French Director Research Articles

Beginka we współczesnej Europie. O filmie Hadewijch Brunona Dumonta

The article focuses on Hadewijch, a film by the French director Bruno Dumont. The film is discussed from the perspective of the contemporary religious experience. Bruno Dumont, one of the most interesting French directors, refers in his movie to the tradition of Robert Bresson. The protagonist of Hadewijch, a contemporary girl fascinated by the medieval mystic Hadewijch, experiences her religiousness in a world completely devoid of any metaphysical context. Her loneliness draws her near the circles of Islamic terrorists. Dumont’s ambiguous movie poses numerous questions and while it does not offer an unequivocal answer to any of them, it succeeds in providing a painful diagnosis of the condition of contemporary Western Europe.

A Twenty-first-century Wunderkammer: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) was founded by Australian collector David Walsh in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2011. The intuitive arrangement of art and objects from different cultures and periods creates a modern day Wunderkammer effect that is visually spectacular and seen to be unique to MONA. Walsh challenges the sanctity of the established art museum by reorganizing presentation models and injecting an element of inquisitiveness to exhibition displays that have much to do with the prevailing culture of curiosities and the notion of time and the changing world. Although it is often described as having an immediate context in contemporary curating, I would argue, by contrast, that much of its concerns can be traced back to the recent works of French curator and museum director, Jean-Hubert Martin; his innovative arrangement of old and new art and non-art objects alongside contemporary art makes them relevant and innovative for a contemporary audience to engage with them, to arouse their curiosity, and to allow them to make sense of a changing world. Nevertheless, MONA is a museum that offers an alternative way of seeing by positioning art in a theatrical non-white cube space that emphasises a sensory and visual didacticism above all else; one that creates Martin's museum of enchantments and curiosity by way of unconventional comparisons and juxtapositions.

Quality Wars: The Groupe des Trente and the Renewal of the Short Subject in France, 1953–1963

The Groupe des Trente (Group of Thirty, hereafter G30) was a collective of French film directors, producers, critics, and technicians. It formed in 1953 with a mission to protest proposed changes in state funding policies that the group described as a threat to the unique form of the short subject (le court metrage). The origins of the policies in question draw on reforms instituted some 20 years earlier and revised during the 1940-44 German occupation by the Comite de l’Organisation dse l’Industrie Cinematographique (Organizing Committee of the Cinema Industry, aka COIC) and its postwar successor, the Centre National de la CInematographie (National Center for Cinema, aka CNC). In 1953, the G30 lobbied against a proposed replacement of automatic support for the short subject to a quality subsidy (prime a la qualite) to be awarded competitively. The second part of the G30’s mission was to promote dialogue and exchange of screenings with filmmakers working in U.S.S.R. capitals including Moscow, Leningrad, and Prague.

La construcción de la niña y la adolescente en el cine de Céline Sciamma

Cinema is still a men’s field more than women’s, something that studies from the New York Film Academy, the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative or the Bechdel Test Movie List have backed up. However, statistics are slowly showing optimistic results, and Celine Sciamma is one of the women who are making them improve. She is a young French director, whom trilogy (Naissance de Pieuvres, Tomboy y Bande de Filles) is focused in women, specially little girls and teenagers, and how the puberty process affects their feelings and the discovery of their identity and sexuality. These pages will analyze how Sciamma is contributing to the seventh art with her films and how she transforms woman into an active subject, not a passive one, changing this way the established narrative structures in the prevailing cinema.

French supervisory board gender composition and quota threat: changes from 2008 to 2010

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore how an environmental threat (possible quotas for female supervisory directors) might change supervisory board gender composition in SBF120 French company boards between 2008 and 2010.Design/methodology/approach– From a census of supervisory board membership of SBF120 companies in France in January 2008 and December 2010, data were obtained to test hypotheses relating to changes in gender composition of boards and demographic differences between new and earlier director appointees. The authors drew on institutional theory to inform the discussion of this paper’s findings.Findings– The authors reveal significant increases over 2008-2010 in SBF120 board female representation and significant cohort differences between recent and earlier appointees. Newer female appointees differed from male peers and from earlier appointed females and males, bringing youth and international experience. New females were more likely to gain CAC40 seats than their male peers. There was an increase in boards with multiple female directors.Research limitations/implications– Actual motivations for increase in female appointments are unknown, but institutional theory provides possible explanations, as suggestion of coercive forces loomed. Chairmen of larger firms may have made strategic choices to attract younger and English-speaking foreign women, before the rush. Limitations include the descriptive nature of the paper, but it sets a benchmark for later studies to monitor progress in depth.Practical implications– The talent pool for female directors has widened to include foreign English-speaking women, bringing a range of new insights and experience of international governance practice to traditional French boardrooms. However, this could be seen as further discriminatory practice that requires female appointees to bring more human and social capital than that required of their male peers.Originality/value– This is the first paper charting the changes in supervisory board composition during the three-year period of environmental unrest as quotas were proposed and legislated in France and comparing new and existing cohort French director demographics.

