Introduction                                              

      This book grew out of the desire to provide students with a textbook which would introduce them to some of the most important French film directors and help them to reflect in depth upon their best works. For those colleagues who are teaching this course in French, or who have in their cinema class students proficient in French, a French language version of this book, Apprentissage du cinéma français. Livre de l’étudiant (2004), is also available through Focus Publishing. Although this textbook begins with two chapters on the early stages of French and world cinema, French Cinema. The Student’s Book is not a history of cinema, just as it is not the study of a specific period, genre, or theme of cinema. This book offers an in-depth study of a number of widely recognized masterpieces, any of which might be included in the syllabus of a course on French film.

      Each chapter of French Cinema includes a synthesis of the best critical thought surrounding the film featured in that chapter, followed by a study guide designed to facilitate the students’ reflection on that film. The chapters are completed by a critical dossier composed of a selection of excerpts from the best articles and books I was able to find during research conducted primarily at the Film Library (Bibliothèque du Film, or BIFI) in Paris. I have provided these excerpts to promote yet more sophisticated reflection by the students on the various films by encouraging them to take into account a variety of critical viewpoints, some of which are quite divergent.

      Any instructor who uses this textbook in conjunction with his or her course on French film will, of course, ask the students to read the chapters which are the most relevent to the particular films included in the course. The sheer number of masterpieces of French cinema presented in this book — eighteen, if we count the short subject An Andalusian Dog — is too large to include all of these films in a one-semester course. I thought it best to provide the instructor with a choice of great films rather than attempt to dictate the precise content of the course. Moreover, some colleagues who may be less interested than others in early cinema may prefer to skip one or both of the short chapters on the origin and beginnings of moviemaking from the nineteenth century to the end of the nineteen-twenties. I consider it very important, however, no matter which films are on the course syllabus, to include the chapter on “‘Reading’ A Film,” in which the students learn the technical vocabulary and concepts essential for film analysis.

      It goes without saying that this book does not pretend to present all of the masterpieces of French cinema; this would simply be impossible. It was necessary to select works from the corpus of great films which have by and large been consecrated by tradition. My criteria of selection were related primarily to the richness of content and the formal originality of each film, that is, the film’s thematic and esthetic interest in the history of French and world cinema. It should be emphasized that the choice of films in this book is not intended to be restrictive as regards course content. It would be perfectly normal for an instructor to include in his or her course other films — more recent French films for example — which seem particularly important or interesting to that instructor, while leaving out some of the films presented in this volume. In this area, I would recommend strict adherence to the latitudinarian motto of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème: “Do as you please!”

      As for classroom use of the three parts of each chapter (introduction, study guide, and critical dossier), here is the approach I have developed with my own students, teaching the class on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule. I first ask them to read the introduction before seeing the film, to focus their attention immediately on the most important and interesting elements when they come to the projection. This preliminary reading would be less important if the students had the time to see each film several times, but they rarely have that luxury. In the class following the projection of the film, normally Thursday, we discuss the various themes and characters. Since the following class is on Tuesday, they have a substantial period in which to prepare the next assignment, which is more demanding. For this class I ask the students to read the study guide (with the director’s remarks, important quotations from the dialogue, and reflection topics) and a selection of readings from the critical dossier. I also ask them to study and answer questions on a series of film excerpts which I make available to them electronically. When the students come back to class, we discuss selected elements in the above material, varying the focus from film to film. We always include substantial discussion of the most important formal aspects of the film, as well as the relationship between the form and the themes, by analyzing together some of the excerpts they have studied out of class.

      I’ve attempted to present in this textbook an abundance of pedagogical and critical materials so that each instructor has a wide range of pedagogical options. It is difficult to discuss everything in the study guide and critical dossier, and the instructor is free to decide which exercises are most appropriate to assign to his or her students to prepare the class discussions. This is a choice which is dictated quite naturally, I believe, by each instructor’s personal sense of what is most important in each film.

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