Le Cinéma de Jean Genet. Un chant d’amour - Jane Giles

Jean Genet is not only France's greatest post-war prose writer, the perverse heir to Chateaubriand and Rimbaud, the man who imposed the mythology of enchanting assassins, inflexible pimps and divines.

A filmmaker - but also a screenwriter and theorist - Genet produced a rare, provocative, clandestine body of work that has been gradually emerging since his death in 1986: “It is strange to note,” writes Edmund White in his 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 culture as an adolescent, is at the heart of his writing process, and that many of the constructions in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs or Miracle de la rose - alternating montages, flashbacks, details - stem 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 near London in 1964, wrote her dissertation on “The Cinema of Jean Genet” at the University of Kent in 1986, and published a book under the same title with the B.F.I. (British Film Institute) in 1991. In addition to a foreword by Serge Daney, the book includes a preface by Edmund White, interviews with Edmund White, Albert Dichy and Nico Papatakis, and 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