Screening the Paris Suburbs

Philippe Met is Professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University of PennsylvaniaDerek Schilling is Professor of French at Johns Hopkins University

• Introduction – Philippe Met and Derek Schilling1 On the origins of the banlieue film, 1930–80 – Annie Fourcaut2 Lumière, Méliès, Pathé and Gaumont: French filmmaking in the suburbs, 1896–1920 – Roland-François Lack3 Roads, rivers and canals: spaces of freedom from Epstein to Vigo – Jean-Louis Pautrot4 The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s – Keith Reader5 Julien Duvivier and interwar ‘banlieutopia’ – Margaret C. Flinn6 Margins and thresholds of French cinema: Ménilmontant, Le Sang des bêtes, Colloque de chiens – Eric Bullot7 Georges Franju and the grotesque genius of the banlieue – Tristan Jean8 Tati, suburbia and modernity – Malcolm Turvey9 A crucible of emotions: Maurice Pialat’s L’Amour existe – Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck10 Godard’s suburban years – Térésa Faucon11 The banlieue wore black: postwar French polar, from Becker to Corneau – Philippe Met12 Erasing the suburbs: the grands ensembles in documentary film and television, 1950–80 – Camille Canteux13 Elusive happiness: screening France’s new towns after 1968 - Derek Schilling14 Towers of evil: Jean-Claude Brisseau – David Vasse15 What’s left of the ‘red suburb’? Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise as case study – Guillaume SoulezIndex

‘This edited volume is an important contribution to conceptions of geography and French cinema. The fifteen contributions address the banlieue in film as geographic suburb and mise-en-scène that is both incidental landscape and elemental context for cinematic storytelling. Overall, the volume demonstrates how notions of banlieue cinema allow us to reconsider well-known French interwar and postwar films with an awareness of the postcolonial and hip-hop discourses that have over-coded an underlying historical context. The richness of this approach lies in how it foregrounds spatial dynamics within the Hexagon, or metropolitan France, as supplemented by longstanding histories of migration and regional idioms [...] A wide range of perspectives thus describe and reconsider the “space of periphery” in French cinema.’Peter J. Bloom, University of California, H-France Review, Vol. 19 (2019)