French Filmmaker Research Articles

A Different Depiction of Non-Western Culture: An Analysis of Michel Ocelot's Animation Kirikou and the Sorceress Based on Orientalism Theory

Kirikou and the Sorceress, a feature-length animation directed by French filmmaker Michel Ocelot, is set within an African tribe and weaves together elements of fantasy and reality to depict the culture and beliefs of the community it portrays. This article seeks to examine Ocelot's interpretation of African culture and how this perspective is represented in Kirikou and the Sorceress, through the framework of Edward Said's theory of Orientalism.A thematic analysis of the film reveals that Ocelot diverges from the traditional Western gaze on the "East" by adopting a more nuanced and balanced approach. While addressing themes of superstition and its influence on individuals, a subject often associated with Orientalist discourse, Ocelot simultaneously highlights the presence of wise, knowledgeable figures within African societies. This portrayal suggests that the guidance of such figures can safeguard people from the detrimental effects of superstition, offering a more complex and respectful view of African culture.

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.

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.

Home as survival: Seeing Queer archival lives

As a teenager in the eighties, French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz scoured flea markets for amateur photographs. In 2013, he assembled a book titled The Invisibles comprised of snapshots depicting queer lives. He included a pair of Kodachrome images, which replicate a near-identical domestic scene in the 1960s: two aging women in their bourgeois home sit at a table, embracing as they look at the camera. Taking as a point of departure these personal photographs, this article focuses on two documentaries that queer postwar domesticity: Lifshitz’s The Invisibles (2011) and Magnus Gertten’s Nelly and Nadine (2022). In his film, Lifshitz not only includes postwar snapshots and home movies, but also reinvents the amateur dispositif. He interviews queer aging men and women inside their homes, challenging social exclusion and stigma based on gender nonconformity and aging. In Nelly and Nadine, a sexagenarian named Sylvie retrieves home movies from her attic that uncover a lesbian love story between her grandmother Nelly and a fellow survivor of Ravensbrück named Nadine. Decades later, the centrality of the domestic space and the amateur archive in these two documentaries offers a lesson in seeing the home as survival and unlearning the master narratives of the postwar era.

Sensing and self: a haptic ‘look’ at the aesthetics of women’s labour in contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French diasporic cinema

ABSTRACT This article expands on an ongoing dialogue about representations of female protagonists’ sensual and embodied experiences in Francophone North African cinema scholarship. It examines the dynamic cinematographic styles of contemporary Maghrebi French filmmakers Abdellatif Kechiche, Nadia El Fani, Leila Kilani and Houda Benyamina, asserting that they create a multisensory connection with the viewer that disrupts the underlying unequal power dynamic between film viewer and the Maghrebi woman’s body. This article places labour practices as the loci of analysis, as these examples of quotidian life represent a microcosm of protagonists’ participation in larger social and economic frameworks. First, it looks at the role of embodied labour in strengthening a protagonist’s connection to her community in Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet/The Secret of the Grain (2007) and El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003). Then, it turns to labour practices in Kilani’s Sur la planche/On the Edge (2011) and Benyamina’s Divines (2016) that isolate and disconnect the protagonist from her community and her body. This article concludes that it is the distinctly multisensory style used by all four directors that centres their protagonists’ physical, lived experiences while challenging the viewer not to merely watch them passively, but to engage in a dynamic, empathetic relationship with the body onscreen.

Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montage

Sylvain George is one of the most interesting French filmmakers working today. He has made a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and has brought together migrant figures and Occupy movements in his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). The principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin. This article shows how certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But it also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, they show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.

Feminism and Vegetal Freedom in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985)

This essay examines French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985) for their critical invocation of the persistent and patriarchal association of women with plants. Both women and plants are thought within the metaphysical tradition to have a deficient or negative relation to freedom. Varda’s films, however, link the liberation of women in postwar France to the liberation of vegetal being; her female protagonists pursue their liberation by accessing the vegetal freedom that subtends human freedom. In Le Bonheur, Varda uses visual irony to critique the processes of idealization that turn both women and flowers into signifiers of ideal beauty in thrall to the enchantments of happiness. In Vagabond, the enigmatic female drifter at the center of the film enacts a plant-like refusal of self-preservation. In both films, female liberation takes vegetal shape, as their protagonists embody a vegetal silence or vegetal indifference in defiance of the patriarchal situations they encounter.

Cinema and the Art of Anachronism

This study argues that the way visual art forms migrate and transform from one media to another over time can be traced through their varied relationships to temporality. By introducing a model of “artistic anachronism,” it is possible to better understand the way these transformations take place. After establishing some of the theoretical characteristics of anachronism, the study turns to the films of the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, and the way he directly references painting through his films. Such an examination provides a model for future studies that use anachronism as a way of better understanding the way migrations take place between visual media both old and new.

