French Blockbusters : Globalization and the Cultural Politics of a Popular Cinema

Examines how changes to the French film industry have resulted in popular films which in turn are changing perspectives on French cinema.

The digitised spectacles conjured by a word like ''blockbuster'' may create a certain cognitive dissonance with received ideas about French cinema - long celebrated as a model for philosophical, economic and aesthetic resistance to globalised popular culture. While the Gallic ''cultural exception'' remains a forceful current to this day, this book shows how the onslaught of Hollywood mega-franchises and new media platforms since the 1980s has also provoked an overtly commercialised response from French producers eager to redefine the stakes and scope of their own traditions.

Cutting a swath through recent French-produced cinema, French Blockbusters offers the first book-length consideration of the theoretical implications, historical impact and cultural consequences of recent popular films that are rapidly changing what it means to make - or to see - a ''French'' film today. From English-language action vehicles like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017) to revisionist historical films like Of Gods and Men (Beauvois, 2011) and crowd-pleasing comedies like Intouchables (Toledano & Nakache, 2011), the variously filiated ''local blockbusters'' from contemporary France brim with the seeds of cultural contradiction, but also with the energy of a counter-history.