Global Gallicisms: the postnational popular in francophone European film and television since 2010

In 2001, writing in The Observer about Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001), Stuart Jeffries remarked, ‘Here is not just a French film for French audiences but one that makes punters leave the cinema with a warm glow for all things French in general’ (Jeffries 2001). Since then, other French productions from the past 20 years have managed to perform well with French audiences as well as outside of the domestic market: La Môme/La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007) and Coco avant Chanel/Coco before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, 2009) sold more tickets abroad than in France – the difference was exceptional for Fontaine’s film, which attracted five times as many viewers abroad (5,567,509) as in France (1,030,096) (Unifrance 2021) – and further standout successes include the Oscar-winning The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2013) and Intouchables/Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, 2011). In the 2010s, this movement expanded, with the unprecedented international visibility of big-budget French prime-time series that took television production beyond its usual limits of a national audience: for example, series commissioned by Canal+, often co-produced, including Borgia (Canal+/ZDF/Sky Italia, 2011–2014), The Young Pope (HBO/Sky Atlantic/Canal+, 2016) and Versailles (Canal+/Super Écran/RTBF, 2015–2018). Although it should be recognised that ‘The arrival on French primetime schedules of American series such as CSI (CBS, 2000–2015), ER (NBC, 1994–2009) and 24 (Fox, 2001–2010) in the early 2000s was a major turning point in the development of French television’ (McCann 2024, 5), the advent of new players such as streaming and VOD platforms in the 2010s in France allowed for a rapidly accelerating spread of mainly American and other English-language series within the country. Not only that, but it also aided the international dissemination and development of French films and series made for a dual market, both domestic and global. Netflix, for instance, launched its operations in France in 2014 as part of its European expansion, and opened its Paris office, located near the Opéra Garnier, in January 2020. This opening coincided with a smoothing of relations between Netflix and the French government, which had criticised the company for not investing enough in national productions; Netflix then committed to spending at least 25% of its turnover in France on production within the country. Franck Riester, the Minister of Culture at the time, stated, ‘Between France and Netflix, it hasn’t always been simple, but in the end we understood that we couldn’t live without one another’ (Piquard 2020). Even though Marseille (2016–2018) was unsuccessful despite the presence of Gérard Dépardieu, and the science fiction series Osmosis (2019) ended after only one season, the romcom series Plan cœur/The Hook-Up Plan (2018–2021) and especially Lupin (2021–), in which Omar Sy updates the adventures of the hero created by Maurice Leblanc, ensured that French Netflix Originals were both nationally and internationally visible and successful.

The postnational popular turn

All of these developments struck the editors of this Special Issue as sufficiently momentous in terms of the change they imply to underpin a research network funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and entitled ‘Producing the Postnational Popular: the Expanding Imagination of Mainstream French Films and Television Series’. The findings of the project are contained within these pages and in the issue’s sister publication, the Open Access book, Is It French? Popular Postnational Screen Fiction from France (Harrod and Moine 2024). What is new is that this phenomenon now involves a variety of actors, genres and types of media, unlike in previous decades when Luc Besson and EuropaCorp were the exception in producing for a global market (see Delon and Vinuela 2020). Also new is that these productions are not ‘just French films for French audiences’, to quote Jeffries, but popular films and series for an international audience. The dialectical relationship that exists between the national and the international is one of the major characteristics of contemporary international art cinema, and has been for several decades. In 2002, Alan Williams argued that, from a commercial point of view, the contemporary cinema landscape could be divided into at least three groups, corresponding to different types of budgets, each targeting different audiences. The first group, ‘the capital-intensive, increasingly faceless “global” cinema’, includes big-budget films. Its most emblematic productions are blockbusters, often made in Hollywood, which generally belong to the various sub-genres of action films. This cinema, which corresponds to what is often called ‘global Hollywood’ (Miller et al. 2001), is characterised by an elimination of local, national and identity-based characteristics. The second group consists of films with medium budgets. In general, these are national productions intended for national audiences, whose success (when they are successful) is limited to those national audiences, or at least to a limited geographic area (for example, Belgium and Quebec could be included for France). Moreover, these films feature forms and representations that are too culturally or nationally specific to be truly successful abroad: national popular cinemas and genre cinemas, especially comedies, can easily be recognised as part of this second group. The third group of Williams’s typology is made up of ‘the low-budget, film festival oriented “art”, “independent” or “auteur” cinema. This sector may be properly termed “international”. The difference between global and international is crucial in today’s marketplace: on the film festival and the art house/independent cable channel circuit, a visible national origin is de rigueur, almost as important as a visible author/director’ (Williams 2002, 18–19). It is now clear, however, that this classification, which was relevant at the beginning of the century, no longer applies to the productions we have mentioned, which are popular and – as several articles in this issue point out – often consciously, starting from their initial conception, target local and international audiences, reaching both when they succeed. The time has therefore come to revisit the question of the articulation between the national and the international in contemporary French mainstream audiovisual productions, which until recently have been thought of in terms of ‘Hollywood influence’ or, conversely, ‘standing against Hollywood’. Today, however, in a world where cultural products are constantly exchanged across the globe, the production and consumption of films and series, driven by the development of streaming platforms such as Netflix, occur in a de-centred media system (Jenner 2018, 199–218).

