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Coline Serreau is one of the most famous female French directors alive, not only in France but also abroad. This book is devoted not only to some relevant biographical aspects of Serreau's personal and artistic life, but also to the social, historical and political context of her debut. It deals with the 1970s' flavour of Serreau's work and more especially with the importance of politics. Taking intertextuality in its broadest sense, it assesses the strong literary influence on the tone, genre and content of Serreau's films and dramas. The book is concerned with the cinematographic genres Serreau uses. It provides a description and an analysis of Serreau's comedies, within the wider perspective of French comedies. The book also deals with the element of 'family' or community which is recurrent in Serreau's films and plays. During the 1980s, Serreau's career moved towards fiction, and she worked both for the cinema and the theatre. Serreau often underlines her family's lack of financial resources. The book considers the specificity of French cinema in the 1970s before analysing in more detail Serreau's first film. Serreau's work on stage and on big or small screens was strongly influenced by the political mood which succeeded May '68 in France. The book also discusses the idea of utopia which was the original theme of Serreau' first documentary and which is central to her first fiction film, Pourquoi pas!. Female humour and laughter cannot be considered without another powerful element: the motivation of often transgressive laughter.
and women’s films in particular. However, her main attribute is to ‘confuse’ the issue by making auteur films as well as commercial films, and by constantly mixing cinematographic genres within the same narrative. Her constant ‘borrowing’ from varied narrative genres, together with the recurrent topical elements of her films, are analysed to illustrate this aspect. In order to grasp the very specific mood of France in the late 1960s, the major social and historical turning point, the ‘revolution’ of May ‘68, is briefly
whether by choosing a traditionally ‘male’ genre some women directors were not perceived as ‘marginalising’ themselves from the accepted notion of ‘what a woman [director] should do’. 2 Since Pas très catholique by Tonie Marshall (1994), a detective story starring Anemone as the female detective, and Personne ne m’aime, a female road movie directed by Marion Vernoux in 1994, some female directors have tended to opt for other cinematographic genres. Despite the overwhelming majority of comedies directed by male directors, with
the silent years of the European cinema overcame what would become a major problem for most contemporary national cinemas apart from that ofthe United States. The proliferation of American remakes of European films (including Serreau’s Trois hommes et un couffin) could also be considered in this light, although this is obviouslynot the only reason. In France, comedy is probably the oldest and the most popular cinematographic genre. For a very long period it has also been an almost exclusively male preserve, a feature it shares
process through the use of different cinematographic genres, mainly social and anthropological documentary and melodrama. Within this trend, it is important to acknowledge the pioneering documentaries Les fosses del silenci ( The Graves of Silence ) and Els nens perduts del franquisme ( Franco’s Lost Children ) (2003) by Montse Armengou and El cielo gira ( The Sky Spins , 2004) by Mercedes Álvarez
-historical context and a fidelity to Hugo’s political discourse, whereas American versions offer a more voluntarist – and optimistic version – of social progress. The French adaptations focus on understanding the harsh reality of the human condition in the nineteenth century, whereas the American ones show the narrative possibilities of the novel and their potential exploitation through the hybridization of cinematographic genres.11 This hybridization’ of the novel is precisely where Hugo could be useful to Hollywood during the Great Depression. Therefore, when it came to
, contraception, abortion or rape. Though women have not always chosen fiction to express their desires and wishes for change, in the post-1968 period, some women filmmakers were putting ‘fiction to the service of the feminist cause’, to take up the phrase used of Agnès Varda’s film L’Une chante, l’autre pas (1976). Une femme et un bébé: Coline Serreau and motherhood An interesting aspect of Serreau’s work, apart from the strong emphasis on family from her debut onwards, is the fact that after choosing a cinematographic genre
great cinematographic genres, from the early avant-garde with Le Sang d’un poète (1930–32) to fairytale fantasy with La Belle et la bête (1946), historical melodrama with L’Aigle à deux têtes (1948), domestic bourgeois drama and vaudeville with Les Parents terribles (1948) (regarded by Cocteau himself as his greatest success), detective thriller and mystery with Orphée (1950), to finally the
cinema (and cinematographic genre) to communicate more ‘radical’ ideas and to lead her audience to think differently is typical of Serreau’s work, as mentioned in Chapter 1. It is also one of the main features of the conte philosophique (philosophical tale) as will be shown later. We have defined the radical director’s project as one of filming different things in the same way or filming the same thing differently. It is obvious when watching some 1970s’ films that both alternatives are used by filmmakers to show the ‘contemporary