While popular European cinema is strongly linked with the dominant American version of popular film, it cannot be read simply as Hollywood in foreign dress. The styles, stars and genres of popular European cinema - Swedish melodramas, Italian horror movies, French musicals - all have their own conventions, superfically similar to Hollywood and yet certainly distinct from it. The popular cinema of Europe has been surprisingly little studied as both art and social document. Popular European Cinema seeks to fill this gap and to illuminate two compelling contemporary issues: the nature of the...

Ginette Vincendeau discusses the artistic value of his films in their proper context and comments on Jean-Pierre Melville's love of American culture and his controversial critical and political standing in this English language study.

In this original and illuminating study, Ginette Vincendeau explores Brigitte Bardot's complex and revolutionary image of femininity, her film career and her lasting and controversial celebrity. Analyzing all Bardot's output, encompassing popular comedies and melodramas, work with New Wave directors Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard, and international productions such as Dear Brigitte (1965) and Shalako (1968), Vincendeau shows how Bardot's enduring fame is based on her status as a sexual, lifestyle, musical, and fashion role model and even an icon of national identity....

Released in 1995, "La Haine" is the black and white chronicle of 24 hours in the life of a mixed-race young male trio from a run-down Parisian suburb. The author provides an understanding of the context of the film's making, of the film's narrative tension, stylistic sophistication and ideological ambiguity, and of its success.