"Leos Carax" is a study of the films of this popular "enfant terrible" of contemporary French cinema. The key ingredients and influences of Carax's four films (including "Les Amants du Pont Neuf" and "Pola X") are examined here: Paris, pop music, flanerie and amour fou, mannerist and neo-baroque aesthetics, the "Nouvelle Vague" and contemporary naturalist cinema. The authors draw on a variety of intellectual sources, from Deleuze's philosophy of Cahiers-based film criticism to theories of art and literature, in order to disentangle the complex web of biographical mythology, formal and...

Lisa Downing's comprehensive study of the films of Patrice Leconte, the maverick chameleon of contemporary French cinema, traces lines of continuity and revision through a body of apparently disparate films whose 'messages' often appear both contradictory and controversial. Pursuing a close reading of the recurrent themes, styles, intertexts and techniques which structure Leconte's filmmaking, Downing re-evaluates Leconte's status as an enigmatic artist offering complex and paradoxical commentary on contemporary questions of sexuality, ethics and identity. She indicates for the first time the...

Claire Denis is one of France's most acclaimed and original filmmakers. Since her remarkable debut success with 'Chocolat' (1986), she has produced an impressive series of features which have been intriguing, visually striking, and often highly controversial (including 'Beau Travail' (2000) and 'Trouble Every Day' (2001)). Beugnet provides a thematic and stylistic framework within which to consider Denis' work, as well as a comprehensive analysis of individual films. She highlights the resonance of Denis' films in relation to ongoing debates about French national identity and culture, and...

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinema and Eloge de l'amour.
Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic and philiosophical texts, the book places Godard's work within its intellectual context, examining how developments in French culture and thought since 1950 have been mirrored in - and sometimes anticipated by - Godard's films.
Numerous sequences from Godard's films are singled out for...

Mathieu Kassovitz is arguably the most important filmmaker to have emerged from French cinema in the past two decades. As a director, his work often engages with highly controversial socio-political issues whilst still managing to attract and connect with a popular audience - and, above all, with a youth audience.He is also one of the few contemporary French filmmakers who is capable of productively engaging with Hollywood, in terms of cinematic style, narrative and genre, yet still retaining his own identity as a French filmmaker. In addition to his directorial successes, Kassovitz has also...

Few filmmakers have taken the principle of the 'talking picture' so far as Eric Rohmer, the internationally reknowned director of the Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles. Occasionally dismissed as precious or overly literary, Rohmer's features may leave the impression that there is more to listen to than to look at. Yet as the secretive director (b. Maurice Scherer in 1920) points out, dialogue is no less engaging than the best gunfights, and if his characters prefer discussing love to making it, they are no less the 'heroes' of the stories they tell....

This is the first book written on Diane Kurys. It is essential for study of women filmmakers in France/Europe. An original and concise reading of Kurys' work.

Alain Resnais, director of "Hiroshima mon amour" (1959) and "L'Annee derniere a Marienbad" (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest documentaries to the musical films of the last decade, traces the evolving patterns of his filmmaking, its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt. Exploring questions of the time-image, of trauma, of the senses, this volume sets Resnais' films in the context of important current debates in film theory, and provides a...

This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those often neglected or little known. Jean Cocteau is not only one of French cinema's greatest and most influential auteurs whose work covered all the major genres but also an experimenter, collaborator, theorist and all-round ambassador of film. The often applied label of 'literary filmmaker' is insufficient to describe Cocteau, who operates on so...

This is the first full-length monograph in English about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, perhaps best known in the English speaking world for his award winning Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds of 1994. This study locates Andre Techine within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian war, May 1968 and contemporary globalisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French wave. The originality of Techine's sixteen feature films lies in his subtle exploration of sexuality and national...