Name: Films With Legs
SKU: 1-4438-3204-9
Availability: InStock

Films With Legs

Crossing Borders with Foreign Language Films

Edited By: Véronique Maisier, Rosemary A. Peters

£39.99

This book explores how international cinema both erects and tears down borders. It examines how borders are constructed on screen—not just in fences and walls, but also in dialogue, dialect, and even silence.

Films With Legs: Crossing Borders with Foreign Language Films addresses the ways international cinematic traditions both erect borders and blur them or tear them down.…

Films With Legs: Crossing Borders with Foreign Language Films addresses the ways international cinematic traditions both erect borders and blur them or tear them down. Each chapter of this book examines real and perceived borders, their representations on the screen and their manifestations in filmic texts that can also be cultural documents and political statements.

The fifteen articles included here discuss films made by twenty-four directors, with dialogues in nine foreign languages, representing cultural aspects from twelve countries and five continents. From Algeria to Bulgaria, Germany to Israel, India to Argentina, the films studied in this book have legs that cross many borders and take their audiences on distant journeys. Simultaneously, these films comment on the ever-expanding nature of cinema itself, of filmic language and of film as language, and discuss how borders are constructed on the screen, not just in fences and walls and boundaries, but also in dialogue and dialect, speech and accent and silence.

Rosemary A. Peters is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Louisiana State University, USA, where she teaches primarily 19th-century French literature. Her publications treat Honoré de Balzac, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Arthur Rimbaud, Eugène-François Vidocq, and Emile Zola; as well as poetry by Joaquin du Bellay, contemporary banlieue rap videos, and films by Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock. Peters has recently completed a book entitled Criminal Fictions: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France. She is now working on a critical edition and translation of Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc.

Véronique Maisier is Associate Professor of French at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA. She works in the field of 20th-century and contemporary French and Francophone literature, and has published extensively on Albert Cohen and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others. She is the author of L’inspiration picaresque dans l’œuvre d’Albert Cohen (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2001), and numerous articles in journals such as The French Review, Dalhousie French Studies, Romance Quarterly, and Etudes Francophones. She is currently working on several essays on Guadeloupean writer Gisèle Pineau, and a book project provisionally entitled Stones and Blood: Violence in Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean Literature.