ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the 1990 first edition of French Film: Texts and Contexts, we wrote that ‘The study of French cinema in English-speaking countries presents something of a paradox. Whereas, undoubtedly, “the landscape of film studies in Britain and the United States has been transformed by post-1968 developments in French film theory” (Harvey 1978, 1), the study of the cinema of France has in the main seemed to be by-passed by these developments and remained the province of rather conventional approaches: the study of film as “reflection” of society on the one hand, and traditional auteurism on the other.’ We then went on to argue that, as the study of French cinema was often situated in Modern Language departments, ‘with the primary aim of giving students an increased access to French culture filtered through the work of individual artists on a literary analogy, as a result French film as film and French cinema as an institution tend[ed] to be neglected’. However, we also noted that, when studied within Film Studies, French cinema was frequently reduced to the work of a few exceptional ‘masters’ or subsumed under the category of European art cinema, with the effect of losing its national specificity.
