Phil Powrie

Heritage, history and ‘new realism’: French cinema in the 1990s

Abstract A number of key events in the 1990s have helped shape the decades cinema. The first of these is the conjuncture of the GATT negotiations (culminating in 1993) and the ascendancy of heritage cinema to mainstream dominance in French production at the expense of popular genres such as comedy and the polar. The second is the attempted return of the auteur through the influential 1994 television series ‘Tous les garcons et les filles de leur âge’. Finally, overlapping to some extent with the return of the auteur, is the arrival of a new generation of film‐makers whose political impact in the call for civil disobedience of February 1997 has undoubtedly affected the way in which the French view the films of this younger generation of directors.

Politics and embodiment in Karmen Geï

The Carmen narrative is one of the most frequently adapted to the screen, with some 80 films since 1895. However, despite the connections with Africa which Prosper Mérimée’s novella of 1845 indicated with its many references to Egypt (the word at the origin of the appellation “gypsy,” because gypsies were said to have originated there), and Nietzsche’s observation that Bizet’s opera had an African sensibility (qtd. in McClary 118), the vast majority of the adaptations have white actors in European settings, usually, but certainly not always Spain. One of the three exceptions is Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), which is one of the best-known adaptations. The other two were both released in 2001: Carmen: A Hip Hopera (USA, dir. Robert Townsend), starring the lead singer of Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé Knowles; and Karmen Geï (Senegal/France/Canada, dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka), with Djeinaba Diop Gaï. Karmen Geï opens explosively in a riot of music and color, much like Bizet’s opera. But there the resemblance ends, for the music is by an American, the well-known jazz tenor saxophonist David Murray with more than 80 albums to his credit since the 1970s. His freewheeling improvisations play against the heady rhythm of 40 sabar drummers, led by Doudou N’Diaye Rose, Professor of Rhythm at Dakar’s Arts Institute, Chief of the National Ballet, and composer of Senegal’s national anthem. The drums slowly take over as Murray’s saxophone is backgrounded, and they are made all the more stirring by having the location soundtrack doubled up by a studio track (see Anon. [a]). Karmen, smiling straight at the camera, sits provocatively, legs wide open, dressed in black, her thighs swaying open to the music. A reverse shot establishes that she is seducing a woman dressed in a severe khaki uniform. Karmen gets to her feet, to the wild cheering of what seems to be, apart from the male drummers, an all-women crowd, her flowing robe revealing flashes of red underclothes, as she dances erotically towards the woman in khaki. They dance together, soon surrounded by a swirling, shouting, seething mass of women in a variety of colorful robes. A whistle blows, and the camera pulls back and up. We are not in Bizet’s cigarette factory, but in the infamous fortress on Senegal’s Gorée Island, where slaves in the fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries spent their last few days in Senegal before being taken to the New World. The women are prisoners, surrounded by high walls and guards; the woman in khaki is the Warden, Angélique (Stéphanie Biddle). Smitten by Karmen, she will invite her to bed and then free her; later in the film, she commits suicide by drowning. Karmen appears unexpectedly at the wedding of a high-ranking official’s daughter with Corporal Lamine Diop (Magaye Niang), the Don José equivalent. Karmen accuses the assembled

The surrealist mind

This work reflects the search for proof of the existence of a mind that may be accurately called surrealist. Concentrating on painting and poetry, it shows how the surrealists envisaged, reacted to, and practiced art as a creative activity.

Money: now you see it now you don’t

The global economic crisis of 2008 was the worst since 1929. Its effects have been felt across the world, ranging from the closure or restructuring of ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks, beginning with Lehman Brothers in September 2008, to the recession of many national economies and the near-collapse of others, such as Greece, together with swinging cuts in many countries as governments attempt to absorb unsustainable levels of debt. The reasons for the crisis have been thoroughly analysed, with most commentators arguing that the principal cause was the over-confidence and greed of the banks. The Economist ran a series of articles five years on, exploring the multiple causes. These made it quite clear that the banks were the prime problem, given that they:

Pierre Batcheff, the surrealist star

Abstract Pierre Batcheff was one of the foremost jeunes premiers of 1920s cinema. Unlike his fellow stars, he despised the commercial films he made, and engaged with the surrealists and their sympathizers, leading to his role as the Man in Un chien andalou in 1929. In this article, we argue that Batcheffs performance style, which more often than not involved distancing himself from the action and from his female screen partners, and his star persona as the exotic other, contributed to make him what might seem like a contradiction in terms: a surrealist star. We show how the ideological preoccupations of the surrealists at the end of the 1920s, whether in relation to literature (Breton), painting (Dalí), or cinema (Artaud), intersected with those of Batcheff, making him an exemplary uncanny object, as defined by Hal Fosters work on surrealism.

