In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Je t’aime . . . moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations
  • Keith Reader
Je t’aime... moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations. Edited by Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. viii + 289 pp., ill. Hb $95.00; £55.00.

Francois Truffaut’s notorious assertion of ‘a certain incompatibility between the terms “cinema” and “Britain”’ for far too long tended to overshadow and block serious discussion of the multifarious cinematic relationships between the two nations. This collection of essays does not explicitly put forward an overarching comparative perspective, but one contrast that emerges with great regularity is that between what Catherine Wheatley calls ‘British bawdiness and French sexuality’ (p. 94) — as might be said, the seaside postcard versus Brigitte Bardot. Another key point is that, as Lucy Mazdon states, ‘[t]he very journey from one culture to another can significantly alter the identity of a given film’ (p. 9), as when popular French films (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis is a pertinent example) turn up in UK art cinemas. Sarah Street makes the stimulating point that the best analogy for the British New Wave of the 1960s might not be its French contemporary and homonym, but rather, diachronically, the poetic realism of the 1930s and early 1940s. Such comparisons are long overdue, and their articulation is one of the two unique selling points of this anthology. The other is its wealth of historical — even anecdotal — detail, as in Vincent Porter’s tracing of how France became the dominant foreign presence in British cinemas as early as the 1930s, or his emphasis on the importance of film societies for those outside London who wanted to see French films. Another institutional dimension vividly evoked is that of film festivals — not only the French Film Festival UK, which annually showcases works otherwise not visible here, but the Festival du film britannique in the Breton resort of Dinard, a favourite vacation haunt of Alfred Hitchcock. Stars discussed include not only the inevitable Gainsbourg–Birkin tandem of the title, but the 1930s icon Annabella (Hôtel du Nord), whose profile on this side of the Channel was far higher than that of nowadays better-known performers such as Arletty or Michèle Morgan. The work’s purview is broad — all the way from the dubbing of Hitchcock’s Waltzes from Vienna (as Le Chant du Danube) to Saul Dibb’s 2004 Bullet Boy, cited by Jim Morrissey, rather than the better-known Trainspotting, as an intertext to La Haine. [End Page 285] Television gets a look in through Ginette Vincendeau’s piece on British representations of the Resistance, which deals rather more kindly with ’Allo ’Allo! than do most critics. Major errors are few and far between, although Prévert receives directorial rather than simply scriptwriting credit for Le Quai des brumes — Carné must be spinning in his grave — and the neglect into which René Clair has fallen is cruelly exemplified by the mistitling of both Un chapeau de paille d’Italie and Quatorze juillet. The book is attractively presented and well illustrated, and should certainly feature in libraries and reading lists for students not only of French but also of film and cultural studies.

Keith Reader
University of Glasgow
...

pdf

Share