Abstract

This chapter examines a queer sensibility in contemporary French cinema and argues for its specific political and artistic value. André Techiné, François Ozon and Christophe Honoré explore queer identities and desires in their films; they work to integrate queer into the mainstream of French auteur cinema and queer it from within. This queering is achieved through acts of retrospection and reinvention, in particular of Nouvelle Vague aesthetics; in new representations of desire, the couples and threesomes of this film genre are opened and queered. The chapter argues that in these acts of reinscription, queer identity and desire become the source of innovation in cinematic representations of pathos, emotion, loss, and extreme sensation and move from a nouvelle vague ambivalence to affect. Rather than essentialising queer, this search for access to pathos through queer can be conceived politically.

Share