French Cultural Studies

The binary opposition that is said to hold between an enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde and a melancholic, past-oriented traditionalism deserves to be re-examined. This essay aims to complicate this binarism by highlighting a moment within the history of modernism when an enthusiasm regarding the future fused with a melancholy regarding the past. Both Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia were deeply committed to the avant-garde discourse of the new, yet a number of their works in the years after 1912 harbour an ambivalence that compels us to rethink the simple divide between modernism and anti-modernism and suggest that some of the central figures of modernism were simultaneously bound to the sentiment of nostalgia.

In response to the 1931 Paris Exposition Coloniale, André Thirion and Louis Aragon organised the Exposition Anti-impérialiste in an attempt to bring about collaboration between Communists and Surrealists on political activity under the auspices of the Communist Party. However, tensions arose immediately, often as personal spats. Thirion's section of the exhibition adhered to the didactic method favoured by the Party. In contrast, Aragon's section, ostensibly dealing with the cultural impact of colonialism, reveals a distinctly surrealist approach with its irreverent tone and rich ambiguity. In this paper, I argue that the conflict between Aragon and Thirion was rooted in their respective notions of revolution, and therefore politics, resulting in an Exposition Anti-impérialiste containing two fundamentally different (even opposing) protests to French colonialism. Aragon's section of the exposition also reveals his commitment to surrealist ideals, even as he was moving toward his break with André Breton.

The number of Americans in France — notably on former military bases and in areas of industrial investment and development — increased dramatically after 1945, and their values and influence gradually permeated all aspects of French life. Reactions from writers and intellectuals were varied. Some were positive; others, especially those clearly on or sympathetic to the Left, were not. But if America and things American were viewed by many with suspicion, disapproval and even distaste, there developed a growing acknowledgement that they had come to stay. This paper charts some of these reactions as they were expressed in essays, newspaper articles and imaginative writing during the two decades following the Liberation.

Alexandre Trauner is remembered for his highly evocative `poetic realist' designs in films such as Le Quai des brumes (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938), Le Jour se lève (1939) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945). His designs intertwined familiar iconography with stylistic accentuation so that the decor became the narrative's organising image. This article will concentrate on three of Trauner's American films: Othello (1952), Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and The Apartment (1960). It will identify the consonances between Trauner's work in 1930s France and 1950s America and argue that his design methodology seamlessly adapted to a different set of professional imperatives, which in turn allowed a fuller development of the `poetic realist' style. The `Trauner style' — cultivated in France and refined in America — revolves around three recurring aspects: visual symbolism, the interplay between monumental and intimate, and the decor paraphrasing the narrative.

This paper explores the process and practice of inscription and impression in the photographic works of Natacha Lesueur. It suggests that while Lesueur engages with the idiom of the fashion photograph, this is to subvert rather than affirm the genre. Her photographs play with and speak to the nature of the photographic medium itself (which is time-based, materially ephemeral and, in the popular consciousness, linked with stereotypical portrayals of the female subject). They serve to show, like Cindy Sherman's work, that the stereotype and essential femininities are constructed in the act of looking, rather than in the act of representation. Finally, it proposes that the epidermal inscriptions made on the skin ( pellicula) of Lesueur's models can be understood to function as a mise en abyme of the photographic process itself (pellicule). This leads to the conclusion that Lesueur's practice seeks at once to un-frame the real and to articulate identity as event.