Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled ‘hood’ film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social types in which to anchor their fictions, from bourgeois villas and bucolic riverside cafés to post-war housing estates and postmodern new towns. For the first time in English, contributors to this volume address key aspects of this long film history, marked by such towering figures as Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Jean-Luc Godard. Idyllic or menacing, expansive or claustrophobic, the suburb served divergent aesthetic and ideological programmes across the better part of a century. Themes central to French cultural modernity – class conflict, leisure, boredom and anti-authoritarianism – cut across the fifteen chapters.
Table of Content
Introduction – Philippe Met and Derek Schilling
1 On the origins of the banlieue film, 1930–80 – Annie Fourcaut
2 Lumière, Méliès, Pathé and Gaumont: French filmmaking in the suburbs, 1896–1920 – Roland-François Lack
3 Roads, rivers and canals: spaces of freedom from Epstein to Vigo – Jean-Louis Pautrot
4 The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s – Keith Reader
5 Julien Duvivier and interwar ‘banlieutopia’ – Margaret C. Flinn
6 Margins and thresholds of French cinema: Ménilmontant, Le Sang des bêtes, Colloque de chiens – Eric Bullot
7 Georges Franju and the grotesque genius of the banlieue – Tristan Jean
8 Tati, suburbia and modernity – Malcolm Turvey
9 A crucible of emotions: Maurice Pialat’s L’Amour existe – Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck
10 Godard’s suburban years – Térésa Faucon
11 The banlieue wore black: postwar French polar, from Becker to Corneau – Philippe Met
12 Erasing the suburbs: the grands ensembles in documentary film and television, 1950–80 – Camille Canteux
13 Elusive happiness: screening France’s new towns after 1968 – Derek Schilling
14 Towers of evil: Jean-Claude Brisseau – David Vasse
15 What’s left of the ‘red suburb’? Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise as case study – Guillaume Soulez
Index
About the author
Derek Schilling is Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University
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