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From Brigitte Bardot in her bikini at the Cannes Film Festival, to François Ozon's intimate portrayals of grief and loss, some of the most iconic and challenging moments in French cinema are associated with the beach. Cinema at the Shore argues that the Parisian cityscape is not the only significant definition of space in French cinema and instead explores the industrial, aesthetic and thematic relations of French cinema to the beach.
Examining a range of films from the 1950s to the present day - including popular comedies by Jacques Tati and Patrice Leconte, the lively and ruminative documentaries of Agnès Varda, the classicism of Eric Rohmer, and the provocations of Catherine Breillat - this book showcases the dynamism and importance of the beach as a site for the reconfiguration of French cinematic identity itself. The beach offers a unique crystallization of our attitudes towards nature, culture, the body, space and time. In its constant mobility, its close, yet distinctive, relationship with nature, and its paradoxical centrality in the French cultural imaginary as a site of relaxation and holidays, the beachscape, re-framed and re-imaged by the camera, offers new ways of conceiving of the spatial politics of French cinema.
List of contents
Contents: The Cinematic Beachscape - The Girl in the Bikini: The Beach and French Cinema's Cultural Economy - Sex (and Gender) on the Beach: Modes of Masculinity and Fantasies of Femininity - Eric Rohmer à la plage: Musical Moments and Ethnographic Encounters - The Old Woman and the Sea: Agnès Varda's Beachscapes - The Possibilities of a Beach: Queerness and François Ozon's Beaches - Conclusion: Beyond the Beach.
About the author
Fiona Handyside is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Exeter, UK. She is the editor of
Eric Rohmer: Interviews (2013) and has published in several journals, including
Screen and the
European Journal of Cultural Studies.
