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French B Movies
Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood
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Book Presentation:
In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film.
French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin. David Pettersen traces how, in these works and others, directors fuse features of banlieue cinema with genre formulas associated with both Hollywood and Black cultural models, as well as how transnational genre hybridizations, such as B movies, have become part of the ecosystem of the French film industry.
By combining film analysis, cultural history, critical theory, and industry studies, French B Movies reveals how featuring banlieues is as much about trying to imagine new identities and production models for French cinema as it is about representation.
About the Author:
David Pettersen is Director of the Film and Media Studies Program and Associate Professor of French and Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France.
Press Reviews:
"A much-needed contribution to scholarship on banlieue cinema. . . . Pettersen's analyses provide a thoughtful and highly informed discourse on identity politics in contemporary Western, multiracial societies that is of broad relevance, just as his overview of transnational genre theory and industrial exegeses will provide paradigms applicable to other areas of audiovisual study."
-Mary Harrod, author of Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Rise of the Cine-fille
"This compelling study revises our ideas about contemporary French cinema, foregrounding the banlieue film—from the work of Mathieu Kassovitz to Luc Besson to Céline Sciamma—and linking it the horror film, socially critical cinema, and art film. Pettersen makes judicious use of the tools of cultural history, critical theory, and film analysis in this excavation of the national and transnational character of French cinema."
-Kelley Conway, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"David Pettersen's French B Movies offers a provocative analysis of 21st century cinematic visions of France's multicultural, and often dysfunctional, suburbs. Under the 'B Movies' moniker – the term also covers banlieues and blockbusters – he ingeniously gathers disparate film genres and cinematic practices invested in banlieues topics, from auteur dramas to popular comedies, via horror, historical and action movies. This enables him to uncover the porousness and transnational nature of French generic categories and revisit the familiar auteur/popular divide, encompassing the likes of Jacques Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Luc Besson, while conducting fresh re-readings of key films such as La Haine, L'Esquive, Banlieue 13, Intouchables and Bande de filles, among others. Particularly welcome is Pettersen's nuanced and erudite discussion of French universalism as applied to ethnic screen representations. Beyond its banlieue remit, this makes French B Movies essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary French cinema."
-Ginette Vincendeau, King's College London
See the publisher website: Indiana University Press
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