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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.
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
oppressed yet enterprising underdog protagonist; toxic masculinities and hostile social environments; language used as a tool for exerting power and control; and restrictive socioeconomic and class barriers that characters struggle, but usually manage, to surmount. However, from De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (2005) onwards, and especially in Un prophète (2009), Jacques Audiard’s France becomes
Audiard est l’un des cinéastes qui filme le mieux le corps des hommes. (Nuttens, 2012 : 7) 1 The body, and the boundaries that can be transgressed by and within it, are essential to the cinema of Jacques Audiard. This is despite the fact that the
On a longtemps considéré Jacques Audiard comme le fils de Michel. Après Un prophète et De rouille et d’os , on se dit maintenant que Michel Audiard est le père de Jacques. (Kaganski, 2012 ) 1 Fingers
Jacques Audiard a toujours aimé aborder la tension entre la marge et la norme, l’exclusion et le désir d’appartenance. Avec Dheepan , il va plus loin que jamais dans cette recherche en s’intéressant à des personnages qui sont aussi étrangers que possible à la
perhaps more than any other filmmaker working in the French space today, Jacques Audiard is both the ideal subject to complement a book series named French Film Directors, and the ideal one to challenge it. Audiard is at once an archetypal French film director and one who tests the definitions of each of these terms. He is of French nationality, but he operates in an increasingly transnational and
There have been vigorous debates about the condition and prospects of auteur cinema in France over the last decade, debates that seem mostly to have gone unreported in anglophone criticism of francophone cinema. But these have been paralleled by a revival of international debate about the status of the auteur: in their extended chapter on auteur cinema added to the second edition of Cook's
significant factor in the continuing health of auteur cinema in recent years. 10 Assayas to Ozon: the auteurs The context of the careers and filmographies of three of the directors in this book – Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard and François Ozon – is the cinema of France. All Audiard’s feature films have been funded entirely by French production companies, and this is also true of the
César nomination as most promising young actor – Kassovitz was cast in Jacques Audiard’s idiosyncratic noir thriller Regarde les hommes tomber (1994) (Vachaud 1994 : 40). In the film Kassovitz plays Johnny, an emotionally fragile, itinerant social misfit who is taken under the wing of Marx, an ageing, small-time criminal played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Such was the critical impact of