ABSTRACT In Katell Quillévéré’s Réparer les vivants (2016), based on Maylis de Kerangal’s best-selling novel, a fatal road accident after a surfing trip leaves Simon Limbres (Gabin Verdet) braindead. His vital organs will be donated, and his heart transplanted into Claire Méjean (Anne Dorval). These grave events shape the film’s narrative arc, with the heart connecting Simon’s death to Claire’s rebirth. Yet this heart transplant film is indebted to a more archaic, elemental connectivity between the heart and the sea, blood and seawater, recognised variously from Galen to René Quinton and beyond. A fusion of the elements of air and water with breath positions the film distinctively in relation to scholarship on the elements and on breathing in film and media studies, inviting its watery bonds to be theorised anew. Engaging with such research before drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the fold and film scholarship indebted to his work, this article explores how the film’s narrative is enfolded into tight formal bonds with the elements, air and water in particular. The lifeblood of this film and its affective heart emerge through myriad folds of foaming, curving waves.

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Belgian identity is articulated in contemporary Belgian cinema. Since the introduction of sound, Belgian cinema has been characterised by a divide between Flemish and Belgian francophone cinema. However, the twenty-first century has seen an increase in co-productions between the two communities. By analysing how these intranational co-productions relate to Belgium and Belgian identity, this article explores the textual implications of this industry trend. Drawing upon the concept of ‘Belgitude’, it teases out two ways in which Belgian identity is re-imagined. Some films explicitly thematise community issues by conveying a message of solidarity between Flanders and the French-speaking community of Belgium, while others show characters that embody Belgium’s cultural complexity, using multilingualism and the city of Brussels as implicit markers of Belgian identity. At odds with the country’s political climate of increasing tensions between the linguistic communities, the revival of ‘Belgitude’ in contemporary Belgian cinema can be considered as a reaction against Flemish nationalist discourses.

ABSTRACT French screenwriters’ precarity has been highlighted in a number of different ways in recent years, not least by their efforts to organise and publicise professional abuses. This article will consider the situation of writers and how these are often framed in relation to a cinematic culture rooted in what Jonathan Buchsbaum calls ‘a certain idea of film [as] the art form of the twentieth century’, an idea that engages with debates on quality as well as authorship. As will emerge, this is also an idea of cinema that many of the screenwriters in question contribute to and defend, even if its emphasis on the director-auteur has implications for their own position and visibility. The article will then turn to recent efforts on the part of French screenwriters working in different sectors of audio-visual and cinematic production to stand up against precarious employment conditions, inadequate remuneration, and what they have described as a systematic downplaying of their role and their work, which have successfully attracted attention from the media but also from professional bodies, notably the CNC.

ABSTRACT Agnès Varda’s science fiction tale, Les Créatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article argues that these two aspects of the film are related. Les Créatures can be read as a condemnation of a certain kind of unrestrained storytelling, in which an artist’s desire for invention displaces any effort to engage with the world. The novelist-hero of Les Créatures cooks up fantasies that share the freewheeling improvisation of some of Varda’s other films but lack an ethnographic or observational dimension that would tether them to reality. As a result, his story, and indeed Varda’s film, amount to a self-absorbed game-playing that Varda repudiates in spite of its eerie fascination. In this way the film can be seen as a road not taken for Varda, drawing attention to the ways in which her other films hold their fantasies accountable to a shared world, and imagining what they would be like if they didn’t.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Franco-British series The Tunnel (Canal+, 2013–2017), co-produced by Sky Atlantic and StudioCanal, as an iteration of the Swedish-Danish series Bron/Broen/The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, 2011–2018). The author situates Bron within the global television format trade and argues that The Tunnel is best understood as a localised version rather than a remake or an adaptation. With six versions of the original series now available around the world, the author argues that Bron has become such a reproducible global television format because it offers a readymade co-production template in industrial, linguistic and narrative terms through its focus on crimes on and around national borders. The article then explores the specific localisation strategies used in the Franco-British version that employ social problems such as terrorism, human trafficking and immigration to position audiences within national and regional frames. Finally, the article discusses the complexities of situating The Tunnel within a nation-centred approach to French television.

ABSTRACT There is very little academic work on music in television series, and none on music in French television series. This article focuses on one of the most successful French television series, the eight-season-long Engrenages/Spiral (Canal+, 2005–2020). It identifies the similarities and differences between music for films and music for television series before focusing on the music composed by Stéphane Zidi for Engrenages. This combines the unusual use of gamelan instruments as musical cues with more melodic piano themes. Arguing that television series music, which might have been even more ‘unheard’ than film music, functions to shape audience perception of the characters, the article focuses on the specificities of gamelan cues and piano themes. The piano themes migrate from one character to another across the eight seasons of the series, and the article shows how this affects the narrative arc of the main character, Laure Berthaud, emphasising her rejection of (both) the conflicting roles of mother and leader.

ABSTRACT This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Using an intersectional frame of reference which combines postcolonial theory, Third World feminism and geography/spatiality, this article demonstrates that these two films unearth structures of power and inequality that situate the white female of the colony not as subjugated by the patriarchal order, as has been argued, but as an agent of imperialism in herself. This analysis shows that Denis’s films anchor their aesthetic sensibility and narrative discourse within pictorial and narrative practices specific to, or appropriated by, imperialism, such as mapping, landscape painting and cinema. These films reveal a rhetorical and visual inventory of colonial tropes that ineluctably structure Denis’s cinematic Africa as a space which, through racial privilege, the white woman claims as her own.

ABSTRACT The author examines the mise en scène of performance in Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017) in the context of the problematic yet pervasive cultural re-inscription of the musical biopic in French cinema, and its remediation of the traditions of chanson française and variété through the body of the female performer. Featuring Jeanne Balibar as ‘Brigitte’, an actress playing the eponymous singer-composer, Barbara unfolds as a ‘film-about-filmmaking’ that presents the iconic Barbara as a hypothesis. The article looks at performance in terms of approximation rather than imitation and considers the ways in which the film extends its investigation on the chanteuse to the spectator-in-the-text played by Amalric himself. As a biopic, Barbara stands against the fetishisation of the absent (i.e. dead) performer. Instead, it engages with the rhetorical authenticity that makes for the basis of the genre by producing the female performer’s presence as cinematic event. Furthermore, the article discusses the connection between performer and spectator through affective intimacy and redefines the space of performance as a nomadic cinematic form, which hypothesises a postnational cinematic aesthetic that weakens the alignment of the female musical performer with the Frenchness of the biopic.

ABSTRACT The maison close [brothel] in French history and culture, particularly during the nineteenth century because of its representation in art and literature, could be argued to be a lieu de mémoire [site of memory]. In light of the gaps in material that gives direct voice to women in sex work, especially during this period, the maison close could equally be termed a lieu d’oubli [site of forgetting]. In contemporary popular culture, the brothel has become a popular setting for fiction, as with the Canal+ series Maison close (2010, 2013), set in 1870s Paris. The series reflects a fascination with sex work in popular culture, as well as offering a commentary on the legal standing of sex work between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. This paper interrogates the extent to which Maison close attempts to offer alternative or more nuanced visions of history than simply categorising sex workers as victim/criminal/femme fatale, informed by abolitionist debates during its production and emerging critiques of the Nordic Model of sex work. It also analyses how the series provides an alternative vision for sex workers, and workers more generally, that moves from exploitation to collective action and attempts to increase their agency.