The Rhetoric of Imagism in the Cinepoetry of Jean Cocteau and Abbās Kīyārustamī: A Comparative Study

This article examines the shared Imagistic principles of two poet-filmmakers in the experimental genre of cinepoetry. On the one hand, Jean Cocteau, the French poet-turned-filmmaker, epitomizes the Imagistic experimentations of a French filmmaker with the narrative framework of poetry to create a “page-based” movie. On the other hand, Abbās Kīyārustamī, the Iranian filmmaker-turned-poet, typifies the cinematic aesthetic of modern Persian poetry to offer visual images that rely entirely on the creative engagement of the reader. The rhetoric of Imagism, that short-lived modernist movement of the early twentieth century, is what these poet-filmmakers similarly employ in their cinepoetic study cases, namely Tempest of Stars (1997) by Cocteau and A Wolf Lying in Wait (2005) by Kīyārustamī. Following a comparative approach to their common Imagistic foundations such as economical wording and phrasing, cinematic adaptation of visual imagery, rigor and clarity of vision, the poetic prerogative of subject matter, the avoidance of vague and ambiguous descriptions, and the writerly approach to the rhetoric of the poem, this article proves that Cocteau and Kīyārustamī are respectively the epitomes of Imagistic cinepoetry in French and Persian literature.

There, before you: caring for the uncared for

ABSTRACT Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside institutions of care: hospitals, psychiatric wards, private doctors’ offices, nursing homes and even prisons. This article focuses on two films – Prendre soin/Caring (Bertrand Hagenmüller, 2018) and Être là/Being There (Régis Sauder, 2012) – that bring the viewer inside nursing homes and a psychiatric care unit located at the heart of a violent penitentiary – to contend that filmmakers have redefined (health)care as a political and ethical field so as to interrogate our collective (in)ability to care for all members of our society with compassion and attention. It proposes that Prendre soin and Être là actively engage with care as a set of practices, attitudes and interactions that continually need to be reaffirmed against misconceptions, managerial demands and institutional violence. As they do so, they position documentary cinema as a space where the value of care can be grasped more intimately. Furthermore, both films dislodge the viewer from the safe position documentary spectators expect to maintain by leading them to face alterity (social, psychological, physical) as a shared human condition.

Jacques Tati and the Philosophy of the Sight Gag

Abstract In his article “Notes on the Sight Gag” from 1991, the philosopher Noël Carroll proposed a taxonomy of sight gags that recur throughout the genre of comedian comedy in cinema. This article revisits and augments Carroll’s taxonomy by analyzing the sight gags found in the films of Jacques Tati (1907-1982). Tati worked in a very different context than that of the silent Hollywood filmmakers from whose comic films Carroll largely derives his categories. He began making films in the sound era, and five of his six feature films were made in color. As a French filmmaker, he also sought to adapt the genre of comedian comedy in cinema to his culturally specific concerns. This article shows that he drew on at least three of the types of sight gag identified by Carroll. But he modified some of them and innovated several other kinds.

REVIEW: Ophir: Bougainville's epic struggle for freedom

Ophir: Decolonize. Revolutionize, directed by Alexandre Berman and Olivier Pollet. Arsam International/Fourth World Films/Ulster University. 2020. 97 minutes. https://www.ophir-film.com/
 IN OPHIR (2020), a feature length documentary film about the Bougainville civil war (1989-1998), French filmmakers Alexandre Berman and Olivier Pollet analyse the devastating conflict and under-reported repercussions which continue to reverberate in the region today. Ophir in the Old Testament (Genesis 10; 1 Kings 10:22) is a land of great mineral wealth exploited by King Solomon. In eastern Papua New Guinea, the people of Bougainville also claim Ophir to be the original name of their remote islands. Like the fabled land, Bougainville is endowed with treasure, predominantly copper and gold. In the late 20th century, exploitation of these was at the centre of a powerful story of colonialism, inequality, war and redemption.

