A Thousand Screenplays: The French Imagination in a Time of Crisis

In 1991, French public television held an amateur screenwriting contest. When Sabine Chalvon-Demersay, a French sociologist, examined the roughly 1,000 entries, she had hoped to analyze their differences. What she found, however, surprised her. Although the entrants covered nearly every social demographic, their screenplays presented similar characters in similar situations confronting similar problems.

The time of crisis presented by the amateur writers was not one of war, famine, or diseas...