Maxime Philippe Bey-Rozet
Assistant Professor, European Languages and Studies
School of Humanities
School of Humanities
Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2020, Film and Media Studies with a Concentration in French
University of California, Irvine
243 Humanities Instructional Building
Mail Code: 3150
Irvine, CA 92697
243 Humanities Instructional Building
Mail Code: 3150
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Extreme cinemas, 20th century French literature and culture, French cinema and television, trauma studies, industry studies, memory studies, French Queer cinema
Research Abstract
Broadly, my research interests include trauma and memory studies, industry studies, genre theory, and 20th century French thought and literature. My current book project, "Irredeemable: Céline, Glissant, and the Opacity of French Cinema" integrates most of these disciplines by examining 21st century French arthouse cinema and placing it in conversation with the fascist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline on the one hand, and the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant on the other.
"Irredeemable" concerns French films and novels that have adopted what I call “opacity” as a
discursive strategy to confront French Republican Universalism. By being gratuitously violent or simply difficult to parse, the texts discussed in the book fall outside of what Leo Bersani has called “the culture of redemption,” that is to say, the belief that narrative arts are inherently equipped to make sense of, or “redeem,” experience perceived to be “damaged or valueless.” "Irredeemable" makes three central claims: first, that the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Édouard Glissant frame strategies of resistance to Universalism in 21st century French cinema based on opacity; second, that films of the New French Extremity, aligned with Céline, identify tears in the social fabric that cannot be mended in art, thereby conceiving of Universalism as a hopeless utopia; and third, that films staging sexual and racial minorities, aligned with Glissant, deploy opacity as a hopeful strategy of political resistance against Universalism for racial and sexual minorities.
I'm also interested in drawing attention to the films produced on what I think of as "the margins" of the French film industry’s primary funding structures - that is to say, films that, for one reason or another, receive little support from national institutions, yet manage to eke out a modest existence on domestic and international screens. This includes French horror and science fiction films, Black and queer films, as well as so-called "outlaw" films that are made outside the legal bounds set by the Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image animée (CNC), and that are therefore doomed to receive little to no distribution.
"Irredeemable" concerns French films and novels that have adopted what I call “opacity” as a
discursive strategy to confront French Republican Universalism. By being gratuitously violent or simply difficult to parse, the texts discussed in the book fall outside of what Leo Bersani has called “the culture of redemption,” that is to say, the belief that narrative arts are inherently equipped to make sense of, or “redeem,” experience perceived to be “damaged or valueless.” "Irredeemable" makes three central claims: first, that the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Édouard Glissant frame strategies of resistance to Universalism in 21st century French cinema based on opacity; second, that films of the New French Extremity, aligned with Céline, identify tears in the social fabric that cannot be mended in art, thereby conceiving of Universalism as a hopeless utopia; and third, that films staging sexual and racial minorities, aligned with Glissant, deploy opacity as a hopeful strategy of political resistance against Universalism for racial and sexual minorities.
I'm also interested in drawing attention to the films produced on what I think of as "the margins" of the French film industry’s primary funding structures - that is to say, films that, for one reason or another, receive little support from national institutions, yet manage to eke out a modest existence on domestic and international screens. This includes French horror and science fiction films, Black and queer films, as well as so-called "outlaw" films that are made outside the legal bounds set by the Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image animée (CNC), and that are therefore doomed to receive little to no distribution.
Publications
"Holocaust in VFX: Artifice, Memory, and Visuality." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Vol. 30 (2): 284-297, 2026.
“Cycles of death and rebirth in French contemporary horror cinema,” French Screen Studies, Editor’s Introduction, Special Issue “Contemporary French Horror Cinema,” 2021
“From the Casbah to Père Jules’s cabin: theorizing the exotic-abject in 1930s French Cinema,” Studies in French Cinema, 2019.
“Un ‘Je’ tyrannique ? Céline, Sartre, et le cinéma extrême,” Écrans 1, No. 8-9, pp. 193-203 (2019).
Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=7177
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=7177
Last updated
05/20/2026
05/20/2026