![]() Not least amongst its merits is the coverage of directors who are not from the French classical period or the New Wave. Although encompassing directors from a variety of national cinemas, there have so far been more volumes on French directors (Buñuel, Becker, Duvivier, Mocky).Īnglophone auteur studies took off again with the vibrant Manchester University Press 'French Director' series, the first volume of which was published in 1998. The Paris Bibliothèque du Film's commitment to public access led to a recent series, 'Ciné-regards', each volume serving as handbook with biography, filmography, bibliography and extensive documentation such as contemporary reviews. There were major Anglophone studies on Abel Gance in the 1980s (King, 1984) and on Jean Renoir (Sesonske, 1980 Faulkner, 1986 Braudy, 1989), but later work on Renoir was French (Serceau, 1985 Haffner, 1988 Bessy, 1989 Bertin, 1994 Viry-Babel, 1994), with the exception of O'Shaughnessy (2000), as is the case with that other major director of the 1930s, Marcel Carné (Pérez, 1994), or on one of the major directors of the 1980s, Maurice Pialat (Magny, 1995). ![]() This was the case too with other major French directors. Anglophone studies on these directors, with the exception of Godard (Dixon, 1997 Silverman and Farocki, 1998 Sterritt, 1999 Temple and Williams, 2000), were rarer and earlier in that period (Monaco, 1978, on Resnais Crisp, 1988, on Rohmer). The last 20 years or so of the twentieth century saw the publication in English, but more especially in French, of numerous auteur studies on the directors of the New Wave: Chabrol (Magny, 1987 Blanchet, 1989), Godard (Desbarats, 1989 Douin, 1989 Aumont, 1999 Bergala, 1999), Resnais (Prédal, 1996 Leperchey, 2000), Rivette (Deschamps, 2001 Frappat, 2001), Rohmer (Magny, 1986 Bonitzer, 1991 Tortajada, 1999 Serceau, 2000) and Truffaut (Gillain, 1991 Le Berre, 1993 Rabourdin, 1995). Forbes (1992) has chapters on less well-known directors, such as Allio and Garrel, for example Austin (1996) has a substantial chapter on the cinéma du look, an important but under-researched area of 1980s production and Powrie (1997) focuses on the 1980s through the lens of Gender Studies. In the post-New Wave period, there were histories that do not try to be all-encompassing, but select specific genres, directors or approaches. For the New Wave, there was Jeff Kline's absorbing work on intertextuality (Kline, 1992). For classic French cinema, there were two major volumes in the mid- to late 1990s (Andrew, 1995 Crisp, 1993). In silent cinema there was the ground-breaking work of Richard Abel (1984 1994), who has almost single-handedly put the earliest periods on the critical map. The interest of these volumes is that instead of mapping out a general history where individual films are lucky to get more than a few lines of text devoted to them (what one could characterise as the thumbnail approach), these works have critical agendas and develop new ways of thinking about periods of French cinema. Following on from Susan Hayward's rather different conceptualisation of the history of the French cinema in the opening volume of the Macmillan national cinema series she edits (Hayward, 1993), there were significant volumes in English focusing on specific periods. Where histories are concerned, there was Williams in English (1992) and, occasioned by the centenary of the cinema, two very large volumes in French (Billard, 1995 Frodon, 1995). The first two in particular have dominated academic work on the French cinema from the 1960s. Partly as a result of the gradual increase in numbers of courses on French cinema in universities, there was an accompanying increase in particular in general histories, auteur studies, compendia and single-film studies. ![]() At the same time, the late 1990s saw an explosion, not just in French cinema itself, with the advent of a new generation of young film-makers, as we outlined above in Chapter 1, but also in major books on French cinema in the UK and the USA, special issues of major journals (Screen and Nottingham French Studies, both in 1993 French Cultural Studies in 1996 Australian Journal of French Studies in 1999), and in the establishment of a new journal and association devoted entirely to French cinema in 2001, Studies in French Cinema. In the 1990s, French cinema, in academic and film distribution circles, joined the ranks of 'everything-that-isn't-Hollywood', nesting in the catch-all category of 'World Cinema'. In this chapter, we will outline the types of academic work which have been produced on the French cinema, with a particular emphasis on work in the 1990s and beyond.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |