In just over a decade, Francois Ozon has earned an international reputation as a successful and provocative filmmaker. A student of Eric Rohmer and Jean Douchet at the prestigious Femis, Ozon made a number of critically acclaimed shorts in the 1990s and released his first feature film Sitcom in 1998. Two additional shorts and eleven feature films have followed, including international successes 8 femmes and Swimming Pool and more recent releases such as Angel, Ricky, and Le refuge. Ozon's originality lies in his filmmaking style, which draws on familiar cinematic traditions (the crime thriller, the musical, the psychological drama, the comedy, the period piece) but simultaneously mixes these recognizable genres and renders them unfamiliar. Despite tremendous diversity in cinematic choices, Ozon's oeuvre is surprisingly consistent in its desire to blur the traditional frontiers between the masculine and the feminine, gay and straight, reality and fantasy, auteur and commercial cinema. Thibaut Schilt provides an overview of Francois Ozon's career to date, highlighting the director's unrestrained, voracious cinephilia, his recurrent collaborations with women screenwriters and actresses, and the trademarks of his cinema including music, dance, and the clothes that accompany these now typically Ozonian episodes. Schilt contextualizes Ozon's filmmaking within the larger fields of French filmmaking and international queer cinema, and he discusses several major themes running through Ozon's work, including obsessions with inadequate fathers, various types of mourning, and a recurring taste for "the foreign." The volume also includes an insightful interview with the director.

A thematic examination of a prolific rising star in contemporary French filmmaking

About the Author
Thibaut Schilt is an assistant professor of French in the department of modern languages and literatures at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Reviews
"An elegant, highly readable, and refreshing discussion of Francois Ozon's career to date. Schilt combines incisive readings of visual and narrative detail with vivid enthusiasm for Ozon's films."--Emma Wilson, author of Atom Egoyan
"A solid and engaging addition to the literature on a director who has become central to studies of contemporary French cinema."--H-France Review




Book Information
ISBN 9780252077944
Author Thibaut Schilt
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 210mm * 140mm * 13mm