This multi-authored survey offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history from the 1890s to the 2010s. In this volume, Michael Temple and Michael Witt propose new insights into familiar areas and set out a fresh agenda for the study and appreciation of French cinema. Structured according to seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates – this key text poses important questions and interesting challenges for students and teachers, and suggests prospective lines of enquiry for researchers. This is an ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses devoted to topics such as film history, film technology, silent cinema, film theory, and European and French cinema.

To a large extent, the story of French filmmaking is the story of moviemaking. From the earliest flickering images of the late nineteenth century through the silent era, Surrealist influences, the Nazi Occupation, the glories of the New Wave, the rebirth of the industry in the 1990s with the exception culturelle, and the present, Rémi Lanzoni examines a considerable number of the world's most beloved films.

Georges Sadoul published this study of the evolution of French cinema in 1962. The second half of the book is an indispensable reference tool for all cinema professionals and enthusiasts. It includes an analytical dictionary of 200 personalities connected with the art of filmmaking in France: directors, screenwriters, actors, etc., followed by a chronological filmography of major French films from 1892 to 1929 and all feature films from 1930 to 1960.

Introduction: Defining the 'national' of a country's cinematographic production -- 1. A brief ecohistory of France's cinema industry 1895-1992 -- 2. Magical moments of musical silence: French cinema's classical age 1895-1929 -- 3. From clarity to obscurity: French cinema's age of modernism 1930-58 -- 4. From ideology to narcissism: French cinema's age of the postmodern 1958-91

In interviews, Jean-Luc Godard likes to describe himself as a frustrated writer. His films of the 60s and 70s reveal an ambiguous position towards the literary, a mixture of fascination and mistrust. At the dawn of the 80s, the desire for a book was reborn: Godard decided to publish a book entitled "Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma".

The French New Wave is an essential anthology of writings by and about the critics and filmmakers of this revolutionary cinematic movement, which has had a radical impact on film practice and the way we think and write about film. The volume includes foundational writings such as Francois Truffaut's A Certain Tendency in French Cinema and Andre Bazin's La Politique des auteurs, as well writings by Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Alexandre Astruc.

The directors of the French New Wave were the original film geeks - a collection of celluloid crazed cinephiles with a background in film criticism and a love for American auteurs. They armed themselves with handheld cameras, rejected conventions, and successfully moved movies out of the studios and on to the streets at the end of the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol had changed the rules of filmmaking forever. This Guide reviews and analyses all of the major films in the movement and offers profiles of its stars.

A major survey of contemporary French cinema's leading films and filmmakers.

From the seething internal aftermath of the German Occupation to the stylish radicalism of the New Wave and the slick post-modern fantasies of today, French directors such as Melville, Becker, Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol have adapted American crime movie conventions to create their own cinema of good and evil. Fully illustrated with stills from a wide selection of movies, French Film Noir also contains a complete filmography listing over 100 films.

Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of 'New Europe' more evident than in French-language cinema.

Since the 80s, there has been a revival of costume films in cinema and television, with productions such as Camille Claudel, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Reine Margot, Saint-Cyr, Le Pacte des Loups and Un long dimanche de fiançailles for the movie screen, and La Rivière Espérance, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Colette, Princesse Marie and Les Rois maudits for the TV screen. This body of work includes both auteur and popular films, single TV movies as well as mini-series and soap operas. Its strong intermediality, its desire to reconstitute or celebrate the past, whether distant or near, its museum-like aesthetic, and its memorial and identity-related functions makes it a specific genre of contemporary French cinema and television: "heritage fiction".

Constructing memory : the history of heritage in France -- Family pictures : ancestry, nostalgia, and the French heritage film -- Heritage and its discontents : memory, history, and the expanding space of the past -- Memory's blind spots : immigration, integration, and the post-colonial heritage -- Recovered memories : diversity, history, and the expanding space of the past -- Conclusion : the fall of time and the rise of space from the post-colonial to the posthistorical.

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of André Bazin. Each of the six periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.

This study forges new and creative connections between Deleuzian philosophy and contemporary film studies.When watching films we respond to the visual elements of colour, movement, rhythm and sensation through our bodies as well as our minds. Barbara Kennedy shows how we can understand this response as an 'aesthetics of sensation', which in turn can begin to explain the experience of the spectator, who feels the film as an event.

contains:
vol.1 The movement-image
vol.2 The time-image
In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze proposed a new way to understand narrative cinema, based on Henri Bergson's notion of the movement-image and C. S. Peirce's classification of images and signs. In Cinema 2, he explains why, since World War II, time has come to dominate film: the fragment or solitary image, in supplanting narrative cinema's rational development of events, illustrates this new significance of time.

Deleuze and Cinema presents a step-by-step guide to the key concepts behind Deleuze's revolutionary theory of the cinema. Exploring ideas through key directors and genres, Deleuze's method is illustrated with examples drawn from American, British, continental European, Russian and Asian cinema.

Films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? Badiou addresses this in his account of cinema. He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the other and renders human presence visible, testifying to the value of human existence.

The art of cinema, the film industry, are only the parts that emerge into our consciousness of a phenomenon that we must try to grasp in its fullness. But the submerged part, this obscure evidence, merges with our own human substance, itself obvious and obscure, like the beating of our heart, the passions of our soul.

This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guediguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world.

