Contemporary French Cinema

Catalog description

This course analyzes major developments in French cinema over the past fifty years, with occasional reference to earlier movements such as the French New Wave, to explore how filmmakers have represented, questioned, and reimagined French society. Through close analysis of films from diverse periods and genres, the course examines cinema as a critical lens on social change, cultural identity, power, and belonging in France. French cinema has long served as a space for negotiating tensions around class, race, gender, immigration, religion, memory, and national myths. From postwar transformations and urbanization to debates surrounding postcolonialism, marginalization, and social justice, filmmakers have used aesthetic innovation and narrative experimentation to challenge dominant representations and make visible alternative perspectives. This course foregrounds how cinema both reflects and actively shapes public conversations about who belongs in France and how French society understands itself. Students will engage with fiction and documentary films by established and emerging filmmakers whose work interrogates social hierarchies, institutional structures, and everyday lived experience. Attention will be paid to cinematic form as well as content, including questions of realism, authorship, ethics of representation, and the relationship between film, history, and politics. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey, the course emphasizes critical viewing and interpretation, encouraging students to see film as an evolving cultural practice embedded in broader social and historical contexts. By situating contemporary works in dialogue with earlier cinematic traditions, the course highlights continuities and ruptures in how French cinema has addressed social justice and collective identity. This course is taught in English.