“Mise en Cadre” of the Social Drama in Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice (2005)

2006

Cet article s'intéresse aux effets très originaux de « mise en cadre » dans cette récente adaptation du roman de Jane Austen, notamment l'emploi de la caméra mobile (Steadycam et caméra à l'épaule), du hors-champ et de l'espace. Cet élément de l'écriture filmique est utilisé pour articuler la thématique de la classe sociale avec l'identité générique et l'origine littéraire du film. Ainsi, la caméra mobile contribue à la théâtralité du film tout en marquant les limites du champ visuel de la caméra qui permet, par contre, d'apercevoir en arrière-plan les serviteurs, le plus souvent hors-texte dans le roman. La gestion de l'espace, elle, permet à la fois d'opposer et de mêler les différentes c…

"More or Less American: Sergio Leone's Vision of America in 'Once Upon a Time in the West' (1968)"

2012

This article focuses on the representation of the American West in Sergio Leone's fourth Western, which is the first to include several scenes that have been shot on location in the U.S. The author argues that Once Upon a Time in the West offers a critique not only of the classical Hollywood Westerns Leone adored, but also of his own brand of Italian Western, which may, in part, explain why members of the counter-culture were so enthused by the film at its release. The first section examines the way the use of American locations foregrounds the artificiality of Leone's spatial construction. The second explores the political implications of the inclusion of various minority groups, thereby r…

Raymond Carver : Where I'm Calling From

2008

David Cronenberg : une mission utopique

2002

This essay is meant as an introduction to the body of Cronenberg's work up to and including Spider. It is an attempt to analyze what Cronenberg calls his mission in aesthetic and ethical terms, Cronenberg having admitted to Serge Grünberg that he wanted to participate in changing contemporary norms by encouraging the spectator to see something beautiful when his initial reaction is repulsion. I argue that the utopian/dystopian aspect of the diegeses of Cronenberg's early films becomes a structuring element in his later films. I first examine Cronenberg's approach to the fantastique in Shivers and Rabid, with particular interest to the monster as a metaphor of the repulsive. In the later fil…

De l'intime dans le cinéma anglophone

2015

International audience; La notion d’intime, qui touche au secret des oeuvres et des êtres, n’est pas toujours associée au cinéma anglophone, en particulier aux productions hollywoodiennes caractérisées par une prédominance du récit peu propice aux scènes d’intimité. Cette tendance qui tient à la nature même du dispositif cinématographique et a fait son attrait dès les origines, ainsi que les contradictions entre exhibition et censure, révèlent cependant l’importance de cette question au sein de la production anglophone. Si les documentaires, les archives familiales ou les films underground paraissent relever naturellement d’un cinéma de l’intime, les oeuvres de fiction, classiques ou contem…

David Cronenberg's Having to Make the Word Be Flesh

2004

International audience; Cet article part d'une remarque faite par Cronenberg dans un entretien où il dit vouloir « transformer le mot en chair ». La démarche créatrice que décrit le cinéaste, démarche en trois temps — écriture, mise en scène des corps et objets, et « mise en cadre » — est comparée à la représentation de ces étapes dans ses films, de sorte que la première conclusion à laquelle on arrive est que Cronenberg est, en quelque sorte, cinéaste malgré lui : un cinéaste qui se passerait de la « mise en cadre ». Aussi, la formule de Cronenberg, qui subvertit le texte biblique en inversant la création divine, apparaît comme une pique contre le littéralisme puritain qui habite le cinéma…

Conversations with Russell Banks

2010

Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (2007): Subverting Gender through Genre or Vice Versa?

2010

International audience; The article examines how Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007) subverts both gender and genre by mixing several genres (the slasher, the car movie, the buddy movie) generally considered to be male, either at the diegetic level (e.g. the main characters) or at the level of reception (i.e. the target audience). The film's play on gender and genre, which is clearly based on the idea that film genres are gendered, is, then, enabled by the very discursivity of these norms. The article also shows how Tarantino took into account feminist film theory, namely Carol Clover and Laura Mulvey, when making Death Proof, suggesting that film genre, for Tarantino, is not so much a matter of …

(De)constructing "America": the Case of Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream (1993)

2010

International audience; By means of an analysis of Kusturica's only film about America, Arizona Dream, this article argues that while the United States offers a vision of a united society founded on diversity, it also represses, altering in the process both society and the landscape. National unity is consequently a dream – a dream the film suggests that has often been dreamed up by un-Americans. Filtered through Kusturica's own perceptions of America – and his position on the Balkan War (1991-2001) – the film seems to suggest sadness at the loss of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural perspective. Through its representations of geography and ethnic diversity, and its dense network of filmic cita…

Reading the Body in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) : Confusing Signs and Signifiers

2009

http://www.graat.fr/roche.pdf; International audience; This article examines how matter, in Ellis's scandalous novel, is read according to the texts that inform the yuppie's etiquette, labeling the body as either “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Basing his argumentation on the works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Clément Rosset and D.W. Winnicott, the author argues that the body is perceived as a sign of something when it is actually an effect of the signifier, and that the novel's excess makes the invisible workings of what Michel Foucault called “power” extremely visible. The novel thus undermines the yuppie/psychopath-narrator's essentialist quest. Indeed, the psychopath attemp…

