Popular French Research Articles

Evolution of the French Language System in Ivory Coast

This article examines the current state of the French language in Ivory Coast. The relevance of the study is related to the lack of research on the state of French in Ivory Coast, represented by the following varieties: Ivorian Popular French, Ivorian French and the Nouchi language code. Nouchi, an integral part of Ivory Coast's linguistic system and a crucial factor of Ivorian identity, remains a poorly researched phenomenon today. The aim of the work is to objectively describe the phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic changes that take place in French on the territory of Ivory Coast in a situation of interaction with the autochthonous languages under the influence of extralinguistic factors. The scientific novelty lies in the integrated approach to the study of the French language system in Ivory Coast and the differences between each of the varieties of French and standard French. The research uses general scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalization) and special methods (descriptive and comparative methods). The analysis of the French language system shows the distinctive features of the French varieties from the standard French on the phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactical levels. Ivorian Popular French is characterised by the greatest influence from the autochthonous languages and numerous features at all levels of the language, caused by the lack of education of its speakers. The continuity and interconnectedness of all the varieties of language examined is highlighted: the oldest variant of Ivorian Popular French became the basis for the formation of modern Ivorian French. Nouchi, on the other hand, combines earlier variants of French with borrowings from the autochthonous and European languages. Ivorian French and Nouchi are now widespread in all social strata and contribute to the issue of Ivorian self-determination.

Palatalized/affricated plosives in Paris French. A sociophonetic production-perception study of a dynamic working-class and/or language contact phenomenon among middle-class speakers

A long tradition of attracting work forces to Paris from outside countries has produced a high proportion of inhabitants using other languages than French (Gadet 2008). Geographically, most of the immigrants and their descendants are housed in cheap residential areas in the northern and eastern parts of the capital and its surrounding suburbs - zones that were historically the home of working-class Parisians. Recently, sociolinguists have observed that a specific way of speaking French in these areas has emerged (Fagyal 2010; Gadet 2017), and might be spreading. There is agreement that part of the lexical phenomena in this “multiethnolectal French” is due to language contact between French and the immigrant languages, but as for phonetic features, diverging claims exist. Are the palatalized and affricated plosives (qui [kji]), voiture [vwatʃyr]), the strongly articulated /r/’s, and the frequent drops of phonetic material an effect of contact with Arabic or are they features of working-class Parisian French that have been boosted through an identity-based process of reallocation? Regardless of the answer to this complex question, we seek here to grasp the potential of the palatalized/affricated plosives to spread socially upwards to non-multicultural, middle-class speakers outside the area in question. On the basis of our recordings with upper- and lower-middle-class Parisians (Hansen ms.) and of the attitudinal data we have gathered from a listening experiment among 235 predominantly middle-class French speakers (Hansen 2015, Hansen ms.), we conclude that the phenomenon in question does show signs of active adoption and social spread upwards, while being intriguingly little salient for our participants according to the perception results, as compared to other phonetic phenomena. Only when occurring with other features (in casu strongly articulated /r/’s, with which it shares the ambiguity of being both a popular French and a possible French-Arabic language contact feature), a few listeners comment overtly on its presence and associate its users to Maghreb and/or poor suburban descent.

Playbird superstar: Mary Millington and Come Play With Me (1977) as a national box-office sensation

ABSTRACT This article examines the record-breaking box-office performance of pornography mogul David Sullivan’s 1977 film production Come Play with Me in substantial detail. This film was so successful that it remained on release at one London cinema for nearly four years and went on general release at around 1,000 cinemas across the UK. The article also considers the role that Mary Millington had in generating this ongoing box-office success and her associated capacity as a pornography superstar, who was fashioned as such by her patron David Sullivan. It then more briefly examines the box-office performance of the follow-up films made through the Millington-Sullivan combination. Finally, it considers the hypothesized notion of national porn culture by comparing some popular UK (Come Play with Me), US (Deep Throat), and French (Emmanuelle) pornography films from the 1970s, and then some porn/sex star actresses from the 1970s – Millington (British), Linda Lovelace (American) and Sylvia Kristel (Dutch/European) – as part of wider cinema trends and national film cultures.

