Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 22, No. 2-3, 2022)

ABSTRACT This article analyses Michèle Morgan’s rapid rise to stardom between 1937 and 1939 through the prism of her media coverage and her reception in popular magazines and their readers’ letters. From a perspective combining cultural history with star and gender studies, the article is based on an analysis of three specialised film magazines (Cinémonde, Ciné-Miroir, Pour Vous) while exploring the

RÉSUMÉ Michèle Morgan, après un exil de six ans à Hollywood pendant la guerre, retrouve la faveur du public français en 1946 avec le film de Jean Delannoy, La Symphonie pastorale et devient la star féminine n°1 en France pendant une décennie. En tête au box-office et couverte de récompenses, en couple à la ville avec Henri Vidal et associée à l’écran aux stars masculines les plus populaires, Jean Marais

ABSTRACT Both on and off screen, the Michèle Morgan–Henri Vidal star couple was a pair of opposites. Morgan personified an ethereal femininity on screen, but she chose as her partner the most athletic and virile actor in France, and they became one of the most glamorous French couples of the time. The quintessence of ‘quality’ cinema, Morgan accumulated successes, while Vidal was often consigned to

RÉSUMÉ Au milieu des années 1950, lors de ses premiers films en couleurs, Michèle Morgan, alors au sommet de sa carrière, doit confronter sa « cinégénie » à la couleur et adapter ses personnages à son âge réel, 35 ans. Les trois films qu’elle tourne alors, Obsession de Jean Delannoy, Les Grandes manœuvres de René Clair et Marguerite de la nuit de Claude Autant-Lara, apportent des réponses convergentes

ABSTRACT Michèle Morgan starred twice alongside Bourvil, in 1958 in Le Miroir à deux faces (André Cayatte) and in 1960 in Fortunat (Alex Joffé). These films present the pairing of Morgan and Bourvil as an anomaly, casting them as a mismatched couple who could only have come together under exceptional circumstances. The contrast between the two characters, and between the two stars, provides the main

ABSTRACT This article examines Michèle Morgan’s films of the 1960s, the last phase in her long career, and one hitherto ignored by film history, largely on account of the dearth of auteur films in the star’s late filmography. Morgan’s 1960s films are explored against three contexts: the impact of the New Wave on popular cinema (in particular the arrival of youth culture); the changing social context

ABSTRACT This essay constructs a post-auteurist historiography of the French New Wave centred on the role of the producer. Examining the scattered recollections and contradictory accounts of producers Pierre Braunberger, Anatole Dauman, Georges de Beauregard, Mag Bodard and Christine Gouze-Rénal, the author builds a case for considering the New Wave’s director-oriented legacy, its aura of genius creators

ABSTRACT This article analyses Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables as a depiction of a generational conflict in a contemporary banlieue. The film stresses that age-related mistreatment is an abuse of power in parity with ethnic discrimination and social exclusion. When local authority figures are prepared to sacrifice a boy to secure their power game, the young banlieusards retaliate with violence. The uprising

ABSTRACT The reception of François Truffaut’s 1975 film L’Histoire d’Adèle H., dealing with the obsession and descent into madness of the daughter of Victor Hugo, has recurrently focused on its critical engagement with Romantic melodrama, as well as its literary and ‘romanesque’ dimensions. This article argues that the term ‘romanesque’ has camouflaged the film’s active engagement with both cinematic

ABSTRACT In addition to playing characters, stars can represent a story and this is true both of individual stars and star couples. The story of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Yvan Attal – one of France’s most famous couples – unfolds both onscreen and offscreen and is articulated in a play of signification across various representations. Gainsbourg and Attal have made several films together, including three

(2022). Bibliography for French and francophone cinema and television 2021. French Screen Studies. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT One of the unknowns associated with Alain Guiraudie’s thriller L’Inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (2013) is what the film is really about. Set at a lake where men have sex with men, the film follows the protagonist Franck, who pursues a relationship with a man despite witnessing that man drown his lover. Whereas some reviews have read the film as a fable about the dangers of casual sex

(2022). What makes a major? Recent books on French studios. French Screen Studies. Ahead of Print.

(2022). Ethics of care in documentary filmmaking since 1968. French Screen Studies: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 1-5.