To analyse this phenomenon, we propose the notion of the ‘postnational popular’, drawing especially on Thomas Elsaesser’s work on European cinema (2005, 46–67; 2013). Elsaesser has developed the notion of ImpersoNation or ‘self-othering’ to describe European films made starting in the 1990s, from Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) to Good Bye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003), Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain and heritage cinema, all of which he considers postnational; these films are made possible by the expansion of financial agreements between television channels and production companies in different countries, and ‘now address themselves to world audiences (including American audiences). Post-national pastiche as well as self-othering represent more fluid forms of European identity, appealing to audiences receptive to films from Britain, France, Germany or Spain’ (Elsaesser 2005, 72). The hypothesis that underpins this issue is that postnational productions operate on two levels, addressing diverse audiences, both francophone and beyond, and offering narratives and performances that highlight local markers and values while also transcending them. By using pastiche, irony and nostalgia, by introducing occasionally satirical clichés of ‘Frenchness for export’ but also renewing the repertoire of ‘national’ figures or roles precisely because they address cosmopolitan audiences – sometimes via racialised characters or actors – they assert their postnational identity. This does not mean that everything assumed to be ‘national’ is eliminated from these works, but rather that national characteristics engage in a dialogue and interact with practices, discourses and identities operating on another scale. Today, Netflix offers an extreme example of this, ‘located in a tension between the national and the transnational, a “grammar of transnationalism” and strategies of domestication or a national and a transnational audience’ (Jenner 2018, 194). The question of the language spoken, identified as essential to the ‘Frenchness of French cinema’ by Ginette Vincendeau (2013), is revealing in this respect, without there being any monolithic uniformity in practices, as we will see in different case studies published in this issue. Some productions decide to use English rather than French in order to feature English-speaking actors and more easily overcome the language barrier of the international market (Versailles); others, to various extents, are multilingual series and films (La Môme, Saint-Laurent [Bertrand Bonello, 2014], Barbara [Mathieu Amalric, 2017], Aline [Lemercier, 2020], No Man’s Land [Arte/Hulu, 2020] as well as a new wave of twenty-first century Belgian films examined by Bram Van Beek’s contribution to this issue); still others are shot entirely in French, like Plan cœur or Lupin, as new distribution and viewing practices have given viewers across the world easy access to original language versions, with or without subtitles, as well as dubbed versions.¹

