French Cinema Research Articles

Strengthening The Ties That Bind: Similarity, Status and Uncertainty in Film Production

Studies of collaboration have highlighted the importance of similarity as a driver of tie formation, however, we seldom know when this driver breaks down. Prior literature offers two forces as likely suspects when searching for dampener of the influence of similarity on the choice of a collaborator: perceived environmental uncertainty and partner status. Prior studies of uncertainty have highlighted that it creates a tension that can be adressed in two opposed way by managers: either they look for new partners, or they tend to rely more on existing and similar partners. However, we know little about what leads the tension to be resolved one way or another. Similarly, studies of status in collaborative settings suggest it creates options for choosing new partners and a strengthened preference for working with similar others, however, it is not clear how those two tendencies play out in practice. Do high status individuals explore the collaborative options afforded to them by their status or do they display an exacerbated tendency to collaborate further with past collaborators or similar others? Individuals choose collaborators they believe are the best fit for their project. Constraints during the recruitment process---in terms of time and resources---imply that decisions are made under uncertainty on the quality of the new collaborator. As a result, project stakeholders have to rely on what they can observe. I explore how one of those observables---similarity---is used by project stakeholders while choosing collaborators. More precisely, the contribution of this paper is to highlight the boundary conditions of the preference for similarity in regard to status and uncertainty. I show that, while similarity has a positive effect on the likelihood of collaboration, status of the project stakeholder limits the influence of similarity. In addition, uncertainty at the project level heightens the reliance on similarity; while uncertainty at the market level does not influence the reliance on similarity. My data tracks technicians in the French film industry over a 14-year period, exploring the implications beyond this industry for collaboration among skilled workers and for managers involved in recruiting decisions.

Viaggio in Francia: Pathé Italian-French co-productions in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract The article explores some recurring features found in Pathé’s Italian-French co-productions in the 1950s and 1960s, addressing this corpus of films as a representative sample of the larger co-production trends between the two countries in the period under discussion. The analysis is based on the examination of unpublished documents as well as press material from the archives of the Fondation Seydoux-Pathé (Seydoux-Pathé Foundation) and the Cinémathèque française (French Film Library). As the article evidences, co-productions served as a powerful instrument of transnational cultural exchange, modern marketing practices, and the rethinking and revisiting of country-specific genres. They also paved the way for the exportation and popularization of Italian actors, directors and cinematic style across France. Great attention is paid to how the French specialist and popular press received such co-productions, whether the films’ dual nationality affected their reception and to what extent co-productions contributed to the image of Italian cinema in post-war France.

Europa bije się w piersi. Recenzja książki „Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina” Krzysztofa Loski

EUROPE REPENTANT. REVIEW OF POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE: ETHNO-REPRESENTATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA BY KRZYSZTOF LOSKAThe subject of the present paper is a book „Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina” by professor Krzysztof Loska from the Jagiellonian University, focused on an attempt to analyse the cinema of the Old Continent from post-colonial point of view. The review underlines a valuable contribution to Polish film studies that the book makes and emphasizes the scale of research underta­ken, as well as the manner accuracy and the ability to perform a witty interpretation of each and every movie. In accordance to the reasoning included in the review, all these features can be noticed in parti­cular in the chapters dedicated to the French cinema. In the present paper the author also pays attention, though, to omission of few movies that are strongly tied to the subject of Loska’s considerations and some irrelevance of the chapter named „Hybrydowość...” in relation to the rest of the book. However, those little concerns do not affect a very high rating of the quality of the reviewed book. Translated by Kordian Bobowski

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...