ABSTRACT During the years that preceded the legalisation of abortion in France by la loi Veil in 1975, feminists and activist doctors provided women alternative modes of reproductive care and advocacy. Militant and documentary filmmakers captured these developments in films such as Y’a qu’à pas baiser ! (Carole Roussopoulos and Vidéo Out, 1971–1973), Histoires d’A (Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel

ABSTRACT This essay attends to the 1975 documentary film Ce gamin, là, a collaboration between educator Fernand Deligny, filmmaker Renaud Victor and the inhabitants of the para-institutional space of care for non-verbal autistic children that Deligny established in the Cévennes in the late 1960s. Less a documentary illustrative of ways of caring for autistic children than an experiment in observational

ABSTRACT This article proposes a chiastic reading of Elle s’appelle Sabine, examining how director Sandrine Bonnaire folds time. She represents her sister, the subject of the film, in the present and past, but also offers points of comparison between herself and her sibling. The film has a doubled set of ethical challenges: documentary ethics and ethics of care implicate Bonnaire both as filmmaker

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

ABSTRACT This article explores how the techniques of surviving Atlantic slavery leave legacies of care, notably in the practice of the jardin créole (creole garden) as a counter-plantation practice of mutual distribution. By taking up Édouard Glissant’s theorisation of the jardin créole in Manthia Diawara’s documentary, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation, the author shows how Diawara’s staging

ABSTRACT Nicolas Klotz and Élisabeth Perceval’s La Blessure (2004) bears witness to invisible state violence at the nation’s borders, in airport zones of exception, where asylum seekers are detained, injured, cared for and forced to return. This early visual representation of repressive care in the current border regime also cultivates forms of attention and regard for the asylum seeker’s face, voice

ABSTRACT Damien Manivel’s Les Enfants d’Isadora (2019) is inspired by Isadora Duncan’s solo dance ‘Mother’, which she choreographed after the tragic loss of her two young children. Manivel’s film shows a series of women who engage with the dance in contemporary times, juxtaposing their interpretations of the solo with scenes from everyday life. These women’s performances point to a shared vulnerability

RÉSUMÉ Du Groupe Dziga Vertov, collectif de cinéma militant animé par Jean-Luc Godard et Jean-Pierre Gorin après Mai 68 (en pleine période de « libération sexuelle »), on pourrait attendre qu’il aborde frontalement la dimension sociale et politique de la sexualité. Or, les cinéastes effectuent un double pas de côté par rapport aux milieux militants de leur époque : non seulement ils privilégient la

ABSTRACT This article presents a quantitative analysis of Belgian fiction film production between 2000 and 2019. Analysing an extensive database, it explores the current state of Belgian cinema, which is characterised on the one hand by a strong international dimension, and on the other hand by two largely separate intranational industries: a Flemish and a francophone Belgian film industry. Despite

(2021). In search of lost screens. Remapping the cultural history of Paris. French Screen Studies. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT In 2019, Jacques Audiard’s eighth feature film, Les Frères Sisters, was nominated for nine César awards and headlined both the UniFrance and Alliance Française French Film Festivals. However Les Frères Sisters features no French dialogue, actors, settings or filming locations. Indeed, a growing number of recent films are being labelled as French by national cinema bodies ranging from the CNC

ABSTRACT This article studies the political dimension of friendship in Robert Guédiguian’s cinema, delving into the crucial role that conversation plays in this relationship, and taking Stanley Cavell’s thought as a main reference. Aristotle’s concept of civic friendship, along with its contemporary readings, and Cavell’s notion of conversation provide a theoretical frame for the analysis of three

(2021). Agnès Varda and Xavier Dolan – between politics, the art house and popular culture. French Screen Studies. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Roland-François Lack (1960–2021). French Screen Studies. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Expanding upon Faure’s and Epstein’s writings on the plasticity of the cinematic image, this article updates this concept for the post-cinematic image of the internet era via an analysis of Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover (2002). In doing this, it connects plasticity to Deleuze’s work on the cinema and his assertion that ‘the brain is the screen’. Rather than a continuation of the optimistic

ABSTRACT Previous scholarship focusing on Chris Marker’s involvement with social movements tends to overlook the inextricability of social and environmental concerns and to position the 1980s as a return for Marker to personal filmmaking. This article seeks to recontextualise Marker’s work from Japan during this period to reveal the continuity of earlier preoccupations with social movements and planetary

ABSTRACT The ground-breaking director Céline Sciamma observes that her films are often obsessed with the circulation of objects. This article analyses the forms this circulation takes across Sciamma’s first four films (Naissance des pieuvres, Tomboy, Bande de filles and Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), as well as the significance of the objects themselves. Building on insights offered by scholars

