David Roche
I grew up in Berkeley, California, then moved to France where I defended my PhD in US-American literature and film at the Université Aix-Marseille in 2005. My first tenured position was as an Associate Professor of US-American literature at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon. After passing my Habilitation on North American Cinema in 2012, I became a Professor of Film Studies in the English department at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (2013-2019). I was Visiting Associate Professor in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. In September 2019, I started working as a Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Drama department at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. I was head of the film program from 2020-2021, Film, TV and New Media Department from 2021-2022 and am currently co-head of the Masters Program in Film, TV and Media Studies. I have been in charge of research programms in Dijon, Toulouse and now in Montpellier. I am currently President of SERCIA, an academic society which promotes research on English-language film (www.sercia.net). I have just become a member of the Institut Universitaire Français from 2022-27.
I have published widely on American, Australian, British, Canadian and European cinema. I am the author of “Meta in Film and Television Series” (Edinburgh UP, 2022), “Inglourious Basterds de Quentin Tarantino” (Vendémiaire, 2019), “Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction” (UP of Mississippi, 2018) and “Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s” (UP of Mississippi, 2014), and have co-edited several collected volumes, including “Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film” (with Hervé Mayer, UP of Indiana, 2022), “Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television of the Post-Feminist Era” (with Cristelle Maury, Bloomsbury, 2019), “Comics and Adaptation” (with Benoît Mitaine and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, UP of Mississippi, 2018) and “Steven Spielberg: Hollywood Wunderkind & Humanist” (PUM, 2018). My articles have appeared in the journals Adaptation, E-rea, EJAS, La Furia Umana, Horror Studies, Miranda, Mise au point, Positif, Post-Script and TV/Series. I am currently writing a book-length study of Arrival.
I have published widely on American, Australian, British, Canadian and European cinema. I am the author of “Meta in Film and Television Series” (Edinburgh UP, 2022), “Inglourious Basterds de Quentin Tarantino” (Vendémiaire, 2019), “Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction” (UP of Mississippi, 2018) and “Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s” (UP of Mississippi, 2014), and have co-edited several collected volumes, including “Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film” (with Hervé Mayer, UP of Indiana, 2022), “Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television of the Post-Feminist Era” (with Cristelle Maury, Bloomsbury, 2019), “Comics and Adaptation” (with Benoît Mitaine and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, UP of Mississippi, 2018) and “Steven Spielberg: Hollywood Wunderkind & Humanist” (PUM, 2018). My articles have appeared in the journals Adaptation, E-rea, EJAS, La Furia Umana, Horror Studies, Miranda, Mise au point, Positif, Post-Script and TV/Series. I am currently writing a book-length study of Arrival.
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Books by David Roche
Works discussed include: Sunset Blvd., Fellini Roma, Twin Peaks, Scream, Community, and NO
Explores the theory and history of meta
Provides methodology for the analysis of meta-phenomena
“That’s so meta!” The emergence of the prefix-turned-adjective “meta” to describe media productions is, no doubt, symptomatic of an increasingly media-savvy audience; it has also drawn attention to the lack of scholarship on meta-phenomena in film and television studies.
Meta in Film and Television Series aims to make up for this. Meta is defined as an intense form of reflexivity, that is characterized by its aboutness; meta-phenomena are not just an arsenal of devices but suppose an interpretive act and an active audience. Meta creates a framework with which to interrogate a work’s relationship to its production, reception, medium, forms, and the world, and to explore its potentials and limitations. Meta supports the intuition latent in the popular usage that meta-phenomena are deeply entangled, while demonstrating that analysis stills requires such concepts to make sense of them.
Mais les Basterds ne sont pas les seuls à saisir cette occasion : unique rescapée d’une famille juive, Shosanna Dreyfus, propriétaire du cinéma Le Gamaar, médite elle aussi sa vengeance.
Avec ce sixième long-métrage virtuose qui réécrit l’histoire, le réalisateur de Pulp Fiction démontre, en multipliant les hommages et les clins d’œil, son amour passionné du septième art sous toutes ses formes, des grands classiques aux films de genre. Il affirme aussi une ambition politique : faire du cinéma qui prenne à bras-le-corps des enjeux idéologiques très actuels, tels que l’antisémitisme, le racisme, le féminisme ou l’exercice de la violence.
