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

Abstract

This 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.

As we write this introduction in December 2022, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Qatar is the subject of fierce disapproval, and victim of some boycotts, due to the nation’s poor human rights record and anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Televised international sport shares with screen fiction a privileged status as a forum for articulating transnational culture (Giulianotti and Robertson 2009; Hedling 2015). While the persistence of national categories in such competitions is nothing less than their sine qua non, the current controversy serves to highlight the significant economic and political stakes engaged when transnational identities are instantiated even within the seemingly anodyne sphere of entertainment: the central pillar of what this book dubs postnational popular culture.

The initial idea for a research project exploring this category in French film and television series was fleshed out in 2018 through a series of meetings between its editors. At that time, we observed that in the previous decade, data from the French Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) and the European Audiovisual Observatory had recorded exceptionally high cinema attendance in France, the second-largest industry in the Western world, alongside strong figures for Europe as a whole. Local produce is a significant element of this picture—especially in France, where the national comedies that always hold the status of the most popular domestic genre (here as elsewhere) have since 2008 comprised three of the top 20 films ever at the domestic box office, while home-grown post-millennial crime and heritage films are also represented in the nation’s overall top 50 (Harrod and Powrie 2018). More strikingly, given the usual conceptualisation of ex-Hollywood genre films as destined for home markets, several of these—for instance, comedies Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001), Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis/Welcome to the Land of Shtis (Dany Boon, 2008) or Intouchables/Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011); the heritage musical Les Choristes/The Chorus (Christophe Barratier, 2004); the heritage biopic La Môme/La Vie en rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007) or the neo-noir thriller Ne le dis à personne/Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, 2006)—had also performed markedly well outside France.¹ Meanwhile, ‘quality’ French television series such as police procedural Engrenages/Spiral (Canal+, 2005–2020), sold to the highly internationally oriented BBC in a landmark development; supernatural drama Les Revenants/The Returned (Canal+, 2012–2015), part funded by the EU’s MEDIA programme (Fig. 1); workplace comedy Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (France 2/Netflix, 2015–2020); and heritage drama Versailles (Canal+, 2015–2018) (Fig. 2) had, along with Scandinavian crime dramas, started to become international household names to an unprecedented degree for European television.

Fig. 1

The newly outward-looking face of postnational Frenchness in Les Revenants

Fig. 2

The newly outward-looking face of postnational Frenchness in Versailles

This raised the question of how ‘the Frenchness of French cinema’ (Vincendeau 2011) and its typically even more domestically oriented cousin television, both produced within a system historically characterised by cultural exceptionalism, might need to be rethought through reference to translocal signifiers. If, as it is generally claimed, nations comprise ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]), mass cultural discourses including popular film and television are key signifiers for not only national but also—increasingly of late—transnational identity (cf. Appadurai 1996, 35), as a category that transcends the national while taking this in and even shoring it up (Ezra and Rowden 2006a, 4). In other words, new narratives of Frenchness demand scholarly scrutiny in order to apprehend shifts in how France represents and thereby constructs itself during a period of neoliberal globalisation—with attendant anxieties about nationhood.

The project’s broad primary objective has from the outset been to designate an intensification of truly mass-popular audiovisual products’ uncoupling from national spheres of circulation if not production. Charlie Michael’s chapter in this volume dates a move to embrace genre filmmaking in France back to Minister of Culture Jack Lang’s structural reforms in the sector during the 1990s, which made cable television a key source of film finance. More recently, as producer of Les Revenants, Engrenages and Versailles, the subscription channel Canal+ was instrumental in early changes in France (see also Kitsopanidou and Thévenin forthcoming; Harrod 2021, 304). However, since the mid-2010s, a shift has occurred that renders the need for such new terminology all the more urgent: the increasing reach and visibility of global digital subscription video-on-demand ((S)VoD) streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or a growing list of competitor services.² It is striking to consider that these were but one element of the changes becoming apparent even as recently as 2018. Market-leading Netflix expanded very significantly in 2011–2012 and developed a French division in 2014, while Amazon Studios was founded in 2013. However, the obligation from early 2020 onwards for swathes of the world’s population to spend most if not all of their time at home for weeks or months on end gave such services an enormous boost. Thus, data suggests that after a broadly steady rise in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, by 2021 around 19 million French households subscribed to at least one (S)VoD service (Netflix represented 8.4 million subscriptions, with Prime Video and Disney+ the next most popular) (Goodall forthcoming).³ Meanwhile, the French streaming service Molotov had become available in half a dozen Francophone African countries (only more recently ceding dominance to Netflix), and an international surge in series production was already underway. While evidence of a waning in the fortunes of Netflix specifically has generated headlines since 2022, this is hardly surprising after such spectacular success and at a moment when world populations are not only out of lockdown but face heightened financial pressures; it does not detract from the massive reorientation of viewing models that has been prompted by the ability to stream films and television programmes from all over the world with ever-increasing ease and flexibility, across multiple devices, either in the original language with or without subtitles or else dubbed, in almost any situation. It is commonly asserted by postmodern geographers that digital technology has led to space–time compression (Mihelj 2011, 144). For audiovisual products, there is no doubt that recent changes have made the consumption of narratives produced abroad easier than ever before.⁴ Today, for the millions of subscribers to (S)VoD platforms, televisual immersion in a wide variety of ‘foreign’ cultural narratives can be achieved effortlessly from the comfort of one’s own home. Moreover, thanks to the now standard provision of multi-lingual dubbing, it can also be enjoyed in their own language by the vast majority of audiences who prefer to avoid subtitles (Mazdon 2015, 208–209; see also Betz 2009, 45–92) (even if social media platforms amply evidence the use of such products by a significant proportion of viewers to enhance language learning). Given the commonly held view that ‘no other media institution was more central to the modernist intent of engineering a national identity [than was television]’ (Chalaby 2005, 1; cf. Elsaesser 2005, 54), such a change highlights a demand for investigation into the role of fictions consumed on small as well as (more traditionally transnational) large screens in forging postnational identities, and the specificities of their contours.

The shapes traced by such new configurations of a particular postnational identity are the subject of this volume. One challenge has clearly been to grapple with focalising a period of transition (post-2000) from older to newer models for the production and distribution of Frenchness in popular audiovisual fiction. Contributions to it bridge this divide, while seeking ultimately to understand how the latest emergent tendencies may develop in the future and with what significance for postnational identity-formation. First of all, however, we sketch out a more detailed survey of both the historical background to and recent landscape of postnational Frenchness as articulated in mainstream 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. Here, 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. In so doing, it points to initial conclusions about key emergent features of on-screen postnational Frenchness, as well as other comparable identities, as constructed and circulated through fictions produced for mass-popular consumption.

