Studies in French Cinema looks at the development of French screen studies in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years and the ways in which innovative scholarship in the UK has helped shape the field in English- and French-speaking universities. This seminal text is also a tribute to six key figures within the field who have been leaders in research and teaching of French cinema: Jill Forbes, Susan Hayward, Phil Powrie, Keith Reader, Carrie Tarr, and Ginette Vincendeau.
Covering a wide range of key films-contemporary and historical, popular and auteur-the volume provides an invaluable overview for students and scholars of the state of French cinema, and French film studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Introduction - W. Higbee and S. Leahy
PART I
Chapter1: 'Pierrot le fou' and post-New Wave French cinema - Jill Forbes
Chapter 2: National Cinemas and the Body Politic - Susan Hayward
Chapter 3: Unfamiliar Places: 'heterospection' and recent French films on children - Phil Powrie
Chapter 4: The circular ruins? Frontiers, exile and the nation in Renoir's 'Le Crime de Monsieur Lange' - Keith Reader
Chapter 5: Beurz N the Hood: The articulation of Beur and French identities in 'Le Thé au harem d'Archimède' and 'Hexagone' - Carrie Tarr
Chapter 6: Community, Nostalgia and the Spectacle of Masculinity - Ginette Vincendeau
PART II
Chapter 7: Asserting text, context and intertext: Jill Forbes and French Film Studies - Julia Dobson
Chapter 8: Jill Forbes: The continued conversation - Sue Harris
Chapter 9: Political Threads and Material Memory: Mayo's Wardrobe for 'Casque d'or' (1952) - Jennie Cousins
Chapter 10: 'Une vraie famille Benetton': Maternal metaphors of nation in 'Il y a longtemps que je t'aime' (Claudel, 2008) - a response to Susan Hayward - Sarah Leahy
Chapter 11: Phil Powrie: French film studies as a heterotopic field - Ann Davies
Chapter 12: Men in Unfamiliar Places: A response to Phil Powrie - Alison Smith
Chapter 13: To elicit and elude: The film writing of Keith Reader - Douglas Morrey
Chapter 14: Sexuality (and Resnais): A response to Keith Reader - Emma Wilson
Chapter 15: Of spaces and difference in 'La Graine et le mulet' (Kechiche, 2007): A dialogue with Carrie Tarr - Will Higbee
Chapter 16: Cinema, the second sex and studies of French women's films in the 2000s - Kate Ince
Chapter 17: The bafflement of Gabin and Raimu and the breathlessness of Belmondo: a dialogue with the work of Ginette Vincendeau - Martin O'Shaughnessy
Chapter 18: Placing French Film History - Alastair Phillips
PART III
Chapter 19: To the distant observer - Jill Forbes
Chapter 20: Censoring French 'Cinéma de qualité' - 'Bel-Ami' (Louis Daquin, 1954) - Susan Hayward
Chapter 21: Raymond Bernard's 'Les Misérables' (1934) - Keith Reader
Chapter 22: Jewish-Arab Relations in French and Maghrebi Cinema(s) - Carrie Tarr
Chapter 23: The Frenchness of French Cinema: The language of national identity, from the regional to the trans-national - Ginette Vincendeau
Chapter 24: Four decades of teaching and research in French cinema - Phil Powrie
