Michael Witt

James S. Williams

Michael Temple

For the last 50 years Jean-Luc Godard's innovative cinematic and video output has provoked and inspired fans, critics and academics. Reviewing this key film and video maker, the contributors to 'For Ever Godard' provide a new context for his body of work.

For Ever Godard

A biography of the revolutionary philosopher and psychiatrist. Doctor, militant, essayist, ambassador, teacher, journalist, pan-Africanist, Frantz Fanon sought to decolonize mid-twentieth-century culture as he embodied a new kind of intellectual. Born in colonial Martinique, he fought for France during World War II but later renounced his citizenship and fought in the Algerian War of Independence. This book emphasizes Fanon’s gift for self-invention and performance as it follows his short but extraordinary life and explores how his pioneering work in psychiatry influenced his revolutionary philosophy.

Frantz Fanon

La Peste

Camus

This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those often neglected or little known. Jean Cocteau is not only one of French cinema's greatest and most influential auteurs whose work covered all the major genres but also an experimenter, collaborator, theorist and all-round ambassador of film. This lucid account provides a complete introduction to Cocteau's cinematic project in the context of his entire oeuvre, detailed analysis of individual films, and a thematic engagement with all his cinema from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. The Cocteau that emerges is at once a materialist filmmaker and visionary who is committed to realism in all its guises and reveals the wonder and mystery of what he called 'the cinematograph'.

Jean Cocteau

The extraordinary range, complexity and power of Marguerite Duras – novelist, dramatist, film-maker, essayist – has been justly recognised. Yet in the years following her death in 1996, there has been a increasing tendency to consecrate her work, particularly by those critics who approach it primarily in biographical terms. The British and American specialists featured in this interdisciplinary collection aim to resurrect the Duras corpus in all its forms by submitting it theoretically to three main areas of enquiry. By establishing how far Duras’s work questions and redefines the parameters of literary and cinematic form, as well as the categories of race and ethnicity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, fantasy and violence, the contributors to this volume ‘revision’ Duras’s work in the widest sense of the term

Film, Race, Sex

Revisioning Duras

Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.

The Politics of Beauty

Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema

A complete account of the fiction, films and media work of Marguerite Duras since the film Le camion (1977). Williams pursues a variety of theoretical approaches - psychoanalytic, comparative, rhetorical, intertextual – emphasizing in each case the formal pleasures of Duras’s work.

Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras

The Erotics of Passage

Anna-Louise Milne

Julian Jackson

An accessible collection of essays about one of the most dramatic moment in France's modern history: the "event" of 1968. Often seen purely as a student revolution, the events of 1968 in fact impacted on almost every aspect of French society – theatre, film, gender relations, sexuality, race and immigration, farmers, workers. This volume of essays, written by young researchers and established scholars from France, Britain and the United States is the only book in English to explore the full diversity of this extraordinary upheaval. It takes us out of Paris to the regions of France, out of the student Latin Quarter into the factories, and shows how the events of 1968 continued to reverberate throughout the next decade, and how their legacy is still highly contested in France today.

Rethinking France's Last Revolution

May 68

Alex Hughes

Owen Heathcote

This interdisciplinary book responds to the explosion of gay and lesbian creativity in modern day France. The work of many French writers and authors is investigated.

Gay and Lesbian Theory, Fiction and Film in France, 1945-1995

Gay Signatures

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)

Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Bringing together original essays by French, British and American scholars, this collection explores the key role of gender and sexual politics in 20th-century French cinema.

Gender and French Cinema

This volume of essays constitutes a comprehensive and interdisciplinary engagement with Jean-Luc Godard's current film and video work. Its key focus is the eight-part magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinma (1988-1998), an extraordinary experiment in film history that attempts to tell 'all the stories of cinema' whilst remaining true to the specificity of what 'the cinema alone' contributed to twentieth-century culture. The Cinema Alone features contributors from France, Britain and America who discuss Godard's recent work both in the context of his earlier corpus and in relation to subjects such as literature, art history, philosophy, silent cinema, European culture, film theory, video and digital technology. The collection will make an important contribution to critical debates on the past, present and future of Film and Media Studies as cinema enters its second century.

Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985-2000

The Cinema Alone

Despite Jean Cocteau’s renown as a leading figure in European cinema, his work and life have rarely been examined together. Evaluating Cocteau’s career and his fascinating personal life on equal terms, James Williams offers here a groundbreaking analysis that sets them both within highly revealing historical and artistic contexts. Williams’s biographical investigation of this poet, dramatist, novelist, designer, and filmmaker centers around Cocteau’s constant self-questioning and how it permeated his work. From Cocteau’s work in fashion and photography to his formal experimentation to his extensive collaborations with male friends and lovers, the book charts the complex and unpredictable evolution of his work and aesthetic. Williams argues that Cocteau’s body of work is best viewed as an ethical, erotic project of aesthetics that carries important ramifications for our contemporary understanding of being and subjectivity. An engaging and wholly accessible account, Jean Cocteau is essential reading for all those fascinated by the man and his unforgettable films.

Evaluating Cocteau’s career and his fascinating personal life on equal terms, James Williams offers here a groundbreaking analysis that sets them both within highly revealing historical and artistic contexts.

Janet Sayers

Presents ten essays written mostly by British professors of French, comparative literature, and visual arts addressing three main areas of inquiry: Duras' films, film criticism, and photographic criticism; issues of racial difference, immigration, and the representation of the native "other" in her fiction; and issues relating to gender and sexuality, heterosexual relations, and sexual practices in her work. Distributed by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.

This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees. Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like ‘Europe’ and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a ‘transborder’ consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the ‘migrant to Europe’ figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner). Bringing together 16 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in Film and Media Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Migration/Mobility Studies, Cultural Studies, and Aesthetics.

Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema

This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those often neglected or little known.

James S. Williams

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