From a Transnational to a Postnational Model

It is well known that in the pre-sound era France, widely perceived to have invented cinema, rivalled the USA for world dominance of screen markets. The nation’s toppling from grace occasioned much Gallic cultural agitation, including concern about threats to national identity, in the second half of the twentieth century. It was without doubt a factor in France’s adoption of protectionist policies preventing Hollywood produce from saturating domestic circuits, the subject of fraught GATT negotiations in 1993 in particular (Mazdon 2000, 6–8). This account hints at why France recommends itself as a case study for an enquiry into postnational identity. The national cinema’s status as emblematic of European exceptionalism dates back until at least the art cinema movements of the 1960s, when for Sight and Sound editor Penelope Houston ‘if Hollywood’s directors look longingly towards the greater freedoms of Europe, it is to France that they look first’ (1963, 81). This long-standing, elevated status, linked to subsidies and grassroots activities along with generalised and persistent forms of national cultural protectionism (Lobato 2019, 144–151; Buchsbaum 2017), has enabled French audiovisual fiction to retain a particularly strong identity, both in itself and as a privileged articulator of Europeanness more generally—in particular from Anglo-American perspectives.⁵ At the same time, France has continued to nurture major ambitions as an exporter of audiovisual fare: for decades it has been the most numerically dominant non-Anglophone nation in Europe when it comes to exporting film and now—following a concerted industrial effort to adapt to the greater international opportunities offered by VoD models announced at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in 2017 (Hopewell 2017)—the nation also occupies that status in world television markets.⁶

Emphasising the importance of (S)VoD does not of course suggest televised fictions of the previous decades, whether serial or feature-length, were necessarily all more domestically circumscribed than theatrical films. For one thing, a proliferation of overlaps between the categories dates back at least to the 1980s, and the strengthening of financing arrangements between televisions channels and film production companies (cf. Elsaesser 2005, 54–56) has generally continued to date, including to an exceptionally high degree in France (Delaporte 2015, 75–77). This is above all a result of television channels financing film production in exchange for exclusive or priority screening rights after any theatrical release—quite some time after in France, due to the strict local ‘media chronology’ also outlined by Christopher Meir’s chapter in this volume.⁷ Rather, the difference is both the scale and the multidirectional diversity of flows that make up the traffic system. Thus, in the 1970s, European nations and especially the USA dominated export markets for not only cinema but also television (Lobato 2019, 140–141). Subsequently, this picture has diversified to a degree. In cinema, notably, several East Asian nations and India now feature in the top ten exporters of cinema. Television’s transnational ambitions first expanded significantly in the 1980s with the advent of satellite distribution (Chalaby 2009, 7–53; 2023, 37–55). Jean K. Chalaby’s 2005 discussion of transnational television’s contribution ‘towards a new media order’ seeks to move away from unidirectional accounts of the relationship between ‘the West and the rest’ through reference to channels such as the Qatari Al Jazeera, catering to the Arab world; looking more directly to both televised fiction and the Global South, Latin American telenovelas, after growing in export importance in the 1980s, were the largest global television export form in 2008 (see Bielby and Harrington 2008, 75, 69). However, the USA actually increased its dominance over European nations in global television production during the 1980s (for reasons largely contingent on developments in the latter territories rather than any taking place in the US industry [Bielby and Harrington, 17]). Subsequently—and as Chalaby’s own work on MTV (2009, 29–30) symptomatises—television produced in the USA has remained dominant (Buonanno 2008, 92–94).⁸ In the last ten years (especially the last five), much more content produced in a far wider variety of countries has become available to mainstream audiences in any countries penetrated by (S)VoD: the reach of Netflix and its successors is global, totally excluding only nations such as China that exert rigid state control over media—even if the cost of subscriptions does limit the audiences along class lines that also track the wealth of nations themselves to a degree, simultaneously creating new cross-national categories of exclusion.

If we recall that (prior to Benedict Anderson’s work) Ernest Gellner’s (1983, 127) classic theorisation of national identity posited that it was not so much the content of media as the sheer existence of its shared channels that created a sense of belonging, the scale of the potential change effected by recent developments comes into relief. More specifically, Gellner’s observation suggests that the transmission of film and television digitally across borders via a shared transnational space has very great potential to rewrite the coordinates of human identification and community. Sabina Mihelj is right to point out that Gellner and Anderson were theorising nation at a time when the vogue for discourse analysis tended to lead to idealised conceptions of cultural production. As she puts it, nations may comprise imagined communities but these are not imagined in circumstances of individuals’ own choosing (Mihelj 2011, 16). Indeed, it is in recognition of media products’ thorough and formative embedding in economic structures that this collection takes in industrial perspectives from macro (in Meir’s and Michael’s analyses) to micro (in Reece Goodall’s and the book’s ‘co-authored’ closing chapters) levels, and everything in between.⁹ Nonetheless, applying Gellner’s contention to (S)VoD consumption, it is clear that the experience of viewing fictions from multiple world cultures results at the very least in diffuse feelings of communion thanks to transcultural familiarity, prior to the analysis of cultural and ideological specificities in which many of the essays in the collection engage.

Our allusion to a sense of belonging takes up the call for transnational television studies to consider in more depth the place of emotion in the translocal viewing experience and attendant contributions to constructions of identity (Harrington and Bielby 2005). We return to affective questions in closing this introduction. However, acknowledging their absence from much relevant scholarship here serves to underline the fact that, although we have noted that very recent changes to industrial structures are a major driver of the need for new frameworks for conceptualising on-screen transnational identities, the historical perspective points to a pre-existing need, from various perspectives. Not that transnational French identities have been neglected by film scholarship. Rather, research on cinematic constructions of French (and typically other European) identities has been heavily skewed in favour of ‘art’ over popular cultural artefacts and trends, both at home and internationally, and in reference to both domestically popular and (perhaps especially) internationally circulated fare. In cinema in particular, European identity has been equated with high art at least since the 1960s New Wave, when France’s internationally visible and influential auteurist filmmaking and criticism helped legitimise and shape Film Studies. Although there have been attempts to redress this balance over the last 30 years through analyses informed by Cultural Studies, with Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau’s collection Popular European Cinema (1992) representing a significant milestone, none of them take in the unapologetically mainstream contemporary production sector with which the present study concerns itself. While their work was pioneering outside France especially, Dyer and Vincendeau centralised truly popular genre films of earlier periods rather than contemporary ones, reproducing a trend whereby these cinemas are reclaimed from a historical perspective in a fashion that, if not enabled by nostalgia, is at least animated by the benefits of hindsight. Further, our own understanding of popular refers to films and series addressing a significantly broad public at their inception, through choices made around genre and industrial positioning—and not including arthouse products that may have broken through at the international box office; it is thus synonymous with the more culturally denigrated moniker mainstream that we have chosen, for the sake of clarity, to centralise in the title of this introduction. With these criteria in mind, examining in detail scholarly analyses centred on ‘popular’ French audiovisual narratives from an external (broadly transnational) perspective reveals that, even recognising that the popular vs. auteur opposition is ever-less meaningful (cf. Moine 2005), the bias towards art cinema is plainly still endemic many years after the popular cinema was notionally embraced by academic enquiry. To take one representative example on French cinema, Lucy Mazdon’s (2001) edited collection France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema includes (out of a total of 11 chapters) three essays on films by Karim Dridi, Alain Berliner (his transgender story Ma vie en rose) and Jacques Audiard that are more immediately aligned with minoritarian filmmaking (Dridi and Berliner) or auteurist positioning (Audiard) than with the mainstream, as well as three analyses of others by Sandrine Veysset, Robert Guédiguian and even Catherine Breillat (her challenging Romance) that are resolutely auteurist, arthouse-oriented pieces from whichever perspective one cares to examine them.¹⁰ The more recent co-edited The Europeanness of European Cinema (Harrod et al. 2015) attempts to begin to move past these biases by specifically emphasising popular cinema but contains only one chapter (by Neil Archer) dedicated to French cinema with major export success and nothing on television. In short, there is still very limited work on mainstream contemporary French audiovisual narratives, still less in English, and no book-length analyses at all dedicated to how such forms intersect with the (recently accelerated) trans/postnationalisation of media—let alone in the (S)VoD era.

