French National Cinema (National Cinemas)

by SusanHayward (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $40.13

  This revised and updated version of a successful and established text, French National Cinema offers a thorough and much-needed historical overview of French cinema at a time when it continues to grow in popularity with films such as Amelie and Belleville Rendez-vous.

  Brought wholly up to date to include political and social developments in French cinema in the 1990s, its fresh approach and groundbreaking new writing on the subject offers a much further understanding of French cinema and its relationship with the French national identity.

  New subjects covered include:

  • the GATT negotiations of 1993
  • French cinema's increasing dependence on investment from television
  • the rise of the multiplex
  • the implications of the introduction of digital technology.

  Ideal for all students of cinema, film studies and film history, this book traces the eco-history of the French film and its key figures and movements, and it places them in their wider political and cultural context.

• 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.