1 General

Cécile Accilien, Bay Lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2023), is the first book to examine popular contemporary films from Haiti, with a particular focus on how they address the needs and desires of audiences from Haiti and beyond. The films discussed here were made between 2000 and 2018, shot mostly on digital cameras or mobile phones, and deal with the complexities of community, nostalgia, belonging, identity—particularly in the context of the emotional experience of exile and diaspora. Accilien argues that these films reflect socio-political and cultural problems centred on family, language, migration, religion, gender and sexuality, and poverty. Using less traditionally ‘academic’ techniques like bay lodyans or Haitian storytelling, Accilien uses these films to build specifically Haitian epistemological frameworks. The book includes interviews with Haitian filmmakers, actors, and scholars who challenge Western theoretical approaches and perspectives.

François Giraud, Gesture in French Post-New Wave Cinema (Oxford and New York: Lang, 2023), examines the aesthetics of gesture in a selection of films made during a complex period marked by the disintegration of the French New Wave, May 1968, and the decline of postwar economic prosperity. Girard adopts an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to establish gesture as a key theoretical concept in film analysis, arguing that gesture should be read in terms of its interplay with film technology and its relations with the visual and performing arts. He analyses the works of both major and often under-explored French and Francophone filmmakers, artists, writers, and intellectuals, including Chantal Akerman, Fernand Deligny, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Klossowski, Anne-Marie Miéville, Georges Perec, Bernard Queysanne, Jacques Rivette, Renaud Victor, and Pierre Zucca.

Ben McCann and Peter C. Pugsley, The Cinematic Influence: Interaction and Exchange Between the Cinemas of France and Japan (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), explores the aesthetic and cultural links between French and Japanese cinema. By drawing on examples and case studies of films by Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Claire Denis, Naomi Kawase, Michel Gondry, and others, this book demonstrates the manifold cinematic connections that mark a long history of mutual influence and reverence between French and Japanese filmmakers. McCann and Pugsley offer insights into the ways that national cinemas resist Hollywood to maintain and strengthen their own cultural practices and how these national cinemas perform the task of informing and enlightening other cultures about what it means to be French or Japanese. By situating film as both a form of cultural exchange and a viable cultural and economic player in individual nations, this book investigates the crossover between these two diverse national cinemas by tracking their history of shared narrative and stylistic techniques.

The ‘Special Dossier: French Film Studies in Australia’, ed. by Ben McCann, French Screen Studies, 23.1 (2023), 46–51, reflects on the French cinematic presence in Australia in thoughtful and intricate ways. Greg Hainge uses Élie Faure’s and Jean Epstein’s early writings on the plasticity of the cinematic image and updates them for the post-cinematic image of the internet era via an analysis of Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover (2002). Felicity Chaplin explores how the Yvan Attal/Charlotte Gainsbourg celebrity couple is narrativized through the interplay of their onscreen and offscreen presences. Joe Hardwick looks at Alain Guiraudie’s homme fatal thriller L’Inconnu du lac (2013) through the lenses of genre, space, and narrative to identify the film’s key theme: the question of knowability. Gemma King uses Jacques Audiard’s Les Frères Sisters (2019) to explore how a film might exemplify what Bill Marshall terms ‘cinéma-monde’ (transnational films that maintain a connection to the francophone world whether culturally, linguistically, geographically and/or through production and reception) and consider how works such as Les Frères Sisters continue to be produced, distributed, consumed, and judged within the frameworks of national cinemas.

