Unraveling French Cinema: From L'Atalante to Caché

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction 1

1 Cinema and/as Poetry: L’Atalante’s Apples as Poems 13

2 Cinema and the Real: Renoir’s Rules 35

3 Cinema and/as Crime: Breaking the Law in The Children of Paradise, Pickpocket, and Breathless 54

4 Cinema and/as Mapping: Reorienting Ourselves Through Film 83

5 Cinema and/as Dream: Truffaut’s “Royal Road” to Adele H. 109

6 Cinema and/as Hypnosis: Jacquot’s Seventh Heaven 132

7 Cinema and/as Mourning: Anne Fontaine’s How I Killed My Father 148

8 Cinema and/as Terror: Michael Haneke’s Caché 165

9 Beautiful Fragments: Discontinuity and the French Cinema 179

Notes 193

References 212

Index 219