Ren Daumal and the pataphysics of liberation

ConclusionDaumals use of pataphysics is not, I would contend, quite as cosmetic as Torma suggests. Certainly it fulfils the same function as negation, and therefore might appear to be redundant. But the following passage stresses just how important the concept of humour is in Daumals soteriology:En usant toujours de tels mots que négation, plus exacts peut-être en leurs sens originels, je craindrais de laisser entendre cette opération comme un vain simulacre abstrait du discours, un vain schème vocal. Et, pour tâcher que tu ne retombes dans le sommeil de ton ‘savoir’ philosophique, je dirai donc plutôt, quand je parle bien du doute méthodique, sarcasme ou dérision méthodique (T 41; Daumals emphasis).Despite its heavily idealist overtones, therefore, Daumals method relies far more on the provocation of the rational mind, than it does on the Hegelian Geist, the hypothesis of absolute consciousness.Humour is not just a Bergsonian social corrective for Daumal, a convenient critical tool with which to excoriate the absurdities of science, as it had been for Jarry in Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien.27 Nor is it just a protection against a hostile world, as Breton claims, following Freud.28 For Daumal, it is certainly the former, and could well be the latter; but it is more. It is a soteriological tool of self-criticism and humility, which, like acid, gnaws away at self-importance and self-satisfaction in the search for an authentic self untrammelled by the absurdity of bourgeois individualism. I shall leave the final word to Daumal, whose apparently gnomic Clavicule 3 from Le Contre-Ciel aptly summarizes in its playfulness the joyous rejection of the absurdity of the individual self:Recule encore derrière toi-même ris:Le Non est prononcé sur ton rire.Le Rire est prononcé sur ton NON.Renie ton Nom, ris de ton NON (CC 26).

New directions in contemporary French comedies : from nation, sex and class to ethnicity, community and the vagaries of the postmodern

Comedy, as is the case with many national cinemas, is one of the most dominant genres, if not the most dominant, in French cinema, as Raphaëlle Moine has shown (2014, 233–234). Comedies are even more popular now than they used to be in terms of spectator numbers. Since 2000, for example, French comedies have dominated the best-seller list in France, as can be seen in Table 1, which gives the 27 best-selling films since 2000.1 In the period 2000–2007 there were only 6 French comedies out of the 18 best-sellers in Table 1, representing a third (positions 11, 25, 26, 47, 57, 59), while from 2008–2014 6 out of 9 French films are comedies (positions 2, 3, 19, 51, 68, 96), representing two-thirds. This corresponds to a shift from a 39% share of the total number of French spectators in the first half of the period to an astonishing 72% of the best-selling films since 2008. And yet, surprisingly, while there are many coffee-table or popular books on the genre in French cinema, such as biographies of stars, there is as yet very little major academic work. General works on genre tend to focus on Hollywood comedies, occasionally with some nods to French comic stars, for example Olivier Mongin’s reflection on the genre which includes some work on Jacques Tati and Louis de Funès (Mongin 2002). There are few academic monographs on directors associated with the genre. There is a thesis on Pierre Colombier, active during the 1920s and 1930s, and director of major comic stars such as Georges Milton in Le Roi des resquilleurs (1930), Raimu in Ces messieurs de la Santé (1933) and Théodore et Cie (1933), and Fernandel in Ignace (1937) (Binet 2003), and a couple of standard introductions to the work of Jean-Pierre Mocky (Le Roy 2000; Prédal 1988). But there is as yet nothing substantial on Gérard Oury, JeanMarie Poiré or Francis Veber, directors of some of the most successful French comedies of the 1980s and beyond. The only two major works on French film comedy in recent times are both by Anglophone academics: Rémi Lanzoni’s broad introduction (2014) and Mary Harrod’s in-depth study of the recent development of the romcom (2015a). With the exception of some essential articles by Raphaëlle Moine, which we refer to in this introduction, there is as yet nothing major by French academics on contemporary developments. It is not difficult to understand why this is the case. Comedy, more than any other genre, is a ‘bad object’, a repository of low-denominator stereotypes and the source of the potentially guilty pleasure accruing from them that appears to be difficult to justify critically. This is particularly the case in France, where the critical establishment has until recently been more interested in auteur cinema than popular genres. As Moine has argued in her book on genre (2005, 66–85), whether one adopts the position of the Frankfurt School – that comedies like all genres function principally to maintain the status quo – or whether one adopts the position inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth – that comedy, like other genres, functions to express and reconcile social and cultural tensions – these two positions, antithetical in appearance, both operate to neutralise dissent, allowing bad objects to inculcate Sartrean bad faith as the audience unquestioningly accepts questionable representations. As Moine says, the guilty pleasure one may feel emerges from the fact that comedy ‘autorise un plaisir contre-culturel sans générer de danger social’2 (79).

