French blockbusters: Globalization, national cinema and the discourses of 'cultural diversity'

The title of this dissertation---"French Blockbusters"---evokes the contradictory valences of a popular cinema often implicated in conflicts between the "global" and the "national." Over the past three decades, the French film industry has sought to revitalize its commercial practices to better compete for audiences at home and abroad. Yet likely because the French are best known for their aesthetic and economic resistance to North American hegemony, these strategies often get dismissed by critics as the "homogenized" products of global media capital. My research counters this view by situating the films as complex symptoms of a culture industry embracing the global market while seeking to carve a distinctive niche within it. Drawing on theories of globalization and national cinema, the first four chapters offer a recent history of big budget French filmmaking, not as a coherent push for "post-national" forms, but as a result of conflicting discourses on the "cultural diversity" of national production. Since Socialist reforms of the 1980s, there has been a growing disconnect between the government's protectionist film policies and the commercialism of France's expanding audiovisual sector. By the 1990s, television pre-sales and private investment groups had bypassed state-centric arteries for film subsidy, and the demand for crowd-pleasing entertainment accelerated as multiplexes went up across Europe. Exploring how these shifts register in trade press coverage, government policy reports, critical polemics and academic exegesis, I identify three preponderant stances on these issues, which I term "exceptionalist" (anchored in subsidized protection and independent artisanship), "professionalist" (turned toward free markets and multimedia flows) and "pragmatist" (a mediating tern that often leads to the constant tweaking of French cultural policy). The last three chapters consider how these internal tensions ripple to the surface of three films from 2001. Although they differ in style and generic affiliation, the nostalgic romance Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet), the action-heritage hybrid Brotherhood of the Wolf (Christophe Gans), and the "coming out" farce The Closet (Francis Veber) each offer a sampling of how contemporary French cinema both stylistically internalizes---and provokes continual commentary on---the problem of promoting national identity through a globalized, popular idiom.