Department of Film Studies

Palmer examines the work of filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, who is hailed for his unconventional persona and is known for his fetishized films. Palmer provides a revisionist account of the director's origins, focusing on his activities as a non-professional entrepreneur. By shifting the emphasis on production contexts, Palmer sheds new light on Melville's idiosyncratic career arc and examines its relationship within the French movie industry. Palmer begins by examining the changing form of post-Occupation French cinema, then explores Melville's roots as an amateur filmmaker and his skirmishes with national cinema institutions. Palmer ends by addressing "Le Silence de la mer," Melville's seminal debut feature and offers reasons for its notoriety and catalytic impact within the industry.

This essay recontextualizes Dalton Trumbo, HUAC, and the postwar American blacklist by analyzing Tumbo's personal archives, his writings in the Hollywood trade press, his work in the Screen Writers' Guild as editor of its official journal, The Screen Writer, and his pivotal role in the anti-HUAC debates before he was imprisoned.

This article explores the work of the French filmmaker Marina de Van, focusing on her debut feature Dans ma peau/In My Skin (2002), which deals with the issue of self-mutilation. The essay situates the film within the recent phenomenon of the cinéma du corps, whose agenda is an on-screen interrogation of physicality
in stark yet intimate terms. Using personal interviews and trade discourses, it then charts the cultural, professional and institutional contexts to de Van’s career, emphasizing her foundational experiences in film school. Finally, it analyses
Dans ma peau’s use of avant-garde style, de Van’s experimental techniques as a performer, and the film’s array of social critiques.

This article, a seminal English-language appraisal of the then-neglected figure Jean-Pierre Melville, uses Un Flic (1972), the filmmaker's last completed production, to explore his minimalist, ascetic approach to film style, and the problems his career has posed for overarching histories of postwar French cinema.

This paper is a star study of James Stewart, focusing on his mid-career overhaul in Hollywood, as his career evolved from earlier idealistic roles, to much more cynical and violent roles in the hands of filmmakers such as Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock.  In addition, more broadly, the paper offers a methodology for analyzing stardom in cinema, exploring stars as a composite of the pretextual (a body comprising a physical repertoire of expressive traits), textual (a component part of a stylistic system on-screen) and extratextual (a source of a star persona, the sum total of their off-screen promotion and celebrity).

Straddling popular generic cinema and the Japanese New Wave, Seijun Suzuki's work can be classified as a "pop-Brechtian" mixture of materials high and low.  This short essay reappraises Suzuki in the light of his FIGHTING ELEGY (1966) and YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963), connecting his formally disjunctive work to the template of the Japanese New Wave.

Surveying the iconoclastic career of independent French filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Melville, the essay studies his cult film, La Samourai, as a piece of minimalist cinema, a refined and idiosyncratic version of the policier genre, and a highly stylized test case for Melville's popular auteurism,

This essay studies the long-overlooked and long-forgotten French New Wave filmmaker, Paule Delsol, focusing on her debut feature, La Dérive (Drift, 1962–1964). Using archival primary documents, the essay first examines Delsol's artistic emergence, her independent mode of production, her interactions with François Truffaut and her outlier status within the New Wave. Second, the essay examines the feminist design of
La Dérive, its stylistic and temporal agitations, its considerations of
female-centred domestic binds in 1960s France, versus better-known
New Wave texts. Third, the essay contrasts La Dérive’s polarised
reception, especially its censorship and distribution problems, with
Delsol’s enfranchised status at Cahiers du cinéma, emphasising her
many published contributions to the New Wave’s agenda. In sum, we discover the full embattled range of Delsol's long-repressed career, and finally correct the often reproduced line that Agnès Varda was the only woman associated with the French New Wave.

This article analyses Valérie Donzelli’s film Declaration of War (La Guerre
est declarée, 2011), in the context of the contemporary French film
ecosystem. The article argues that Donzelli’s film exemplifies the
French miniaturist mode of production; demonstrates the modern
conceptual notion of applied cinephilia; highlights the idiosyncratic
uses possible for French popular genres, particularly the comedy and
the musical; and embodies the French film industry’s export mission
by representing on-screen the French national healthcare system.

A study of Abdellatif Kechiche's polarizing and quintessential  French film, Blue is the Warmest Color (2013).  The paper approaches Kechiche's production from multiple perspectives: as a syptomatic corporeal-focused production, part of a vanguard cinema du corps; as a controversial yet highly representative work of the contemporary French film ecosystem; as an adapation of a groundbreaking graphic novel; and as a penetrating examination of same-sex desire through bravura film style.

A study of the postwar French crime film policier, approaching the loadbearing heist set piece as a fascinating example of French entertainment low art, an ingenious and broadly representative model of how postwar French cinema seeks to divert, to beguile, to create fleeting and often paradoxically lyrical crimes akin to the classical Hollywood musical.