The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film Since 1995 by Martin O’Shaughnessy

The relationship of cinema to politics has a rich and chequered history, effectively dictating the form of many of cinema’s most vibrant configurations (Russian cinema in the wake of the 1917 revolution, Italian neorealism after the Second World War…). The real stakes of the affair however were perhaps most clearly spelt out in France in the heady days following May ’68, the ‘red years’ that bore witness not only to the very real subsumption of film under politics, but also the gradual elaboration of a critical approach to cinema which understood that, at least in terms of ideology, “every film is political”