Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s

Scholars of classical French cinema will know that a great deal has been written about ‘colonial’ cinema, with attention often returning to a relatively few well-known films, typically set in North Africa, that come to stand in for the broader corpus. At the same time, it is often assumed that the same cinema is a prolongation of the broader colonial project and somehow delivers (or betrays) a propagandist message. Yet popular cinema is a more complex object than this, and ‘colonial’ film is a research object with an illusory coherence. Seeking to develop a more adequate approach, Colleen Kennedy-Karpat broadens the object of study to include exoticism more generally and moves well outside the familiar corpus of films to discuss neglected works and less studied performers. She convincingly demonstrates that, while a colonial setting may indeed place limits on what a film can say or show, ‘colonial’ cinema also shares features with the exotic and, to that extent, needs studying in terms of the pleasures it offers rather than its uneven propaganda value. . . .[T]he book is welcome for its willingness to open up new ground and challenge dubious critical orthodoxies. * French Studies *
... original, beautifully written, and ground-breaking in its designation of an entirely new field of study... [this book] will become a standard against which future work in this field will be measured. ... -- Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Rutgers University, Organizer of the conference, Hidden Voices: Childhood, the Family, and Anti-Semitism in Occupation France