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The book begins with a consideration of the origins and influences that have shaped Mathieu Kassovitz's development as a director, but also the cultural context within which he emerges as a filmmaker. It argues new realism, the banlieue. The book examines the American influences evident in all of Kassovitz's films to date as a director and explores the continuity and difference between his films as actor and director. The first phase of Mathieu Kassovitz's career comprises his short films and feature films up to and including
Kassovitz emerged to direct his first three short films, concentrating in the second half on key transformations relating to youth culture that have taken place in relation to French popular culture since the early 1980s. Origins and influences: ‘a different way of looking at cinema’ Born in Paris on 3 August 1967, Kassovitz grew up in Ménilmontant a relatively cosmopolitan
public personality and (largely) self-styled rebel of France’s Seventh Art, this book intends to locate Kassovitz’s cinema in relation to key cultural and cinematic developments that have taken place in France during the 1990s. On the one hand, it will address the effects of the shifting configurations of French popular culture that began in the 1980s under the auspices of Lang’s le tout culturel
Introduction Imagining the popular: lowbrow, highbrow, middlebrow Diana Holmes and David Looseley O ur aim in this book is to explore how the French in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have come to imagine the popular in particular and distinctive ways: how popular-cultural texts or forms have, variously, been produced and received, theorised and judged. We are interested, then, in both discourse and practice in contemporary French popular culture. This ambition is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. First, ‘discourse’ and ‘practice’ cannot
cultural affirmation. Despite the critical contempt of the early years, the enduring success of Blier’s films gives cause for optimism for the future of popular French national cinema. The close focus on traditional dramatic forms drawn directly from French popular culture can arguably be read as a positive and forceful affirmation of cultural specificity in the face of an ever-threatening post-GATT global film culture
, Pagnol’s has grown ever stronger, standing today as an indelible part of French popular culture, and national identity. This is perhaps the most fitting vindication for an artist who consistently flouted stylistic and industry conventions in order to preserve his independence and realise his own distinct creative vision. References Cinefeed ( 2011 ), Box-office statistics compiled weekly from
Americanised popular culture permeate national cultural borders more easily, carry an increasing weight within popular youth cultures throughout the world and are more accessible than ever before, American popular culture (including cinema), now forms an identifiable part of French popular culture beyond any mere influence or imported trend. Thus in the context of Kassovitz’s cinema – and, indeed, for an
Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936), Le Quai des brumes/Port of Shadows (Carné, 1938 ), Le Jour se lève/Daybreak (Carné, 1939), Remorques/Stormy Waters (Grémillon, 1941) and, most especially, Les Enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise (Carné, 1945). However, Prévert also has a unique status within French popular culture. Unlike many of his contemporary
River’s critique of European civilisation and opens a tryptych of historical costume dramas that are deliberately anti-realist in their theatricality. French Cancan (1954) saw Renoir return at last to film-making in his native country. 1 Set in the belle époque, it can be seen as a celebration of French popular culture designed to help the director to re-establish himself in his homeland. Eléna
, AngloAmerican pop could only be viewed as ‘other’, just as Baker and la Revue nègre had been in the 1920s, albeit without the same directly racialised element. Pop was inauthentic and lowbrow: a foreign, manufactured, barely literate product of American industrial capitalism; it was everything that chanson was not. Nevertheless, the story of pop in France from the 1960s to the present is in fact one of gradual appropriation and transformation into a more rooted, more organically French popular culture. Appropriation and the reinvention of the lowbrow The meanings of yéyé What