French Cinema Research Articles

Cinéma théâtral: stardom and performance in the Tradition of Quality

ABSTRACT Departing from the directorial focus of debates about the Tradition of Quality, this article examines stardom and performance as central to late 1940s and 1950s mainstream French cinema. Authorship is not discarded but understood as a power dynamic in which directors and performers, alongside other contributors, struggle for control over characters and narrative. The article first establishes the main elements of quality performance, building on André Bazin’s concept of cinéma théâtral. Examples, drawn from major stars (Fernandel, Pierre Blanchar, Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin, Edwige Feuillère and Michèle Morgan), highlight the crucial importance of elocution and language, a dimension of performance that is often neglected. The article then focuses on Brigitte Bardot in two quality films, En cas de malheur/Love is my Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958) and La Vérité/The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960). B.B.’s iconoclastic image and her departure from prevailing notions of ‘good acting’ provoke a ‘dissonant’ performance, which illuminates further, by contrast, the Tradition of Quality’s acting norms. Conversely, Autant-Lara’s and Clouzot’s variously successful efforts to blend Bardot seamlessly into quality aesthetics betray their wish to modernise their cinema at a pivotal historical moment when the Tradition of Quality was under assault from the emerging New Wave.

‘Que le carnage commence !’: French cinema, la chronologie des médias and the rise of the streamers

ABSTRACT Since the arrival of Netflix – the world’s dominant Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) platform – in France in 2014, the French streaming market has undergone considerable growth with significant impact on the wider audiovisual landscape in France. The rise of VOD, and the French film industry’s response to the incursion of the US streamers (especially Netflix) into the French market, therefore have much to tell us about the transformation of France’s distribution and exhibition landscape since the mid-2010s. A significant part of this transformation has been the changes to the chronologie des médias – the French windowing system and a central part of the regulation designed to promote and safeguard the economic sustainability and diversity of the French film industry. This article will analyse the rise of the streamers in France with a particular focus on the impact of Netflix and the consequences of a radically transformed chronologie des médias, as France (Europe’s largest cinematic producer and one of the most mature, tightly regulated national cinemas in the world) fights to maintain its (cultural) specificity and cinematic independence in the wake of a realignment of the media markets at local and global levels.

‘Martenaut Waves’ in the Music of the French Avant-Garde Cinematographer of the First Half of the 20th Century (on the example of the creativity of A. Honegger)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the figurative, semantic and symbolic specificity of the interpretation of the timbre of "Martenaut waves" in the music of the French avant-garde cinematography of the first half of the 20th century, including in the work of A. Honegger. Research methodology. Cultural-historical, interdisciplinary historical-cultural, as well as analytical-musicological methods were essential for this work. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it introduces for the first time into the circulation of art historians the materials related to the film music of A. Honegger and its timbral specificity, marked by an appeal to the semantic and expressive features of the "Martenaut waves". Conclusions. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as a result of rapid scientific and technical progress, cinematography came to the forefront of world art. The unity of cinematography as a synthetic art and music is strengthened by the emergence of sound cinema in 1926-1927, in which music is recorded on the same film as the image. The use of electric musical instruments, including "Martenaut waves", becomes organic in this process. Thanks to their unusual timbre, they acquired the meaningful status of the embodiment of "the materialisation of the intangible." The world of hallucinations and dreams, mystical spiritual revelations and unusual natural phenomena – such was the range of images that were conveyed with the help of this instrument in French film music of the 1930s and 1940s. A. Honegger worked most fruitfully in this field during the mentioned period, whose creative output includes more than forty soundtracks, including those using "Martenaut waves". One of the first films in which the expressive timbre of this instrument is used was the science fiction film "The End of the World" (1931) directed by A. Gans, as well as the animated film "Idea" (1934) directed by B. Bartosh and artist F. Mazerel. In the musical accompaniment of these films, the timbre of the "Martenaut waves" occupies almost the most important place, revealing the connection of the instrument with the sphere of the Sacred and the Cosmic and the spiritual and stylistic searches of European modern culture.

