Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema

Brutal Intimacy

TIM PALMER

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS · MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

ANALYZING CONTEMPORARY

FRENCH CINEMA

WESLEYAN

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2011 Tim Palmer

All rights reserved

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Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

5 4 3 2 1

For Liza

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Contemporary French Film Ecosystem

CHAPTER ONE

5X1

Young Cinema and First-Timers

CHAPTER TWO

The Cinéma du Corps

CHAPTER THREE

Popular Cinema, Pop-Art Cinema

CHAPTER FOUR

Feminine Cinema

CONCLUSION

Instructive Cinephilia

Film Literacy and la Fémis

APPENDIX

The 156 Films That You Must Have Seen

The List

Notes

Select Filmography

Select Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I was writing this book, many people cleared my path and helped me find my way. Thank you first of all to the people who agreed to be interviewed, for giving up their time so generously. I am especially grateful to Marina de Van, Lola Doillon, and Julie Lopes-Curval. Thanks to Matthieu-David Cournot for our conversations in person and via email, and especially for the insider’s tour of la Fémis in 2008. Thanks to the staff of the BiFi in Paris, to Delphine Selles and the French Embassy, and to the organizers of the VCU French Film Festival, for giving me access to so many worthy materials.

To my colleagues in the Film Studies department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington—Todd Berliner, Nandana Bose, Chip Hackler, Mariana Johnson, Carlos Kase, Jim Kreul, Terry Linehan, Melinda Miles, Dave Monahan, Glenn Pack, Sue Richardson, André and Shannon Silva—I owe thanks, especially to those who did battle with my more troublesome sections. I must single out the impact of Lou Buttino, my chair during the years in which this book was written, for being such a staunch mentor, energetic advocate, and friend. Also in King Hall, thanks to Megan Helsley and the irreplaceable Pat Torok for all their help in making my professional life so much easier. Thanks to Sophie Williams for her interlibrary loan endeavors, as well as all the Randall librarians and staff who aided my research process. My home institution, the UNCW, also supported me many times in America and France, with Charles L. Cahill research grants, summer research funds, and a research reassignment leave in the fall of 2009. Thanks also to the Office of International Programs for a series of travel grants.

Elsewhere, a big thank you to Kelley Conway, for her generous and unfailing long-term encouragement on this and many other projects. Thanks also to Mike Benedetti, Whitney Byrd, Sam King, and the American vanguard of Intellect Press, and Charlie Michael, who got his much-deserved Ph.D. while this book was completed. From my years in Madison, thanks to Four Star Video Heaven for the two-year grant; and my officemates Tom Yoshikami, Madhavi Mallapragada, Mobina Hashmi, Chris Sieving, and Jen Cook. I must also acknowledge the intellectual debt I owe to David Bordwell, from my time in Vilas and beyond it.

For direct or indirect professional help, thanks to Pascale Borenstein, Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie, Richard Neupert, Alan Williams, and Jonathan Buchsbaum. Thanks to Leigh Gibson for starting the ball rolling, Eric Levy and Parker Smathers for keeping it going, to Margaret Way, and all at Wesleyan University Press. I’d also like to thank the many students who’ve joined me in the classroom with such enthusiasm, especially those who’ve worked with me on French cinema.

Acknowledgment is also due here to the diverse and talented community of people who make French cinema happen, whose work is discussed in the pages that follow. Pessimism and faint praise are all too often directed at French cinema, a gloom I’ve never shared. To those men and women responsible for the extraordinary films which have inspired so many of my activities as teacher, programmer, and writer, I hope I do your work justice.

On a more personal note, thank you to my Mum and Dad, for keeping an eye on me from across the Pond. Thanks to my brother, John, for, among other things, visiting me in America so many times laden down with European DVDS. To David Shippey and the indefatigable Betty Shippey, thank you so much for your unflagging back-up, support far above and beyond the call of duty, before, during and after the writing of this book. I hope you all know how grateful I am.

