Filmmaking In France Research Articles

How to build an ecosystem for the non-fiction cinema? The history and politics of Lussas Documentary Film Festival

ABSTRACT This article presents the experience of the Lussas Documentary Film Festival from a historical point of view, following the genealogy of one of the most important events devoted to the non-fiction cinema in Europe and describing the ethical and political challenges behind such adventures. The aim, here, is to study and interpret the key role played by this festival in channelling institutional and public attention to documentary filmmaking in France over the last fifty years. The essay will also highlight the attempt to construct in Lussas an ecosystem based on the association between a minor, non-theatrical cinematic field and a marginal geographic area while putting into practice the principles of autonomous organization by documentary workers themselves.

Introduction: French Cinema at the Margins

Introduction: French Cinema at the Margins Eric Smoodin, Guest Editor (bio) Let’s begin with two issues of Pour Vous. On 12 October 1933, as it would every week during its twelve years of publication, from 1928 until the surrender to Germany in June 1940, this French film weekly published a complete list of the cinemas in Paris and all of the movies they were showing. About a year earlier, on 7 July 1932, as it did occasionally, Pour Vous ran a column “On screens in the four corners of France” (“Sur les écrans des quatre coins de la France”), detailing all of the movies opening in Lille, Marseille, Dijon, and elsewhere in the nation, and including at least some of France’s North African colonies, in this case, Algeria and Morocco.1 These two issues of one of the period’s major film periodicals give us a literal rendering of French cinema at the center and at the margins. In the first case via that list of commercial cinemas and mostly narrative films in the nation’s capital, and in the second with an assertion of the cinematic periphery, those “four corners of France” at varying distances from the Parisian center. French film historiography, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and also France, has tended to follow this model of centers and margins, by concentrating on canonical narrative and avant-garde film texts, standard modes of textual analysis, and conventional systems of situating film texts within historical contexts.2 Slowly, though, over the last twenty years or so, just as the French film has come to be more and more marked by minority cinemas—the cinéma de banlieue, for instance—so too has French film studies come to acknowledge the peripheral and often barely visible. Think, for instance, of Richard Neupert’s French Animation History, from 2011, or Carrie Tarr’s 2005 Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France.3 A quarter-century after Alan Williams’ [End Page 33] still-standard history of French cinema that hardly varies from the analysis of canonical texts and well-known auteurs, it would be hard to imagine a “Republic of Images” that wouldn’t include the movies and filmmakers that Neupert, Tarr, and other scholars have helped bring to our attention.4 Most of this recent scholarship concentrates on French cinema since 1985 or ’90, and most of it also focuses on the films themselves. Those of us involved in this dossier propose bringing a sense of the margins—in relation to films, film culture, and methodologies—to what we might call the classical era of French cinema, or to use Susan Hayward’s term, the French cinema’s “age of modernism,” from around 1925 to 1960.5 Of course, there are precedents for this work, some of it from this period but most of it from slightly before or just after. Peter Bloom, for instance, has extended our sense of French national cinema to include North Africa in his consideration of government documentary production designed for France’s colonies in the years just before World War Two. Richard Abel, in his encyclopedic studies of French cinema before 1930, has focused significant attention on those texts—film journals, for example—and those exhibition sites—the ciné-clubs—that so often fall out of studies of French national cinema. And in the French context, at least from the early 1980s, scholars have shown an interest in the governmental apparatus of French cinema, especially as it concerns the Occupation, typified by the work of Jean-Pierre Jeancolas.6 Much more recently, Dimitri Vezyroglou’s edited volume from 2014, Le Cinéma: une affaire d’État 1945–1970, extends this research to a far broader examination of the administrative bureaucracy of film culture in ways that Jeancolas, who still typically concentrated on the contributions of particular filmmakers and the importance of various films, could not have imagined.7 Despite these shifts, the historiography of the period from the 1920s through the 1950s has been dominated by the “great” movements of Poetic Realism, the Tradition of Quality, and the New Wave, by exhibition sites controlled by large corporations (Gaumont and Pathé, for example...

