Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2018.1432452
Nathalie Mauffrey
Abstract This article relativises Varda’s feminism. When she films women in her documentaries, because she is herself a woman, she is not only filming herself but is also illustrating her idea of total cinema through her representation of the couple. The installation Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2005), in which she shows some widows who are doubly like her, first for having lost their husbands and second because they live on the same island of Noirmoutier, partakes of the same utopia. Her documentary shows a poetics of space stemming from Bachelard and Jung which is nurtured by each widow’s account, creating a collective imagination that posits the ambivalent union of the individual and the collective, of reality and the dream, of the feminine and the masculine. This article aims to show the extent to which Varda’s documentary gesture is part of this dialectical materialism of the imagination.
摘要本文对瓦尔达的女权主义进行了比较。当她在纪录片中拍摄女性时，因为她自己就是一个女性，她不仅在拍摄自己，而且通过对这对夫妇的表现来阐述她对整体电影的想法。装置作品《Noirmoutier的面纱》（Les Veuves de Noirmoudier，2005）展示了一些与她有双重相似之处的寡妇，第一是因为失去了丈夫，第二是因为她们生活在同一个Noirmoulier岛上，她们共享着同一个乌托邦。她的纪录片展示了一种源自巴切拉德和荣格的空间诗学，这种诗学是由每个寡妇的叙述所培育的，创造了一种集体想象，假设了个人和集体、现实和梦想、女性和男性的矛盾结合。本文旨在展示瓦尔达的纪实姿态在多大程度上是这种辩证唯物主义想象的一部分。
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2017.1383797
Timothy Scheie
Abstract French Western films land in a blind field in accounts of both film genre and national film industries. Genre studies often place a strong focus on Hollywood, while there remains a tendency to favour auteur and art cinema in studies of French film. French Westerns are all but invisible, dismissed as clumsy parodies of what André Bazin dubbed the ‘cinéma américain par excellence’. The convergence of the Western and France’s most visible post-war star therefore strikes a dissonant note. Brigitte Bardot’s global celebrity has been hailed as an emblem of transnational exchange. However, accounts of her star image dwell on the youthful sexuality exhibited in her early films or her consecration as a nouvelle vague icon. When not overlooked entirely, her Western pictures are cast as curiosities of a film career’s undistinguished end. Bringing critical pressure to the discordance between these films and the relays that shape ideas of both ‘Western’ and ‘Bardot’ yields a more differentiated understanding of her star image, of the Western genre and, when a singularly visible emblem of French cinema is cast in a genre closely associated with America and Hollywood, of the volatile conjunction of ‘French’ and ‘Western’.
法国西部电影在电影类型和国家电影产业的描述上都陷入了一个盲区。类型研究通常将重点放在好莱坞，而在法国电影研究中，仍有倾向于支持导演和艺术电影的趋势。法国西部片几乎都是看不见的，被视为拙劣地模仿了安德罗•巴赞(andr Bazin)所称的“cinsamacriain par excellence”。因此，西方和法国最耀眼的战后明星的汇聚敲响了一个不和谐的音符。碧姬·芭铎的全球知名度被誉为跨国交流的象征。然而，对她的明星形象的描述主要集中在她早期电影中表现出来的青春性感，或者她作为一个模糊的新小说偶像的奉献。如果没有被完全忽视，她的西方电影就会被视为电影生涯平淡结局的珍品。对这些电影之间的不协调以及塑造“西部片”和“芭铎”思想的传递带来批评压力，产生了对她的明星形象，西部片类型的更不同的理解，当法国电影的一个独特可见的标志被投在与美国和好莱坞密切相关的类型中时，“法国”和“西方”的不稳定结合。
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2016.1213587
Calum Watt
Abstract This article is based around an interpretation of the opening line of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010), ‘money is a public good’. This line is spoken by the economist Bernard Maris (1946–2015), who was killed during the assassinations in Paris in January 2015. The article identifies the source of this line and explores its context in Maris’s writings in the magazine Charlie Hebdo at the time of the financial crisis of 2008. Examining the meaning and implications of the line in relation to Maris’s reading of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, the article situates Godard’s film in relation to the contemporary events to which the line is a response. Furthermore, the article considers the filmic uses to which Godard puts the figure of Maris and how this allows the viewer to understand Maris, including the position Godard puts him in in relation to other real-life figures appearing in the film, namely Bob Maloubier and Alain Badiou. The article concludes by considering how an understanding of the persona of Maris can help to situate the ‘socialism’ of the film’s title as well as what it tells us about Godard’s approach to the figure of the intellectual in this film.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2016.1242045
A. Utterson
Abstract This article will analyse Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D feature film, Adieu au langage (2014), as a reflexive meditation on the changing technologies and aesthetics of cinema, in which the history and memory of an entire medium are evoked (or invoked) and reimagined via the apparatus of contemporary 3D imaging. The result is a film that says ‘goodbye’ (per the ‘adieu’ of the film's title) to cinema itself, or at least to a particular conception of cinema and cinematic language (per the ‘langage’ of the film's title), at an end-of-history or end-of-cinema moment at which many, including Godard, have long since proclaimed the medium’s existential demise. Engaging a recurring concern within the director’s oeuvre, Adieu au langage visually and sonically articulates a densely inscribed self-historiography, wherein the now-3D cinematic image maps its own history (or histories, plural), including its evolving technologies, and a broader existential trajectory that spans but also exceeds ‘birth’ and ‘death’ (or ‘deaths’, plural). Positioned between 3D and 2D, present and past, the ‘death’ of cinema and its potential ‘resurrection’, Adieu au langage exists as a revealing historiographic intervention whose 3D images at the edge of history bid ‘adieu’ to cinema to in turn reframe and rearticulate its future.