My son, Riley Tate Palmer, was born while this book was starting to take shape; I hope one day he comes across these words. Riley, you have given me so many new perspectives about so many things, filling my life with wonderful mayhem. Seeing the world through your eyes, with your boundless curiosity, reminds me each day to try and keep a sense of discovery. I hope this book captures at least part of your zest for life.

To Liza, my wife, coviewer and coconspirator, collaborator in all things, I owe the biggest thanks of all. From my earliest days gathering my thoughts, to the final stretches of writing and revisions, you have kept me going with your tireless faith and support, and endless insights. You inspire me every day. A lot of this book is about courageous and talented women, making it especially fitting that it’s dedicated to you. The best thank you I can offer is to tell you that I’ve always wanted to write a book, since my earliest memories of growing up in England. Here it is, and it’s for you, with all my love.

Brutal Intimacy

The Contemporary

French Film Ecosystem

The December 2007 European edition of Time magazine, prompted by Marcel Marceau’s death that September, used for its cover a sorrowful mime staring tearfully at the ground. The accompanying headline proclaimed: The Death of French Culture. Unsurprisingly, in the light of recent Franco-American relations, this incident quickly roused passions. One official response, widely reproduced, came from Culturesfrance, an agency supervised by France’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture & Communications. Its director, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, published a bilingual Letter to Our American Friends, at once conciliatory and caustic. D’Arvor began: On the announcement of the extinction of French culture, we wanted to react rather than simply revel in the silence of the tomb into which you had hurled us.¹ The letter next cited American luminaries, from Paul Auster to Woody Allen, as advocates for France’s position as an epicenter of global culture. Defensive yet expansive, d’Arvor’s conclusion then offered an A to Z of contemporary French artistic luminaries, an address book [which] has brought in a notable haul of fish . . . men and women of culture originating in France and whose impact is making itself felt all over the world.²

Delivered with spirit in a high-profile forum, this manifesto broaches key points about French culture—and, more specifically, French film culture. The first point is how vital cinema still is to France’s artistic and national identity. Nearly half of d’Arvor’s A to Z are either filmmakers or film stars, from an arthouse icon, Isabelle Adjani, to the more commercial figure of Lambert Wilson. Besides asserting the strength and breadth of French cinema, the Culturesfrance essay also revives longstanding debates about cultural protectionism, France’s response to American hegemony. On this front, d’Arvor pointedly refers to the 2005 Paris trade agreements, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted overwhelmingly (the United States was the only negative vote among 191 member countries)³ in favor of preserving cultural diversity. With film on his mind, d’Arvor recalls the Cultural Exception ideology, France’s oft-cited belief that the commercial circulation of its culture must be complemented, whenever necessary, by institutional safeguards against the pressures of the global marketplace, especially versus North American incursions. In sum, d’Arvor’s essay distills certain paradoxes of contemporary French cinema: that this is a vigorous industry but also a subsidized artform; a field with intellectual ambitions that also courts widespread popularity; a craft extending from idiosyncratic experiments to commercial operations; a medium identified with a local audience yet one that also allows France to export itself on-screen around the globe, even to America.

While we open here with an image of French culture’s alleged demise, this book argues from the outset for the vivacity of French film, its embattled but enduring health. In fact, the central premise is that twenty-first-century French cinema is one of the most expansively interesting in the world. A brief but representative selection of films confirms the extraordinary range of different approaches on offer, from the popular to the antagonistic, the opulent to the austere, the generic to the unclassifiable. There is, for instance, Brice de Nice (2005), a scurrilous comedy and star vehicle for Jean Dujardin in which a bleach-haired surfing wannabe craves the perfect wave, while worshipping his icon, Patrick Swayze, who eventually appears to him in a sun-baked vision. There is also Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle (2005), which adapts a Joseph Conrad short story in a devastating period drama of marital collapse, punctuated by intertitles of anguished dialogue that resemble a neo-Brechtian exercise or a presound short. And there is La France (2007), set in World War I, about a young bride searching for her soldier husband; while she combs the battlefront we witness soldiers inexplicably performing song numbers after their weapons are replaced by musical instruments. Alternatively, we might consider In My Skin (Dans ma peau, 2003), one of France’s continuing tide of debut features, female-centered like many recent French films, one of the most lyrical yet challenging works in recent world cinema, an intimate and open-ended depiction of a young woman’s descent into graphic self-mutilation.

