The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930–1956 by Noël Burch, and Geneviève Sellier (review)

This translation of Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier’s groundbreaking La drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–1956 (Paris: Nathan, 1996) draws on an admirable programme of rigorous primary research. Referencing over 300 films, the authors trace, through cinema, the evolutions taking place in the collective thinking of gender and sexual difference in France following the national humiliation of the Occupation. With careful attention to the effects of historical circumstance on the lives of ordinary French men and women, the authors scrutinize the concomitant shifts occurring in dominant gender stereotypes in the cinema. A triptych structure generates a strong and valuable focus on the little-studied cinema of the Occupation period. (Nonetheless, films of the previous and following decades also receive rewarding attention.) A chapter of film analyses follows each section, allowing for in-depth studies of gender representations in individual films from the period concerned: many of these analyse little-known films, although favourites such as Le Corbeau (dir. by Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943) feature too. The book’s arguments on gender representation occupy the disputed territory between the ‘phoney war’ of the French edition’s title and the more bloodthirsty ‘battle of the sexes’ referenced in the present volume’s title. (Relationships between men and women in French cinema of the 1930s are likened to the ‘phoney war’, whilst the ‘battle of the sexes’ comes closest to being realized in a certain misogynist strain of French cinema emerging in the aftermath of the Liberation.) Considering cinema to be the expression of a ‘social imaginary’ (p. 2), not the film director’s personal world-view, Burch and Sellier, always at least implicitly polemical, reject director-centred, aesthetics-driven approaches to French cinema. In addition to their broadly psychoanalytical perspective, they borrow from cultural studies to model alternatives to auteurist methodologies, making particularly effective use of starstudies approaches in order to trace shifts in the popularity of particular gendered ‘types’, such as the ‘gentle male’ (p. 164) or the ‘mothering father’ (p. 173). The depths of French cinematic misogyny are revealed in the numerous references to female roles belonging to the main character type associated with femininity in this era: the garce, who is sexually assertive (if not licentious), hard-hearted, money-grabbing, or vindictive. As Burch and Sellier attempt a serious analysis of the waxing and waning of cinematic misogyny here (including intriguing reverses to this misogynistic trend in the cinema of the Occupation), it is extremely unfortunate that important subtleties in their discussion of misogynistic gender stereotypes — often conducted in a laconic tone in the original French — have become lost in translation. This problem particularly affects translations of the term garce — rendered inconsistently and without irony as ‘bitch’ or ‘slut’ — and of terms invoking racial stereotypes too. Consequently, the anglophone reader is sometimes subjected to offensive misogynist and racist language that is out of place in an academic study. Notwithstanding this shortcoming, and some authorial blind spots relating to stereotypes of male homosexuality, this translation of Burch and Sellier’s study will prove immensely valuable for non-French-speaking researchers — despite the regrettable removal of the French edition’s excellent annotated filmography.