This situation is also partly down to the reproduction of such biases in transnational film scholarship, where they sometimes overlap with but also exceed the championing of European art cinema. Such scholarship has proliferated in this millennium, neatly signposted by the publication in 2000 of the essay to which this introduction owes its subtitle, Andrew Higson’s ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’. Here, Higson challenged a previously dominant model of scholarship that accorded great weight to the intersections between cinema and national identity, in view of the fact that national identities are not fixed, impregnable and unadulterated, but rather ‘borders are always leaky and there is a considerable degree of movement across them (even in the most authoritarian states). It is in this migration, this border crossing, that the transnational emerges’ (2000, 67–68). Following the post-1990s acceleration in the globalisation of culture, a string of works certainly took up the baton laid down by Higson (see, e.g., Ezra and Rowden 2006b; Higbee and Lim 2010; Durovičová and Newman 2010; Marshall 2012; Lim 2019), while 2010 saw the launch of the journal Transnational Cinemas. However, not only do the definitions of the transnational and/or transnationalism emerging from these studies often diverge somewhat—when the term is explained at all rather than appearing as a ‘largely self-evident qualifier requiring only minimal conceptual clarification’ (Hjort 2010, 12–13; see also Higbee and Lim 2010, 10)—but they all base their explorations on corpuses dominated very significantly by arthouse and/or independent films.¹¹

There has been a logical turn in very recent years towards considering the transnational aspects and implications of streaming platforms, notably by Mareike Jenner (2018, 185–240) and Ramon Lobato (2019, especially 67–71). Noting that the transnational phenomenon as understood via Netflix is linked to convergence culture, in the sense that it relies on audiences who do not discriminate content according to its source, Jenner actively embraces this terminology in the streaming platform context. Specifically, building on Mihelj’s (2011, 70–94) account of the ongoing importance of ‘grammars of nationhood’ in a global world, she thus coins the phrase ‘grammars of transnationalism’ to describe key structuring principles of Netflix’s international operations (Jenner 2018, 224–226). Mihelj argues convincingly that national markers are the building blocks of transnational spaces, symbols, dialogue and events—the world clock, say, or we might add the multi-flag display on the voting board of the Eurovision Song Contest (Fig. 3)—and thus cannot be dismissed as major determinants of cultural identity (not to mention economic trends).

Fig. 3

The 2019 Eurovision Song Contest’s voting board illustrates transnational spaces’ typical reliance on declaratively national components

Jenner combines this framework with a citation from Steven Vertovec:

Transnationalism describes a condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common—however virtual—arena of activity. (in Jenner 2018, 191)

Such relationships become, we can infer, the bedrock of the streaming platform’s approach to transnational models of commerce and cultural representation. In fact, Jenner here asserts that the case of Netflix takes the paradigm one step further, making the transnational audience primary (‘[it] precedes any notions of a national market [or the concept of cultural export]’) in determining production patterns. However, such claims refer to commercial considerations and as such, taken alone, they reveal little about how the processes underpinning the production of fictions instantiate cultural identities. Moreover, even as a description limited to industrial-economic arrangements, they are potentially misrepresentative of the situation as it has evolved since Netflix’s international collaborations have multiplied into the later 2010s. As David Pettersen’s chapter in this volume explains, Netflix led the way among US-based streaming platforms (including also Amazon, Hulu and Apple) and has been by far the most active agent in not merely acquiring but commissioning content in other territories, starting (with a Brazilian collaboration) in 2014 and moving into French collaborations from 2016.¹² If this distinction is rendered hazy by the overuse of the label ‘original’, as Meir’s chapter reminds us, the discussion with the producers of Dix pour cent included in this volume illustrates how the US company can concretely influence content even when it merely acquires locally produced series mid-run. Writing four years after Jenner, Christel Taillibert and Bruno Cailler (2022) describe Netflix more specifically as adopting what they call a ‘localized’ model of ‘local production as the foundation of global consumerism’, in a fashion emblematic of other (S)VoD services’ models. They thus detail a business approach wherein a property is planned locally but simultaneously analysed by a team of Netflix experts who assess its likely local and global audience potentialities as a basis for recommending a production budget. This paradigm situates any text’s immediate context as primordial in the development of its identity; yet the local production team are incentivised to target a putative global audience as well (cf. Goodall and Harrod forthcoming). Analysing Lupin, Pettersen helpfully draws on terminology from software design to describe this move in terms of internationalisation, as a process which leads to texts whose postnational status is—somewhat counterintuitively—a function of the very ease with which they can be attributed locally, to their recognisably signalled and notionally familiar nations or regions of origin, by (varied) target audiences. Postnational here refers, then, to audiovisual fictions designed from the development stage with eyes trained on the export market as—though not necessarily primary—much more than the afterthought it has historically tended to represent for non-Anglophone fare, without this delocalising them. Of course, any shift is a question of degree not category. In European television, the logics of purposeful transnationalism underpinned production to a degree at least as far back as the 1970s, when France rivalled the UK (now dominant in Europe) as a key exporter of worldwide television (Nordenstreng and Varis 1974, 30).¹³ According to Chalaby (2023, 1), indeed, ‘Broadcasting was a national industry that progressively internationalised[, while streaming is essentially a global industry that is progressively localising]’. Purposeful transnationalism was certainly already also an influential factor shaping blockbuster movies, most obviously US-produced ones (see Miller et al. 2005) but also, increasingly in this millennium, French films such as Intouchables (see Pettersen 2016).¹⁴ However, since the mid-2010s such practices have become more widespread across a much wider range of mainstream texts than was previously the case, ushering in what we might dub a truly postnational era in the circulation of audiovisual fictions.