Tsivia Frank Wygoda, ‘(Un)Mapping the ‘Pied-Noir Jew’: Indeterminacy and the Representation of Pied-Noirs and Algerian Jews in Contemporary French Cinema’, Modern Language Notes, 138 (2023), 1337–1360, offers new reflections on the representation of Pied-Noir and Algerian Jewish memory through the figure of the ‘Pied-Noir Jew’ in French culture. Using analysis of cinematographic materials and their literary sources, Wygoda demonstrates how Algerian Jewish stage and screen artists participated in the creation in France of a nostalgic cultural community of Algerian Jews and French-European ex-settlers while simultaneously navigating the tensions between Pied-Noir and Jewish memory of Algeria. The book’s guiding question, ‘is there a “Pied-Noir Jew”?’, is concerned with the existence of a cultural phenomenon which, while being problematic, might serve as a bridge between two different collective memories: the memory of French and European settlers and that of the indigenous Jewish population of Algeria. For Wygoda, the aporetic figure of the ‘Pied-Noir Jew’ is a cultural and affective concept that encapsulates the afterlife of Algerian Jews’ entangled identities.

2 Documentary/Non-fiction

Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers: Beyond Representation, ed. by Suzanne Crosta, Sada Niang, and Alexie Tcheuyap (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023), explores the contributions of Francophone African women to the field of documentary filmmaking and is a timely addition to contemporary scholarly debates on African cinemas. Shunned from costly, fictional, 35-mm filmmaking, Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers examines how these women engaged and experimented with documentary filmmaking in personal and evocative ways that opposed the officially sanctioned, nationalist practices. It features ten chapters from prominent film scholars focusing on the unique documentary work of African and Sub-Saharan women filmmakers since the 1960s including the pioneering work of Safi Faye in Kaddu Beykat, Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, Katy Lena Ndiaye’s Le Cercle des noyes and En attendant les hommes, Dalila Ennadre’s Fama: Heroism Without Glory, and Leïla Kilani’s Nos lieux interdits.

Martin O’Shaughnessy, ‘Reinventing Democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian Urban Montage’, French Cultural Studies, 34 (2023), 106–125, makes a timely and valuable contribution to a scholarship on a filmmaker little known by the broader cinemagoing public, whose work responds to some of the more urgent questions of the historical moment. It examines the influence of Walter Benjamin on the work of Sylvain George, arguing that certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George’s films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilizations and the history embedded in urban spaces. Concentrating on George’s poetic and experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees set around Calais, and his two ‘city symphonies’ Vers Madrid (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018), O’Shaughnessy argues that, even though George’s use of Benjamin indicates a renewal of European critical traditions, it nonetheless also shows that a politics which is not limited by national identity is still lacking.

Katherine Shingler, ‘Modernity and the Machine in Ballet Mécanique’, French Screen Studies, 23 (2023), 270–286, examines Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique (1924), focusing on its response to technological modernity. It first assesses the film’s ‘Purist’ leanings, and especially the notion that it provides moments of reprieve from the perceptual shock that typifies modern urban life, before offering a close reading of the relationship between human and machine in the film and whether it writes out the human in favour of the mechanical or reconfigures the human after the model of the machine. It then considers other ‘mechanisms’ at work in the film—the cinematic apparatus and the human psyche—and the figure of ‘Charlot’ (Charlie Chaplin) as an emblem of these. It ultimately suggests that Léger is mobilizing some of the techniques of the earlier ‘cinema of attractions’ in order to capture anxieties around the effects of machine culture on the human beings living under its regime.

3 Film Theory and Criticism/Philosophy

Cristóbal Escobar, The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), introduces the concept of the ‘intensive-image’ to develop a deeper understanding of the part played by intensity in the history of the cinematic image. Escobar argues that the intensive-image constitutes an important cinematic category that prompts a rethinking of Deleuze’s taxonomy of images in his cinema books. He explores the notion that the idea of intensity has the potential to change the way in which we think about Deleuze’s classification of films as signifying two separate periods: the classical period of the movement-image and the modern period of the time-image. For Escobar, bringing these concepts together using the idea of intensity overcomes the separation that Deleuze originally postulated. This book also explores the ways in which the intensive-image varies and differentiates itself from other images and the role it plays in contemporary cinema.