Responding to productions like these, a key hypothesis here is that to understand contemporary French cinema we should explore its diversity, from the broadest of mainstream products to the most esoteric arthouse practices. To pursue this, we must depart from traditional critical methods, which usually tend towards selectivity and abstraction—privileging either certain auteurs or else isolated genres or movements (Impressionism, the French New Wave, the cinéma du look, etc.). Instead, this book treats contemporary French cinema as an interconnected continuum, a series of concentric circles, a range of craft techniques from all walks of film-making life. What then emerges is a fascinating kind of cinematic ecosystem, a population of French filmmakers that is highly cineliterate, a group very much engaged by and in conversation with the work of their peers. Beyond the production process, we will also observe that the resulting films are themselves subject to a reception of intense cinephilia, based upon the energetic interventions of critics, sponsors, financial and governmental agencies, academics, and even, of course, from mass paying audiences. (A subtext to this book is that France’s film culture, centered in Paris, is still far and away the world’s most advanced; in some ways France gets the cinema it expects, or demands.)

At issue, then, is our need to conceptualize the extent of French cinema, on-screen, but also to analyze broadly the habits of its practitioners (newcomers and veterans alike), off-screen, together with their critical respondents and industrial advocates. In this frame we will consider French filmmakers to be active and rational agents, cultural entrepreneurs as well as the creators of film texts. Within France’s bustling film culture, indeed, we see how its filmmakers behave as professional craftspeople—attuned to cinematic developments around them; attentive to their own self-promotion and self-presentation; alert to institutional opportunities like grants and festivals; creatively informed by pedagogical experiences; engaged by the discourses of the French trade and popular press. Hence the act of film-making involves an array of roles: work as writers, interviewees, self-promoters, students, teachers, cultural activists, applied cinephiles, and so on. While French cinema has drastically evolved in recent years—today it has something for everyone—its materials are continually reinvented by cineliterate professionals, creating models in flux, films produced according to innovative formulae, connected to the past yet versatile, adapting to the changing appetites of the twenty-first century. On these terms, we can begin to grasp contemporary France as a major center of world film.

Brutal Intimacy also emphasizes empirical inquiry and revisionist analysis. The chapters that follow respond to recent French cinema by devising, where appropriate, a new set of critical approaches, resisting the temptation to pour new wine into old bottles. To characterize contemporary French cinema (defined here as films produced since 2000, including detours to earlier moments when needed) we will study it on its own terms, without recourse to reviving preexisting templates for their own sake—updating the résumés of famous auteurs, say, or plugging new films into breakdowns of historical genres or putative movements. As we see repeatedly, contemporary French cinema relies upon continual overhaul and renewal, an industry famously committed since the 1950s to advancing the film-making careers of untested newcomers. (This jeune cinéma phenomenon is analyzed in detail in Chapter 1.) In this context, new and relatively obscure filmmakers emerge as part of the group conversation that sustains the recent work of well-known veterans. We will find icons like Claire Denis and Olivier Assayas working alongside, and related to, budding professionals like Diane Bertrand and Serge Bozon.

As a result, my intention throughout is to offer any critical methods as defined by the actual range of films encountered, not, as is regrettably customary, coercing a smaller set of cherry-picked texts into preexisting ideological or critical categories, inherited trains of thought. Although not as scientific as the unbiased sample used by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson to characterize classical Hollywood cinema, their hundred random titles drawn from 1916 to 1960,⁴ Brutal Intimacy nonetheless shares a proximate approach, a systematic editorial response to an unfiltered and wholesale engagement with the continuum of French cinematic practice, as many films as possible, supplemented by the testimonies of filmmakers and professionals. Over the last decade, my reading, viewing, interviews, campus and festival programming, and teaching have come from hundreds of contemporary French films taken from as wide a range of sources as possible: at American film festivals in places like Boston, New York City, and Richmond, Virginia; through specialist region-1 DVD companies; during the theatrical releases of French films in the United States; a consideration of those films highlighted, for good or bad, in trade papers like Le Film français and more popular magazines like Studio and Première; in mainstream movie theaters during regular visits to Paris; in specialist repositories like the Bibliothèque du Film and the Cinémathèque Française; and, most free-ranging of all, through the constant flow, the torrent of films released (in recent years far more comprehensively than ever before) on French DVD. (The Select Filmography includes the availability of these with English subtitles.) Our major objective is to broaden the canon of contemporary French cinema, especially the texts that are discussed here for the first time in the English language.

