18. Études filmiques (SERCIA)

18. Études
filmiques (SERCIA)

Ateliers I

Jeudi 6 juin 2019, 13h30-16h30

13h40 Julie Michot

Université
du Littoral Côte d’Opale

Hitchcock
and Wilder breaking up their own conventions: Waltzes from Vienna and The
Emperor Waltz

If one Alfred Hitchcock movie stands apart from all the others, it
really is Waltzes from Vienna (1934).
One of the director’s few costume dramas, it can also be considered as his only
musical, romanticizing the rivalry between Johann Strauss II and his father –
quite an unexpected plot for the “master of suspense”. The same incongruity
applies to Billy Wilder’s The Emperor
Waltz (1948), in which an American traveling salesman uses all possible
means to make Franz Joseph buy his gramophone. After having started his
Hollywood career with noir masterpieces, Wilder decided to shoot a kind of
operetta in flashy Technicolor – a genre and aesthetics he was not at all
comfortable with. Another obvious connection between these two movies is their
European-born directors’ dissatisfaction with the final result. And yet, beyond
their clichés, unsophisticated humor and apparently conventional happy endings,
the two films are far from being without interest. From a thematic perspective,
both offer sharp social criticism; artistically, they are not devoid of
brilliant camera work, clever dialogue and insightful use of diegetic music.
Though these two movies may neither be exceptional nor the exceptions that prove the rule in their directors’ filmographies, they
are more than simple oddities and deserve a critical re-examination. The
purpose of this presentation is to find Hitchcock’s and Wilder’s personal touch
in these atypical productions and to highlight the fact that these filmmakers
have much more in common than could be thought.

14h15 Oliver Kenny

Université
de Lille

(S)exceptions:
pornography, eroticism, obscenity, art

Les
termes « érotique » et « art » sont souvent compris comme
les opposés des termes « obscène » et « pornographique ».
Actuellement, à l’encontre du courant influent des porn studies, qui nient l’importance de telles distinctions et qui
analysent les images à leur gré, des censeurs, des journalistes et des
universitaires continuent fréquemment à poser comme principe la distinction
fondamentale entre l’art/l’érotique et la pornographie. Les décisions
controversées du Comité Britannique des Classifications de Films (BBFC)
acceptant pour la distribution sans coupures ou exigeant des coupures dans de
nombreux films réalisés après 1998 et contenant des scènes de sexe explicite
constituent un focus central de ce débat ; quelques-uns des films
concernés sont Baise-moi, Les Idiots,
Romance X, Anatomie de l’enfer, 9 Songs, Le Pornographe, A Serbian Film,
Bataille dans le ciel, Enter the Void et Intimité, qui sont parfois regroupés sous le titre « new
extreme films ». Cette communication analyse la réception britannique de
ces films, proposant une définition de l’« extrême » basée sur l’extremus et l’exter de Paul Ardenne. Nous appuyant également sur le travail de
Nathalie Heinich autour de l’industrie de l’art contemporain, nous affirmons
ici que ces films transgressent mais ne transgressent pas ‘trop’, ce qui permet
leur inclusion dans la catégorie « art ». Étant donné la
transgression inhérente à l’originalité, le choc et l’innovation exigés
systématiquement par l’art et le cinéma modernes, la transgression devient obligatoire
plutôt que proprement transgressive, elle reste néanmoins acceptable
institutionnellement seulement sous certaines conditions. Dans le contexte
particulier au tournant du siècle au Royaume-Uni, cela permettait l’inclusion
apparemment exceptionnelle des images hardcore
dans les films grand public. Ainsi proposons-nous que l’« extrême »
constitue un concept plus adapté à la compréhension de ce processus que la
« transgression ».

15h50 Dominique Sipière

Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre

Deux exceptions symétriques :
Churchill le centrifuge et Turing le centripète (Darkest Hour de Joe Wright et The
Imitation Game de Morten Tyldum)

Dans sa novelization de The Darkest Hour (Joe
Wright, 2016), le scénariste Anthony McCarten, insiste sur sa thèse: « Winston Churchill seriously entertained the prospect
of a peace deal with Hitler in May 1940 » (259). Le
moment clef est celui de la plus troublante exception du vingtième siècle :
la guerre qu’il a fallu faire. Or, comme chacun sait, tout en Churchill
relève de l’exception et il s’agit d’une exception centrifuge qui vise la
diffusion, le bruit et l’éloquence. À l’opposé, un film presque contemporain
(2015), The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, avec Benedict Cumberbatch et
Keira Knightley), célèbre Alan Turing, autiste, infiniment discret et victime
de l’homophobie de l’époque. Turing participe pourtant au même combat, avec une
efficacité comparable, mais son exception est centripète, discrète,
retournée sur elle-même et sur le nécessaire secret de ses succès, au risque
d’informer l’ennemi. Ce sont ces variations de la figure de l’exception qu’on
tentera de développer.

