Cinéma du look
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Cinéma du look was a French film movement of the 1980s and 1990s, analysed, for the first time, by French critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, in which he classified Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax as directors of the "look".
Cinéma du look referred to films that had a slick visual style and a focus on young, alienated characters that were said to represent the marginalised youth of Francois Mitterrand's France. The three main directors of the Cinéma du look were Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Leos Carax. Themes that run through many of their films include doomed love affairs, young people with peer groups rather than families, a cynical view of the police and the use of the Paris Métro to symbolise an alternative, underground society. The nobrow mixture of high culture, such as the opera music of Diva and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and pop culture, for example the references to Batman in Subway, was another key feature. Unlike previous French film movements, the Cinéma du look had no clear political ideology.
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Key directors and key films
Jean-Jacques Beineix
- Diva (1981)
- La Lune dans le caniveau (English: Moon in the Gutter) (1983)
- 37°2 le matin (English: Betty Blue) (1986)
Luc Besson
- Subway (1985)
- Le Grand bleu (English: The Big Blue) (1988)
- Nikita (1990)
- Leon (1994)
Leos Carax
- Boy Meets Girl (1984)
- Mauvais Sang (1986)
- Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991)
See also
- Form and content
- Vulgar auteurism
- MTV
- Neo-noir
- Postmodern film and television
- Auteur theory
- Arthouse action film
