The Transparent Illusion: Image and Ideology in French Text and Film (Ars Interpretandi)

This unique study interprets forty major French films, their texts and intertexts, analyzing them both as windows on their subject, projections of the imagination, and as frames or mirrors reflecting the cultural contexts that produced them. They are grouped in three major categories, foregrounding their relationship to history, literature or the filmmaking process itself, in ascending order of opacity and modernity. This much needed work offers not only comparative cultural perspectives on French text and film but also a better understanding of the poetics of image and ideology.