Professor Sue Harris

Profile

Sue serves on the editorial boards of Studies in French Cinema and Open Screens and is Associate Editor of the UK journal French Cultural Studies. She is a regular reviewer for the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine, and is a regular guest speaker at BFI Southbank in London.

She serves as Secretary to the national subject association BAFTSS (British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies).

She is a member of the AHRC peer Review College and a Fellow of the Camargo Foundation.

Teaching

FLM014 French New Wave

FLM306 Screening the Past: The Contemporary French History Film

FLM6205 Contemporary French Cinema

SMLM018 Paris on the Screen

Current PhD supervision

Lisa Duffy: ‘Fantasy Spaces of Postwar Hollywood Musicals: Explorations of Gender and Sexuality’, co-supervised with Professor Peter Evans

Research

Research Interests:

• French cinema, theatre and popular culture
• Contemporary French society and culture
• Post-World War II French history and culture
• Film stardom, especially as it relates to issues of ageing and abjection
• Theory and practice of set and production design in film
• The Hollywood musical

Publications

Forthcoming publications

‘Kings and Queens of Court and Screen’, co-authored with Adrian Garvey and Lucy Boltom, in The Habsburgs, edited by P. Barta and P. Powrie (Berghan, 2018) (submitted)

Books and edited works

'Contemporary French Civilization at 40', Special issue of Contemporary French Civilization, co-edited with Nicoleta Bazgan and Denis M. Provencher, 41:3-4, 2016

An American in Paris, BFI Film Classics (Palgrave 2015)

'Performance', Special issue of French Cultural Studies, 24:3, August 2013

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, co-authored with Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street (Amsterdam University Press, 2007)

From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, co-edited with Lisa Downing (Manchester University Press, 2007). Paperback issued 2011.

'New Directions in French Cinema', Special issue of French Cultural Studies, 15:3, October 2004

Bertrand Blier, French Film Directors Series (Manchester University Press, 2001)

France in Focus: Film and National Identity, co-edited with Elizabeth Ezra (Berg, French Studies series, 2000)

Selected articles and book chapters

'Degraded divinity? Sacred monstrosity? Gérard Depardieu and the abject star body', Screen, 56:3, 2015

'L’Arlequin. Le Balzac. L’étoile des Lilas. La Grande Italie. Le Max Linder. Le Nouveau Latina/Luminor. La Pagode. Le Panthéon.', in Cinemas of Paris, ed. by D. Iordanova and J-M. Frodon (St. Andrews Film Publishing, 2015)

'Toujours Delon: The script of Ageing', in Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity, ed. by Nick Rees-Roberts & Darren Waldron (Bloomsbury, 2015)

'Ninette (dir. Jose Luis Garci, 2005): Paris Revisited', in Spanish Cinema 1973-2010: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape, Memory ed. by Maria Delgado and Rob Fiddian (Manchester University Press, 2013)

'Renoir's Paris: The City as Film Set', South Central Review (Special issue: Re-framing Renoir; ed. by Katharine Golsan), 28:3, Fall 2011

'Chronicle of a Death Unseen: Cinematic Treatments of the Disappearance of Medhi Ben Barka', L'Esprit Créateur (special issue: The Powers of Cinema; ed. by Lynn Higgins, Steve Ungar and Dalton Krauss), 51:3, Fall 2011

'Sex, comedy and sexy comedy at the French box office in the 1970s: Rethinking Emmanuelle and Les Valseuses', Contemporary French Civilization 35:1 (Winter/Spring 2011)

'Jill Forbes: the continued conversation', in Studies in French Cinema: UK perspectives 1985-2010, ed. by Will Higbee & Sarah Leahy (Intellect, 2011)

'Conspiracy, surveillance and the spatial turn in the Bourne Trilogy' (The Bourne Identity, Liman, 2002; The Bourne Supremacy, Greengrass, 2004; The Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass, 2007), in Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities, ed. by C. Lindner (Routledge, 2009)

'Films parlants, chantants et dansants: René Clair's early experiments with sound cinema' in Words and Things: Essays in memory of Keith Foley, ed. by A. Morris, C. Moreau & J. Charnley (Glasgow University Press, 2009)

