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Covering the rich film production of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together films that might otherwise be divided by questions of race, gender, genre, period, or nation, in a valuable comparative study of a diverse corpus. Individual countries, film-makers, and films are treated separately in order to emphasize their specific identities or those which are represented in their films, and key films are examined within a well-developed historical context. Clearly written and accessible to the specialist and general reader alike, this informative book is a valuable reference source.
An engaging, content-based book that uses fifteen easily accessible feature films from all regions of the Francophone world, helping classrooms incorporate Francophone cinema and culture into advanced French Language or Francophone Studies courses.
Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.
In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film. French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin. David Pettersen traces how, in these works and others, directors fuse features of banlieue cinema with genre formulas associated with both Hollywood and Black cultural models, as well as how transnational genre hybridizations, such as B movies, have become part of the ecosystem of the French film industry. By combining film analysis, cultural history, critical theory, and industry studies, French B Movies reveals how featuring banlieues is as much about trying to imagine new identities and production models for French cinema as it is about representation.
"Cinema and Sensation: " "French Film and the Art of Transgression" looks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the reemergence of filmmaking practices (and, by extension, of theoretical approaches) that give precedence to cinema as the medium of the senses.France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the release, in close succession, of a series of films that exemplify a characteristic awareness of cinema s sensory impact and transgressive nature: "Adieu"; "A ma soeur"; "Baise-moi"; "Beau Travail"; "La Blessure"; "La Captive"; "Dans ma peau"; "Demonlover"; "L Humanite"; "Flandres"; "L Intrus"; "Les Invisibles"; "Lady Chatterley"; "Lecons de tenebres"; "Romance"; "Sombre"; "Tiresia"; "Trouble Every Day"; "Twentynine Palms"; "Vendredi soir"; "La Vie nouvelle"; "Wild Side"; and "Zidane, un portrait du XXIeme siecle." These films, among others, typify a willingness to explore cinema s unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually.Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Bataille, among others, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques, and motifs that allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching today s most burning sociocultural debatesfrom the growing supremacy of technology, to globalization, exile, and exclusion."
Youth has been represented on screen for decades and has informed many directors' visual, narrative and social perspectives, but there has not been a body of work addressing the richness and complexity of this topic in a French and Francophone context. This volume offers new insights into the works of emerging and well-established directors alike, who all chose to place youth at the heart of their narrative and aesthetic concerns. Showing how the topic of 'youth' has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions - political, social, religious, economic or cultural - that agitate a society at a given time in its history.
Setting the stage for a critical encounter between Francophone African cinema and Continental European critical theory, this book offers a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of 16 Francophone African films, including Bassek Ba Kobhio's The Great White Man of Lambarene, Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba the Tyrant, and Amadou Seck's Saaraba. The author invites readers to study these films in the context of transnational conversations between African filmmakers and the conventional theorists whose works are more readily available in academia. The book examines black French filmmakers' treatments of a number of cross-cultural themes, including intercontinental encounters and reciprocity, ideology and subjective freedom, governance and moral responsibility, sexuality and social order, and globalization. Throughout the work, the presentation of literary theory is accessible by both beginning and advanced students of film and culture. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
It is often taken for granted that French cinema is intimately connected to the nation’s sense of identity and self-confidence. But what do we really know about that relationship? What are the nuances, insider codes, and hidden history of the alignment between cinema and nationalism? Hugo Frey suggests that the concepts of the ‘political myth’ and ‘the film event’ are the essential theoretical reference points for unlocking film history. Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers new arguments regarding those connections in the French case, examining national elitism, neo-colonialism, and other exclusionary discourses, as well as discussing for the first time the subculture of cinema around the extreme right Front National. Key works from directors such as Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, François Truffaut, and others provide a rich body of evidence.
Like its French-language companion volume Le Cinéma français contemporain: Manuel de classe, Alan Singerman and Michèle Bissière's Contemporary French Cinema: A Student's Book offers a detailed look at recent French cinema through its analyses of twenty notable and representative French films that have appeared since 1980. Sure to delight Anglophone fans of French film, it can be used with equal success in English-language courses and, when paired with its companion volume, dual-language ones. Acclaim for Le Cinéma français contemporain: Manuel de classe "From Le Dernier Métro to Intouchables, Bissière and Singerman cover the latest trends of French cinema, emphasizing context and analytical method as Singerman did in Apprentissage du cinéma français (Focus 2004). The authors offer a selection of films most French cinephiles will applaud, and they incorporate insights from some of the best critical work on French cinema. Students of French film will also find all the bibliographical pointers they need to dig deeper, and instructors will appreciate the pedagogical components included in the chapters." --Jonathan Walsh, Department of French Studies, Wheaton College, Massachusetts "This remarkable book comes to us from two seasoned teachers and critics and beautifully complements an earlier work, Alan Singerman's Apprentissage du cinéma français. The time period covered, more targeted here than in the preceding text, is admirably well chosen, and the breakdown by broad category, each offering multiple options, guides the teacher while offering a choice among an abundance of interesting films. The preliminary chapters, both succinct and informative, give students an excellent overview of French cinema as a whole and of the technical knowledge needed for film analysis. Each of the subsequent chapters offers an indispensable introduction discussing the plot, director, production, actors, reception, and context of the film in question and also provides a very useful filmography and bibliography... an exemplary work." --Brigitte E. Humbert, Department of French and Francophone Studies, Middlebury College
Stories of violence — such as the account in Genesis of Cain's jealousy and murder of Abel — have been with us since the time of the earliest recorded texts. Undeniably, the scourge of violence fascinates, confounds, and saddens. What are its uses in literature — its appeal, forms, and consequences? Anchored by Alice Kaplan's substantial contribution, the thirteen articles in this volume cover diverse epochs, lands, and motives. One scholar ponders whether accounts of Huguenot martyrdom in the sixteenth-century might suggest more pride than piety. Another assesses the real versus the true with respect to a rape scene inThe Heptameron. Female violence in fairy tales by Madame d'Aulnoy points to gender politics and the fragility of female solidarity, while another article examines similar issues in the context of Ananda Devi's works in present-day Mauritius. Other studies address the question of sadism in Flaubert, the unstable point of view of Emmanuel Carrère'sL'Adversaire, the ambivalence toward violence in Chamoiseau's Texaco, the notions of “terror” and “tabula rasa” in the writings of Blanchot, the undoing of traditions of narrative continuity and authority in the 1998 film,À vendre, and consequences of the power differential in a repressive Haiti as depicted in the filmVers le Sud (2005). Paradoxes emerge in several studies of works where victims may become perpetrators, or vice versa.