Carrie Tarr

Carrie Tarr's analysis of the cinema of Diane Kurys is the first full-length study of this director, whose delightfully unsentimental reconstructions of the lives of girls and women in post-war France have established her as a distinctive presence in contemporary French film-making. Tarr traces Kurys' trajectory from actress to author, director and producer of her own films and situates her work within debates on women's film-making and female authorship. The book includes detailed readings of each of Kurys' films to date, from the evocation of growing up in the 1960s in Diabolo Menthe to the dilemmas facing contemporary women artists in A la Folie. The conclusion defines Kurys' "authorial signature" and discusses the extent to which she has been able to create a space for female subjectivity within the constraints of contemporary French culture.

Diane Kurys

Jane Freedman

This volume examines the relationship between gender and immigration within the multi-ethnic society in France, and also explores the wider personal and political issues at stake for women of immigrant origin.

Women, Immigration and Identities in France

Reframing difference is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, cinema beur (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and cinema de banlieue (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates). Carrie Tarr's insightful account draws on a wide range of films, from directors such as Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassovitz and Djamel Bensalah. Her analyses compare the work of male and female, majority and minority film-makers, and emphasise the significance of authorship in the representation of gender and ethnicity. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that these films challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture, addressing issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French. This timely book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between cinema and citizenship in a multicultural society.

Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France

Reframing difference

This is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, "cinéma beur" (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and "cinéma de banlieue" (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates). Carrie Tarr's insightful account draws on a wide range of films, from directors such as Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassowitz and Djamel Bensalah. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that these films challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture, addressing issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French.

Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France

Reframing Difference

Diana Holmes

The Third Republic, known as the 'belle époque', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history.

Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture 1890-1914

A Belle Epoque?

Brigitte Rollet

Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive – over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.

Carrie Tarr

Books

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