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This is the first book dedicated to the career and films of Jacques Audiard. It argues that the work of this prominent French director both reinforces and undermines the traditional concept of the auteur.
The book traces Audiard’s career from his early screenwriting projects in the 1970s to his eight directed feature films. From a prison outside Paris to a war zone in Sri Lanka, from a marine park on the Côte d’Azur to the goldfields of the American Wild West, these films revolve around the movement of bodies. Fragile yet powerful, macho yet transgressive, each of these films portrays disabled, marginalised or otherwise non-normative bodies in constant states of crisis and transformation.
This book uses the motif of border-crossing – both physical and symbolic – to explore how Audiard’s films construct and transcend boundaries of many forms. Its chapters focus on his films’ representation of the physical body, French society and broader transnational contexts. Located somewhere between the arthouse and the B movie, the French and the transnational, the feminist and the patriarchal, the familiar and the new, this book reveals how Jacques Audiard’s characters and films reflect his own eternally shifting position, both within and beyond the imaginary of French cinema.
significant memory carriers in the context of immigration. Few fiction films depicting the war were made in the 1980s and 1990s, and the harkis generally played only a very minor role in those produced by majority-French directors. For example, in Pierre Schoendoerffer’s L’Honneur d’un capitaine (1982), which addresses the French Army’s use of torture and summary executions, harkis appear briefly in just a small number of episodes, mostly as translators, in scenes where French soldiers interact with villagers, but also as witnesses of violence, as when an adolescent is
5 Seeking paths to existence in Rachid Djaïdani’s Rengaine Mona El Khoury Rengaine, Rachid Djaïdani’s first feature-length film not only expands on 1980s and 1990s works by Maghrebi-French directors,1 but is quite original in the themes it tackles.2 Indeed, if Djaïdani’s film shares ‘a concern with the place and identity of the marginal and excluded in France’ (Tarr, 2005: 3) which is typical of beur and banlieue films, it innovates through its focus on minority racism and its treatment of identity construction.3 The original choice of telling a philosophical
technically brilliant craftsman, a skilled manipulator of audiences, who produced a series of arresting genre films? If he was as much an entertainer as an artist, why in that case did he direct so few films? And finally, were his films influenced in any way by the rise of the New Wave of French directors and critics from the late 1950s, or did they remain rooted in what some hostile commentators saw as a conventional and stultifying classicism? Although Clouzot’s output as a director spanned a period of twenty-six years, in this time he released only ten full-length feature
After substantial success as a screenplay writer, Jacques Audiard has directed some of the most engaging and enduring films of the last decade in France. His films, Regarde les hommes tomber (1994), Un héros très discret (1996) and Sur mes lèvres (2001), received critical recognition, yet he is often absent from canon-forming lists of contemporary French directors. This will undoubtedly change
composition was at times so mobile, Renoir is a challenge to constricting frames. Because he is widely seen as the greatest French director and one of the major figures of world cinema, Renoir has become a plum prize for critics (especially French ones) to fight over. The principal combatants have been critics of the left and auterists. Yet each camp has difficulty with Renoir because of the discontinuities and shifting contexts
It runs in the family: Serreau’s family background Coline Serreau is one of the most famous female French directors alive, not only in France but also abroad. She is the only woman with a film figuring in the list of the twenty most popular French movies since the start of the Fifth Republic (1958), reaching fourth position with Trois hommes et un couffin. Coline Serreau was born in Paris on 29 October 1947, the daughter of Geneviève Serreau (1915–1981), a writer and translator, and of Jean-Marie Serreau (1915
quintessentially European initiative. Like Okkupert , it was produced by Franco-German broadcaster Arte, and Moll’s background is Franco-German despite his self-identification as a French director. Moll, who also directed two episodes of the first season of The Tunnel , had previously worked primarily within the French film industry before undertaking this project, which connects a variety of
Elisabeth (Brenda Blethyn), a white Protestant from the Channel Islands, looking for their children in the city of London after the 7 th July terrorist attacks. Borders feature prominently in the film. The narrative crosses various geographical borders and was filmed in different locations: France, London and one of the Channel Islands (Guernsey). It was a French–British co-production and it features a multinational cast and crew, including a French director of Algerian origin working in London. This chapter looks at the film
The great American film critic Manny Farber memorably declared space to be the most dramatic stylistic entity in the visual arts. He posited three primary types of space in fiction cinema: the field of the screen, the psychological space of the actor, and the area of experience and geography that the film covers. This book brings together five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guediguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. It proposes that people think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Dumont's attraction to real settings and locality suggests a commitment to realism. New forms and surfaces of spectatorship provoke new sensations and engender new kinds of perception, as well as new ways of understanding and feeling space. The book interrogates Guediguian's obsessive portrayal of one particular city, Marseilles. Entering into the spaces of work and non-work in Cantet's films, it asks what constitutes space and place within the contemporary field of social relations. The book also engages with cultural space as the site of social integration and metissage in the work of Kechiche, his dialogues with diasporic communities and highly contested urban locales. Denis's film work contains continually shifting points of passage between inside and outside, objective and subjective, in the restless flux.