THE REPOSSESSION OF A COMPLEX LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN CAMEROON

This article sets out to study the evolution of the French language in Cameroon from the period of colonisation to the present. The article focuses in particular on the use of the language during the colonial period and its imposition on Cameroonians through the French policy of assimilation. Contrary to the British policy of indirect rule, France considered its colonies as oversea territories (la France outre-mer) whichss had to speak and write the French language in a manner as prescribed by the Académie Française. Our investigation looks at the evolution of the language after independence and the different varieties that developed from mainstream French: these include Cameroon popular French (CPF) or the social variety, and a hybrid variety (camfranglais) used mostly by the younger generation of Cameroonians. We aim at evaluating the influence of the latter variety, in order to analyse the radical transformation process that the French language is experiencing in French Africa in general and in Cameroon in particular. The article aims at validating our hypothesis that the French language as used in Cameroon is a repossession of a very complex language.

Необыкновенные приключения французского популярного романа

Необыкновенные приключения французского популярного романа

THE REPOSSESSION OF A COMPLEX LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN CAMEROON

This article sets out to study the evolution of the French language in Cameroon from the period of colonisation to the present. The article focuses in particular on the use of the language during the colonial period and its imposition on Cameroonians through the French policy of assimilation. Contrary to the British policy of indirect rule, France considered its colonies as oversea territories (la France outre-mer) which had to speak and write the French language in a manner as prescribed by the Académie Française. Our investigation looks at the evolution of the language after independence and the different varieties that developed from mainstream French: these include Cameroon popular French (CPF) or the social variety, and a hybrid variety (camfranglais) used mostly by the younger generation of Cameroonians. We aim at evaluating the influence of the latter variety, in order to analyse the radical transformation process that the French language is experiencing in French Africa in general and in Cameroon in particular. The article validates our position that the French language as used in Cameroon is a repossession of a very complex language. We conclude with comments on the opinions of various actors, their attitudes and judgments of the different varieties of the language as used in Cameroon.

Une poétique des espaces : lecture écocritique des géographies et langages hybrides dans Verre Cassé

Le roman Verre Cassé d’Alain Mabanckou présente une nouvelle réalité de l’Afrique. A travers les écrits du personnage éponyme, le lecteur entre dans la vie quotidienne d'un quartier pauvre à Pointe-Noire, au Congo. Le livre est un effort de donner une voix à cet espace normalement muet ; dans un langage qui est toujours à mi-chemin entre le français littéraire et le français populaire, Verre Cassé représente une manière de tenir compte de plusieurs espaces, tant global que local. Cet article se propose d’analyser le rôle que joue le langage dans cette ouverture aux complexités du monde et dans la mise en relation de plusieurs espaces géographiques. Verre Cassé semble nous donner un moyen d’existence « entre-deux » : entre le français littéraire et populaire, entre une prise de conscience locale et un engagement plus global. Cet article se propose donc d’examiner le rapport entre l’espace local (dans le quartier Trois-Cents) et l’espace global (le Congo, la France, ou le monde en général) dans Verre Cassé. Dans quelle mesure peut-on dire que le langage permet un enracinement et une ouverture en même temps? À partir de quelques notions géographiques de base, cet article analyse le roman de Mabanckou comme une poétique des espaces. Enfin, en examinant les théories de Glissant (Relation, Tout-monde, mondialité), l’étude explore la vision originale de l’espace que propose Mabanckou tout en démontrant la pertinence des approches écocritiques portant sur des littératures francophones.

Etude d’écarts de la langue française par les occurrences « ça », « là » et « ça là » dans le français populaire ivoirien

