Her films have finally earned recognition as deeply probing and fundamental to the growing awareness in France of women's issues and the role of women in the cinema. "I'm not philosophical," she says, "not metaphysical. Feelings are the ground on which people can be led to think about things. I try to show everything that happens in such a way and ask questions so as to leave the viewers free to make their own judgments." The panoply of interviews here emphasize her core belief that "we never stop learning" and reveal the wealth of ways to answer her questions.
T. Jefferson Kline, Brookline, Massachusetts, is professor of French at Boston University. He is the author of several books, including Unraveling French Cinema: From L' Atalante to Caché, and he is coeditor of Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).