Through the prisms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, French Minority Cinema explores key questions of identity and social interaction in the context of republican France, across two significant 'minority' cinemas: cinéma de banlieue and gay cinema. It offers the first comprehensive parallel study of these two bodies of film and their inter-relations, examining issues of national cinema and identity and the problematic status of minorities within the contemporary Republic. Against a backdrop of political and media debates on the PACS, parity, the affaire du voile and the French principle of laïcité, banlieue youth dissatisfaction, and gay parenting, French Minority Cinema charts the negotiatory discourse that has emerged through, and around, a core corpus of films released over the past two decades. This study will be of interest to scholars and students alike, working in the fields of French, Film, and Gay and Lesbian/Queer Studies.

French Queer Cinema examines the representation of queer identities and sexualities in contemporary French filmmaking. This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer film and video in France. French Queer Cinema addresses the emergence of a gay cinema in the French context since the late 1990s, including critical coverage of films by important contemporary directors such as Francois Ozon, Sebastien Lifshitz, Patrice Chereau, Andre Techine and Christophe Honore. Nick Rees-Roberts transposes contemporary Anglo-American Queer Theory to the study of French screen culture, drawing particular attention to issues of race and migration such as problematic fantasies of Arab masculinities in queer cinematic production. This theoretically-informed book engages with a number of fault-lines running through queer cultural representation in France including transgender dissent and the effects of AIDS and loss on the formation of queer identities and sexualities.

Reframing difference is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, cinema beur (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and cinema de banlieue (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates). Carrie Tarr's insightful account draws on a wide range of films, from directors such as Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassovitz and Djamel Bensalah. Her analyses compare the work of male and female, majority and minority film-makers, and emphasise the significance of authorship in the representation of gender and ethnicity. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that these films challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture, addressing issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French. This timely book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between cinema and citizenship in a multicultural society.

According to Mitchell, a “color-blind” post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against claims that race is an outmoded construct, he contends that race is not simply something to be seen but is a fundamental medium through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it.

In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film. French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin. David Pettersen traces how, in these works and others, directors fuse features of banlieue cinema with genre formulas associated with both Hollywood and Black cultural models, as well as how transnational genre hybridizations, such as B movies, have become part of the ecosystem of the French film industry. By combining film analysis, cultural history, critical theory, and industry studies, French B Movies reveals how featuring banlieues is as much about trying to imagine new identities and production models for French cinema as it is about representation.

To a large extent, the story of French filmmaking is the story of moviemaking. From the earliest flickering images of the late nineteenth century through the silent era, Surrealist influences, the Nazi Occupation, the glories of the New Wave, the rebirth of the industry in the 1990s with the exception culturelle, and the present, Rémi Lanzoni examines a considerable number of the world's most beloved films. Building upon his 2004 best-selling edition, the second edition of French Cinema maintains the chronological analysis, factual reliability, ease of use, and accessible prose, while at once concentrating more on the current generation of female directors, mainstream productions such as The Artist and The Intouchables, and the emergence of minority filmmakers (Beur cinema).

North African immigrants, once confined to France’s social and cultural margins, have become a strong presence in France’s national life. Similarly, descendants of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have gained mainstream recognition as filmmakers and as the subject of films. The first collective volume on this topic, Screening Integration offers a sustained critical analysis of this cinema. In particular, contributors evaluate how Maghrebi films have come to participate in, promote, and, at the same time, critique France’s integration. In the process, these essays reflect on the conditions that allowed for the burgeoning of this cinema in the first place, as well as on the social changes the films delineate. Screening Integration brings together established scholars in the fields of postcolonial, Francophone, and film studies to address the latest developments in this cinematic production. These authors explore the emergence of various genres that recast the sometimes fossilized idea of ethnic difference. Screening Integration provides a much-needed reference for those interested in comprehending the complex shifts in twenty-first-century French cinema and in the multicultural social formations that have become an integral part of contemporary France in the new millennium.

"An all-encompassing history of French motion pictures and cinematographic trends chronologically from 1895 to the present"--

This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.

A thought-provoking study of what contemporary French cinema has to say about immigration and social cohesion.