Phil Powrie is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Surrey, UK, and one of the world’s leading authorities on French Cinema. During his visit to The University of Queensland, Professor Powrie delivered a public lecture titled, '(Re)viewing French Cinema'. You can listen to the podcast below.
Abstract
In this three-part lecture Professor Powrie will consider how ‘international’ French cinema is. He will start by presenting the traditional academic view of the history of French cinema and its various movements, partly to demonstrate how closed in on themselves the normal histories are, at least until the turn of the millennium. With the aim to open up our view of French cinema, the talk will then consider reciprocal influences between French cinema and Hollywood, the dominant global cinema of the western world, using clips from films by Jacques Demy, Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino. This section also considers the international reach of French cinema using a variety of film awards as denominator. In the final section, the talk will consider the phenomenal success of contemporary blockbuster French comedies to illustrate very French specificities with international relevance: Bienvenue chez les Cht’is/Welcome to the Sticks (2008, 20.5 million spectators), Intouchables/The Intouchables (2011, 19.5 million spectators), Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?/Serial (Bad) Weddings (2014, 12.4 million spectators). It is often said that film comedies are ‘unexportable’. But these three films engage with issues of relevance to many developed countries: the geosocial division between North and South, class division and racism.
Presenter
Phil Powrie is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Surrey, UK, and one of the world’s leading authorities on French Cinema. He has published more than 90 articles and book chapters and published 20 books as author or editor including his most recent monograph Music in Contemporary French Cinema: The Crystal-Song(Palgrave, 2017). He has previously worked at Newcastle University where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Film and Media and the University of Sheffield where he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities before moving to Surrey where he took up the post of Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences in 2010. From 2014-17 he was Chair of the British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies and he is the Chief General Editor of Studies in French Cinema, the only English-language journal dedicated to French cinema.