Returning to Brutal Intimacy’s rationale, my survey reflects another pivotal tendency: that French cinema evolves at speed, from an industry and culture machine built around continuity but also rapid flux, the new and old poised in creative friction. Regarding the films and their shaping contexts, certain critical gospels are simply no longer apt; some have become ossified and out of touch. An example of this, explored in Chapter 3, is the traditional belief in a rigid antagonism between France’s arthouse auteurs and their more commercially oriented colleagues, the notion that French cinematic practices high and low do not mingle. This, like some other conventional theories of French film, we can abandon, but hopefully in a productive spirit, as something from the past that no longer rings quite true, becoming less an overarching truism than just one point of departure among many. Exploring newer developments like France’s contemporary pop-art cinema, my aim is not only to revise our critical repertoire, but also to open up new avenues within which to situate the shifting techniques—conceptual, stylistic, thematic, promotional, and so on—of French filmmakers at large. While each section that follows details a particular model of French cinema, these models are often interrelated and are not mutually exclusive. As a result, the case studies are worthy ambassadors of French cinema in their own right, but also represent larger tendencies, markers to chart the changing contours of French cinema, as well as, where pressing and salient, its wider connections to French society.

On the issue of French cinema’s versatility, its reputed strength in depth, we can briefly survey France’s recent production landscape. This introduces the French cultural-commercial complex, subsidized film art underpinned by capitalism. France’s cinema industry, indeed, often resembles a financial minefield, a heavily regulated business coupling mandated top-down government initiatives to the economic resources of, variously, production bodies, national television networks, regional and international grant agencies, artists and artistic enterprises, and cautious investment companies. A hypothetical production scenario demonstrates the system—sometimes flexible, sometimes precarious—in action.⁵ In 2008, the average French film cost 6.4 million euros. Say you are the enterprising producer in charge, negotiating the French film industry, how might you raise these funds?

Besides assembling your creative and technical personnel, you would first seek institutional support. Your first port of call becomes the state-sponsored Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), at the heart of the French film industry. The CNC primarily offers a compte de soutien aid program, which disburses taxation revenues—principally from film tickets and DVD sales—to would-be producers (a more lucrative prospect if you are experienced and your previous film made money). In addition, the CNC annually awards avances sur recettes (advances on takings) grants: first and primarily for debutants, second for everyone else (less commercial ventures are prioritized), and third, more rarely, for at-risk productions after principal photography is complete. Around 10 percent of applicants receive the avances sur recettes, however, which in 2008 averaged around 400,000 euros each (this financial kernel is, though, typically decisive: over 90 percent of avances sur recettes recipients complete their productions and make it to the big screen).

After the CNC, your real financial deals begin. First, you would almost certainly approach Canal+, the pay-per-view and subscription media empire described impishly by Michel Palmiéri as the good fairy of French cinema.⁶ In exchange for screening rights and continued state accreditation, Canal+ is obliged to invest at least 20 percent of its revenues into film production, of which just under half must be French in origin. (In 1988, Canal+ founded Studio Canal, a separate and extremely active film and DVD production company.) With or without Canal+, your next step is to consider France’s terrestrial or indigenous television channels, all of which are similarly directed to fund film-making (3.2 percent of their total investments into prepurchasing and/or coproducing; 2.5 percent into French cinema specifically). At this stage, your ability to pitch your film as a prime-time candidate, suitable for broad audiences, and, most marketable of all, as a property with a star attached, is certainly useful. Beyond your potential television benefactors, you would soon need to attract distributors, domestic and international. Their input, typically, will take the form of a minimum garanti (MG), up-front capital, which is subsequently reimbursed from the takings of theatrical and/or DVD release.

