Contact Details

Dr Fiona Handyside
	Lecturer in Film
	Department(s): Modern Languages (French and Film Studies)
	Room: BG35 (Queen's Building)
	Telephone: +44 (0)1392 264208 (Internal Ext. 4208)	This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Research Specialisms

Trans-cultural approaches to female stardom in European and Hollywood cinema

My PhD thesis, ‘Femininity, Stardom and the Everyday', (London, 2003) undertook a comparative approach towards the issues and debates concerning the presence of the female star in national cinemas. While stars studies has generally been concerned with questions of gender and performance, the framework has largely been silent on how race, class, nationality and historical moment might inflect spectatorship, and also about how these factors impact upon the politics of representation. My research proposes a theory of female stardom that addresses questions of time and place in the construction of the star image, arguing that the American female star acted as a privileged site to act out anxieties about modernity in 1950s France. I have published articles on the star personas of Jean Seberg, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn in 1950s France. More recently, I have published work that expands into a more general consideration of the presence of the American in Paris as a tourist and theorisations of iconic (yet exportable) ‘Frenchness' in images of stars such as Catherine Deneuve. 

François Ozon: Queer Inheritances

I have published or have in press several articles on films by François Ozon, a contemporary French film-maker whose work appears to divide neatly into two strands: intimate chamber pieces filmed with documentary attention to detail concerning experiences of loss, grief and death; and genre-driven, highly camp and farcical melodramas or musicals. My research on Ozon attempts to understand the ways in which both these approaches allow us to question the use of cinematic inheritance(s) by contemporary film-makers. I make the case that Ozon's work ethically avows queerness in its antecedent texts, opening up categories such as genre and adaptation to difference as well as repetition.  

Representations of Space in Contemporary Film and Television

The driving question that animates my research is an investigation of both cinematic spaces and the spaces of cinema. By the former, I mean an interest in the way in which film and television represents specific, geographically locatable sites; by the latter, an attempt to theorise the way in which the circulation of films and television programmes between and around different nation states creates transnational cinematic cultures (for example, film noir is a genre that may have been primarily produced in Hollywood, but was critically invented in Europe). This has led to wide-ranging publications. I consider the representation of Manhattan in the TV series Sex and the City and the way in which it operates as a Utopian space of freedom for the single woman, in comparison to her historically and geographically more restricted access to sexual, financial and physical mobility in the cityscape. I am particularly interested in the approach taken by the French film-maker Eric Rohmer to issues of spatial representation. His films and television programmes reflect his ethnographic sensibility and concerns with the way in which the built environment fashions everyday life, and I am working on several articles on his work that I plan to bring together as a book. I am also working on a book length study of the representation of the beachscape in European cinema, examining the ways in which the beach works as a liminal site, a threshold, and is therefore a privileged location for explorations of identity, mutability, memory and mortality, in the work of directors such as Federico Fellini, Nanni Moretti, Gurinder Chadha, Shane Meadows, Catherine Breillat, Diane Kurys, François Ozon and Eric Rohmer.   

Publications

Publications in Print

Chapters in Books (since 2001)

• ‘Possessing Stars, Possessing Texts: Jeanne Moreau and the New Wave', in Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Culture and Theory, ed. by Lynsey Russell-Watts and Julia Horn (Berne: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 55-66.
• ‘Girls on Film: Mothers, Sisters and Daughters in Contemporary French Cinema', in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. by Marie-Clare Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 221-37.
• ‘Colonising the European Utopia', in Dialogues with Hollywood, ed. by Paul Cooke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 138-53.
• ‘Catherine Deneuve as fashion icon: Belle Toujours', in Catherine Deneuve: From Perversion to Purity, ed. by Lisa Downing and Sue Harris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 161-179

Articles in Refereed Journals (since 2001)

• ‘Stardom and Nationality: The Strange Case of Jean Seberg', Studies in French Cinema, 3.2 (2002), 165-76.
• ‘ "Paris isn't for changing planes, it's for changing your outlook": Audrey Hepburn as European Star in 1950s France', French Cultural Studies, 14.3 (October 2003), 99-108.
• ‘Beyond Hollywood, Into Europe: The Tourist Gaze in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953) and Funny Face (Donen, 1957)', Studies in European Cinema, 2.1 (October 2004), 77-88.
• ‘Une certaine idée du cinéma français: Contemporary French Cinema Criticism' [review article], French Cultural Studies, 15.3 (October 2004), 217-25.
• ‘The Auteur is an Imposter: Reconsidering the Director' [review article], Film-Philosophy, 10.1 (2006), 15-20
• ‘It's either fake or foreign: The Cityscape in Sex and the City', Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 21.3 (September 2007), 405-18.
• ‘Melodrama and Ethics in François Ozon's Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes/Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000)', Studies in French Cinema, 7.3 (October 2007), 207-18.

Encyclopaedia entries

• In The Encyclopaedia of France and the Americas, ed. by Bill Marshall (Santa Barbara,CA: ABC-Clio, 2005)  (on Montand, Yves; Morin, Edgar; Seberg, Jean)

Forthcoming Publications

Articles in Refereed Journals

• ‘Alternative Inheritances: Rethinking what Adaptation might mean in François Ozon's Le temps qui reste (2005)', Literature/Film Quarterly [accepted for publication 2009]

Conferences

Conference Papers Given (since 2001)

• ‘Catherine Deneuve: the star as fashion icon'
  July 2003, University of Stockholm, Sweden, Popular European Cinema 4: Stars and Methods
• ‘"The Great American Tourist": The Tourist Gaze in Hollywood Musicals'
  September 2003, NUI: Cork, Ireland, Musicals: An International Conference
• ‘Girls on Film: Mothers, Daughters and Sisters in Contemporary French Film'
  March 2004, University of Durham, Affaires de famille: Family in French Culture and Thought
• ‘Flow, not form: Melodrama in François Ozon's Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000)'
  March 2005, Institut Français, London, Studies in French Cinema Annual Conference
• ‘Sex and setting: The Beach in Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur' [part of panel on Sex and Setting]
  June 2005, Queen Mary, University of London, Space and Place: Design and Setting in the Cinema International Conference
• ‘Water Drops Far From Heaven: The Contemporary Melodrama in America and in France'
  July 2005, University of Leeds, European Cinema Research Forum Annual Conference
• ‘Adaptation in the films of François Ozon' [part of panel on adaptation]
  July 2006, University of Wales, Swansea, European Cinema Research Forum Annual Conference
• ‘The Beach in Female Authored Films'
  October 2006, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, Space, Place and Landscape: Women and Environments in Contemporary French Culture
• ‘Melodrama for the New Generation: The Role of Melodrama in Contemporary French Cinema'
  July 2007, University of Glasgow, Screen Annual Conference
• ‘The Margins don't have to be Marginal: Re-thinking Alterity in the Films of Eric Rohmer'
  September 2007, University of Exeter,  Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts 

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching in 2007-2008

• MLC 1203 Transnational Cinemas  (co-teacher)
• MLC 1205 Approaches to Film 2: Major Debates in Film Theory (co-teacher)
• MLC 1206 An Introduction to European Cinemas (co-teacher)
• MLC 2201 French National Cinema (convenor and sole teacher)
• MLC 2203 European Film Noir (convenor and sole teacher)
• MLC 3203 Contemporary European Stars (convenor and sole teacher)
• MLC 3201 Dissertation (supervision)

Postgraduate Teaching in 2007-08

• SMLM 060 Research Methodologies (co-teacher)
• SMLM 061 European Cinemas In Context (co-teacher)
• SMLM 065 European Directors (co-teacher)