Parmi les usages langagiers attribués au français populaire ivoirien, ceux relatifs au pronom démonstratif « ça » et à l’adverbe de lieu « là » sont remarquables. La présence récurrente, voire abusive de ces deux morphèmes est symptomatique d’une forme langagière locale qui donne l’illusion d’emplois normatifs. Cet article se propose de marquer un arrêt sur les distributions syntaxiques et sémantiques différentielles dont font l’objet les unités grammaticales « ça » et « là » en français standard et en français populaire. Et d’en évaluer les enjeux rhétoriques.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction William M. O’Barr (bio) and Edward Timke (bio) Video 1. The editors discuss issue 18.1. Click to view video In this editorial introduction, editors William “Mack” O’Barr and Edward Timke discuss the launch of Advertising & Society Quarterly( ASQ). O’Barr details the emergence of ASQ, which has roots going back to O’Barr’s founding of Advertising & Society Review( A&SR) in 2000. A&SRwas the first journal dedicated to the study of advertising’s place in society, culture, history, and the economy. ASQ’s vision is to continue to ask important questions about advertising’s various roles in the world. What distinguishes the new journal is the integration of digital features that bring the discussion of advertising and society to life. Timke provides a brief overview of this first issue’s predominant focus on digital advertising as well as the new segments found in the journal, including a filmed roundtable, interview, and book discussion. The editors hope that readers and viewers find the new format engaging in their study, research, and teaching about advertising. The ASQEditors would like to thank Linda M. Scott and Astrid Van den Bossche for their service and contributions to Advertising & Society Review. William M. O’Barr William M. O’Barr is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University where he has taught since 1969. He holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Sociology and English. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern, Dalhousie, and Oxford. He has been recognized for his outstanding undergraduate teaching by both the Duke University Alumni Association and Trinity College (Duke University). His course Advertising and Society: Global Perspectives is one of Duke’s most popular undergraduate courses. His seminars include Advertising and Masculinity, Children and Advertising, and The Language of Advertising. He is author and co-author of ten books, including Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising, Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse, and Just Words: Law, Language, and Power. He has conducted anthropological research in Brazil, China, East Africa, India, Japan, and the US. In addition to his interest in social and cultural aspects of advertising, Professor O’Barr has researched law in a variety of cultural settings. In 2000, he founded Advertising & Society Reviewand served as editor from 2000 to 2005. In 2017, he was appointed editor of Advertising & Society Quarterly (ASQ), the successor journal to A&SR. He is author of ADTextOnline.org, which consists of more than 25 units published as supplements to A&SR. Edward Timke Edward Timke is Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Associate Editor of Advertising & Society Quarterlyand contributor to ADTextOnline.org. His work centers on understanding the role of media in international relations and how different cultures understand and imagine each other. His current book manuscript focuses on representations of American and French women in popular French and American media. His research and teaching specialties include American and international media history, trans-Atlantic magazine history, women in the media, photojournalism and visual culture, the cultural history of advertising, and research methods. Copyright © 2017 The Advertising Educational Foundation, Inc

Second language education and micro-policy implementation in Canada: The meaning of pedagogical change

Using data from a study investigating the implementation of a popular French as a second language (FSL) teaching method in Canada (i.e. the Accelerative Integrated Method), this article presents a second language (L2) perspective on micro-policy implementation and pedagogical change. According to Fullan (2007), successful change implementation requires the establishment of ‘shared meaning’: a balanced vision of what the change represents and coordinated management of its implementation. This inquiry compared stakeholder perspectives ( n = 36) on the method and its implementation in contexts where it was mandated and optional for FSL instruction. Data from interviews and focus groups were triangulated to provide a descriptive synthesis of the shared realities and practices of these local players. Findings showed that the bias for action and utility of the method, teacher agency and lack of collaborative monitoring emerged as factors affecting the short-term implementation of this change and its potential long-term sustainability. The findings present important implications for FSL education, micro-level L2 policy implementation and ongoing research focusing on L2 pedagogical change in the Canadian context.

Sentimental Novels and Pushkin: European Literary Markets and Russian Readers

This article examines literature in Russia, as opposed to Russian literature, through the window of Tat'iana's reading, especially two novels by Sophie Cottin, in Aleksandr Pushkin'sEugene Onegin. A quantitative, sociological approach to European markets for novels shows that Russians and Europeans were reading the same popular French, German, and English sentimental novels by August von Kotzebue; Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de Genlis; August Lafontaine; and Cottin. Pushkin, however, positioned himself in the Russian literary field with the canonical novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, and Madame de Stael, against the "mediocre" novels of Cottin. Nevertheless, in his ongoing efforts to write Russian novels, Pushkin covertly engaged with popular sentimental novels to integrate their conservative emphasis on duty, virtue, and love with Russian noble life. I argue that a likely intertext for the eponymous heroine ofThe Captain's Daughterwas Cottin's European bestsellerÉlisabeth, ou Les exilés de Sibérie(1806).