Les filles de Méliès: l’exception culturelle, analogue aesthetics and women filmmakers of le cinéma-monde

ABSTRACT This article examines transnational francophone films from writer-directors Marjane Satrapi and Chloé Mazlo, filmmakers who show how the politics of l’exception culturelle [the cultural exception] have made French cinema a multiply exceptional force in world cinema. The analogue effects in Poulet aux prunes/Chicken with Plums (2011) and Sous le ciel d’Alice/Skies of Lebanon (2020) mark an aesthetic resistance to the homogenising force of digital photorealism while also reflecting an approach to filmmaking pioneered by Georges Méliès, particularly his ground-breaking work in set design and cinematography. As women filmmakers, their reliance on practical aesthetics to present stories set outside l’Hexagone (mainland France) represent the French commitment to the diversity of cinéma-monde. This article argues that these filmmakers and their films have benefitted from policies rooted in l’exception culturelle while expanding the sense of ‘exception’ in a French context to mean films directed by women, films featuring analogue effects and films that reflect transnational identities and cross-cultural collaboration. Both Poulet aux prunes and Sous le ciel d’Alice frame an expanded logic for l’exception culturelle that has shaped more than three decades of contemporary French cinema.

French Film History, 1895–1946 by Richard Neupert (review)

French Film History, 1895–1946 by Richard Neupert (review)

About Oleksandr Dovzhenko and His Stay in France

The subject of the analysis of this article is the foreign trip and stay in France of Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Yuliia Solntseva in the summer of 1930 and the probable stay of Dovzhenko himself in Paris in 1932. The analysis is written on the basis of articles and reviews, most of which have appeared in the French film press in 1930–1931. The article is aimed at the describing a little-known information about Dovzhenko’s stay in France. The author also is trying to and to submit his exclusive assumptions about his probable second visit to the City of Light in 1932. During his visit Dovzhenko has been accompanied by Parisians Yevhen Deslav and Leonid Mohylevskyi, as well as the artist Mykola Hlushchenko. The description contains a number of events – visits to film studios for the study of sound film technologies, proposals for the production of a French-Ukrainian film, screenings of his films in his presence in the Studio 28 cinema, meetings in the Montparnasse district with leading French filmmakers and with Ukrainian artists of the so-called Paris School, contacts with the former colleagues of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, a probable trip to Amsterdam planned with Deslav. The article contains two hitherto unheard-of reports about Dovzhenko’s second trip to France. The first is based on Yevhen Deslav’s annotation: “I’ve met Dovzhenko in Paris somewhere in 1932 (sic), where he comes to study sound cinema”. The second is the photo of Dovzhenko, posing in the photo salon to the French photographer and film director Elie Lothar. This is the fact, strengthening the hypothesis of the master’s repeated presence in Paris in 1932.

Enraged to live: reviving Liliane de Kermadec’s Aloïse

ABSTRACT This article argues for the historiographic value of the long-neglected film Aloïse (1975). Directed by Liliane de Kermadec, Agnès Varda’s protégée, Aloïse is a biopic of Aloïse Corbaz, a Swiss governess, diagnosed in 1918 with schizophrenia and institutionalised until her death 46 years later, whose riotously erotic ‘Art Brut’, or so-called outsider art, latterly gained attention. This article re-appraises Aloïse in three ways. First, it situates Kermadec in a revisionist historiography of post-New Wave French cinema, bypassing male-centric auteurist models to explore intra-female mentoring networks, encompassing work by figures like Paule Delsol, Nelly Kaplan, Michèle Rosier and Varda. Second, the essay analyses the textual frictions between Kermadec’s deconstructed stylistic palette and the neurodivergent imaginings of Aloïse’s artmaking, in light of the diegetic patriarchal society affronted by such transgressive pursuits. Third, from a contemporary perspective, the article considers ‘intervention subtitling’ in light of the author’s efforts to revive Aloïse by creating new English subtitles that actually engage, and intensify, Kermadec’s diverse repertoire of suppressed female voices.

