About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherIndiana University Press

ISBN-100253064899

ISBN-139780253064899

eBay Product ID (ePID)21057248222

Product Key Features

Number of Pages346 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameFrench B Movies : Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood

Publication Year2023

SubjectEurope / France, Film / History & Criticism, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

TypeTextbook

AuthorDavid A. Pettersen

Subject AreaPolitical Science, Performing Arts, History

SeriesNew Directions in National Cinemas Ser.

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.9 in

Item Weight18.5 Oz

Item Length8.9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2022-033275

Reviews"A much-needed contribution to scholarship on banlieue cinema. . . . Pettersen's analyses provide a thoughtful and highly informed discourse on identity politics in contemporary Western, multiracial societies that is of broad relevance, just as his overview of transnational genre theory and industrial exegeses will provide paradigms applicable to other areas of audiovisual study."--Mary Harrod, author of Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Rise of the Cine-fille "This compelling study revises our ideas about contemporary French cinema, foregrounding the banlieue film--from the work of Mathieu Kassovitz to Luc Besson to Céline Sciamma--and linking it the horror film, socially critical cinema, and art film. Pettersen makes judicious use of the tools of cultural history, critical theory, and film analysis in this excavation of the national and transnational character of French cinema."--Kelley Conway, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "A much-needed contribution to scholarship on banlieue cinema. . . . Pettersen's analyses provide a thoughtful and highly informed discourse on identity politics in contemporary Western, multiracial societies that is of broad relevance, just as his overview of transnational genre theory and industrial exegeses will provide paradigms applicable to other areas of audiovisual study."--Mary Harrod, author of Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Rise of the Cine-fille "This compelling study revises our ideas about contemporary French cinema, foregrounding the banlieue film--from the work of Mathieu Kassovitz to Luc Besson to Céline Sciamma--and linking it the horror film, socially critical cinema, and art film. Petterson makes judicious use of the tools of cultural history, critical theory, and film analysis in this excavation of the national and transnational character of French cinema."--Kelley Conway, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dewey Edition23

Grade FromCollege Graduate Student

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal791.430944

Table Of ContentAcknowledgments Note on Film Titles and French-Language Citations Introduction 1. Suburban Cinema Between Art and Genre 2. Luc Besson's EuropaCorp and Parkour in the Suburbs 3. Suburban Gangsters: Screen Violence and the Banlieues 4. Suburbanoia and French Banlieue Horror Films 5. Omar Sy: Black Superstardom in Contemporary France 6. Beyond the Art/Genre Divide: Céline Sciamma's Girlhood Conclusion: Genre, Inclusive Casting, and the Suburbs in the Age of SVoD Bibliography Index

Synopsis-- In 2017, David Pettersen was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms as a Knight. Prior to his induction, he founded an ongoing scholarly collaboration and exchange program with the Film and Media Studies Program at the Lumière University Lyon 2. As part of that work, he has organized conferences and co-edited two special journal issues of Écrans: Politique des auteurs / Auteur theory : Lectures contemporaines (Fall 2016) and Le cinéma ou la nouvelle expérience de l'art / Cinema or the new experience of art (Fall 2018). -- Pettersen's attention to France's B-movies offers a radically new idea of French cinema, with descriptions of blockbuster action films set in gritty urban spaces, and different, emergent notions about France observed in politically engaged filmmaking as a multicultural state with unequal access across parties to liberté, egalité, and fraternité. -- This book contributes to our offerings on French film, and IUP's strategic plan praises our stance as a leading publisher in this area. It is especially relevant to our film and media studies list because of the list's commitment to projects in postcolonial French and European studies and the series' focus on interdisciplinary and transnational approaches. -- The audience includes students, including undergraduates, and scholars of contemporary French and American cinema, transnationalism, and critical race studies. The book will be especially useful to those interested in transatlantic approaches to questions of race, migration, and cultural diversity in France., 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.

LC Classification NumberPN1993.5.F7P45 2023