Jakob A. Nilsson, Cinecepts, Deleuze, and Godard-Miéville: Developing Philosophy through Audiovisual Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), explores how philosophical concepts can be constructed as compounds of moving images/sounds/voice/texts/graphics/montage and presents a theory of a formal development of philosophy as a theory of ‘cinecepts’. Drawing together film, media, art, critical theory and philosophy, this study proceeds mainly through a close reimagination of the work of Gilles Deleuze, allowing for a merging of what he kept separate: filmic thinking and philosophical conceptualization. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s underexplored 1970s Sonimage works are also the subject of extensive examination here, along with critical considerations of a contemporary era of academic video essays and phenomena such as philosophy channels on YouTube. Nilsson poses the questions of how can philosophy adapt in ways that develop—rather than dilute—philosophical rigour and specificity, and how can it harness the potential of audio-visual media to conceptualize with greater precision and depth?

Anaïs Nony, Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), focuses on the technological practices of video artists and activists in France from the 1970s to the early 2020s. Video art and video activism are analysed alongside each other to revaluate key concepts in media studies and foreground a performative approach to the theory of image technology. Nony examines works in visual culture, performance studies, digital studies, critical race theory, and feminist methodologies to account for the changes brought about by video technology in social and psychic life. She explores how video-image technology shapes our psychic and social environments from an art historiographical perspective to show how media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape. Performative Images is about art and activists’ engagement in video technology that unsettles the hegemonic narrative of dominant media and foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics.

Chiara Quaranta, Iconoclasm in European Cinema: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Image Destruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), investigates the relationship between a disruptive aesthetics and its ethical potential, and establishes a dialogue between the philosophical mistrust of visual images and the breaking of mimesis in cinema. It is the first full-length study on iconoclasm and cinema, bringing together ancient philosophy, medieval theology, and contemporary film and image theory. Quaranta investigates the aesthetic and ethical significance of destroying certain film images, both literally (via damages to the filmstrip) and metaphorically (through blank screens, altered motion, and disruptive sounds). She analyses the work of various filmmakers, including Godard, Duras, Kieślowski, and Isidore Isou to consider iconoclastic gestures against the film’s ability to mimetically represent contents on the verge of the invisible and the ineffable. This book offers a new, interdisciplinary approach to film ethics by looking at anti-mimetic images and sounds and demonstrates that the overlooked issue of iconoclasm in film is essential for understanding contemporary attitudes towards images and argues that cinematic iconoclasm can encourage an ethics of (in)visibility by questioning the limits of our right to see and show something on a screen.

4 Genre

Oliver Kenny, Transgressive Art Films: Extremity, Ethics, and Controversial Images of Sex and Violence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), provides a framework for understanding controversial and extreme films as well as a theory of transgressive film that accounts for multiple contradictory viewer perspectives. Kenny offers an approach that incorporates micro- and macro-scale analysis of films and reflects on the ethical and political implications of scholarly engagement with images of sex, violence, and sexual violence. For Kenny, the term ‘transgressive art film’ refers to a small number of controversial films recuperated each year as part of an expansion of the definition of film art. Rather than seeing transgressive art films as aberrations, Kenny argues they should be understood as an essential part of cinema’s need for newness, innovation, and renewal. Focusing on aspects of cinema from individual frames through to global distribution and film festivals, Kenny shows how certain types of cinematic transgression achieve wide-reaching status rather than being ignored and offers a rigorous framework for understanding some of the most controversial films of the past twenty-five years.

Janice Loreck, Provocation in Women’s Filmmaking: Authorship and Art Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), offers a new critical perspective on female auteurship and considers its place in the avant-garde tradition of provocation. Beginning with the observation that there is a long and largely unexamined history of female auteurs who shock and unsettle their viewers, this book challenges the gendering of provocation as a hyper-masculine mode of authorship and uncovers an enticing and complex array of divisive works by eight contemporary women filmmakers: Lisa Aschan, Catherine Breillat, Jennifer Kent, Isabella Eklöf, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Claire Denis, Anna Biller, and Athina Rachel Tsangari. Loreck investigates how these directors participate in the tradition of provocative art cinema and considers their aesthetics and strategies for provocative filmmaking.

