"Fishes with funny French names, the French restaurant in London from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century." Modern & Contemporary France, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), p. 1

The French New Wave’s defiant assertion of cinema’s specificity as an art form — now all but a cliché — has perhaps tended to obscure the richness and density of its relationships with other art forms, eruditely explored here. These relationships, at once benign and agonistic, qualify the current as embodying ‘the “impure cinema” the theoretician of the movement, André Bazin, advocated in opposition to the “pure cinema” of the classical avant-garde’ (p. 4). Marion Schmid invokes successively literature, theatre, painting, architecture, and photography, each medium accorded a separate chapter but brought into fruitful dialogue with its peers. There are to be sure omissions: Lynn A. Higgins’s New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) surely merited at least name-checking; the description of Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966) as ‘the only genuinely canonical work adapted by a New Wave director’ (p. 21) gives Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991), made admittedly when the New Wave was no more, short shrift; the chapter entitled ‘Architecture of Apocalypse, City of Lights’ makes no reference to William Klein’s twelve-minute Broadway by Light (1958), lauded though it was by Chris Marker. But Schmid covers a daunting textual range in a relatively short compass with elegance and aplomb. Whether dealing with classics such as L’Année dernière à Marienbad (dir. by Alain Resnais, 1961), which ‘fus[ed] theatre and film into a hybrid space without frontiers’ (p. 61), or exploring texts likely to be unfamiliar even to a specialized readership, such as Éric Rohmer’s early 1960s documentaries for French television, her analyses are consistently stimulating and insightful. Of particular interest is her championship of Guy Gilles — not even a name to this reviewer at least hitherto, and neglected owing to his early death and the ‘blatant homophobia’ of the French industry at the time (p. 115), but clearly a very important figure whose work is now available on DVD. A monograph on this director would be a most welcome addition. The book will be of interest not only to film scholars, but also to those working in the visual arts, adaptation, and urban studies; that ‘the new city […] is not diachronic, but synchronic’ (p. 151) is a formulation at once suggestive and lapidary, emblematic of the work’s amalgam of erudition and conciseness.

"Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930-1950." Modern & Contemporary France, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), p. 1

"Paris in modern times: from the Old Régime to the present day." Modern & Contemporary France, 29(4), p. 450

This book explores the history and the vicissitudes of one of Paris’s most extraordinary areas, the Marais. Centrally located on the Right Bank, this neighbourhood was from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century the most fashionable in the city, headquarters of the nobility who endowed it with resplendent architecture. The Court’s move to Versailles and the Revolution of 1789 led to the quartier’s decline, so that in the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth it was in parlous shape, its fine buildings run down and often severely overcrowded. It escaped wholesale destruction in the post-War frenzy of modernization largely thanks to André Malraux, who as Culture Minister fostered the restoration of the area. Malraux’s efforts were, however, not immune from criticism, sometimes seen as a form of socio-economic cleansing with concomitant fossilization, and thus emblematic of the problems faced by a city which has always been torn between the preservation of its past and the need to adapt to social and historical change. The book focuses particularly on literary, cinematic and other artistic reproductions of the quartier, of which it attempts to provide a comprehensive overview, and foregrounds particularly its importance as home to and base of two highly significant minorities – the Jewish and the gay communities.

