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. Cet article examine la contribution apportée par Canal+ à la consolidation contemporaine ou récente de trois genres traditionnellement absents dans le paysage de la production cinématographique français: les comédies romantiques, les films d’horreur et les teen movies. Les maints films relevant de ces genres naissants qui ont bénéficié du financement de Canal+ - et souvent d’autres soutiens moins directs - évoquent le statut transnational et transmédiatique de l’organisation en tant que fabrique de production. Par ailleurs, l’analyse des nouvelles tendances de genre dont le succès se doit considérablement à Canal+, indique la difficulté de dénouer les allégeances et les influences géo-culturelles dans une médiasphère qui ne cesse de multiplier les voies de distribution, les directions des échanges et communications et la promiscuité des références. L’article focalise les cas d’étude Alibi.com (2017) et Grave (2016) pour illustrer que les films de genre français, tout comme la culture audiovisuelle grand public européenne en général, font partie d’une toile intertextuelle chaque fois plus transnationale et complexe - situation encouragée par des organisations multinationales telles que Canal+. Il soutient néanmoins que de tels exemples français de genres d’origine américaine s’emparent des modèles existants pour les transformer, et non pour les citer, les copier ou en faire l’écho. Qui plus est, en s’appuyant sur la théorie esthétique et affective, l’on suggère que ces processus ont la capacité de nourrir de nouvelles identités

Making Confessions: The Confessional Voice Found Among Literary Genres

This graduate thesis will explore the term confessional and its application to literature. The term confessional varies; confessional writing can take different forms in different genres. In this thesis, works by contemporary authors of personal lyric poetry, memoir, and fiction are discussed and an investigation of confessional writing within their work is undertaken. While not all authors use a direct confessional voice, the overall effect of their writing creates an intimate space between the writer and reader. A sense of self-reflection on the part of the author gives a confessional feel to his or her work. While the lines of literary conventions separate genres, confessional writing tends to blur those lines by bringing the message of the work to the forefront. A piece of literature said to be of a particular genre is challenged when one discovers a confessional voice, as it weaves itself among genres and changes the face of the genre itself. While the confessional voice may be less pronounced in fiction, when we think we hear it speaking, albeit unconsciously on the part of the writer, the same effect takes place: writer and reader become engaged in a communicative relationship that reveals secrets of the heart. In exploring personal lyric poetry and memoir of Gregory Orr, personal lyric poetry of Linda Gregerson and Frank Bidart, short stories and essays by Susan Sontag, and finally, the short stories, essays, and letters of Flannery O\u27Connor, confessional writing proves to be ambiguous in meaning and difficult to define; nevertheless, each author uniquely incorporates varying degrees of confessionalism to achieve a sense of intimacy that is not a result of the genre they are working in, but in how they say what they do within the genre they have chosen to write in

'Money can't buy me love' : radical right-wing populism in French romantic comedies of the 2010s

This article surveys developments in the French romantic comedy of the 2010s from a cultural studies perspective. Specifically, it considers how the particularities identifiable in the French genre following its emergence in the 1990s and consolidation by the end of the 2000s have evolved during the next decade. It argues that the most striking new trend comprises a more domestically circumscribed orbit for the genre, with notably fewer export successes, paralleled by the increased prominence of nationalistically inflected and/or otherwise broadly retreatist themes, notably in relation to 'globalizing’ conformist (neo-liberal) values. These traits manifest themselves through elements such as explicit celebrations of French culture, especially that of the northern French provinces that are the historical heartland of the right; obsessive representations and validations of heterosexual family structures, including through homophobic elements; a marked accentuation of bromance and other misogynistic elements in the genre; and a parodic if not mocking attitude towards generic and cultural values coded as North American – albeit one typically embedded in layers of ‘self-reflexive’ postmodern irony. I argue that this last tendency, constituting one of the complexities of the hybrid French genre à l’américaine, is useful for interrogating the very concept of radical ideology – and its antithesis, conformity – for their different meanings in diverse geo-cultural contexts

From postnational mobility to posthuman fluidity : unfixed identities and social responsibilities in Personal Shopper (Assayas, 2016) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017)

This article approaches contemporary European cinema as transnational cinema from an angle informed by gender and sexuality studies. It is underpinned by a fluid conception of identity, which it identifies with its objects of study, in terms of production context, market positioning and also form and theme. Specifically, I approach comparatively the embrace of postnational textual identity alongside posthuman ‐ especially post-gender ‐ characterization by two of the most visible recent European auteur films, Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper (2016) and Michael Haneke's Happy End (2017). I consider the ideological implications of the narratives' explorations of immorality in a contemporary western context marked in both films by the breakdown of communication and a related failure of ethical responsibility, often constellated in relation to technological advancement. The article draws on the Continental theories of Slavoj Žižek and to a lesser extent Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman to illuminate the extent to which these films' subtle and conflicted yet tenaciously enduring nostalgia for earlier ideals of European community is discernible via or inseparable from regret at the loss of an imagined 'natural' mode of embodiment, including more traditional gender roles. It finally reflects briefly on the related question of the attitudes towards European cinema itself, as well as cinemas associated with the past more generally, which these films display and invite the audience to share