What other funding sources are available to you as producer? One financial fixture, created in 1985 by France’s renowned Minister of Culture Jack Lang, is the Société pour le Financement du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel (SOFICA), which generates tax shelters to encourage investment in film-making. In 2008, a SOFICA could net you as much as 500,000 euros or more. Similarly vital to the ambitious producer are regional agencies—dominated in France by that of the greater metropolitan Paris/Île-de-France—which allocate cash grants in exchange for commitments to base location shoots, with all the local incomes they stimulate, within their particular domain. Elsewhere, there is a further fiscal option: since 2004, you can apply directly to the state for further tax credits under the crédit d’impôt, provided that your production satisfies criteria about the French nationality of its financiers, creative pool and staff; and that it has suitable CNC credentials.

At this point, as a typical French producer you are probably not yet out of the woods. Counting your total investments, you would discover that you still lack about 20–30 percent of your total production budget. Balancing your books might, in turn, require additional coproducer partnerships, or simply oblige you as producer to stump up the extra money yourself, either from your production company or from your own pocket. Many contemporary French producers hence describe their work as a mixture of practical fiscal negotiations and dedication to films they creatively and financially believe in. As Olivier Delbosc of Fidélité Films, the adventurous producer of 5x2 (2004) and Actresses (Actrices, 2007), who currently makes about five films annually, remarks ruefully: Among the 200 films produced in France each year, many are almost self-produced by enthusiasts ready to risk their homes or their futures to get a film shot.⁷

From the vicissitudes of our hypothetical film project, we can turn to a broader assessment of the French production situation. Statistically at least, the key data, collated meticulously by the CNC, do point to a measure of stability, especially as the dwindling revenues of the turbulent 1990s (the nadir being the years following the 1993 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT] treaty) gave way to the more vigorous business of the early-to-mid 2000s. Most industrial analysts express ambivalence but also a measure of confidence about France’s cultural-commercial production conundrum, despite the perennial perception that crises loom. Two recent studies, by Jonathan Buchsbaum and Laurent Creton, conclude on the same note of cautious optimism—that French cinema will weather storms by devising contingent top-down solutions to financial exigencies. As Buchsbaum puts it, The French support system is built on elaborate national definitions in order to identify, track, and capture currency flows . . . [with] the CNC direct[ing] the proliferating mix of aids distributed in all directions. . . . As France values cinema as an essential cultural achievement . . . it is unlikely that France will fail to design a new system to preserve cinema’s vitality.⁸ More succinct, Creton reflects that "in the throes of crisis we find mixed the two poles difficulty-danger and chance-opportunity."⁹

Turning to the figures, certainly as far as the last fifteen years go, a trajectory of fiscal and production gains is clear. Tracking the data, we can discern several defining trends. One is a pattern of obvious production growth, from just 89 French features released in 1994 to a solid pattern of more than double this figure by 2009, the two hundred annual film threshold routinely bandied about as a new norm in the French trade press. Investment in French cinema, concomitantly, has soared, more than tripling during the same period, a phenomenon linked to the rapid development of France’s blockbuster mega-production sector, popularized by Luc Besson. (Only in 2009’s slight shrinkage of productions and budgets is evidence of the 2008 global economic downturn evident.) Analysts of these CNC statistics offer us broad perspectives about contemporary French film production. Le Film français, an important mouthpiece for the French film industry, much as Variety is for Hollywood, is arguably the most systematic respondent. One of its consistent refrains is to note the influx of production capital: as early as 2000 Sarah Drouhard noted presciently that, as far as French film was concerned, there’s always more money¹⁰—the discrepancy being, however, that these funds were concentrated on fewer, hyper-commercial ventures. In general, annual reports in Le Film français on the industry describe increasing prosperity and continuity throughout the early twenty-first century. Among its assessments are motifs: that the CNC’S and regional fiscal support mechanisms were stable and beneficial (2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008); that first-time directors were augmenting the industry, especially those able to continue their careers (2001, 2002, 2005, 2007); a degree of uncertainty about the fluctuating yet vital role of SOFICA, Canal+, and television networks (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005); and, almost every year, confirmation that budgets were on the rise. By 2004, Le Film français declared that French cinema (boosted by its new crédit d’impôt) had left its period of crisis; by 2006 it announced that it had stabilized at unprecedented high production standards; by 2008 it went so far as to suggest a beautiful permanence¹¹ about the industry as a whole, a rather ironic statement given the global financial turbulence to come.

