Thirty years of doctoral theses on French cinema

Abstract

This article collates data on doctoral theses in French cinema since the early 1970s through to 2002. The data has been collected from a variety of sources: for France, the Service de l'Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur (SUDOC); for the USA, UMI Dissertation s; and for Great Britain and Ireland (i.e. including the Republic of Ireland), the Index of Theses (ASLIB).1 There are just over 380 doctoral theses collected; some theses are the French Doctorat d'État, rather than the Ph.D. equivalent (the theèse de troisiéme cycle), both of which were replaced in 1985 by a single doctorat nouveau régime, akin to the Ph.D. thesis. A word of caution is appropriate, however. The data is unlikely to be complete: first, because not all theses on French cinema will have been included in the three databases; second, because the databases do not always give abstracts. This is particularly true of the French database. At best, then, what follows should be taken as a snapshot of research into French cinema in France, the USA, Great Britain, Ireland and Canada in the last 30 years or so.