Reader in French Cinema Studies

Room: Arts 1.29
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8305
Fax: +44 (0)20 8980 5400
email: S.Harris@qmul.ac.uk

Sue Harris is on research leave in the academic session 2009-10.

Sue Harris is a graduate of the Universities of Strathclyde (BA Hons.), Picardie, France (M.ès.L) and Bristol (PhD), and has developed her lecturing career at the University of Stirling (1993-1999) and Queen Mary, University of London (2000-present).  She is an Associate Editor of French Cultural Studies and an advisory board member of Studies in French Cinema. She has published in mainstream as well as academic outlets, and her work includes a single and a co-authored monograph, three edited works, journal articles and invited book chapters, film reviews and DVD notes (see below). She offers courses at all levels from level 1 undergraduate to MA, and supervises film studies PhD students.

Sue is a specialist in French cinema and theatre studies and her interests range from the socio-cultural (spectatorship, cultural policy, national identity, festival culture, street theatre), to textual analysis (essays on the work of directors including Bertand Blier, François Truffaut, Claude Miller and Erik Zonca), to work on genres and styles (comedy, performance theory, aesthetics, stardom). Her monograph Bertrand Blier (MUP, 2001) attempts to identify strategies for negotiating some of the more subversive aspects of popular French cinema, and uses a Bakhtinian framework to investigate and challenge established positions with regard to female performance and comic narrative.  More recently, the volume From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve (Manchester University Press, 2007, co-edited with Lisa Downing) revisits critical discourses on star studies, and looks at Deneuve as an example of how European stars operate as mobile vehicles, transcending the limitations of national representation. Her most recent book is Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (co-authored with Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street), published by Amsterdam University Press in 2007. This book investigates theories and practice in set design in European cinema in the 1930s, and offers new perspectives on the work of émigré personnel who worked in the European film studios during the transition to sound. Sue’s contribution focuses in particular on the work of designers Lazare Meerson, Georges Wakhévitch, Eugène Lourié and Alexandre Trauner.  Current projects include an extended study of representations of Paris in international cinema, and the development of a long-standing interest in the stage and screen work of Patrice Chéreau.

Books and edited works

• Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema
  (with Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street), Amsterdam University Press 2007.
• From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, ed. Sue Harris and Lisa Downing (Manchester University Press, 2007)
• New Directions in French Cinema, Special issue of French Cultural Studies, October 2004. Volume 15, part 3.
• Bertrand Blier, (French Film Directors Series) Manchester University Press 2001.
• France in Focus: Film and National Identity, ed. Sue Harris and Elizabeth Ezra, (Berg, French Studies series: 2000).

Other published work

• 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); Screen Vol 46 (2) Summer 2005
• 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
• 'Spectatorship 1960-2004: The Decline, Fall and Rebirth in Cinemagoing,' in M.Temple and M.Witt (eds.): The French Cinema Book, British Cinema Institute, London (256-264) 2004.
• 'Dancing in the Streets: The Aurillac Festival of Street Theatre, Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 14 (2): Border Crossings, (57-71), May 2004.
• J.Forbes and S.Harris 'Cinema' in Nicholas Hewitt (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture, (Cambridge, 2003)
• 'Dispossession and Exclusion in La Vie rêvée des anges (Zonca, 1998)' in Russell-Watts and Horne (eds.): Possessions, Peter Lang (2003)
• 'Le Cinéma du Look' in Elizabeth Ezra (ed.): European Cinema (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)
• 'French cinema in a nation of filmgoers' in Sîan Reynolds and Bill Kidd (eds.): Contemporary French Cultural Studies, (Arnold, 2000).
• 'Festivals and fêtes populaires' in Sîan Reynolds and Bill Kidd (eds.): Contemporary French Cultural Studies, (Arnold, 2000).
• 'Les comiques font de la résistance: dramatic trends in popular film comedy', Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol. XXXV No. 1, January-April 1998, 'Popular Culture in Post-war France', (86-99).
• 'The people's filmmaker? Popular Theatre and the films of Bertrand Blier' in Sheila Perry and Maire Cross (eds.): Voices of France: social, political and cultural identity, (Pinter, 1997) (114-126)
• 'Bertrand Blier and Misogyny', Sue Harris and Russell S. King, Stirling French Publications, Volume 4, 1996.
• 'Hitler connais pas! Bertrand Blier's apprenticeship in the techniques of spectacle'. French Cultural Studies, Volume 7, part 3, No.21, October 1996, '100 years of French cinema', (295-307).

<< Return to staff list