Julia Dobson – författare

Mapping Cinematic Norths presents an international range of research and enquiry into the significance, representation and manipulation of depictions of the ‘North’ in cinema and television. Northern landscapes, soundscapes, characters and narratives are defined and recognized as distinctive image-spaces within film and television. However, the ‘North’ is portrayed, exploited and interpreted in divergent ways by filmmakers and film audiences worldwide, and this volume sheds new light on these varying perspectives.Bringing together the work of established and emerging academics as well as practising filmmakers, this collection offers new critical insights into the coalescence of North-ness on screen, exploring examples from Britain, Scandinavia, continental Europe, Australia and the United States. With contextual consideration and close readings, these essays investigate concepts of the North on film from generic, national, aesthetic, theoretical, institutional and archival perspectives, charting and challenging the representations and preconceptions of the idea of North-ness across cultural and cinematic heritages.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the work of four important contemporary directors whose work falls between the reductive labels of 'auteur cinema' and 'popular cinema'. Their work is contextualised within this timely investigation into the shifting relationship between the privileged status of the auteur and questions of genre, gender and cinematic production in France today. This important contribution to understanding the shifting landscapes of contemporary French film identifies an essential intermediacy in the films of these directors, which works to undo a series of dominant oppositions, generic template and contestation, public collectivity and personal intimacy, to offer a new perspective on the location of the political in contemporary French cinema. The four chapters provide detailed critical analysis of films by Dominique Cabrera, Laetitia Masson, Noémie Lvovsky and Marion Vernoux, and present common thread including the possible construction of social intimacy, the political demystification of romance narratives and the role of nostalgia, to argue that their work uses popular genres in order to challenge dominant cultural representation that resonates beyond the immediate parameters of contemporary French cinema. This book will be of interest to researchers working in French and European cinema, to students of Film Studies and French and Francophone Studies, and to film enthusiasts.

This issue of Paragraph, 'Revisiting the Scene ofWriting: New Readings of Cixous', aims both to reflect and to foster the extraordinary ongoing impact of Helene Cixous's writing across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines and literary forms