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Group portrait with a star: Jeanne Balibar and French ‘jeune’ cinema

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1386/sfci.5.1.49/1

1758-9517

Jacqueline Nacache,

Cultural Identity and Heritage

AbstractEven with a film industry as resistant as France's to the American invader, its popular cinema is showing signs of exhaustion in the face of Hollywood competition whilst auteur cinema is taking a lead. It is in this context that, at the beginning of the 1990s, a new movement emerged full of energy, the jeune cinema francais which is backed by a funding policy and supported by an auteur cinema audience that is already well established in France. This movement has proved propitious for the construction of star images of the ‘vernacular’, which have developed against the grain of the traditional values of the star system and which have more of a political than economic cachet. Jeanne Balibar is the most striking example of this. Her image incorporates, other than a strong affinity with the intellectual world, paradoxical elements that prevail in her film roles and which make of her a star in the sense that she is today the woman actor, par excellence, who best embodies the ambitions and difficulties ...