Le Ciné Françs is an irresistible illustrated guide and primer to the best of French films, starting with the 1950s, through the spectrum of French New Wave, and on to modern-day confections. Starring the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, and Jeanne Moreau, and directed by iconoclasts such as Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard, French movies are as touching, beautiful, and romantic as they come in all of film. Le Ciné Françs captures their spirit in whimsical detail. Each movie is covered with a plot summary; back stories; and illustrations by author/artist Anne Keenan Higgins of highlight scenes, costumes, props, and characters that are as enchanting as the films themselves. This gorgeously gifty tribute to French cinema is not just for movie buffs or followers of international films, but for all who are enchanted by French culture.

Here is the definitive story of one of the most celebrated filmmakers of our time, an intensely private individual who cultivated the public image of a man consumed by his craft. But as this absorbing biography shows, Truffaut's personal story—from which he drew extensively to create the characters and plots of his films—is itself an extraordinary human drama.

This book focuses on the debates which shook French cinema in the immediate aftermath of the student revolution of May 1968. Alison Smith examines these effects across the spectrum of French production, the rise of new genres and re-formulation of older ones. Chapters investigate political thrillers, historical films, new naturalism and Utopian fantasies, dealing with a wide variety of films. A particular concern is the extent to which filmmakers' ideas and intentions are contained in or contradicted by their finished work, and the gradual change in these ideas over the decade.

It can be argued that cinema was created in France by Louis Lumi_re in 1895 with the invention of the cinZmatographe, the first true motion-picture camera and projector. While there were other cameras and devices invented earlier that were capable of projecting intermittent motion of images, the cinZmatographe was the first device capable of recording and externally projecting images in such a way as to convey motion. Early films such as Lumi_re's La Sortie de l'usine, a minute-long film of workers leaving the Lumi_re factory, captured the imagination of the nation and quickly inspired the likes of Georges MZli_s, Alice Guy, and Charles PathZ. Through the years, French cinema has been responsible for producing some of the world's best directors_Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Fran_ois Truffaut, and Louis Malle_and actors_Charles Boyer, Catherine Deneuve, GZrard Depardieu, and Audrey Tautou. The A to Z of French Cinema covers the history of French film from the silent era to the present in a concise and up to date volume detailing the development of French cinema and major theoretical and cultural issues related to it. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, photographs, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on many of the major actors, directors, films, movements, producers, and studios associated with French cinema. Going beyond mere biographical information, entries also discuss the impact and significance of each individual, film, movement, or studio included. This detailed, scholarly analysis of the development of film in France is useful to both the novice and the expert alike.

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspects of French cinema from 1990 to the present day. Features original contributions from top film scholars relating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema Includes new research on matters relating to the political economy of contemporary French cinema, developments in cinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digital filmmaking Contains an unusually large range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those of genre, gender, auteur, industry, economic, star, postcolonial and psychoanalytic studies Includes essays by important French cinema scholars from France, the U.S., and New Zealand, many of whose work is here presented in English for the first time

Colin Crisp re-evaluates the stylistic evolution of the classic French cinema, and represents the New Wave film-makers as its natural heirs rather than the mould-breakers they perceived themselves to be.

This revised and updated edition of a successful and established text provides a much-needed historical overview of French cinema from its roots through to the political and social developments in the 1990s and beyond.

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.

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.

Screenwriters have been central figures in French cinema since the conversion to sound, from early French-language talkies for the domestic market to lavish literary adaptations of the notorious 'quality tradition' of the 1950s, and from the ‘aesthetic revolution’ of the New Wave to the contemporary popular and auteur film in the 2000s. The first English language study to address screenwriters in French cinema, this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of French film and screenwriting. Taking a diachronic approach, it includes case studies drawn from the early sound period to the present day in order to offer an alternative historiography of French cinema, shed light on these overlooked figures and revisit the vexed question of film authorship.