Cinéma du look
A French cinema movement of the 1980s marked by highly stylized visuals, urban settings, youthful alienation, and heightened melodrama.
Diva: Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film about an opera singer, an illicit recording, and a young postal worker. Its saturated colors and city spaces helped establish the movement’s visual signature.
Luc Besson: A French film director, screenwriter, and producer whose early films include Subway and The Big Blue. Subway helped define the movement’s fascination with stylized urban subcultures.
Neon lighting: Lighting produced by or made to resemble colored neon signs and tubes. Colored artificial light turns city nights into expressive visual environments in these films.
Poetic realism: A French film style of the 1930s characterized by fatalistic stories, working-class settings, and atmospheric imagery. Both styles stylize urban life, but poetic realism favors social fatalism over youthful pop-inflected spectacle.
Subway: Luc Besson’s 1985 film about a fugitive hiding in the Paris Métro and its subculture. Its underground setting makes urban space a stylized world of youthful outsiders.
Jean-Jacques Beineix: A French film director whose films include Diva and Betty Blue. Diva and Betty Blue made visual excess and intense romance central to the movement.
Production design: The planning and creation of a film’s physical settings, objects, and overall visual environment. Carefully constructed spaces make the movement’s cities feel heightened rather than documentary.
Social realism: An artistic approach that represents social conditions and ordinary life with an emphasis on material realities. Its attention to lived conditions contrasts with the movement’s glossy, deliberately artificial cityscapes.
The Lovers on the Bridge: Leos Carax’s 1991 film about two homeless lovers living around the Pont-Neuf in Paris. It extends the movement’s urban romanticism into extravagant, physically staged spectacle.
Leos Carax: A French film director known for formally adventurous films including Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. His films pushed the movement’s youthful alienation toward poetic, self-conscious experimentation.