Christina Lord, Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023), is the first book-length study to consider both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and science fiction (SF) scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. The study of French science fiction remains an underexploited field, even in France. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Lord shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical enquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. With an emphasis on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. The work includes a chapter on posthuman women in the films of Luc Besson.

Marilyn Mallia, ‘In the name of the Gothic father: François Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975)’, French Screen Studies, 23 (2023), 323–343, argues that the term ‘romanesque’, frequently used to describe François Truffaut’s 1975 film L’Histoire d’Adèle H., has obscured the film’s active engagement with both cinematic and literary Gothic heritage. This reductive stress on the film’s debt to Romantic melodrama tends to downplay the dynamic tensions of paternal influence, particularly embodied in the figure of Victor Hugo. Mallia argues that Truffaut as director and Adèle Hugo as film character actively renegotiate the father’s artistic heritage of violent passions and dark metaphysical forces, with differing results. She goes on to propose a two-pronged analysis consisting of a close reading of the film’s Gothic tropes, shedding light on Truffaut’s intertextual dialogue with Hitchcock, his favourite ‘Gothic’ father, and an examination of the character Adèle H.’s intertextual performance, in which she contends with the powerful Gothico-Romantic myth embodied by the literary patriarch Victor Hugo. This provides extended insight into Truffaut’s brand of filmic Gothic as a vehicle of haunted intensity and on his distinctive exploration of the torments of female subjectivity, haunting, and neurosis.

5 History

Dudley Andrew, French Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), explores films from all periods of French cinema through an examination of themes, motifs, and the lineage of film style. Andrew clarifies French cinema’s relationship to Hollywood and other cinemas, considers the impact of major eras in France’s recent history on French filmmaking, and analyses French film’s relationship with contemporary art, literature, music, and drama. Using the lens of the French New Wave, Andrew opens up French cinema by looking at some of its key works and goes on to show how the New Wave both brought the three decades that preceded it into focus and created deep resonance that continue fifty years later. Directors studied include Renoir and Bresson, and the book also features mediations on Jeanne Moreau and Jean Gabin.

Eli Boonin-Vail, ‘The System of the Genius: The French New Wave’s Politique Des Producteurs’, French Screen Studies, 23 (2023), 305–322, 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 article builds a case for considering the New Wave’s director-oriented legacy, its aura of genius creators, as in part the product of producers’ own tactics and attitudes of self-effacement. By conceiving of the New Wave producer figure as curatorial—curating a movement and a sensibility in the role of patron and promoter of both films and directors—Boonin-Vail finds a production culture shaped by particular economic, cultural, and intellectual contexts that enabled the New Wave to exist and thrive.

Vanessa Brutsche, ‘Retro Visions: Scandalous Politics in Resnais’s Stavisky (1974) and Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978)’, French Historical Studies, 46 (2023), 277–312, examines films that revisit two polarizing scandals during the explosive final years of the Third Republic. Alain Resnais’s Stavisky (1974) recounts the mysterious death of a swindler that triggered a political crisis, leading to the violent street protests of 6 February 1934, while Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978) dramatizes a famous case of parricide in 1933 that became a national obsession. Rather than investigate the ‘myth’ of resistance under Vichy, Brutsche delves into films exploring the fault lines of the bitter divide between Right and Left, recasting the pre-war narrative through the prism of the 1970s to interrogate the legacies of fascism and the political stakes of interpreting history.