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on twenty-first century French horror cinema provides a historical overview of the past 20 years of horror film production in France. From the ‘Bee Movies’ label started in 2001 to the 2017 CNC call for genre film projects led by Julia Ducournau, the author discusses how French horror, despite a hostile industrial ecosystem, has managed to survive and

ABSTRACT Julia Ducournau’s Grave (2018) takes place within the confines of an isolated veterinary school, where humans and animals coexist as part of a highly codified environment. Against the backdrop of the school’s methodical and ritualised social regulation, disruptive bodily transformations take place, blurring the biological and behavioural categories that traditionally define species-based identities

ABSTRACT The rebirth of French horror cinema at the start of the twenty-first century coincided with a critical moment in the country’s debates on immigration. The Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) called for cultural assimilation and integration from its immigrant population, but there was also a growing trend in the party towards a more hard-line approach. This article uses Jacques Derrida’s

ABSTRACT Les Revenants, a Canal+ TV series about a small town whose dead return to life, was one of the biggest critical and popular successes of the 2010s on the domestic and international markets. While the series has been discussed by the French popular press as part of a concerted effort among French production companies to compete in long-form serial television, its engagement with the tradition

ABSTRACT Ever since the 1950s, the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos has exerted a particular influence on French cinema, both through the adaptations of his work by Robert Bresson and through his political writings, which Godard incorporated into films such as For Ever Mozart (1996). In this paper, the author aims to unearth this legacy of Bernanos in particular, and of the renouveau catholique,

ABSTRACT Of his mentor Roger Leenhardt, André Bazin once stated, ‘There is in all phenomena a primary level, that of basic understanding. There is a second level, where the subtleties lay. And the third level, that belongs to Roger Leenhardt’ (cited in Roger Leenhardt ou le dernier des humanistes, André Labarthe, 1965). Though the influence of Leenhardt’s realist film theory on the Cahiers du cinéma

(2021). Bibliography for French and Francophone cinema 2020. French Screen Studies: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 184-188.

RÉSUMÉ Les films de Pagnol sont généralement présentés comme des représentations de la culture méditerranéenne dont l’authenticité repose souvent sur l’usage de stéréotypes de l’identité locale. L’exemple de Manon des sources permet pourtant de mettre en évidence l’éventail des références culturelles qui montre le caractère hybride de l’identité locale. En plaçant les conflits territoriaux au cœur

ABSTRACT When Parisian theatre impresario Maurice Lehmann sued the widow and sons of the late playwright Edmond Rostand in 1932, the French press took careful notice. Lehmann owned the theatrical rights to L’Aiglon, a play about the emperor Napoleon’s son, which Rostand had written for Sarah Bernhardt. But Rostand’s widow maintained the film rights. When a sound-film version appeared in 1931, Lehmann

ABSTRACT This article examines Bambi (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2013), a documentary that deals with carefully selected aspects of the life and career of French-Algerian trans* woman Marie-Pierre Pruvot: a showgirl and dancer, ‘Bambi’ was Pruvot’s stage name. The article considers the film through the lens of animation; the author uses this word both technically (as in cinematic movement) and metaphorically

ABSTRACT This article analyses Romy Schneider’s roles and performances in films depicting the rise of European totalitarianisms and the German Occupation of France during World War II. This small but significant corpus holds an important place in Schneider’s career in France as it was decisive in the shaping of her persona (i.e. a media construction) in the 1970s, capitalising on her own personal life

(2021). Correction. French Screen Studies: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 189-189.

ABSTRACT While much of the criticism of director Marguerite Duras’s cinema has tended to prioritise sound over image, the writing process over the cinematographic one, this article argues that at every moment, Duras evokes cinema, its components and its material, thus making Duras a cineaste who thinks cinema. To establish this, the author explores the fundamental questions asked by Duras about the

ABSTRACT This article considers one of the most canonical films in Francophone African cinema, Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de… (1966), through the lens of listening to reveal new dimensions of the film’s neo-colonial critique. Applying concepts developed in inquiries into racialised politics of listening in the United States context, this article shows how the film both exposes and critiques Diouana’s

ABSTRACT This article approaches questions of race and imperialism in India Song through the film’s strategies of sound. Departing from the notion that Duras’s relegation to the soundtrack of certain aspects of the film’s colonial context might be read as a means to avoid the totalising risks of the image, this article suggests that, in the film, sound is deployed not only as a means of survival for

