Working within the 1970s French avant-garde, Marguerite Duras set out to dismantle the mechanisms of mainstream cinema, progressively undermining conventional representation and narrative and replacing them with her own innovative technique. However, the experimental impetus of her cinema was not motivated solely by artistic or aesthetic considerations, but also had important political implications. While all films by Duras can be described as 'political' or 'oppositional', in the sense that they subvert dominant modes of representation, Nathalie Granger, Le Camion and Les Mains négatives differ from the rest of her work. This is because they combine this formal challenge with overtly political themes relating to feminism, communism and postcolonialism. The making of Nathalie Granger in 1972 coincided with the period of intense political activity and lively theoretical debates which marked the early years of the post-1968 French feminist movement.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains how the cinéma du look was placed by many, including Jean-Jacques Beineix himself, in a position of confrontation with the cinema of the nouvelle vague. It considers the early 1980s debates concerning the film image which led to the view espoused by Jean-Michel Frodon, after a brief account of Beineix's apprenticeship years. The book attempts to place Beineix's work within the context of the development of French cinema and discourses on the French cinema, as they evolved during the 1980s. It also considers ways in which one can see Beineix's films as a kind of psychodrama. Beineix's first feature film, Diva, enjoyed considerable success, becoming something of a cult film for the youth audience of the time, as well as launching the careers of Richard Bohringer and Dominique Pinon.

This chapter addresses Catherine Breillat's work in terms of its relation to the pornographic, exploring what is at stake for her aesthetically in this relation, and using some of the issues raised to discuss features characteristic of her filmmaking. It discusses Breillat's supposed proximity to the pornographic and consider Breillat's own conception of her art, with particular reference to questions of identification, literality and transcendence. The chapter examine Breillat's portrayal of relations between the sexes; via the figures of the touch and the cut which emerge from this, it will then attempt to get closer to the aesthetics of Breillat's work. It explores what Breillat understands to be the nature of this truth, before considering the questions of transgression, transcendence and identification it raises, and its aesthetic consequences for the relation between Breillat's films and the reality they represent.

This chapter sheds light on the origins and characteristics of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, including the influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century determinist philosophical discourses in the writings of Buffon, Maupertuis, Condillac, Helvétius, Saint-Hilaire and Darwin. The philosophical discourse of the ‘true style’ was influenced in part by the ‘providential’ vision of ‘man’ and reality. The chapter further highlights how this determinist tradition influenced nineteenth-century French literary realism and naturalism, examining the distinctions between realism and naturalism, focusing on conceptions of representation and human agency within the naturalist movement. The study draws attention to the fact that the perspective on nineteenth-century realism rests on fundamental misconceptions concerning the historical role and character of the realist movement. The overall objective is to elaborate the French nineteenth-century tradition of ‘critical’ naturalist-realism, distinguish that tradition from more normative forms of realism, and establish its themes, stylistic devices and historical consequence.

In the early 1980s, Michelangelo Antonioni had major exhibitions of a series of photographs entitled Le montagne incantate in Venice, in Rome and in Paris at the Louvre. Antonioni enlarged the photographs and at a certain point arrested the enlargement process, printing the resulting images. These images are le montagne incantate. In Le montagne incantate exhibition, each image that is shown is a moment along a path of images not shown, a pause in infinitude, rescued as an instant from the oblivion and void of virtuality. In the enlargements in Blow-up and in Le montagne incantate, the choice of stopping an enlargement is a choice within a series that can be made at any moment and at any point, any one of which will result in a different image, endlessly. In Antonioni's film, Blow-up, a photographer, by chance, takes some photographs of a woman and her lover in a park.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book aims to re-evaluate Georges Méliès's place in film history by examining some of the myths surrounding his work. These myths have been all-pervasive, leading many film students and scholars to accept them unquestioningly. However, by acknowledging Méliès's status as an auteur working independently to make a distinctive mark on the films he wrote, designed, directed, edited, produced and starred in, it is possible to replace these myths with a more accurate assessment of Méliès's legacy. The book shows that Méliès's films lend themselves to narrative analysis. What is most clear is that Méliès was a Janus-faced figure linking two centuries: he drew upon and developed the theatrical traditions of the nineteenth, but he also had a profound influence on cinematic art of the twentieth.