BackFrench Blockbusters
Cultural Politics of a Transnational Cinema (book in English)
- Type
- Studies
- Subject
- Countries > France
- French cinema, blockbuster, Luc Besson
- Publishing Date
- 2021
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- Collection
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Language
- English
Relative size
- Physical desc.
- Paperback • 256 pages • 27 €
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm) - ISBN
- 978-1-4744-8427-5
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Book Presentation:
The digitised spectacles conjured by a word like 'blockbuster' may create a certain cognitive dissonance with received ideas about French cinema - long celebrated as a model for philosophical, economic and aesthetic resistance to globalised popular culture. While the Gallic 'cultural exception' remains a forceful current to this day, this book shows how the onslaught of Hollywood mega-franchises and new media platforms since the 1980s has also provoked an overtly commercialised response from French producers eager to redefine the stakes and scope of their own traditions.
From English-language action vehicles like Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017) to revisionist historical films like Of Gods and Men (Beauvois, 2011) and crowd-pleasing comedies like Intouchables (Tolédano & Nakache, 2011), the variously filiated 'local blockbusters' from contemporary France brim with the seeds of cultural contradiction, but also with the energy of a forceful counter-history.
Cutting across a swath of recent French-produced cinema, French Blockbusters offers the first book-length consideration of the theoretical implications, historical impact and cultural consequences of a recent grouping of popular films that are rapidly changing what it means to make - or to see - a 'French' film today.
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> On a related topic:
Luc Besson, l'homme qui voulait être aimé (2016)
La biographie non autorisée
Subject: Director > Luc Besson
Schneider, Adjani, Delon et les autres (2022)
Cinquante éclats de cinéma
Les Manufactures de nos rêves (2021)
Les studios de cinéma français des années 30
Note: A book on a beige background is a book published in a language other than French.