French Women Directors Negotiating Transnational Identities

Abstract

cinematic representation of transnational processes over the past decade has engaged a number of women filmmakers in France, ex tending earlier discourses of national cinema and postcoloniality. As Frangoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have argued, The transnational . . . can be conceived as a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cul tures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center.1 fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, launched by young directors to protest the hegemonic filmmaking practices of a stu dio-based system, constitutes a point of departure for many of these filmmakers and a frame of reference for this essay.2 For just as New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette used the jump cut, the tracking shot, real-time long takes, and camera move ments to call attention to the cinematic apparatus in a provocative manifesto, so, too, do these transnational directors propose innova tions worthy of attention. Borrowing from avant-garde, independent, and commercial film practices of French and European cinema, and combining them with the specificities of diasporan filmmaking, French women filmmakers are calling into question the validity of both national cinema and cul tural identity as assumed or fixed representational concepts. A number

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