RÉSUMÉ Cet article revient sur l’essor des membres de la troupe du Splendid dans le cinéma comique français au tournant des années 1970–1980. Issue des scènes du café-théâtre parisien, l’équipe du Splendid est l’une des réussites les plus manifestes de cette expression scénique nouvelle. Les comédiens de la troupe s’imposent collectivement au cinéma, contribuant à une identification plus nette pour l’industrie, la critique et les spectateurs du « style café-théâtre ». Une impression de renouveau de la comédie se dégage à la lecture des articles de presse de l’époque qui reviennent sur les films portés par des membres du Splendid. Tout en s’adaptant à cette industrie cinématographique, le Splendid cultive sa différence par son ancrage artistique avant-gardiste et par son affiliation à une certaine marginalité, qui donne le sentiment au public et à la presse que les situations dépeintes à l’écran sont plus tranchées et moins consensuelles. Cependant, de nombreuses voix remarquent dans ces comédies la reprise de formules boulevardières. Sans renier la dimension caustique de leur identité artistique théâtrale, ces comédiens ont étouffé les aspects les plus noirs de leur style pour s’adapter à un marché impliquant plus de risques économiques que le circuit des cafés-théâtres. En ce sens, ces comédies dans le sillage du café-théâtre se distinguent davantage par un certain sens de l’équilibre que par une radicale nouveauté.

ABSTRACT Jean Delannoy suffered more than any other director from the New Wave narrative of the Tradition of Quality as a bureaucratic, academic, professional and soulless production disconnected from everyday life. Compared to an insurance salesman by his critics, Delannoy came to encapsulate the ultimate commodification of cinema. However, a close look at the director’s work during the late 1940s – arguably his peak – shows that it was far from old-fashioned. On the contrary, the author argues that his late 1940s output contributed to French cinematic modernism, particularly Les Jeux sont faits/The Chips Are Down (1947), Aux yeux du souvenir/To the Eyes of Memory (1948) and Le Secret de Mayerling/The Secret of Mayerling (1949). The author turns the view of Delannoy as a mere insurer on its head to instead reframe the director as a moderniser. The first part of the article situates in historical context Delannoy’s rise to prominence and his reformist attitude. The second part theorises the relation between insurance and modernity. The final part conducts a close reading of Les Jeux sont faits to showcase what the author calls Delannoy’s ‘cold humanism’, an intellectualisation of cinema that entailed embracing non-cinematic registers and destabilising narrative expectations.

ABSTRACT Departing from the directorial focus of debates about the Tradition of Quality, this article examines stardom and performance as central to late 1940s and 1950s mainstream French cinema. Authorship is not discarded but understood as a power dynamic in which directors and performers, alongside other contributors, struggle for control over characters and narrative. The article first establishes the main elements of quality performance, building on André Bazin’s concept of cinéma théâtral. Examples, drawn from major stars (Fernandel, Pierre Blanchar, Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin, Edwige Feuillère and Michèle Morgan), highlight the crucial importance of elocution and language, a dimension of performance that is often neglected. The article then focuses on Brigitte Bardot in two quality films, En cas de malheur/Love is my Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958) and La Vérité/The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960). B.B.’s iconoclastic image and her departure from prevailing notions of ‘good acting’ provoke a ‘dissonant’ performance, which illuminates further, by contrast, the Tradition of Quality’s acting norms. Conversely, Autant-Lara’s and Clouzot’s variously successful efforts to blend Bardot seamlessly into quality aesthetics betray their wish to modernise their cinema at a pivotal historical moment when the Tradition of Quality was under assault from the emerging New Wave.

ABSTRACT This article examines transnational francophone films from writer-directors Marjane Satrapi and Chloé Mazlo, filmmakers who show how the politics of l’exception culturelle [the cultural exception] have made French cinema a multiply exceptional force in world cinema. The analogue effects in Poulet aux prunes/Chicken with Plums (2011) and Sous le ciel d’Alice/Skies of Lebanon (2020) mark an aesthetic resistance to the homogenising force of digital photorealism while also reflecting an approach to filmmaking pioneered by Georges Méliès, particularly his ground-breaking work in set design and cinematography. As women filmmakers, their reliance on practical aesthetics to present stories set outside l’Hexagone (mainland France) represent the French commitment to the diversity of cinéma-monde. This article argues that these filmmakers and their films have benefitted from policies rooted in l’exception culturelle while expanding the sense of ‘exception’ in a French context to mean films directed by women, films featuring analogue effects and films that reflect transnational identities and cross-cultural collaboration. Both Poulet aux prunes and Sous le ciel d’Alice frame an expanded logic for l’exception culturelle that has shaped more than three decades of contemporary French cinema.