Many of Jenner’s observations are nonetheless incisive. In fact, her discussion of national versus transnational dynamics even in relation to earlier (i.e. principally locally distributed rather than commissioned) Netflix products does accord significant space to accounts that warn against ‘underestimat[ing] the salience of the nation-state in the process of globalization’ (Iwabuchi in Jenner 2018, 191). This tendency to foreground the persistence of nationally accented values and symbols within expressions of transnational identity resonates strongly with the locally (co-)produced corpus examined by this volume, which takes the view that accelerated globalisation is always accompanied by heightened attention to the national. This is most obvious in the form of backlash—as evidenced of late in the political sphere by the rise of populist national parties across the Western world. But the opportunities for nation-building offered by postnational media (for instance, promotion of local brands like the French cars highlighted by Michael’s analysis of Netflix’s Balle perdue/Lost Bullet [Guillaume Pierret, 2022], of aspects of French culture such as the stand-up comedy scene scrutinised by Mary Harrod’s discussion of Drôle/Standing Up [Netflix, 2022] or of newly ‘globalised’ gender identities examined in chapters by Le Gras, Ginette Vincendeau and Anne Kaftal on female stars and characters) are not simply reducible to reactionary politics. The observation that international audiences have more primacy than ever before when it comes to determining details of the production and circulation of fictions on streaming platforms informs our enquiry, as one which shares with much transnational film scholarship an interest in the dialogical interfacing of national and other elements to produce specific new textual articulations (cf. Higbee and Lim 2010, 10). Where we concur with Lobato rather than Jenner is in the conviction that ‘we lack an adequate vocabulary to describe the geographical configurations characteristic of internet-distributed television. We may need to go beyond terms like global, national, and transnational; however, as yet there is no consensus regarding viable alternatives’ (Lobato 2019, 67). Although Lobato suggests that rendering the complexity of digital flows’ global-national implications and allegiances may prove impossible, we offer postnational as a partial solution to the issue when it comes to audiovisual media—even if we do not limit its relevance to internet-distributed products, which in any case lacks coherence as a category, in view of licencing deals that mean many texts are available in multiple viewing spaces.

The concept of the postnational offered her shares with other ‘posts’ (postmodernism, postfeminism, to name only two salient examples) a conviction that post denotes a structuring genetic debt to the (national) forebear and not a severance of ties. It is worth stressing at this point another way in which national identity, rather than enduring as a residual aspect of such developments, determines both ends of the production–circulation process. Thus, not only is nation still the primary production context for film and television (international co-production practices and mechanisms notwithstanding), but it is also their dominant destination, since the domestic market is still by far the biggest market for most cultural fictions, especially non-Anglophone ones. This model foregrounds the thorough interweaving of national and postnational identity-construction. Acknowledging it reflects the fact that this collection is not merely concerned with how France represents itself abroad but also how postnationally inflected fictions reinvent French identity within France—even if the European Audiovisual Observatory insists that in 2020 ‘global streaming services’ were still only responsible for 10 per cent of European television series produced (Fontaine 2022). There is a certain parallel here with a scholarly drive spearheaded by David Morley to move away from emphasising mobility when discussing media’s role in geo-cultural identity-construction, privileging instead the way in which such media may allow for a strengthening of notions of ‘home’ (2001, 426–427).¹⁵ In the present case, rather paradoxically, the contention is that precisely because the influence of the geographical nation-state cedes ground at one middle stage of the production process to a privileging of notions of what might sell elsewhere, Frenchness tout court is here renegotiated in a bilateral relation with external cultures: national identity on screen is reconstructed with significant reference to values drawn from global film and television culture, even when playing to local audiences. Thus, the interview that closes this collection notes that the purchase by Netflix of France 2’s Dix pour cent—which, as an acquisition, would be excluded from European Audiovisual Observatory calculations about ‘global streaming’ produce—led (as noted) to it evolving in terms of focus and also to increased viewer numbers for the show when it was broadcast on the domestic channel. The interview also reminds us of the fact that such fictions also exert second-order creative influence (such as through personnel) in ways impossible to measure in the broader domestic mediasphere. The enhanced reach and impact of global media on French screens to which such examples attest is all the more remarkable in a national context defined by historically heavy state control of television for a democratic nation (this monopoly ended with the Broadcasting Bill in 1982) and an ongoing high level of regulation. Nonetheless, it will be clear by now that the short answer to the question posed in this book’s title, Is it French?, is yes, on the proviso of recognising national identities are permanently under negotiation.

Screening Postnational Frenchness

One of the textual results of the industrial paradigm centralised by Jenner’s work on Netflix is a proliferation of narratives that abstract from history, yet do so by way of specific referentiality to spheres of representation that resonate ‘glocally’. Jenner cites as a paradigmatic example the US series Stranger Things’s (Netflix, 2016–2024) heavy appeal to an imaginary of 1980s–1990s Spielberg-influenced screen Americana (2018, 227). While not every transnationally exported fiction plays up rather than playing down specificity, especially when a particular exporting nation’s own international profile may be less clearly defined, we do see a similar phenomenon in several of the French films and series examined in these pages. Notably, spaces that are declaratively national to the point of metonymy such as the French Riviera—in Thomas Pillard’s chapter—and especially Paris and its suburbs—in the contributions by Harrod, Michael, Vincendeau, Kaftal and Pettersen—recur as key signifiers of Frenchness.¹⁶ That such spaces are not only discursively (re-)constructed but complexly intercultural is brought to the fore by Harrod’s analysis of both space and language in writer Fanny Herrero’s major international hit series Dix pour cent and her follow-up Drôle, with which the book’s Part I, ‘New Figures, New Voices’, opens. Harrod builds on Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of ImpersoNation to suggest that such narratives offer an ImPosture of Frenchness for international consumption, yet one that may nonetheless have performative benefits, notably for race relations as constructed by the emphatically ‘multicultural’ later series. Questions of diversity, including linguistic ones typically ignored by audiovisual analysis, are then developed in Gemma King’s chapter examining the increasing presence of LSF (Langue des Signes Française or French Sign Language) as a form of communication, complicating long-standing ties between national identity and language in recent narratives. Her most visible example concerns the film La Famille Bélier/The Bélier Family (Eric Lartigau, 2014) (Fig. 4)—although this visibility comes partly courtesy of the film’s Oscar-winning US (Apple ‘Original’ but French co-financed) remake CODA (Siân Heder, 2021) (Fig. 5), in a classic example of a long-standing remake strategy involving the suppression of a text’s local origins.

