Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage

Against this backdrop, Oscherwitz goes on to investigate the multicultural worlds of and movies—cinema seemingly in direct contrast with the heritage film—offering the theory that these films serve as a “countermemory” to an institutionalized one and provide alternative models of collective memory and identity. Through careful analysis of several examples, Oscherwitz demonstrates how these two seemingly different realms—heritage and multicultural cinema—are far from mutually exclusive in the construction of French identity. Throughout the volume, numerous well-known French movies are reexamined, inviting new interpretations of and challenging old views through investigations of familiar cinematic works. is arevolutionary volume that boldly reimagines our ideas about French film and its role in communicating history and memory.