French Queer Cinema


Book Description

A full account of the formation and reception of contemporary queer film in France.




French Queer Cinema


Book Description

French Queer Cinema examines the representation of queer identities and sexualities in contemporary French filmmaking. This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer film and video in France. French Queer Cinema addresses the emergence of a gay cinema in the French context since the late 1990s, including critical coverage of films by important contemporary directors such as Francois Ozon, Sebastien Lifshitz, Patrice Chereau, Andre Techine and Christophe Honore. Nick Rees-Roberts transposes contemporary Anglo-American Queer Theory to the study of French screen culture, drawing particular attention to issues of race and migration such as problematic fantasies of Arab masculinities in queer cinematic production. This theoretically-informed book engages with a number of fault-lines running through queer cultural representation in France including transgender dissent and the effects of AIDS and loss on the formation of queer identities and sexualities.




French Queer Cinema


Book Description

A full account of the formation and reception of contemporary queer film in France.




Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema


Book Description

Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema combines close film analysis with a small-scale qualitative investigation of audience responses to examine images of queerness in contemporary French popular cinema and their reception. Through its blending of the textual and the empirical, this book provides a unique insight into the ways in which sexuality and gender are represented on the cinema screen, as well as the spectator reactions they elicit. Since the mid-1990s, depictions of lesbians, gay men, and queer forms of sexual desire and identity have shifted to the mainstream of French cinematographic representation - as evidenced by the box-office success of a series of highly commercial comic films, including Gazon maudit (Josiane Balasko, 1995), Pédale douce (Gabriel Aghion, 1996), Le Placard (Francis Véber, 2000), and Chouchou (Merzak Allouache, 2003). Alongside this commercial strand, a series of small-budget alternative comedies and other genre films have also challenged heteronormative conceptualizations of sexuality and gender. Films such as Sitcom (François Ozon, 1998), L'Homme est une femme comme les autres (Jean-Jacques Zilbermann, 1997), Pourquoi pas moi? (Stéphane Giusti, 1999), Drôle de Félix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000), and Les Chansons d'amour (Christophe Honoré, 2007) portray desire as fluid and/or gender as unfixed. With their use of parody and their blending of comedy with the musical, melodrama, romance or road movie, these and other similar films have resonated with a burgeoning viewing public, tired of having to seek queerness in connotation, of appropriating marginal characters in ostensibly straight narratives, and of tragedy and trauma as the principal modes of representation and spectator address.




French and Spanish Queer Film


Book Description

The book advances the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts by analysing how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and Spanish ones in France. It studies films (in various media and platforms) and their reception across four languages (Spanish, French, Catalan, English) and considers and engages with participants from across a range of digital and physical audience locations, with a particular focus on festivals. It examines films that chronicle the local (in portraying national and sub-national identities) and draws on the regional-global (translating and transferring foreign models of non-heterosexual experience). No comparative and crosscutting study with audience research at its heart has yet been undertaken.




Queer Cinema in Contemporary France


Book Description

Comprehensive in scope, Queer cinema in contemporary France traces the development of the meaning of queer across five French directors' careers, from their earliest, often unknown films to their later, major films with international release.




Queer cinema in contemporary France


Book Description

Jacques Martineau, Olivier Ducastel, Alain Guiraudie, Sébastien Lifshitz and Céline Sciamma. The films of these five major French directors exemplify queer cinema in the twenty-first century. Comprehensive in scope, Queer cinema in contemporary France traces the development of the meaning of queer across these directors’ careers, from their earliest, often unknown films to their later, major films with wide international release. Whether having sex on the beach or kissing in the high school swimming pool, these cinematic characters create or embody forward-looking, open-ended and optimistic forms of queerness and modes of living, loving and desiring. Whether they are white, beur or black, whether they are lesbian, gay, trans* or queer, they open up hetero- and cisnormativity to new ways of being a gendered subject.




Sapphism on Screen


Book Description

This book sets out to investigate and theorise mediations of lesbian desire in a substantial corpus of films (spanning the period 1936-2002) by male and female directors working in France and also in French-speaking parts of Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and Africa. The corpus is unique in never before having been assembled, and represents a valuable tool not just for researchers but also for university teachers creating courses both on lesbianism in film and on sexuality in French cinema. A fair number of the 89 texts treated are mainstream films which have achieved high critical acclaim and/or high viewing figures: to cite just a few examples, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Quai des orfevres (1947), Louis Malle's Milou en mai (1989), Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (1995), Andre Techine's Les Voleurs (1995), and Francois Ozon's Huit femmes (2001). As such, they have contributed to hegemonic constructions of and debate on (female) homosexuality, in a century wherein sexed/ gendered identity, including sexual orientation, has become a preeminent factor in the constitution of subjectivity. While such constructions and debate have a French-language specificity, and have been produced in distinct socio-political and cultural contexts, this study also engages in analytical comparisons with relevant anglophone films and their own distinct discursive contexts.




Performing Place in French and Italian Queer Documentary Film


Book Description

This book explores the space of queer documentary through the modernist optic of Marcel Proust’s ‘lieu factice’ (artificial place), a perspective that problematizes the location of place in a post-postmodern world with a dispersed sense of the real. The practice of queer documentary in France and Italy, from the beginning of the new millennium onwards, is seen to re-write the coherence of ‘place’ through a range of emerging queer realities. Proposing the post-queer as a way of contending with the spatial dynamics of these contexts, analysis of key texts positions place as mourned, conceded and intersectional. The performance of place as agency is considered through the notional film, the radical archive of documentary, the enactment of politics, queer indeterminacy and a phenomenology of the object, the frame and queer mobility. The central themes of family, gender, dis/location, in/visibility and re/presentation question blind investment in the integrity of being emplaced.




New Queer Cinema


Book Description

B. Ruby Rich designated a brand new genre, the New Queer Cinema (NQC), in her groundbreaking article in the Village Voice in 1992. This movement in film and video was intensely political and aesthetically innovative, made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS. The genre has grown to include an entire generation of queer artists, filmmakers, and activists. As a critic, curator, journalist, and scholar, Rich has been inextricably linked to the New Queer Cinema from its inception. This volume presents her new thoughts on the topic, as well as bringing together the best of her writing on the NQC. She follows this cinematic movement from its origins in the mid-1980s all the way to the present in essays and articles directed at a range of audiences, from readers of academic journals to popular glossies and weekly newspapers. She presents her insights into such NQC pioneers as Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien and investigates such celebrated films as Go Fish, Brokeback Mountain, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and Milk. In addition to exploring less-known films and international cinemas (including Latin American and French films and videos), she documents the more recent incarnations of the NQC on screen, on the web, and in art galleries.