Bibliography for Jacques Audiard

General Dobson, Julia. 2008. “Jacques Audiard: Contesting Filiations.” In Kate Ince (ed) Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, edited by Kate Ince, 38–58. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dobson, Julia. 2010. “Asserting Text, Context and Intertext: Jill Forbes and French Film Studies.” In Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives, 1985–2010, edited by Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy, 117–126. Bristol: Intellect Rouyer, Philippe and Yann Tobin. 2012. “Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: qu’est-ce que le discours amoureux aujourd’hui.” Positif 616: 9–14. Rouyer, Philippe and Claude Vassé. 2005. “Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: et si tuer quelqu’un au cinéma, c’était difficile?” Positif 529: 21–25. Tirard, Laurent and Thomas Baurez. 2006. “Jacques Audiard.” Leçons de cinéma 2. Paris: Nouveau monde éditions.

Bibliography for French and francophone cinema 2010–2015

1. Abecassis, Michaël, and Marcelline Block, eds. 2015. French Cinema in Close-up: La Vie d’un acteur pour moi. Dublin: Phaeton. 2. Alexandre, Olivier. 2015. La règle de l’exception: l’écologie du cinéma français. Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales. 3. Andrew, Dudley, ed. 2011. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and its Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 4. Andrew, Dudley. 2012. What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and its Charge. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 5. Anwar, Mabrouki. 2014. Le cinéma tunisien contemporain: analyse d’une vingtaine de films (entre 2000 et 2007). Saarbrücken: Éditions universitaires Europeennes. 6. Archer, Neil. 2013. The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity. Oxford: Berghahn. 7. Assiba d’Almeida, Irène, and Sonia Lee. 2015. Essais et documentaires des africaines francophones: un autre regard sur l’Afrique. Paris: L’Harmattan. 8. Aurouet, Carole. 2014. Le cinéma des poètes: de la critique au ciné-texte. Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau. 9. Austin, Guy. 2012. Algerian National Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 10. Banaji, Ferzina. 2012. France, Film and the Holocaust: From Genocide to Shoah. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 11. Bantcheva, Denitza, and Roberto Chiesi. 2015. Le film noir français: figures, mythologies, auteurs. Rome: Gremese. 12. Bazin, André. 2014. André Bazin’s New Media. Edited and translated by Dudley Andrew. Oakland: University of California Press. 13. Bickerton, Emilie. 2011. A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma. London: Verso. 14. Binh, N. T., José Moure, and Frédéric Sojcher. 2013. Paris-Hollywood, ou le rêve français du cinéma américain. Paris: Klincksieck. 15. Blum-Reid, Sylvie. 2015. Traveling in French Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Money talks: the logorrheic masquerade in two films from 1934

In the early 1930s there were a number of financial scandals, involving fraud and corruption at the highest levels, as talented individuals played unregulated markets at the expense of small savers. The best known of these involved the banker Marthe Hanau – whose story was later told in La Banquière (Francis Girod, 1980) – and Alexandre Stavisky (the subject of Alain Resnais’s 1974 film). The scandals led to several plays, two of which were made into films in 1934: Ces messieurs de la Santé (Pierre Colombier, starring Raimu) and La Banque Nemo (Marguerite Viel, starring Victor Boucher). The two films have several common features: a charismatic and garrulous male lead as the unscrupulous banker, who tricks those around him into investing their savings unwisely. This is done with help of a female assistant. She seduces the men sexually, while the banker seduces them with words. The culmination of each film is investment in (imaginary) minerals in foreign lands. This article will show how the films’ currency is the seduction of erotic and exotic dreams beneath which there is literally nothing: what circulates, masquerading as something, is the power of words in a spectacular star performance.