Global and local rhetorics at a public-facing private company: Studiocanal and French cinema

This article utilizes Canal+’s film production and distribution subsidiary Studiocanal as a way to understand both companies’ impacts on French cinema since the formation of the subsidiary in the early 1990s. As such, the article is structured as a chronology and an analysis of the major films made in French and financed by Studiocanal in terms of their critical and popular reception. The article also examines the talent relationships underpinning this production and the trajectories of the various stars, writers, directors, and producers who worked on the films as well as the executives who oversaw them. Finally, the article analyzes the corporate rhetoric that was advanced by both Studiocanal and Canal+ over the years to position itself in the French and international markets. Synthesizing these branches of the analysis and noting certain cyclical patterns, the article argues that Studiocanal’s relationship to French cinema has been complex and changeable, at times limited in favor of pursuing the international market, at times devoting ample amounts of rhetoric and resources to pursuing success in its home market. Moreover, the article demonstrates that the company’s production activities have helped to mold a generation of French filmmakers and industry executives who have in turn gone on to influential careers. Looking forward, the article concludes by arguing that by virtue of its size and scale as a producer and distributor, Studiocanal will always be a significant player in French cinema.

Green Rays on Historical Horizons: The Filmic Refractions of Tacita Dean's The Green Ray and Éric Rohmer's Le Rayon vert

What connects British artist-filmmaker Tacita Dean's The Green Ray (2001) and French filmmaker Eric Rohmer's Le Rayon vert [The Green Ray] (1986)—on the surface, two very different works—are their ...

Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism, by Malcolm Turvey

Rather early on in The Imaginary Signifier (1982), Christian Metz takes a full paragraph to detail the type of love for cinema that a “theoretician of the cinema” should have (15). It is a complicated affair; the thinker negotiates a safe distance between herself and her cinephilia, which she must forget about, rediscover, and ultimately keep in check—as if the work of theory were not already quite the handful in and of itself. Now, I cannot say whether Turvey is a theoretician/born-again cinephile in the Metzian sense, but, while reading his latest book, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism, I certainly felt his love for cinema, and in particular for that of French filmmaker extraordinaire Jacques Tati; a clear, sincere, and undoubtedly personal, love. This makes Turvey’s already famously limpid, precise, and accessible thinking and writing even more enjoyable than usual. I would in fact argue that his patent investment in the book’s subject is clearly a crucial cog in the functioning of the whole study, ensuring that every reader feels involved and present at all times, as she goes through the work’s vast and deep analytical and conceptual apparatus.

Mr. Hulot’s Invisible Gorilla

This article examines the work of mid-century French filmmaker Jacques Tati. Tati suggested that his films allow more visual freedom to audiences and that audiences discover new material upon multiple viewings of his films. We review the scholarship on Tati, especially in relation to critic André Bazin’s theories of realism, and then propose another model for understanding Tati’s films: the psychological concept of inattentional blindness. The article then discusses our experiment using eye tracking technology to study how subjects watch Tati’s films versus other types of cinema and also how they re-watch films. Finally, we applied several statistical and mathematical tests to the eye tracking data to understand key differences between Tati’s films and other filmmaking practices.

Bodies Underwater

Abstract This article engages with French filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s experimental shorts on the physiognomy and behavior of marine animals. The article argues that Painlevé’s films establish a corporeal and nonlinguistic mode of interspecies communication that draws upon the spectators’ immediate emphatic and empathetic reactions to the animal creatures on-screen. By evoking affective responses below the visible and audible registers, the films place the human animal body both in proximity to and at a distance from the nonhuman animal, revealing ontological ties as well as uncanny encounters with other ways of living. In doing so, the films inspire a plurality of ethico-political perspectives on species entanglement that all propose distinct responsibilities without making any organism the center of agentic events. To illuminate those perspectives, the article brings Painlevé’s films into conversation with Massumi’s animal politics, Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming-animal, and neuroscientific research. It thus shows how the cinematic medium can make palpable debates in environmental studies and political theory and installs communication as an interspecies phenomenon that involves human and nonhuman bodies in a shared affective space. Last, the article reclaims Painlevé for contemporary concerns, linking aesthetics to ethics and politics and bodily movement to care for the world.

К ВОПРОСУ ОПРЕДЕЛЕНИЯ ГРАНИЦ ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНОСТИ В СОВРЕМЕННЫХ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫХ ПРАКТИКАХ: НА ПРИМЕРЕ АНАЛИЗА ФИЛЬМА ЭРИКА БОДЛЕРА "ПИСЬМА МАКСУ"

Document has become one of the key tools of modern artists when working with history and memory. The search for different ways of representing the past leads artists to explore their own family and personal archives as well as museums and historical archives. Thus, chronicles, family photos and letters found on flea markets turn into a material for contemporary artists. Within the artistic work documents get transformed, so the things that are not relevant for historians can become important for artists. Questions arise: what happens to documentary material in the space of contemporary art? What are the boundaries of documentary as part of artistic practice? In what situation does a document lose its status, and when a material unimportant for historians can be transformed into important source for exhibitions? Many artists address these questions when working with memory and history. This article focuses on the film “Letters to Max” by French artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire based on the correspondence with the former minister of Abkhazia Maxim Gvinjia. The specifics of Baudelaire’s work is in the juxtaposition of different types of documents: letters that Baudelaire and Gvinjia wrote to each other and video that Baudelaire shot during his travel to Abkhazia. Connection between different materials allows us to see how different dimensions of representation of the past correlate with each other.

