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New directions in contemporary French comedies: from nation, sex and class to ethnicity, community and the vagaries of the postmodern

2018; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14715880.2017.1415420

1758-9517

Mary Harrod, Phil Powrie,

Cinema and Media Studies

Comedy, as is the case with many national cinemas, is one of the most dominant genres, if not the most dominant in French cinema, as Raphaëlle Moine has shown (2015,(233)(234).Comedies are even more popular now than they used to be in terms of spectator numbers.Since 2000, for example, French comedies have dominated the best-seller list in France, as can be seen in Table 1, which gives the 27 best-selling films since 2000. 1 In the period 2000-2007 there were only 6 French comedies out of the 18 best-sellers in Table 1, representing a third (positions 11, 25, 26, 47, 57, 59), while from 2008-2014 6 out of 9 French films are comedies (positions 2, 3, 19, 51, 68, 96), representing two-thirds.This corresponds to a shift from a 39% share of the total number of French spectators in the first half of the period to an astonishing 72% of the best-selling films since 2008.