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the filmmakers' project a celebration of idleness. Rather, as they strive to restore the productive value of individuals unable and unwilling to enter the labor market, they reject what the filmmakers see as leftist politics' complacency about capitalism's promotion of work as an ethics of self-realization. Drawing from Jacques Rancière's emphasis on the proletariat's self-identification and incidental political inscription in late nineteenth-century society, this analysis argues that the two films discussed here operate therefore a political and aesthetic shift away from twentieth-century militant cinema by replacing the figure of political consciousness commonly associated with industrial capitalist society, namely the worker, with the unemployed post-industrial subjects of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Post-Beur Cinema: North African Emigre and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000

Post-Beur Cinema: North African Emigre and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000

Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000 by Will Higbee

Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000 by Will Higbee

Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression

First published in hardback in 2007, Cinema and Sensation rapidly established itself as a major intervention in contemporary French cinema studies. Its theorizations of the technologies and materialities of recent film-making in France have become as invaluable a resource to film scholars working on tactility, embodiment, affect, and the sensorium, as the work of Laura U. Marks, Vivian Sobchack, and Emma Wilson. The volume's publication in paperback attests its scholarly popularity and will prove a relief to the many scholars who have been profoundly influenced by it. Beugnet offers a deep critical perspective on the current cultural and political dynamics of France, via a perspicacious study of contemporary French art cinema. She was one of the first to analyse with full scholarly rigour the period in the late 2000s that saw the rise of pornocratic and hyperviolent film-making in France, named pejoratively by James Quandt as ‘The New Extremism’ (in ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum International, 42.6 (2004), 126–32). In Cinema and Sensation Beugnet explores the implicit and explicit cultural imaginaries that subtended that moment in image-making, uncovering geopolitical critiques of the gendered, sexualized, degraded, and eviscerated bodies on screen in films by Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, Philippe Grandrieux, Vincent Dieutre, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, and others. A detailed and culturally specific philosophical framework of contemporary French thought, which also gestures beyond a purely French or francophone remit, informs Beugnet's critique. She intertwines readings of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille with contemporary art theory from October Group critics Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Hal Foster on formlessness. Incisive readings of Gilles Deleuze's concepts of becoming, visagéité, hapticity, and (with Félix Guattari) immanence are united with recent scholarship from Laura U. Marks, Barbara M. Kennedy, and Rosi Braidotti. Psychoanalytic theory informs the hinterland of Beugnet's conceptual frameworks, yet beyond Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva she also integrates post-Lacanian scholarship from Nicole Brenez and Stephen Shaviro. Phenomenology, too, is a structuring signpost for the complex relationships between embodiment and disembodiment, subjecthood and objecthood, world and body that unfold in Beugnet's delicate negotiations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writing with more recent film-phenomenological discourses from Vivian Sobchack and Stanley Cavell. The most striking and eloquent aspect of this volume, however, is the evocative manner in which Beugnet writes about the films themselves. Her senses are attuned — invested even — in the intimate, otherworldly proximity of filmic images and sound; this she communicates with grace as she winds sinuously through a labyrinth of non-dualistic thinking, and hybrid, materially self-aware cinema. Drawing on Jean Epstein's claim that the image thinks, she writes: ‘Films do not just provide life-like testimonies on their contemporary world; as flowing, embodied forms of thought, they can help us imagine ways out of the dead ends down which dual thinking leads us’ (p. 17). Artaud's ‘third path’ (p. 22) between cinematic abstraction and psychological realism is precisely the location of Cinema and Sensation: it is both a way out and a way forward for film theory and cultural critique.

The Renaissance of Documentary Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s

The Renaissance of Documentary Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s

Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema by Tim Palmer

the DVD, “[a] nightmare from which no one awakes [...] in a nameless African country teetering on the brink of an all-out civil war.” At the center of this “nightmare” is Isabelle Huppert, who brings extraordinary physicality to the role of Maria Vial, mother of a shiftless teenage son and manager of a coffee plantation belonging to her ex-in-laws. Her story flashes back and forth over a span of some forty-eight hours that begin with the military flying over to drop survival supplies and exhort her to flee. Her workers leave, her ex-husband, played by Christophe Lambert, schemes to sell the plantation to an African official, and anonymous child soldiers pose a persistent threat. Meanwhile, Maria clings desperately to the place she loves, doggedly insisting that she needs just one more week, then the coffee will be ready. As this unfolds, le Boxeur, a charismatic rebel hero brilliantly portrayed by Isaach de Bankolé, finds his way onto the plantation, where Maria periodically tends to him in his final hours. The film ends in a state of anarchic horror depicted with the kind of visceral cinematography we have come to expect from Denis, an experience that will leave no viewer indifferent. As Huppert notes in her interview on the DVD, “tout a son importance” in Denis’s œuvre. White Material is no exception. Everything in the film seems to be exactly as it should, from the cinematography and lighting to the costuming and script, which Denis co-wrote with Marie NDiaye. Huppert and Bankolé, whose credits include Protée in Chocolat, deliver powerful performances, as do the local actors, especially those playing the child soldiers, a particularly compelling aspect of the film. Denis skillfully underscores the disturbing nature of their existence by emphasizing their childishness even more than their crimes, in large part through the mise en scène. The child soldiers’ musical theme, one of three primary musical motifs, further highlights this dichotomy between innocence and horror. Indeed, the entire score, composed by Tindersticks, suits the film perfectly, with haunting strains that help establish the tone for every character, every scene. In White Material, whose title refers to both the Europeans’ possessions and the transformation of said Europeans into disposable objects, nothing is overstated. Instead, the audience must interpret what they see and hear, as well as imagine back stories to which there are limited clues. As with Denis’s other films, White Material rewards the attentive viewer, and it will doubtless occupy a place of note in the filmography of one of France’s most talented contemporary directors. University of the Cumberlands (KY) Laura Dennis PALMER, TIM. Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8195-6827-4. Pp. 286. $28.95. Aspiring to broaden the canon of contemporary (i.e., twenty-first century) French cinema, Tim Palmer, “cineliterate” and revisionist, has created a denselywritten , generally jargon-free volume replete with informative detail and provocative analyses. Focusing on aspects he considers less-known or neglected, of necessity he ventures away from the mainstream and into “fringe” areas. To examine productively what he finds there he eschews the traditional critical approach (antiquated and no longer useful) that distinguishes art-house (auteur) fare from commercial, endeavoring instead to analyze films on their own terms. This approach leads him to emphasize style and cinematic design over themes. Reviews 935 Brutal Intimacy opens with “The Contemporary French Film Ecosystem,” a helpful roadmap to what follows and an overview of the process and pitfalls of filmmaking in France; and concludes with “Instructive Cinephilia: Film Literacy and la Fémis,” an instructive look at the program and educational orientation of the elite state-funded film school that has formed the craft and cineliteracy of many of the young directors discussed in this study (the appendix listing the school’s 156 must-see films provides intriguing reading). Four central chapters, whose titles indicate their focus, are each constructed around discussions of factors relevant to contextualizing the topic at hand, followed by analyses of representative films. Within the frame of what Palmer deems the unique systematic emphasis in France on débutants filmmakers and the amount of...

Entertainment and Instruction as Models in the Early Years of Animated Film: New Perspectives on Filmmaking in France

This study of the oeuvres of Emile Cohl, Marius O’Galop and Robert Lortac, united by reason of their biohistorical and aesthetic kinship, helps to reconstruct the specificities of the first school of animated film in France. In their films, these animators, formerly caricaturists, combined models whose function was either entertainment or educational, and specific either to the illustration industry or to the children’s books and toys market, with spectacular paradigms borrowed from the stage and other performance arts. By showing how these multiple cultural series combine and interact, this analysis of their oeuvres thus opens up an arena in which the historiography of the Seventh Art in its infancy can be viewed and appreciated as a whole.

Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France

Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France

Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France

Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France

Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France by Gill Rye, Carrie Tarr

Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France by Gill Rye, Carrie Tarr

Marivaux in the suburbs: Reframing language in Kechiche's L'Esquive (2003)

This article examines the extent to which L'Esquive, the winner of four Césars in 2005, follows the recent traditions of beur and banlieue film-making in France, which, since the mid-1980s, have traced the particular histories of immigrant and marginalized populations that have otherwise largely gone underrepresented in French cinema (Tarr 2005). These films, as Carrie Tarr would put it, ‘reframe difference’ in order to highlight the ways in which France's self-conception as a nation state sometimes occludes certain identifications articulated by marginalized individuals and groups. In so doing, many of these films call into question the French model of integration by highlighting the extent to which socio-political and ideological factors have a hand in marginalizing these individuals. While one observes in L'Esquive many of the hallmarks of other banlieue films before it, this film nevertheless sets itself apart in the way it reframes the relationship between high and popular culture through its explicit and very conscious use of language. By juxtaposing the eighteenth century playwright Marivaux's play Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and the street slang of the Parisian banlieues, L'Esquive puts into question the very divide between high and low cultures. This article explores the implications of such a juxtaposition of different registers by taking into account both the film's production values (casting, budget, etc.) and the impact of its tremendous success at the Césars, as well as the way in which the film deftly deconstructs the much propagated stereotype of a necessarily violent banlieue. Through such sensitive and nuanced portrayal of banlieue life, L'Esquive goes a long way in laying bare some of the otherwise-hidden stakes of the French model of integration.

Reframing Difference: ‘Beur’ and ‘banlieue’ Film-Making in France

Reframing Difference: ‘Beur’ and ‘banlieue’ Film-Making in France

Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s

Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s

Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990sTarr, Carrie with BrigitteRollet, eds. Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s . London and New York: Continuum, 2001. Pp. 312. $29.95.

Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990sTarr, Carrie with BrigitteRollet, eds. <i>Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s</i> . London and New York: Continuum, 2001. Pp. 312. $29.95.

Review: Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s

Review: Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s