French B Movies

David A. Pettersen

Description

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.

Acknowledgments
Note on Film Titles and French-Language Citations
Introduction
1. Suburban Cinema Between Art and Genre
2. Luc Besson's EuropaCorp and Parkour in the Suburbs
3. Suburban Gangsters: Screen Violence and the Banlieues
4. Suburbanoia and French Banlieue Horror Films
5. Omar Sy: Black Superstardom in Contemporary France
6. Beyond the Art/Genre Divide: Céline Sciamma's Girlhood
Conclusion: Genre, Inclusive Casting, and the Suburbs in the Age of SVoD
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Película fotográfica
• History of Europe
• History of film
• Céline Sciamma
• Omar Sy
• Lupin
• Film
• Mathieu Kassovitz
• Luc Besson
• France
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253064912
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NEW DIRECTIONS IN NATIONAL CINEMAS
Robert Rushing, editor

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2023 by David A. Pettersen
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2023
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06488-2 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-06489-9 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-06490-5 (web PDF)
For my parents,
Brian and Barbara
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Film Titles and French-Language Citations
Introduction
1. Suburban Cinema between Art and Genre
2. Luc Besson s EuropaCorp and Parkour in the Suburbs
3. Suburban Gangsters: Screen Violence and the Banlieues
4. Suburbanoia and French Banlieue Horror Films
5. Omar Sy: Black Superstardom in Contemporary France
6. Beyond the Art/Genre Divide: C line Sciamma s Girlhood
Conclusion: Genre, Inclusive Casting, and the Suburbs in the Age of SVoD
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was my second trip to France on a high school exchange program in the summer of 1995. We spent a week in Paris, and somehow I learned that the movie La Haine had just come out in theaters and that everyone was talking about it. I snuck out of the hotel where we were staying (apologies, chaperones) and went to see the film. My French was not yet good enough to understand the film s use of suburban vernacular, but its power still came through. I went out the next night and saw it again. While I wouldn t begin working on this book until many years later, La Haine taught me to pay attention to different kinds of French cinema and to how French films employ Hollywood genre traditions. The second beginning for this project was when I was teaching at Davidson College, where I advised Blake Evitt s senior thesis on parkour in the late 2000s. Blake shared with me his personal library of parkour documentaries and films, including the cult hit District B13 . I had already been researching French genre films, but District B13 reminded me so strongly of La Haine that I began to collect French genre films set in the banlieues and to think about how genre and the suburbs were related.
Working on a project for over a decade means that I have acquired a lot of debts, and I will do my best to acknowledge them here. My colleagues and students in the Department of French and Italian and in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh have contributed invaluable insights through our many conversations over the years. First, thank you to all my students and advisees. I have learned so much from all of you. I especially want to thank those students in the spring 2012 graduate seminar I taught in which I first tried out some of the emerging ideas for this book. That was a special seminar, and I think of you all often. I m especially grateful to my colleagues Mark Lynn Anderson, Jim Coleman, Lorraine Denman, Charles Exley, Chlo Hogg, Lina Insana, Alberto Iozzia, Giuseppina Mecchia, Kaliane Ung, John Walsh, Brett Wells, and the late Jane Feuer. Having completed this book during the COVID-19 pandemic, I miss our many informal conversations even more acutely. I m grateful to the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh for travel and research support during the writing of this book. Many thanks to Jonathan Arac and the University of Pittsburgh s Humanities Center for the support of a faculty research fellowship at a crucial juncture. Thank you to Jeanette Jouili and Adam Lowenstein for discussing the book s introduction in the public workshop during that fellowship semester. I appreciate Mark Best, Adam Hart, and Neepa Majumdar s careful readings of chapters 1 and 3 during our summer writing group just before the pandemic began. Finally, a special thank-you to Randall Halle and Todd Reeser for their constant encouragement and advice over the years I have spent writing this book.
