Covering the rich film production of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together films that might otherwise be divided by questions of race, gender, genre, period, or nation, in a valuable comparative study of a diverse corpus. Individual countries, film-makers, and films are treated separately in order to emphasize their specific identities or those which are represented in their films, and key films are examined within a well-developed historical context. Clearly written and accessible to the specialist and general reader alike, this informative book is a valuable reference source.

This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.

Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.

An engaging, content-based book that uses fifteen easily accessible feature films from all regions of the Francophone world, helping classrooms incorporate Francophone cinema and culture into advanced French Language or Francophone Studies courses.

"Cinema and Sensation: " "French Film and the Art of Transgression" looks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the reemergence of filmmaking practices (and, by extension, of theoretical approaches) that give precedence to cinema as the medium of the senses.France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the release, in close succession, of a series of films that exemplify a characteristic awareness of cinema s sensory impact and transgressive nature: "Adieu"; "A ma soeur"; "Baise-moi"; "Beau Travail"; "La Blessure"; "La Captive"; "Dans ma peau"; "Demonlover"; "L Humanite"; "Flandres"; "L Intrus"; "Les Invisibles"; "Lady Chatterley"; "Lecons de tenebres"; "Romance"; "Sombre"; "Tiresia"; "Trouble Every Day"; "Twentynine Palms"; "Vendredi soir"; "La Vie nouvelle"; "Wild Side"; and "Zidane, un portrait du XXIeme siecle." These films, among others, typify a willingness to explore cinema s unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually.Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Bataille, among others, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques, and motifs that allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching today s most burning sociocultural debatesfrom the growing supremacy of technology, to globalization, exile, and exclusion."

The traditionally American genre of the road movie has been explored and reconfigured in the French context since the later 1960s. Comparative in its approach, this book studies the inter-relationship between American and French culture and cinemas, and in the process considers and challenges histories of the road movie. It combines film history with film theory methodologies, analysing transformations in social, political and film-industrial contexts alongside changing perspectives on the meaning and possibilities of film. At once chronological and thematic in structure, The French Road Movie provides in each chapter a comprehensive introduction to key themes emerging from the genre in the French context - liberty, identity and citizenship, masculinity, femininity, border-crossing - followed by detailed, innovative and often revisionist readings of the chosen films. Through these readings the author justifies the place of the road genre within French cinema histories and reinvigorates this often neglected and misunderstood area of study.

Like its French-language companion volume Le Cinéma français contemporain: Manuel de classe, Alan Singerman and Michèle Bissière's Contemporary French Cinema: A Student's Book offers a detailed look at recent French cinema through its analyses of twenty notable and representative French films that have appeared since 1980. Sure to delight Anglophone fans of French film, it can be used with equal success in English-language courses and, when paired with its companion volume, dual-language ones. Acclaim for Le Cinéma français contemporain: Manuel de classe "From Le Dernier Métro to Intouchables, Bissière and Singerman cover the latest trends of French cinema, emphasizing context and analytical method as Singerman did in Apprentissage du cinéma français (Focus 2004). The authors offer a selection of films most French cinephiles will applaud, and they incorporate insights from some of the best critical work on French cinema. Students of French film will also find all the bibliographical pointers they need to dig deeper, and instructors will appreciate the pedagogical components included in the chapters." —Jonathan Walsh, Department of French Studies, Wheaton College, Massachusetts "This remarkable book comes to us from two seasoned teachers and critics and beautifully complements an earlier work, Alan Singerman's Apprentissage du cinéma français. The time period covered, more targeted here than in the preceding text, is admirably well chosen, and the breakdown by broad category, each offering multiple options, guides the teacher while offering a choice among an abundance of interesting films. The preliminary chapters, both succinct and informative, give students an excellent overview of French cinema as a whole and of the technical knowledge needed for film analysis. Each of the subsequent chapters offers an indispensable introduction discussing the plot, director, production, actors, reception, and context of the film in question and also provides a very useful filmography and bibliography… an exemplary work." —Brigitte E. Humbert, Department of French and Francophone Studies, Middlebury College