Jane Giles
Le Cinéma de Jean Genet. Un chant d’amour - Jane Giles
Author(s) Jane Giles, Edmund White, Albert Dichy, Nico Papatakis, Philippe-Alain Michaud
Format paperback
Year 2018
Language(s) French
Pages 160 pages
Description
Jean Genet is not only the greatest French prose writer of the postwar period, the perverse heir of Chateaubriand and Rimbaud, the man who imposed the mythology of enchanting murderers, inflexible pimps, and divine queens.
Filmmaker – but also screenwriter, theorist – Genet produced a rare, provocative, clandestine body of work that has gradually emerged since his death in 1986: "It is strange to note," writes Edmund White in the preface, "that Genet thought about cinema throughout his career as a writer. He wrote more pages of screenplays than of any other literature."
Reading Jane Giles's book, one realizes that cinema, Genet's first cultural influence as an adolescent, is at the heart of his procedures as a writer, and that many constructions in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs or Miracle de la rose – alternating montages, flashbacks, details – derive from it.
For Edmund White, "Un Chant d'amour, the only film written and directed by Genet, reveals in their pure form the techniques he used in his novels and plays."
Jane Giles, born in 1964, near London, defended her thesis at the University of Kent in 1986 on "The Cinema of Jean Genet" and published, in 1991, under the same title, a book at the B.F.I. (British Film Institute). In addition to a preamble by Serge Daney, this book includes a preface by Edmund White, interviews with Edmund White, Albert Dichy and Nico Papatakis, as well as a study by Philippe-Alain Michaud.
Collection: Cinéma
1st edition: 1993
Translation: Françoise Michaud
Preface: Edmund White
Text: Philippe-Alain Michaud
Dossier: Jean Genet, Albert Dichy, Edmund White, Nico Papatakis, Jane Giles, Frédéric Charpentier
160 pages
bibliography
56 black and white illustrations
Format: 18 x 23 cm
ISBN: 978-2-86589-043-9