“To Show the People in Paris How We Live Here”: Working-Class Representation, Paul Carpita, and Film History

“To Show the People in Paris How We Live Here”: Working-Class Representation, Paul Carpita, and Film History Sabine Haenni (bio) French and Anglo-American film historians usually stress the “idea of continuity” that dominated French cinema after World War II.1 Susan Hayward claims that “the look of France’s cinema did not change considerably” after the war, and Alan Williams suggests that the foundation of institutions such as the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie) helped nurture “the strong artistic continuity between the new French school of the Occupation and the postwar Tradition of Quality.”2 During the war, when the German company Continental made films in Paris, production in the South had become more important, at least before the occupation of the Southern zone in 1942. Many film professionals found themselves in Nice, the country’s second largest production site, and other cities such as Toulon and Marseille saw the foundation of new production companies.3 After the war, however, most film histories shift their focus back to Paris. Film production seems once again centered in the capital. In terms of representation onscreen, however, historians have noted one major change compared to the pre-war period. The 1930s, Susan Hayward tells us, saw “the emergence onto the screen of the working class in a big way. The proletariat—most especially the Parisian working class . . . became the new iconography denoting ‘Frenchness.’” Such a new iconography entailed a shift not just to the representation but also to the valorization of the working class. And yet, “after the Occupation and into the 1950s, the working class all but disappeared both as an icon and as a preoccupation (either positive or negative).” Instead, the 1950s are characterized by an “aura of uninventiveness” during which genre films such as the film policier and comedies dominate.4 In a more detailed account of the [End Page 79] fate of the cinematic working class, Michel Cadé acknowledges the paucity as well as the diversity of working-class themed films that in his view do not constitute a clearly defined “genre,” but equally emphasizes their relative flourishing in the 1930s, after 1968, during the 1980s, and from 1992–2002. Cadé also notices a brief moment of flourishing working-class representation during post-war liberation, which came with a brief left-wing political victory.5 I want to start with this brief post-war moment marked by “revolutionary illusion” and “great Hope for social change.”6 According to historian Emile Temime, this was particularly true for the country’s southern port city of Marseille, which had been deeply affected by the war, when it was the major port in Europe from where people fleeing fascism tried to escape, and which had resulted in the total destruction of one of its central neighborhoods.7 After the war, Marseille was a stronghold of the Communist Party and briefly had a communist mayor, before strikes in 1947 paralyzed the city’s port—strikes that would flare up again in 1950 and 1951.8 One of the more fascinating filmmakers to come out of this milieu was Paul Carpita, a son of a dock worker and fish-monger, who had become a schoolteacher, who had been active in the Resistance, and who had joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1943.9 In 1947, Carpita created Ciné-Pax, a small filmmaking collective—which he was happy to call a “counter-school of cinema”—committed to filming “counter-actualities” that were then screened unofficially in Marseille’s Saint-Lazare Cinema. Some footage shot for Ciné-Pax, particularly that of a strike of the dock workers in 1950, was incorporated into the fictional feature-length film, Le Rendez-vous des quais/Meeting on the Docks (FR, 1955), about the daily life of dock workers in Marseille during the Indochina War (1946–54), which would be finished only in 1955.10 In this essay, I understand Carpita as coming out of this postwar moment, and I will unpack how especially his feature film creates spaces where intersectional working-class identities—differently marked by anti-colonial struggles, gender, and race—come together in an alliance based on friendship. Carpita creates images of a...

“The Last Amateurs of Pure Cinema”: Ciné-Clubs and French Film Culture, 1930–1945