Welcome to Europe! Linking the EU Parliament LUX Film Prize and the impact of migration films to the emergence of a European public sphere

Abstract Migration films represent an emerging genre of film-making that is increasingly influencing European citizens and policy-makers alike. Through them, we are able to deconstruct negative attitudes about migrants and how they fit into an increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse Europe. In 2008, the EU Parliament created the LUX Film Prize, an award that recognizes European films that embody European traditions, values and integration. In 2009, the prize was awarded to French Director Philippe Lioret’s film Welcome, the story of a Kurdish migrant in France hoping to reach Britain by swimming the English Channel. Despite its fictional scope, it was highly politicized and controversial due to its critical approach of French refugee policies, specifically the L622-1 law prohibiting citizens from offering assistance to undocumented migrants. Following the EU Commission’s acknowledgement of the need to further involve citizens in debates on European issues, this article argues that the LUX Prize is an innovative medium to foster debate and discussion on matters of migration within a wider European public sphere. It has also provided a platform for those outside the political landscape to help shape the discourse on migration, thus reinforcing a more inclusive European civic participation on matters directly affecting them as citizens.

The Disturbing Fascination of the Inexplicable: La Main (The Hand,1920) from Maupassant to the Fantastic Cinema of Violet

The main objective of the article is the presentation and the analysis of the short film La Main (France 1920), directed by French director Edouard-Emile Violet (1880-1955). The film is adapted from the short story La Main (1883), written by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Through a comparison of the movie and its literary source, and between the definitions of the fantastic in literature and in cinema criticism, it will be possible to show the affiliation of Violet's work to (a specific) fantastic cinema. This article will also endeavor to define this genre in cinema during the Twenties: close to the fantastic genre in literature, it is also able to express itself in an independent way, developing its own characteristics, which are nethertheless coherent –in this specific case– with Maupassant’s idea of the fantastic.

Youth Dispossession, Volcanoes and Diaspora: Recent Developments in Francophone Caribbean Film

THE PAST DECADE HAS WITNESSED SEVERAL EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS in Francophone Caribbean cinematic production, and this article presents a survey of the current landscape of Caribbean cinema in French, focusing on work by Martiniquan and Guadeloupean filmmakers.1 The distinct history of the French islands has given rise to the development of strong literary and theoretical traditions, from Negritude and Antillanite to Creolite, which seek to explore the parameters of Francophone Caribbean identity, questioning how this identity relates to the wider Caribbean and problematising the ongoing relationship with France.This complicated history famously finds expression in the work of the late Martiniquan theorist, novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, particularly in the extended essay Caribbean Discourse, in which Glissant laments the fact that in the Caribbean, colonisation has divided into English, French, Dutch, Spanish territories a region where the majority of the population is African: making strangers out of people who are not.2 Despite this call for a greater racial and diasporic solidarity in the early 1980s, literary proclamations of Francophone Caribbean identity are inevitably shaped by references to metropolitan French poets, philosophers and novelists, and must first be translated and contextualised in order to reach non-French-speaking audiences. In contrast, film offers a more immediate manner of crafting cultural works which, through their use of setting and characterisation, can create bridges with a regional Caribbean audience. The visual and audible appeal of landscape, soundtrack and emotion can, then, combine to overcome the obstacle of language.Neg maronJean-Claude Flamand-Barnys Neg maron (2005) demonstrates a pronounced desire to connect with a local Caribbean audience. Just three years prior to its release, the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002) by Fernando Meirelles had achieved global success, marking a new boom in neo-naturalist fictional narratives and images that focus on marginal characters, urban violence, poverty and extreme experiences.? Neg maron deals with these same themes, initiating the public to a poor area of an unnamed Caribbean island by following the violent everyday lives of marginalised young men.Neg maroris director Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny, who now works under the name of Jean-Claude Barny,4 co-wrote the script with Alain Agat, a Martiniquan,? and the film was produced by Mathieu Kassovitz and Richard Maignan. Barny had gained experience of the film industry by working with the acclaimed French director Kassovitz, and he was a casting director for Kassovitz's 1995 global hit La Haine (Hate), a film which also explores the theme of youth dispossession, and which examines the violent and chaotic lives of young French men from highrise estates on the outskirts of Paris.Barny began work on Neg maron in 1999, and moved back to Guadeloupe, where he had spent his childhood, to complete the project. The film skilfully blends the present-day era with references to the slave past - the title alone forges this connection - by passing comment on the ways in which this past continues to inflect the present. In 1998, the figure of the negmaron (maroon) played a central role in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French DOMs, and in Guadeloupe a flame honouring the memory of the neg mawon passed from town to town during the entire year preceding the events.6 Barny's film must, then, be understood as part of an ongoing cultural reworking of the memory of the Neg maron in the French Caribbean consciousness.Moreover, Neg maron can be viewed as part of a Francophone tradition of using film as a means of examining the economic legacy of colonialism and its impact on contemporary economic structures: in a very different context, the African film Bamako (2006), set in the Malian capital and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, also addresses these themes. …

