French Comedy On Screen: A Cinematic History
by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni /
2014 / French / PDF
1.7 MB Download
French film comedies have always been extremely popular with English-speaking audiences, especially in America with the numerous Hollywood remakes of comedies from France. These films occupy a specific cultural space and are influenced by national traditions and shared cultural references, but at the same time they have always been difficult to classify. Often a combination of several genres, they can be described as a hybrid art form, incorporating basic slapstick elements (the Lumière's brothers L'arroseur arosé, 1895) all the way to rather daring, even delicate subjects such as war (Autant-Lara's La traversée de Paris, 1956) or racism (Philippe de Chauveron's Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? 2014). The diversity of disciplines - history, linguistics, social and political sciences - that form the background of this analysis guarantees a variety of approaches. French Comedy on Screen investigates the different methods in which these comedies textually inscribed and exemplified a variety of cultural and historical landmarks.
