Jewish Identity in French Cinema (1950–2010) by Serge Bokobza

Abstract

treatment of France’s cinema industry, as it delineates a new sociology of the creative industries. A complex web of interrelations involving state subsidies, the history and future of French cinema has long been a polemical, wide-ranging topic of debate in France and around the globe, particularly after World War II. Since then, France has engaged in hard-driving negotiations with the United States and within Europe to protect the specificity of its cultural capital (symbolic as opposed to economic), especially of its most recent and most mediatized septième art. In fact, it has been (re)consecrated as an art in France over a series of three “waves,” which Alexandre alludes to briefly by name, but which underpins his study. The Première Vague of the 1910s established cinema as art by applying literary terms to film. Then the Nouvelle Vague of the 1950s–1960s“starified”the“auteur-réalisateur,”most notably in Truffaut and Godard. That status was vigorously reified in the Nouvelle Nouvelle Vague of the 1980s–1990s. More commonly known as Jeune Cinéma (as the previous two waves had also been known), this is the one Alexandre focuses on in his study. French cinema continues to be admired globally today, in no small part for its state-subsidized support. But as that aspect becomes ever more disdained in a free market-driven world economy, Alexandre’s work, for better or worse, adds fuel to the fire in choosing to “renverser la perspective habituellement adoptée” in approaches to French cinema. That is, he flips the focus that is usually up-close and on the films themselves (promoting French cinema in terms of what Alexandre calls the deceptive discourse of enchantement,images, and auteurs), to zoom out on the“système qui les rend possibles” (14). This entails a monumental task of sorting out the intricacies between private investment and state-based institutes, such as the IFCIC (Institut pour le financement du cinéma et des industries culturelles); politicians (Jack Lang was ministre de la Culture under François Mitterrand); CEOs in communication and media entertainment industries (the Bollorés of Havas-Vivendi); national education (the École nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son, better known as the Fémis); known directors and actors; hidden producers and distributors (mostly from France’s uppercrust families); prestigious film festivals (Cannes), and managers of television channels (the Bollorés of Canal+). Last and decidedly least are the hundreds if not thousands of techniciens, the largely unrecognized and worst served by this system. News is not all hopeless though, but you must read Alexandre’s book to find out why! Union College (NY) Michelle Chilcoat Bokobza, Serge. Jewish Identity in French Cinema (1950–2010). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4438-8681-9. Pp. 220. As a scholar with an ongoing interest in teaching and researching French films of the Second World War, I looked forward to this study, anticipating that it would cover such films as part of its analysis. As the study does indeed include several World War 268 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 269 II films, along with many others (“over 144,” the author asserts), this expectation was met. Others were not. The introduction, for example, explains the need for the study and delineates the criteria by which films were selected. Yet the criteria themselves occasionally give pause, for instance the decision to omit relevant international coproductions such as The Pianist (2002). Still, lines must be drawn, and the ones in Jewish Identity in French Cinema largely work. Of greater concern are conceptual and organizational difficulties. Chief among these is the author’s decision to use “Jewish identity”not as a clearly defined attribute, but rather a“loose concept”that relies rather heavily on Sartre’s 1946 Réflexions sur la question juive. More often than not, “Jewish identity” appears to be defined by what it is not, rather than what it is. Similar complications arise in discussions of the admittedly thorny question of French national identity, in which, among other issues, the term français de souche often surfaces with only partial analysis of its implications. Furthermore...