摘要本文将分析让-吕克·戈达尔的3D故事片《Adieu au langage》（2014），作为对电影技术和美学变化的反思，在这部电影中，通过当代3D成像装置唤起（或唤起）和重新想象整个媒介的历史和记忆。其结果是，在历史的终结或电影的终结时刻，包括戈达尔在内的许多人早就宣布了这种媒介的存在消亡，这部电影向电影本身，或者至少向电影的特定概念和电影语言（根据电影标题的“语言”）说了“再见”。Adieu au langage在导演的作品中反复引起人们的关注，他在视觉和声音上表达了一种密集的自我史学，其中，现在的3D电影图像描绘了它自己的历史（或历史，复数），包括它不断发展的技术，以及一个更广泛的生存轨迹，它跨越但也超过了“出生”和“死亡”（或“死亡”，复数）。Adieu au langage位于3D和2D、现在和过去、电影的“死亡”及其潜在的“复活”之间，是一种揭示历史的干预，其历史边缘的3D图像向电影“告别”，进而重塑和重新表述其未来。
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2018.1527972
Douglas Morrey
It is widely assumed that the New Wave has been singularly influential in the history of French cinema. In fact, while the nouvelle vague remains a constant point of reference for both filmmakers and critics (Morrey 2019), the movement itself can be seen to have marked such a unique conjunction of social, demographic and cultural shifts in France (de Baecque 1998; Neupert 2002) that it is unlikely ever to be repeated in the cinema. James Tweedie (2013) has argued that the New Wave was essentially a response to economic modernisation and the consequent rapid urban renewal in France and he suggests that comparable film movements can be found in subsequent decades in Taiwan and China as a result of broadly similar cultural transitions. Yet the New Wave can also be understood as a late example of a widely shared public culture that was soon eclipsed by the private consumption of television, gradually leading to the extreme fragmentation and specialisation of popular culture that we experience today. Still, any new and youthful development in French cinema must inevitably measure itself against the nouvelle vague and critics have been making these comparisons, with results both negative (the 1980s cinéma du look) and positive (the 1990s jeune cinéma français) for several decades (Morrey 2019). More broadly, any French director who looks upon filmmaking as a kind of artistic research, rather than purely as a mean to entertain, is bound to find models and inspiration in the New Wave. In this issue, Fiona Handyside explores the debt owed by Mia Hansen-Løve to the work of Éric Rohmer, in particular around the close attention paid by both directors to the mise en scène of speech in developing a philosophical cinema and in representing female experience. More pragmatically, the New Wave, as a movement that developed formal innovation partly as a response to economic necessity, can sometimes offer practical filmmaking tips to younger directors. Thus Handyside shows how Hansen-Løve borrows Rohmer’s trick of filming in ‘natural amphitheatres’ – that is, on location but in secluded spaces such as park benches enclosed by foliage – in order to preserve the clarity of speech in the sound recording. At the same time, the New Wave can serve as a sort of shorthand for French cinema’s ongoing dialoguewith Hollywood. Handyside demonstrates how Rohmer’s work was influenced by the comedies of Hollywood’s classical era. In turn, Rohmer’s persistent focus on ironically conceived love stories can be read as a kind of parallel commentary on the development of romantic comedy in Hollywood, a genre to which Hansen-Løve’s work obliquely responds. The remainder of this issue looks at late work by surviving New Wave directors, arguably justifying Edward Said’s definition of such work as characterised by ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’ (Said 2006, 7). It is a curious historical twist that the two New Wave directors who have survived the longest – and who
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2017.1408981
Fiona Handyside
Abstract Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1996) are landmark studies that established the centrality of women’s experience in mid-twentieth century Hollywood’s imaginary and posed, against a backdrop of increasing sexual equality following women’s suffrage, deep ethical questions of recognition and non-recognition, desire and freedom, within the traditional American heterosexual couple. Cavell identified conversation as central to these films’ attempts to grapple with shifting forms of private intimacy and their relation to broader changes in the public sphere. In this article, the author demonstrates that Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve deploy the Cavellian techniques of everyday language brought to vivid life within a naturalistic mise-en-scène to explore heterosexual coupling culture within changing French gender norms and roles. This allows their films to explore a specifically feminine subjectivity, bringing to the fore questions of self-reliance and doubt in a society which allows women legal and social freedom but still subjects them to patriarchal expectations. The article thus sheds light on why Rohmer and Hansen-Løve’s cinema makes such use of dialogue, its connection to a sympathetic interest in female becoming, and traces a new New Wave inheritance outside of Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2018.1427181
