Film & Media: 4 Wonders of Modern French Cinema

We step away from the well-trodden path of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s and the Cinema du Look of the 1980s to examine what are some of the themes and running features of French Cinema moving through the 1990s and into the 21st Century? What became of the anti-Hollywood anti convention stance of the New Wave? Do a new generation of filmmakers take the themes of the past and move forward or do they attempt to make a clean break and express their own individual voices? We consider the mix of fantasy and realism in films such as La Haine and the rise of a new socially aware cinema expressing discontent - Le Jeune Cinema (‘young cinema’) arising in the mid 1990s. Renown French filmmaker Claire Denis prefers to disregard film theory and focus on ‘texture’ and often makes films exploring multiculturalism both in and, in the case of White Material, outside of France. Some consider these films as consciously expressing a ‘moral crisis’ within society. Leon, stides the boundary between Hollywood and French cinema – is its director consciously using Hollywood tropes to pass comment on mainstream cinema and the action film genre in general? Films explored: The Intouchables / Untouchable (2011), Leon: The Professional (1994), La Haine (1995), White Material (2010).