Thursday 11 February 2010

An all too typical example

"The films discussed here were not, of course, the French productions actually watched by most French people during the period under discussion. That distinction went to Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974), most notorious of the soft-porn features that followed the disappearance of censorship, and Gerard Oury's Les Aventures du Rabbi Jacob (1973). Oury had enjoyed even greater success in 1966 with La Grande Vadrouille, like Les Aventures du Rabbi Jacob starring two of France's best loved screen comedians of the time, Bourvil and Louis de Funes."

Or, the films that audiences see and the films that academics discuss are too often different; that this passage appears in "A Student's Guide" its subject only serves to show how the system renews itself: We will teach you about these films and about this film history, the implication being that they are all you really need to know about. What about popular (or vernacular) cinema as a better barometer of a country's 'real' film culture?

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