When: Friday, 17 May, 2–3pm
Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne Parkville Campus
Dr Felicity Chaplin, Monash University
“Tiny details: Julie Delpy’s cinephilia and cinécriture“
Julie Delpy once remarked: “We are everything and we are nothing. It is just the big paradox of being alive. We’re tiny details, yet we are details.” Perhaps the most ubiquitous thematic concern in Delpy’s work is being alive or the human condition. This is generally treated in her screenwork through the subthemes of love and death, with a focus on relationships, whether romantic, platonic or familial, and rendered through a representation of myriad tiny details, often of a quotidian nature. An examination of Delpy’s screenwork and the paratextual discourse surrounding it reveals a close attention to detail and an acute cinephilia. Tim Palmer characterises cinephilia as “an impassioned close apprehension of film style, a heightened keen perception of tiny details of form and technique”. He calls “applied cinephilia” the “intertextual deployments of film history that catalyse actual filmmaking”. Delpy’s applied cinephilia extends to a love of the film medium as a storytelling device because it incorporates visuals, poetry, music, and philosophy. Thus, her filmmaking practice might also be encapsulated by cinécriture – a term invented by Agnès Varda which refers to filmmaking as an integrated creative process, as Varda states “In writing it’s called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture.” This paper considers how Delpy’s applied cinephilia and cinécriture coalesce to represent the tiny details that make up the human condition.
Presenter
Dr Felicity Chaplin is Lecturer in European Languages (French) at Monash University. She is the author of Charlotte Gainsbourg (Manchester UP 2020) and La Parisienne in cinema (Manchester UP 2017) and a contributor to Refocus: The Films of François Ozon (Edinburgh UP 2021) and Remembering Paris in Text and Film (Intellect 2021). Her work appears in Australian Journal of French Studies, Celebrity Studies, French Screen Studies, and Screening the Past. She is currently writing a book on actress-writer-director Julie Delpy for Manchester UP.