I also want to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and coconspirators in the field who invited me to be on panels and to give talks and who generally encouraged me to keep working on this this project: Martin Barnier, Lia Brozgal, S bastien David, Audrey Evrard, Maggie Flinn, R mi Fontanel, Michael Gott, Mary Harrod, Elizabeth Hodges, Josh Lund, Charlie Michael, Rapha lle Moine, Dan Morgan, Phil Powrie, and Luc Vancheri. Thank you to series editor Rob Rushing and the editorial team at Indiana University Press, Allison Chaplin and Sophia Hebert, for supporting this book and shepherding it through the publication process. Special thanks to Jhonphilipp Yonan for drawing such amazing art for the front and back covers and to Morgan Genevieve Blue for creating such a wonderful index. And finally, thank you to the press s two anonymous readers for their generous and careful reading of the manuscript.
Part of chapter 1 first appeared in Cincinnati Romance Review , part of chapter 2 first appeared in Cinema Journal (now Journal of Cinema and Media Studies ), and part of chapter 5 first appeared in Modern Contemporary France . I am grateful to the editors of those journals for permission to reuse the material from those articles in revised form here.
On a personal note, I want to thank my wife, Stacey Triplette, for her constant love and support throughout the time it took me to write this book. She always thought the book was a good idea, even though she didn t always want to see the films I was watching. With great patience, she listened to my many ideas about the book at the dinner table, and once again, she read every word of the manuscript and offered invaluable copy editing. If my commas are in the right place, it s largely thanks to her. I m grateful to have two wonderful sisters, Holly and Tracy Pettersen, who supported the human being behind the computer throughout the writing process. We all live in different parts of the country, but we met regularly for sibling weekends that were a welcome break from writing. Finally, a very special thank-you to my parents, Brian and Barbara Pettersen. They always gave me space to discover what I wanted to do, and they have supported me unquestioningly throughout my life, despite the many twists and turns it has taken. Above all, they sensed my love of French early on and found ways to send me to France at a young age. For that and many other things besides, I am very grateful. I love you both so much, and this book is for you .
NOTE ON FILM TITLES AND FRENCH-LANGUAGE CITATIONS
I USE THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE TITLES of French films throughout this book for readability except when certain films are best known in English by their original French titles ( La Haine or Intouchables ) or when the English-language translation is inaccurate ( Baise-moi ). On first mention of a French film in each chapter, I give the original French-language title in parentheses along with the release year. When selecting the English-language titles for French films, I chose the ones that international distributors used for release in English-language markets or the ones by which the films are best known in English-language scholarship.
This book focuses on French cinema of the past three decades, and consequently it references contemporary scholarship, newspaper and magazine articles, and cinephile blogs written in French that have not been translated into English. When I quote from these kinds of sources, I cite the French original but give only my translation of the quotation. However, I will occasionally include words or phrases from the French original in parentheses alongside the translation when the language choices are relevant for my analysis. For scholarly sources originally written in French that have been translated into English, I worked from the French originals while writing, but I only cite and quote from the published English translation unless I indicate otherwise .

INTRODUCTION
JACQUES AUDIARD S 2015 FILM DHEEPAN tells the story of three Tamil refugees who end up living in one of France s impoverished, multicultural suburban neighborhoods, called banlieues . The family of refugees is in fact fake: father, mother, and daughter are not related. Rather, they have acquired the passports of a real family who was killed. They work hard and seek to fit into the texture of everyday French society. He takes on the position of building caretaker, she becomes a personal care assistant for a neighbor, and the daughter attends the local school. However, their new life is upended when the local drug gang begins to fight with rivals, turning their neighborhood into a war zone. When his wife s life is threatened, the main character, a former Tamil Tiger, takes up arms and brutally executes most of the gang to save her. While the eruption of violence is not entirely unexpected, its excess comes as something of a surprise, as if the film were not quite sure what its genre was.
In fact, stylistic dissonances define Dheepan : much of the film unfolds in Tamil, a language that Audiard, most of his French audience, and the French characters in the film do not speak. The film alternates between slice-of-life sequences shot in a loosely ethnographic style and intense images of gang activity that conclude in spectacular violence. These are not the only two styles in the film; Audiard references the gangster film, the vig