Ateliers II

Vendredi 7 juin 2019, 9h-10h30

9h15 Lucas Barrières

Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

Drive (Nicolas
Winding Refn, 2011)ou le poids de l’exception

Dans
la filmographie du réalisateur danois Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive (2011)
se distingue de par son accessibilité, sa production et son succès critique
international. Et si cette addition fait de ce film une exception, c’est dans
la suite de la carrière de son réalisateur que nous trouvons des motifs
d’interrogations. Car Only God Forgives (2013) et The Neon Demon (2016)
reprennent des éléments similaires à Drive. Mais ici, les formes seront
poussées de plus en plus vers l’extrême, marquant une radicalisation dans les
intentions de Winding Refn. Telle une première ébauche maudite, Refn rature
formes, idées et personnages pour former ce qui peut apparaître comme une
trilogie de la radicalisation. Il faut alors peut-être voir en Drive
l’expression d’une parenthèse « grand public » unique qui porte le
poids de son accessibilité et qui nous permet de saisir ce qu’implique de
poursuivre une filmographie après un film d’exception.

9h50 Pierre
François Peirano

Université de Toulon

Le Reptile (There Was A Crooked Man, 1970) : exception dans l’œuvre de
Joseph L. Mankiewicz ou dans le genre du western ?

Avant-dernier
long métrage de Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Le
Reptile (There Was A Crooked Man,
1970) constitue la seule incursion du réalisateur dans le domaine du western
et, à plusieurs titres, mérite d’être considéré comme une
« exception ». En effet, Mankiewicz reste fidèle à ses choix
techniques et esthétiques : les dialogues conservent une grande importance
et la majorité des scènes se déroule au cœur d’un pénitencier, ce qui apparente
l’ensemble au théâtre filmé, un élément inhabituel dans le genre, et crée une
impression d’artificialité. L’affrontement psychologique entre les deux principaux
personnages, Paris Pitman, Jr. (Kirk Douglas), prisonnier fourbe et sans
scrupules, et Woodward Lopeman (Henry Fonda), directeur intègre, constitue le
nœud de l’intrigue et un tel parti pris entraîne le spectateur dans des chemins
singuliers et tortueux, en accord avec les westerns
« révisionnistes » de la même époque, dans lesquels la vision
idéalisée de l’histoire de l’Ouest était remise en question. De telles
influences se retrouvent dans Le Reptile,
comme le suggère le titre original. Au-delà du qualificatif
d’« exception », les éléments qui composent cette œuvre singulière
entrent dans le jeu entre vérité et illusion qui caractérise l’ensemble de
l’œuvre de Mankiewicz.

Ateliers III

Samedi
8 juin 2019, 9h-10h30

9h15 Andrew
Robert Hodgson

Université Paris Est

Scene and Structural
Tonic: Forms of Reversal in Chris Marker’s La
Jetée (1962)

To view Chris Marker’s
1962 La Jetée is to be confronted
with a series of destabilising reversals in both reception coding, and formal
project. It was, and is, shown in a cinema, it is sold on DVD and pirated on
Youtube: it is a ‘movie’, and yet the images projected do not ‘move’. It is the
product of a compiled series of still photographs, a status too drawn into
ambiguity: the opening credits announce La
Jetée is a ‘photo-roman’. A comic book made up of speech bubbled cells of
staged photos rather than the usual illustrations. Something you might see in
the back of a tabloid newspaper, whereby the progressive movement of characters
through a scene relies on the viewer’s active movement of hand and eye, that
gives the illusion of progression. Whereas a ‘movie’ switches still frames in
rapid rate, mechanically carrying out this process for the viewer, Marker’s
film imposes this process back upon them, like a sort of evolution from the 19^th
century proto-giffing of images found with novelties like stereoscopic glasses.
In this sense it would seem to formally cut away at the viewer and their
passive role, and as such destabilise the established norms of film as imposing
transmission of ‘meaning,’ and viewer as passive receiver of ‘message.’ Which,
in 1962, would appear the application within cinema itself, of wider critical
positions regarding the warping impositions of ‘Hollywood’ romance upon the
real-world, in France but also particularly in Britain, and the
characterisation of post-war societies as caught within ‘the perpetual cinema
show’ (Brophy); a kind of cinematic recoding of Plato’s cave. With this paper I
aim to open up a discourse upon these planes of reversal, and in doing so draw
the received processes of cinematic presentation and reception of the era into
problematisation.

