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
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: Trauma, History, French Extremity," integrates most of these disciplines by historicizing the films of the recent “New French Extremity,” and situating them in a genealogy of artistic transgression that includes writers like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Georges Bataille, and Marguerite Duras.
I am interested in the corpus of extreme cinemas—arthouse films that are explicit in their depictions of sex and violence, or that otherwise make a conscious attempt to confront their viewers—specifically with regards to the relationship between cinema and historical trauma. Since the 1990s, when the field of trauma studies was first investigated by literature and film scholars, it has been argued that narrative arts have the potential to help work through trauma by giving form and meaning to what was otherwise, by definition, inscrutable. In this way, narrative arts were endowed with healing powers by redeeming trauma, that is to say making sense of it through art. However, I argue that extreme cinemas create an aesthetic space where historical trauma in particular is “irredeemable”: it cannot be adequately addressed or processed through art, and instead remains opaque. By assuming that history is opaque, rather than deciphered and available, these films motivate a civic interrogation of traumatic events in France’s past—for instance, its collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Occupation, and the still largely unknown and untold story of the massacre of Algerian protestors at the hands of French police on the night of October 17, 1961.
I view novelists like Céline, Bataille, Duras, and Jean Genet as precursors to extreme cinemas. One of the goals of my book is to situate extreme cinemas within a genealogy of artistic transgression that dates back to the early 20th century, instead of treating them like relatively novel phenomena initiated by the “New French Extremity” of the early 2000s. By demonstrating Céline’s significant influence on turn-of-the-century French cinema, my research nuances existing research in film studies that has overwhelmingly relied on the writings of Georges Bataille to historicize and explain the aesthetic phenomenon of extreme cinema. Furthermore, I alter a fundamental parameter of the relationship between trauma and art. Although film and literature have long been seen as tools to mediate and make sense of the traumatic past, I show that such intentions can be politically dangerous, as they threaten to replace one regime of national truth for another. Where the field of trauma studies has long advocated for the healing potential of cinema, I call attention to the political possibilities of films that intend to hurt.
I'm also interested in drawing attention to the films produced on the margins of the French film industry’s primary funding structures. This includes contemporary French horror cinema, as well as so-called "Outlaw" French films ("films hors-la-loi"), made by artists who are forced to work outside the purview of the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), and whose films are doomed to receive little distribution. This research is developing into a second monograph in which I plan to draw attention to the ways current funding structures stifle diversity by funneling specific tropes to success and casting others aside, many of whom come from underrepresented or marginalized communities.
I am interested in the corpus of extreme cinemas—arthouse films that are explicit in their depictions of sex and violence, or that otherwise make a conscious attempt to confront their viewers—specifically with regards to the relationship between cinema and historical trauma. Since the 1990s, when the field of trauma studies was first investigated by literature and film scholars, it has been argued that narrative arts have the potential to help work through trauma by giving form and meaning to what was otherwise, by definition, inscrutable. In this way, narrative arts were endowed with healing powers by redeeming trauma, that is to say making sense of it through art. However, I argue that extreme cinemas create an aesthetic space where historical trauma in particular is “irredeemable”: it cannot be adequately addressed or processed through art, and instead remains opaque. By assuming that history is opaque, rather than deciphered and available, these films motivate a civic interrogation of traumatic events in France’s past—for instance, its collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Occupation, and the still largely unknown and untold story of the massacre of Algerian protestors at the hands of French police on the night of October 17, 1961.
I view novelists like Céline, Bataille, Duras, and Jean Genet as precursors to extreme cinemas. One of the goals of my book is to situate extreme cinemas within a genealogy of artistic transgression that dates back to the early 20th century, instead of treating them like relatively novel phenomena initiated by the “New French Extremity” of the early 2000s. By demonstrating Céline’s significant influence on turn-of-the-century French cinema, my research nuances existing research in film studies that has overwhelmingly relied on the writings of Georges Bataille to historicize and explain the aesthetic phenomenon of extreme cinema. Furthermore, I alter a fundamental parameter of the relationship between trauma and art. Although film and literature have long been seen as tools to mediate and make sense of the traumatic past, I show that such intentions can be politically dangerous, as they threaten to replace one regime of national truth for another. Where the field of trauma studies has long advocated for the healing potential of cinema, I call attention to the political possibilities of films that intend to hurt.
I'm also interested in drawing attention to the films produced on the margins of the French film industry’s primary funding structures. This includes contemporary French horror cinema, as well as so-called "Outlaw" French films ("films hors-la-loi"), made by artists who are forced to work outside the purview of the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), and whose films are doomed to receive little distribution. This research is developing into a second monograph in which I plan to draw attention to the ways current funding structures stifle diversity by funneling specific tropes to success and casting others aside, many of whom come from underrepresented or marginalized communities.
Publications
“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
07/24/2023
07/24/2023