Film and/as Devotion: Bruno Dumont’s Enworlded Cinema

I am trying to be a filmmaker [... ] I despise the religious, the clerical. I think that there is something profound in human beings, something mysterious, bound to the sacred. The sacred is also in the profane [... ]Bruno DumontFrom the wide-screen environs of Bailleul that open upon and dwarf the tiny human in L'Humanite (Humanity, 1999) to the recurrence of the vast, impassive California desert in Twentynine Palms (2003) or the windswept expanse of the Cote d'Opale in Hors Satan (Outside Satan, 2011), the films of French director Bruno Dumont level the precedence of the human over the environmental. Dumont's characters often find themselves engulfed by the physicality of their surroundings or subject to violent actions that lie beyond their own control. In these terms, the director's selfconfessed shock tactics frequently test our ability to look without looking away- from viscerally charged scenes of human violence, rape and suffering that take place within his beautifully detailed worlds.1To date, much of the existing scholarship on Dumont has been divided between those critics who explore his films as philosophical meditations on topics such as religion, secularism and art but elide their embodied effects and those who associate his films with a sensory, non-representational order in which narrative comprehension and reflective engagement are all but redundant.2 In either case, the intellectual, religious and artistic implications of Dumont's remain severed from its sensorial appreciation. In this article, I will attempt to breach these divisions by considering how the feeling of Dumont's is bound up with both his privileging of the natural world and his conscious re-working of various religious and artistic frameworks. To develop this argument, I draw upon Nathaniel Dorsky's critically neglected concept of cinema to better understand Dumont's own enactments of and/as devotion.3 Concentrating my analyses on Hors Satan, I examine how Dumont's materialist aesthetic, together with his considered emphases on duration, stillness and the painterly tableau, incite our contemplation of and affective to other bodies, selves, landscapes and objects, as well as to the sensuality of itself.As the title of this article indicates, my understanding of and/as need not be attached to exclusively religious or sacred subject matter. Despite the Biblical allusions and figurations of prayer that recur in Hors Satan, it is the expression of a worldly that I am most interested in with regards to Dumont, especially as his activates what Vivian Sobchack calls the passion of the and the grace of [a] common material in film.4 Finally, this article will consider how Dumont's de-centering of the human need not only be framed through destruction, violence and horror. While negative affects pervade Dumont's work, his can appeal to us in intimate, vital and enworlded ways that have yet to be fully explored.DevotionIn his book Devotional Cinema, the American experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky detaches devotion from its traditional theological connotations to extend it to film itself [as] the spirit or experience of religion.5 According to Dorsky, is an alchemical medium that has the to transform our everyday reality into moments of revelation or aliveness.6 Dorksy mobilises as a model for human and for cinematic being. This model of being speaks to films' potential to be transformative, to be an evocation of spirit, and to become a form of devotion.7 For Dorsky, devotional arises from the way a filmmaker use[s] itself'.8 As such, his book invokes a number of specific formal features: a tendency towards topics that relate to the mystical or the mysterious; a foregrounding of the vibrancy of the surface, together with intimations of depth (the screen, in union with its subject matter, becomes a luminous square-a reflecting pool of surface and depth); an attention to materiality (human and cinematic) and a distinct temporal structure. …

