French Cinema Research Articles

The Politics of Hair: Girls, Secularism and (Not) the Veil in Mustang and Other Recent French Films

This article explores art cinema's association of long, straight, shimmering hair with an idealized white, secular, agentic version of girlhood in Deniz Ergüven's Mustang (2015). With reference to girlhood studies and current debates in France about the politics of hair concealment and display, the essay argues for the central role played by the ‘politics of hair’ in thinking through the complex role of women and girls in a postsecular world. The girl's material body, and especially her hair, is made to support a binary approach toward questions of religion and modernity, rendering her the prime figure through which the relation between Islam and the West, tradition and modernity, patriarchy and feminism is articulated.

Sonic ‘Detheatricalization’: Jean Cocteau, Film Music, and ‘Les Parents Terribles’

Abstract Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of his controversial play Les Parents terribles for the screen stands out in his oeuvre as an attempt to reconcile theatre and cinema. It also presented a challenge in preparing a soundscape for a work that did not have any music in its original form. Parents occupies a unique, Janus-like position in the history of French film music, as forward-looking in its anticipation of New Wave treatment of music as material as it is representative of the turn to adapting stage plays for the screen that started in the 1930s. Drawing on production sketchbooks and testimonies, this article considers the development of Cocteau’s working method and his collaboration with Georges Auric, fuelled by the director’s desire to take control of sonic matters. The resulting employment of a monothematic score was not only a new solution to the famous problem of filmed theatre, ‘detheatricalizing’ Parents sonically and visually, it contributed considerably to the development of Cocteau’s status as film auteur—one whose role now extended to adapting musical material. Furthermore, the effect of this compositional technique in Parents suggests that it can be fruitfully situated in relation to recent work in film music studies on issues of anempathetic scoring practices.

La afición por el cine ante la cultura digital: hacia una caracterización de la cinefilia 2.0

Resumen: Durante décadas la cinefilia tuvo como paradigma la cultura cinematográfica francesa; se originó a mediados del siglo XX, se vinculaba a un discurso erudito sobre el cine y a unos espacios específicos para su cultivación. Pero la revolución digital instauró nuevas prácticas de consumo cinematográfico e Internet catapultó nuevas cinefilias. En este artículo se analiza el papel de la cultura digital en estas nuevas cinefilias y se describe cómo los jóvenes aficionados al cine encuentran hoy los nuevos espacios virtuales para forjarla y pronunciarla.PALABRAS CLAVE: Cinefilia; cine; estudios de audiencia; cultura fan; comunicación 2.0.

(Re)visions of the Outre-mer: looking at the male gaze in Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934)

ABSTRACT Cinéma colonial is regarded by certain scholars as a highly conventionalised and commercialised film practice that grants spectators a sense of control over the potentially threatening colonial Other, and Belgian director Jacques Feyder has been subject to particularly harsh criticism in this regard. This article argues that Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934), which depicts a young legionnaire’s relationship with a cabaret singer who bears an uncanny resemblance to a previous lover who jilted him in Paris, challenges dominant tendencies in portrayals of gender and colonialism in French cinema of the 1930s. Drawing on the relationship between Laura Mulvey’s theorisation of the male gaze and E. Ann Kaplan’s understanding of the imperial gaze, this article considers two core aspects of Feyder’s film. First, it illustrates how narrative sequences structured around the male protagonist’s point of view simultaneously grant insight into his vision of women and critically distance the spectator from his manipulative relationship with Irma. Second, it demonstrates that the framing of the protagonist’s gaze is linked with broader questions regarding French white objectification of indigenous Algerian women in a fashion that reflexively exposes the ideological underpinnings of cinéma colonial and French colonial culture of the interwar period more broadly in ways that French cinema of the 1930s largely elided.

