Unraveling French Cinema - From L'Atalante To Caché

Unraveling French Cinema provides a much needed introduction to the complexities of French film for students, cineastes, and the movie-loving public.


* Looks at the differences between French and American national cinema

* Explores how French directors shape their films around two potentially divergent goals: the narration of a story and an elaboration of some theory about film itself.

* Demystifies the "difficulty" of French cinema, allowing the American movie-goer to enjoy films that are too often perplexing at a first viewing.

* Offers extended analyses of classic, New Wave, and contemporary French films—including L'Atalante, Adele H., The Rules of the Game, and Cache.

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Looks at the differences between French and American national cinema

T. Jefferson Kline is a Professor of French at Boston University where he served as Chair of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (1979-88) and more recently received a Metcalf Award for excellence in teaching. His publications include Bertolucci's Dream Loom, I film di Bertolucci, Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema and various edited works and essays on literature.

Acknowledgments.


Introduction.


1 Cinema and/as Poetry: L'Atalante's Apples as Poems.


2 Cinema and the Real: Renoir's Rules.


3 Cinema and/as Crime: Breaking the Law in The Children of Paradise, Pickpocket, and Breathless.


4 Cinema and/as Mapping: Reorienting Ourselves Through Film.


5 Cinema and/as Dream: Truffaut's "Royal Road" to Adele H.


6 Cinema and/as Hypnosis: Jacquot's Seventh Heaven.


7 Cinema and/as Mourning: Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father.


8 Cinema and/as Terror: Michael Haneke's Caché.


9 Beautiful Fragments: Discontinuity and the French Cinema.


Notes.


References.


Index.