This article tracks the political and ethical positions taken up by Alice Diop’s documentary La Permanence/On Call (2016) in relation to its subjects, both outpatients and hospital staff. It begins...

Jacqueline Audry was that rare phenomenon, a woman film director in mid-twentieth century France. Drawn to Colette’s work by her appreciation of the latter’s style and close affinity with her value...

This article examines transnational francophone films from writer-directors Marjane Satrapi and Chloé Mazlo, filmmakers who show how the politics of l’exception culturelle [the cultural exception] ...

La persona d’acteur de Denis Lavant semble nouée autour de la figure du monstre. C’est d’abord au plan physique que s’exprime sa monstruosité. En effet, son visage contrevient aux canons de beauté ...

This article argues for the historiographic value of the long-neglected film Aloïse (1975). Directed by Liliane de Kermadec, Agnès Varda’s protégée, Aloïse is a biopic of Aloïse Corbaz, a Swiss gov...

Published in French Screen Studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)

This article builds on the emerging scholarship on Netflix productions and French series to analyse questions of racial visibility and feminine representation in two series: Dix pour cent/Call My A...

François Ozon’s Regarde la mer/See the Sea uses the generic codes of a psychological thriller in order to portray femininity in a state of flux. Although Ozon is one of the most established contemp...

In 2021, the restoration of the long-lost French film El jefe político (‘The Political Boss’, released as La Réponse du destin in France) was finally completed. Directed by André Hugon between 1924...

The long-running French detective series Engrenages/Spiral (2005–2020) anticipates and participates in the changing ecosystem of French TV, one that transnationalises and hybridises content in a gl...

This article considers the parallels that can be drawn between two characters portrayed by Sandrine Bonnaire at distinct junctures in her film career: Mona, a young homeless woman whose wanderings ...

Cet article revient sur le « réalisme psychologique » d’après-guerre à travers la collaboration artistique du scénariste Jacques Sigurd et du réalisateur Yves Allégret entre 1948 et 1952, en se foc...

This article focuses on Juliette Binoche’s career during the past decade, a period running from her mid-forties to her mid-fifties, and suggests that her roles in this period can also be read as a ...

Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7/Cléo from 5 to 7 begins with a divination session that launches a process by which the protagonist will shed her public persona in favour of an inner form of self-awaren...

Une fenêtre ouverte/An Open Window (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of the mental health difficulties suffered by bo...

The ocean is a constant presence in Mati Diop’s award-winning film Atlantique/Atlantics (2019), a ghostly love story about the ongoing migration crisis set in Dakar, Senegal. A critical issue Diop ...

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 24, No. 2, 2024)

Jacques Becker is well known as an auteur, one of the few French directors working in the post-war period who has been hailed as an ‘uncle’ of the New Wave (alongside Robert Bresson, Max Ophuls, Je...

Published in French Screen Studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)

In the 1980s, the French documentary field opened up to a number of autobiographical practices which redrew the frontiers of the cinematic landscape. L’Heure exquise (‘The exquisite hour’) (René Al...

Anatole Litvak, a Russian Jew who began his career at Ufa in Berlin, was one of the German émigrés who settled in France after Hitler came to power. His case is little known, yet it is both singula...

La tétralogie « judiciaire » réalisée entre 1950 et 1955 par André Cayatte a apporté au réalisateur une notoriété paradoxale : reconnue par la presse et le public, la plupart des histoires du ciném...

Albeit a director scornfully dismissed by the Cahiers du cinéma’s ‘Young Turks’, writing in the 1950s, as part and parcel of the derided ‘cinéma de papa’, Henri Verneuil was, as this essay will sho...

Cet article explore les dynamiques contradictoires à l’œuvre dans les biopics français contemporains qui apparaissent d’une part comme les symptômes d’une culture cinématographique globalisée, ce d...

Published in French Screen Studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 24, No. 2, 2024)

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 24, No. 1, 2024)

Dans cet article, l’autrice étudie les interventions d’Agnès Varda à la télévision française et la manière dont cette dernière a forgé une image genrée de la cinéaste. Dans ses reportages, journaux...

Based on the examples of Versailles, a series co-produced by Capa Drama with the Quebec company Incendo and Zodiak Fiction for Canal+, and No Man’s Land, a Franco-Belgian-Israeli co-production prod...

This article positions Guy Gilles (1938–1996), an overlooked filmmaker at the periphery of the French New Wave, as an important pioneer of queer cinema. Situating Gilles in the context of the Frenc...

Published in French Screen Studies (Ahead of Print, 2024)

This article considers how Alice Diop’s documentary Nous/We (2021) challenges the myopia of hegemonic colourblind constructions of France and its people. Its title both raises a question (who are w...

Film historians have long known that the version of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) shown at its French premiere was heavily censored by the state and the Catholic church. E...