Screening race, streaming Frenchness: Women of colour on French Netflix

ABSTRACT This article builds on the emerging scholarship on Netflix productions and French series to analyse questions of racial visibility and feminine representation in two series: Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (France Télévisions/Netflix, 2015–2020) and Plan cœur/The Hook-Up Plan (Netflix, 2018–2022). The first section focuses on Dix pour cent’s Sofia Leprince, a mixed-race receptionist and aspiring actress, and the ways in which she serves to highlight the lack of Black actors in French cinema. The second section analyses Plan cœur’s Charlotte Ben Smires, a young woman at a career crossroads who offers a paradoxical perspective on the place of Maghrebi descendants in – and their relationship with – France. Overall, the authors examine how Dix pour cent and Plan cœur, two series featuring strong women of colour, navigate racial visibility in universalist French contexts. These series speak back to a striking historical absence of actors of colour – especially women – from French television screens, yet they are nonetheless circumscribed in persistent norms of republican universalism and thus racial colour-blindness. This article examines this paradox to determine whether these successful contemporary series can truly offer ‘narrative renewal’ within the confines of republican representation norms.

El jefe político: genre crossover and thematic originality in a restored French film

ABSTRACT In 2021, the restoration of the long-lost French film El jefe político (‘The Political Boss’, released as La Réponse du destin in France) was finally completed. Directed by André Hugon between 1924 and 1925 and based on the homonymous novel by the Spanish writer José María Carretero, alias ‘El Caballero Audaz’ (‘The Audacious Gentleman’), it is a most remarkable melodrama set against the backdrop of the turbulent political climate that prevailed in Spain in the early 1920s. Its revival has meant rescuing two subjects from oblivion: André Hugon, a French filmmaker with one of the most prolific careers who directed more than 80 films between the 1910s and 1950s; and the film itself, a stark portrait of an upstart embroiled in political corruption. The author aims to analyse El jefe político as a film in which the most representative genres of the French commercial cinema of the time come together. This analysis will demonstrate Hugon’s personal approach to these genres as well as his originality when adapting Carretero’s novel, to which he adds two striking themes: an epidemic outbreak and the socio-political struggle to introduce the eight-hour working day.

María Félix in Italy

ABSTRACT By the end of 1940s the Mexican film star, María Félix, had risen to the status of living legend at home and piqued the attention of filmmakers abroad. While her participation in Spanish and French productions has been studied, her performances in films produced in Italy, Incantesimo tragico (Dir. Mario Sequi, 1951) and Messalina (Dir. Carmine Gallone), have received less critical analysis. Building on scholarship about the regional and international reverberations of Mexican Golden Age cinema, studies on transnational stardom, as well as star theory, this article reveals how Felix’s projects in Italy constituted transnational experiments within a broader Southern European postwar strategy to counter Hollywood’s market dominance. In contradistinction to her Spanish and French films in which Félix was cast as a foreigner, in Italy Félix played Italian characters. Close film analysis illustrates how to varying degrees, Félix’s roles in Italy engaged her preestablished type known as the mujer sin alma (woman without a soul), and the examination of archival materials shows how the Italian popular press blended Félix’s onscreen characters with the actress off screen. Ultimately, Félix clashed with the ideals of postwar Italian female stardom and was met with an ambivalent financial and critical reception.

Visualizing the unseen: Stage and screen adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall

Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (1957) has been adapted for different media. In order to understand the challenges it poses for any form of visual representation, this article will first show how the radio play exploits the acousmatic nature of the medium and its so-called ‘blindness’. In a next step, it will discuss how the various stage performances of All That Fall have dealt with these difficulties, in light of the author’s reservations about the matter and the restrictions imposed by his estate. However, Beckett did allow French film and television versions to be made during his lifetime – respectively by Alain Resnais and Michel Mitrani, the latter for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF). This raises questions not only about how authors and cultural contexts impact the adaptation process, but also about the aesthetic differences and historical relations between theatre and technological media, which the article will additionally probe.

