Includes bibliographical references (p. [212]-218) and index.

Cinema and/as poetry: L'Atalante's apples as poems -- Cinema and the real: Renoir's rules -- Cinema and/as crime: Breaking the law in The children of paradise, Pickpocket, and Breathless -- Cinema and/as mapping: reorienting ourselves through film -- Film and/as dream: Truffaut's "royal road" to Adele H. -- Cinema and/as hypnosis: Jacquot's Seventh heaven -- Cinema and/as mourning: Anne Fontaine's How I killed my father -- Cinema and/as terror: Michael Haneke's Cache -- Beautiful fragments: discontinuity and the French cinema.