It may seem surprising that we have chosen to speak of ‘global Gallicisms’ and ‘postnational popular cinema’ instead of adopting and updating the notion of transnational cinema to the contemporary context – the term ‘transnational’ is actually found in some of the articles in this issue and we have already employed it several times in this introduction. Research on transnational cinema (for instance Durovičová and Newman 2010; Ezra and Rowden 2006; Higbee and Lim 2010; Lim 2019; Marshall 2012), which developed considerably starting in the late 1990s along with growth in transnational practices of creation, production and distribution, aimed to de-centre the analysis of national cinemas and better take into account exchanges, contacts, interactions, margins and in-between areas in a vision critiquing ‘the limiting imagination of national cinema’ and de-essentialising national identities (Higson 2000). We do not intend to question the relevance or richness of the transnational approach in film studies research, nor do we wish to replace it, in a prescriptive way, with the notion of postnational cinema; instead, with this new term, our goal is to rethink the connections between different levels (local, national, international, global, etc.) in a new context characterised by the diversification of film and series offerings as well as the diversification of audiences.² Moreover, the concept of the transnational, whose definitions vary, has mostly been used to address the capacity of a film not only to bring different nationalities together (in this case, the word ‘international’ would be adequate), but also to transcend them, to make them work together to produce new possibilities: exilic and diasporic filmmaking, collaborative transnational networks, polyglot films, fragmented narration, etc. Situating research within the realm of the transnational thus often, but not always (see Jenner 2018), means emphasising works and creators (Tony Gatlif, Alejandro Iñárritu, Fatih Akin, for example) explicitly located in a space of migration or ‘supranational’ production. The idea of the postnational, however, prompts us to think more about the persistence of values, images and symbols encapsulated in transnational representations and modes of production, as seen in the analyses of genre films and series that appear in this volume. As Vanessa Schwartz has pointed out in her book on relations between France and Hollywood in the 1950s and the creation of a cosmopolitan culture, ‘the global culture does not simply “replace” national or local culture. Instead, global culture becomes an idiom through which an additional identity is formed, one whose very definition is based on the knowledge that it is being simultaneously consumed around the world’ (Schwartz 2007, 6). Finally, reflections on transnational cinema have almost exclusively focussed on auteur or independent films – which is perhaps also consistent with research on cinema and television in general, but neglects many television productions and popular productions regardless of the medium. While the present issue includes an analysis of the auteur film Barbara – a biopic whose ostentatiously self-reflexivity lends it a singular status within the production of that genre in France since 2007 – the following summary of its contents generally attests to the central position in our reflection occupied by film and television primarily aimed at mainstream audiences.

Analysing French and francophone production

Writing from a socio-economic perspective in their article ‘From Versailles to No Man’s Land: French broadcasters and the new geopolitical reality of the audiovisual industry’, Kira Kitsopanidou and Olivier Thévenin explore Canal+’s strategy to adapt to a globalised series market as a French producer and broadcaster. Based on numerous interviews with professionals and players within the sector, this article shows how Versailles took a new approach to the French historical costume drama series, seeking to combine typically French themes and aesthetics with artistic management practices drawn from the dominant model of English-language series. The comparison with the Franco–Belgian–Israeli co-production No Man’s Land, more cosmopolitan than ‘glocal’ because of its subject, linguistic choices and production context, reveals that different editorial and production strategies can successfully respond to the challenges of producing ‘French’ series for international audiences.

In another piece with an eye on industrial developments and multilingualism, Bram Van Beek’s ‘Beyond the split: re-imagining “Belgitude” in contemporary Belgian cinema’ considers a trend in post-2000 films produced or co-produced beyond Metropolitan France that has seen an increase in Belgian narratives featuring both French and Flemish, or these languages in combination with others. On the one hand, this phenomenon can be ascribed to local political issues, and more specifically to a rise in Flemish nationalism, against which it reacts. Importantly, however, Van Beek also reports that the films’ open and inclusive reassertion of a cosmopolitan (often Brussels-based) national identity coincides with an outward-looking stance more consonant with a transcendence of national borders.

Van Beek’s research demonstrates that large corpora can be analysed in order to assess their postnational aspect, and this is also the approach taken by Raphaëlle Moine in her article, ‘Le biopic français: un genre postnational?’, which demonstrates how contemporary French biopics are shaped by two tendencies, visible both in their linguistic choices and in their potential for export and sales on the international market: they incorporate global or international stylistic or aesthetic elements into narratives that generally involve national figures and icons while, at the same time, offering a new definition of Frenchness, both nationally and for exportation, through portraits of these figures. The author also offers an analysis of cases allowing for an assessment of the postnational dimension of French biopics, locating where and how the national, the international and the global are articulated in their narratives and how they evolve: La Môme; Saint Laurent and Yves Saint-Laurent (Jalil Lespert, 2014); and Chocolat (Roschdy Zem, 2016).

The exploration of biopics continues in ‘The Barbara Hypothesis: Performance and Spectatorship in the Musical Biopic’. Belén Vidal examines how popular French musical biopics often adapt the generic formula to the national context by fetishising the performance of deceased singers. Although performance and the cast are of key importance in French musical biopics, Barbara offers a different approach: instead of confining its main character in a plot about identity (who is Barbara?), the film draws on a national musical tradition – the dramatic staging of movement and voice in chanson française and in the French language – to explore cinema’s potential to create a space of intimacy between the viewer and the performer. Musical performance becomes key in the pursuit of a dialectic, nomad cinematic form where the actress’s and the singer’s performance are based on approximation rather than imitation. This extends the possibilities of the biopic genre beyond the boundaries separating popular and art cinema, fiction and documentary, global and national.