“The Last Amateurs of Pure Cinema”: Ciné-Clubs and French Film Culture, 1930–1945 Eric Smoodin (bio) During the 1930s, André de Fouquières wrote a column as the resident bon vivant and man about town for La Semaine à Paris, a weekly listing and description of all of the cultural events going on in Paris from Friday to the following Thursday. He arranged possible activities—going to concerts, museums, lectures—day by day, and as much as possible he staggered events by time, indicating that those so inclined might go from one to the other. He rarely included anything about the movies playing at regular cinemas, but he paid careful attention to the ciné-clubs. In the edition of 12 April 1935, de Fouquières wrote that on Friday, one might take in the opening of the Goya Exposition at the Bibliothèque nationale and then, at 3:00, move to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro for a display of photographs of Indo-China and Siam. Following this afternoon of visual pleasures, one might then go to the Club George Sand to hear travel writer Marion Senones explain “how she became a nomad” and then move on to the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs for a 5:00 conference on “that distressing problem: ‘Will there be war?’” That evening, after the conference, there were a number of choices. The pianist Artur Schnabel would be playing at 9:00, but at about the same time there also would be a meeting of the Ciné-Club de la Femme at the Marignan Cinema on the Champs-Élysées. De Fouquières did not note the program at the club that night. For him, the gathering of the members of the club was significant enough.1 De Fouquières had been born in 1874, virtually the beginning of France’s decidedly pre-cinematic Belle Époque, and he had grown up wealthy enough to be the consummate dilettante, writing some plays as well as many essays. Perhaps because of his upbringing and his artistic inclinations, the cinema itself—in its [End Page 90] regular, daily, popular form—would not appear in his La Semaine column. And so, we can get the sense of a difference, at least for de Fouquières and those like him, between the cinema and the ciné-club, with the latter fully on the level of Goya or Schnabel and just as important as a conference about the prospects for world peace. As much as it belonged to what we might call the broad film culture of Paris and the rest of France, the ciné-club was also marginal to it, given the dominance of the commercial cinema. But the clubs had affiliations that the commercial cinema typically did not have, affiliations with a highbrow Parisian culture of the museum and the concert hall. In both French and English-language film histories, scholars have paid little attention to the ciné-clubs from around 1930 to 1945. Richard Abel, of course, has chronicled the club scene before that, and there has been some significant work on the postwar movement, particularly around André Bazin and those acolytes who would become so central to French filmmaking in the 1950s.2 But perhaps because the evidence of the clubs in the 1930s is so ephemeral—mostly in newspapers and magazines—we have little sense of how they worked or what they showed. As a result, the history of the ciné-club from the period tends to follow a simplified, heroic narrative. With the coming of sound, the clubs devoted themselves to preserving the art of silent cinema or, as in the cases of Le Ciné-Club de France or Les Amis de Spartacus, to show those films censored by French authorities, with the formation of the Cinémathèque française in 1936 standing as the only logical evolutionary step in the clubs’ developmental history. After the catastrophe of World War Two, according to this narrative, the clubs reestablished themselves as the place for the nurturing and growth of the brilliant young men who would lead the French New Wave in the next decade.3 The recent availability of so many online...

Suggestion of Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom through the Discourse Analysis of a French Film ‘The Class’ and a American Film ‘Freedom Writers’

Suggestion of Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom through the Discourse Analysis of a French Film ‘The Class’ and a American Film ‘Freedom Writers’

Remaking Beyond Boundaries: the case of La Femme Nikita and Point of No Return

The following article frames a particular case-study: the question of the remake in its ontological nature, encompassing all its various forms across media. It will examine the diverse levels (cultural, linguistic and semiotic) at which remaking operates, including translation, transposition, transcreation, and adaptation. Foraging through the dense thicket of Hollywood remakes of French films, we will look at the specific example of Luc Bresson's La Femme Nikita (1990) and John Badham's American remake of it, Point of No Return (1993). The methodology will take into account the contextual landscape of remakes as linguacultural artefacts and the texts themselves, adopting both a cultural studies approach and the visual strategies of textual analysis from the perspective of film studies. This will entail a close examination of the films under consideration, paying attention to particular cinematic sequences, set in the context of technical possibilities and offset against the creative options presented by the diverse narratives of the two versions. John Badham's remake of La Femme Nikita will show how remade films tend to differ on numerous levels from the source films, thus offering what Jonathan Evans calls an expanded understanding of audiovisual translation (2014, 300).

The Transnational and the Transformative: Haim Tabakman’s Tu n’aimeras point and the Shifting Profile of French Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

The transnational in French cinema has largely been examined in terms of the industry’s relation to Hollywood. This article, through a reading of the French-Israeli coproduction Tu n’aimeras point (2009) by Haim Tabakman, will ask what the transnational means when Hollywood is not in the frame. Three kinds of “trans” will be discussed. The first is how the transnational is read in writing on French cinema. The second is translation: how the film travels to reach a wider audience. The third is the transformative. Eyes Wide Open recounts several months in the life of Aaron, a kosher butcher whose life in transformed when he welcomes the outsider Ezri as his apprentice. In reading Tabakman’s film in relation to transnational genres, it will be argued that the film can teach us something about the French transnational through the themes it explores: stagnation and mobility, hospitality and hostility.