Fig. 4

The French poster for La Famille Bélier, promising feel-good comedy

Fig. 5

Marketing for CODA, like its title, subtly amps up the emphasis on social issue realism

By reminding us that Americanised produce still captures the most massive markets—certainly if we exclude the special case of the rapidly growing Chinese industry, which is linked primarily to the size of the Chinese viewership itself—even by comparison with a successfully exported European film, King’s analysis provides among other things a usefully comparative angle on certain ongoing economic limitations (as well as affordances) to postnational screen culture. Together, the two opening chapters establish various textual clichés of Frenchness that recur in postnational narratives: namely, modern urban milieus characterised by an admixture of glamour and realism connected to what Vincendeau’s chapter calls ‘the extremes of the French social spectrum’, alongside nostalgic narratives more obviously aligned with the ‘transnational middlebrow’ (see Galt and Schoonover 2016), whether these literally return us to the French past or, in the case of La Famille Bélier, do so more performatively. Goodall then turns to genres with a shorter history in French audiovisual production that now appear to be gaining some traction, more obviously calqued from the outset at least partially on external models: horror and sci-fi. Expanding the opening section’s exploration of new perspectives to take in the space behind the camera, his chapter suggests that the director, producer and all-round industry player Alexandre Aja, who has been behind a recent wave of successful films in these categories, may offer the perfect example of a postnational genre auteur. Here, genre acts as a higher-order category for positioning Aja’s films than questions of nation, without the latter being totally elided. As this phenomenon has to date not been typical outside films made in English (cf. Mazel 2023), Goodall’s chapter offers something of a counter-perspective to any suggestion inferable from King’s piece that all French genre pieces might need an English-language remake to truly maximise their potential circulation.¹⁷ For Aja’s films, the process is if anything reversed, as his name has become synonymous with ‘French horror’ especially as an internationally saleable discursive property.

If discussion of the partial unmooring of postnational narratives from geographical coordinates nonetheless appears to suggest the waning of certain concrete histories, the book’s Part II, ‘Embodying the Postnational’, complicates this assumption by centralising individual industry actors and voices in postnational production and fan culture, alongside the endurance of bodies and material culture more generally, in on-screen articulations of postnational identity. As regards corporeality, an obsession with the body is a stereotype of French cinema as viewed from beyond the Hexagon. This is perhaps most obvious in the wide export of arthouse body horror and/or sexually explicit films under the rubric of New French Extremity since the 1990s (Quandt 2004; see also Palmer 2011). Within more mainstream fare, we have already observed that action has been a key export genre and it comes under critical scrutiny in Part II. Notably, Luc Besson’s production company EuropaCorp, specialising in such films, has been responsible for no fewer than four of the top five French films exported in the 2010s (Unifrance 2020, 20), before collapsing in 2019.¹⁸ As such, its success then fall from grace represent highly influential developments deserving of sustained scrutiny, accorded to it in the two chapters that open this section. Firstly, Pillard’s analysis of international reactions to Besson’s recent films on the online platform IMDb (Internet Movie Database) points towards the paradigm shifts described by this introduction as screen industries are increasingly postnationalised, and Besson’s status as a victim of this change: a ‘has-been’ who knew success with a 1980s and 1990s generation of viewers but who, in trying to adapt to post-millennial trends he does not fully grasp, fails to seduce either audience. As well as explicating certain industrial factors in the demise of his blockbuster studio, Vanderschelden’s following chapter identifies in Besson’s filmmaking an attempt to be ‘postnational’ that broadly accords with the derogatory definition of the concept offered by Martine Danan. This represents one of the few pre-existing attempts to pin down the term, certainly within French film studies, and from which this collection distances itself.¹⁹ Danan thus describes the ‘erasure of distinctive elements which have traditionally helped to define the imaginaries and traditions of national cinemas against Hollywood’ (2006, 177; see also Danan 1996) in high-budget international films of the late twentieth century. Vanderschelden’s analysis of the infamous mega-budget flop Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017) argues persuasively that in fact the total dilution of Frenchness, and even cinematic medium-specificity, through incorporating delocalised sci-fi elements unfaithful to the French source text and starring celebrities instead of actors, is central to the failure of EuropaCorp and therefore the whole project of the truly global French blockbuster, at least in the delocalised terms envisaged by that studio.²⁰ The contrast with the case of Aja in Part I is striking here. Indeed, both Pillard’s and Vanderschelden’s contributions also sketch out the way in which the failure of recent major EuropaCorp productions equates to the diminished currency of writer–producer–director Besson’s brand. This comprises an industrial complex that functions much like a more traditional popular auteur ‘label’ as a mark of what to expect for Besson’s fanbase—not least since, for Vanderschelden, (gendered) aspects of Besson’s genre filmmaking have been co-constellated with culturally decried episodes in his personal life.

Closing the section with the first contribution to focus on Netflix as such, Michael maps out points of contact between this company’s intervention into cultural politics through action cinema in particular and the negotiation of local versus global production sites within an emblematic French film, Balle perdue. His chapter suggestively captures the wider phenomenon of global culture’s tendency to endorse consumerist ideologies and practices as a substitute for varied forms of local affiliation (including those lying, by contrast, outside top-down circuits of power) and ‘the emerging parameters of a marketplace where national identity increasingly mingles with other sliding forms of referentiality on demand’. At the same time, just as Goodall acknowledges the Frenchness of ‘body horror’, Michael’s chapter identifies a kind of intensified corporeality in French action cinema, obviously linked to a paucity of special effects but also to ‘athletic performers’. Although Michael is referring here principally to the performance of action stunts, other forms of virtuoso control of the body distinguish more than one standout star career in French fictions that have travelled, from Jean Dujardin’s turn in the Oscar-winning The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) (Fig. 6) to the work of Omar Sy indirectly examined in these pages by Pettersen (Fig. 7). The fact that both these personae are infused with significant overtones of knowing self-deprecation further tallies with Michael’s conclusions: that Frenchness can trade in an aesthetic of unremarkability and self-effacement that is nonetheless positioned by the same token as a ‘plucky’—and, we would add, altogether cool—player in the global marketplace.²¹

