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’s publications’ (Forbes 1992 : 77). Subsequently, in 1972, the French women’s movement – the MLF – was launched, and in 1974 a women’s film festival (in later years held at Créteil) was established. Many first features were made by women in this climate, such as Yannick Bellon’s Quelque part, quelqu’un (1972) and Coline Serreau’s Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1976), as well as militant documentaries on feminist issues, the
their own voices. 2 This chapter analyses two feature films, made since the sans-papiers protest began, which are critically concerned with the place of undocumented immigrant women in the French and, indeed, the wider economy. Mehdi Charef’s Marie-Line (2000) focuses on a multi-ethnic team of women night cleaners working for a company (‘Euro-Nettoyage’) run by members of the Front National, while Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2001 ) features a
, parenting, race and miscegenation. Lola refuses to choose between her two lovers and both men ultimately decide to join forces to support her desire for communal responsibility for the baby-to-be. In the tradition of comedies such as Coline Serreau’s Pourquoi pas! (1977), Trois hommes et un couffin (1986) and Romuald et Juliette (1989), and Josiane Balasko’s Gazon maudit (1995), Kassovitz uses the genre to question the centrality of the white heterosexual
interview suggest that they, too, constitute fictionalised reworkings of Kurys’ own experiences. Each foregrounds an independent woman whose role as an artist caught up in triangulated relationships can be read as a stand-in for the director, herself a former actress, a screenwriter and, along with Coline Serreau, one of the most successful women directors of her generation. Kurys herself has equivocated about the autobiographical
(Bernard Blier, 1974: this achieved audience figures of 5.7 million (Frodon 1995 : 833), and was the second most successful French film of the year, after Emmanuelle ), Violette et François (Jacques Rouffio, 1977), Pourquoi pas! (Coline Serreau, 1978), and even Cocktail Molotov (Diane Kurys, 1979). Not all of these make any pretence to be more than individualistic, but all are characterised by an effort on the part of the protagonists to create something positive rather than simply expressing anger against the system. The
) and the exotic, drug-addicted dancer of Clubbed to Death (Yolande Zauberman, 1997) to the black and Maghrebi prostitutes of Gamer (Zak Fishman, 2001) ( figure 21 ). In contrast, domestic spaces contain the victims of the oppressive patriarchal Arabo-Islamic sex/gender system, from the tragic heroine of Pierre et Djemila (Gérard Blain, 1986) to the sister who needs rescuing in Chaos (Coline Serreau, 2001). Thus, representations of the spaces occupied
trends, they are mentioned occasionally for comparative purposes. Since the 1980s, women screenwriters have also played an increasing role in a genre that has long been dominated by male authors and comic characters. Coline Serreau and Danièle Thompson, followed by Balasko and Valérie Lemercier, have transformed the comedy landscape by putting female characters at the centre of their screenplays (see
, if Cocktail Molotov is compared with other French women’s films of the late 1970s, it lacks the originality of Coline Serreau’s exploration of a triangular relationship in Pourquoi pas! (1977) and rather prematurely takes abortion for granted, instead of raising it as an issue, as in the feminist documentary, Histoires d’A (Marielle Issartel and Charles Belmont 1973) and Agnès Varda’s L
culture of comedy has […] entered into the mainstream’ (Harris 1998 : 91). Foreign bodies in the family: La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille , Tatie Danielle , Un air de famille During the 1980s several directors were making popular comedies with little or no connection to café-théâtre . Among them were Coline Serreau with Trois homes et un couffin and
-point for the series of events which follows. The 1970s saw a considerable rise in the number of women making films which reached the screens, and many of these films dealt with gender relations, often – but not always – in the context of the couple. Utopian visions were elaborated of possible new formations of the nuclear relationship, for example Coline Serreau’s first feature film, Pourquoi pas? (1977). Serreau started her career with a documentary, Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (also 1977), which proposed a cinematic prise