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This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world. The book proposes that we think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new ‘space of the cinematic subject’. Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume opens up new areas of critical enquiry in the expanding interdisciplinary field of space studies. It will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working not only in film studies and film philosophy, but also in French/Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, gender and cultural studies.Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http://bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser)

The story of Sara Baartman, who was brought to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited as the erotic-exotic freak 'Hottentot Venus', is arguably the most famous case study of the scientific validation of (gendered) racism. Her scientific examination and post-mortem dissection by Georges Cuvier, who looked for an alleged connection between the Khoisan and the orangutan, have been the object of famous critical works (Gilman, 1985; Haraway, 1989; FaustoSterling, 1995), but also exposed her to the unpalatable fate of becoming the 'quintessential' figure of intersecting gender and racial oppressions. This paper deals with Abdellatif Kechiche's film Vénus Noire (2010), which interestingly rearticulates the (in) famous narrative in unexpected ways. Shot by a male director who is also a postcolonial subject, the film exposes the performativity not only of gender and racial identities, but also of science theorisation, while at the same time raising the issue of whether exposing a violent male colonial gaze on a heavily exhibited woman can contribute to a counter-knowledge of her experience or rather risks reiterating the historical violence. The startling dynamic between the portrayed abuse and Kechiche's peculiar filmic strategies is the crucial focus of this paper. While Sara's body is continually exposed and violated, Vénus Noire relies on her face, shot in recurrent extreme close ups, as a haunting presence potentially exceeding violence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987 [1980]) account of the close up, I explore how Kechiche's take on Sara's face builds a strong connection with the spectator's extra-filmic dimension. As a case of what Deleuze and Guattari call a 'reflective face', such close ups invest the viewer with the ethical responsibility of being complicit in the othering practices of (post)colonial times. Vénus Noire thus manages to engage the spectator's own corporeal awareness of violence, and calls attention to the persisting exploitation of sexual and racial colonial tropes in the contemporary world.

Helene Cixous's liminal text 'The Laugh of the Medusa' calls for a challenge of traditional representations of femininity and prompts women to inscribe their hitherto concealed femininity into the world. Depicting the love, relationship and loss experienced by two female characters, Julie Maroh's 2010 Blue Is the Warmest Color provides a narrative sustained by a reclaimed matrixial gaze that challenges patriarchal definitions of women. Whereas the original comic book acts in concert with Cixous's perspective and seeks to assert the infinite richness of women's individual constitutions, the 2013 film adaptation by Abdellatif Kechiche presents a different economy. This article analyses how, in contrast to Maroh's original, the filmic adaptation discounts the feminine stance, develops a heteronormalised take on the same story and could therefore be read as promoting heteronormative leitmotifs and fantasised cliches of lesbian subjectivity and sexuality. Keywords: Abdellatif Kechiche, Blue Is the Warmest Color, feminine subjectivity, heteronormativity, Julie Maroh, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', scopophilia

Variety magazine described it as \"the most explosively graphic lesbian sex scenes in recent memory\" while the The Hollywood Reporter said the \"sprawling drama\" would \"raise eyebrows\" as it crossed the barrier \"between performance and the real deal\". The Cannes accolade presents a dilemma for British film censors, and the director, over whether to cut to make the film marketable to a wider UK audience. [Abdellatif Kechiche], 52, has indicated he would be willing to remove racier scenes to meet censor approval. \"We wouldn't want the film not to be screened because of one scene,\" he said at the weekend. \"But, of course, that wouldn't apply if it were the whole thing.\"

Variety magazine described it as \"the most explosively graphic lesbian sex scenes in recent memory\", while the The Hollywood Reporter said the \"sprawling drama\" would \"raise eyebrows\" as it crossed the barrier \"between performance and the real deal\". [Abdellatif Kechiche] (52) has indicated he would be willing to remove racier scenes to meet censor approval. \"We wouldn't want the film not to be screened because of one scene,\" he said. Kechiche is the first director born in Africa to win the top prize at Cannes. His is also the first explicitly gay-themed film to take the top honour.

The conceit for this smart, satirical and squirm-inducing indie horror-comedy and coming-of-age movie is both completely outlandish and at the same time so perfectly ingenious that it's a wonder no one thought of using it before. It's best summed up by the gynaecologist who, having just lost four fingers to the film's scared and confused teenage heroine, screams: \"Vagina dentata... it's real!\" [Jess Weixler] deservedly won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her carefully modulated performance, without which the film couldn't have worked. She stars as a girl coming to terms with a sexuality she's always been afraid of, who goes from being the virginal leading light of her high school's chastity movement to a female avenger. ***

The film's director, Abdellatif Kechiche, who grew up on a council estate in Nice with his builder father and Tunisian family, has been compared to Truffaut and the Italian neo-realists. \"He's the major auteur that France has been waiting for,\" announced the culture bible Les Inrockuptibles. \"At last, we've found our Ken Loach,\" announced Paris Match yesterday. Didier Peron, the film critic of Liberation, said: \"This is the great political film we were missing. It both takes your breath away and suddenly makes the air around you easier to breathe.\" The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, served vegetable couscous to the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy, in Paris this week. But Sarkozy's likening of troublemakers on immigrant estates to \"scum\" still rankles with France's north African community, including the film's director.

The conceit for this smart, satirical and squirm-inducing indie horror-comedy and coming-of-age movie is both completely outlandish and at the same time so perfectly ingenious that it's a wonder no one thought of using it before. It's best summed up by the gynaecologist who, having just lost four fingers to the film's scared and confused teenage heroine, screams: \"Vagina dentata... it's real!\" [Jess Weixler] deservedly won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her carefully modulated performance, without which the film couldn't have worked. She stars as a girl coming to terms with a sexuality she's always been afraid of, who goes from being the virginal leading light of her high school's chastity movement to a female avenger. HHHH