Marion Hallet and Elizabeth Miller, ‘Abortion in French Cinema during the Long 1960s and Beyond’, Modern & Contemporary France, 31 (2023), 1–17, examines the representation of abortion in French cinema during one of the most pivotal periods for women’s rights and lives (1959–1973); one caught between post-war conservatism and the more tangible feminism of the mid-1970s. Using a feminist and sociocultural approach alongside statistical analysis of all 1,455 French-produced feature films released during this period, Hallet and Miller examine various aspects of abortion, including representation of the decision process, the procedure itself and the aftermath, alongside physical and emotional aspects. They also look beyond this era to films made in the aftermath of the Loi Veil before concluding with a discussion of recent French television series.

Daniel Morgan, ‘Censorship and Consensus in Post-war French Cinema: The Making of Au royaume des cieux (Julien Duvivier, 1949) and La Cage aux filles (Maurice Cloche, 1950)’, French Cultural Studies, 34 (2023), 377–393, re-examines the role of negotiations and propaganda in the construction of post-war French ‘consensual’ cinema. Morgan focuses on two films, Au royaume des cieux (Julien Duvivier, 1949) and La Cage aux filles (Maurice Cloche, 1950), both set in rehabilitation centres for young women, and both based on the same news story. For this latter reason they were subjected to the same complex negotiations regarding censorship. Duvivier’s film, whose relationship to reality is ambiguous, escapes the imperative to rewrite, while Maurice Cloche agrees to work closely with the Ministry of Justice to make a more realistic film according to the official line of the authorities at the time. Nonetheless, Morgan argues, both films still present residential rehabilitation in a manner that is misleading and contrary to the reporting on which they are based.

Rosemarie Scullion, ‘Mediating Memory: The Paris Commune and Postwar French Cinema’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 27 (2023), 357–367, raises the important question as to why the efforts that post-war filmmakers made to recall the history of the Paris Commune met with such stiff resistance in the years immediately following the Nazi Occupation of France. For filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon, an active member of the French Resistance and founding member of the CLCF (Comité de la Libération du Cinéma Français), the scenes of ordinary Parisians battling Hitler’s occupying forces evoked memories of the Paris Commune, whose parallels with the post-war present Grémillon sought to highlight in La Commune de Paris, the feature film he began envisioning in the final months of the war. This essay considers the political climate that doomed Grémillon’s project to failure and calls attention to a second film, a 1951 documentary short, also titled La Commune de Paris, that Robert Ménégoz was able to bring to completion, but that also fell into the oblivion into which government censorship cast it.

Mani Sharpe, Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), analyses a cluster of French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence. Sharpe identifies and analyses a previously unidentified trend in modern French cinema to address a ‘late-colonial’ gap in scholarship on cultural histories of de-colonization, between the colonial and the post-colonial. He combines textual analysis of fifteen case studies with contextual analysis of late colonial French culture, politics, and society and deploys a different critical approach in each chapter, including star studies, documentary studies, gender studies, and space studies, among others. Sharpe argues that late colonial cinema represents a formally and thematically important, yet unappreciated tendency in French cinema; one that has largely been overshadowed by a scholarly focus on the French New Wave. He contends that while late colonial French cinema cannot be seen as a coherent cinematic movement, school of filmmaking, or genre, it can be seen as a coherent ethical trend, with many of the fifteen central case studies explored in Late-Colonial French Cinema filtering the Algerian War of Independence through a discourse of ‘redemptive pacifism’.

6 Place/Space

Troy Michael Bordun, ‘Sublime Aesthetics in Philippe Grandrieux’s Un Lac’, Studies in European Cinema, 20 (2023), 1–16, examines Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac through the lens of the sublime. Bordun offers a formal analysis of the film supported by contemporary theorists who have previously articulated the stakes of Grandrieux’s work in the tradition of narrative cinema. This book sets out to understand Grandrieux’s aesthetics and how his filmmaking engages the viewer’s sensory apparatuses and alters their perception of film. Where this book diverges from earlier scholarship is in demonstrating how the theory of the sublime is useful for theoretical understandings of Grandrieux’s films and experimentations with narrative cinema more generally. Specifically, Bordun focuses on Alexi, the main protagonist of Un lac, to unpack Grandrieux’s experimental cinematography, editing, and sound. He then examines the film through Cynthia A. Freeland’s conceptualization of sublime cinema to conclude that the film’s snowy landscapes, overpowering woods, treacherous weather, and fragile bodies diminish and dismantle the human figure.

