Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive - over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Third Republic, known as the "belle epoque," was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history. Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published widely on French women writers, including Colette, Rachilde, Renee Vivien, and bestselling romantic authors of the Belle Epoque. Her recent publications include Rachilde Decadence Gender and the Woman Writer (Berg, 2001), and she is working on a study of romance in 20th century France. Carrie Tarr is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kingston, UK. She has published extensively on gender and ethnicity in French cinema. Her recent publications include Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (with B. Rollet, 2001) and Reframing Difference: beur and banlieue cinema in France (2005).

The Third Republic, known as the 'belle epoque', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history.

Reframing difference is the first major study of two overlapping strands of contemporary French cinema, cinema beur (films by young directors of Maghrebi immigrant origin) and cinema de banlieue (films set in France's disadvantaged outer-city estates). Carrie Tarr's insightful account draws on a wide range of films, from directors such as Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassovitz and Djamel Bensalah. Her analyses compare the work of male and female, majority and minority film-makers, and emphasise the significance of authorship in the representation of gender and ethnicity. Foregrounding such issues as the quest for identity, the negotiation of space and the recourse to memory and history, she argues that these films challenge and reframe the symbolic spaces of French culture, addressing issues of ethnicity and difference which are central to today's debates about what it means to be French. This timely book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between cinema and citizenship in a multicultural society. -- .

Carrie Tarr's analysis of the cinema of Diane Kurys is the first full-length study of this director, whose delightfully unsentimental reconstructions of the lives of girls and women in post-war France have established her as a distinctive presence in contemporary French film-making. Tarr traces Kurys' trajectory from actress to author, director and producer of her own films and situates her work within debates on women's film-making and female authorship. The book includes detailed readings of each of Kurys' films to date, from the evocation of growing up in the 1960s in "Diabolo Menthe" to the dilemmas facing contemporary women artists in "A la Folie." The conclusion defines Kurys' "authorial signature" and discusses the extent to which she has been able to create a space for female subjectivity within the constraints of contemporary French culture.

Feminist approaches to questions of women, pleasure and transgression have generally been premised on the assumption that women's pleasures are typically constrained - if not ignored, marginalized or forbidden - in patriarchal cultures. The naming, foregrounding and pursuit of women's pleasures can therefore be deemed potentially transgressive and linked to women's emancipation in other realms. The essays in this volume draw on a range of materials, from travel writing and the novel to film and stand-up comedy, addressing the specificity of French and Francophone approaches to women, pleasure and transgression across a range of historical contexts. The volume is divided into three sections: intellectual and creative pleasures; normative pleasures, that is, pleasures conforming to women's conventionally expected roles and status as well as to accepted views regarding race, national identity and sexuality; and perverse pleasures, that is, pleasures transgressive in their tendency to reject authority and norms, and often controversial in their "excessive" appetite for violence, sex, alcohol or food. In each case, questions are raised about how we approach such pleasures as feminist researchers, motivated in part by a desire to counter the notion of feminism and feminist research as something "dour" or joyless.

Women's film-making in France is a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive--during the period in question, over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a sigificant factor in their filmaking.This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of "postfeminism," women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the recent impact of a new generation of filmakers. It thus enables readers for the first time to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.

This book is the first to address the relationship between gender and immigration in contemporary France and the political and personal issues that affect women of immigrant origin. Focusing on the social and political aspects of women's lives, the book investigates how they are affected by racism and changes in citizenship laws and explores the strategies they use to combat exclusion through movements such as the 'sans-papiers'.
Authors go on to discuss ways in which immigrant women and their daughters negotiate their changing cultural identities in relation to their communities of origin and their positions in France, with reference to the Magrebhi family and attitudes to the Islamic headscarf.
These issues are further developed through analyses of women's cultural production across a wide range of media, from the writing of Vietnamese women to 'Beur' Filmmaking, including Yamina Benguigui's highly acclaimed documentary Memoires d'Immigres.
Combining a range of case studies and practical data with a theoretical overview of the topic, this is an important reference work for anyone studying postcolonial France and the role of women within it.