| Popis: |
Film comedy as a genre is exceptionally difficult to define. As comedy scholar Gerald Mast argued in his seminal work The Comic Mind, “we pretty much know what a comedy is even if we do not know what Comedy is” (9). Indeed, the viewing public is able to identify a film as a comedy, but it is difficult to put into words what makes a film comedy. While giving an overarching definition of such a diverse genre is certainly challenging, this dissertation aims to theorize a particular element of film comedy, what I am terming the comic object, to conceive of larger generic conventions and make a step towards answering the puzzling question of what film comedy is. Because any sort of discussion of a genre as varied as comedy needs to be restricted, I limit my study to films of France’s classical era (1930s-1960s). I have chosen this timeframe not only because it is the “golden age of French comedy” (Remi Fournier Lanzoni, French Comedy on Screen, 69), but also because this historical period represents a moment of change and reorganization of a French society mediated by objects as a result of the rise of consumer culture and advertisement, shifting relationships to capitalism, and nationalist policies and projects that are reflected in the philosophy, literature, art, and film of the era. Through four chapters focusing on a distinct typology of the comic object—the commercial object, the domestic object, the hygiene object, and the fashion object—I examine an increasing intrusion of the object in space and into/onto the body. Using phenomenology and contemporary philosophies of perception, I build a theory of the comic film object, arguing that the comic object has a specific ontology derived from its framing and movement, comic environment, dialectic with the comic figure, conceptual ties to the body, its representational force as a sign and as bodily replacement, and its unique relationship to realism. The comic object is one that is liberated and unruly, freeing either itself or the body (or, constraining the body through the object’s freedom) that gives life and potentiality to the object that does not exist in other modes or genres. In theorizing the comic object on screen, I demonstrate a distinct element of comedy cinema and take steps towards theorizing the elusive genre. |
