French cinema : a student's guide

221 Pages·2002·10.822 MB·English

by  Phil Powrie, Keith Reader

French Cinema:
A Student's Guide
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French Cinema:
A Student's Guide
Phil Powrie and Keith Reader
The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 340 760044 (PB)
ISBN 0 340 760036 (HB)
First Published 2002
Impression number 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 32 1
Year 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002
Copyright © Phil Powrie and Keith Reader 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or under licence from the
Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details of such licences (for reprographic
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Typeset by Phoenix Photosetting
Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton Educational, a division of Hodder Headline Plc,
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH by MPG Books Ltd
Contents
Introduction 1
1. History 3
1896–1929: the silent period 3
1930-1939: the 'early classic era' – from sound to the Second World War 7
1939-1945: the war years 13
1945-1959: le cinema de papa 16
1959-1968: the New Wave 20
1968-1981: the New Wave (postscript), realism and comedy 28
1981-2001: heritage, the look, women, Beurs, Banlieue, Le Jeune Cinema 36
Conclusion 53
2. Theory 54
1900-1945: early film theory 56
1945-1960: Andre Bazin and the politique des auteurs 58
1950-1970: sociology and structuralism 60
1968-1970: ideology and suture 66
1970-1980: psychoanalysis and post-structuralism 68
The space(s) of cinema: Daney, Burch and Gardies Gardies 71
The movement(s) of cinema: Deleuze 74
The sound(s) of cinema: Chion 80
3. Practice 85
4. Writing about French films 93
Essays 93
Sequence analysis 127
Appendices 163
Table 1: History of the French cinema (stars, movements, directors) 163
Table 2: French theorists of the cinema 164
Table 3 and Figure 1: numbers of spectators 1945-1999 166
Table 4 and Figure 2: numbers of films produced 1945-1999 167
Table 5 and Figure 3: share of the French market 1945-1999 170
Table 6: best-sellers 1945-1999 171
Table 7: the top 50 French films 1945-1999 (by number of spectators) 183
Table 8: French prizes 1945-1999 185
Table 9: Oscar for Best Foreign Film won by French films 192
Table 10: key technical terms in English and French 192
Further reading 196
Bibliography 199
Index of films and proper names 209
VI
This book is dedicated to the memory of our colleague and friend Jill Forbes,
Professor of French at Queen Mary & Westfield College, London.
Jill was one of the finest writers on French cinema; she died at the far
too early age of 54 on Friday, 13 July 2001.
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INTRODUCTION
Since the early 1980s there has been a gradual increase in the number of people
teaching and researching French cinema courses in UK universities. There are now
some 45 staff members in universities in the UK alone publishing material on this
subject; these and many more also teach French cinema on a regular basis. French
cinema forms an integral part of many French/Modern Languages university
degrees, as well as being an important component of what is now called World
Cinema in Film Studies degrees, in both the UK and the USA. Surprisingly,
though, there is no single volume that serves as a reasonably comprehensive back-
ground for such study.
Although there have been many histories of the French cinema, French-specific
theorising on the cinema has not to our knowledge formed part of any introduc-
tory texts; 'film theory' is seen as a global phenomenon that tends to elide French-
specific continuities. There are guidebooks on how to study or write on film, but,
again, these are not French-specific. There are no books for students outlining
the different types of research in French cinema; this is confined to scattered
reviews in learned journals or alluded to in a fragmentary way in scholarly tomes.
Our volume is an attempt to combine all of these strands - history, theory, prac-
tice - with the more usual statistics one might expect to find in a student hand-
book.
We have decided to focus specifically on French, rather than Francophone, cinema.
The reader will therefore not find references to French-speaking African cinema,
nor to Swiss cinema (for example, the films of Alain Tanner), nor, finally, to Belgian
cinema.
We have included an annotated Bibliography in addition to the usual References,
which will act as 'further reading' for those readers wishing to pursue some of the
strands outlined in this volume.
Film titles are given in their original French version, without a translation (unless
this is necessary in the context).