Tango for a dream

Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) combines unapologetically cerebral content with a sensuous audiovisual style; fragmentariness in the narrative with an all-encompassing breadth of ideas. Another aspect of Waking Life’s internal contradictions is the juxtaposition of the film’s liminal narrative space with the most “earthly” of music genres, the tango. I will explore the contradictions of Linklater’s film by viewing it in the context of the filmmaker’s metaphysical concerns, showing how all his formal choices, including the rotoscoped visual style, the “narrative of digressions” (Linklater qtd. in Singer) and the choice and placement of music, resonate with the film’s thematic undercurrents and its inquiry into the mysteries of existence, consciousness and time. I will argue that the tension between the film’s narrative liminality and tango’s erotic corporeality addresses the dualistic nature of human experience and that the film’s references to Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen (1983) in the scoring not only evoke the French director’s distrust of the film medium itself but also connect to Waking Life’s wider concerns with the nature of reality and our perception of it.

Música e vozes em Pickpocket (1959), de Robert Bresson

O cineasta francês Robert Bresson ficou conhecido pelo uso criativo dos diversos elementos sonoros em seus filmes e pela parcimônia na inserção de música. Em obras da fase intermediária de sua carreira, como Um condenado à morte escapou (1956), Pickpocket (1959) e A grande testemunha (1966), peças pré-existentes do repertório clássico foram utilizadas como música extradiegética e possuem aspectos formais que guardam analogias com sua distribuição nos respectivos filmes. Além disso, em Pickpocket, a música pré-existente de Lully também se relaciona com as vozes in e over. Na maioria das vezes, a voz in do final dos diálogos desencadeia os trechos de música, colocados em situações de movimento e com uma função semelhante ao divertimento na ópera barroca. Consideramos também as relações entre voz in e over e defasagens desta última com a ação e a imagem do diário do protagonista sendo escrito.

Cinema e Educação: reflexões e interfaces / Cinema and Education: Reflections and Interfaces

Thinking about using movies during classes infers some reflections on how to develop a constructive approach concerning this educational instrument. We choose the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and the French director Alain Resnais (1922) as mediators of the dialogue between Education and Movies here proposed, for considering the concepts developed by both as detachable assumptions to teachers´ interdisciplinary reflections about their classes. Always proposing thinking as a starting point, we will expose some concepts developed by Deleuze about movies as a philosophical production and, in a second turn, we will apply a deleuzian reading, including an interdisciplinary dialogue among education, arts and philosophy, to the short-feature movie Toute la Mémoire du Monde (1956), from Alain Resnais. We see this short-feature movie as good thematic and aesthetic example to be worked during a class for it shows time-memory concepts applied to the library.

Cinema e Educação: reflexões e interfaces

Pensar a utilização do cinema na sala de aula infere maiores reflexões sobre como aproveitar construtivamente esse instrumento sem deixar que ela caia na banalidade. Optamos pelo filósofo francês Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) e pelo diretor cinematográfico também francês Alain Resnais (1922) como mediadores do diálogo entre Educação e Cinema, por consideramos os conceitos desenvolvidos por ambos como pressupostos destacáveis para reflexões interdisciplinares por parte do professor consciente da importância das interfaces do conhecimento no desenvolvimento de suas aulas. Exporemos alguns conceitos desenvolvidos por Deleuze no tocante ao cinema pensante como produção filosófica, e aplicaremos a leitura de Deleuze, pautada pelo diálogo interdisciplinar entre educação, arte e filosofia, ao curta metragem Toda a Memória do Mundo (1956), de Alain Resnais, por entendermos essa obra como exemplo temático e estético para um trabalho com alunos em sala de aula.

Simetrias, repetições e variações - a Missa em dó menor de Mozart em Um condenado à morte escapou, de Robert Bresson

In the films of the french director Robert Bresson, especially in those from the intermediary phase of his career, preexistent classical music was commonly utilized and the distribution of these musical parts in the film guard analogies with the original piece. In A man escaped (1956), choral and instrumental parts from the Kyrie of Mozart´s C-minor Mass are symmetrically distributed in the film, what recalls the very symmetry of Mozart´s Classicism. The music also symbolizes the way of the main character, a prisoner during the Second World War, who has to pass from solitude to communication with the others in order to escape.

