Description:
Youth has been represented on screen for decades and has informed many directors' visual, narrative and social perspectives, but there has not been a body of work addressing the richness and complexity of this topic in a French and Francophone context. This volume offers new insights into the works of emerging and well-established directors alike, who all chose to place youth at the heart of their narrative and aesthetic concerns.
Showing how the topic of 'youth' has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions - political, social, religious, economic or cultural - that agitate a society at a given time in its history.
Brief description: Romain Chareyron is an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He is a contemporary French and Francophone cinema specialist, with interests that branch into Francophone culture and contemporary French society. His research primarily focuses on gender and sexuality, the representation of disability, and film genres in contemporary French cinema. He edited Trans Identities in the French Media: Representation, Visibility, Recognition (2023) and co-edited Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema (2019). His current project is investigating the representation of disability in French cinema.
Review Quotes: [...] an innovative text that gathers together diverse approaches to the notion of youth in French-language cinema.--Peadar Kearney, Maynooth University "L'Esprit Créateur Vol. 60, No. 2"