Channeling globalism: Canal+ as transnational French genre film producer

This article examines Canal+’s contribution to the recent or contemporary consolidation of three genres traditionally excluded from the French filmmaking landscape: romantic comedies, horror films, and teen movies. The many films from these emergent French genres funded and in frequent cases also more indirectly supported by Canal+ speak to the organization’s status as a transnational, transmedia production entity. Moreover, analyzing the new French genre trends in whose burgeoning the company has been instrumental suggests the difficulties of unpicking geo-cultural allegiances and influences in an ever more multidirectional, multiplatform, cross-hybridizing mediasphere. This article considers the case study films Alibi.com (2017) and Grave (2016) to illustrate the fact that, like the European audiovisual mainstream as a whole, French genre films are bound up in an increasingly transnational and complex intertextual web - a state of affairs promoted by multinational conglomerates such as Canal+. It nonetheless suggests that such French iterations of US-originated genres appropriate and transform rather than merely citing, echoing, or emulating existing models. What is more, drawing on theorizations of aesthetics and affect suggests that these processes can foster new identities.

The Emotional Politics of Limerence in Romantic Comedy Films

“Limerence” describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a romantic relationship, a period that is also the primary focus of many romantic comedy films. This chapter asks how filmmakers have used depictions of limerence to highlight spaces in which its potential for both disruption and loving care could be brought to political spheres. I look at a series of millennial romantic comedies that express emotional upheaval, vulnerability, and openness to change as qualities of relevance to both a romantic and a political selfhood. These “political romcoms” reveal a range of dynamic relations between notions of character competence, moral fiber, personality, and deservedness, and invite investigation of complex emotions that modify a more generalized positive affect associated with romantic comedy cinema: humiliation as a comic device and the existential fear of rejection.

Postfeminism à la Turca

This essay analyzes how postfeminism is constructed on a visual level in the Turkish context. It uses theories of postfeminism to discuss new popular romantic comedies of Turkish cinema by comparing the new female protagonists with the women portrayed in Yeşilçam melodramas. Three films—Kocan Kadar Konuş (dir. Kıvanç Baruönü, 2014), Hadi İnşallah (dir. Ali Taner Baltacı, 2014), and Aşk Nerede? (dir. Semra Dündar, 2015)—are analyzed from a postfeminist perspective, opening up a new scholarly discussion about the place of postfeminism in the Turkish cinema. These films represent what may be termed “Turkified” postfeminism, which has been commonly discussed for the Western world but not sufficiently taken into account for Middle Eastern women.

“Serious” Cinema and the Box Office

Ideological pressure continued to bedevil film editing and production in the 1970s. This decade saw increasing financial pressure and an emphasis on budgetary control. A scandal about Aleksei German’s Operation “New Year” was related to the film’s representation of the “Great Patriotic War,” but also to the failure to comply with production targets. The fuss led to the sacking of Ilya Kiselev and the appointment of Communist Party apparatchik Viktor Blinov. Yet Blinov continued to subscribe to Lenfilm’s core values of artistic quality and respect for talent, with the result that conflicts with regulatory bodies persisted. This was exacerbated by the policies of Leningrad’s Party leader, Grigory Romanov, who kept the studio’s activities under tight scrutiny. In 1978, Blinov was dismissed. The next appointment as general director was Vasily Provotorov, and most of his short tenure of office was occupied with issues of work discipline, with the liveliest work done for TV rather than the big screen. But under his successor, Vitaly Aksenov, filmmakers had the opposite problem of autocratic control that paid little heed to the studio’s artistic ethos. The main development of Aksenov’s time as director, which ended after only three years, was a successful line in blockbuster romantic comedies, such as Vladimir Bortko’s The Blonde from around the Corner and Igor Maslennikov’s Winter Cherries. Otherwise, signs of discontent and malaise became ever stronger. The studio entered the Gorbachev years in a diminished condition, having sacrificed the artistic prestige that reached its heights in the mid-1970s.

The Temporality of (Serialized) Romantic Comedy

Romantic comedies have a temporal structure based on suspense that I call temporality of the almost: the micro-narrative structure that repeatedly makes erotic resolution almost happen at several points in the story. This article analyzes how this temporality of constant and continual deferral functions as a retardatory structure posing obstacles apparently in order to keep characters apart, but, in fact, increasing the desire between them, and also between narrative and spectators.

Introduction to Standard Issue

This standard issue features six contributions from postgraduate and early career scholars working at the intersections of media, communications, education, sociology, and technoculture. The articles differ in their objects of inquiry – from sound in digital games, social networking sites, and digital technology in education, to broadcast journalism and romantic comedies, but they broadly converge around a common focus on temporality and time. Between them, the contributions present a good mix of empirical work and significant conceptual development, moving forward theoretical debates in the fields of media and communications. Concepts are either developed, through in-depth engagement with the extant literature (Amaral 2020; Martins & Piaia 2020), or tested through empirical studies using a variety of methods – from surveys (De Andrade & Calixto 2020) to digital ethnography (Polivanov & Santos 2020) to participant observation and interviews (Gomes, Vizeu, & de Oliveira 2020). In some cases, altogether innovative methodological approaches for analysing artefacts are proposed, as in Luersen and Kilpp (2020), whose article opens this standard issue of the journal.

Rethinking Romantic Comedy through the Art Film: Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In this chapter, Rafaele Ariano examines Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014) as a hybrid of the art film and the romantic comedy. Ariano conceptualizes the “art romantic comedy” as a sub-genre that targets audiences that would typically reject the romantic comedy based upon conventions of taste and cultural hierarchy. The chapter places Gondry in a cohort of contemporary auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola and Alexander Payne, whose romantic comedies are characterized by qualities drawn from art and indie cinema. These characteristics include the expressive use of film style and implementation of metafictional devices, complex “sensitive” protagonists, and endings that are ambiguous and thus only partially “happy.” Ariano applies this genre framework to an analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but also places the film within wider trends in the genre of romantic comedy.