Table 1 Films Produced in France, 1993–2009

To other parties, the state of affairs in twenty-first-century French film production appears more controversial. Especially contentious was a Le Film français finding about the 2007 industry—that a bipolarization process was evident, in which low budget (less than 4 million euros) and high budget superproductions (more than 10 million euros) were starting to dominate the field, leaving little or no room for middle budget features in between.¹² At the 2007 César awards, France’s annual celebration of its cinematic achievements, Pascale Ferran, director of five-prize-winner Lady Chatterley (2006), took the opportunity to attack what she saw as the system of financing films which leads on the one hand to films that are increasingly rich, and on the other to films that are extremely poor.¹³ In effect, Ferran argued, the French industry was losing its capacity to support films du milieu, midrange productions that were historically the domain of commercial artists like Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut. Following this broadside, between March and December 2007, Ferran convened a hand-picked Club des 13, excluding studio insiders and film critics and instead representing the profession with three directors (Ferran herself, Jacques Audiard, and Claude Miller), a scriptwriter (Cécile Vargaftig), four producers (including Patrick Sobelman), a distributor, three exhibitors, and an export agent. After extensive investigations, in 2008 the Club des 13 published its findings, widely debated ever since, as Le Milieu n’est plus un pont mais un faille—The Middle Is No Longer a Bridge But a Faultline.

Table 2 Finances in French Productions, 1993–2009

The Club des 13’s 321-page report, in some ways mimicking the format of the CNC’S own exhaustive yearly surveys, seizes upon a number of allegedly fatal flaws in the French industrial system. The main problem, the Club des 13 claims, is the undue pressure the contemporary French film industry places upon its so-called films du milieu, a category shifting amorphously between productions with midrange budgets to those defined by more independent and/or artistic (yet presumably quite costly) aspirations. At times, Le Milieu n’est plus un pont mais une faille is quite specific and industrially acute, noting that the proliferation of French film production is squeezing the fixed grant resources available through the CNC to ambitious producers; that funding sources have not grown proportionately to inflation and escalating production costs; and that conservative and/or commercially oriented exhibition practices (apparent in multiplexes and in Canal+’s programming alike) are hindering the quality of French cinema. Elsewhere, the Club des 13 yearns romantically for the past: when the mainstream ideology of French television channels did not dictate film investment, when scriptwriters were able to work closely with directors and producers, and when, in a shamelessly idealized fantasy, times were vastly different from today, when the cinema of auteurs is attacked on all sides.¹⁴ As Isabelle Vanderschelden points out, while the Club des 13’s analysis highlights productive areas for financial reform, it can be and indeed has been criticized for its stereotypically French auteurist bias . . . an ideal of directorial control . . . [that drops] market and reception issues rapidly from the discussion.¹⁵ A point in common, however, between writers as diverse as the largely optimistic Le Film français and the more pessimistic Club des 13 is their shared sense that the twenty-first century has changed the production equation in France, that the perennial interests of commerce and art are producing an unprecedented diversity of French film-making.

