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ABSTRACTParallax historiography refers to the way that early cinema comes into focus from the perspective of the end of the 20th century. This essay examines the parallels between the first decade of cinema and the diversification of visual media in the 1980s and 90s, similarities which have been theorized by the feminist film scholars Miriam Hansen, Anne Friedberg and Giuliana Bruno. These theorists have argued that the public spheres of these two periods solicit a very different form of spectatorship than that theorized by "apparatus theory." The diversity of media and of viewing positions, as well as the various architectures of reception, suggest a model of modernity and a gaze that offers a space for female spectatorship. This essay summarizes and collates these theories, foregrounding their value as a historiography of early cinema.

Through elements of semiology and a structuralist approach (the point of view in narrative film as a way of producing meaning), this essay tends to demonstrate that the shift from a neutral point of view to a more personnalized one, both visual and cognitive, emphasizes the growing autonomy of women in three films by three female directors : Coup de foudre(1983) by Diane Kurys, Sans toit ni loi(1985) by Agnès Varda and Anne Trister(1986) by Léa Pool.

AbstractIn the case of ‘cult-movies,' translations (mostly subtitled and dubbed versions) are often authoritative or taken for granted, to the extent that the reception of the original movie and that of the “translated” versions are generally undifferentiated by movie critics. There is, therefore, a major interest in reconsidering these translations and their impact on the question of reception.  Through a detailed contrastive analysis of the original English version of Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) with both its subtitled and dubbed French versions, this paper intends to analyze the impacts of the respective choices made by the translators on two issues deemed crucial to the aesthetic and symbolic meaning of the film, namely: the interpersonal relationships between the characters, and cultural transfers.

Keywords: personnages, réception, relations interpersonnelles, transferts culturels, Un tramway nommé Désir

AbstractThe Sheltering Sky (Bertolucci, 1990), from Paul Bowles' homonymous novel, is an eloquent and original example of intercultural road movie. The motion juxtaposing and continuously connecting places, sounds, faces, rhythms, lights; the road; the disorientation; the trip; the experience of unknown places; the linguistic differences constitute at the same time the form and the content of the film that reveals and stages the opacity of the Other (no matter if it is the other within a couple, in friendship, in madness or the ethnic and cultural other). This road movie summons the viewer to experience difference and to distrust an interpretation informed by the need of transparency.

Abstract This article examines the ways in which the Futurist adoration of the machine found expression in the cinema. Two tendencies are distinguished : first, that of the machine as machine, as a non-human invention that can become charged with symbolic meaning (from the eroticism of Charles Dekeukeleire's Impatience to the proletarian revolution in S.M. Eisenstein's Strike ) ; and second, that of the new machine as a new being with a human form which quickly becomes a threat to its creator.

AbstractSeveral authors, in their discussions of the problem of the ontology of the cinema, have drawn analogies between the cinema and fantastic creatures (mummies, ghosts, vampires, Frankenstein's creature). The hypothesis of the present article is that an analogy can be drawn between the two mechanical arts the automaton and the cinematograph, arts which are both technological and aesthetic, as a way of examining the topos “cinema, art of movement and life.” This analysis leads the author to address Freud's concept of the “uncanny” and the episteme of what Villiers de L'Isle-Adam called “enigmatic positivism.” The author also establishes a link between the cinema, seen as an automaton, and the aesthetic problem of “distraction” as discussed both by Henri Bergson in Laughter and Walter Benjamin in his article “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” Reading these texts, it appears that an excess and an absence of distraction form the two boundaries fixed by modern perception. The subject of modernity is cleaved, divided between the conscious and the unconscious, between freedom and automatism—and this subject is also the spectatorial subject of the cinema. In addition, the automaton enables us to see how fantastic Romanticism may be the episteme of the cinematograph. The cinema, like the automaton, is the site of a balancing, of uncertainty. The automaton may also be at the centre of a possible definition of modernity, in the same way that the moving image, for Benjamin, conveys the emergence of the new forms of perception associated with it.

In Lévinas' work the feminine plays a crucial role : first encountered in the erotic relationship, it breaks the circle of sameness, opening it to the salutary dimension of transcendence. However, though some thought that in this he was breaking away from phallogocentrism, Stella Sandford shows us, following Beauvoir, to what point he remains masculinist. Without demonstrating any critical distance, Lévinas associates the feminine with the ambiguity of Eros, with sexual difference, establishing it as the inviolable and almost animal, irresponsible or childish other of a masculine subject. Beauvoir's critique was therefore to the point, and the Derrida of "Violence and metaphysics" would have done well to ask himself what man was wielding Lévinas's pen when he wrote, instead of delighting in the fact that he was writing as a man.