Les emprunts a l'horrifique et au pornographique a travers les images du corps dans le cinema français contemporain

• Author / Creator

  Chareyron, Romain

• The purpose of this thesis is to offer a better understanding of some contemporary French films, whose aesthetics result from the borrowing of visual and/or technical elements pertaining to the genres of horror or pornography. To do so, I adopted an inductive approach, based on a semiotic analysis of the film image. My goal is to unearth some patterns that would allow us to have a better comprehension of the image, as filtered through the process of borrowing. Throughout the six films I offer to analyse, I wish to come up with a visual typology of the different forms of borrowing, in order to see how the latter operates, and to comment on the repercussions it has, on the level of the image itself as well as on the audience who has to integrate these images and make sense of them.
  My analyses are centered around the reexamination of five concepts that are instrumental to the organisation of this thesis ; I will first observe how the process of borrowing calls for a redefinition of the concept of « film genre », where the latter has to be understood, not as the sum of immutable visual and thematical elements, but rather as an ever-changing concept whose meaning always has to be redefined. I will then reevaluate the concept of « hybridity », as the result of the combination of two different film genres (i.e. the genre of horror or pornography and the genre of the film where the hybridization process takes place). This will lead me to analyse the role of the spectator, when confronted to this new type of images. I will demonstrate that the redefinition of the image operated by these films calls for a different kind of spectatorship, whose role is to actively participate in the meaning-making process of these films. I will finally see that the process of borrowing from another film genre, whether it be horror or pornography, is always concerned with the human body. I will show that each one of the films of my corpus revolves around the desire to subvert traditional representations of the body.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Horreur
  • Images
  • Pornographie
  • Cinema
  • Corps

• Graduation date

  Fall 2010

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3C36K

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.