Queer Cinema In Contemporary France

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.

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.

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 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.

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

This thesis examines how recent French queer films may mirror, interrogate and engage with sexual politics in France. The key political changes include the 1999 Pacte Civil de Solidarité legislation and the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2013. The thesis focuses on French queer films which are sexually explicit, including simulated and unsimulated sex acts. Using Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal and Michel Foucault's conceptions of homosexuality, the thesis suggests that the sexual politics in France ostensibly normalize and desexualize gay and lesbian modes of desire. This thesis ultimately argues that the explicit sex scenes in the films discussed are not gratuitous. Rather they are integral to the director's engagement with contemporary French sexual politics. French queer cinema, as such, remains a key critical lens through which to analyze the global shift towards the legalization of gay marriage and the unpredictable social, sexual, and political implications of normalization.

Until the 1980s, the history of French cinema was for the most part written without the work of women filmmakers. Despite a recent surge of interest, the works that focus on the films of women filmmakers remain few. This project therefore seeks to replace women at the center of French film production by focusing on the films of three directors with very diverse backgrounds. Close readings of the films of Céline Sciamma, Virginie Despentes, and Emilie Jouvet, as well as the consideration of changing modes of film production will shed light onto the existence of a queer space within French film production. This project will therefore pave the way for the study of French films through an original lens, which will disrupt the history of French cinema as well as the very ways in which queer films have been examined. Instead of focusing on the thematic content of the films, this work will demonstrate that their queerness lies in their aesthetics and modes of production. In other words, this project opens up a new space for French film studies, at the center of which is queer.

Advancing the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts, French and Spanish Queer Film analyses how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and Spanish ones in France.

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspects of French cinema from 1990 to the present day. Features original contributions from top film scholars relating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema Includes new research on matters relating to the political economy of contemporary French cinema, developments in cinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digital filmmaking Contains an unusually large range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those of genre, gender, auteur, industry, economic, star, postcolonial and psychoanalytic studies Includes essays by important French cinema scholars from France, the U.S., and New Zealand, many of whose work is here presented in English for the first time

The last three decades have witnessed the proliferation of gay/lesbian-themed films both on our screens and at international film festivals. This trend - termed 'hypervisibility' by Julianne Pidduck - has gone far beyond the boundaries of countries with a multicultural tradition and now reaches many territories, including the French-speaking world. What is the narrative and thematic originality of such films in French-speaking contexts? Do such feature films develop problematics and approaches specific to areas such as metropolitan France or Francophone Canada? The sixteen essays included in this collection (six in English and ten in French) aim to answer to such questions by offering in-depth and challenging discussions of film productions from France and Quebec, ranging from Patrice Chéreau's L'Homme blessé/The Wounded Man (1983) via Josiane Balasko's Gazon maudit (1995) to Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005). Works by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, Sébastien Lifshitz, Gaël Morel, François Ozon and Léa Pool are also examined.