ABSTRACT
The French heritage film is most readily associated with the cycle of super-productions released in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which combined high production values with the box-office draw of major French stars as a means of differentiating French cinema from Hollywood and wooing both national and international audiences. As a consequence of Bouchareb’s apparent willingness to embrace the middlebrow’s potential for accessibility (to its intended audience), Days of Glory arguably becomes the more influential and, in political terms, radical work. The representational politics adopted in Black Venus, in contrast, for all their power and artistic ‘worth’, confine it within clear hierarchies of cultural value associated with the auteur film and obscure it from the view of popular French audiences, thus limiting a more profitable engagement with both the politics of gender and the memorialization of France’s colonial past in the middlebrow cultural space of thefiction patrimoniale.
