%0 Journal Article
%T Gender and the politics of decolonization in early 1960s French cinema
%A Mani Sharpe
%J Journal of European Studies
%@ 1740-2379
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0047244119837478
%X In a recent monograph, Todd Shepard has implored us to examine the ways in ¡®which the Algerian War modified the form and the content of debates surrounding contemporary sexuality in France¡¯, from the nationalist revolution spearheaded by the FLN in Algeria, to the sexual paradigm shift of May ¡¯68 (2017: 21). An important injunction, undoubtedly. But also an injunction that, as I will show, could also be inverted to examine how, in the world of cinema, the radicalization of identity politics catalysed by decolonization found itself similarly distorted by a tendency among male directors to imagine the war through the lens of their own androcentric preoccupations, fantasies and anxieties: anxieties that, in the case of Jacques Rivette¡¯s Paris nous appartient (1961), Louis Malle¡¯s Le Feu Follet (1963), and Jacques Dupont¡¯s Les Distractions (1960), ricochet erratically between masochistic and misogynistic tales of impotence and carnal retribution; anxieties that subtly twist the dynamics of the decolonial debate into strange shapes, places and meanings
%K Algerian War
%K censorship
%K cinema
%K decolonization
%K gender
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047244119837478