Masculinity on the Road in the Films of Cédric Kahn

Cédric Kahn is one of the most interesting directors to have emerged in France in recent years. A striking feature of a number of his films is the central place of the car and the act of driving. In L’Ennui (1998), Roberto Succo (2001) and most strikingly Feux rouges (2004) the car acts as both a motivating narrative device and a central metaphor for the protagonists’ mental state. In this essay I look at the depiction of the road trip in Feux rouges and attempt to unpack the ways in which the trip is used to trigger and represent the central protagonist’s masculine identity crisis asking what this can suggest to us about contemporary discourses of masculinity and society more broadly

Film remakes, the black sheep of translation

Film remakes have often been neglected by translation studies in favour of other forms of audiovisual translation such as subtitling and dubbing. Yet, as this article will argue, remakes are also a form of cinematic translation. Beginning with a survey of previous, ambivalent approaches to the status of remakes, it proposes that remakes are multimodal, adaptive translations: they translate the many modes of the film being remade and offer a reworking of that source text. The multimodal nature of remakes is explored through a reading of Breathless, Jim McBride's 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1959), which shows how remade films may repeat the narrative of, but differ on multiple levels from, their source films. Due to the collaborative nature of film production, remakes involve multiple agents of translation. As such, remakes offer an expanded understanding of audiovisual translation

Reading the geographies of post-war British film culture through the reception of French film

This paper examines the ways in which British specialist film culture anticipated and received the resumed supply of French films at the end of the Second World War. It finds that in serious film journalism and within the rapidly expanding film society movement, new French cinema was the focus of at least as much British attention as Italian neo-realism – the European cinema more famously associated with the era. The paper posits that a number of factors, including anti-Americanism, combined to position the delayed wartime and immediate post-war French releases as a site of impossible expectations and subsequent interpretative difficulty for British cinephiles. In particular, through a case study of the local mediation of French cinema in the English city of Nottingham, this paper considers the role of published criticism for setting the local viewing frame within the provincial film society movement. By tracing the tensions surrounding the circulation of film prints, information, and opinion relating to these prestigious cultural imports, it becomes possible to gain greater insight into both the range of nationally specific meanings attributed to the imported films and the geographic and cultural inequalities at work within the film culture of the country of reception

French televised debate and the public service ethos

As the French televisual landscape has been altered through privatisation and the advent of new channels, many commentators have posited a shift from paleo-television to neo-television, from viewer as citizen to viewer as consumer. This article argues that such a dichotomy is overly simplistic, suggesting instead that contemporary French public service broadcasting combines elements of both types of television. It goes on to examine two television discussion shows. Whilst acknowledging that no one programme can alone represent the remit of a particular channel, the article suggests that the longevity and popularity of these programmes makes them key products of their respective moments of production and consumption. Finally, the ways in which each programme constructs and represents the transformations and the ambivalence at the heart of French public service television in examined

"Kings of the Middle Way": continental cinema on British screens

Synchronized sound of course created new challenges for non-English-language films in Britain as dialogue now rendered them inaccessible and arguably even more ‘highbrow’ to many filmgoers. There existed two main outlets for the showing of these films throughout the 1930s: the London-based Film Society established in 1925 and its regional off-shoots, and the specialized cinemas. French films were a very prominent feature of the Everyman’s programmes, both during the 1930s and after the cinema’s post-war re-opening. The idea for such a society had come from filmmaker and writer Ivor Montagu and actor Hugh Miller. The continental cinemas showed ‘prestigious’ European film to a ‘discerning’ audience. The lack of new films due to the war was countered by frequent and often popular revivals, revivals that would entrench both the familiarity of these films and their canonization, again playing an important role in positioning a certain type of continental cinema in a quality middle ground