Description:
The nimble, creative spirit of Québécois screenwriter and filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve, is reflected in his varied body of work. Villeneuve explores questions of alterity and interculturality, of language and identity, of memory and forgetting, of violence and retribution, throughout his filmography: Un 32 août sur terre (1998), Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), Incendies (2010), Enemy (2013), Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Dune: Part 1 (2021).
This edited collection brings together original works of scholarship on all of Villeneuve's feature films from different theoretical approaches, in order to deepen our understanding of this important and yet relatively understudied director; read individually or as a collective whole, these studies reveal important elements of Villeneuve's filmic practice, as well as the evolutions of his oeuvre.
Brief description: Jeri English is an Associate Professor of French and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada). Her teaching and research areas include feminist literary, film and cultural theories, contemporary French cinema and 20th and 21st century French women writers. She recently published a chapter in Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema (EUP, 2019), and has an article appearing in a forthcoming issue of Dalhousie French Studies. Her current research project examines the monstrous, the abject and the uncanny in contemporary Science Fiction films.
Review Quotes:
This valuable collection provides a rich discussion of Villeneuve's oeuvre, from Quebec indie -auteur to Hollywood blockbuster. Individual essays provide deep analysis of formal elements including the use of sound, camera-movement, and editing alongside examinations of such themes as gender, trauma and memory, monsters and temporality, nationhood, subjectivity and identity.
--Darrell Varga, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design