Reflecting the historical association between reproduction and nation, questions of sex and gender form the core of Mary Harrod’s piece, ‘Out of Time: Fantasising the French Romantic Hero in the Netflix Era’. Harrod thus explores how two French Netflix Original romantic comedies – the series Plan cœur and the film Je ne suis pas un homme facile/I Am Not an Easy Man (Eléonore Pourriat, 2018) – adapt national gender stereotypes (especially the French seductive romantic male) to a global audience particularly sensitive to the question of toxic masculinity in the post-#MeToo era. To achieve this, Plan cœur portrays its hero, Jules, as having a form of split personality: he works as an escort, which allows him to satisfy the requirements of the fictional narrative and present a certain number of problematic traits which are absent from his true personality. In Je ne suis pas un homme facile, the use of fantasy is what enables Damien’s virile masculinity to be expressed and neutralised at the same time. Harrod argues that such examples do indeed demonstrate the kind of ‘additional identity [formation]’ described by Schwartz in the realm of gender in particular. Given yet more sensational allegations against predatory French men in the audiovisual industries themselves the very week of writing, the shift appears timely.

By way of conclusion, it only remains to emphasise our hope that the analysis undertaken by our enquiry into popular francophone European productions in the postnational era, both within and beyond the confines of this Special Issue, may serve as a stimulus for future research into comparable developments in other contexts within international film and television. It seems likely that the advent of SVOD will continue to diversify the range of mass-audiences’ intercultural literacy worldwide, such that territories less familiar within truly mainstream cinema circuits rise in prominence. While this is arguably already occurring with various East Asian contexts, epitomised by the phenomenal success of Squid Game (Netlix, 2021–), productions from francophone Africa could offer fertile future terrain for considering more fully ‘globalised’ culture inflected by Franco-European legacies. More generally, there is no doubt that national sovereignty is at the forefront of current affairs in 2024 at the very moment that screen fictions appear increasingly borderless – yet, as we have seen, far from homogenised. While political conflict is well beyond the scope of these pages, research into international relations, including as negotiated by entertainment media, seems more important than ever in our precarious times.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the project Producing the Postnational Popular: the Expanding Imagination of Mainstream French Films and Television Series (2019–2023).

Notes on contributors

Mary Harrod

Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (I. B. Tauris, 2015), Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the following co-edited collections: The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization (I. B. Tauris, 2015, with Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina); Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, with Katarzyna Paszkiewicz; BAFTSS Best Edited Collection, 2019); and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021, with Diane Negra and Suzanne Leonard; MeCCSA Edited Collection of the Year, 2022). She is co-Chief General Editor of French Screen Studies, with Ginette Vincendeau.

Raphaëlle Moine

Raphaëlle Moine is Professor of Film Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (IRCAV). She has published Les Genres du cinéma (2002), translated into English as Cinema Genre (2008), Remakes: les films français à Hollywood (2007), Les Femmes d’action au cinéma (2010), Vies héroïques: biopics masculins/biopics féminins (2017), L’Analyse des films en pratique (with A. Boutang, H. Clémot, L. Jullier, L. Le Forestier and L. Vancheri, 2018). She has edited a number of works, including most recently A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema (with Alistair Fox, Michel Marie and Hilary Radner, 2015), L’Âge des stars: des images à l’épreuve du vieillissement (with Charles-Antoine Courcoux and Gwénaëlle Le Gras, 2018) and Mise au point, n^o15, ‘Chefs d’œuvre et navets: la construction de la qualité cinématographique’ (with Laurent Jullier, 2022).

Notes

1. Also deserving of acknowledgement are productions that circumvent linguistic differences, sometimes reflexively, such as The Artist, ‘which deflects the language problem onto Hollywood, making it the very subject of the film and the substance of its historical re-enactment’ (Elsaesser 2013, para 20) [qui se défausse du problème de la langue sur Hollywood, en en faisant le sujet même de son film et la substance de sa reconstitution historique].

2. Pace the term’s somewhat antithetical usage by Martine Danan in the context of French cinema within an earlier media ecology, where postnational cinema is defined by the ‘erasure of distinctive elements which have traditionally helped to define the imaginaries and traditions of national cinemas against Hollywood’ (Danan 2006, 177; also Danan 1996).