From the Casbah to Père Jules’s cabin: theorising the exotic-abject in 1930s French cinema

ABSTRACT This essay examines two oft-commented on films of 1930s France, Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937) and L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934). The author argues that representations of the exotic in both films are best understood in conjunction with Julia Kristeva’s conceptualisation of abjection. Although both films are representative of different political discourses and cultural movements (colonialist for Pépé le Moko, Surrealist and therefore presumably anti-colonial for L’Atalante), they meet in their representation of the exotic Other, who is at once destabilising and structuring, undermining power and yet ultimately reinforcing its legitimacy. The author concludes that the exotic serves the same purpose as abjection in processes of (national) identity formations, processes which exclude, draw frontiers and help determine with certainty what one is, and what one is not.

Authenticity in A Real Young Girl (Catherine Breillat, 1976)

In French cinema, representations of girls have often been associated with films made by women, as demonstrated by Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet (2001). They claim that the young girl is the major cinematographic topic for a woman’s first film, and names, such as Céline Sciamma in the late 2000s, Diane Kurys and Catherine Breillat in the 1970s, substantiate this position. However, Breillat’s A Real Young Girl was different, as it attracted critics’ acerbic reception and was subsequently banned for its open depiction of a young girl’s sexual experiences. It is argued that Breillat’s images of the young girl’s sexual initiation in the 1970s brings to the fore the significance of the idea of authenticity in relation to sex and cinema. Examining the representation of the ‘real young girl’ highlights the ideas of reflexivity and creativity attached to the existentialist notion of authenticity. This article aims to show that the young girl stands as a metaphor for Breillat’s auteurist approach to challenging existing filmic conventions.

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France

Animal products: livestock farming and ecological citizenship in French political documentary

ABSTRACT In the past 15 years, French cinema has seen a significant uptick in documentary films devoted to the issue of industrialized agriculture. These films join a large international corpus of documentaries that critique agricultural threats to human health, animal welfare, and the environment. This article analyses four recent political films on French livestock production that critique industrialized agricultural practices. Three are solutions-oriented films, Herbe (2009), Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010) and Steak (R)évolution (2014), and one, Entrée du personnel (2011), that takes stock of one set of consequences of the system by portraying the interior of an industrial slaughterhouse. The article uses the framework of ecological citizenship to analyze the films’ political stance through the implied viewer they address. The analysis demonstrates that this viewer is assumed to share concerns about both the social and environmental consequences of food choices. The films articulate these concerns through various visual and verbal strategies that make the link between individual acts and collective concerns visible. They also suggest the existence of a non-territorial environmental community that the viewer might join. The values that emerge from the films align with more generalized concerns about French food that are migrating out of activist circles and into the mainstream of the French population. These include the quality and geographic origin of food, and concern for animal and human welfare, and the ecological footprint of various food choices.

Stardom and historical thinking in Isabelle Adjani’s French heritage film Camille Claudel

ABSTRACTStardom plays an important role in heritage film, a contemporary genre of costume drama and historical film. Stars’ on-screen and off-screen presences, their star personas and worldviews, powerfully impact heritage films’ historical reconstitutions, potentially influencing the spectator’s ‘historical thinking’ and critical engagement with the past. A genre of popular and art-house/auteur cinema, heritage film provides a setting where renowned actors and actresses may assume a ‘politics of stars’, operating as ‘star-auteurs’ who offer a meaningful contribution to films’ depictions of prior eras through their unique incarnation of historical figures. In the star-led phenomenon of heritage biopics, stars’ roles can be instrumental in impacting the viewer’s historical understanding. Iconic French Cinema star Isabelle Adjani has appeared in several crucial roles in heritage film, most notably her incarnation of Belle Époque artist and sculptress Claudel in the 1988 biopic Camille Claudel. In her adaptation of Reine-Marie Paris’s original 1984 biography, Adjani’s specific star presence forcefully influences the film’s portrait of Parisian art worlds, salons, galleries, artists’ studios, and workshops in turn-of-the-century France. Through close analysis of Camille Claudel, this article examines the biopic’s reconstitution in relation to star Adjani’ role, testing notions of historical realism and authenticity in consultation with historical texts.