ABSTRACT François Ozon’s Regarde la mer/See the Sea uses the generic codes of a psychological thriller in order to portray femininity in a state of flux. Although Ozon is one of the most established contemporary French auteurs, this film is often overlooked in studies of his work. This article explores Regarde la mer as one of Ozon’s many contributions to a specific genre. The ‘psychological thriller’ relies heavily on suspense and ambiguity in order to function, and much of the film’s ambiguities are built around a sense of ambivalent sexual tension. In addition to the analysis of genre, this article approaches this ambivalent sexual tension from a queer perspective. Many normative configurations of gender are transgressed in the film, and the article identifies how this is conveyed in its expressive visual style. Furthermore, the film interrogates traditional female roles, such as ‘wife’ or ‘mother’. As a result, Regarde la mer draws on the aforementioned generic codes in order to subvert normative discourses of femininity.

ABSTRACT Based on the examples of Versailles, a series co-produced by Capa Drama with the Quebec company Incendo and Zodiak Fiction for Canal+, and No Man’s Land, a Franco-Belgian-Israeli co-production produced for Arte France and the US platform Hulu, this article aims to compare two different dimensions of the globalisation of the series market and the integration of French producers and broadcasters into this new transnational creative ecosystem. The challenge for the production of Versailles was to bring the French heritage series up to the standards of the English-speaking world while promoting French producers’ financial and artistic creativity in launching series with distinctive stories onto a global market. For No Man’s Land, however, the challenge was to produce a cosmopolitan series, featuring several cultural areas and a multilingual cast. Whether in terms of the broadcasters’ globalisation strategy or in terms of the creative or even cross-cultural challenges raised by the production process, both experiences are representative of the way series are emerging today as a laboratory of audiovisual ‘glocalisation’.

ABSTRACT Netflix’s globally oriented French products are commercially bound to negotiate between producing locally legible and internationally acceptable gender types. This article spotlights variations in representing the French romantic hero – traditionally a gallant séducteur – to a global audience hypersensitive to notions of toxic masculinity in two post-#MeToo Netflix Original French romantic comedy narratives: the series Plan cœur/The Hook-Up Plan (2018–2021) and the film Je ne suis pas un homme facile/I Am Not an Easy Man (Eléonore Pourriat, 2018). Noting that Netflix is now the key export channel for French romcoms, the article draws primarily on textual analysis, while also leveraging psychoanalytic and affective theories, to argue that the platform’s impetus to make French masculinity in particular more widely palatable, and (so) appeal to emergent popular feminism, has the potential to reconfigure parameters of legitimate gender norms, French and beyond.

ABSTRACT This article expands on an ongoing dialogue about representations of female protagonists’ sensual and embodied experiences in Francophone North African cinema scholarship. It examines the dynamic cinematographic styles of contemporary Maghrebi French filmmakers Abdellatif Kechiche, Nadia El Fani, Leila Kilani and Houda Benyamina, asserting that they create a multisensory connection with the viewer that disrupts the underlying unequal power dynamic between film viewer and the Maghrebi woman’s body. This article places labour practices as the loci of analysis, as these examples of quotidian life represent a microcosm of protagonists’ participation in larger social and economic frameworks. First, it looks at the role of embodied labour in strengthening a protagonist’s connection to her community in Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet/The Secret of the Grain (2007) and El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003). Then, it turns to labour practices in Kilani’s Sur la planche/On the Edge (2011) and Benyamina’s Divines (2016) that isolate and disconnect the protagonist from her community and her body. This article concludes that it is the distinctly multisensory style used by all four directors that centres their protagonists’ physical, lived experiences while challenging the viewer not to merely watch them passively, but to engage in a dynamic, empathetic relationship with the body onscreen.

ABSTRACT French screenwriters’ precarity has been highlighted in a number of different ways in recent years, not least by their efforts to organise and publicise professional abuses. This article will consider the situation of writers and how these are often framed in relation to a cinematic culture rooted in what Jonathan Buchsbaum calls ‘a certain idea of film [as] the art form of the twentieth century’, an idea that engages with debates on quality as well as authorship. As will emerge, this is also an idea of cinema that many of the screenwriters in question contribute to and defend, even if its emphasis on the director-auteur has implications for their own position and visibility. The article will then turn to recent efforts on the part of French screenwriters working in different sectors of audio-visual and cinematic production to stand up against precarious employment conditions, inadequate remuneration, and what they have described as a systematic downplaying of their role and their work, which have successfully attracted attention from the media but also from professional bodies, notably the CNC.