9h50
Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot

Université de Bourgogne Franche Comté

Once (and Only Once?) Upon a Time in America: Sergio Leone’s vanishing points

Following the steps of authors like Christopher Frayling or Robert C.
Cumbow who analyzed Sergio Leone’s unique position in and perspective on US
films and history, our study will start from the choice of Once Upon a Time as a provocative formula encapsulating Leone’s
attempt at grasping the essence of two major Hollywood film genres, the Western
and the Gangster Movie. Presented as tales from the start, the two films delve
deep in mythologies supposedly alien to an Italian director. The study will
then concentrate on Once Upon a Time in America and its enigmatic use of
timelines and shifting moral grounds as but two aspects of the multifarious
tensions constructing and deconstructing an exceptional quest for an ever
elusive, complete and satisfying re/vision of the fascinating core of the
Hollywood gangster film.

Ateliers IV

Samedi 8 juin 2019, 11h-12h30

11h
Emilie Cheyroux

Université
Paris 3

Alejandro G. Iñárritu,
an “alien” director in Hollywood?

In 2016, before
announcing the winner of the Oscar for Best Director, Sean Penn made a quick
joke: “Who gave that motherfucker his Green Card?”, referring to Alejandro G.
Iñárritu, awarded for The Revenant.
In spite of the fact that both men are friends, the remark implied that a
successful Latino in Hollywood infringes upon American borders. Awarded for the
second time in a row (Birdman 2015, The Revenant 2016), the Mexican director
in fact showed that he had impressed the Academy two years in a row. This article
seeks to discuss to what extent Iñárritu can be considered to be an “alien”
director, considering the polysemy of the word, referring both to a status in
American immigration law (“resident alien”) and to the quality of being
exceptional. The study first considers Iñárritu’s in-betweenness since after
analyzing Babel, Deborah Shaw
referred to his personal style as “Hollywood world cinema,” insisting on its
transnational quality. Can this label still be used for Birdman and The Revenant?
Has Iñárritu become more of a Hollywood director conforming to its narrative
standards or does his transnational position still influence his choices in
terms of production, distribution or cast? Secondly, if Ridley Scott and Martin
Scorsese lament that cinema is dead, to what extent can Inárritu’s films be
considered to be an exception in Hollywood in terms of themes and directing
techniques? The article thus considers the way he revisits the western movie,
offers criticism about the entertainment industry and tackles the theme of
immigration. This article therefore works on the paradox that an “alien”
director succeeded in seducing Hollywood with films that can comment on the
U.S.’s culture and history.

11h45 David Roche

Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès

The War Zone (Tim Roth, 1999) and the Conflicting Self-Construction of the
Actor-Director

In 1999, Tim Roth released The
War Zone, two years after his friend and colleague Gary Oldman’s first
venture into screenwriting and directing, Nil by Mouth (1997), came
out. A film about sexual abuse in a working class English family, The War
Zone tackles a topic rarely dealt with in child-centered films. Like
Oldman, Roth decided to make a film more in line with the TV movies that
launched his career, Made in Britain (Alan Clarke, 1982) and Meantime
(Mike Leigh, 1983), rather than the US indie movies he had performed in the
1990s. Although Roth’s movie would be a film adaptation and not a
semi-autobiographical script like Oldman’s, Alexander Stuart’s novel echoed
Roth’s own story of sexual abuse. Arguably, all artists—actors, composers,
directors, musicians, painters, singers—construct themselves as artists, that
is invent a persona that embodies their views on their art and art in general.
The specificity of the actor-director lies in that the star has already
established him/herself in the industry and in the audience’s mind, and more
importantly even, in her/his own, and must thus adjust to the preexisting
construct. In other words, the actor-director has baggage, and the fact that
the new role remains in the same industry and medium actually makes the venture
more daring: in a sense, the actor should know more about movies than, say,
poetry, painting or sculpture. This article proposes to analyze both the
paratexts and the film itself in order to determine how a highly successful
actor like Tim Roth managed, with just one film, to construct himself as a
specific type of director with a specific view of cinema in mind. Attention
will be paid to the adaptation process, to the narration and finally to what
the actor perceived as his main challenge: directing other actors.