Michael Gott, Screen Borders, from Calais to Cinéma-Monde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), opens with the premise that film and television offer important insights into social outlooks on borders in France and Europe more generally. This book undertakes a visual cultural history of contemporary borders through a film and television tour. It traces on-screen borders from the Gare du Nord train station in Paris to Calais, London, Lampedusa, and Lapland. It contends that different types of mobilities and immobilities (refugees, urban commuters, workers in a post-industrial landscape) and vantage points (from borderland forests, ports, train stations, airports, refugee centres) are all part of a complex French and European border narrative. It covers a wide range of examples, from popular films and TV series to auteur fiction and documentaries by well-known directors from across Europe and beyond.

Gemma King, ‘Cinéma-Monde, Jacques Audiard’s Les Frères Sisters and the Limits of National Cinemas’, French Screen Studies, 23 (2023), 100–113, analyses a selection of transnational, transcultural, and translingual case studies that have been distributed as French, concentrating on Jacques Audiard’s eighth feature film, Les Frères Sisters, through the lens of cinéma-monde. King argues that Audiard’s film, which features no French dialogue, actors, settings, or filming locations, is one of a growing number of recent films that are being labelled as French by national cinema bodies ranging from the CNC (Centre national du Cinéma et de l’Image animée) to UniFrance and the Césars Academy, despite few clearly ‘French’ characteristics. Transnational in scope while maintaining connections to the Francosphere, cinéma-monde bends the conventions of national cinemas to foreground ‘a flexible corpus of films that are linked to the Francophone world by some combination of linguistic or cultural affinities, geographic contacts, production connections, or reception networks’. The article uses cinéma-monde to consider how films such as Les Frères Sisters continue to be produced, distributed, consumed, and judged within the frameworks of national cinemas, but also to conclude that such frames are insufficient to fully understand these films and how they operate in the world.

Jeremy F. Lane, ‘The Anti-city: Representing La Défense in Recent French Fiction and Film’, French Cultural Studies, 34 (2023), 49–61, examines the trope and chronotype of the anti-city in a range of recent novels and feature films which lament the destructive effects of globalized finance on French society, polity, and nation. Beginning with Jean-Robert Viallet’s 2009 documentary La Dépossession, Lane goes on to look at the way these novels and films figure spatiotemporal relationships between France’s present and its historical past, between the anonymity of La Défense and certain unmistakably French locations, between a so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mode of capital accumulation and the French nation this is believed to threaten. Having identified the characteristic features of this trope and chronotope, the article then considers some of their inherent paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions, pointing out that the historic centre of Haussmann’s Paris is itself the product of an earlier process of violent restructuring and dispossession driven by powerful financial forces and undertaken at the behest of a highly conservative political regime.

Barry Nevin, ‘Jacques Feyder’s Paris, 1923–35: Cartographies of Gender, Class and Empire’, Journal of European Popular Culture, 14 (2023), 5–33, draws on close textual analysis, historical contextualization, and archival research to trace two developments in Jacques Feyder’s vision of the capital and its shifting economic, political, and cultural climate. First, Nevin focuses on the evolution of Paris from a locus clearly signposted by recognizable locations to a studio-built milieu that is heavily reliant on generic Parisian tropes; and second, he examines the city’s transition from a site where the post-war national psyche and associated family structures can be optimistically redefined to a politically volatile environment replete with criminality and sexually disruptive women. Nevin argues that throughout the 1920s and 1930s Feyder repeatedly illustrated tensions pertaining to class, gender, and empire in Paris.

