ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd i 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM ReFocus: The International Directors Series Series Editors: Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer, and Gary D. Rhodes Editorial Board: Lizelle Bisschoff, Stephanie Hemelryck Donald, Anna Misiak, and Des O’Rawe ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of international film directors, from the celebrated to the ignored, in direct relationship to their respective culture—its myths, values, and historical precepts—and the broader parameters of international film history and theory. The series provides a forum for introducing a broad spectrum of directors, working in and establishing movements, trends, cycles, and genres including those historical, currently popular, or emergent, and in need of critical assessment or reassessment. It ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or outside of the studio system—beginning with the origins of cinema and up to the present. ReFocus brings these film directors to a new audience of scholars and general readers of Film Studies. Titles in the series include: ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier Edited by Missy Molloy, Mimi Nielsen, and Meryl Shriver-Rice ReFocus: The Films of Francis Veber Keith Corson ReFocus: The Films of Jia Zhangke Maureen Turim and Ying Xiao ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan Edited by Andrée Lafontaine ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa: Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema Nuno Barradas Jorge ReFocus: The Films of Sohrab Shahid Saless: Exile, Displacement and the Stateless Moving Image Edited by Azadeh Fatehrad ReFocus: The Films of Pablo Larraín Edited by Laura Hatry ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry Edited by Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refocint 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd iiii 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry Edited by Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd iiiiii 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5601 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5603 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5604 3 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd iivv 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM Contents List of Figures vii Notes on Contributors viii Acknowledgments xii Introduction: Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur 1 Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby Part I Dreams, Play, and Whimsy 1 “We Can Change the Whole Narrative”: Crafting Play and Nostalgia in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo 17 Danica van de Velde 2 In Dreams and in Love There are No Impossibilities: Michel Gondry’s Cinema and the Aesthetics of the Oneiric 33 Bruno Surace 3 I Am Collecting Beautiful Objects: Michel Gondry’s Taxidermy of Emotions 49 Jenny Pyke 4 The Cost of Whimsy in Mood Indigo and The Grand Budapest Hotel 66 Mica Hilson Part II French Cinema and Identity 5 L’Amour fou Revisited: The Surrealist Poetics of Michel Gondry 89 Sian Mitchell 6 On the Road to Adulthood: Microbe & Gasoline and the French Road Movie 102 Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd v 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM vi CONTENTS Part III Narrative and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 7 Rethinking Romantic Comedy through the Art Film: Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 117 Raffaele Ariano 8 Apocalypse Ever After: Lifted Veils and Transcendent Time in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 132 Sheheryar B. Sheikh Part IV Gondry in/on America 9 The Reel and Surreal of Race in America: Michel Gondry and the African–American Identity Crisis of Dave Chappelle 153 Monique Taylor 10 Memory à la Americana: From Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Be Kind Rewind 167 Yu-Yun Hsieh 11 Playing with Superheroes: Genre, Aesthetics, and Deconstruction in The Green Hornet 184 Jennifer Kirby Part V Multi-Media: Music Video and Television 12 “It Would Not Be Just Visual, It Could Have Words and a Story”: Performance and Narrative in the Music Video Oeuvre of Michel Gondry 197 Daniel Klug 13 Death and Pickles: Thinking through Gondry’s Neighborhood 213 Lisa DeTora Index 221 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd vvii 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM Figures 1.1 Chloé’s organs depicted as made of wool and thread in Mood Indigo 20 1.2 Stéphane uses cellophane and cotton wool to construct a scene in The Science of Sleep 24 2.1 Stéphane cooks a dream in The Science of Sleep 42 4.1 Manic whimsy as Chick and Alise race to the altar in Mood Indigo 75 4.2 Zero and Agatha, Wes Anderson’s picturesque lower-class workers in The Grand Budapest Hotel 79 10.1 Joel and Clementine watch stars on the frozen surface of the Charles River in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 174 10.2 Miss Falewicz encourages Mr. Fletcher to create his memories of Fats Waller in Passaic, New Jersey, in Be Kind Rewind 181 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd vviiii 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM Notes on Contributors Raffaele Ariano is research fellow at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, where he obtained his Ph.D. and teaches Contemporary philosophy. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford. He has published a book on Michel Foucault and one on Lionel Trilling. His research interests are con- tinental and post-analytic philosophy (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rorty, Cavell); film-philosophy; philosophy of literature. Marcelline Block is a graduate of Harvard and Princeton universities. Her publications include Le Grain de la voix dans le monde anglophone et franco- phone (2019); An Anthology of French Singers from A to Z: Singin’ in French (2018); the first English translation of Propaganda Documentaries in France, 1940–1944 by Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit (2016); French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (2016); French Cinema in Close-up: La vie d’un acteur pour moi (2015; named a Best Reference Book of 2015 by Library Journal); Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe (2014); Filmer Marseille (2013); World Film Locations: Marseilles (2013); World Film Locations: Paris (2011; translated into Korean, 2014), and Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectator- ship in Postwar Cinema (2009). Her writing appears in Afterall, Art Decades, Big Picture Magazine, Cahiers Tristan Corbière, Cineaste, The Guardian, Harvard French Review, Hook Literary Magazine, Periodical, Soledad, Vingtième siècle: revue d’histoire, Wages of Film, and Women in French Studies, and is translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Russian. Lisa DeTora is Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University, where she is Director of STEM Writing. Her publications include Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture (2009), Regulatory Writ- ing: An Overview (2017), and Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities: 66412_BLOCK412_BLOCK & KKIRBY.inddIRBY.indd vviiiiii 220/08/200/08/20 55:15:15 PPMM NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix Representations of Corporeality (2019), which presents essays on bodies, mate- riality, and embodiment from Montaigne to the present. She is co-editing a volume of essays presented at the Graphic Narrative Research Group of the International Comparative Literature Association. Recent and forthcoming publications discuss regulatory documentation in forming public opinion, US Right to Try legislation, quantum physics as a model for reading graphic nar- ratives, and biomedical authorship ethics. Mica Hilson is Assistant Professor of English and Communications at the American University of Armenia. His research on modern and contempo- rary literature, film, television, and critical theory has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including Pacific Coast Philology, The Comparatist, Doris Lessing Studies, and The Harold Pinter Review, as well as numerous essay col- lections, ranging from Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture to The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology. Yu-Yun Hsieh is an award-winning writer from Taiwan. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she completed her dissertation on adaptation and transculturation. She currently teaches at Cooper Union, Baruch College and Hunter College. Her work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, World Literature Today, and Fa Film Appreciation Journal. Her Chinese trans- lation of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 was published in 2014. She was a fiction fellow of the Writers’ Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center. Jennifer Kirby received her Ph.D. in Media, Film and Television from the University of Auckland in 2018. She is currently a Senior Tutor in Media Studies at Massey University. Her research interests lie primarily in contem- porary film and television, with a focus on the representation and organiza- tion of virtual and augmented spaces on screen, genre studies, and gender.