ABSTRACT
France has a more buoyant and internationally successful domestic film industry than any other West European nation. French practitioners and critics have been in the front line of developing new theories within the discipline of film studies: since the 1950s, discussions and analysis in the pages of journals like Cahiers du cinema and Positif have set the parameters for debate in world cinema. French cinema’s position as the representative of the European industry on the world stage appears to be bound up with the idea that opposition to the might of the Hollywood dream factory must be the very antithesis of what the latter has deemed cinema to be. The intensity of the film’s treatment of social exclusion and the huge critical and public response to the film as social artefact is a revealing indication of how far so-called alternative cinema has been embraced by mainstream audiences and directors.