Composers and “Microgénie”: A Study of the Symphonic Sound of French Cinema in the Thirties

Abstract During the thirties, French cinema was mostly accompanied by small symphonic orchestras. Through the theoretical writings on “microgénie” (i.e., quality of a composition well-written for the microphone) and the scores of Arthur Honegger, we will try to define a conception of cinematic orchestral sound of this neoclassical composer and his contemporaries. While studying the number of musicians and the orchestral parts, the microphone positioning, the diversity of orchestral devices, and some musical writing principles, we will distinguish a “French film music sound” from the Hollywood orchestral sound of the same period.

Alcançando um público estrangeiro

Este artigo analisa algumas das questões que envolvem a tradução intercultural de filmes. Centra-se na tradução de referências e questões culturais específicas, particularmente, a validade das noções de estrangeirização e domesticação em Estudos da Tradução, elaboradas por Venuti (1995), como uma abordagem conceitual tradicionalmente usada para discutir as estratégias empregadas no processo de tradução de referências culturais. Com base nos resultados obtidos em um estudo piloto composto de três filmes franceses dublados e legendados para o inglês, este artigo sugere um desafio teórico ao propor uma abordagem mais pragmática para o estudo da transferência cultural em tradução audiovisual (TAV). De modo particular, propõe a analisar se é possível observar qualquer forma de regularidade no emprego de estratégias de tradução de referências culturais, assim como de que maneira isso impacta as relações dialógicas entre o Eu e o Outro e a representação da alteridade.

Reaching a foreign audience

This paper examines some of the issues involved in the intercultural transfer of films. It focuses on the translation of culture-specific references and questions in particular the validity of the notions of foreignisation and domestication, brought to the fore of Translation Studies by Venuti (1995), as a conceptual framework traditionally used to discuss the strategies applied when translating cultural specifics. Drawing on the findings of a pilot study consisting of three French films dubbed and subtitled into English, this paper suggests a theoretical challenge by proposing a more pragmatic approach to the study of cultural transfer in audiovisual translation (AVT). More particularly, it will examine whether it is possible to observe any form of consistency in the strategies used for the translation of culturally-bound references and what this implies for the dialogic relationship between Self and Other, and the representation of alterity.KEYWORDS: Audiovisual translation, cultural transfer, culture-specific references, foreignisation, domestication

A moda retrô e a fascinação com o nazismo: <i>Lacombe Lucien</i> e a crítica de cinema francesa

Quando Louis Malle escolheu colocar nas telas o tema da cooptação do jovem camponês Lacombe Lucien (1974) em vez de frisar a resistência francesa, ele adentrou num campo minado com a crítica de cinema da revista Cahiers du Cinéma. Num contexto de crescente politização, a publicação dedicou ao filme artigos em torno das teorias da enunciação, da semiologia, da criação de estereótipos e especialmente em torno da onda retrô. Por mais de um ano, o cineasta foi acusado de estar fascinado pelo nazismo ao invés de denunciá-lo. O assunto tabu para os franceses acendeu um debate intenso entre Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney, Pascal Kané, Serge Toubiana, Michel Foucault e Marc Ferro, que analisamos nesse artigo para ampliar a compreensão da metodologia da crítica de cinema francesa daquele momento.