Gabonese French Dictionaries: Survey and Perspectives

This article is a survey study of lexicographic activities with regards to the French lan­guage as it is spoken in Gabon, a French-speaking country in central Africa. The French language as it is spoken in Gabon does not only refer to Gabonisms (mostly items derived from native Gabonese languages), but also to standard French, official French (acrolectal level), common French (mesolectal level) and popular French (basilectal level). All four levels are present in French as it is used in Gabon. In other words, the Gabonese have named the realities of their own environment with lexical items coined on their own soil or borrowed from other languages. This has strength­ened and enriched French as it is spoken in Gabon. The modern era of Gabo­nese lexicography has wit­nessed the production of various dictionaries focusing on this African variety of French. Before 1999, in Gabon and due to the status of French as the sole official language of the country, French dic­tionaries used in Gabon were mostly French products. Mono­lingual French dictionaries pro­duced in Gabon by Gabonese scholars include a very limited num­ber of authors, namely: Dodo Bounguendza (2008), Ditougou (2009) and Moussounda Ibouanga (2011). Despite the fact that these dictionaries were compiled for use by Gabonese, they are differen­tial as they tend to include references of the Parisian standard French. Indeed, a differential dic­tion­ary is a dictionary focusing on differences between two language varieties or two similar lan­guages, and current Gabonese French dictionaries are by all means differential. It is this situation, and the ways it can be corrected that this article will focus on. The idea is to produce a complete dictionary of variant B, namely Gabonese French. Such a dictionary will reflect certain emancipa­tion from the French language spoken in France (i.e. Parisian standard French), herein referred to as variant A.

Concurrent models and cross-linguistic analogies in the study of prepositional stranding in French in Canada

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses (il veut pas payer pour ça ~ il veut pas payer pour “he doesn't want to pay for [it]”) and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative clauses (j'avais pas personne avec qui parler ~ j'avais pas personne à parler avec “I had no one to whom to talk ~ I had no one to talk to”). In main clauses, the variant lacking the adjacent complement is said to have an orphaned preposition (il veut pas payer pour); in relatives, it is said to have a stranded preposition (j'avais pas personne à parler avec). In popular spoken French in Canada, stranding appears to be much more frequent than in other Francophone areas. Because so many French speakers in Canada are bilingual, because of the high frequency of stranding, and no doubt also because stranding violates prescriptive norms, stranded prepositions in French in Canada are widely believed to be instances of English influence (e.g. j'avais pas personne à parler avec is regarded as modeled on I had no one to talk to). But in a masterly variationist treatment, Poplack, Zentz and Dion (2011, this issue) argue that Canadian stranding is not of English origin. Stranded Canadian prepositions represent, instead, the expansion to relative clauses of the ordinary main-clause orphans. The historical source for Canadian stranding is thus analogy-induced and internal (French orphans), not contact-induced and external (not English stranding).

Nathalie...: An Alternative Enunciative Position in Popular French Cinema

Anne Fontaine’s latest film, Nathalie… (2003) draws comparison with Francois Truffaut’s 1981 film, La Femme d’a Cote ( The Woman Next Door ), in that it features a relationship between Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu. The couple could be seen to have evolved from a passionate relationship, as depicted by Truffaut, to one devoid of passion. Moreover, both films are narrated from a woman’s point of view. Similarities between the two films stop here, however, for Nathalie… ’s central interest rests on the relationship between two women of different age and background and focuses on their creation of a fantasmatic situation. The attention towards the creation of a feminine cinematic space raises the significant cinematographic question of the enunciator’s position as producer of the fiction. For contrary to classical cinema, where the source of enunciation controlling the discourse and the narrative logic is usually suppressed, in Fontaine’s film this is a position which is rendered visible within the narrative and is, moreover, occupied by a woman. Nathalie… centres around Catherine’s decision to hire a prostitute when she learns that her husband occasionally cheats on her. With her help, she creates a female character, Nathalie, and the filmic story – ‘herstory’ – both of which she directs. In this article, my aim is to consider the political impact of enunciation that the film raises. A close study of Fontaine’s film will reveal its attempt to challenge the masculine logic inherent in mainstream narrative cinema. My intention will be to show how Nathalie… manages to supplant hierarchical oppositions and divisions to enable alternative enunciative positions, defined in terms of fluidity and diversity, to be considered.

