Responding to Globalization: The Evolution of Agnès Varda

Abstract

Long before Luc Besson shot Fifth Element (1997) in English, and long before the squabble over whether Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiancailles (A Very Long Engagement [2004]) was really a French film or a Warner Brothers’ film, the “national” in French national cinema was complicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most film departments will tell us that the discipline of Film Studies persists in employing a national cinema model when conceptualizing non-Hollywood cinema. In fact, French cinema has been global from its inception, if we think of globalization as the “increasing speed, ease, and extent with which capital, goods, services, technologies, people, cultures, information, and ideas now cross borders” (Gordon and Meunier 5). Indeed, throughout the history of French film, we can find examples of films, filmmakers, and business models that challenge a unified notion of national cinema. The crossing of national borders, whether in terms of production, distribution or exhibition, occurred in French cinema early on in the history of the medium. Indeed, “in its first decades (prior, say, to World War I) a primary way that film understood itself was as a medium that could express a new sense of a global identity” (Gunning 11). Following the invention in 1895 of the first moving picture camera, the cinematographe, the Lumiere brothers began almost immediately sending cameramen around the world to shoot and exhibit films. By 1903, Pathe had opened offices in London, New York and Moscow (Millar 35). Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures set up shop in the Joinville Studios in Paris from 1929-31 and made multiple-language films (Danan). During the 1930s and the 1940s, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tourneur, Julien Duvivier, Maurice Chevalier, Simone Simon and Charles Boyer all worked in Hollywood. New Wave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were adept at the international promotion of their work, traveling to film festivals around the world. Most obviously, perhaps, films regularly bear the influence of films made in other countries. French cinema—and indeed, cinema traditions around the world—absorbed many of the norms of classical Hollywood cinema. More specifically, the influence of German cinematographers on 1930s French film has been well documented. Another, more auteur-specific