Theses on French and Francophone cinema 2016–2018

Theses on French and Francophone cinema 2016–2018

REPESENTASI FEMINIS MARXIS DALAM FILM SUFFRAGETTE

This paper tries to describe the Marxist Feminist values that are embedded within themovie Suffragette. Suffragette is a movie created by Sara Gayron and was premiered bythe French cinema Pathé. Suffragette was inspired by a true story of the movement fromthe Radical Feminist group Suffragette led by Emmeline Pankhurst, in fighting for thewomen’s rights for political participation. Suffragette tells the story using the perspectiveof the main character Maud Watts, a laundry service worker who joined Pankhurst inraising the issue of sexual harassment and women’s rights to vote in front of theParliament; which mainly consists of upper class Caucasian men. This paper exhibits theinequality between the upper class and the domination of masculinity towards thelabors/female labors. This research adapt on Sara Mills’ Discourse Analysismethodology in order to provide description of the Marxist Feminist values which wasadopted within the character of Maud Watt, as the research subject, and the act ofresistance by Suffragettes as the object; in addition, placing the movie viewers as thereader and Sara Gavron as the writer. The values of Marxist Feminism were visiblethrough the scene which the character Maud Watts gave her testimony before the courtand within the Darby Horse Race scene which the group Suffragette performed theirprotest. The court scene showed the resistance from the female labor group, whichrepresents the rejection against the hegemonic masculinity values that’s projected by theupper class Caucasian men in parliament. In the final scene, the Darby, which wasconsidered as an activity for the elites and demonstrates masculine and competitivevalues, was chosen as a channel to demonstrate the labor class women’s resistance.Keywords : Representation, Marxist Feminism, Suffragette, Feminist Methodology, Movie.

Gender and the politics of decolonization in early 1960s French cinema

In a recent monograph, Todd Shepard has implored us to examine the ways in ‘which the Algerian War modified the form and the content of debates surrounding contemporary sexuality in France’, from the nationalist revolution spearheaded by the FLN in Algeria, to the sexual paradigm shift of May ’68 (2017: 21). An important injunction, undoubtedly. But also an injunction that, as I will show, could also be inverted to examine how, in the world of cinema, the radicalization of identity politics catalysed by decolonization found itself similarly distorted by a tendency among male directors to imagine the war through the lens of their own androcentric preoccupations, fantasies and anxieties: anxieties that, in the case of Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961), Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963), and Jacques Dupont’s Les Distractions (1960), ricochet erratically between masochistic and misogynistic tales of impotence and carnal retribution; anxieties that subtly twist the dynamics of the decolonial debate into strange shapes, places and meanings.

Transfer emocji w translacji audiowizualnej na przykładzie polskich tłumaczeń napisowych wybranych filmów anglojęzycznych i francuskojęzycznych

<p>Szeroki dostęp do zagranicznych produkcji filmowych w Polsce zaowocował w ostatnich latach rosnącym zapotrzebowaniem na tłumaczenia audiowizualne. Dzięki rozwojowi nowych technologii i form dystrybucji filmów oraz seriali napisy filmowe przestały być domeną kina i stały się coraz chętniej wybieraną wersją tłumaczenia filmów. Pomimo niewątpliwych zalet translację napisową cechują szczególnie restrykcyjne ograniczenia systemowe determinujące wybory translatorskie i w rezultacie kształt tekstu docelowego. Nadrzędną zasadą tłumaczeniową jest kondensacja źródłowych treści, w wyniku której wyjściowy tekst dialogów podlega znacznym reformulacjom i opuszczeniom. Ponieważ charakter postaci w filmie w dużym stopniu manifestuje się poprzez ekspresję emocji, w artykule podjęto próbę zbadania, w jaki sposób w tłumaczeniu napisowym dokonuje się transfer funkcji emotywnej źródłowych dialogów filmowych. W tym celu analizie poddano wybrane filmy anglojęzyczne i francuskojęzyczne oraz ich polskie przekłady w wersji napisowej.</p>

Books published on French and Francophone cinema in 2018

Books published on French and Francophone cinema in 2018

French Cinema and the Great War. Remembrance and Representation

French Cinema and the Great War. Remembrance and Representation

CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE: THE THREAT OF DEATH OR REBIRTH? (BY THE MATERIALS OF TRAVEL ESSAY BY MATERIALS OF TRAVEL ESSAY BY MARKIYAN KAMYSH «OFORMLAND: A STROLL TO THE ZONE»)

CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE: THE THREAT OF DEATH OR REBIRTH? (BY THE MATERIALS OF TRAVEL ESSAY BY MATERIALS OF TRAVEL ESSAY BY MARKIYAN KAMYSH «OFORMLAND: A STROLL TO THE ZONE»)