Exception Taken

When European cinema began a steady decline in the 1980s, France sought to strengthen support for its film industry. Over the following decades, the country lobbied partners in the European Economic Community to design strategies to protect national cinema and to resist cultural free-trade pressures in international trade agreements. These struggles to preserve the autonomy of national artistic prerogatives emboldened other countries to oppose the powerful homogenizing force of Hollywood and question the benefits of accelerated globalization. Promoting commercial cinema and art cinema together, France articulated "a certain idea of cinema" that was expansive and disproved the medium's much-heralded death.

Jonathan Buchsbaum examines the movements that have emerged in opposition to the homogenizing force of Hollywood in global filmmaking. Exception Taken details how France sought to strengthen support for its film industry and designed strategies to protect the audiovisual industries and to resist cultural free-trade pressures.

Jonathan Buchsbaum is professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of Cinema and the Sandinistas: Filmmaking in Revolutionary Nicaragua (2003) and Cinema Engagé: Film in the Popular Front (1988).

Janet Bergstrom, University of California, Los Angeles:
Jonathan Buchsbaum has given us a powerfully researched analysis of the political economy of French film and state-aided funding systems since the 1970s. Exception Taken shows how French cinema has intersected with other national cinemas, and how the famous "French exception" – which excluded cultural products from international general trade agreements such as the GATT accords – was part of a vigorous state policy to save French cinema from domination by Hollywood, while becoming increasingly international in funding outreach. Explanatory appendices (schematics) provide a clear map for understanding and tracking this complex comparative history of national and international cinemas. This is an essential, foundational study of the political economy of French film since the 1970s.

Laurent Creton, Professor in Economy of Cinema, University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3:
Jonathan Buchsbaum is one of the leading scholars of the history of French cinema policy and institutions. With this book, he presents an outstanding analysis of a system that has furnished models for other national cinemas. Often, these policies are reduced to a state-imposed system of protection based on taxation and financial assistance. The author counters this by demonstrating it to be an effective and beneficial system of regulation. French policies have ensured that long-term collective interests prevail by introducing qualitative factors that constrain the dominance of short-term economic interests. An essential contribution to understanding what is, and can be, a cinema policy.

Alan L. Williams, Professor of French and Cinema Studies at Rutgers University and author of Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking:
Exception Taken explains and explores a striking state of affairs that most film lovers take for granted: the continued survival, in a globalized, "free" media market, of minority film cultures. This is one of the best- and most thoroughly researched books on cinema that I have ever read, on one of the most important subjects in contemporary world cinema... Buchsbaum tells the story of a political-legal process that has done more to shape the form and content of the modern audiovisual experience than anything else in recent history, and importantly, he shows us why it is so crucial to cinema's future.