In a 1993 article on Fassbinder and homosexuality, Douglas Crimp seems implicitly to challenge the notion that a gay director has to either make films that are overtly or covertly about homosexuality. But, overlooking major works that don't feature homosexuality such as Regarde la mer ( See The Sea, 1997), one could surely never watch the films that do-the piercing studies of sexuality and identity that are Le Petite Mort ( The Little Death, 1995) or Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes ( Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 1999)-and come to the conclusion that the homosexual content is forced on them. Perhaps there is some (very limited) currency in this with regard to the outrageous, Buñuelian anti-bourgeois fantasy of Sitcom (1998). Taking it at face value, I don't see how one can extract any other meaning from this statement than the deeply condescending one that Ozon is so gay (whatever is meant by this: presumably, that he is a rampantly nymphomaniacal homosexual) that he can't but impose "gayness" on his material, can't but make films that are "about" gays. seems to have been spood-fed on queerness to the extent of simply coughing it up again in his works," a notice that seems to me to miss much of the thematic complexity and organic construction of Ozon's best films, and indeed to be greatly misleading in denoting the degree to which homosexuality is the point or even the focus of his work. It has been remarked by the influential Queer View website that "Young homo Ozon. It seems almost obligatory to look at Ozon in a different way entirely from the above noted attributes, and to consider him in the light of the strain of film-making within which he was more or less squarely placed on the strength of the short films and early features that made his name: New Gay Cinema (though now this is as much a problematic category in which to put Ozon as any other). So, after noting all this, where does one begin? Spoon-fed on queerness The only tag that seems anywhere near appropriate for him (and even this becomes somewhat unsatisfactory as one comes up to date) is, like Buñuel, like (to a lesser extent) Fassbinder, that of François Ozon unto himself. He has self-consciously flirted around certain genres and trends (the extreme element of French cinema, exemplified by, say, Gaspar Noé), but only to compound and provoke, shock and surprise. But nonetheless François Ozon is, I think, particularly problematic and to some extent marginal because it is impossible to put any kind of label on him or to place him with any confidence in any aspect of French film-making. Of course these are far from exhaustive in defining the total output of French cinema, and it is by no means the case that every other French film-maker fits easily into one or other of them. Finally, the fantastical comedy received much attention throughout the 1990s, along with the cinema de banlieue (meaning outskirts of the city, though not suburbs), which was heralded by Matthieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995). Broadly, the films d'art of the 1910s, the pejoratively termed cinema de papa (daddy's cinema-the polished literary adaptation) of the 1940s and 50s (against which the New Wave critics-turned-directors were rebelling), the thriller (in its various guises of gangster and policier pictures) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and the cinema du look and heritage film of the 1980s, 90s and beyond. There have also been genres that have emerged and helped define whole generations of film-making. Historically, one can point to movements like impressionism (and indeed surrealism) in the 1920s and 30s, poetic realism in the 1930s and 40s, the Nouvelle Vague and the recent New, New Wave. To my mind, the central issue in this neglect concerns French cinema's (and French critical magazines like Cahiers du Cinema and Positif's) perpetual and often over-riding placement of its directors in schools, movements and other such groupings to help define its own sense of national cinema. His place in contemporary French film-making has been difficult and ambiguous something reinforced by his complete absence from the (not insubstantial) list of books on French cinema that have continued to appear in recent years: works like French Cinema in the 1990s, French Cinema A Student's Guide, and French Film: texts and contexts make no mention of him whatever, and a recent publication of a series of studies of French directors-from Renoir to Truffaut to Besson, and even including Marguerite Duras-has noticeably failed to rectify these omissions. The career of François Ozon has, thus far, almost self-consciously defied easy or definitive categorisation. But, finding wider themes in his work, Adam Bingham argues against those who say Ozon is just a "young homo. Ozon has been marginalised in writing on French film and when discussed is usually considered in terms of New Gay Cinema.
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