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 "Click for larger image")
La Reine Margot
Julianne Pidduck
Paper978-0-252-07331-1
$15.00
| Pub Date: | 2005 |
| Pages: | 128 pages |
An epic portrayal of aristocratic sex and violence in sixteenth century France
Patrice Chéreau's 1994 film La Reine Margot paints a vivid canvas of political intolerance and intrigue framed as a romance between Marguerite de Valois (Isabelle Adjani) and her Protestant lover La Môle (Vincent Perez). The film is based on Alexandre Dumas's historical novel and is renowned for its eroticized and violent depiction of the French national past, especially the treatment of the 1572 St Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Protestants at the film's outset.
Julianne Pidduck examines the industrial, social, and political contexts of the film's production as part of an influential recent cycle of French historical "super-productions," including Cyrano de Bergerac, Germinal, and The Horseman on the Roof. Conceived as a cinematic "event" film featuring the elusive star Isabelle Adjani, Margot presents a theatrical chiaroscuro Renaissance past, in which struggles for political and religious power are entwined with plots, poisons, and the pleasures and perils of the flesh. Pidduck goes deep into this prestigious costume film and traces the wide critical acclaim it has received, both nationally and internationally. She also reveals how Margot's cinematic spectacle of Renaissance religious intolerance offers a haunting allegory for modern French and European experience.
"Ginette Vincendeau has assembled an elite corps of film scholars to address a marvelous array of modern and classic French films with the close-up scrutiny they deserve. While each study will take the reader into the texture of intensive filmmaking, the series as a whole forms a bright constellation letting us imagine something of the content and the style of the French imagination, and letting us realize how deeply that culture has invested itself in cinema."--Dudley Andrew
Julianne Pidduck teaches at the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University in the areas of media and cultural studies and film. She is the author of Contemporary Costume Cinema: Spaces of the Self.
Subjects:
Film / French Studies / French Film Guides
Copublished with I. B. Tauris and Co., Ltd.