Covering all eight of Quentin Tarantino's films according to certain themes, David Roche combines cultural studies and neoformalist approaches to highlight how closely the films' poetics and politics are intertwined. Each in-depth chapter focuses on a salient feature, some which have drawn much attention (history, race, gender, violence), others less so (narrative structure, style, music, theatricality).
Roche sets Tarantino's films firmly in the legacy of Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and the New Hollywood, revising the image of a cool pop-culture purveyor that the American director cultivated at the beginning of his career. Roche emphasizes the breadth and depth of his films' engagement with culture, highbrow and lowbrow, screen and print, American, East Asian, and European.
To what extent can the politics of these films be described as "disturbing" insomuch as they promote subversive subtexts that undermine essentialist perspectives? Do the politics of the film lie on the surface or are they wedded to the film's aesthetics? Early in the book, Roche explores historical contexts, aspects of identity (race, ethnicity, and class), and the structuring role played by the motif of the American nuclear family. He then asks to what extent these films disrupt genre expectations and attempt to provoke emotions of dread, terror, and horror through their representations of the monstrous and the formal strategies employed? In this inquiry, he examines definitions of the genre and its metafictional nature. Roche ends with a meditation on the extent to which the technical limitations of the horror films of the 1970s actually contribute to this "disturbing" quality. Moving far beyond the genre itself, Making and Remaking Horror studies the redux as a form of adaptation and enables a more complete discussion of the evolution of horror in contemporary American cinema.
Collective works by David Roche
These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve. Most date from the late 1990s on, when the publication of Pulitzer-finalist Cloudsplitter in conjunction with the back-to-back release of film adaptations of his novels The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction suddenly put Banks in the spotlight as "Hollywood's Hottest New Property."
Banks has always believed that the writer plays the role of the storyteller, fulfilling very basic and universal human needs: "to talk about the human condition, to tell us something about ourselves." Yet, for him, writing is not a one-way process. It is an exchange where the key is to tune in and listen--to the voices of the characters engaging the writer's imagination and to the voices of the readers sharing their own experiences of his books and of the world.
panorama critique, Christophe Gelly et David Roche (dirs.), Clermont- Ferrand, Presses
Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2012
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 intimacy, the essays explore intimacy in silent and classic Hollywood movies, underground, documentary and animation films; and contemporary Hollywood, British, Canadian and Australian cinema from a variety of approaches.
Ce volume collectif est, à ce titre, l’un des tout premiers à être consacré intégralement à ce sujet. Construit en deux parties, l’une traitant des adaptations littéraires en bandes dessinées, l’autre des adaptations cinématographiques de bandes dessinées, cet ouvrage mêlant approches théoriques et analyses d’œuvres spécifiques ouvre la porte d’une pratique culturelle en perpétuelle révolution et d’un champ de recherche encore plein d’avenir.
After an introduction that assesses adaptation studies as a framework, the book examines comics adaptations of literary texts as more than just illustrations of their sources. Essayists then focus on adaptations of comics, often from a transmedia perspective. Case studies analyze both famous and lesser-known American, Belgian, French, Italian, and Spanish comics.
Essays investigate specific works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Castilian epic poem Poema de Mio Cid, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, French comics artist Jacques Tardi's adaptation 120, rue de la Gare, and Frank Miller's Sin City. In addition to Marvel Comics' blockbusters, topics include various uses of adaptation, comic book adaptations of literary texts, narrative deconstruction of performance and comic book art, and many more.
The book is structured in three parts: Neo-femmes Fatales; Action Babes and Monstrous Women. Films and series examined include White Men Are Cracking Up (1994); Hit & Miss (2012); Gone Girl (2014); Terminator (1984); The Walking Dead (2010); Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); Contagion (2011) and Ex Machina(2015) among others.
Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film traces the Western from the silent era to present day as the genre has circulated the world. Contributors examine the reception and production of American Westerns outside the US alongside the transnational aspects of American productions, and they consider the work of minority directors who use the genre to interrogate a visual history of oppression. By viewing Western films through a transnational lens and focusing on the reinterpretations, appropriations, and parallel developments of the genre outside the US, editors Hervé Mayer and David Roche contribute to a growing body of literature that debunks the pervasive correlation between the genre and American identity.