The Myth of Stalin and the Death of Hitler: André Bazin and The Fall of Berlin’s Transnational Travels

This essay explores aspects of the transnational and transhistorical impact of The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina, Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949). Although the film is late Stalinist propaganda, and an outstanding manifestation of the Stalin personality cult, it cannot be reduced to those descriptors. It has had an ongoing impact upon viewers within different cultural contexts who do not necessarily subscribe to its politics. André Bazin’s seminal, frequently translated and reprinted essay ‘The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema’ (‘Le cinéma soviétique et le mythe de Staline’, 1950), is the most famous and frequently quoted piece of writing on Stalin personality cult films, but it is not the final word on them. It needs to be understood within the specific context of French film culture during the immediate postwar period. This essay therefore highlights the cultural specificity of ‘The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema’ by contrasting the debates within which Bazin’s essay was enmeshed with the equally culturally specific British reception of The Fall of Berlin in the early 1950s, exemplified by leading film critics and historians such as Dilys Powell, Fred Madjalany and Hugh Trevor-Roper.

“Education as the Art of Making Oneself at Home in the World with and Through Others”: The Call to Bildung in Meister Eckhart and the Film Of Gods and Men

This paper explores the mystical structure of education as Bildung in medieval theologian and Dominican friar Meister Eckhart’s work and the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux). I start this paper with a short introductory sketch of the Bildung tradition, in order to situate my discussion of Eckhart within the more well-known humanist tradition. Here, I claim that Bildung (as we understand it today through the classic Bildung philosophers) points back to its theological heritage and horizon of meaning, when it is claimed as the general tekhnê (art, craft) of making oneself at home in the world with and through others. In my first step, I then explore the intellectual heritage of this mystical structure of Bildung. Drawing on a range of Meister Eckhart’s writings (esp. his German sermons), I elaborate three features pivotal to his concept of Bildung (as image-ing) of the imago Dei (image of God) in the human soul/action: (1) divine grace, (2) human cultivation and (3) the harmonisation of both in (what I shall call) ‘careful gestures'. In my concluding second step, I illustrate this mystical structure of Eckhartian Bildung—with a particular focus on the emergence of careful gestures—through the motion picture Des Hommes et Des Dieux.

Analysis of Technological Development and Enhancement in Modern Film Noir

This paper explores the visual and technological evolution of film noir, particularly the transition from classic to modern film noir. Originally defined by French film critics, film noir is known for its distinctive low-key lighting and strong visual contrasts, emphasizing a mysterious and dramatic visual presentation. The article first compares low-key lighting in traditional and modern film noir, highlighting modern advancements in controlling lighting and shadows. It then examines color usage in both eras, noting modern noir’s use of low saturation and vivid colors for enhanced emotional impact. Lastly, it explores modern technology’s role in restoring classic film noir, emphasizing high-resolution scanning and digital processing for improved visual and auditory quality while preserving artistic style. These analyses underscore film noir’s adaptation to technological advancements in global cinema. Through these analyses, the paper reveals how film noir has adapted to technological advancements to maintain its significant place in global cinematic art. Nonetheless, it acknowledges limitations, primarily focusing on visual and technological aspects while neglecting potential socio-cultural, political, and economic influences on the genre. Future research could address these gaps by exploring interdisciplinary perspectives and incorporating quantitative methods to provide a more comprehensive understanding of film noir’s evolution.

Blue Boys: Maurice Pialat, Nicolas Poussin and the Work of Art

Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) in his Libération article “Éloge de Poussin” (1987) tells us that cinema has made no progress since the Lumière brothers’ first projected images. Provocatively, he informs his readers that only painting has progressed and, as such, remains the far more innovative art form. For all the pointed remarks directed with some force towards French film critics and filmmakers, Pialat’s short notes in Libé offer us something more. It is one of the few opportunities to consider the auteur’s critical and aesthetic approaches to filmmaking. While Pialat emphasises the failure of critics and filmmakers to elevate cinema to the level of art, the article more saliently invites us to analyse Pialat’s understanding of cinematic practice as an intricate enfolding of painterly and cinematic concepts. In this article I contend that, through a reading of the theoretical dimensions Pialat introduces in his “elegy” to the Classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), along with an analysis of a selection of the director’s films, we not only discover Pialat’s film-philosophy; moreover, we discover new ways to study Pialat’s acute rendering of fraught manhood. Significantly, I argue, Pialat’s wrestling with masculinity (fatherhood, sexual desire, boyhood, and so on) reveals itself through a key element critical to Poussin’s aesthetic palette: the colour blue.