How does this book engage with this continuum of contemporary French cinema? Chapter 1 analyzes one of the main aspects of French film-making for several generations, especially pressing in the early twenty-first century. This is the matter of France’s debutant cinema, an industry predicated on the institutional and artistic support awarded to first-time filmmakers, from sources like the CNC and the French Film Academy. The first chapter explores the particular contexts that give rise to France’s contemporary young cinema, the relationship between newcomers present and newcomers past, the fiscal resources and official bodies that shape the careers of emergent French filmmakers, often propelling them into the international spotlight as part of France’s mission to safeguard its indigenous film culture and showcase it abroad. This chapter also analyzes this first-time cinema on-screen: its painfully frank yet often dispassionate coming-of-age narratives, as well as its representation of burgeoning sexuality, adolescence, and teenage identity politics. As we will see, a paradox that emerges is the notion of a rebellious young cinema, texts about alienated youths and juvenile delinquency, which derive from institutional mandates. To examine the major conventions of France’s first-time cinema, both on- and off-screen, this chapter’s representative sample is the five debut features nominated, hence officially sanctioned as French success stories, for the 2008 Best First Film César awards: Lola Doillon’s Et toi, t’es sur qui?, Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies (La Naissance des pieuvres), Mia Hansen-Løve’s All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonné), Anne le Ny’s Those Who Remain (Ceux qui restent), and Vincent Paronnaud’s and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (Persépolis).

In the second chapter, Brutal Intimacy responds to the contemporary phenomenon of the cinéma du corps, a defining strand of France’s most experimental and textually fraught art cinema. This, arguably the most notorious tendency in recent French film-making, is a cinema profoundly centered on the body, dwelling on the visceral processes of corporeal acts, from body crimes to self-mutilations, often savage behaviors derived from unchecked sexual and carnal desires. This chapter explores the emergence of the cinéma du corps, its leading practitioners and their critical reception, its resonance beyond France, and its contemporary culmination in the work of figures as diverse as Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, Marina de Van, and Diane Bertrand. In the hands of filmmakers like these, we consider how the cinéma du corps has been controversial yet misunderstood, its stylistic conception and execution overlooked, as have the bravura means by which diegetic defamiliarization occurs, the construction of social spaces that are apprehended in the context of such stark, atavistic, threateningly amoral case studies. This brutal intimacy template most profoundly extends to the actual viewer, a role that becomes highly unconventional, challenged overtly by the artful proximity of such formally and physically confrontational events.

Chapter 3 broaches another fascinating paradox or cultural incongruity within contemporary French film-making: its emergent pop-art cinema. This I define as a confluence of what have traditionally been seen, certainly since the New Wave, as distinct discourses in France—the materials of high art and mass cinema. Instead, this chapter argues that many representative pop-art filmmakers are increasingly motivated to interweave the ingredients of France’s mainstream sector with its more esoteric, intellectual art et essai works. On the one hand, this chapter begins by studying case studies of French cinema at its most ingeniously commercial: the Mesrine and OSS 117 franchises, which are designed around stars like Vincent Cassel and Jean Dujardin, oriented to popular genres like the comedy and the crime thriller or policier, and attuned to audiences both local and international. From here, I explore how France has recently entered a hyper-commercial, global phase of its mainstream production sphere, focusing especially on how such popular French cinema targets American markets. But the neglected facet of this equation, defined in this chapter, uses the examples of leading and lesser known French filmmakers—from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi to Olivier Assayas to Serge Bozon to Robin Campillo and others—to define France’s pop-art cinema as a collision, an intermingling, a productive textual intersection between the forms and subjects of two such ostensibly opposed approaches to film.

Feminine cinema is the focus of Chapter 4, which charts the historical emergence of women in France, and the corresponding growth of French women filmmakers since the 1980s. The chapter considers how women increasingly permeate the French industry, from the popular mainstream to the more radical domain of the arthouse. Considering the materials of figures such as Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Siegrid Alnoy, the chapter outlines the salient critical models connected to women filmmakers in France, the theoretical notions and critical terminologies applied to what is a comparative success story within French production: the advance of females in a highly competitive, and traditionally chauvinistic, trade. On-screen, by result, in many representative feminine films we see evidence for a more textually progressive cinema, departing from the closed formal system of traditionally male-centered cinema in favor of more lyrical, polyvalent, rhetorically open forms. Once again, such cinema is highly empowering for the alert viewer, as witness the energetic reception of films that offer complex but compelling screen portraits of female characters, within diegetic worlds that represent the domains of women as at once liberating yet contingent, idyllic yet under