Douglas Morrey
Abstract Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent feature films, Film socialisme (2010) and Adieu au langage (2014), are striking for their prominent imagery of nature: recurring images include water and forests, and one of the principal ‘characters’ of Adieu au langage is a dog. In many ways, this can be seen to prolong a long-term project of aesthetic research begun in Godard’s films of the early 1980s, complete with the sometimes dubious gender politics of that period. The recent films also include an historico-political tirade against technocracy. Yet nature in these films is prevented from becoming a transcendent opposing pole to technics through the extreme fragmentation of Godard’s imagery that reaches an unprecedented level of distillation at this late stage of his career. As such, this article suggests that the difficult, unstable form of these films marks a serious attempt to capture something of a new political reality.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-12DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2018.1545199
Kelley Conway
ABSTRACT Visages Villages (2017), co-directed by Agnès Varda and photographer JR, is a performative, poetic documentary structured around the pair’s creation of portraits of ordinary people in the far-flung villages of rural France. This essay examines the links between Visages Villages and Varda’s documentary practice as a whole. The film extends Varda’s longstanding preoccupation with the power of place, documenting the filmmakers’ travels and their establishment of connections with people they meet on the road. The specificity of Visages Villages resides in its weaving together of the key motifs of vision and the vagaries of friendship, resulting in a series of staged and spontaneous encounters that raise questions about the function of art and the nature of collaboration.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-13DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2018.1528536
Jimia Boutouba
ABSTRACT Nicolas Boukhrief’s film Made in France (2015) charts an unsettling path into the world of terror, with the radical intent to shake public perceptions and disrupt state discourses by redirecting the gaze inward to investigate the very disturbing, and much repressed, phenomenon of home-grown terror. The film marks a major departure in Western films about terrorism, in that it frames the story through the perspective of the terrorist, and maps a different cartographic imagination, directing attention away from conceptions of terrorism as dispersed, networked or de-territorialised to establish a geography in which terror is located in the inner domain and manifests itself as a state of rupture or ‘anomie’. Made in France avoids the trap of perpetual binaries (‘us’ versus ‘them’ rhetoric) to deliver a trenchant message about the growing threat couched in the social fabric, and in our contemporary times. By shifting the gaze from the more generalised subject of ‘terrorism’ to focus on individual terrorists as well as processes of radicalisation and group dynamics, the film aims to unpack the concept of terrorist and undo the spectacle of terrorism in order to articulate a more complex and reflective narrative that emphasises causality, history and temporality.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-01DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2018.1531337
Maria Flood
ABSTRACT François Margolin and Lemine Ould Salem’s documentary Salafistes is without doubt one of the most controversial films about terrorism released in France in recent decades. The film’s central focus is the occupation of the northern Malian cities of Timbuktu and Gao by the jihadist group Ansar Dine, but Salafistes also mixes interviews with jihadis from groups such as Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb and ISIS members in Tunisia with jihadi propaganda videos, mostly from the Islamic State. Upon release, the film was subject to state restrictions on distribution, and it provoked strong reactions of both praise and censure in the national and international press. This article outlines the socio-political conditions surrounding the conflict in Mali and the work of filmmakers in the region, before considering some of the press responses that Salafistes evoked. This brief introduction is followed by an interview with Salafistes co-director François Margolin.
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