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French National Cinema

2nd Edition

By Susan Hayward

Published June 17th 2005 by Routledge – 408 pages

Series: National Cinemas

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Description

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.

Reviews

'This factual and analytical book offer[s] the reader an encompassing and informative introduction to a "global picture" of French cinema.' - Scope

'This is an ambitious and useful text … this is a worthy and in many ways a very helpful edition of a text that has played an important role in encouraging new ways of thinking about French film history.' – Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Contents

Introduction: Defining the 'National' of a Country's Cinematographic Production 1. A Brief Ecohistory of France's Cinema Industry 1895-2003 2. Magical Moments of Musical Silence: French Cinema's Classical Age 1895-1929 3. From Clarity to Obscurity: French Cinema's Age of Modernism 1930-1958 4. From Ideology to Narcissism: French Cinema's Age of the Postmodern 1958-1991 5. Towards a Multiplicity of Voices: French Cinema's Age of the Postmodern, Part Two 1992-2004

Author Bio

Susan Hayward is Professor of French in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on French film and gender and sexuality in film. Her most recent publication is Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign (Continuum, 2003)