The Feminist Beachscape: Catherine Breillat, Diane Kurys and Agnes Varda

Copyright © 2011 L’Esprit Créateur. This article first appeared in L'Esprit Créateur 51:1 (2011), 83-96. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.Abstract not available

Alternative Inheritances: Rethinking What Adaptation Might Mean in Francois Ozon's Le Temps qui reste [Time to Leave]

Reprinted with permission of Literature/Film Quarterly @ Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, 21801Abstract not available

Book review: the contemporary femme fatale: gender, genre and American cinema by Katherine Farrimond

In The Contemporary Femme Fatale: Gender, Genre and American Cinema, Katherine Farrimond shows how the femme fatale - primarily associated with the classic film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s – remains a remarkably resilient and malleable figure in the present, tracing her appearance across a variety of genres in contemporary US cinema. This is a well-argued, convincing study, writes Fiona Handyside, with a reading of the femme fatale that demonstrates her capacity to pose vital and complex questions about the representation of women’s agency, sexuality and desire in the current cultural landscape

Queer Filiations: Adaptation in the Films of Francois Ozon

Copyright © 2013 by SAGE PublicationsThe adaptation of canonical literary texts in cinema is often linked to a genre known as ‘heritage cinema’, a form associated especially with European cinema and used to promote a conservative vision of the nation as a site of heteronormative reproductive futurity. However, recalling Judith Butler’s assertion that all repetition carries within it the possibility of subversion, and, furthermore, that subversion requires repetition, adaptation reappears as a potentially queer textual activity. As Linda Hutcheon argues, adaptation is ‘repetition without replication’. Through a close reading of differing modes and techniques of adaptation in the films of François Ozon, this article will demonstrate that adaptation offers the possibility of imagining new relationalities and affective encounters beyond the heteronormative reproduction of the nation state

The possibilities of a beach: queerness and Francois Ozon's beaches

© The Author 2012. This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Screen following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version vol. 53 issue 1 pp. 54-71 is available online at: http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/1/54.abstract.François Ozon's predilection for the beach has been noted by many critics, to the extent that is now read as an auteurist signature. Using the work of Judith Halberstam and Lee Edelman, this essay argues that the recurrent use of the beachscape in Ozon's films offers a way of envisaging a queer cinema which is not predicated on individual bodies performing discrete acts, but which provides a framework for constantly reconfiguring what queer forms and practices might be. His beaches undo reproductive futurism as they place time into a loop of repetition and haunting. These spectral figures often take the form of ghostly children, though these act not as sentimental ciphers of the future but as an affective pull issuing from another time (a simultaneous doubled past and future) outside of the remit of normative desires. As such, Ozon's films offer a radical vision in which alternative kinship structures are suggested by the friable and shifting nature of the sands which feature in his films

Femininity, stardom and the everyday : a comparative account of the French female cinema star and the Hollywood female cinema star in French cultural discourses of the 1950s..

PhDThis thesis explores the links between ideology, stardom, nationality and the everyday. It argues that as France underwent rapid economic expansion and technical modernisation in the 1950s, everyday life was subsequently rendered `unfamiliar' whilst simultaneously retaining its banal quotidian nature or `familiarity' - i.e. it became `uncanny'. It thus became an object of intense critical inquiry and there was also a resulting object-fetishisation within mass culture. The introductory chapter argues that in a climate of urbanisation, a new `leisure' culture and the explosion of the mass media (women's magazines, news and picture magazines such as L'Express and Paris-Match, American cinema, the launch of Cahiers du cinema, the beginnings of television) the American female star became newly visible in this `uncanny' everyday existence. Her fetishised body thus became a privileged space for expressing the processes of Americanisation and modernisation in France. Each empirical chapter takes an aspect of how modernity effects the body (cleanliness, spatial positioning, clothing) and then explores in detail the different ways these attributes were inflected in representations of the female American star in France and her French equivalent. My thesis thus engages with the ways in which cinematic representation effects the experience of and behaviour within everyday life, and how cultural discourses regulate both the individual and that national body. It closely examines Edgar Morin's writings on the mass media and also uses established theorists such as Henri Lefebvre in a new cinematic context. It also challenges the ways in which star studies generally concentrates on the star in their own culture in order to address stardom as an international phenomenon. It concludes that the presence of the female American star in France enabled the ideological management of the contradictory construction of femininity at this time

Girlhood, postfeminism and contemporary female art-house authorship: the “nameless trilogies” of Sofia Coppola and Mia Hansen-Løve

Both Sofia Coppola and Mia Hansen-Løve’s first three films can be understood as trilogies of female coming of age. These are thematic or conceptual trilogies, declared as such after the fact by their directors, and thus a self-conscious declaration of authorial agency, but the trilogy itself is not given a definitive name. This article explores the complex position these trilogies thus occupy. On the one hand, they testify to the impact of feminist activism and theorising on filmmaking, as they demonstrate the creative power and autonomy of the postfeminist auteur. On the other, they concentrate on narrow, girlish worlds, and remain marked by hesitancy and containment, demonstrating the persistent restrictions for women within postfeminist cultural norms

Let's Make Love: Whiteness, Cleanliness and Sexuality in the French Reception of Marilyn Monroe

Copyright © by SAGE PublicationsRichard Dyer’s seminal work on whiteness in film considers Marilyn Monroe as the epitome of an institutionally racist Hollywood system that imagines the most desirable woman to be blonde, given that blondeness is understood as a guarantee of whiteness. This article adds to other recent scholarship on Monroe that has sought to complicate this reading by examining other meanings that can be attributed to her bleached blonde hair. By closely analyzing media texts that discussed Monroe in 1950s France, this article demonstrates the way in which her performance of ideal American female sexuality was read through the prism of Monroe as icon of cleanliness and (linked) modernity. It examines the way in which Monroe’s modernity allowed her to partially escape the traditional feminine private sphere and it concludes that Monroe’s bleached blonde hair can be seen in this context as having liberatory potential