Fig. 6

Jean Dujardin in The Artist strikes a carefully controlled pose

Fig. 7

A French poster for Netflix’s Lupin foregrounds Omar Sy’s imposing physicality

Part III examines intersections between French postnational and different iterations of feminine and/or feminist values on screen, including orienting the discussion of embodied identities to include female stars. This section’s emphasis implicitly acknowledges women’s privileged status as symbols of the national ‘body politic’ (cf. Yuval-Davis 1996), emblems that may or may not resolve tensions around ‘progress’ versus tradition that frequently map onto those of globalisation versus localism (cf. Ozia 2006, 21–44). Le Gras’s opening contribution considers the stardom of veteran actress Charlotte Rampling. While English-born Rampling’s work across British, French and other cinemas underlines the historical status of transnational identity-formation, Le Gras identifies complex postnational inflections in the actor’s recent film work (a move from local embedding to a status connoting generic otherness—perhaps even posthuman identity—that is, we note, broadly paralleled by at least one other major European star: Javier Bardem). Both Vincendeau’s and Kaftal’s following contributions explore in detail a collision already symptomatised by the problem of outmoded gender representations in Luc Besson’s films: a clash between conventional French attitudes to female and feminine identities, which are in many ways quite conservative, and the injunctions of contemporary global (post)feminism. Vincendeau’s piece pinpoints the precipitate obsolescence of the female characters—and construction of racial identities—in a forerunner to the contemporary moment of widely postnational television, Engrenages. Her detailed analysis of the series’s two much-mediatised, counterpointed female leads probes beneath the veneer of feminist assertiveness to root the characters in much older and more reactionary representational lineages. These observations speak clearly to the way in which shifts in production circumstances equate to shifts in aesthetics and therefore culture. Kaftal’s essay then carefully unpicks the fine line negotiated by more recently conceived French narratives featuring the ‘modern’ French postnational star Camille Cottin, who is positioned to appeal simultaneously to both value systems. Postfeminist culture’s ability to ‘regulate its own tensions’ through irony is central to this process, chiming with the cool masculinities outlined in Part II—although through a notably more middle-class and racially Whiter lens. Seeking a potentially dual address for more local and more international audiences, moreover, is quite typical of postnational screen fictions; yet it represents a very particular twist on Amanda Lotz’s (2018) observation that increasingly finely calibrated modes of distinction become more important in the era of ‘taste cultures based on race and class that supersede national borders and align with changing contemporary TV technologies and production models that emphasize quality television programming and transnational distribution’ (Nygaard and Lagerwey 2021, 40).²² Such findings support Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey’s claims in the same passage that in such a context the imagined community of transnational viewers targeted by fictions that circulate internationally is conceived fundamentally as a ‘coalition audience’—in other words, with different on-screen (and paratextual) elements appealing to different segments.

Part IV, ‘Industry Players: From Product to Brand’, opens with an examination of the good fortunes of the major French film studio Gaumont in the streaming era. In an analysis focused almost exclusively on industrial change, Meir demonstrates the benefits of the company’s flexible adaptation to the new models of audiovisual circulation, notably developing series to complement their traditional cinematic output but also engaging in other partnerships with newly emergent key players, such as licensing its back catalogue to Netflix for both local and international screening. Meir also highlights the particular importance of Netflix’s female CEO, Sidonie Dumas, in weathering the storm. Like Vanderschelden’s chapter especially, such an emphasis contributes to correcting the paucity of ‘middle-level’ analysis of specific industry organisations and actors in media studies (Bielby and Harrington 2008, 10–21). Pettersen’s chapter, in contrast, homes in on a particular actor in the traditional sense of the word, but one whose influence rivals that of major producers: Omar Sy. Combining industrial and textual analysis, Pettersen shows how Sy’s career, and specifically his role in the most streamed—and altogether extremely popular (see Alessandrini 2021)—French series Lupin (Netflix, 2021–), has rewritten the script of not merely legibility but desirability for Frenchness at several levels.

Sy’s success is notably indicative of one important finding emerging from the corpus of postnational fictions under examination. While French cinema remains overwhelmingly (around 80 per cent) White, and the numbers perceived as non-White in French television as a whole dropped from 17 per cent in 2018 to 15 per cent in 2019, fictions whose genesis and/or circulation is markedly postnational appear to be leading the way in slowly diversifying French casts.²³ Further notable examples include the very popular comedian and film actor Kad Merad, who in 2022 starred in Disney+ French historical drama miniseries Oussekine (2022), and Tahar Rahim, whose success in the awards-decorated and widely exported popular auteur film Un prophète/A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009) led to roles in Samba (2014), the film with which Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano followed up Intouchables and in which he played opposite Sy; multi-lingual crime series The Last Panthers (BSkyB, Canal+, 2015–2016), distributed in the UK, France and Germany; the US counter-terrorism procedural drama series The Looming Tower (Hulu, 2018); and the forthcoming UK-US feature biopic Napoleon (Ridley Scott, 2023), alongside French international auteur circuit regular Ludivine Sagnier. While we have noted that women of colour still lag behind, especially in the A-list category, Leïla Bekhti (who also played the most substantial if still undeveloped female lead role in Un prophète, among other successes in cinema) features in key roles in postnational series Midnight Sun (Sveriges Television/StudioCanal, 2016), a Franco-Swedish crime drama; the Paris-set multinational co-production drama The Eddy (Netflix, 2020); and the comedy spoof The Flamme (Canal+, 2020), a remake of a US series (as well as the non-fictional Amazon Original LOL, qui rit, sort! [‘LOL, Whoever Laughs is Out’, Amazon Prime, 2021–]), while Harrod’s and Michael’s chapters also highlight in passing the careers of Stéfi Celma, and the former that of Drôle’s Mariama Gueye as well.²⁴ Some of these roles are clearly inherently ethnically marked (while Meir’s chapter lists various postnational French actions films and series where reactionary racial stereotypes endure); however, this is not true across the board, including a priori for the behemoth Lupin, and as Pettersen notes, motivations behind increased racial variety on screen may also be economic, a product of ‘circulation-based casting’ informed by the perception that ethnic diversity plays well in many parts of the world—and his engagement with international social media responses to Lupin, while unsystematic, suggests the approach’s efficacy for that show. Given that second-generation West African immigrant Sy reportedly came up with the idea behind the series, and its evident tailoring to his performed persona such that this becomes a creative motor in Lupin’s narrative design, the example approximates fulfilling the potential of diasporic cinema for ‘occupying or influencing the mainstream in national and transnational cinematic spaces’ in the manner of a director such as Rachid Bouchareb, who has worked in Hollywood after several significant popular successes in French cinema—while stopping short of ‘exploring the transnational connections or intercultural exchange between France and [its former colonies]’ (Higbee and Lim 2010, 10–12) in as much depth as such a predecessor.²⁵ The example might appear something of a pyrrhic victory in continuing to exclude creative personnel of diasporic heritage from officially occupying key creative roles behind the camera. This circumscription limits such figures’ ability to shape narratives, not to mention their celebrity capital more generally, in a long-standing socio-industrial tendency to obfuscate the achievements of socially disempowered subjects: to cite another pertinent instance, the first screenplay draft for the recurrently mentioned Un prophète was originally written not by auteur director Audiard but the lesser-known Abdel Raouf Dafri, yet the former is widely credited with being its ‘genius’ creator. Nevertheless, many creative practitioners (notably comedians) attain fame as performers first and moreover, as Harrod argues, even the optics of diversity on screen can be performative in a media age in which we are constantly reminded that appearances ultimately generate realities. While it is beyond the scope of the operations examined in this book to radically renegotiate relations between France and its former colonial subjects, or their descendants, they do contribute to making perceived norms of Frenchness itself much more inclusive. Furthermore, while Régis Dubois (2016, 33) has suggested that entertainment and sports industries have had degrading connotations in France as one of the few arenas in which Black people might succeed, it is unclear that this is true to the same extent in the USA, where Black citizens have attained success in a wider range of professions, or by extension in global cultures, also as these are influenced by a US-led love of mass-popular entertainment. Here, postnational screen fictions are no doubt part of a wider array of factors likely to be gradually contributing to an elevation in the status of French showbusiness figures in general and multi-ethnic ones in particular.

