Late-colonial French Cinema

Offers a sustained analysis of a cluster of French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence

• Identifies and analyses a previously unidentified trend in modern French cinema
• Addresses a ‘late-colonial’ gap in scholarship on cultural histories of de-colonisation, between the colonial and the post-colonial
• Defines late-colonial cinema as trans-generic ‘body’ of films, bound up with various cinematic traditions and tendencies, including the French New Wave, film noir, the World War Two combat film, observational documentaries, Soviet Montage cinema, parallel cinema, and settler cinema
• Combines textual analysis of fifteen case studies with contextual analysis of late-colonial French culture, politics and society
• Deploys a different critical approach in each chapter. These include star studies, documentary studies, gender studies and space studies, among others

Deploying the term ‘late-colonial’ to describe a body of largely French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), this book revolves around one question – what is late-colonial French cinema? – generating two answers.

Firstly, Sharpe argues that late-colonial cinema represents a formally and thematically important, yet unappreciated tendency in French cinema; one that has largely been overshadowed by a scholarly focus on the French New Wave. Secondly, Sharpe contends that whilst late-colonial French cinema cannot be seen as a coherent cinematic movement, school of filmmaking, or genre, it can be seen as a coherent ethical trend, with many of the fifteen central case studies explored in Late-colonial French Cinema filtering the Algerian War of Independence through a discourse of ‘redemptive pacifism’.