This book is a political history of visibilities at the crossroads of the history of cinema and that of Catholicism. It examines the relationship between the imposition of cinema as a mass medium and the redefinition of a missionary social group - the French Catholic world - in early 20th-century France.

The third and final volume of Godard par Godard, "Des années Mao aux années quatre-vingt" traces the evolution of Jean-Luc Godard's career and personality.

Showing how the topic of ‘youth’ has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions – political, social, religious, economic or cultural – that agitate a society at a given time in its history.

The book investigates how women perceive, use, and inhabit the city of Paris on-screen, showing that the strong connection between the city and its women offers a strategic site to examine gender in urban space in cinema.

French Queer Cinema looks at queer self-representation in contemporary auteur film and experimental video in France. Whilst there is growing research on representations of queer sexualities in France, this is the first comprehensive study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer film and video. French Queer Cinema addresses the socio-political context informing both queer DIY video and independent gay cinema.

Against a backdrop of political and media debates on the PACS, parity, the affaire du voile and the French principle of laïcité , banlieue youth dissatisfaction, and gay parenting, French Minority Cinema charts the negotiatory discourse that has emerged through, and around, a core corpus of films released over the past two decades.

Reframing difference is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, cinema beur (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and cinema de banlieue (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates).

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France is the first comprehensive study of cinematic representations of first-generation Muslim women from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) in France.

'Immigration Cinema in the New Europe' examines a variety of films from the early 1990s that depict and address the lives and identities of both first-generation immigrants and children of the diaspora in Europe.

Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema. His innovative use of unscripted improvisation by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, Paul Henley reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch’s pioneering career, Henley examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch’s cinematographic legacy.

Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found refuge in France where he discovered in film a language that allowed him to tell what happened to the two million souls who suffered hunger, overwork, disease, and death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. His innovative cinema is made with people, not about them—even those guilty of crimes against humanity.

Tracing the visual rhetoric of French colonial humanitarianism, Peter J. Bloom's unexpected analysis reveals how the project of remaking the colonies in the image of France was integral to its national identity.
Examining the interconnection between French documentary realism and the colonial enterprise, Bloom demonstrates how the colonial archive is crucial to contemporary debates about multiculturalism in France.

Each issue has individual author and title and is catalogued individually. SEARCH UNDER THE SERIES : French film directors

French cinema is second only to Hollywood in the number of its movie stars who have emerged to achieve international fame. France is, in fact, arguably the only country other than the United States to have an international "star system." Yet these glamorous and charismatic stars differ from their U.S. counterparts in that they maintain more freedom to control their own images and often straddle both mainstream and auteur cinema.

The films of François Truffaut defined an exhilarating new form of cinema for moviegoers the world over. But before Truffaut became a great director, he was a critic who stood at the vanguard, pioneering an innovative way to view movies and to write about the cinematic arts. In this book, the legendary director examines the art of movie-making through engaging and deeply personal reviews about the movies he loves. Truffaut writes extensively about his heroes, from Hitchcock to Welles, Chaplin to Renoir, Buñuel to Bergman, Clouzot to Cocteau, Capra to Hawks, Guitry to Fellini, sharing analysis and insight as to what made them film legends, and how their work led Truffaut and his fellow directors into classics like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and the French New Wave movement.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the work of four important contemporary directors whose work falls between the reductive labels of 'auteur cinema' and 'popular cinema'. Their work is contextualised within this timely investigation into the shifting relationship between the privileged status of the auteur and questions of genre, gender and cinematic production in France today. This important contribution to understanding the shifting landscapes of contemporary French film identifies an essential intermediacy in the films of these directors, which works to undo a series of dominant oppositions, generic template and contestation, public collectivity and personal intimacy, to offer a new perspective on the location of the political in contemporary French cinema.

Duvivier was a giant of classic French cinema with a career spanning key moments of French film history. This analysis goes beyond its historical range to engage with key debates in film studies: notably auteurism, stardom and questions of the national.

This collection presents new essays in the complex field of French literary adaptation. Using a variety of textual and interpretive approaches, it sheds light on issues of gender, sexuality, class, politics and social conventions while acknowledging a range of contexts, from the commercial to the archival and the aesthetic.

A ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenising use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

This introduction to translation theory, written by a leading author in the field, uses the genre of film to bring the main themes in translation to life. Through analyzing films as diverse as the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera, The Star Wars Trilogies and Lost in Translation, the reader is encouraged to think about both issues and problems of translation as they are played out on the screen and issues of filmic representation through examining the translation dimension of specific films.

Topics include: the ethics of translation; rewriting and remakes; questions of originality and authenticity; translating film; translating French poetry of the two world wars; translating French poetry into English; translation and cultural transfer; why retranslate the French classics, or the impact of retranslation on quality.

The director of such major films as Au hasard Balthazar, Pickpocket, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc and Lancelot du Lac, brings together his working notes in this book.

In a world defined by the flow of people, goods and cultures, many contemporary French films explore the multicultural nature of today's France through language. From rival lingua francas such as English to socio-politically marginalised languages such as Arabic or Kurdish, multilingual characters in these films exploit their knowledge of multiple languages, and offer counter-perspectives to dominant ideologies of the role of linguistic diversity in society. Decentring France is the first substantial study of multilingual film in France.

Studies in French Cinema looks at the development of French screen studies in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years and the ways in which innovative scholarship in the UK has helped shape the field in English and French speaking universities.