Quelques problèmes de traduction du registre populaire français en langue hongroise

Difficulties of translating socially marked speech from French into Hungarian are analyzed. The corpus is based on a French crime fiction by Fred Vargas, translated into Hungarian by myself. Firstly, I deal with the strategies and techniques of social marking in the French version. Then, I turn to the Hungarian translation and see whether the socially marked character of the original text could be rendered and, if yes, what kind of markers were used. Differences seem to arise from the fact that popular French, as a register, does not have a perfect equivalent in Hungarian. This ``deficiency'' becomes most striking in the domain of syntax. While the French author uses mainly syntactic devices to mark popular speech, the translation must rely on phonetic and lexical markers, given that syntactic differences between standard Hungarian and its non-standard varieties are almost null. Also, while markers are clearly popular throughout the French version, the Hungarian translation renders either a dialectically marked speech, for non-Parisian popular French speakers, or a kind of urban slang, for Parisian popular French speakers.

Henry Wood: the "Proms," and National Identity in Music, 1895-1904

Henry Wood, the “Proms,” and National Identity in Music, 1895–1904 Lawrence Poston (bio) Tell me, Mr. Wood, are you quite English? Your appearance is rather un-English" (qtd. in Jacobs, Wood 62). Queen Victoria directed this provocative question to the young conductor Henry Wood on the occasion of a command performance at Windsor Castle on 24 November 1898, perhaps motivated by the cut of his beard, modeled on that of Arthur Nikisch, the Austro-Hungarian conductor. The question was not necessarily an insular or xenophobic one, since a preference for German music had always prevailed among the royal family, dating back to the visits of Felix Mendelssohn half a century earlier. For this occasion, the queen had chosen five selections from Richard Wagner, rounding off the program with Engelbert Humperdinck's overture to Hansel and Gretel, and selections from two non-German composers, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky. A later concert at Windsor was devoted entirely to music from Parsifal. Having spent sixty years on the throne in no way necessitated the queen's attention, it would seem, to sixty years of English music. One recent judgment that "the Victorians, it seemed, could do anything with music—except compose it" (Hoppen 394) follows a long line of obiter dicta that a lively scholarly dialogue in the twenty-five years has increasingly challenged. The Victorians composed a great deal of music, much of it better than the merely pedestrian and some of it of a quality that renders its neglect unjustifiable. Even in the current climate of scholarly revisionism, the study of such music, its reception, its performance history, and its role as cultural expression continues to lag well behind the study of other nineteenth-century music among musicologists, just as it has lagged behind literature, history, and the visual arts as objects of study among Victorianists.1 In the annals of this music, arguably only the death of the composer Arthur Sullivan in 1900 could be assigned a cultural resonance akin to that accorded the deaths of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.2 [End Page 397] I argue in this essay that Victorian music was preempted by Continental music before it properly registered its weight in late Victorian England. Evidence for this claim is, I believe, offered by the popular success and cultural importance of the early Promenade concerts at Queen's Hall, for which Robert Newman was the indefatigable proprietor, Wood the conductor, and Edgar F. Jacques the program annotator. From their inception in 1895, the "Proms" (to use the sobriquet which gradually attached to them as the twentieth century wore on) were consciously intended as a bridge between "serious" and "popular" taste, designed to promote greater musical appreciation. The Proms, even when they did not feature Victorian or even British music, constituted a distinctive and lasting ritual of British Victorian musical culture. I. Promenade concerts were well established on the London and Paris musical stages long before Wood made his first appearance (Weber, Music 108–13). Percy Scholes traces "the idea of standing or walking whilst listening to music, instead of sitting in solemn rows," to the great eighteenth-century and Regency gardens such as Vauxhall, Marylebone, and Ranelagh. The term itself probably came from France, where the musician Philippe Musard had developed concerts on the Ranelagh model in Paris in the 1830s (Scholes 1: 192). On 6 December 1838, the Musical World sardonically commented that "the chief interest lies in the elegant perambulators themselves, who wander in pairs, finished by the Stultz and the St. James Street milliners, and arranged to orchestral accompaniments by Strauss and Musard" (qtd. in Mackerness 180). By 1846 the popular French conductor Louis Jullien conducted nightly an orchestra of three hundred at the Surrey Gardens where polkas, operatic selections, and waltzes alternated with isolated movements from symphonies by Franz Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven; Jullien later directed concerts featuring similar programs and inviting similarly stylish strollers at Covent Garden in the 1850s. As the century wore on, promenade concerts became less a venue for social display than an attempt to bring concert music within the range of the pocketbooks of the middle classes. In Manchester, the...