'Madame la France: Deneuve as Heritage Icon' in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, ed. by L. Downing and S. Harris (MUP, 2007)

'Spectatorship 1960-2004: The Decline, Fall and Rebirth in Cinemagoing,' in The French Cinema Book, ed. by M.Temple and M.Witt (BFI, 2004)

'Dancing in the Streets: The Aurillac Festival of Street Theatre, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14:2, Border Crossings, May 2004

'Cinema', co-authored with Jill Forbes, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture, ed. by Nicholas Hewitt (Cambridge, 2003)

'Dispossession and Exclusion in La Vie rêvée des anges (Zonca, 1998)' in Possessions, ed. by Russell-Watts and Horne (Peter Lang, 2003)

'Le Cinéma du Look' in European Cinema, ed. by Elizabeth Ezra (OUP, 2003)

'Lives out of sequence: Maternal identity in François Truffaut's Les 400 Coups and Claude Miller's La Petite Voleuse', French Cultural Studies (Memorial edition for Jill Forbes) (October 2003)

'Les comiques font de la résistance: dramatic trends in popular film comedy', Australian Journal of French Studies, 35:1, 1998. Reprinted in French Cinema, ed. by Phil Powrie (Routledge, 2013)

'Hitler connais pas! Bertrand Blier’s apprenticeship in the techniques of spectacle', French Cultural Studies, 7:3, 1996

'Image, Position, Performance: Misogyny and the Female Subject in the Films of Bertrand Blier', Stirling French Publications, 4:12-23, 1996

Other publications

'Gérard Depardieu, an unlikely poster boy for French ambitions', OUPBlog, 29 October 2015
http://blog.oup.com/2015/10/gerard-depardieu-french-cinema-culture/

'International version of Mood Indigo is all gimmick and no substance', The Conversation, 5 August 2014,
https://theconversation.com/international-version-of-mood-indigo-is-all-gimmick-and-no-substance-30171

'French benefits dispute with artists will haunt Hollande', The Conversation, 13 June 2014 https://theconversation.com/french-benefits-dispute-with-artists-will-haunt-hollande-27884

'Film incites France's fury by condemning DSK where the courts did not', The Conversation, 22 May 2014 https://theconversation.com/film-incites-frances-fury-by-condemning-dsk-where-the-courts-did-not-26999

Encyclopedia Entries: 'David Goodis', 'Alice Guy-Blaché', 'Jack Lang', 'Jean-Pierre Melville', 'Jean Rouch', 'Roger Vadim', in Encyclopaedia of the French Atlantic, ed. Bill Marshall (ABC-CLIO, 2005)

Review Article: Colin McCabe, Jean-Luc Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (Bloomsbury, 2003); Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Ginette Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (British Film Institute, 2003), in Screen, 46:2, 2005

Media and public engagement

Public lecture on Agnès Varda at 'The Many Faces of Agnès Varda' day at the British Film Institute

Public lecture and meet the author event (An American in Paris), Lichfield Literary Festival, October 2015

Q&A with Leslie Caron in the London on Film series (The L-Shaped Room), BFI Southbank, London, August 2015

Bertrand Blier career restrospective, Festival Premiers Plans, Angers January 2015

Introduction to Renoir's French Cancan (1954) in 'The War that Changed Everything: Before the War' season at the British Film Institute, London, June 2014

Public presentation on ‘Catherine Deneuve as screen icon’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum as part of the 'Fashion and Cinema: Catherine Deneuve & Yves St Laurent' series, V&A, London, 23 February 2013

Moderator at Barbican Screentalk event with Eve Stewart, production designer of Les Miserables (Tom Hooper, 2012), Barbican, London, 16 January 2013

French Cultural Studies podcast series: http://journals.sagepub.com/page/frc/podcasts

Interview on French Radio London about the 10 year anniversary and Blu-Ray DVD release of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, 17 October 2011

Masterclass interview with director Bertrand Blier at the French Institute, London, February 2011 (opening event of UK career retrospective)