Fairies & Witches

Fairies & Witches Cay Dollerup (bio) The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre Jack Zipes Princeton University Press http://press.princeton.edu/titles/ 256 Pages; Paper, $19.95 Jack Zipes, the foremost American scholar of the world of fairy tales, opens his book with a brief reference to recent interest in fairy tales in scholarship and the genre’s proliferation in the media which demonstrate the unique impact fairy tales have on our lives. Zipes states that it is impossible to provide any date or, for that matter, any approximation of a date for the “birth” of the fairy tale, a genre which depends on “the symbiotic relationship of oral and literary currents.” This leads to an exploration of the origins of human communication in which it is argued that all narratives are driven by the urge to be in power, to be relevant and are hence elitist. It is emphasised that the precursors of fairy tales related to belief systems, represented shared experience preserved in the oral tradition. Tracing themes of conflict, notably as they cast a light on the dark side of human life, Zipes cautiously points to Sumerian precursors and then pays full attention to the Greek fables attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Aesop (c. 600 b. C.). He sees fables as stories of animals involved in human conflicts and he tries to identify fairy tale elements. He goes in depth concerning the literary versions of Puss-in-boots from the 16th and 17th centuries the origins of which reach back to India. Employing Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes (a meme being a unit in cultural transmission), Zipes suggests that fairy tales are created out of pools of memes and are instruments used to preserve instinctual morality in changing environments. The French term conte de fées, “fairy tale,” was coined by Baroness d’Aulnoy for stories she wrote and narrated in the salons of Paris in 1690-1710. She recycled much material that existed both in the oral tradition as well as in literature and Roman-Greco myths and tales. So did her contemporaries, mostly women who appropriated narratives involving fairies and other fantastic beings in alternate worlds outside the confines of the state and the church which, in their tales, were portrayed as weak. It is argued that the spectacles of Italian opera exerted some influence on the fantastic narratives, and Zipes refers to d’Aulnoy’s own life (and those of many other women) for the importance of midwives, nannies as real-life fairies who were of paramount importance as protectors of girls and women in many cultures. Homing in on the French author Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, Zipes notes that this story, possibly the first written narrative about a serial killer, has a life of its own and is more well-known than the author. Elements from the story had been circulating long before 1695. It has been remade thousands of times both in literature and in other media. Zipes sees this as “part of a discursive process of remakings within the larger genre of the fairy tale.” In the same fashion that tales should be understood in their contemporary context, remakes should be so too. This is illustrated in a discussion of the French director Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard (2009). It is concluded that whereas the first tale bears the imprint Perrault’s personality, experience and age, Breillat subtly changes Perrault’s male dominance and female curiosity in her film. Retellings of the theme will continue to be made as long as there are serial killers but they will also reflect changed mores. Zipes turns attention to the nature of fairies and witches. He considers them as the mimetic seeds spread by pagan goddesses that have been transformed into benevolent and malevolent powers by misogynistic cultural processes. With an excursus on the Russian narrologist Vladimir Propp in which Zipes emphasises that Propp’s research was never subject to Soviet censorship, he homes in on the Slavonic, specifically Russian character of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga appears in thousands of tales as an unpredictable power which seems to have antecedents in “Mother Earth” and who metes out gifts, rewards...

‘When you have your back to the wall, everything becomes easy’: performance and direction in the films of Catherine Breillat

French director Catherine Breillat has gained notoriety for her distinctly personal portrayal of gender relations and intimacy. With the inclusion of sexually explicit scenes, such as those featuring loss of virginity and/or rape, her films explore subjects of emotional, as well as visual, taboo. In this article the author examines Breillat’s preproduction and on-set practices, particularly focusing on her control of actors’ bodies. Breillat’s risk-taking seems to involve a lack of contact with actors in the preproduction stage of each film, meaning that the camera is rolling when scenes play out for the first time. The director counters this risk with long periods of casting and her technique of control on-set: the precise choreography of each shot. Rather than allow actors to move and act on the emotional responses they draw from the script, Breillat physically puts them into position, choreographs their movement in advance and models the performance she wishes to capture. The author suggests that, by taking risks as director, notably by pushing cast and crew into fearful and uncomfortable situations, Breillat is able to capture moments of onscreen intimacy in a subversive manner. The author draws upon her own interview with Breillat (undertaken during a period of screen testing for her latest film, Abus de faiblesse [2013]), as well as a range of other primary and secondary sources, to provide a new reading of key scenes in films such as Romance (1999) and À ma sœur (2001).