Vautier and Vieyra: Contact of Cinéastes engagés

Paulin S. Vieyra is one of the few contemporary critics who commented on the films of the militant French filmmaker René Vautier, principally known for the censored short film Afrique 50 (1950) and the commercially released and award-winning Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972). While Vautier and Vieyra are both fundamental figures within the framework of anticolonial and postcolonial Francophone cinemas following the Second World War, their interactions, as captured in Vautier's interviews and writings on Vieyra and Vieyra's critiques of Vautier, have not yet been used as a lens through which to consider each figure, even if the two are often mentioned in relation due to their temporal and political proximity. Using as contrast other critical positions on Vautier and Vautier's own pieces, this article highlights and identifies aspects of the perspective of Vieyra within anticolonial and postcolonial film, as well as distinguishes a model according to which Vautier's disputed legacy can be understood.

Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism by Malcom Turvey

Reviewed by: Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism by Malcom Turvey Pardis Dabashi Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism. Malcom Turvey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 282. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper); $29.99 (eBook). Midcentury French filmmaker and comedic actor Jacques Tati wanted us to avoid getting consumed by the distracting exigencies of modernity and instead take the time to notice, enjoy, and get involved in the fleeting moments of subtle comedy that permeate our everyday situations. This is the basic premise of Malcom Turvey's excellent new book Play Time, the first monograph on Tati "in English in almost twenty years" (9). To those unfamiliar with Tati, Turvey's book is essential reading for an in-depth understanding of the comedic style of this cinematic auteur. Tati is most famous for creating and playing the character Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling gentleman who often finds himself confused and making mistakes when trying to navigate technological and urban modernity. To those familiar with Tati, Play Time offers an expertly executed contextualization of Tati's oeuvre within the ongoing scholarly conversation about the role of humor in modernist aesthetics and its response to the emergence and development of capitalist modernity. Turvey argues that Tati developed a "modernist form of comedy" born out of the hilarity of our encounters with the particular form of everyday life engendered by modern technology and capitalist production (10). That modernist sensibility, according to Turvey, can be found in the ways that Tati both distributes and directs attention across his densely packed shots, often hiding, rather than showcasing, gags. This "comic opacity," in Turvey's account, instills in Tati's viewers a "playful, participatory attitude toward the modern world" that would help them counteract the acquiescent detachment Tati saw as constitutive of modern experience (103, 9). Chapter one places Tati's work within the context of a long history of modernist engagements with the comedic. This chapter demonstrates that comedy was an essential element of the cinematic surrealism of Fernand Léger and René Clair as well as the circus worlds of Pablo Picasso. Intrinsic to the surrealism and nascent modernist comedy of Léger and Clair was a preoccupation with the body as an object rather [End Page 585] than a vessel of mind—and vice versa: objects in their work often take on human, or at least animate, qualities. We might find versions of Turvey's work in this chapter also in Michael North's Machine-Age Comedy (2009); engagement with Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai's recent theoretical work on humor and Maggie Hennefeld's on silent-film comediennes might have helped to further differentiate Turvey's argument as well as widen its male-dominated conceptualization of pre-Tati comedic modernism.1 But Turvey's take is nevertheless fresh, informative, and essential for understanding how Tati's cinema extends and revises much of this earlier art. Turvey's reading of Clair's "situational comedy," the comedy Clair thought was afforded by "groups," and his attendant "lack of interest in the individual or psychology" is especially excellent, setting up well the more direct discussion of Tati beginning in the following chapter (49). Chapters two and three constitute the engine room of the book, elaborating the "democracy" thesis regarding Tati's films. Critics have indeed long characterized Tati's comedy as democratic, since his tendency toward long takes, long shots, a static camera, and staging multiple simultaneous actions within one frame "allows viewers the freedom to choose what to look at in the image" (6). However, Turvey puts a finer point on this undertheorized observation, bringing masterful technical virtuosity and analytical rigor to his close readings of the structure and style of Tati's gags. A key term for Turvey is participation. He argues that whereas the European avant-garde of the 1920s found in American popular culture a source of modern vitality—e.g., Léger's fascination with Charlie Chaplin's "Charlot" character—"postwar European intellectuals and artists of Tati's generation were more inclined to perceive American mass culture as hegemonic and totalitarian, engendering passivity and annihilating individuality" (54). Tati's response to the sense that the midcentury...