Heightened genre and women’s filmmaking in Hollywood : Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) as teen gothic

In this video essay I explore intertextuality in Twilight as a marker of cinephilic female authorship. I aim to show that the film relies for much of its gripping effect on overtly re-engaging overdetermined structures of feeling established by earlier texts, in other words by invoking genre memory. Considering the key genres with which the film engages – notably Gothic horror and romance as well as the teen film – I demonstrate how Twilight repeatedly appeals to cultural knowledge at not only an intellectual but also an emotional level. I suggest that apostrophising the mind and the body simultaneously and in a way that cannot be parsed demands to be read as a feminist gesture, since the mode of address adopted by what I call heightened genre films such as this one forecloses the viability of Cartesian dualistic understandings of human experience on which patriarchal exclusions of women and other groups have often rested

The “Selfish” Mothers of Contemporary French Screen Comedy

This article explores a salient trend for “selfish” behaviours featuring in comic depictions of motherhood and the female actors who embody it in French cinema and secondarily television in the late 2010s. I identify tensions between various postfeminist ideals and the self-sacrifice and morally exemplary behaviour associated with contemporary parenting norms, including as coloured by US influence, which combines in an exigent admixture with traditionally more draconian French approaches. Specifically, the article focalises the emergence of the “can-do” mother who combines maternity with professional and successful fulfilment in female-authored film, as well as the “mother behaving badly” informed by comparable Anglophone representations. In both cases, it homes in on the images of star actors (in particular, Julie Delpy, Catherine Deneuve and Marina Foïs but also Karin Viard, Virginie Efira and Juliette Binoche) as key determinants in the ideological resonance of the portrayals under examination, with their popular personae fleshing out and tending to endorse recently expanded parameters for contemporary French motherhood.Cet article étudie les représentations récurrentes d’une maternité « égoïste » dans la comédie française de la seconde moitié des années 2010. Il met en lumière les tensions entre les idéaux postféministes et le modèle de dévouement et de comportement moralement exemplaire, au sein de normes parentales contemporaines contraignantes où l'influence américaine s'articule à une tradition française plus draconienne en la matière. Deux figures dominantes sont successivement examinées : celle de la mère « capable (can-do) » chez qui la maternité s'ajoute aux succès professionnel et sexuel, dans des films réalisés par des femmes, et celle de la « mère qui se comporte mal (mother behaving badly) », particulièrement répandue dans le paysage audiovisuel anglophone. Dans les deux cas, une attention particulière est portée aux actrices qui incarnent ces rôles (notamment Julie Delpy, Catherine Deneuve et Marina Foïs, mais aussi Karin Viard, Virginie Efira et Juliette Binoche), dont la persona et la popularité influent de manière déterminante la portée idéologique de ces portraits de mères « égoïstes », en leur donnant de la consistance et de l’attrait, contribuant ainsi à l’élargissement des normes de maternité dans la société française contemporaine

New directions in contemporary French comedies : from nation, sex and class to ethnicity, community and the vagaries of the postmodern

Comedy, as is the case with many national cinemas, is one of the most dominant genres, if not the most dominant, in French cinema, as Raphaëlle Moine has shown (2014, 233–234). Comedies are even more popular now than they used to be in terms of spectator numbers. Since 2000, for example, French comedies have dominated the best-seller list in France, as can be seen in Table 1, which gives the 27 best-selling films since 2000.1 In the period 2000–2007 there were only 6 French comedies out of the 18 best-sellers in Table 1, representing a third (positions 11, 25, 26, 47, 57, 59), while from 2008–2014 6 out of 9 French films are comedies (positions 2, 3, 19, 51, 68, 96), representing two-thirds. This corresponds to a shift from a 39% share of the total number of French spectators in the first half of the period to an astonishing 72% of the best-selling films since 2008

Cinephilia as Multilingualism in The Artist

The Multilingual Screen is the first volume to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the place of multilingualism in cinema, investigating the ways in which linguistic difference and exchange have shaped, and continue to shape, the medium's history. Moving across a vast array of geographic, historical, and theoretical contexts, the essays in this collection address the aesthetic, political, and industrial significance of multilingualism in film production and reception. Attending to multilingualism's force beyond the soundtrack, the contributors bring into critical dialogue essays that reexamine canonical film theories and film-producing regions and others that excavate rarely discussed film histories. The Multilingual Screen employs numerous theoretical frameworks across a multitude of international case studies and includes an interview with Roman Polanski, whose filmography affords one of the most intriguing and theoretically fertile negotiations of the perceptual dynamics of linguistic displacement. Each of the contributors provides an important perspective on the study of both regional and transnational cinemas and commercial and experimental films, provoking a re-evaluation and re-invigoration of the question of cinema's relation to language. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-multilingual-screen-9781501302886/#sthash.O63f4kRB.dpu