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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/2437 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright.

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Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. British cinema has been able to do so without quoting Truffaut. 3 The official story that has been encoded in this critique has become a standard reference for both scholars and journalists whose focus has typically fallen on a small corpus of writings that in some way allegorise the French view on British cinema. The systematic repetition of this perspective has worked, since the

1960s,

to produce an official story, a discernable doxa that has set the limits for what is thinkable about French writings on British cinema and resolutely left any alternative accounts of British cinema in France out of the picture. The continuous high cultural currency of the official story represented by

Truffaut

also pinpoints a major schism underlying most writings on the subject: on the one hand there has been a monumental literature on one journal,

Cahiers

du cinema and on the other a surprising dearth of material on the rest of a numerically considerable output, an anomaly that has largely persisted. To date no extensive research on the reception of British cinema in France appears to have been done. Moreover, the processes that led Truffaut to forge this negative opinion have been invariably ignored and have left it open to a high degree of instrumentalization. There seem to be many reasons for the persistence of these unquestioned assumptions. Firstly, quite apart from his emblematic status as a director in

French

film history, Francois Truffaut is one of the best-known French film critics of the post-war period. Secondly, the emergence of a dominant critical discourse through Cahiers du cinema and Andre Bazin more or less coincided in the 1960s with the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline Charles Barr, "Introduction: Amnesia and Schizophrenia", in Charles Barr (ed. ), . 411 Our

Yesterdays:

90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 1.

5 devoted to the study of auteurs and films as texts. Thirdly, at least in English. there has been a limited availability of primary critical texts in translation and a scarcity of studies that document cross-cultural exchanges within a Franco-

British

or even a European cinema context. This thesis investigates the critical reception of British cinema in France in the post-war period. The work that follows sets out to determine what kind of readings have been produced in France and what they reveal about the cinematic and cultural context from which they have emerged. My aim is to go beyond published canonical texts and embrace a more expansive view of film culture in order to document the historical determinations that have structured and conditioned the way in which British cinema has been consumed and understood. By investigating the discourses behind the reception of British cinema, I hope to make explicit the need for an analysis of texts and ideas that is concretely localised and takes into account the historical conjuncture within which they appeared. Before providing the necessary overview of historical writings on cinema and those that specifically address British cinema, I will give an account of the structure and methodology of my research.

Film and History

In his model of film and history, Dudley Andrew argues that, "every history that treats the cinema must calculate the importance of films within a world larger than film. Culture can be said to surround each film like an atmosphere 6 comprised of numerous layers and spheres, as numerous as we want". 4 Following Andrew's conception of the object of film historical analysis as an investigation of the intertexts that surround or have surrounded a film text or a series of film texts, this thesis will take as its methodological basis the branch of film history known as reception studies. As a general working principle. then, my approach throughout this study could be described as an archaeological research project aiming to document the intertexts, the network of discourses, and historical factors that have surrounded the critical reception of British cinema in post-war France. I will now schematically survey accounts of reception studies with a view to establishing their usefulness in making possible a complex representation of the subject.

Before

the historical turn in film studies in the 1980s, the history of cinema had been traditionally confined to film texts and their production. Following the New Historicism in literary studies, film scholars have engaged in debates about the problems and inadequacy of conventional histories of cinema, organised along national lines and where aesthetic values, rather than historical interest were foregrounded, and they have attempted to bridge the critical separation of text from context. One direction of the historiographic paradigm in film studies has been to look at the discourses that surround films at different moments and how reading formations have constituted historically situated viewers. The adoption of Tony Bennett's notion of a reading formation in recent film studies has provided a way of attending to the actual history of a text's social circulation rather than privileging the originating conditions of a ° Dudley Andrew, "Film and History", in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds. ), The

Oxford

Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 185. 7 given text's productions In Bennett's conceptualisation, the activation and reading of texts exist within a process whereby they: Exist

only as variable pieces of play within the processes through which the struggle for their meaning is socially enacted: kept alive within the

series of bids and counter-bids which different critical tendencies advance in their attempt to organise reading practices - to make texts

mean differently by re-writing their relation to history - texts are thus kept alive only at the price of being always other than just themselves. 6

Historical studies of reception, according to the denomination used by Janet Staiger, involve a methodology informed by archival research and which roots its analysis in material and historical investigation, supporting its claims with tangible documents. A critical history of the reception of British cinema in France is thus an attempt at "a historical explanation of the event of interpreting a text"', assuming that the immanent meaning of a film is

Questionable.

Thus for instance, Steven Cohan in a recent case study of the reception of Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952), has demonstrated how although a film text has its own specificity, different interpretative frameworks will cause its significance to shift8, while the cultural historian Roger Chartier, in his historiography of reading, has argued that while a text retains a certain textual characteristic, it also changes as the social circumstances and modes of reading that surround it undergo change: To be sure the creators [... ] always aspire to pin down their meaning and s See Noel King, "Hermeneutics and Reception Aesthetics", in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds. ), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19998),

212-32.

6 Tony Bennett, "Texts in history: the determinations of reading and their texts", in David

Attridge,

Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76.

7 Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception ofAmerican Cinema

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8 1, emphasis in text.

8 Steven Cohan, "Case study: interpreting Singin' in the Rain", in Christine Gledhill and Linda

Williams

(eds. ), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 53-75. 8 proclaim the correct interpretation, the interpretation that sets out to constrain reading (or viewing). But without fail, reception invents, shifts about, distorts. 9

Contemporary

historians have begun to redeem reviews as important sources of information about reception. Their use value in reception studies lies in their mobilisation of denominations that help to establish the terms of discussion and debate within the culture at large. The question is whether one can straightforwardly read the events of reception or the discourses that produce these events directly from these texts. As Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomerv have argued, for example, that these materials might be better seen as having an agenda-setting function. Rather than straightforwardly producing events, there are parts of a process through which intertexts are constructed and readings are framed. As they put it, these texts may not tell "audiences what to think so much as [... ] what to think about". '() Similarly, published materials may be seen as traces of the terms within which texts were publicly evaluated and as one of the ways in which critics position themselves within hierarchies of taste: Reviews also represent materials that signify the cultural hierarchies of aesthetic value reigning at particular times. As a primary public tastemaker, the critic operates to make, in Pierre Bourdieu's parlance 'distinctions'. Among other things, the critic distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate art and proper and improper modes of aesthetic appropriation. As the epigraph suggests, it also often secures a class position far from the vulgar crowd in the process. ' Q Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers. Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the

Fourteenth

and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, California:

Standford

University Press, 1994), x.

"' Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York:

Knopf,

1985) 90, emphasis in text.

Barbara

Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and The Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1994), 70.

9 In reception studies, then, questions of values and taste and the relation between the aesthetic and the social which are the heart of the interpretative enterprise become contextualised. It is also interesting to note, in relation to my own project, that Barbara Klinger has identified cross-cultural reception asquotesdbs_dbs28.pdfusesText_34

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