ABSTRACT For decades after its release, Nicole Vedrès’s Paris 1900 only received fitful critical attention. This article argues that Paris 1900 warrants systematic reappraisal as a pivotal and influential proto-essay film – galvanising for essay filmmakers that followed, in the post-war period and after, including Agnès Varda and Chris Marker, and many others. To make this case, the article uses archival

ABSTRACT Director Jean Renoir’s 1930s films are considered some of the most influential in film history. However, little is known about Renoir’s team of collaborators who helped to realise these ground-breaking, politically engaged films. This study considers the role of Renoir’s long-time editor during this period, Marguerite Renoir. Through an examination of Jean Renoir’s personal letters from and

(2021). Revisiting Jean Renoir and Marguerite Duras: time, space and spectatorship. French Screen Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 81-84.

ABSTRACT Claire Denis’s and Catherine Breillat’s films pass through nightclubs with striking frequency. Though their work emerges with the rise of clubbing in the 1970s and 80s, their liminal clubs bear a skewed relation to the representation of geographically rooted subcultures. A place rather of transient fantasy, they allow marginal bodies into the light and those usually in focus to move differently

ABSTRACT This article studies the persona which enabled Marion Cotillard to become a Hollywood star at the end of the 2000s. Insofar as her part in La Vie en rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007) was key to her success in the US, the author’s analysis focuses first and foremost on her performance in this film, as well as the media content that accompanied its release. He pays specific attention to the national

ABSTRACT This article addresses issues of gender, migration and race in Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966) through an examination of the film’s representation of transnational motherhood and maternal-domestic labour. While commentators tend to read the film’s female characters in terms of an allegory of imperial violence between France and Senegal, this article argues that La Noire de… should be simultaneously

ABSTRACT The cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton has collaborated with Chantal Akerman on her feature films, shorts, documentaries and installations. However, Wieder-Atherton’s influence on Akerman’s filmmaking, and her physical presence in the films themselves, have not been examined directly by scholars. This article will address this imbalance by outlining their collaborative project, before analysing

Allaoui, Mounir. 2016. ‘Dialogues interculturels entre la critique et les institutions cinématographiques en France et le “cinéma d’auteur asiatique” (Corée du Sud, Japon, Taïwan): De la notion de “nouvelle vague” à la réalisation de films de cinéastes asiatiques en France’, Montpellier 3, France. Amaral, Genevieve M. 2017. ‘Act Six: Aristocracy and History in Interwar French Literature and Film’,

Abadie, Shahram. Architecture des salles obscures: Paris, 1907-1939: Paris: AFHRC. Armes, Roy. Roots of the New Arab Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Aurouet, Carole. Le Cinéma de Guillaume Apollinaire: Des manuscrits inédits pour un nouvel éclairage. Paris: Grenelle. Aventin, Christine. Breillat, des yeux le ventre. Bruxelles: Espace nord. Bazin, André. Écrits complets. 2 vols. Edited

ABSTRACT Visages Villages (2017), co-directed by Agnès Varda and photographer JR, is a performative, poetic documentary structured around the pair’s creation of portraits of ordinary people in the far-flung villages of rural France. This essay examines the links between Visages Villages and Varda’s documentary practice as a whole. The film extends Varda’s longstanding preoccupation with the power of

ABSTRACT Nicolas Boukhrief’s film Made in France (2015) charts an unsettling path into the world of terror, with the radical intent to shake public perceptions and disrupt state discourses by redirecting the gaze inward to investigate the very disturbing, and much repressed, phenomenon of home-grown terror. The film marks a major departure in Western films about terrorism, in that it frames the story

ABSTRACT François Margolin and Lemine Ould Salem’s documentary Salafistes is without doubt one of the most controversial films about terrorism released in France in recent decades. The film’s central focus is the occupation of the northern Malian cities of Timbuktu and Gao by the jihadist group Ansar Dine, but Salafistes also mixes interviews with jihadis from groups such as Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda of

ABSTRACT The term humour communautaire has been adopted to describe the widely popular genre of ethnic comedy cinema in France, films both praised for their ability to bring together diverse groups through humour while also raising scepticism as to whether a genre reliant upon stereotypes is not simply producing racist rhetoric. Such typecasting is particularly salient when non-European characters