What is this Trash?: French Cinema and B

This course will chart a history of French cinema through exemplary films of mauvais goût or bad taste. Whether they were explicitly banned or censured, deemed too grotesque, pornographic, or violent, cult classics or quite simply panned or labeled unwatchable, these films challenge received expectations of what a film should be. Beginning in the 1920s and ending in the present, this course will track major movements of French and Francophone cinema (surrealism, impressionism, realism, New Wave, Situationism, cinéma-vérité, cinéma du look, the New French Extreme, etc.) and seminal directors (Painlevé, Dulac, Vigo, Carné, Malle, Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Ozon, Kechiche, etc.) along multiple axes of “bad taste.” Since its inception in the 1890s, viewers have continuously questioned cinema’s relationship to morality, sexuality, and youth audiences, as well as its political dimensions. What qualifies as “bad cinema” is dictated as much by the technical evolution of the new medium, as it is by larger historical contexts: the First and Second World Wars, the decolonialization of the French empire, French Maoism, feminism, the AIDS crisis, the globalization of media, and so on. On the one hand, this course explores cinematic form and viewers’ reception, in both Europe and abroad, as the global industry itself changes. On the other hand, it addresses unique aspects of the French cinema industry, notably the French State’s outsized role in financing and promoting cinema. We will necessarily consider the history of film censorship, as various political, anti-Vichy, or anti-colonial films are routinely banned, and sometimes screened decades later. We will also investigate, however, more subtle questions of uncomfortable form and subject matter, especially in the unwatchable avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s and the grotesque, genre- and gender-bending works of the 1980s to 2020s. While this class leans heavily on cultural studies, it does not adhere to a strict interpretive framework and secondary readings engage with psychoanalysis, sociology, Marxism, material culture, feminist theory, and so on. Class taught in English with films in French with English Subtitles. Secondary materials in English. French majors and minors must submit papers in French. This class will also involve a few class field trips (TBD), likely to the Museum of the Moving Image and the Lincoln Film Center, as well as in-pe