This is an appraisal of the work of Coline Serreau, situating her films within the social, cultural and political context of France since May 1968, and assessing the impact of women's movements on French society and culture.
Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive – over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.
Coline Serreau became famous in 1985 when her third film, Trois hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Baby), the most successful French film of the 1980s. She was already known in France for her major contribution to feminist documentaries with the acclaimed Mais qu'est-ce qu'elles veulent?, a series of interviews with French women made between 1975 and 1977. She is now a key figure in French cinema and drama, with international hits including Romuald et Juliette (1989) and La Crise (1992). This appraisal of her work situates her films within the social, cultural and political context of France since May 1968, and assesses th emajor impact of the women's movement on French society and culture. Politics and sexual politics, two key aspects of Serreau's films and plays, are thoroughly examined. This book also considers the cultural influences of her work, and provides an overview of her films and filmic skills. Special attention is given to comedy, the cinematographic genre favoured by Serreau and the French audience, which is apprehended from a historical and gendered perspective. The clarity of the style and the wide-ranging analysis of Serreau's films and filming techniques make this book relevant both to students of film and film enthusiasts.
Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive – over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.
Film, a latecomer to the realm of artistic media, alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the discourses of the other arts--literature and painting especially--in order to carve out a position for itself among them. Exposing the anxiety in film's relation to its rival arts, Brigitte Peucker analyzes central issues involved in generic boundary crossing as they pertain to film and situates them in a theoretical framework. The figure of the human body takes center stage in Peucker's innovative study, for it is through this figure that the conjunction of literary and painterly discourses persistently articulates itself. It is through the human body, too, that film's consciousness of itself as a hybrid text and as a "machine for simulation" makes itself deeply felt. In films ranging from Weimar cinema through Griffith, Hitchcock, and Greenaway, Peucker probes issues in aesthetics problematized by Diderot and Kleist, among others. She argues that the introduction of movement into visual representation occasioned by film brings with it an underlying tension suggestive of castration and death. Peucker goes on to demonstrate how the encounter between narrative and image is both gendered and sexualized, rendering film a "monstrous" hybrid. In a final section, she explores in specific cinematic texts the permeable boundary between the real and representation, suggesting how effects such as tableau vivant and trompe l'oeil figure sexuality and death. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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