French National Cinema (National Cinemas)

by SusanHayward (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $3.25

  French National Cinema examines France's national cinema through its primary artefact, the feature film, discussing both popular cinema and the avant-garde' cinema that contests it, and the ways in which each cross-fertilises the other. Susan Hayward argues that writing on French national cinema has tended to focus on other great' film-makers (following the auteurist approach) or on specific movements, addressing moments of exception rather than the global picture. Her work offers a thorough much-needed historical textualisation of those moments and relocates them in their wider political and cultural context. Filling in the gaps between the auteurs and the movements she begins with an ecohistory' of the French film industry, charting its beginnings in the 1890s and the rise to power of the three major studios Pathe, Gaumont and Eclair. She traces key movements in French cinema and the directors associated with them, including the avant-garde - Germaine Dulac, Marie and Jean Epstein; Poetic Realist - Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne, New Wave - Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and todays postmodern cinema of Jean-Jacques Beinex, Luc Besson and Colinne Serreau.