Introduction: The Expanding Imagination of Mainstream French Films and Television Series

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter surveys the historical background to and recent landscape of Frenchness as articulated in mainstream postnational film and television. This involves a dialogue that aims to build on and update existing scholarship on trans/postnational media industries, as a foundation for deciding which perspectives are most fitting when turning subsequently to significant trends in texts themselves. An overview of the rationale for the book’s chapter selection, accompanied and followed by summaries and extrapolations of the foci and implications of each, reflects the twin objectives of capturing a representative variety of empirical developments in media production and testing apt paradigms for their analysis. The chapter points to initial conclusions about key emergent features of both on-screen postnational Frenchness and comparable identities linked to contemporary screen cultures in general.