La sangre que esconde el cuerpo: la subversión del deseo en el cine francés contemporáneo

Desde principios de este siglo el cine francés se siente interesado por un singular universo narrativo en el que, por una parte, los nuevos relatos testimonian un interés por la sexualidad y la intimidad del cuerpo y, por otra, esos mismos cuerpos están dispuestos a aceptar el sacrificio, la violación o la muerte a cambio del deseo. A través del análisi de numerosas películas, este artículo se propone demostrar que la tendancia de las nuevas generaciones surge de la transferencia de un deseo fraguado en el ámbito del realismo y que emigra hacia lo fantástico. Esta transferencia supone una inversión de los códigos de la tradición francesa, al tiempo que responde a la misma reflexión que la Nouvelle Vague hace sobre la imagen, concebida como un viaje, una búsqueda del Otro.

“En français, s’il te plaît”: the linguistic battlegrounds of Entre les murs

AbstractRepresentations of language as a tool for exerting social power are steadily increasing in the French cinema of the twenty-first century. In linguistically diverse films like Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (2008), language is used by institutions to establish hierarchies, and by individuals to undermine them. In such films, both French and other languages can constitute a narrative device in themselves, and a weapon for challenging authority and manipulating others. Such a cinema raises important questions concerning the role of language in today’s France. This article examines the ways in which language is harnessed as a tool for both constructing and deconstructing power relationships in the environment of the contemporary French collège in Entre les murs. Within the film’s ritualized classroom setting, the bourgeois French teacher and multicultural student cohort use variations of French and other languages, including undervalued slang forms such as verlan and tchatche, to dominate one another and (re) negotiate the social hierarchy. The result is a linguistic battleground, in which the codified power relations of the teacher–student dynamic are undermined. The film thus prompts us to reconsider what it means to “master language” in relation to cinema and the contemporary concept of “Global French.”RésuméDans le cinéma français du 21e siècle, de plus en plus souvent, la langue est représentée comme un outil de pouvoir. Dans les films multilingues comme Entre les murs de Laurent Cantet (2008), la langue aide à la fois les institutions à établir des hiérarchies, et les individus à les remettre en question. Dans ces films, la langue – qu’elle soit le français standard, l’argot ou une langue étrangère – peut représenter un élément narratif important, et même une manière de contester l’autorité et de manipuler les autres. Ce cinéma soulève des questions importantes sur le rôle de la langue dans la France d’aujourd’hui. Cet article examine les manières dont les personnages d’Entre les murs utilisent la langue pour négocier les relations de pouvoir dans l’environnement du collège contemporain français. Dans un espace politique et ritualisé, le professeur français bourgeois et sa classe multiculturelle utilisent plusieurs formes du français, y compris le verlan et la tchatche, ainsi que d’autres langues, pour (re) négocier la hiérarchie sociale. L’école devient par conséquent un champ de bataille linguistique, où les relations de pouvoir professeur-étudiants sont mises en question. Le film nous pousse donc à reconsidérer les concepts de “la maîtrise de la langue” et du “français mondial” (“Global French”) dans le contexte du cinéma contemporain.

L ANALYSE DES ASPECTS CULTURELS FRANÇAIS DANS LES EXTRAITS DU FILM FRANÇAIS, LES ACCORDS AUX THÈMES ET SON APPLICATION AU LYCÉE

The objective of this research is to describe French cultural aspects in French films, to classifyFrench cultural aspects and segments of French films in six themes, and to propose a lessonplans using the segments of French films. It is a descriptive qualitative research. Data source isthree French films: Être et Avoir; Paris, Je T’aime; and Y’aura t’il de la neige à Noël?. Thosedatas are printscreen of French films segments and also the dialogue conversation sentences.I used a documentation methode to collect data. The result shows that it has found 65 segments of French films which contain the French cultural aspects. Those segments are based onCECRL theories about French cultural. There’s also 86 French cultural aspects within the segments, and 89 compatibilities which related from segments to the six themes of French subject.In high school, it can be used into French cultural learning.