Symbols of nation? Women and the European war film

This article questions the traditional perception of the ‘war film’ as essentially concerned with masculinity, and notes that in recent years there have been a large number of films released which explore the experiences and legacy of war through female protagonists. Focussing on Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, Verhoeven’s Black Book and Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, it considers the ways in which the presentation of the central female characters can be seen as reflecting the ways in which nations come to terms with their roles in, and the after-effects of, major conflicts. Whilst the French director is able to draw a more distinct line between the ‘innocent’ central protagonist and her more sexually aggressive foil, the Dutch and German films both present more morally ambiguous women, which this article argues can be read as suggesting a continuing discomfort with the roles played by these countries in World War Two.

La pirogue by Moussa Touré

Reviews 249 wake of a devastating accident; Laurence Anyways (dir. Xavier Dolan), an exuberantly imagined and photographed epic tale that explores the nature of love and the title character’s transition into a transgendered individual; and Inch’Allah (dir. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette), a portrayal of Israeli-Palestinian hostility through the eyes of an outsider (a Québécois obstetrician) living in Israeli territory and working in a West Bank refugee camp. Finally, under the rubric“French Connections”: French directors are working outside France, as evidenced by Rachid Bouchareb’s Just Like a Woman (Great Britain/ United States) and Anne Fontaine’s Two Mothers/Adore (Australia/France). Fontaine’s film, from a Doris Lessing story, was particularly intriguing as the director continued to explore her favorite theme—the emotional and sexual tensions in relationships among women and men. El taaib (The Repentant) by Merzak Allouache (Algerianborn veteran of the French industry) and Les chevaux de Dieu by Nabil Ayouche (Paris-born, Morocco-based) screened in SIFF’s inaugural African Pictures project. Ayouche received the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Director in recognition of his absorbing tale of three boys from a Moroccan bidonville who become suicide bombers. My favorite films this year came from Spain and Estonia. Their connections to France? Both are in French and each features an octogenarian French thespian whose performance is pure pleasure. In The Artist and the Model (dir. Fernando Trueba), Jean Rochefort plays a dispirited artist in Occupied France who is unexpectedly inspired by a young passeuse to make one last attempt to capture Beauty in his art. In A Lady in Paris (dir. Ilmar Raag), Jeanne Moreau (in a supporting role) creates the most cantankerous senior citizen imaginable. Her haughtiness, complaints, and demands (croissants must be au beurre, fresh from the bakery) cause her Estonian caretaker frustration and anger, but eventual compassion and friendship. Deeply humane stories both—don’t miss them! University of Idaho, emerita Joan M. West Touré, Moussa, réal. La pirogue. Int. Souleymane Seye Ndiaye, Laïty Fall, Malaminé ‘Yalenguen’ Dramé. Chauves-Souris, 2012. Senegalese director Moussa Touré’s 1997 film TGV was featured at the 2013 New York African Film Festival, due to the great success of La pirogue, his latest. TGV is a comic satire about Rambo, who drives a brightly painted bus between Dakar and Conakry, Guinea, and a host of passengers, each with different reasons for paying the handsome fare to make the dangerous journey. Fifteen years later, La pirogue tells a similar tale, only now as epic tragedy, and the vehicle is a brightly painted huge pirogue piloted by Baye Laye, who can no longer make his living from a sea overfished due in part to his government’s preference for international industrial fishing companies. Like TGV, passengers in La pirogue have different reasons for making the dangerous trip from a popular fishing port of Dakar to the Canary Islands. It is a story featured regularly in newspapers about scores of victims who die en route, or wash up as corpses on tourist beaches, or arrive at their destination only to be repatriated or interned in centres de rétention (one character in the film burns his papers since, according to international law, sans-papiers cannot be returned to a country for which they hold no proof of origin). Touré’s purpose is to move viewers beyond headlines and into the lives of people who, in increasing numbers, leave loved ones, homes, and businesses behind, searching for a better life for themselves and their families. At the port from which the pirogue departs, Touré depicts the construction of numerous étages (as homes with a second floor are called), which, a character remarks, is the sign of a successful crossing to Spain. But it comes with a price: a seven-day trip across open sea in a pirogue offering no shelter from burning sun, raging storms, and dwindling supplies of food, water, and fuel. Passengers, however, by no means share a common dream. Of the thirty lives Baye Laye must navigate to safe harbor, one-third come from a tribe in Guinea seeking no more than the possibility of day labor in Spain...

