Search results
This book aims to provide an overview of the history and development of film noir and neo-noir in five major European cinemas, France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, written by leading authorities in their respective fields. It contains a bibliography and extensive filmography. The book describes the distinctiveness of film noir or neo-noir within its respective national cinema at particular moments, but also discusses its interaction with American film noir and neo-noir. It commences with a reflection on the significant similarities and differences that emerge in these accounts of the various European film noirs, and on the nature of this dialogue, which suggests the need to understand film noir as a transnational cultural phenomenon. The problems of defining film noir and the reasons why it has almost always been regarded solely as an American form are discussed. Because British film noir had never received critical recognition, Andrew Spicer argues that British neo-noir had to reinvent itself anew, with little, if any, explicit continuity with its predecessors. The book also explores the changes in the French polar after 1968: the paranoia of the political thriller and the violence of the postmodern and naturalistic thriller. That new noir sensibility is different enough, and dark enough, from what preceded it, for us to call it 'hyper-noir'. British neo-noirs are highly intertextual and allusive, both thematically and visually. The book also discusses German neo-noir, Spanish film noir and neo-noir, and the Italian film noir.
Jean Epstein, born in Warsaw, was raised in Switzerland, but it was Brittany where he made some of his best films. He was famous yet misunderstood, original yet held to be idiosyncratic and poetic to a fault, consistently referred to by most critics as a key theoretician. Using familiar genres, melodramas and documentaries, he hoped to heal viewers of all classes and hasten social utopia. This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to and preliminary study of Epstein's movies, film theory, and literary and philosophical criticism in the age of cinema. Diluted into a single word, photogénie, his aesthetic project is equated with a naïve faith in the magic power of moving images, whereas Epstein insistently articulated photogénie in detailed corporeal, ethical and political terms. While Epstein scarcely refers to World War One in his writings or film work, it is clearly from this set of urgent questions that he began reflecting on art and literature. The New Wave movement in France in the late 1950s, put melodrama and avant-garde together feels oxymoronic if not sacrilegious. Epstein's filmography contains roughly an equal number of films that can be labelled fiction and documentary, a little over twenty, in each category. Epstein has opened the way for a corporeal cinema predicated on cinematography and montage rather than narration and mise-en-scène. Epstein's work in cinema, film 'theory', and philosophy, offers today a surprisingly contemporary set of movies, cinematographic idioms, and reflections on all the phenomena of cinema.
Few directors are as ambiguously placed in the French popular imaginary as Jacques Demy. With nine shorts and thirteen full-length features, Demy's filmography is solid. Although he died in October 1990, Demy's legacy as an iconic director for generations of admirers and filmmakers endures. This book examines Demy's relation to the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). It probes Demy's 'musicals', Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and Une chambre en ville. The book shows how the films comply with and deviate from the codes and conventions of the Hollywood staple, producing a specifically Gallic and 'Demyesque' twist on the genre. It is a commonplace of writings on Demy to highlight his 'monde en-/ enchanté', meaning both 'expressed through song' and 'enchanted'. The book examines Demy's adaptations of fairytale (Peau d'âne), fable (The Pied Piper) and myth (Parking). The representations of gender and sexuality in Demy's cinema, with particular attention to Le Bel Indifférent, La Naissance du jour L'Evénement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la lune and Lady Oscar are analysed. Finally, the book reveals how his final feature, Trois places pour le 26, establishes the foundations of his posthumous myth, which Agnès Varda and other directors have affirmed and supplemented since his death. Beneath the apparently sugary coating of his films lie more philosophical reflections on some of the most pressing issues that preoccupy Western societies, including affect, subjectivity, self/other relations and free will.
sets of material social relations but also cultural objects (McDowell 1996 : 31–2). I have organised my arguments into three sections. First, I will map Isabel Coixet’s filmography to determine both the thematisation of gender discourse and the overlap between different national and transnational regimes. Second, I propose an examination of
more difficult of access, is no less interesting. Agnès Varda’s filmography is both long and varied, and, unusually, her career has alternated between fiction and documentary, with some films hovering somewhere between the two ( Jacquot de Nantes being the most recent and the most ambiguous). Varda’s best-known films, mentioned above, come into the category ‘fiction’ with the exception of Jacquot de Nantes , and indeed they
liminal concepts, and thus this book is organised around five key and interrelated themes for his work: war, politics, money, love and corporations. Each theme foregrounds a subset of Stone’s filmography, as well as drawing on distinct aspects of his personal and professional development, including production practices and industry relations. Each theme also highlights particular questions and perspectives in film theory and textual analysis, and draws out equally pertinent aspects to do with the operation of Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry. The
effect in Les Grands Ducs. In sum, L’Homme du train (2002) is an exceptionally mature film about maturation, in which Leconte reassesses some of the key concerns and themes that run through and draw together his corpus to date. Leconte and the landscape of contemporary French cinema As even a brief survey of his career and filmography to date can illustrate, Leconte’s films tend to fall
European film noir aims to provide an overview of the history and development of film noir and neo-noir in five major European cinemas – France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy – written by leading authorities in their respective fields. Each chapter contains a bibliography and extensive filmography. Occasional brief considerations of various European film noirs have emerged – and one
law will be considered as a tool whose effective application depends largely on the realities of the international society, which favours power relations. The implementation of international law thus depends on the contradictions that exist between States. This is what we will call the ‘critical’ conception. 4 Beyond this renowned production, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has inspired a very abundant filmography, which retraces its main events and deals with many aspects of it. From a material composed of a hundred fiction movies and TV series, we will study
Resnais's films are often perceived as demanding, cerebral or soporific. Resnais's directorial ambitions were first realised in a series of documentaries and, from 1959 onwards, in feature films. As his career develops, his filmography replaces his biography in the spotlight of critical interest. This book offers introductions to individual films in its eight chapters. Reflecting on the disruption of chronology in Resnais's films, and their focus on intense pain and rarefied mental activity, notions of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder have been key to recent critical discussion. In Hiroshima mon amour, the history of Hiroshima is embedded within the first traumatic and erotic images of the film. Resnais's second feature film, L'Année dernière à Marienbad, is composed of echoes of Chekhov. Muriel is a film which plays on our nerves. Between 1964 and 1976 Resnais made three films: La Guerre est finie, Je t'aime je t'aime and Stavisky; he also contributed a section to Chris Marker's collaborative Loin du Viêt-nam (1967) and worked on a number of projects which did not come to fruition. Providence is a film which is self-conscious about cinema as medium. From his extraordinary reckoning with parallel lives and human behaviour in Mon oncle à Amérique, he moves to a tightly interwoven yet farcical drama about history and education in La Vie est un roman, two delicate chamber pieces about love and death, L'Amour à mort and Mélo, and a burlesque yet melancholy film about an American cartoonist, I Want to Go Home.