Colin Crisp Collection

Colin Crisp was born in New Zealand and holds a doctorate from the Université d'Aix-Marseille. Prior to his recent retirement, Colin was Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, which he joined when it opened in 1975.

Here, he served as Chairman and Dean of Humanities and later as Acting Provost and Director of the Queensland College of Art. He has published a number of books on the French cinema, including the 1988 Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist, the first comprehensive analysis in English of Rohmer's work.

Colin's life-long study of classic French cinema is illustrated in two key works. The Classic French Cinema 1930-1960, published in 1993, investigates the critical period from the introduction of sound to the beginning of the New Wave. The second, Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929-1939, released in 2003, examines classic French film, exploring and analysing the cinema as an institution, the textual system to which it gave rise and the light that such an approach can shed on the process of production and reception of specific films. In the first part of Genre, Myth, and Convention, Colin discusses the 1,300 films produced by the French cinema in the 1930s, treating them as a single global textual system that returns obsessively to certain types of story, character and setting.

This rich collection of books and films was donated by Colin to the University of Adelaide in 2013. It consists of several hundred books and films on both tape and DVD related to French cinema from 1930 to 1960, arranged alphabetically by title. See film list.