French Westerns: On the Frontier of Film Genre and French Cinema

The first scholarly monograph dedicated to the French Western film Examines an overlooked body of film whose production spans the history of cinema Advances the recovery of popular European cinema Nuances the positioning of film as a transnational mode of cultural production Provocatively asserts the French Western’s non-existence to open a singular perspective on an emblematic film genre in film scholarship, theory, and criticism The production of films that may be called both ‘French’ and ‘western’ spans the history of cinema, and includes the films by celebrated stars and directors. However, with the exception of early silent production, French westerns are overlooked in studies of French cinema, of film genre, and even of the ‘transnational’ western. French Westerns: The Frontier of Film Genre and French Cinema is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to these films. This study advances the recovery of popular European cinema and adds new dimension to the understanding of the western genre. However, the purpose is not to stretch existing definitions of the genre or the national cinema to accommodate this production. Instead, these films expose and exploit the acts of imagination to which the logics of ‘French Cinema’ and ‘Western’ owe their coherence: acts that fail repeatedly, productively, and at times spectacularly. Cover Half-Title Dedication Title Page Copyright Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction PART I FRENCH + WESTERN 1 Ce genre qui n’en est pas un 2 Imagined (and unimaginable) communities of film PART II THE WILD, WILD MIDI 3 The curious geographies of Arizona Bill 4 The modernity of tradition and the cinematic Camargue 5 The return of the western repressed PART III CHEZ NOUS ON THE RANGE 6 Little colony on the prairie 7 The language of stars on the francophone frontier 8 Cowboy and alien: the Bardot western PART IV THE BAGUETTE WESTERN 9 Spaghetti and camembert 10 East meets west(ern) Epilogue Bibliography Filmography Index