Perfect for media studies and political science, Transnationalism and Imperialism reveals that Western films are more than cowboys; they are a critical intersection where issues of power and coloniality are negotiated.
Works discussed include: Sunset Blvd., Fellini Roma, Twin Peaks, Scream, Community, and NO
Explores the theory and history of meta
Provides methodology for the analysis of meta-phenomena
“That’s so meta!” The emergence of the prefix-turned-adjective “meta” to describe media productions is, no doubt, symptomatic of an increasingly media-savvy audience; it has also drawn attention to the lack of scholarship on meta-phenomena in film and television studies.
Meta in Film and Television Series aims to make up for this. Meta is defined as an intense form of reflexivity, that is characterized by its aboutness; meta-phenomena are not just an arsenal of devices but suppose an interpretive act and an active audience. Meta creates a framework with which to interrogate a work’s relationship to its production, reception, medium, forms, and the world, and to explore its potentials and limitations. Meta supports the intuition latent in the popular usage that meta-phenomena are deeply entangled, while demonstrating that analysis stills requires such concepts to make sense of them.
Mais les Basterds ne sont pas les seuls à saisir cette occasion : unique rescapée d’une famille juive, Shosanna Dreyfus, propriétaire du cinéma Le Gamaar, médite elle aussi sa vengeance.
Avec ce sixième long-métrage virtuose qui réécrit l’histoire, le réalisateur de Pulp Fiction démontre, en multipliant les hommages et les clins d’œil, son amour passionné du septième art sous toutes ses formes, des grands classiques aux films de genre. Il affirme aussi une ambition politique : faire du cinéma qui prenne à bras-le-corps des enjeux idéologiques très actuels, tels que l’antisémitisme, le racisme, le féminisme ou l’exercice de la violence.
Covering all eight of Quentin Tarantino's films according to certain themes, David Roche combines cultural studies and neoformalist approaches to highlight how closely the films' poetics and politics are intertwined. Each in-depth chapter focuses on a salient feature, some which have drawn much attention (history, race, gender, violence), others less so (narrative structure, style, music, theatricality).
Roche sets Tarantino's films firmly in the legacy of Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and the New Hollywood, revising the image of a cool pop-culture purveyor that the American director cultivated at the beginning of his career. Roche emphasizes the breadth and depth of his films' engagement with culture, highbrow and lowbrow, screen and print, American, East Asian, and European.
To what extent can the politics of these films be described as "disturbing" insomuch as they promote subversive subtexts that undermine essentialist perspectives? Do the politics of the film lie on the surface or are they wedded to the film's aesthetics? Early in the book, Roche explores historical contexts, aspects of identity (race, ethnicity, and class), and the structuring role played by the motif of the American nuclear family. He then asks to what extent these films disrupt genre expectations and attempt to provoke emotions of dread, terror, and horror through their representations of the monstrous and the formal strategies employed? In this inquiry, he examines definitions of the genre and its metafictional nature. Roche ends with a meditation on the extent to which the technical limitations of the horror films of the 1970s actually contribute to this "disturbing" quality. Moving far beyond the genre itself, Making and Remaking Horror studies the redux as a form of adaptation and enables a more complete discussion of the evolution of horror in contemporary American cinema.
These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve. Most date from the late 1990s on, when the publication of Pulitzer-finalist Cloudsplitter in conjunction with the back-to-back release of film adaptations of his novels The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction suddenly put Banks in the spotlight as "Hollywood's Hottest New Property."
Banks has always believed that the writer plays the role of the storyteller, fulfilling very basic and universal human needs: "to talk about the human condition, to tell us something about ourselves." Yet, for him, writing is not a one-way process. It is an exchange where the key is to tune in and listen--to the voices of the characters engaging the writer's imagination and to the voices of the readers sharing their own experiences of his books and of the world.
panorama critique, Christophe Gelly et David Roche (dirs.), Clermont- Ferrand, Presses
Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2012
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 intimacy, the essays explore intimacy in silent and classic Hollywood movies, underground, documentary and animation films; and contemporary Hollywood, British, Canadian and Australian cinema from a variety of approaches.