Caterina Scarabicchi, The Migrant’s Corner: Paradoxes of Representing Mediterranean Crossings in Italian and French Contemporary Culture (Oxford and New York: Lang, 2023), considers the portrayal of the migrant’s story in literature, cinema, museums, and festivals in Italy and France, in order to explore the widespread ethical complexities related to agency and advocacy. Scarabicchi argues that while typically produced in support of migrant communities, these narratives often confine the experience of displaced individuals within a Eurocentric, humanitarian discourse that is difficult to overcome. Adopting an interdisciplinary and postcolonial approach, she analyses recent works by Laurent Gaudé and Emanuele Crialese, the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris and a community festival in Lampedusa, to highlight the complexity of advocating for migrants from a European perspective. It includes the chapter ‘Screening the Migrant in Italian and French Cinema’.

Edward Welch, Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning (Oxford: Legenda, 2023), tracks the conceptual, ideological, and discursive foundations of aménagement, mining an array of material from legislative texts to publicity brochures to investigate how visions of the future were articulated and inscribed on the ground as new towns, infrastructure, and other expressions of modernity. The book covers works by writers, filmmakers, and photographers and explores how modernized landscapes and their effect on lived experience begin to permeate French culture during the 1970s and 1980s. Welch further examines how the legacies of spatial planning are negotiated politically, socially, and culturally from the 1990s into the new millennium as the French state wrestles with the different pressures at work on its territory. According to Welch, ‘aménagement du territoire’ was a technical and administrative project, but was also political, moral, and philosophical, as well as creative and imaginative. It was driven by a powerful obsession with the future and a belief that spatial planning could create the future in the present. It includes analysis of Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985).

7 Stars, Stardom, and Performance

Iggy Cortez and Ian Fleishman, eds., Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), engages with the career of Isabelle Huppert, offering analytic frameworks for performance aesthetics in dialogue with critical theory and new readings of important films through the lens of Huppert’s acting style. The chapters in this book use Huppert to theorize screen performance aesthetics in dialogue with debates in the humanities on negativity, affect, and gender, arguing that attention to Huppert’s performances can reframe recent discussions on the social and cultural dimensions of emotion and normativity through a compelling paradox: her roles tend to express grandiose and overwhelming conditions central to debates in the humanities. Contributions include: ‘The Unknown Huppert’ by Catherine Wheatley, Nikolaj Lübecker on Huppert’s work with François Ozon, Ian Fleishman on Isabelle Huppert as Werner Schroeter’s double, Karen Redrobe on Huppert’s comedic force in La Cérémonie, Erin Schlumpf on Huppert’s ‘whiteness’, and Henrietta Stanford on Huppert’s abortionist in Claude Chabrol’s Une Affaire de femmes.

Victoria Duckett, Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), traces how Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars at the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building upon extensive archival research in France, England, and the United States, Duckett argues that, through intrepid business prowess and the use of early multimedia to cultivate their celebrity image, these three artists strengthened ties between countries, continents, and cultures during pivotal years of change. As talented and formidable women with global ambitions, they forged connections with audiences across the world while pioneering the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown.

Hanne Schelstraete, ‘Martyr or Saint? Body, Image and Acting Style in Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Bresson’s Procès de Jeanne d’Arc’, French Screen Studies, 23 (2023), 287–304, explores the construction of the image of Joan of Arc in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928) and Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962). After establishing the historical evolution of and terminological difference between the figures of the martyr and the saint, and the artistic genres in which each has figured, this article then examines how Dreyer and Bresson construct their own images of Joan. Owing to their immediate reciprocity, Schelstraete looks at the primary characteristics of the particular acting styles and forms of bodily (re)presentation embodied in each film to argue that Dreyer depicts Joan mainly as a martyr, facially expressing her intense mental and physical suffering, whereas Bresson portrays her as a saint, emphasizing her vitalizing transcendence.

8 Directors