Chantal Akerman by Marion Schmid

Schmid, Marion. Chantal Akerman. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. ISBN 9780 -7190-7716-6. Pp. 192. £45. The French Film Directors’series seeks to promote“the formal and informal study of French films” and “extend the range of French directors known to Anglophone students” (x). Moving beyond the editors’ goals, Schmid’s enlightening study opens with theoretical reflections on the Belgian director’s fierce resistance to appropriation into theoretical debates,artistic movements,genres,and national traditions.A proponent of fluid identifications, a defender of a hyperrealist, minimalist, non-naturalist cinema technique,Akerman is presented not simply as an intellectual director of interest to an elite of film critics,but also as a major auteur whose complex œuvre raises pressing social, ideological and ethical questions. While recognizing the originality of Akerman’s thirty-year-long production, Schmid traces the various influences which have shaped it: silent film,American musical comedy,Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Demy, the French New Wave, the nouveau roman and the structural aesthetics of the New York avantgarde . Four chapters follow her evolving style and thematic interests, from the early experimental, anti-illusionist works of the 1970s, to the more comic vein of a narrativedriven “cinema of seduction”based on music, song and dance in the 1980s, the ethnographic seriousness of her documentary tetralogy, and her commercial ventures into the mainstream in the the 1990s and 2000s literary adaptation and burlesque comedy. Schmid’s dual approach is to provide informed and stimulating readings of iconic films (Jeanne Dielman, Golden Eighties, Demain on déménage), while establishing a surprising continuity between the different works, genres, and time periods based on a close correlation between theme and technique. Akerman’s resistance to conventional characterization, point of view, suture, and viewer identification appears as a necessary correlate to recurrent motifs of nomadism, homelessness, identity performance, and the weight of the hidden past. A comprehensive index of Akerman’s filmography through the year 2009 offers further resources to the reader. More recent releases, such as La folie Almayer (2011), are not included. Although written in a clear and accessible style, the book targets informed readers, i.e., graduate students, cinema students and researchers, rather than a general public. There is no glossary of cinema terminology, which would increase appreciation for Akerman’s experimental style among nonexperts . One single shortcoming of this exceptional book is the author’s preference for discussing English versions of the films. News from Home, for instance, exists both in a version for the American market dubbed by Akerman and in a version with a French voice-over by the director, who reads her mother’s letters in a flat, monotonous voice. Given her postmodernist play with simulacrum versus authenticity, repetition versus originality, performance versus sincerity, what is the significance of the two coexisting versions carefully produced and controlled by the director? Does one have precedence over the other,or is the question of origin(ality) part of her inquiry as in the pair Les années 80/Golden Eighties? By uncovering traces of the Holocaust experience 246 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 247 in Akerman’s cinematic palimpsest, Schmid initiates helpful ways of including an exceptional filmography in a variety of university courses. Meredith College (NC) Véronique Machelidon Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival, 2013. Reporting on the presence of “French film” in Seattle’s annual spring cinematic extravaganza (447 films representing 85 countries) proved tricky this year due to the number of trans-national projects. French companies helped fund some eighteen features ranging in origin from Iran to Serbia to Hungary to Colombia and even China. Representation of French-speaking countries in the program was strong, although the number of films from France itself was diminished from years past— undoubtedly due to SIFF’s separate French festival. However, incorporating movies with connections to France (language, location, actors) made the total “French” presence quite robust. Love Is in the Air (Amour et turbulences, dir.Alexandre Castagnetti), Low Profile (Je me suis fait tout petit, dir. Cécilia Rouaud), and Populaire (dir. Régis Roinsard)—a trio of well-wrought romantic comedies (all debut features)—delighted audiences with fresh takes on traditional themes. My favorite, Populaire, a well...

10.5937/kultura1442168m = Two or three things on Godard

The paper studies the connection between social theory i.e. critical sociology and philosophy and the committed films of the French director and famous representative of the Nouvelle Vague - Jean Luc Godard. With a short review of his movies Two or Three Things I Know About Her, The Week End and La Chinoise - all three were made in 1967 - attention was drawn to the possibility of a 'joint act' of sociology, social philosophy and film art.