Phil Powrie

Professor of French Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research Into Film Phil Powrie

This volume examines the films of Jean-Jacques Beineix. His work is placed within the context of the 1980s and each film is discussed in detail, while attempting to analyse the films for their intrinsic interest.

Jean-Jacques Beineix

French cultural expert Phil Powrie claims that although French film in the 1980s lacked New Wave invention, gritty police thrillers and nostalgic costume dramas brought French cinema to a wider audience. This landmark study of French film offers a set of critical essays on the crisis of masculinity in contemporary French culture and its interrelationship with nostalgia, in the wake of 1970's feminism. 16 photos.

Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity

French Cinema in the 1980s

Peter I Barta

This book focuses on literature and cinema in English or French by authors and directors not working in their native language. Artists with hybrid identities have become a defining phenomenon of contemporary reality following the increased mobility between civilisations during the postcolonial period and the waves of emigration to the West. Cinema and prose fiction remain the most popular sources of cultural consumption, not least owing to the adaptability of both to the new electronic media. This volume considers cultural products in English and French in which the explicitly multi-focal representation of authors' experiences of their native languages/cultures makes itself conspicuous. The essays explore work by the peripheral and those without a country, while problematising what might be meant by the widely used but not always well-defined term 'bicultural'. The first section looks at films by such well-known filmmakers working in France as Bouchareb, Kechiche, Legzouli and Dridi, as well as the animated feature Persepolis. Here the focus is on the representation of human experience in spatial terms, exploring the appropriation of territory cohabited by 'local' people, newcomers and their children, haunted by the cultural memories of distant places. The second part is devoted to multicultural authors whose 'native' language was English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Spanish (Beckett, Herzen, Voyeikova, Triolet, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kristof, Dorfman), and their creative engagement with difference. A study of the emergence of multilingual writing in Montaigne and an autobiographical essay by Elleke Boehmer on growing up surrounded by English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Zulu frame the volume's chapters. The collection relishes the freedom provided by liberation from the confines of one language and culture and the delight in creative multilingualism. This book will be of significant interest to those studying the subject of biculturalism, as well as the fields of

Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English

Ann Davies

Bruce Babington

Chris Perriam

Professor of Hispanic Studies Chris Perriam

Ian Biddle

Traces the cinematic history of Carmen, the Spanish Gypsy femme fatale

A Cultural History

Carmen on Film

The first collection of essays by UK and USA academics working in French cinema studies on French cinema in the 1990s. There are twenty-one chapters, fifteen of which focus on one film each. Issues covered are genre (the changing heritage film), gender and ethnic issues, community, and national cinema.

Professor of French Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research Into Film Phil Powrie

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