Description: This volume brings together the work of leading film scholars from the UK, France and the US to assess a dominant art form's engagement with expressions of national identity at key moments in French cinematic history, from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century, through the inter-war period, the Occupation, the post-Liberation era, and the New Wave, up to the present day. The essays go against the grain in their attempts to construct an alternative history of French cinema, whether by bringing to light overlooked films or by examining well-known, indeed even "over-exposed" films or film-makers in a new light. In re-evaluating the work of Georges Melies, Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Diane Kurys, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Jean-Jacques Beineix, the contributors to this volume focus on the paradoxical centrality of the marginal in constructions of national identity.

This multi-faceted assessment of French visual culture and identity will be of interest to students and scholars in French studies, media and film studies, cultural studies and French history.

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