Recent publications
The Western Frontier & American Pulp in la zone: Marcel Carné’s Terrain vague (1960) as Proto-‘Banlieue Film’
JCMS: Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, 2020
This essay examines Marcel Carné’s film Terrain vague (The Wasteland, 1960) as a precursor to post-1980 banlieue (disadvantaged suburbs) genre films due to its representation of the transcultural and postcolonial dimensions of this marginalized space. Carné’s critically disparaged film was produced when US cultural imperialism and the French-Algerian War converged in the metropole. In representing this context, the film presages banlieue film themes and media stereotypes that will intensify in post-1980 France: as the banlieue becomes increasingly racialized, it becomes more troublingly associated with the US ghetto and aberrant virility.
Dan (Danièle Gaubert), a masculine teenage girl, leads the gang in Carné’s Terrain vague (1960) (René Chateau Vidéo)
Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1969): Evoking Autism & the Nascent “Eugenic Atlantic”
Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, Dec. 2019.
This essay analyzes François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) as an early representation of autism that metaphorizes the neurodiverse child as the colonial subject. The film takes place in 1798, only a decade after the French Revolution, and depicts the true events of the “wild boy of Aveyron,” a feral child found in the Southern French forest when he was twelve years old. Before the film’s production, Truffaut—who also plays the boy’s teacher, Dr. Jean-Marc Itard—collected articles and books on autism and viewed videos of autistic children to create his main character’s behavioral patterns. The film is thus an exceptionally early representation of autism in narrative film history. While several scholars have analyzed the film with this knowledge—and usually from an autobiographical point of view that uncritically celebrates the film’s auteur director—I merge the critical lenses of disability studies and postcolonial studies to examine it as a white savior film.
Drawing on archival research and considering L’Enfant sauvage’s narrative and production contexts, I explore how the film evokes what Snyder and Mitchell term the “Eugenic Atlantic”—the historical moment when racial and disability eugenics dovetailed at the end of the eighteenth century. The film not only maintains that the boy should be “civilized” in its representation of Itard as the narrative’s hero, but it also conflates disability and race via the following production and formal choices: the casting of a Romani boy (Jean-Pierre Cargol) despite Truffaut’s knowledge that the historical “wild child” was white; and the use of long and iris fade-out shots that work to distance the audience from identifying with the autistic child, most notably in scenes where he connects with nature as he stims (uses repetitive motions to self-stimulate). In its representation of autism-as-savagery only a year after May ’68—a key moment in postcolonial French history—L’Enfant sauvage reveals some of the ways in which colonialism and ableism are mutually imbricated historical methods of normalization that span centuries.
Itard’s (Truffaut) patronizing touch echoes the iris shot–and medical gaze–that constructs Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) as abnormal in Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (1969) (Les Films du Carrosse)
Research in Progress:
“The French ‘Headscarf Affair’ in Film through the Decades: Her Life (1996), Skirt Day (2007), and Mariam (2016).”
“The Queer Crip Witch Wins: A Return to Animality in Thelma (2017) and Blue My Mind (2017),” with Ashley Rini and Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera.
Eco-Cripping Teen Body Horror, a video essay, with Ashley Rini. [in]Transition: A Media Commons Project with JCMS. Submitted Oct. 2022.
In “Not Your Average Teen Horror,” Coco D’Hont explains why Excision (Richard Bates Jr., U.S., 2012) is a feminist step forward for the teen horror film genre: it veers from the trend of female-led films that maintain the trope of the teen-girl-as-violent-monster who must be demolished in order to reinstate social order. While Excision reveals a useful philosophy of social construction—D’Hont shows how the film illustrates that media and society, rather than puberty, render the teenage girl ‘insane’—the protagonist maintains the trend of patriarchal violence by unwittingly killing her sister at the film’s end. This paper will examine Thelma (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2017) and Blue My Mind (Lisa Brühlmann, Switzerland, 2017) as more productive feminist teen body horror films because, unlike Excision, they represent adolescent female protagonists that obtain non-monstrous agency through their budding sexuality.
We will compare tropes in post-2000 teen body horror ‘feminist revenge’ films to two European art house films released in 2017, both of which represent a teenage girl’s transition from innocence to (queer) sexual experience. While Mia’s pubescent monstrosity in Blue My Mind is necrosis of the legs—she ultimately transforms into a mermaid—Thelma’s protagonist develops uncontrollable telekinesis, harkening back to Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976). Taking an ecofeminist approach, we argue that these films offer a template for a new type of teen body horror film: a feminist narrative and form that revokes the imperative to seek vengeance on individual men, as represented in horror-comedy films such as Teeth (Mitchell Lichteinstein, U.S., 2007). By melding the ‘art house’ genre with teen body horror, Blue My Mind and Thelma offer us the radical potential for something different: a feminist future in which teen girls find introspection, agency, closeness to nature, and queer connection in their sexual awakening.
Carceral Schools: Disciplining Delinquents into Citizens in U.S. & French Film
The recent rise of rightwing populism in Europe and the United States has legitimized a transatlantic era of racist, Islamophobic, and misogynistic violence. Via news media, we often see these attacks occur within the walls of the public (and thus ‘secular’) school—a space meant to assimilate students of different backgrounds into ideal national citizens. While several book-length studies have analyzed the production of national citizenship in high school films of France or the U.S., little work has been produced in a comparative context. Drawing on these national studies, Carceral Schools: Disciplining Delinquents into Citizens in U.S. & French Film uses transnational feminist theories to offer a cross-cultural, historical understanding of high school films from the post-WWII era through today. The role of the public school in educating and disciplining citizenries is crucial to our understanding of how nationalist ideologies have transformed since the postwar era. Tracking the cinematic representation of the high school, its authorities, and the racialized and gendered dangers “other” children symbolize across these nations illustrates a startling continuity: the transatlantic public secondary school acts as a prison-like space that contains or controls bodies that have been socially constructed as non-universal, e.g. marked as non-white, non-Christian, or otherwise inadequate for assimilation.
France and the U.S. share an ongoing history of mutual transatlantic cinephilia and a close partnership between film industries, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Both nations also share a complex relationship to liberty, equality, and individualism—yet each nation defines these ideals quite differently. Unlike the U.S. multicultural model, which idealizes ‘diversity’ but produces segregated neighborhoods and schools, French Republican universalism seeks the cultural homogenization of French citizens, claiming to offer all citizens equal rights in a stable Republic. The French model has led, for example, to the outlawing of the Islamic headscarf in public schools. Attending to these two nations’ distinct relations to liberalism, imperialism, gun culture, racial segregation, and the prison industrial complex, Carceral Schools comparatively examines how delinquent characters in cinema are asked to perform desired nationalist values, such as whiteness, diversity, able-mindedness, heteronormativity, laïcité/secularism, and universalism. It also attends to how delinquent characters sometimes perform ‘undesirable’ transcultural identities such as “virilism”—a racialized gender expression characterized by aggression. Relatedly, these films depict students who resist state power by laying claim to difference by creating cultures of their own (e.g. religious or queer cultures). My focus on this tension between the carceral aspects and community-building potential of the public school offers readers potential sites of resistance. The book’s comparative, transnational feminist methodology historically situates the carceral space of the school and the mediated figure of the delinquent by examining how globalizing processes have changed the ways nationalisms function—nationalisms that imagine themselves to be post-colonial and post-racial.
Joy C. Schaefer, Ph.D. 