Éric Neuhoff has been likened to a latter-day avatar of the Hussards — the flamboyantly non-engagé antithesis to Sartrean commitment in the 1950s and 1960s, whose leading members were Antoine Blondin and Roger Nimier. This is the only work by him I have read, but the Hussard analogy sprang to mind unprompted by Wikipedia as I was working my way through it. Out-and-proud anti-intellectualism, however, was some way beneath the Hussards’ dignity; not so for Neuhoff who offers us a neo-Poujadist diatribe targeting Jacques Doillon, Benoît Jacquot, the Garrels (Philippe and Louis), Isabelle Huppert (deemed inferior to Isabelle Adjani on what are fairly clearly non-aesthetic grounds) et j’en passe. Even so, the volume won the Prix Renaudot in November 2019, with a jury composed of nine men and one woman. Cinematic analysis, or even serious justified argument, is some way off Neuhoff’s radar, so that we are regaled with a string of frequently unsupported and almost always poorly argued assertions presented, or rather hammered home, with scarcely any punctuation other than full stops. The effect would be hectoring even were the ‘arguments’ less undernourished. Neuhoff’s insistent nostalgia is sometimes uninformed (while ‘Pariscope a cessé sa parution’ (p. 22), Télérama continues to publish its often perspicacious capsule reviews) and frequently fatiguing in its desire to shock, whether in its gender politics (‘Où sont passées les jeunes policières qui montraient leurs jambes […]?’, p. 28) or in its m’as-tu-vu iconoclasm, albeit sometimes channelled by an imagined alter-ego critic (‘Le carosse d’or me tombe des yeux. Jamais pu voir Les enfants du paradis en entier’, p. 77). And there is more than a hint of sub-Hussardian phallocracy in the claim that today’s French cinema ‘ressemble à Anne Hidalgo: sectaire, revêche, sans grâce, empestant l’arrogance et la mauvaise foi’ (p. 9) — epithets that could well be applied to Neuhoff’s shabby polemic. Katie Hopkins on Godard could scarcely be a more disobliging read than this.

Joseph Harriss is an American journalist based in Paris whose previous books include About France (Or, Why the French Are So French). The degree of methodological sophistication suggested by that remark is, alas, amply in evidence in this otherwise informative and thoroughly documented biography, clearly aimed at an audience for whom Jean Gabin is little more than a name. Not that there is anything wrong about that; it is Harriss’s view and construction of France that regularly set my teeth on edge, saturated as they are in stereotyping of often the most egregious kind. Two examples among a host: ‘Seldom known for their phlegmatic calm, steady nerves, or grace under pressure, the French [in the late 1930s] were succumbing to another of their periodic bouts of collective hysteria’ (p. 60); while that Gabin was ‘the archetypal Frenchman’ is borne out by the fact that ‘he needed, as he always had, a woman in his life’ (p. 155). It is disappointing that Harriss did not flesh out his study with more extensive comparison of Gabin to his American opposite numbers such as Spencer Tracy and James Cagney, both alluded to but only fleetingly. That said, he gives us a chatty and frequently entertaining read, with juicy detail about Gabin’s romance with Marlene Dietrich, along with a comprehensive filmography and bibliography, and insights that are often at once novel and yet in keeping with what we might expect of the personage, such as his distaste for venturing south of the Loire. (Gabin here emerges as basically a Norman farmer at heart.) I was brought up short by the reference to his youthful ‘running through the wheat fields’ (p. 13) — Gabin as a Gallic precursor to Theresa May? — but find it hard to extract much intertextual nourishment from this. Worth reading, certainly, but not a major work of scholarship; there again that is not what it sets out to be.

‘Le Quai des brumes’ de Marcel Carné. Par Thomas Pillard ‘Le Quai des brumes’ de Marcel Carné. Par Thomas Pillard. (Contrechamp.) Paris: Vendémiaire, 2019. 137 pp., ill. Keith Reader Keith Reader ULIP keithreader045@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume 74, Issue 3, July 2020, Pages 511–512, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knaa088 Published: 09 July 2020

The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema. By Douglas Morrey The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema. By Douglas Morrey. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 263 pp., ill. Keith Reader Keith Reader ULIP keithreader045@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume 74, Issue 3, July 2020, Page 510, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knaa096 Published: 09 July 2020

The Moberly-Jourdain affair involved two female Oxford dons who, in 1901 on a visit to the palace and grounds of Versailles, believed that they had encountered the ghosts of Marie-Antoinette and some of her retinue in the Hameau she had had built there to play shepherdess games. The two women's report of their experience attracted much attention at the time, though it seems all but certain that they had simply overinterpreted everyday personages and events. My article reads their account of their "adventure" and subsequent commentaries and glosses of it through the lens of the Freudian unheimlich or uncanny.