Processus de création et valeur d'emploi des insultes en français populaire de Côte-d'Ivoire

In each and every culture, the popular language is a privileged linguistic field of creation as far as insults are concerned. The popular French of Ivory Coast (“nouchi”) is no exception and the stock of insults are renewed by a permanent dynamics in urban communication, where quarrels are frequent and where nouchi is vividly in use. The practice of verbal insult in the Ivory Coast urban context is presented and set within the larger perspective of (Socio)Linguistics (i.e. Labov, Lagorgette, Ruwet). The mechanisms of this continuous creation (lexical items, periphrases used as direct vocative insults) are then established. Insistence is placed on linguistic processes (borrowing from local languages; lexical hybridisation or paraphrase between French and local languages; reactivation or reanalysis of French idioms) as well as stylistic and rhetorical processes (formulaic speech figures, motivation by the immediate environment of the metaphoric creation: news, manufactured products, TV soaps, etc.). This is followed by a consideration of the main themes of the corpus and of their contextual meaning. Finally, hypotheses are formulated on the reasons for the dominance of certain themes in the urban, popular community of Ivory Coast.

Processus de création et valeur d'emploi des insultes en français populaire de Côte-d'lvoire

In each and every culture, the popular language is a privileged linguistic field of création as far as insults are concemed. The popular French of Ivory Coast ("nouchi") is no exception and the stock of insults are renewed by a permanent dynamics in urban communication, where quarrels are fréquent and where nouchi is vividly in use. The practice of verbal insuit in the Ivory Coast urban context is presented and set within the larger perspective of (Socio)Linguistics (/.e. Labov, Lagorgette, Ruwet). The mechanisms of this continuous création (lexical items, périphrases used as direct vocative insults) are then established. Insistence is placed on linguistic processes (borrowing from local languages; lexical hybridisation or paraphrase between French and local languages; reactivation or reanalysis of French idioms) as well as stylistic and rhetorical processes (formulaic speech figures, motivation by the immediate environment of the metaphoric création: news, manufactured products, TV soaps, etc.). This is followed by a consideration of the main themes of the corpus and of their contextual meaning. Finally, hypotheses are formulated on the reasons for the dominance of certain themes in the urban, popular community of Ivory Coast.

Reviews

Genre and Hollywood by Steve Neale. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Reviewed by Frank P. Tomasulo.Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video by Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler. Indiana University Press, 1999. Reviewed by Jacqueline Bobo.Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema by Matthew Tinkcom. Duke UP, 2002. Reviewed by Michael R. Schiavi.Bertrand Blier by Sue Harris. New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Brigitte E. Humbert.Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators, and Foxy Chicks by Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates, eds. Routledge, 2001. Reviewed by Mary C. Beltran.France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema, edited by Lucy Mazdon. London: Wallflower Press, 2001. Reviewed by Valerie Orlando.A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy by Andrea Slane. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2001. Reviewed by Megan Williams.Cassavetes on Cassavetes, edited by Ray Carney. London: Faber and Faber. Reviewed by Todd Berliner.Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, edited by Alexandra Juhasz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Reviewed by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.Science Fiction/Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader, edited by Kim Newman. British Film Institute, 2002. Reviewed by Anne Morey.Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media by Dina Iordanova. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Reviewed by Jerry White.Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster by Geoff King. I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2000. Reviewed by Murray Pomerance.Cutting-Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde by Joan Hawkins. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Reviewed by Kevin A. Morrison.Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, edited by Kenneth S. Calhoon. Wayne State University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Tony Williams.The Ancient World in the Cinema by Jon Solomon. Yale University Press, 2000. Reviewed by Bernie Cook.Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire by Vijay Mishra. Routledge, 2002. Reviewed by Geetha Ramanathan.British Film Institute Film Classics, Volumes I and II. Edward Buscombe and Rob White, Eds., London: BFI, 2003. Reviewed by Wheeler Winston Dixon.Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, edited by Peter Lehman. Routledge: New York, 2001. Reviewed by Jonathan Markovitz.