Ce volume collectif est, à ce titre, l’un des tout premiers à être consacré intégralement à ce sujet. Construit en deux parties, l’une traitant des adaptations littéraires en bandes dessinées, l’autre des adaptations cinématographiques de bandes dessinées, cet ouvrage mêlant approches théoriques et analyses d’œuvres spécifiques ouvre la porte d’une pratique culturelle en perpétuelle révolution et d’un champ de recherche encore plein d’avenir.
After an introduction that assesses adaptation studies as a framework, the book examines comics adaptations of literary texts as more than just illustrations of their sources. Essayists then focus on adaptations of comics, often from a transmedia perspective. Case studies analyze both famous and lesser-known American, Belgian, French, Italian, and Spanish comics.
Essays investigate specific works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Castilian epic poem Poema de Mio Cid, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, French comics artist Jacques Tardi's adaptation 120, rue de la Gare, and Frank Miller's Sin City. In addition to Marvel Comics' blockbusters, topics include various uses of adaptation, comic book adaptations of literary texts, narrative deconstruction of performance and comic book art, and many more.
The book is structured in three parts: Neo-femmes Fatales; Action Babes and Monstrous Women. Films and series examined include White Men Are Cracking Up (1994); Hit & Miss (2012); Gone Girl (2014); Terminator (1984); The Walking Dead (2010); Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); Contagion (2011) and Ex Machina(2015) among others.
Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film traces the Western from the silent era to present day as the genre has circulated the world. Contributors examine the reception and production of American Westerns outside the US alongside the transnational aspects of American productions, and they consider the work of minority directors who use the genre to interrogate a visual history of oppression. By viewing Western films through a transnational lens and focusing on the reinterpretations, appropriations, and parallel developments of the genre outside the US, editors Hervé Mayer and David Roche contribute to a growing body of literature that debunks the pervasive correlation between the genre and American identity.
Perfect for media studies and political science, Transnationalism and Imperialism reveals that Western films are more than cowboys; they are a critical intersection where issues of power and coloniality are negotiated.
au sein d’un même texte mais aussi d’une nouvelle ou d’un poème à l’autre. Cet ouvrage examine les résonnances formelles de l’imaginaire poesque à partir de la circulation de ces motifs au cinéma et à la télévision. Conçu comme un élément narratif et plastique, visuel et sonore, le motif permet de tisser des structures en arabesques telles que les affectionnait Poe via sa recherche de « l’effet » esthétique. Phénomènes éminemment intertextuels, les motifs poesques permettent de repenser l’histoire et l’auctorialité de ces formes fantastiques et gothiques comme autant de relations productives entre circulation et transformation, références et interprétations, dissémination et unité. Pour cela, les neuf chapitres proposent des études d’adaptations écrites et filmées par Jean Epstein, Roger Corman, Alexandre Astruc et Éric Rohmer, mais aussi de films et de séries secrètement hantés par la présence de Poe comme The Thing, Twixt, Antichrist, Following ou encore Altered Carbon.
The genre has been widely read within the confines of a national culture and cinema in the U.S. André Bazin and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout (1953) famously labeled the Western “the American cinema par excellence,” and film genre studies since have consistently resorted to a “sociohistorical analysis” to read the genre as the cinematic expression of an American identity (Le Bris 2012). In recent film studies, the Western genre is still widely explored, understood, and constructed as an American genre despite overwhelming evidence of foreign production and global circulation since the invention of cinema. In doing so, studies of the Western strengthen the construction of an American exception that the genre—and the myth of the West it is grounded in—itself promoted. In order to emancipate studies of the Western from discourses of American exceptionalism, this conference proposes to connect film genre studies with the recent field of transnational cinema. Transnational cinema generally refers to films that cross national borders, as stories, productions, and sometimes both. But the concept of transnationalism can be interpreted more widely as a repositioning of film studies, in which the “study of national cinemas must then transform into transnational film studies” (Lu 1997, emphasis in original). This “critical transnationalism” approaches film from the viewpoint of international networks of production and reception rather than from national film traditions, exploring the complex economic, political, and cultural negotiations between transnational and national along with questions of “postcoloniality, politics and power” (Higbee and Lim 2010).
24th SERCIA Conference, 6-8 September 2018, Sweden Hosted by Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, campus Växjö