The book’s final chapter, comprising the text of an interview with Harold Valentin and Christian Baute, producers of Dix pour cent and its British remake, respectively, offers among other things a first-hand account of being confronted with the withholding by Netflix of the kind of data that makes assertions like some of those made above speculative. Bringing the book’s focus full circle by returning to the pioneering series on whose textual substance its first case study chapter concentrated, the last chapter provides detailed insight into the production process behind the representations engendered, as well as the steps involved in the series being remade by a different nation. This remake contrasts in its approach with that of La Famille Bélier examined by King, playing up rather than denying the more culturally prestigious source text (also true of the Fleabag [BBC Three/Prime Video, 2016–2019] remake Mouche [‘Fly’, Canal+, 2019] examined by Kaftal). The chapter also emphasises the influence of not merely economic but more broadly institutional and cultural contexts in shaping a nation’s output, as interviewee Valentin points to French specificities in the approach to training screenwriters for televisual writing—practices in whose updating he has personally played a role. Finally, the interview is of note for engaging with the issue of transnational queer culture as framing elements of Dix pour cent: a perspective curiously absent from many analyses in a fashion that suggests French postnational products’ relatively tenacious focus on heterosexuality even in the (S)VoD era. This is notably in contrast to, for example, Hispanic fare, where important transnationally popular series such as the Mexican Cuna de lobos (‘Cradle of Wolves’, Televisa, 2019) and Control Z (Netflix, 2020–2022) or the Spanish Veneno (‘Poison’ Atresplayer/HBO, 2020) (the latter two both featuring trans characters) and especially Elite (Netflix, 2018–) place queer identities and culture front and centre. The two Hispanic Netflix series’ related focus on adolescents also illuminates the general absence of teen-focused narratives in major French series, evoking the (for now) ongoing influence of the national cinema, with its audiences and narratives known to skew older than average, on this aspect of audiovisual fictions, even when they are circulated on notoriously youth-oriented streaming platforms.²⁶

Industry, Identity, Ideology

The above statement throws into relief the fact that neo-global (often broadly US-consolidated) approaches to storytelling are not simply absorbed by postnational fictions from other countries. This is true even in the realm of genre: we have noted that ‘noir’ narratives like Engrenages have a French history, and indeed US–European exchange is now truistic of scholarship on the historical genre, for instance. Likewise, even claims by Jenner (2018, 194) that narratives produced by a US company, Netflix, result in a ‘nationally bound’ version of racial diversity prove untenable. Before Omar Sy became a Netflix star, Vincendeau (2014, 559–560) had demonstrated the inextricability of his globally successful persona from French-oriented earlier work (pace Pettersen 2016). In the same way, the racially mixed cast of Drôle (or indeed the roughly contemporaneous Netflix film Tout simplement noir/Simply Black [John Wax and Jean-Pascal Zadi, 2020] and series En place/Represent [2023–, also created by and starring the Black performer Zadi]) play with stereotypes drawn from the French stand-up tradition.²⁷ Thus, even French audiovisual fictions that seek postnational positioning are almost as far from being post-racial as they are from being post-gender. We can conclude, then, that—the distinctive case of certain remakes aside—not only do postnational narratives self-evidently refuse categorisation as products of American cultural imperialism (as some earlier televisual ‘flows’ were accused of engendering [see White 2003]), but nor do they exist in some non-specific global space of the kind put forward, for instance, in comparative literary studies that argue world literature ceases to be national literature in the case of today’s ‘new globally directed works all too easy to understand’, and seen by some to contribute to the ‘McDonaldization of the globe’ (see Damrosch 2003, 18, 25).²⁸

Comparing contemporary global (S)VoD services with the dominant US-originated global brand McDonald’s may be partially defensible in the economic sector alone. The US identity of the major existing streaming platforms means that profits from their local investment do not end up significantly lining the coffers of production companies in the country in question, instead being majority-channelled into the US-based parent corporation (Meir 2021, 23)—certainly in the case of commissioned fare. Although Meir’s European Commission report calls for European companies to develop their own streaming platforms to combat the potentially expanded media market dominance by the USA that the emergence of such enterprises currently implies (2021, 17–19), his analysis of the fortunes of Gaumont contained in these pages nonetheless demonstrates significant benefits of globalisation for local actors. Moreover, when it comes to constructing cultural and not merely economic identities, in line with work on Australian television by Alexa Scarlata, Ramon Lobato and Stuart Cunningham cited by Pettersen, it seems from the case study of French postnational film and television series that global markets seek difference rather than the cookie-cutter sameness of fast food—but difference within recognisable parameters. As in these writers’ analysis of exaggerated regional accents, the question of language is revealing here. Although dubbing possibilities online mean that language is essentially a secondary issue in the streaming sector (while a show such as subscription channel Canal+’s Versailles instead widens its audience base by filming in English), the analyses of communication and dialogue in postnational French film and media by Harrod, King, Le Gras and Kaftal suggest that recognisability is potentially likely to be more desirable than extreme complexity when looking beyond national borders: French language is certainly an additional draw for some viewers but it tends to be standardised and/or ‘folklorised’, which is also the tendency when representing (already somewhat universalised) ‘French’ sign language.²⁹ This trend is not exclusive to contemporary production: inter alia, there are suggestive comparisons to be made with Le Gras’s analysis of Rampling’s earlier oeuvre in which she occasionally accentuated ‘foreignness’ for a particular role through inauthentic means, by intensifying her accent in speaking French (an approach more extensively and caricaturally associated with Jane Birkin even earlier). Put simply, relying on recognisable oppositions (here, Gallic vs. Anglo-Saxon) as a strategy for self-definition, akin to those identifiable with earlier European cinema most famously through Elsaesser’s positioning of the latter ‘face to face with Hollywood’ (2005), has far from disappeared in the postnational era. Yet discursive self-definition always takes place in relation to something else and the process in no way detracts from Frenchness being asserted as a ‘site of [transnational] resistance’ to cultural homogenisation (Wayne 2002, 2).