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France. By Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France. By Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

Le Cinéma français filme l'altérité en Corée du Nord : Le Cas du film Voir le pays du Matin Calme

ABSTRACTIn 2012, the French film made without authorization by hidden camera in North Korea Voir le pays du Matin Calme by Gilles De Maistre presents itself as a “fiction in the real.” Despite its experimental concept confronting an unknown hermetic otherness, why does it stumble on the North Korean reality? Comparing it to Moranbong by C.-J. Bonnardot, the first French film allowed to be made in North Korea (1958) and prepared by the photos of Chris Marker, we try to give an answer by stressing the need to overcome a scopic regime inherited from naturalism and Western positivism with the notions of “montrants” and “montrés,” belief regimes, and veridiction modes.

New Cinema, New Critique: French Film Criticism at the Crossroads, 1960

New Cinema, New Critique: French Film Criticism at the Crossroads, 1960

Screening decolonisation through privatisation in two New Wave films: Adieu Philippine and La Belle Vie

This article analyses images of domestic space in two New Wave films: Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1963) and Robert Enrico’s La Belle Vie (1964). In existing scholarship on the period, critics often define French cinema made during the country’s experience of the Algerian War (1954–1962) in apolitical terms, as a corpus of films stifled by the rise of an insidious censorial regime led by the state. The first part of this article will expand upon this hypothesis by examining the atmosphere of domestic depoliticisation that characterises Rozier’s highly censored film. The second part of this article will then examine how La Belle Vie begins with a desire to flaunt the authority of the censors, before somewhat puzzlingly retreating into the same landscape of apolitical privatisation that defines both Adieu Philippine and popular discourses of the era (for example, women’s magazines). Finally, the author will identify these privatised and politically neutral images of domesticity as one of the reasons that the violent reality of the conflict was initially ‘screened’ from the public imaginary, leading to a war that remained – at least until the wave of highly political films that emerged in the early 1970s – misunderstood, taboo and largely invisible.

‘Vél’ d’Hiv’ six-day race: the spirit of Paris during the twenties

ABSTRACTThe Vélodrome d’Hiver, known colloquially as ‘Vél’ d’Hiv’, was a major sports venue located in Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower. Used for ice hockey, boxing, wrestling and other events, it was above all the scene of a famous cycling competition: the Six-Day Race. It enjoyed such success that it became a source of artistic inspiration, both in painting, literature and film. La Ronde infernale (Infernal Circle), a feature film released in French cinemas in 1928, for example, shows how writer and director Henri Decoin and producer Luitz-Morat, captured the venue, race and popular fervour to depict, with precision and empathy, a typical scene of Parisian life in the 1920s. However, far from being a mere portrait of a bygone era, this film, in the same way as all subsequent figurative portrayals, helped to immortalise this site and establish it in the collective memory, to such an extent that it became a ‘living metaphor’ in Paris. In short, by adopting the principles related to the social history of representations, this paper aims to identify the importance of figurative space in general, and cinema in particular, in the historical, memorial and heritage construction of an ancient temple of French sport.

A Mediterranean gap in the national canon? Paul Carpita’s anti-colonial cinema between militant amateurism and New Wave

A new Marseille cinema, focusing on the city’s everyday culture, emerged in the 1980s with directors such as René Allio and Robert Guédiguian. Even though some of their films received considerable recognition, an important part of the history of this cinematic representation has remained largely unaccounted for: the work of Paul Carpita (1922–2009). His films of the 1950s and 60s are strongly linked to the cultural history of the labour and peace movement. A former member of the Resistance, he created just after World War II Le Rendez-vous des quais/Meeting on the Docks (1953–55), a full-length film shot in the popular quarters of Marseille, thematising the dockers’ protest against the Indochina War. The film was censored before its release and only restored in the 1980s. This article situates the film within the regional and national French cinema of the post-war era, and analyses its hybrid aesthetics, comprising cinematic realism, militant cinema and amateur film. By referring to Carpita’s more intimate and reflexive short films, the article argues that his marginal status within French film history can be traced to the political and amateurish character of his films, but also to the fact that his artistic activity was located in Marseille, at the periphery of the national film scene and academia.

The Ghost of Grandeur

Carsten Meiner analyses a series of classic French films, from Truffaut to Haneke, and their uses of the home with respect to the relation between grandeur and individuality. Homes thus become problematizing mediators between individuals and national grandeur, and together the films form a historical series of quite consistent albeit surprising articulations of the metabolism of life in national grandeur. This focus on the home leads to reflections on the problems of the idea of “represented nationalism” in cinema.

