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PopularCinema, Pop-ArtCinema Most accounts of recent French cinema gloss over or disparage its popular sector;1 they also assume that the mainstream is completely disconnected from the more artistically respectable, hence widely studied, realms of auteur filmmaking. This chapter engages with these inherited notions, disputing both. In the first place, of course, France’s film mainstream is the fulcrum of its industry’s battle to retain its domestic market share, combating American imports, and its fluctuating success headlines the cnc’s annual reviews.2 In this competitive context, popular French cinema is defined by its commercial attractions: an affinity for genres (principally the comedy and the policier or crime thriller); its use of France’s dynamic indigenous star system; and, crucially, its ability to target the interests of local audiences while occasionally adopting aspects of mass cinemas abroad, thinking globally. Besides this mass-oriented template, however, there is the more severely neglected phenomenon of French pop-art cinema. The relationship between France’s popular and arthouse filmmaking has in contemporary times evolved, as fractious and frequently oppositional, yet in an increasing number of cases, fascinatingly symbiotic. This is a new generation of filmmakers rejecting the traditional French dichotomy of auteurs creating high art versus metteurs-ensc ène cranking out broad entertainments. Energetic and productive dialogue is ongoing across these rival camps. In fact, French pop-art cinema today calls for revision, if not complete overhaul, of the paradigm that lingers, like so many others, from the New Wave era. The hereditary mantra is summarized by Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, who suggest of this late 1950s period that the “success of the politique des auteurs . . . and the films of the New Wave drove a wedge between ‘auteur’ and ‘popular’ cinema.”3 Famously, in print and on-screen, the Cahiers cohort declared France’s commercial cinema to be ossified, so terminally impersonal that it was time for artistic revolution. Although the idea that the New Wave broke outright with the 1950s mainstream has been overstated ever since, and is itself ready for review,4 the notion of a French C H A P T E R T H R E E 96 b r u ta l i n t i m a c y popular and intellectual film division nonetheless gained widespread currency , and persists. As we will discover, although orthodox antagonisms still exist between French cinemas high and low—the distinction has even been exacerbated by recent hyper-commercial production trends—the conversation no longer ends there. While French popular cinema has itself developed apace in the twenty-first century, the emergence of a pop-art cinema, a fruitful coalition of textual means, is now inspiring many of France’s most skilful and cineliterate filmmakers. French popular cinema is characterized by its market orientation, a bottom-up ideology that appeals to the sensibilities of a broad audience. This can manifest on-screen through ribald humor that embraces mainstream culture and skewers elitism. Take, for instance, the assertive model of mass film that begins Laurent Baffie’s Car Keys (Les Clefs de bagnole, 2003). Baffie, known for cultural satire and candid camera pranks on French television, plays himself, pitching his script to luminaries such as Claude Berri, Dominique Farrugia, and Alain Terzian. As Baffie outlines his premise—one man’s search for lost car keys, which ninety minutes later turn out to have been in his left trouser pocket all along—the film’s style is deliberately unsophisticated: its focus shifts erratically, a make-up artist wanders in and out of shot, the soundtrack is acoustically uneven, and digital videography makes the image fuzzy and overexposed. Playing up its lowbrow mindset, Car Keys also offers ironic juxtapositions of mise-en-scène. Baffie’s pitch lurches further into selfparody (“Yes, it’s an adventure, it’s a quest, his rite of passage, an allegory!”) while the camera picks out totems of filmic prestige behind the producers’ desks: framed posters of modern auteurist classics like Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), festival trophies from Europe and North America, Berri’s sculpture of a cinématographe, and Farrugia’s face inserted into a still from Citizen Kane (1941). Unsurprisingly , Baffie fails to win these financiers over. When he is then rebuffed by a gallery of France’s leading actors, a quip from Jean Rochefort sums up the film’s manifesto as a self-consciously worthless divertissement. Directly to camera, Rochefort airily dismisses Baffie...

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