Alistair Fox – A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema

Автор: Alistair Fox
Название книги: A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Театр и Кино
Страницы: 714
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspects of French cinema from 1990 to the present day.

• Features original contributions from top film scholars relating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema
• Includes new research on matters relating to the political economy of contemporary French cinema, developments in cinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters
• Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digital filmmaking
• Contains an unusually large range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those of genre, gender, auteur, industry, economic, star, postcolonial and psychoanalytic studies
• Includes essays by important French cinema scholars from France, the U.S., and New Zealand, many of whose work is here presented in English for the first time

Nearly 120 years after the first public screening of projected motion pictures by
the Lumière brothers in Paris on December 28, 1895, French cinema retains a
unique place in the context of global cinema. Not only is it the largest filmmaking
industry in the Western world outside the United States (even though its output
of films, and even more so their distribution, is on a much smaller scale), but it
has also provided an alternative to Hollywood, especially since the New Wave of
the 1950s and 1960s, which fostered what has become known as le cinéma d’auteur.
As Hollywood movie-making has become progressively driven by a commercial
imperative, resulting in cycles of mega-budget, effects-driven, “tent-pole” blockbusters
that become ever more generic in content and style – B-movies elevated
to the primary position among American cultural products, as one critic has put
it1 – French films motivated by artistic ambition that provide human-scale character
studies relating closely to the intimate psychological and social life of ordinary
people have become all the more prized by cinephile audiences throughout the
world as an alternative to movies in which spectacle and extreme action prevail.
On the other hand, it should not be assumed that contemporary French cinema
can be reduced merely to an endless reiteration of the kinds of films made
50 years earlier; to the contrary, the period since 1990 has witnessed a concerted
attempt to diversify the output of films, and also make films that appeal to a
larger audience, both nationally and internationally, by appropriating elements of
foreign genres and developing new ones, such as “auteur comedy,” so as to avoid
being contained within a stereotype.