Not the least of this book’s manifold weaknesses is its seeming inability to decide whether it is trying to be a discursive account to be read cover to cover, or a work of reference to be consulted au fur et à mesure. This might have mattered less than it does had the work not succeeded so spectacularly in falling between those two stools. It is thoroughly, indeed exhaustively, documented, but its perspective appears lacking in any scintilla of theoretical context, resulting in a rapidly fatiguing scattershot effect, while the information diligently harvested and collated is by and large readily accessible both in printed form and online. I found myself wondering what could have possessed L’Harmattan to accept such unoriginal work, but the answer was hiding in plain sight on the back cover. The author is a highly regarded specialist in muscular biomechanics who became something of a television personality through his appearances on the quiz programme Monsieur Cinéma (1967–80), clearly the work’s USP. Francis Goubel’s knowledge is remarkably extensive and his enthusiasm immense, but it is difficult to see what serious scholarly contribution this book might make, especially in the absence of an index (although there is a bare-bones filmography). Goubel struts his stuff eruditely enough and is somebody with whom I might well enjoy discussing cinema over a coffee, which makes me feel extremely churlish for producing so disparaging a review; but it would be difficult for me to recommend this as a serious aid to study or as a piece of scholarship.

Lacanian discourse has a complex and multiplies determined relationship with Catholicism, and Robert Bresson has the reputation of being the cinema's greatest Catholic director. Few Catholic artists, however, have found the institutional life of 'their' Church a congenial or inspirational topic, and its declining importance in Bresson's later work is not of itself particularly surprising. Pascal's wager on the existence of God has what contemporary linguistics might call a performative effect, for it is only thanks to the wager that God's existence becomes certain and available to the believer. Bresson's first film, Affaires publiques, is in many ways as unBressonian a work as could be imagined. Bresson from Journal onwards works to all intents and purposes outside genre, with the exception of those parts of Pickpocket and the inserts in Le Diable probablement that are close to the documentary. In 1947, Bresson went to Rome to work on a screenplay of the life of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, which was never to be filmed. Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé, released in 1956, was and remains Bresson's most commercially successful and critically best-received film, though curiously for a very long time it was unavailable in Britain. Bresson's next two films, his first in colour, are also his first true adaptations from Dostoevsky. Bresson's final film, shot in the summer of 1982 and released in 1983, brought to an end the longest gap in his work since that separating Journal from Les Dames, more than thirty years before.

Sigmund Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents describes 'the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction' as 'what all life essentially consists of', and Robert Bresson's last two films foreground that struggle with particular force. L'Argent, adapted from Tolstoy's novella The Forged Coupon, ends on a note of ambiguity that might be called Dostoevskyan, whereas Le Diable probablement concludes with the virtually unequivocal triumph of Thanatos, a triumph scarcely in doubt right from the beginning. Like Le Diable, and even more ironically considering its title, L'Argent had difficulty in finding a producer, and was turned down by the avance sur recettes commission. Bresson's final film, shot in the summer of 1982 and released in 1983, brought to an end the longest gap in his work since that separating Journal from Les Dames, more than thirty years before.

"1968: de grands soirs en petits matins, by Bantigny, Ludivine, Paris, Seuil, 2018, 450 pp., 25€, ISBN: 978-2-02-1-130157-1." Modern & Contemporary France, 26(4), pp. 435–436

This article examines the reasons why the label of film maudit is all too applicable to Jean Eustache's nowadays little-known masterpiece La Maman et la putain, offering a succinct overview of the director's career and the film as well as situating it within the time of its making and release and analysing its subsequent distributional vicissitudes. Along with a brief scrutiny of what exactly might be meant by the term film maudit, it offers an analysis of the reasons why the film's accessibility is so restricted and a summary of available (and not-so-available) secondary sources dealing with it.