Looking Through the Rearview Mirror

Probing the continuities and discontinuities of queer representation and expression in the vast, multiform corpus of French cinema up to 1945, this chapter celebrates moments of queer visual and auditory intimacy and pleasure in both celebrated and little-known or neglected films. It aims to prove that early French cinema, despite its all-too-evident heterosexist matrices and repressive tendencies (notably the negative and often highly crude, fetishizing stereotypes of the “homosexual,” “lesbian,” and “cross-dresser”), also discloses unpredictable and non-normative aesthetic spaces or “interzones”—of filiation, desire, and sensation—that resist easy categorization (social, cultural political), elude the gender fixities of the period, and are rich in radical ambiguity and queer suggestion, even subversion. A new, materialist, queer aesthetics and historiography is proposed that ties early French film production and spectatorship to abiding aspects of the French cinematic tradition such as cinephilia and film criticism.

Teaching French Language Through Films: The Cultural Contents in French and Francophone Films

Foreign language teaching in the current globalization era needs to compete with technological development. This competition is related to the discovery of digital technology-based methods to motivate learners to provide more interesting cultural content in language classes. For teachers from different cultural backgrounds, authentic documents such as films are considered very effective in delivering cultural content. This research takes a French film, Intouchables, and a Canadian francophone film, Monsieur Lazhar, as a research corpus for their cultural content to be analyzed. The proper understanding of the two films' cultural content can inform a digital technology-based French-language teaching medium. To discover what strategies or formulas are used in teaching French with cultural-laden films as teaching media requires studying the films by dissecting the structure of the text. Examination of the structure of the films was based on the theory of Boggs and Petrie (2008), equipped with in-depth reading to find signs in the text by referring to Buckland (2004); and also the identification of cultural content using the cultural approach by Stern (1992). The construction of a teaching plan with a language teaching approach by Damen (1987) and Byram (1997) will be the last step. This research provides an academic outcome that is a film structural analysis to identify cultural content in the two films. The second outcome is a practical categorization of cultural content utilized as a language teaching material.

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese

This chapter analyzes how Hugo (2011, dir. Martin Scorsese) metacinematically approximates what French film theorist Alexandre Astruc called the caméra-stylo, or camera pen, through which cinema communicates as written language. In “writing” a film history around and through Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), Hugo’s metacinematic caméra-stylo strictly adheres to classical auteur theory ideas about personal, authorial enunciation. However, Scorsese writes a metacinematic film history that periodically disavows personal enunciation to claim film-historical truth, fact, and canon—a white, male, paternalistic canon that teaches Hugo’s young audience a warped film history. Hugo’s metacinematic, historiographic writing invokes contemporary debates about videographic criticism, the essayistic mode, and film historiography conveyed on film.

The evolution of European stunt art (50–70s of the twentieth century)

The purpose of the article is to identify the specifics of the formation and development of stunt art in French cinema of the 1950-1970s; analyze the contribution to the process of formation in the European film industry stunt as a profession of French actors and performers of film stunts. Methodology. The scientific provisions of the article are reasoned at the level of the totality of general scientific methods of cognition and approaches of modern art history. The historical, analytical and typological methods were applied, which contributed to determining the specifics of the professionalization process of stunt art in the French film industry in the 1950-1970s, as well as the typological features of cinema stunts of the leading French stuntmen; a method of comparative analysis (to identify the characteristic signs of stunt activities before and after professionalization) and other. Scientific novelty. For the first time in Russian art criticism, the process of development and professionalization of stunt art in European cinema of the 1950-1970s has been studied. on the example of the evolution of French historical stunt scenes (films “cloak and sword”), adventure and detective films; reviewed and analyzed the professional activities of C. Carlier, R. Julien, J. Delamard and other French stuntmen of this period; revealed the influence of American stunt performers, the specifics of the development of French stunt art, as well as characterized the evolution of stunt techniques, the use of existing ones and the development of new safety methods for their implementation. Conclusions. The content and nature of professional stunt activities in the context of cinematic art are non-static, since its dynamism is determined by the stunt status in the continuous qualification system. The stunt man is the stunt developer, stunt coordinator (stunt director), and the head of the stunt troupe. In the 50–70s. XX century in French cinema, a complex process of professionalization of stunt art took place, the motivation of which was the need to assimilate professional knowledge, skills, abilities, and expand the experience of professional activity. The specifics of the French movie stunts by C. Carlier, R. Julien, J. Delamard, and I. Cipher are manifested in originality, exposure to the viewer with a degree of risk, and a specially refined aesthetics.

O Acossado e o cinema moderno da desmistificação godardiana

The French film “À bout de souffle” (Acossado, 1959) directed by Jean-Luc Godard represents the transgression of social, political and aesthetic norms. Having begun a new cycle in twentieth-century cinematography, this film questions, explains, and parodies American gangster films. We intend, here, to interpret them on their foundations and aesthetic results.

Cinematography’s Blind Spots: Artistic Exploitations of the Film Frame

This chapter discusses filmic and photographic works that focus on isolated film frames, whether extracted from the continuum of a film strip, as in Slide Movie (Gebhard Sengmüller, 2007) and Und ich blieb stehen. (Thames, London) (Susanne Miggitsch, 2017), or captured photographically from a book or a viewing table, as in Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon) (Peter Tscherkassky, 1984/2008) and Précis de decomposition (Éric Rondepierre, 1993–1999). Usually rendered invisible during projection, a single frame represents the ‘blind spot’ of cinematography. An explicitly ideological perspective was offered in 1971 by French film critic Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, who distinguished between the use of extracted frames (or ‘photograms’) and idealized still photographs produced on a film set. These ‘parasitic photographs’ no longer bear traces of the material state of a given film copy; they look flawless and perfectly meet ideological requirements of ‘legibility’ and ‘beauty’. The examples presented here bypass ideological claims, because, on the one hand, their dissected frames belong to the same order as the film they are taken from, and, on the other, they result in varying forms of ‘illegibility’.