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Jul 31, 2013
Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema
Summary
In his new book, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2013), James S. Williams engages the work of five contemporary filmmakers who are complex creators and interrogators of cinematic space in all its forms: screen, landscape, narrative, soundscape, and the space of spectatorship itself. Grappling simultaneously with film theory, the varieties of cinematic technique, and the social and political fields in which films are made and viewed, the book explores the spaces and places of films by Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. The book's seven chapters take the reader from the "provincial" films of Dumont, to Guédiguian's versions of Marseilles, to Cantet's space of the classroom, Kechiche's filmic métissage, and Denis' cinema of diaspora.
A theoretically sophisticated study that includes close readings of key films, the book is throughout concerned with the ways that cinema is a crucial site of representations of, and challenges to, French culture and tradition. Contemporary France and some of its most significant auteurs/directors here offer readers opportunities to think through critical concepts, practices, and experiences of and in the cinema. At the same time, the cinema and its spaces are sites of deep feeling, expression, and politics framing, de-framing, and re-framing the investments and fault lines of the wild, urban, exclusionary, multicultural, and postcolonial Republic.
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Roxanne Panchasi
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.