France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema (review)

L'Esprit Créateur which French cinema functions"), and, finally, film technique and theory. The Editors also plan an annual review article of books published on French cinema and another on key conferences on French cinema. The articles range over cinema history from "Magic and Illusion in early cinema" to "Apocalypse then: French Disaster films of the 1920s," through a carefully nuanced assessment of the anti-modernism of the "Parisian popular" of the classic cinema of die 30s that emphasized its regressive, nostalgic idealization of small, rooted communities. An article on Sembène Ousmane 's first full-length film, La Noire de..., focuses on techniques used to portray the structures of colonialism. Theory is represented by three articles: an examination of the relationship between film and hypnosis in Benoît Jacquot's Le Septième Ciel; a very topical article on the place of "Cinematic Bodies: The Blind Spot in Contemporary French Theory on Corporeal Cinema," that situates film studies at the center of postmodern theory; and "Jouissance at the Margins," an analysis of Philippe Harel's adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's "Extension du domaine de la luttelWhatever " that moves smoothly and perceptively between history and theory, situating its subject in relation to "May 68 and middle management" before reexamining Kristeva's notion of the "abject" in order to apply it to the "masculine." The majority of the articles fit into the category of film genre and film trends, and, reflecting the review's concern to publish work in new areas, focus less on works by canonical auteurs (Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and Godard's A bout de souffle are the exceptions) than on films from the 90s and beyond—Brigitte Rouän's Outremer, Dominique Cabrera's Demain et encore demain, Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Jacques Rivette's Haut bas fragile, and Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac—placing them in Ãœie context of history and film history, genre theory and gender studies. Marja Warehime The University of South Carolina Lucy Mazdon, ed. France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2001.Pp. 180. This is a collection of articles on individual French films, all made in the 1990s, with the exception oÃ- Jean de Florette (1986). Mazdon's aim, through these case studies, is to examine the construction of French cinema, especially in its popular dimension. This is a welcome idea, though Mazdon overstates her case in saying mat "The French cinema articulated in this book might be quite different to that described in other works on the subject," given that an important feature of books and articles on French and European cinema in the last ten years or so has been to consider popular film. It should also be pointed out mat France on Film examines films that have received ample treatment elsewhere (Jean de Florette, Gazon maudit, Nikita, Romancé), though this is not to say that the chapters on these films are to be dismissed for mis reason. My criticism would be rather mat the selection reflects the current slant within UK academic film studies towards contemporary cinema, sadly to the detriment of history. As in all edited collections, contributions are uneven, though each chapter is informative. I personally found Maria Esposito on Jean de Florette, Howard Seal on Vn héros très discret and Phil Powrie on Marius et Jeannette particularly engaging. In the first case Esposito brings a new, detailed attention to this famous film, and the other two cogently contextualise two of the most interesting films of me 1990s. But then each reader will bring different questions to different films. On a more general level, it is a pity that Mazdon did not pursue her own questions about what "popular" means in French cinema. For instance, the issue of quantitative vs qualitative popularity runs through the book but box-office figures are used by some contributors, ignored by others, or interpreted according to different criteria. Similarly, issues of methodology (how to relate the "France" and "film" terms of me title) are left underexplored. 94 Fall 2002 Book Reviews A quality of this collection is to bring in some young scholars, reflecting the widening of interest...