Please join us for another CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday, 2 May from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

Two unanswered questions remain at the centre of the recent influx of French and francophone films about girl protagonists: why has this trend emerged specifically amongst French filmmakers? And, why is the central concern of these films frequently the girlhood body? While scholarship engages with the depictions of girlhood in such films, there has yet to be a study that engages specifically with the ways that these filmmakers render the girlhood body as a site of Frenchness.

In this seminar I will present my thesis proposal review for my research entitled Girlhood Bodies on French Screens: From Monstrous Feminine to Liminal Resistance. My thesis aims to address this growing body of French filmography which centres girl protagonists and understand how these films and filmmakers portray girlhood as a culturally informed phenomenological experience, through the lens of French republican universalist identity politics. By examining recent films such as Junior (Julia Ducournau, 2011), Bang Gang (une histoire d’amour moderne)/Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (Eva Husson, 2015), L’Événement/Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021), 17 filles/17 Girls (Delphine and Muriel Coulin, 2011), and La Vie d’Adèle – Chapiters 1 & 2/Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), I contend these films suggest that bodily actions such as puberty, sexual awakenings, pregnancy and abortion place the characters on the threshold of girlhood and womanhood—a liminal space in which resistance against social norms can occur. Through my research, I will interrogate what these depictions of girlhood bodies reveal about acceptable versions of French femininity and to what extent the adolescent bodily rebellions celebrated in these films are meaningful challenges to these norms, or instead reinforce that the end of adolescence must be accompanied by a return to social acceptability.

Sophie Tallis is a PhD student in Screen Studies at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on  examines francophone girlhood cinema with a focus on transnational films. Her work has been published in The Burgmann Journal and Sacreblue!, with forthcoming publications in The Australian Journal for French Studies and French Screen Studies. She has presented her work in academic and public circles including the Australian Society for French Studies Conference, the Alliance Française French Film Festival and the National Film and Sound Archive.