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  • French Cinema in Close-Up. La Vie d’un acteur pour moi: Illustrated Mini-Dictionary of Actors and Actresses of the French Cinema ed. by Michaël Abecassis, Marcelline Block
  • Tom Cuthbertson
French Cinema in Close-Up. La Vie d’un acteur pour moi: Illustrated Mini-Dictionary of Actors and Actresses of the French Cinema. Edited by Michaël Abecassis and Marcelline Block; with caricatures by Jenny Batlay and Igor Bratusek. Dublin: Phaeton Publishing, 2015. xi + 439 pp., ill.

A recent French television programme dedicated to Jean Rochefort paid particular attention to the symbolic value of the actor’s perhaps most prominent and saleable attribute: his much-celebrated moustache; a single feature that came to define him and to dictate the position he occupies in the imagination of generations of filmgoers. A similar analytical gesture of zooming in on revealing details lies at the heart of this collective volume. Bringing together contributions from academics, journalists, and curators, among others, this Illustrated Mini-Dictionary sets out to give a personal and informal overview of 175 actors judged to have enriched French cinema from its origins to the present day. The volume’s varied entries, each accompanied by caricatures by artists Jenny Batlay and Igor Bratusek, aim to eschew the rigidity of the purely biographical account, and to offer more subjective insight into those elements (like Rochefort’s famous moustache) that durably cement an actor’s position in the collective imaginary. In his short Introduction, Michaël Abecassis describes the volume as offering a succession of personal sketches or portraits, each of which picks apart the specific aspects of an actor’s persona, performance style, and career trajectory that contribute to their unmistakable star identity — those fugitive components that trigger the pleasure of millions of spectators when these actors appear on screen. There is a great deal of variation apparent across the contributions, reflecting the volume’s range of contributors and perspectives. The most helpful entries avoid simply listing the main points of filmographies and biographies, and manage in some way to dissect and convey the unique, often ineffable appeal of the canonical faces of French cinema. The entries are well distributed across time periods, with actors who rose to prominence in the films of the 1930s and 1940s being particularly well represented. Certain entries also offer a welcome nod to the contribution made to French cinema by performers born outside France. The entries are brief, and the volume remains, necessarily, an overview of its subject matter, to be dipped into as the need arises. There are inevitable exclusions and gaps in coverage but the entries are varied enough to hold some interesting surprises. This mini-dictionary offers fun, light-hearted, often irreverent contributions that cast light on a wide range of performers.

Tom Cuthbertson
Wolfson College, Oxford
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