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Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. In a series of important films, including Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South, The Class and Foxfire, he takes stock of the modern world from the workplace, through the schoolroom and the oppressive small town to the world of international sex tourism. His films drive the hidden forces that weigh on individuals and groups into view but also show characters who are capable of reflection and reaction. If the films make their protagonists rethink their place in the world, they also challenge the positions of the viewer and the director. This is what makes them so worthy of study. Combining a fine eye for detail with broad contextual awareness, this book gives an account of all Cantet’s works, from the early short films to the major works. Martin O’Shaughnessy is a leading international writer on French cinema,especially in film and politics.

[...]they all work, typically using some of the armoury of film melodrama, to bring hidden power dynamics to the surface, not least through their investigation of the unevenness of shared space and the hidden barriers and inequalities it may bear.1 Thirdly, they test out utopias, whether they are conservative (the possibility of individual freedom and inclusiveness within the status quo) or progressive (the capacity to make a new, more equal order). [...]the recurrent structural features effectively function as a tool kit: in their attention to individuals and groups, the unevenness of space, hidden power dynamics and utopian claims and possibilities, and in their determination to destabilise presuppositions, they constitute a set of devices for opening up and investigating a specific context, and challenging our preconceptions about it, whether it be the Republican school (Entre les murs) or sex tourism in 1970s Haiti (Vers le sud).

[...]he is the kind of flexible, mobile, connected person that the new world of work seems to call for.1 Yet he is also an embodiment of the new unfreedoms and alienations. With the capitalization of the individual, then health care, education or one’s career path become “investments” of one’s personal capital; as an enterprise in a society of enterprises, one makes good or bad business decisions. Because any social policy based on redistribution and mutualization undermines this passage of the individual into an “enterprising self,” the postwar framework of social rights and collective protections must be undone, and risks must be outsourced from state and companies to individuals (“Neo-liberalism” 121). Going against the healthy tendency to forget and to be open to the new, the promise meant making oneself predictable, and thus implied a particular kind of memory, one oriented to the future. [...]although debt generated a calculating subjectivity able to measure equivalences (the pound of flesh), it also implied a moral relationship based on the guilt of owing. [...]the space of the new is effectively foreclosed. Because the ability to act upon the world presupposes not just sensations, knowledge and perceptions, but also the capacity for the possible to go beyond the actual, then future possibilities are effectively neutralized, as, indeed, are memories of earlier struggles, their disruptive temporalities and release of possibilities having no place in the predictable time of debt repayment (La Fabrique 55).3 Opening Conflicts: Productive Time and Disruptive Temporalities When L’Emploi du temps begins, its hero, Vincent, is asleep in his car.

Because of this, a cinema that really wishes to engage with work must, as Comolli says, \"fi lm against cinema,\" or, in other words, fi nd ways of fi lming that refuse to be drawn to the spectacular surface.5 Picking up on André Bazin's celebrated suggestion that the cinema frame should be seen more as a cache, something that hides what surrounds it, than as a (pictorial) frame or a window (on the world), Comolli suggests that work- related fi lms should concentrate on what is offscreen. More generally, a dialectical relationship between the hidden and the seen is built into both the fi lm's narrative and visual economies in the shape of hidden management maneuvers and discussions behind shut doors and lowered blinds that undercut the surface calm. Because obstacles to workplace fi lming are real in the case of documentary but imagined in fi ction, we would expect them to be a consistent, obligatory feature of the former but a stylistic and narrative choice in the latter. Worse still, they could no longer believe in their own image or in its capacity to interest others. Because fi lm tends to produce belief in what it shows and to reenchant the world, the challenge it faces now is to fi lm workers without inadvertently creating a belief in them that has been lost. [...]more specifi cally, it puts forward a distinctly negative reading of the ability of Cantet's fi lm in par tic u lar and fi lm in general to do anything other than register a defeat.

This article approaches Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935) in two related ways. Firstly, it shows how, responding to the entry of history into Renoir's frame, shot in \"deep time\", the film is structured, not by any sense of inevitability, but by a mise-en-scène of competing possibilities. Secondly, looking at important recent readings of the film, and drawing on Alain Badiou's writings, it asks whether we can still respond to truly radical texts without distancing ourselves from them or making them relativize their own positions, particularly in relation to political violence. Particular attention is paid to the murder sequence which, in its mise-en-scène of the tension between the circle and the line, condenses the film's sense of historical openness and uncertainty. Influential readings have tended to underscore how the sequence collectivizes the murder. My preference here is to emphasize how, when the hero escapes the camera's gaze, he steps into the space of the not already known.

Awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes,Entre les murs (The Class) was the film that cemented Cantet’s reputation as one of France’s leading film-makers. It also confirmed the director’s convictions about how his films should be made, in terms of both their production and their relationship to contemporary issues. Based on François Bégaudeau’s novel of the same name,Entre les murswas shot with an entirely amateur cast that included the novelist himself as the main character, teacher François Marin. Set in a school in north Paris, the film raised questions about Republican education at the beginning of the millennium,

While he was editingEntre les murs, Cantet was given Joyce Carol Oates’s classic American novel,Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gangto read. First published in 1993, the novel presented itself as a mature woman’s account of her 1950s youth and involvement with a gang of girls spurred into revolt against an oppressive, male-dominated society. Cantet was gripped by the book and unsurprisingly drawn to an adaptation. The novel contains so many of his favourite themes: the collision between the utopian and the real; shame and refusal of it; the tensions among individual, group and society. Finding in the

The global context is present in Cantet’s films as early asLes Sanguinaires, with its opening montage of international millennial celebrations. It is an unseen part of the background inRessources humaines, the film’s provincial factory being owned by a conglomerate that is busy investing in the third world. It is more prominent inL’Emploi du temps, with its Swiss set scenes, invented UN job, and accounts of investments in Africa or the old Eastern Bloc. But, all those films are still predominantly French in terms of their locations, language and performers. As noted earlier, Vers le sud is different