A further conclusion to be drawn from the recurrent importance accorded to genre in these essays concerns the way in which the move to VoD not only complicates but also strengthens the relationship between cinema and television, broadly defined. While Meir makes this point specifically in relation to industrial mechanisms for collaboration, more generally it can be seen in the ongoing influence of US genres on production; yet this influence also dates back to the earliest cinema and is a cliché of transhistorical scholarship on such questions. While in this volume the chapters by Pillard, Vanderschelden and Michael centralise spectacular action, and Goodall’s the newly Gallicised horror movie format, other notable extensions of a move to embrace ‘US’ genres in evidence elsewhere in the new mediascape include traces of sci-fi, also touched on by Goodall and Vanderschelden as well as Le Gras, and—more prominently—romantic comedy, partly scrutinised by Harrod.³⁰ It is important to recognise that discussing films and television series together in this collection not only reflects digital (S)VoD services’ blurring of boundaries between these categories (even relative to the earlier 1980s turn to television funding of cinema described earlier) through algorithms and interfaces that deprioritise feature-length versus serial status as a criterion for promoting products to users, as Michael in particular adumbrates in this volume. It also reflects the more generalised phenomenon of convergence culture, as famously analysed by Henry Jenkins, through intermedial exchange and influence: the popularity of science fiction on Netflix in France can lead to more sci-fi being produced for ‘traditional’ theatrical release (including through the trajectories of specific industry actors moving between domains), for example. Conversely, more traditionally Franco-European-accented genres are also populous on postnational television. Salient here are the cases of both crime dramas, often with banlieue film elements, explored in most detail by Vincendeau with reference to the prominent example of Engrenages, but also in a less realist mode by Pettersen’s consideration of Lupin. His analysis simultaneously demonstrates that this wildly popular series also engages primordially (albeit subversively) with tropes of another important local (i.e. originally ‘European’) genre: heritage drama, which is equally to the fore in Gemma King’s examination of the (modestly exported) film Marie Heurtin (Jean-Pierre Améris, 2014) and the Netflix series La Révolution (The Revolution) (2020).

The role played by heritage and history even in a contemporary series such as Lupin raises two suggestive points. Firstly, we have already underlined the importance of Sy’s body to his performance style, which ranges from dancing in Intouchables to performatively conquering space in Lupin. These representations tend either to play on (in the first case) or overturn (in the second) racialised stereotypes.³¹ In other words, their meaning depends intimately on France’s particular history of imperial colonisation, and the migratory flows and enduring power imbalances consequent upon it, signalled by Sy’s physical appearance. Such an observation foregrounds the paradoxical nature of bodies—human and by extension territorial—and the material histories played out upon them as postnational signifiers. That is, we have seen that bodies are potent loci of international stardom, since they are in one sense universal (we all have one); yet in a contradiction that runs to the heart of the postnational, their concrete characteristics retain idiosyncrasy and cannot be disembedded from their specific past experiences and associations. Secondly, like Harrod’s chapter, Pettersen’s analysis of Lupin recalls Tim Bergfelder’s (2015) identification of a tendency for European popular cinema of the 2000s to make widely recognisable European histories the material for contemporary comedy. Such a comparison reminds us of the hybridity of genres and (therefore) ultimately the geo-cultural associations they often imply, in a relation that transcends the technological and industrial shifts of the postnational era. Both points simultaneously bring us back to questions of European identity that enquiries into Frenchness always also represent: one future research direction among various nationally and postnationally accented ones for which this study is intended in part as a blueprint and stimulus.³²

This introduction has engaged very considerably with the concept of the postnational. We will close it by returning to that other too often taken-for-granted notion underpinning the research it describes: the popular. What makes the fictions analysed in these pages especially interesting to scholars of cultural history is the fact that the world-building in which they engage is calibrated to give pleasure and very often succeeds in doing so. As fan studies have shown, their ability to incite emotions means such texts are predisposed to become bound up in consumers’ social identities in ways that exceed the viewing experience—in other words, to promote forms of identification. Certain aspects of the new postnational media regime particularly encourage the development of such feelings. Notably, on-demand streaming platforms’ imperviousness to local broadcast scheduling, alongside their ‘original’ products’ immunity to media chronology legislation, allows the simultaneous release of new material across territories. C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby (2005, 847) suggest that in the case of serial television, an asynchronous release interrupts viewers’ sense of participation in storytelling: a key defining feature of the form, regularly highlighted by critics across the board from the early days of television studies onward. Today, instead, international commentators can debate the merits of new productions in social media spaces as soon as they are released. However, mainstream audiovisual fictions’ ability to prompt active engagement at the same time precedes and exceeds streaming platform fare. Pierre Bourdieu has famously described ‘the complex social process in which individual and collective ever-structuring dispositions develop in practice to justify individuals’ perspectives, values, actions and social positions’ as a ‘habitus’ (Costa and Murphy 2015, 4). Recent engagements with this psychosocial concept—that is, one concerned with ‘the mutual constitution of the individual and the social relations within which they are enmeshed’ —have sought to highlight its significant basis in ‘passions and drives’ experienced affectively in the body (Reay 2015, 10–12). The multiple online posts about Luc Besson’s cinema examined by Pillard are just as revelatory about passionate attachments—or the painful processes of mis- and dis-identification that ensue when changes to fan objects are experienced as an assault on the fan themselves—as the pilgrimages to the Normandy locations of Lupin that are detailed by Pettersen’s chapter. All these examples show that popular audiovisual texts, and their very particular textures, have the potential to create feelings of affiliation, perhaps now more than ever before. Therefore, even while fully recognising that the scope of their representational work may be ideologically compromised by economic and other prejudicial factors, their iterations of national and other identities less ‘authentic’ than ever by virtue of being determined in part from the outside and access to them limited by social inequalities (all charges to be levelled against almost any cultural text), it is clear that mainstream postnational fictions create new communicative lines across borders, with the potential for new lines of communion linked to the cross-cultural sharing of norms and values as well. In an era characterised by the polarisation of cultures, misunderstanding and retrenchment, such channels gain in significance. This book takes seriously their existence, and the fictions engendering and engendered by them, as major determinants of newly postnationalised identities, in France and beyond.