Will Higbee is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and codirector Centre for Research in Film Studies at University of Exeter. He is the author of Matthieu Kassovitz.

Sarah Leahy is a senior lecturer in French and film at Newcastle University. She is the author of Casque d’or.

Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy are associate editors of Studies in French Cinema.

Introduction

Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy

For more than twenty years, UK-based academics have been making key and distinct contributions to the way French cinema (its history and theory) has been taught and researched in both English-language and French universities. Following on from pioneering work produced by academics in France and the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s, studies focusing on key film-makers and movements such as Godard and 1930s Poetic Realism had begun to emerge in English by the mid-1980s – see, for example, Colin MacCabe's work on Godard (1980), Roy Armes' monograph French Cinema (1985) and Keith Reader's (1981) analysis of French cinema in Cultures on Celluloid. In 1984, French cinema studies gained a certain visibility within the broader field of French studies, as the first-ever panel on French cinema at the Society for French Studies' conference was convened; as part of this panel, Keith Reader presented a paper on La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (Renoir 1939), Russell Cousins on La Bête humaine/The Human Beast (Renoir 1938) and Jill Forbes on Jean-Louis Baudry and theory.

Perhaps one of the first events where the question of French cinema as a discipline was directly debated was at the pioneering conference on European Cinema convened by Susan Hayward at Aston University in 1982. The proceedings of that conference, published in 1985, contain a short piece by Hayward entitled 'Film Studies and Modern Languages', in which she argues for the importance of varying theoretical approaches according to what is made necessary by the 'filmic language' (Hayward 1985: 155), indicating a desire to avoid any methodological or epistemological parti pris – a concern that has characterized Hayward's work. The first PhD thesis on French Cinema was also completed in 1985. Submitted by Ginette Vincendeau to the University of East Anglia, this was entitled 'Social Text and Context of a Popular Entertainment Medium' (Vincendeau 1985). It is this thesis – as Phil Powrie argues in Part III of this book – that, along with the intervention of academics such as Forbes, Hayward and Reader at the aforementioned conferences of the mid-1980s, marks the start of the UK strand of French cinema studies. Finally, 1985 was a key date in the sense that the end of the year also saw the publication of the first of a series of seminal articles by Ginette Vincendeau in Screen – the academic journal that was then, and remains now, arguably the most important and prestigious forum for academic debate in the discipline of film studies. The article was titled 'Community, Nostalgia and the Spectacle of Masculinity' (Vincendeau 1985a); though it was certainly not the first contribution on French cinema to be published in Screen, it was notable for the way that it identified multiple areas of inquiry – popular cinema of the 1930s, French stardom, gender representation – that would emerge as key concerns in UK French film studies. The mid-1980s was therefore a crucial period for the emergence and visibility of a nascent network of UK-based researchers whose contribution is being recognized by this volume, which considers UK perspectives on studies in French cinema from 1985 to the present.

Under the direction of Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, this early research, collaboration and ongoing intellectual exchange from the 1980s led to arguably two of the most important departures for French screen studies in the English language in the early 1990s. The first of these was the publication of French Film: Texts and Contexts (1990), a collection of new work on French cinema by French, UK and US academics, edited by Hayward and Vincendeau, which ranged from the early silent period to the mid-1980s. The second was Hayward's groundbreaking French National Cinema (1993), which established the Routledge National Cinemas Series and opened up discussions around the place and significance (ideological, political and economic) of the 'national' within a given national cinema or film culture, discussions that have had a broader impact in relation to national cinema studies in the fields of Film Studies and Modern Languages more generally.

What distinguished these two books was the way they considered French 'national' cinema in a context that combined research on the established key movements and moments (1920s Avant-garde, 1930s Poetic Realism, The Nouvelle Vague) in French cinema with apparently under-valued or overlooked films and film-makers who were seen as the antithesis of the art-house auteur that so characterized perceptions of French cinema from across...