Phil Powrie (ed),
The Cinema of France.
(24 frames series)
Wallflower Press, London, 2006.
288pp
ISBN: 1 904764 46 0 (pb) £18.99
ISBN: 1 904764 47 9 (hb) £45.00
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

This book takes its place in a series entitled “24 Frames,” which looks at a wide range of work.
A major problem with the formula is ‘typicality’ – or, as the forward says, the attempt to choose films that “highlight the specific elements of that territory’s cinema.” Quite simply, some cinemas have many more such elements than others. In particular the French cinema, which has produced over 10,000 films and has never ceased to evolve through radically changing historical, political, economic and material conditions, could not conceivably be constrained within such a straitjacket – the formula is much more problematic when applied to France than when applied, say, to the cinema of Canada, of the Balkans, or of Australia and New Zealand, which are among those included or soon to be included in the series.

Thus in the present instance the editor has been obliged to limit himself to two silent films (from 1927 and 1929), and a mere three from the period 1930-1950. Anyone who knows anything of those 55 years of film production in France will boggle at the prospect of capturing the typical elements in five films. Indeed no attempt has been made to look at most genres, movements or themes from that period: the bulk of the 24 films selected come from the years 1959-62 (four films) and 1985-96 (nine films). Over half the films, that is, are from 15 of the 110 years. The reader is assumed to be interested almost exclusively in the New Wave and in recent films, with the most limited knowledge of or interest in more general film history – indeed, to be interested in reading about specific films, not ‘cinema.’

The editor is of course acutely aware of this problem, several times expressing his unease at the constraints under which he has been obliged to work, and scouting alternative criteria that might have governed his selection and led to a broader overview of French cinema. There is however a sense in which the final selection may also play to his own strengths and preferences, given the uncertainty with which he refers in his introduction to various aspects of the earlier period. He asserts for instance that what constituted a French film was fairly straightforward before 1945 (but what of the multiple-language productions of 1930-35?), that French audiences were not likely to have been attracted to the ‘depressing’ films directed in the late 1930s by Renoir and Carné (what of the crowds who flocked to Les Bas-Fonds, Quai des brumes, Le Jour se lève, Hôtel du Nord, La Bête humaine, even La Règle du jeu?), that Les Enfants du paradis suggests the exhilaration of the Liberation (a difficult argument to make!), and that post-war productions played safe with a literary cinema, big-budget costume dramas and uncontroversial subjects (this is admittedly a widely held but slanderously inexact belief).

The editor is impressed, moreover, that the number of first-time filmmakers should, in the period 1998-2002, have risen towards 20%, when it has been shown that their numbers were always large in the French cinema except during the war years – 20% was normal, rising to nearly 40% in the 1930s and the New Wave. He also credits that New Wave with being at the origin of such waves world-wide, whereas it was itself preceded by the post-war Italian renewal. Finally the editor’s presentation of the selection of films is somewhat ambivalent about the related questions of popularity and of genre. Should the outstanding popular success of a film, often accompanied by marked generic conventions, count for the inclusion of a given film or against it? Some very popular genre films are included, some are not.

So the selection of films is in many ways problematic and it is not helped by the diversity of approaches of the critics. No two commentaries are written by the same critic. Of the 24 critics, 22 are working in Britain or the US, and one each in Ireland and France. In an attempt to unify their contributions, each chapter is supposed to have been organised in a consistent way: a brief presentation, including a synopsis, then a summary of the way in which academics and reviewers have positioned the film, followed by a discussion of any one exemplary sequence from the film – in total, some 3500 words or about 8 pages on each of the 24 films. Even this minimal structure, however, clearly suits some better than others, most reaching an awkward compromise with it, and some disregarding it.

The diversity of approaches is disconcerting. Some of the chapters consist of traditional film commentary (17), or are very pragmatic and factual (e.g. 5), concentrating on contextual information (6), others are more theoretically informed and ambitious (7,9). Some spend a quarter or more of their available space on simply describing the action (6,8), some are clearly auteurist, laying most emphasis on biography and film career (11,12) or on the director’s ‘training’ (in café-théâtre, 21, or mime, 6), others on social and political history (13,23), on documentary (13,16) or on realism (24). Many, indeed most, overcome the editor’s scruples to focus to some extent on genre (notably 7 and 24), while others take into account the industrial context (14). One of the best (Alison Smith on La Reine Margot, 22) focuses on spectatorship and the gaze. But however good individual chapters may be, any sense of an overall coherence is lost. A particular difficulty faces those contributors who want not just to praise their given film as significant, but also to explain its significance, since the formula doesn’t allow space for the exploration of socio-political or industrial causality necessary to ground such explanation. Those reviewers who try to cope with the problem individually find themselves having to make good the lack in a page or so of abbreviated references.

There is one strand of commentary, however, that does fortuitously link a number of the reviews, namely the foregrounding of sexual politics – an on-going concern with feminism, Œdipality and the crisis of masculinity. Nearly all the reviews from chapter 11 onwards (i.e. from 1962 on) deal with these themes. Here, it is particularly apparent that some sort of co-ordination between the writers commissioned to produce these pieces would have resulted in a really interesting argument (or rather that they are drawing fragmentarily on really interesting arguments that have been made more systematically elsewhere). The same could be said of the recurrent arguments about genre that appear in numerous chapters. A post-face drawing together the results of the various writers’ contributions would have gone some way towards rectifying the lack of unity of the volume. As it is, however, it would not be possible on the basis of this book alone for a reader to get that overview of the French cinema which the title seems to promise. It will be of value to those who wish to read about the specific films selected for inclusion rather than to those who wish to acquire an understanding of the French cinema.

Colin Crisp
Australia.

* * *
For the information of potential purchasers, the 24 films dealt with are : (1) Napoléon, (2) Un chien andalou, (3) Le Crime de M Lange, (4) La Règle du jeu, (5) Les Enfants du paradis, (6) Les Vacances de M Hulot, (7) Du rififi chez les hommes, (8) Les 400 coups, (9) À bout de souffle, (10) L’Année dernière à Marienbad, (11) Cléo de 5 à 7, (12) Le Samouraï, (13) La Maman et la putain, (14) Les Valseuses, (15) Diva, (16) Shoah, (17) Trois hommes et un couffin, (18) Jean de Florette, (19) Nikita, (20) Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, (21) Les Visiteurs, (22) La Reine Margot, (23) La Haine, and (24) Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël. Those that I appreciated the most were numbers 9, 14 and 22.

Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006