What feminism is doing to cinema : from the title, this book places itself at the heart of the balance of forces, on the battlefield of the history of representation, its modification through struggles that occur, outside of representation, on the field of reality. Hélène Fiche writes the history of French mainstream cinema in the 1970s from the perspective of its transformation – which, as is demonstrated in depth in this book, of its stories and themes, of the characters it created and the actresses and actors it hired – by the feminist movement of the time (hence second-wave feminism, contemporary with MLF).
This is done through large inventory operations. The corpus limited by the historian for his research consists of 362 French fiction films (excluding animated films) that had more than 700,000 screenings in cinemas between 1969 and 1982 – that is, the decade of turbulent politicization between the first fall of May 68 and the election of Mitterrand, or between Pirate Bride by Nelly Kaplan and explosion 2 from
