French Comedy on Screen

French film comedies have always been extremely popular with English-speaking audiences, especially in America with the numerous Hollywood remakes of comedies from France. These films occupy a specific cultural space and are influenced by national traditions and shared cultural references, but at th [...]
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French film comedies have always been extremely popular with English-speaking audiences, especially in America with the numerous Hollywood remakes of comedies from France. These films occupy a specific cultural space and are influenced by national traditions and shared cultural references, but at the same time they have always been difficult to classify. Often a combination of several genres, they can be described as a hybrid art form, incorporating basic slapstick elements (the Lumiere's brothers' L'arroseur arrose, 1895) all the way to rather daring, even delicate subjects such as war (Autant-Lara's La traversee de Paris, 1956) or racism (Philippe de Chauveron's Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? 2014). The diversity of disciplines - history, linguistics, and social and political sciences - that form the background of this analysis guarantees a variety of approaches. French Comedy on Screen investigates the different methods in which these comedies textually inscribed and exemplified an array of cultural and historical landmarks.