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Both sides, now: love and counterculture in French and American transcurrent films of the 1960s and 1970s
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Labbouz, Etienne J.. Both sides, now: love and counterculture in French and American transcurrent films of the 1960s and 1970s. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gv5m-mh05

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TitleBoth sides, now: love and counterculture in French and American transcurrent films of the 1960s and 1970s
NameLabbouz, Etienne J. (author); Williams, Alan (chair); Parker, Andrew (member); Allamand, Carole (member); Fresko, David E (member); Chabrol, Marguerite (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2023
Other Date2023-01 (degree)
SubjectFilm studies, Cinema, Counterculture, Demy, Sexual revolution, Transnational cinema, Warhol, Andy, 1928-1987
Extent294 pages
DescriptionThe quaking of French and American empires reverberated across the ocean. In the late sixties, decolonizing wars and broader socio-cultural oppression sparked waves of dissidence in the two Western countries and beyond. French and American filmmakers heard the echoes of insurgence happening in the country on the other side of the Atlantic. They set out to make films in a country that was prone to another revolution two centuries after the ones that established France and the United States as nations. Amid the demands for addressing the damages of imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, one of these revolutions was purportedly sexual. Love and sex were issues at the forefront of the mainstream and countercultural discourse, including in Hollywood cinema, whose lack of innovation had sentenced its audiences “to twenty years of boredom.” Like a return of the repressed, filmmakers were eager to comment on this sexual liberation. Through the lens of psychoanalysis and film analysis I explore in this dissertation the cinematic reflections of French and American auteurs-filmmakers who made films in and about each other’s country in the late sixties and early seventies at the time of the so-called sexual revolution. I gauge through their crossed paths and regards croisés the extent to which sexual liberation was embedded in their transnational films. How did they represent the sexual politics of a country they had long fantasized about or that influenced their cinema? Did they find in this cross-cultural exchange the fertile ground for a revolutionary change whether at the level of society, cinema, or their own career? Stylized like a vinyl record popular in the sixties and seventies period of my study, this dissertation offers an analysis on Side A of the “American” films of French auteurs Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda and Henry Chapier who sojourned in California and saw the Golden State as the microcosm of “the radical novelty and strangeness of the transformations taking place in America.” On Side B, I examine the “French” films of Melvin Van Peebles, Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey, Bernardo Bertolucci-Marlon Brando and Peter de Rome whose Paris setting of their films helped them channel an authorial voice and address issues connotated with the French capital’s reputation of City of Light and Love. How do France and the United States manifest themselves through the films of these selected auteurs? What place do they occupy in their imaginary? How did they represent the effusion of discourse precipitated by sexual liberation? Did their status as outsiders endow the artists with confusion or clarity to comment on the socio-cultural events of their time? Did their transversal gazes intersect? And what were the outcomes of these efforts inspired by the counterculture to make films à contre-courant?
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gv5m-mh05
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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