User menu

Accès à distance ? S'identifier sur le proxy UCLouvain

Sepia cinema in Nicolas Sarkozy’s France: nostalgia and national identity

Primary tabs

Fevry, Sébastien [UCL]

The paper examines the wave of nostalgic cinema that reached its peak in France in the 2000s and that some critics have characterised as sepia cinema. The success of Les Choristes/The Chorus (Christophe Barratier, 2004) was followed by a number of films with an old-fashioned flavour such as Le Petit Nicolas/Little Nicholas (LaurentTirard, 2009) or La Nouvelle Guerre des boutons/War of the Buttons (Yann Samuell, 2011). The article aims to understand the memorial dynamics that the sepia wave has assumed in a French society more and more obsessed with its memory and the valorisation of its national past. The author argues that the sepia wave reveals an important change in the frameworks of collective memory. In the context of the repeated failures of the memorial politics enacted by Nicolas Sarkozy, the sepia films tend to mobilise a family memory that appears more efficient than State memory in the sharing of recollections linked to a collective past.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Publication date 2017
Language Anglais
Journal information "Studies in French Cinema" - Vol. 17, no.1, p. 60-74 (2017)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Intellect Ltd. ((United Kingdom) Bristol)
issn 1471-5880
e-issn 1758-9517
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL - SSH/ILC/PCOM - Pôle de recherche en communication
Keywords Memory ; nostalgia ; French cinema ; sepia
Links
  1. Appadurai A., Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)
  2. Assmann Jan, Czaplicka John, Collective Memory and Cultural Identity, 10.2307/488538
  3. Beylot P., Fictions patrimoniales sur grand et petit écran (2009)
  4. Beylot P., Fictions patrimoniales sur grand et petit écran, 9 (2009)
  5. Boym S., The Future of Nostalgia (2001)
  6. Brooks P., The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976)
  7. Erll Astrid, Travelling Memory, 10.1080/13534645.2011.605570
  8. Erll A., A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (2010)
  9. Fevry S., Cahiers Mémoire et Politique: médias en jeu, enjeux de mémoires, 2, 67 (2014)
  10. Fevry S., Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, 2, 239 (2014)
  11. Freud S., Le Mot d’esprit et sa relation à l’inconscient (1905)
  12. Gensburger S., Les Justes de France: politiques publiques de la mémoire (2010)
  13. Halbwachs M., Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925)
  14. Hall S., Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 131 (1996)
  15. Herzfeld M., Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation-State (1997)
  16. Hirsch M., The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012)
  17. Maniglier P., Foucault va au cinéma (2011)
  18. Nora P., Les Lieux de mémoire, 3, 647 (1986)
  19. Offenstadt N., L’Histoire bling-bling: le retour du roman national (2009)
  20. Radner H., A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, 289 (2015)
  21. Rancière J., De l’histoire au cinéma, 45 (1998)
  22. Rosello M., The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (2010)
  23. Véray L., Fictions patrimoniales sur grand et petit écran, 153 (2009)
Bibliographic reference Fevry, Sébastien. Sepia cinema in Nicolas Sarkozy’s France: nostalgia and national identity. In: Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 17, no.1, p. 60-74 (2017)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/183045