Bastard Remakes: Homage and Betrayal in "Dawn of the Dead" (Zack Snyder, 2004) and "Halloween" (Rob Zombie, 2007)

2012

International audience

Resisting Bodies: Power Crisis / Meaning Crisis in the Zombie Film from 1932 to Today

2011

Critics have repeatedly focused on the political subtexts of the living dead films of George A. Romero, revealing, notably, how they reflect specific social concerns. In order to determine what makes the zombie movie and the figure of the zombie so productive of political readings, this article examines, first, the classic zombie movies influenced by voodoo lore, then Romero’s initial living dead trilogy (1968-1985), and finally some of the most successful films released in the 2000s. Resorting to a post-structuralist framework including Althusser’s notions of state apparatuses, Foucault’s distinction between subjection and subjectification, and Butler’s analyses of subversive resignificati…

Books and Letters in Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice (2005): Anticipating the Spectator's Response through the Thematization of Film Adaptation

2007

International audience; About Books and letters in Pride & Prejudice.

French Fries, French Foxes and Crazy Frenchmen in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and Roger Avary's Killing Zoe (1994) : Reading Hollywood “F…

2010

International audience; This article focuses on the representation of Frenchness in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Roger Avary's Killing Zoe, which were both released in 1994 and made by directors who regularly collaborated at the time. The treatment of Frenchness is different in both films, Pulp Fiction containing several anecdotal references and one French character, while Killing Zoe takes place in France with an almost exclusively European cast. The representation of Frenchness in these films will be my starting point to determine the readings possible for a spectator who is or is not familiar with French and French culture. “Frenchness,” which Pierre Verdaguer has shown is genera…

Remaking Horror According to the Feminists Or How to Have your Cake and Eat It, Too

2017

International audience

: Russell Banks, Raymond Carver, David Cronenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch

2008

The use of the French adjective “malsain” (usually translated in English as “unhealthy,” “unwholesome” or “sick”) to judge a work of art has led me to question the relevance of this metaphor, the way this value is determined, the reasons which lead the subject to consume shocking material and the possibility to distinguish art from mere symptom. I consider the unhealthy, on the one hand, as a relation of transmission which produces an aesthetic based on metaphor and metonymy, and on the other, as a subjective value delivered by a self or a law, and I argue that, as it is entirely discursive, the unhealthy is in effect an uncanny metonymy. I show that the works under study represent and cond…

The Blues of David Lynch

2009

International audience; This article is an attempt to elaborate a typology of the color blue in the color films of David Lynch up to and including Mulholland Drive (2001). The color blue is considered alternately as light, matter or verbal language. The author studies the use, function, value and meaning of blue lighting, divided into static and flashing light, and of the blue objects in Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive. The author shows how Lynch appropriates connotations Western culture, under the influence of Christian and romantic imagery, traditionally associates with the color blue in his cinematographic compositions. The author argues that this typology has bearing not only on…

L'« Horreur viscérale » de David Cronenberg, ou l'horreur de l'« anti-nature »

2010

The author uses the films of David Cronenberg as a basis to study the relation between cinematographic strategies of fright and horror. The first are often based on an opposition between the on- and off-camera, while the latter seem to rely on the shot/reverse-shot technique. In this sense, The Brood (1979) provides an interesting shift from fright to horror. The author aims at understanding the term “body horror” which has been associated with Cronenberg's films from the start. The author defines it as the moment when matter does not signify before various discourses (scientific, aesthetic) endow it with a form of nature.

Intimacy in Cinema: Critical Essays on English Language Film

2014

International audience; Though intimacy has been a wide concern in the humanities, it has received little critical attention in film studies. This collection of essays investigates both the potential intimacy of cinema as a medium and the possibility of a cinema of intimacy where it is least expected. As a notion defined by binaries--inside and outside, surface and depth, public and private, self and other--intimacy, because it implies sharing, calls into question the boundaries between these extremes, and the border separating mainstream cinema and independent or auteur cinema. Following on Thomas Elsaesser's theories of the relationship between the intimacy of cinema and the cinema of int…

The Death of the Subject in David Lynch's Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive

2003

International audience; Quel est le sujet de ces deux films qui ont suscité de nombreuses interrogations auprès du public lors de leur sortie, questions portant notamment sur la signification de la diégèse ? Nous avançons que ce n'est pas à ce niveau-là que l'on doit chercher le sens des films de Lynch. En fait, la mort du personnage comme sujet va de pair avec l'absence d'une histoire ; l'évolution du cinéma de Lynch montre que, si sujet il y a, c'est du côté du spectateur qui tient désormais le rôle de l'enquêteur que tenait les personnages dans les œuvres antérieures (Blue Velvet et la série Twin Peaks). Le sujet lynchien apparaît alors un véritable objet dans une composition qui se refl…

Comment Hollywood figure l'intériorité dans les films « hollywoodiens » de David Lynch, Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) et Inland Empire…

2010

en cours de publication; L'article prend comme point de départ les travaux de Zachary Baqué, traite "Lost Highway" (1997), "Mulholland Drive" (2001) et "Inland Empire" (2006) et contient un grand nombre de micro-analyses reliées entre elles. Il montre la complexité de la fonction structurante de Hollywood comme lieu, mythe et système dans les 3 films.