Netflix’s globally oriented French products are commercially bound to negotiate between producing locally legible and internationally acceptable gender types. This article spotlights variations in ...

This article expands on an ongoing dialogue about representations of female protagonists’ sensual and embodied experiences in Francophone North African cinema scholarship. It examines the dynamic c...

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2024)

In Katell Quillévéré’s Réparer les vivants (2016), based on Maylis de Kerangal’s best-selling novel, a fatal road accident after a surfing trip leaves Simon Limbres (Gabin Verdet) braindead. His vi...

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Belgian identity is articulated in contemporary Belgian cinema. Since the introduction of sound, Belgian cinema has been characterised by a divide between Flemish and Belgian francophone cinema. However, the twenty-first century has seen an increase in co-productions between the two communities. By analysing how these intranational co-productions relate to Belgium

This article analyses how Belgian identity is articulated in contemporary Belgian cinema. Since the introduction of sound, Belgian cinema has been characterised by a divide between Flemish and Belg...

ABSTRACT French screenwriters’ precarity has been highlighted in a number of different ways in recent years, not least by their efforts to organise and publicise professional abuses. This article will consider the situation of writers and how these are often framed in relation to a cinematic culture rooted in what Jonathan Buchsbaum calls ‘a certain idea of film [as] the art form of the twentieth century’

ABSTRACT French screenwriters’ precarity has been highlighted in a number of different ways in recent years, not least by their efforts to organise and publicise professional abuses. This article will consider the situation of writers and how these are often framed in relation to a cinematic culture rooted in what Jonathan Buchsbaum calls ‘a certain idea of film [as] the art form of the twentieth century’

ABSTRACT Agnès Varda’s science fiction tale, Les Créatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article argues that these two aspects of the film are related. Les Créatures can be read as a condemnation of a certain kind of unrestrained storytelling, in which an artist’s desire for invention displaces

Agnès Varda’s science fiction tale, Les Créatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article arg...

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Franco-British series The Tunnel (Canal+, 2013–2017), co-produced by Sky Atlantic and StudioCanal, as an iteration of the Swedish-Danish series Bron/Broen/The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, 2011–2018). The author situates Bron within the global television format trade and argues that The Tunnel is best understood as a localised version rather than a remake or an adaptation

This article analyses the Franco-British series The Tunnel (Canal+, 2013–2017), co-produced by Sky Atlantic and StudioCanal, as an iteration of the Swedish-Danish series Bron/Broen/The Bridge (Danm...

There is very little academic work on music in television series, and none on music in French television series. This article focuses on one of the most successful French television series, the eig...

ABSTRACT There is very little academic work on music in television series, and none on music in French television series. This article focuses on one of the most successful French television series, the eight-season-long Engrenages/Spiral (Canal+, 2005–2020). It identifies the similarities and differences between music for films and music for television series before focusing on the music composed

This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Materia...

ABSTRACT This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Using an intersectional frame of reference which combines postcolonial theory, Third World feminism and geography/spatiality, this article demonstrates that these two films unearth structures

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2023)

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2023)

ABSTRACT The author examines the mise en scène of performance in Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017) in the context of the problematic yet pervasive cultural re-inscription of the musical biopic in French cinema, and its remediation of the traditions of chanson française and variété through the body of the female performer. Featuring Jeanne Balibar as ‘Brigitte’, an actress playing the eponymous singer-composer

The author examines the mise en scène of performance in Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017) in the context of the problematic yet pervasive cultural re-inscription of the musical biopic in French cinem...

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2023)

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2023)

ABSTRACT The maison close [brothel] in French history and culture, particularly during the nineteenth century because of its representation in art and literature, could be argued to be a lieu de mémoire [site of memory]. In light of the gaps in material that gives direct voice to women in sex work, especially during this period, the maison close could equally be termed a lieu d’oubli [site of forgetting]

The maison close [brothel] in French history and culture, particularly during the nineteenth century because of its representation in art and literature, could be argued to be a lieu de mémoire [si...

ABSTRACT This article explores the significance of sister–sister relations in Céline Sciamma’s films. It explains how Sciamma is continuing an important feminist film tradition in attending to the complex negotiation from the intimacy of the family home to the realm of the social for girls, and how sisterly relations are conducted between the domestic and the external world. Drawing on work by Eva

ABSTRACT This article explores the significance of sister–sister relations in Céline Sciamma’s films. It explains how Sciamma is continuing an important feminist film tradition in attending to the complex negotiation from the intimacy of the family home to the realm of the social for girls, and how sisterly relations are conducted between the domestic and the external world. Drawing on work by Eva

ABSTRACT Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature film, Petite maman, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in March 2021. Shot in autumn 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a brief film (72 mins) and a return to the work with child actors which typified Sciamma’s first two features, Naissance des pieuvres (2007) and Tomboy (2011). After the death of her grandmother, a child, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), helps