Powers of (Body) Horror

Abstract French film director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau's sophomore body horror film, Titane (2021), like its predecessors of the same genre, examines the malleability and fragility of human corporeality. The film can be categorized under the New French Extremity, a genre coined by art critic James Quandt, who disapprovingly expressed his concerns with the rampant depictions of blood and violence in film; however, this article contends that Ducournau's film offer much more than mere shock factor and spectacle of taboo objects. Featuring a protagonist who is a manifestation of Donna Haraway's radical cyborg, Titane can be situated alongside recent debates in posthuman concerns, but more importantly, in its intersection and close connection to feminist and queer discourse. Although many have utilized Julia Kristeva's abject/-ion to examine the horror film genre through a feminist lens, this article seeks to expand on such existing literature by pointing to its emancipatory powers and its potential for a more inclusive, posthuman queer mode of being and kinship beyond the symbolic order.

The construction of ‘Jacques Becker’: realism, popular film and the auteur in 1950s film criticism

ABSTRACT Jacques Becker is well known as an auteur, one of the few French directors working in the post-war period who has been hailed as an ‘uncle’ of the New Wave (alongside Robert Bresson, Max Ophuls, Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Tati). This article positions him in relation to the ‘quality’ and popular cinema of the period through an exploration of the critical discourses that coalesce around his films. Becker embraced an auteurist conception of cinema but operated in an industry that was dominated by a commercial, quality cinema of international co-productions, stars and films destined for export. Drawing on articles from both the specialist and general press, this article explores the construction of Becker as an auteur at the very moment when the politique des auteurs was setting out its stall in opposition to the Tradition of Quality and popular cinema more generally. By tracing how Becker came to occupy a unique position in post-war French film, it sheds light on the framing of popular, quality and auteur film in relation to key social, political and aesthetic discourses in play at this time.

Anatole Litvak: a unique figure among émigré filmmakers in 1930s French cinema

ABSTRACT Anatole Litvak, a Russian Jew who began his career at Ufa in Berlin, was one of the German émigrés who settled in France after Hitler came to power. His case is little known, yet it is both singular and emblematic of the career of émigré filmmakers in France. Litvak established himself early in France, where he made four films between 1931 and 1935: Coeur de lilas/Lilac (1932), Cette vieille canaille (‘This Old Rascal’, 1933), L’Équipage/Flight into Darkness (1935) and Mayerling (1936), the triumph of the latter opening the door to Hollywood. Above all, his success was ‘curious’ compared to the difficulties faced by his colleagues: this first French period was one of the most fruitful of his career. This article looks back at Litvak’s career to highlight his unique place in French cinema in the first half of the 1930s.

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Questions of identity and global visibility: French funding in Latin American and Maghrebi cinema

This article examines the relationship between French film funding and the regional cinemas of the Southern Cone of Latin America (Cono Sur) and the Maghreb. Since the 1980s, France has steadily increased its support of filmmakers in francophone regions, expanding its funding of organizations and financial aids like Fonds Sud (now Aide aux cinémas du monde) and Fonds Image de la Francophonie in order to promote francophone filmmaking throughout the world. In the cases of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) and the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), the opportunities provided by French funding and the interest in co-producing global cinema coincides with a rise in local productions within these regions. A French co-production status also promotes the global visibility of other national cinemas. Yet the discourse surrounding the types of narratives shown in French co-productions and the ways in which filmmakers are limited by funding stipulations highlights an ongoing issue that filmmakers from the Southern Cone and the Maghreb face when accepting France’s financial support. The combination of France’s global financing of films and the expanding interest in Southern Cone and North African cinema establishes a complex relationship around French funding institutions, francophone regions (as well as their relationships to the term “francophone”), and identity within an increasingly globalized film space. By examining the history and current state of these regions’ cinemas, as well as their relationships to France, this article analyzes the positive and negative effects of France’s history in financially shaping the national (and regional) cinemas of southern Latin America and the Maghreb, the current landscape of Southern Cone and North African filmmaking, and the possibilities for change in transnational filmmaking in the future.