FAVz104 French Cinema in 21st Century

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2023
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 5 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Dr. Mary Harrod (lecturer)
Mgr. Šárka Jelínek Gmiterková, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Mgr. Dita Stuchlíková (assistant)
Mgr. Petr Veinhauer (assistant)
Guaranteed by
Mgr. Šárka Jelínek Gmiterková, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Supplier department: Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Timetable
Tue 12. 12. 12:00–13:40 C34, 16:00–18:40 C34, Wed 13. 12. 14:00–15:40 C34, 17:00–18:40 C34, Fri 15. 12. 8:00–9:40 C34, 12:00–13:40 C34
  • Timetable of Seminar Groups:
FAVz104/01: No timetable has been entered into IS. Š. Jelínek Gmiterková, D. Stuchlíková, P. Veinhauer
FAVz104/02: No timetable has been entered into IS. Š. Jelínek Gmiterková, D. Stuchlíková, P. Veinhauer
Prerequisites
There are none.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 50 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 56/50, only registered: 1/50, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 1/50
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 8 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
This series of six lectures explores some of the major trends in 21st century French cinema. It aims to survey the cultural economy, aesthetic codes and ideological values in contemporary French cinema. Looking at both popular genres and auteur cinema, the lectures are divided into three blocks of two lectures: on the (post)national mainstream industry; on the ongoing importance of auteurist and arthouse film culture; and on the increasingly important sector comprised by women’s filmmaking.
Learning outcomes
The lectures aim to give an understanding of the following issues:

the relationship between contemporary French cinema and the country’s multi-cultural society and history (including the colonial past) as well as societal changes affecting class, gender and sexuality;

the impact of state cultural policy on the film industry and the films’ aesthetic and generic concerns;

the changing landscape of French film culture and of cinephilic culture within the increasingly trans-national (or even post-national) audio-visual culture, up to the ‘Netflix era’.
Syllabus
  • TUESDAY DECEMBER 12TH: POST(NATIONAL) MAINSTREAM INDUSTRY
  • Lecture 1 (12:00 – 13:40 [incl. 10 mins break])
  • Comedy and French identity: Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet 2001)
  • Lecture 2 (16:00 – 17:40 [incl. 10 mins break)
  • Franco-US dialogue and + ‘inclusive’ casting: Intouchables/Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) and Lupin (S01-E1)
  • WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 13TH NEW ITERATIONS OF THE AUTEUR
  • Lecture 3 (14:00 – 15:40 [incl. 10 mins break])
  • Neo-auteurism: multi-racial France and neo-noir: Un prophète/A Prophet (Jacques Audiard 2009)
  • Lecture 4 (17:00 – 18:40 [incl. 10 mins break])
  • 21st-century ‘European’ art cinema: Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas 2017)
  • FRIDAY DECEMBER 15TH WOMEN FILMMAKERS
  • Lecture 5 (08:00 – 09:40 [incl. 10 mins break])
  • Feminist documentary: Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
  • Lecture 6 (12:00 – 13:40 [incl. 10 mins break)
  • Revising history and queering genre: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
Literature
    required literature
  •  King, Homay. ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24:5 (2007): 421-429.
  •  Dobson, Julia. ‘Jacques Audiard: contesting filiations,’ in Kate Ince (ed.), Five Directors: Auteurism From Assayas to Ozon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 38-58.
  • Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaelle Moine & Hilary Radner, (eds), A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, pp. 1-13. Chichester: John Wiley: 2014.
  •  Pettersen, David. ‘Transnational blackface, neo-minstrelsy and the “French Eddie Murphy” in Intouchables,’ Modern & Contemporary France, 24 (1) (2916): 51-69.
  •  Clifton Moore, Rick. ‘Ambivalence to Technology in Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain,’ Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
  •  Sutton, Paul. ‘Olivier Assayas and the Cinema of Catastrophe,’ in Kate Ince (ed.), Five Directors: Auteurism From Assayas to Ozon Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 17-37.
  •  Bradbury-Rance, Clara. ‘Lesbian legibility and queer legacy in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019),’ French Screen Studies 23:2-3 (2023): 172-184.
Teaching methods
The attendance is obligatory on all lectures and will be regularly checked. Combined students may skip two sessions.

Students are required to read all the items from the obligatory reading list. All of the required materials will be provided.

In the week prior to the course screenings of the selected films will take place in the room C34 at designated times (not obligatory). These will be announced at the beginning of September. The rest of the films will be uploaded to the IS system.
Assessment methods
Apart from the compulsory attendance students will have to pass two test. First test is a preliminary one and it will take place just before the start of the first lecture (Tuesday December 12th at 12:00) With two questions, the test will check the knowledge of the required items from the reading list for the first three lesson.

The other test is final, consisting of three questions testing both students' acquaintance with the reading list as well as their knowledge and skills gained throughout the course itself. Ten points maximum can be gathered from both of the test; six points are the necessary minimum in order to pass the course successfully.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
Teacher's information
In her primary research Dr. Mary Harrod focuses on contemporary film and media history and theory and is tied together by a focus on cultural - especially gender - identity, notably in its relation to aesthetics and in popular and/or transnational modes.

After completing a BA in Modern Languages she worked for six years in film development and production, before writing a PhD thesis examining filmed romantic comedy's phenomenal recent proliferation in France from a cultural studies perspective. She concurrently co-edited a book examining the status of European cinema in today's increasingly globalised age.

More recently, alongside maintaining her expertise in cultural approaches to European audiovisual production, she has co-edited a volume looking at genre narratives authored by women in film and television globally that won the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection Prize (2019). Meanwhile, she has completed the related monograph Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood: the Rise of the Cine-fille (2021). In March 2018 she was awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to fund a series of events on the theme of 'Imagining "We" in the Age of "I": Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture'. In collaboration with Diane Negra and Suzanne Leonard, she has co-edited a book deriving from the project with a trans-global and trans-media focus, which won a Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association Outstanding Achievement Award (Edited Collection of the Year, 2022).

She has recently completed an AHRC Networking Grant as Principal Investigator on the project 'Producing the Post-National Popular: The Expanding Imagination of Mainstream French Films and Television Series', whose key intervention was to take French production as emblematic of major expansions in the transnational circulation of audiovisual culture across even linguistic borders in the contemporary moment, drawing out the implications of this change for representations and cross-cultural perceptions and dialogue.

Her various strands of contemporary work take in gender and sexuality studies (especially transnational and comparative); questions of embodied address, performance and celebrity; and issues of media technologically-constructed 'posthuman' identity, which will be the focus of her next monograph. She is a Co-Chief General Editor of French Screen Studies (with Ginette Vincendeau).

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