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Debates about (and resistances to) France's changing identity as a plural, multi-ethnic society are thus at the forefront of public preoccupations. This book aims to assess the ways in which filmmaking in France might contribute to such debates by foregrounding the voices and subjectivities of ethnic others and thereby reframing the way in which difference is conceptualized. The core focus is the appearance and after-effects of two related phenomena in the history of French cinema, cinéma beur and cinéma de banlieue. The book traces the history of beur filmmaking practices from the margins to the mainstream, from low-budget autobiographically inspired features to commercial filmmaking, and assesses their effectiveness in addressing questions of identity and difference. It attempts to gauge the significance of place in the construction of identity through an analysis of films set in the multi-ethnic banlieue. The book also assesses the extent to which the inscription of displacement and identity in films by emigre Algerian filmmakers overlaps with or differentiates itself from that found in beur cinema. For filmmakers of Maghrebi descent, filmmaking is more than just a question of representation, it is also a way of negotiating their own position within French society. Bensalah's Le Raïd demonstrates how the themes of beur filmmaking can be recuperated by beur filmmakers as well as by white filmmakers. Ameur-Zaifmeche's difficulties in making Wesh wesh illustrate how beur filmmaking may still take place in the interstices of the French film industry.
aura-t-il de la neige à Noël?, the first film by the unknown and young film neophyte Sandrine Veysset in 1996, illustrates this trend. It also shows that the ‘feminisation’ of French cinema seems to go beyond the increasing number of female directors within the French film industry. Even if these signs should be viewed with caution, they are nonetheless evidence that things are changing. Another confirmation of this tendency is the growing interest that these films seem now to attract from critics and audience alike. On the eve
meilleur, alors l’art ne sert à ríen. 1 This quotation from Luc Besson’s book of the film Léon aptly sums up this director’s entire conflictual relationship with the so-called heavyweights of French film criticism ( Positif, Cahiers du Cinéma ) and to a certain degree with the French film industry itself. And just as his own book or, indeed, series of books on his films seek to
1950s At the time of the Liberation in 1944 Truffaut was twelve-years old, a precociously literate and knowledgeable filmgoer, intellectually and emotionally committed to cinema, thus far primarily French cinema. The end of the Occupation left the French film industry – like most sectors of French life – divided, disorganised and lacking in resources. Now competition from Hollywood, suspended since 1940
Since Aristotle, there has been ‘a long history of criticism that has viewed comedy as inferior to other genres in Western culture’ (Horton 1991 : 2). Within the French film industry, the critical denigration of genre cinema, the dominance of a realist aesthetic and the lasting influence of la politique des auteurs (see chapter 1 ) have all contributed to the neglect of comedy. This is in spite
Comedy has been at the forefront of the French film industry since the post-war period in terms of both box-office records and cultural impact. For readers who are less familiar with this genre, Les Comédies à la française (Geudin and Imbert 2011 ) and Comédies françaises (Grassin and Sender 2011 ) document the production contexts of the classic films and provide
This book considers Marcel Carne's films within the broader social and political context. It reinvestigates Carné's highly contested position within French film history, and in particular how his films relate to major moments of French cinema such as poetic realism, the tradition of quality and the French new wave. The period from the late 1920s to the end of the 1930s was crucial in Marcel Carné's career: he entered the French film industry, made films now considered his masterpieces, and achieved significant box-office success. The book reflects on the main developments in his career, from his early work as a journalist, amateur filmmaker, and assistant director, to his production of his first feature films,
-Zaïmèche’s difficulties in making Wesh wesh illustrate how beur filmmaking may still take place in the interstices of the French film industry. However, the regular if limited appearance of more and more films by filmmakers of Maghrebi descent suggests that beur filmmaking is now an established part of the French cinema landscape (even if the label itself is not). These films overturn cinematic expectations as to where the cultural life of the nation is taking place and
history when the industry was arguably under particular threat in national terms: the coming of sound was a commercial disaster for the French film industry, which lost out to US- and German-patented technologies; in the post-war period, cheap and highly popular US imports threatened to swamp a fragile French industry rebuilding itself after the Occupation; and in the 1980s, once again, Hollywood
studios in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. Both men also headed powerful French companies, Pathé Frères originally specialising in the phonograph, L. Gaumont et Compagnie in photography. Between them, they established the French film industry as a commercial force of such global influence that in the years 1908 to 1910 the majority of films distributed in the world were French (Billard 1994 : 56