French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation ed. by Marcelline Block, Barry Nevin

of Much Loved. Ayouch, in his films, challenges the status quo and in Much Loved he makes viewers reconsider their attitudes regarding sex workers and sexual identity. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Yahya Laayouni Block, Marcelline, and Barry Nevin, eds. French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4422-6097-9. Pp. 204. $85. Comment le cinéma français représente-il la Première Guerre mondiale et les tensions qui en résultent? Tel est le projet que Block and Nevin se donnent en réunissant un éventail de films muets, sonores et parlants, négligés ou cultes datant de la période de l’entre-deux guerres (1919–1939) à nos jours, soigneusement analysés dans les onze chapitres regroupés sous trois axes thématiques. Dans “Recording and Remembering the Great War”, l’analyse de De Julio sert d’amorce avec l’œuvre pionnière Le cinéma au service de l’histoire (Dulac, 1935), qui incorpore des archives documentaires dans sa trame narrative et donne lieu à un véritable “montage” (3). À cet outil de renforcement de la mémoire collective “officielle” et “vivante” des événements de la guerre, la Nouvelle Vague des années 1960 oppose une réaction “anti-archiviste” que les contributions de Pagnoni Berns et d’Usher sur la comédie franco-italienne Le roi de cœur (de Broca, 1966) mettent en lumière. Cette œuvre filmique est successivement comparée à Thomas l’imposteur (Franju, 1965) et confront ée aux techniques théâtrales développées par Antonin Artaud et Jean Cocteau (27). Cette tendance “anti-archiviste” caractérise aussi la parodie située en Afrique équatoriale La victoire en chantant (Annaud, 1976), que Blanc-Hoàng observe à travers les notions de déplacement temporel et spatial; notions communes à Capitaine Conan (Tavernier, 1996), tourné en Roumanie, et Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, 2004), avec son soldat amnésique. Dans “Women at the Front” sont évoquées les mémoires cinématographiques nationales qui, d’un pays à l’autre, possèdent leurs propres spécificités avec des chronologies qui s’entrecroisent et s’influencent. TholasDisset présente des héroïnes inattendues comme les femmes-soldats dans Une page de gloire (Perret, 1915) et The Little American (DeMille, 1917). Leurs actions face à la guerre sont mises en relief dans l’analyse de Ritzenhoff sur Un long dimanche de fiançailles, où Mathilde (Tautou) cherche son fiancé. Alors que les années 2000 voient la disparition des derniers anciens combattants qui détenaient un rôle capital dans la transmission de l’événement, Block aborde de manière centrale la question du deuil et ses conséquences interminables dans La vie et rien d’autre (Tavernier, 1989) et Joyeux Noël (Carion, 2005): ces films de guerre sont des hymnes à l’amour et à la paix hors des tranchées. Les quatre chapitres qui composent “Interrogating Commemoration: Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937)” montrent comment Renoir (ancien pilote et vétéran de guerre) remémore un enjeu politique de taille et représente la guerre 212 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 213 comme jamais auparavant. Il valorise mais aussi émascule les personnages masculins qui ne cessent de franchir les frontières factices des classes sociales. Nevin clôture son collectif en analysant les mutations que nos sociétés ont opérées sur ce chefd ’œuvre cinématographique en tant qu’objet culturel de la mémoire. Il interroge les raisons pour lesquelles, bien que censuré, amputé et restauré, La grande illusion a fait l’objet de nombreuses sorties médiatiques à l’échelle internationale. Représenter la Grande Guerre au cinéma sert de prisme pour évoquer des dangers qui nous menacent aujourd’hui. Huston-Tillotson University (TX) Anne Cirella-Urrutia Corsini, Catherine, réal. La belle saison. Int. Cécile de France, Izïa Higelin. Chaz, 2015. . The first five minutes of Corsini’s recent feature reveal the conflict that pervades the film: Delphine Benchiessa, daughter of farmers in the Limousin region of France, is torn between her parents’desire for her to marry a man from...