ABSTRACT Director Jean Renoir’s 1930s films are considered some of the most influential in film history. However, little is known about Renoir’s team of collaborators who helped to realise these ground-breaking, politically engaged films. This study considers the role of Renoir’s long-time editor during this period, Marguerite Renoir. Through an examination of Jean Renoir’s personal letters from and an original shooting script from assistant director Marc Maurette, the author establishes Marguerite Renoir’s crucial role in creating Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise(1938). Marrying this archival research with a close reading of a scene from the film, she reveals how additional shifts in point of view can be attributed to the editor, ultimately claiming that representing the social body and a collective filmmaking process are deeply intertwined in La Marseillaise. At the time of writing, this is the first study to focus exclusively on Marguerite Renoir’s unique contributions to this film.

ABSTRACTStardom plays an important role in heritage film, a contemporary genre of costume drama and historical film. Stars’ on-screen and off-screen presences, their star personas and worldviews, powerfully impact heritage films’ historical reconstitutions, potentially influencing the spectator’s ‘historical thinking’ and critical engagement with the past. A genre of popular and art-house/auteur cinema, heritage film provides a setting where renowned actors and actresses may assume a ‘politics of stars’, operating as ‘star-auteurs’ who offer a meaningful contribution to films’ depictions of prior eras through their unique incarnation of historical figures. In the star-led phenomenon of heritage biopics, stars’ roles can be instrumental in impacting the viewer’s historical understanding. Iconic French Cinema star Isabelle Adjani has appeared in several crucial roles in heritage film, most notably her incarnation of Belle Époque artist and sculptress Claudel in the 1988 biopic Camille Claudel. In her adaptation of Reine-Marie Paris’s original 1984 biography, Adjani’s specific star presence forcefully influences the film’s portrait of Parisian art worlds, salons, galleries, artists’ studios, and workshops in turn-of-the-century France. Through close analysis of Camille Claudel, this article examines the biopic’s reconstitution in relation to star Adjani’ role, testing notions of historical realism and authenticity in consultation with historical texts.

ABSTRACTIn Mon Amie Victoria/ My Friend Victoria (2014) Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s representation of the marginalisation of his protagonist,a young black woman in contemporary Paris, problematises both race difference and socio-economic status. Starting from her low affect display, this article identifies two opposing theoretical masks through which it analyses her motivation. The author initially reads Victoria in a Fanonian manner, alienated and powerless to create the meaning of her ‘white mask’. However, a black Noh mask, with which she appears to identify, advises the informed viewer that real transformation is possible. Japanese tradition imagines that such masks allow actors to become, not merely play, diverse characters. A great difference in agency thus exists between the masks, though both answer Victoria’s need to be recognised. Civeyrac’s reluctance clearly to illustrate the protagonist’s two avatars requires us to draw on his experimental films as well as intertexts with two other similarly themed films, Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de./Black Girl (1966) and Sang- soo Im’s Hanyo/The Housemaid (2010). In reading Victoria through their subaltern protagonists, the author elucidates the parameters in which her active and passive avatars operate, concluding that the opportunity for change is more limited than the Noh mask promises.