Channeling globalism: Canal+ as transnational French genre film producer

Abstract

This article examines Canal+’s contribution to the recent or contemporary consolidation of three genres traditionally excluded from the French filmmaking landscape: romantic comedies, horror films, and teen movies. The many films from these emergent French genres funded and in frequent cases also more indirectly supported by Canal+ speak to the organization’s status as a transnational, transmedia production entity. Moreover, analyzing the new French genre trends in whose burgeoning the company has been instrumental suggests the difficulties of unpicking geo-cultural allegiances and influences in an ever more multidirectional, multiplatform, cross-hybridizing mediasphere. This article considers the case study films Alibi.com (2017) and Grave (2016) to illustrate the fact that, like the European audiovisual mainstream as a whole, French genre films are bound up in an increasingly transnational and complex intertextual web - a state of affairs promoted by multinational conglomerates such as Canal+. It nonetheless suggests that such French iterations of US-originated genres appropriate and transform rather than merely citing, echoing, or emulating existing models. What is more, drawing on theorizations of aesthetics and affect suggests that these processes can foster new identities.