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French & Francophone Film: A Research Guide

Books on Francophone Film

Baldus, Edouard, 1813-1889, photographer. Paris. Panorama. [between 1851 and 1870]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library of Congress's collection of French-language film materials includes not only significant feature films, shorts, and documentaries, but also books and audiovisual materials on filmmaking, genres, the film industry, Francophone actors and directors, movie posters, Francophone film history, classification aids with metadata on film, film music, and much more.

For researchers and film enthusiasts who wish to take a chronological approach, a list of the Library's silent films and resources on those and early Francophone films can be found here to start at the beginning.

For patrons interested in a geographical study of Francophone cinema, a partial list of the Library's West African films can be found here. This guide's subpage on Francophone African cinema is here.

The Library's unique collection on the first woman director, Alice Guy-Blaché, can be found here.

Links to resources outside the Library can be found here for researchers interested in film criticism, film industry news, film studies, and film institutes.

Another Library of Congress resource is the France in America Collection, which presents digitized items from the Library of Congress collection originally made available as the France in America digital library project, a part of the Global Gateways initiative. Conceived in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, France in America/France en Amérique was launched as a bilingual digital library made available by the Library of Congress.

It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. The original site was completed in fall 2006. Many of the items in this digital collection were digitized specifically for this partnership. To access materials from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, explore the Gallica External digital library platform. Below is a bibliography of books held at the Library of Congress that cover special topics in Francophone film.

The following titles in English and French link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.