Bertrand Blier

Sue Harris's reading of the films of Bertrand Blier, the "enfant terrible" of contemporary French filmmaking, is as provocative as some of the works themselves. In a complete study of Blier's work to date, Sue Harris traces the director's career from the early 1960s until the present, outlining the forms, themes and style which dominate in his work, and challenging the many labels that have been used to describe both the corpus of films and the man himself. Sue Harris provides a controversial discussion of Blier's alleged "misogyny", and invites the reader to understand the scatological, corporeal and ludic aspects of Blier's filmmaking in terms of long-established traditions of popular dramatic culture. By bringing to light the comic mechanisms underpinning Blier's films, Sue Harris identifies strategies which allow the student, critic and curious filmgoer to find their way through one of the most entertaining and disconcerting bodies of work of recent years. This lucid discussion of Blier's films will be of interest to students, academics and French film enthusiasts everywhere.