In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy - Hardcover

"Having co-organized and co-hosted Professors Philippe Ortoli and Sebastien Lefait's symposium on Bastardy in Cinema at Paris X University in 2011, I hereby testify that this volume, which is based on the proceedings of the conference, is a selection of high quality papers. I can highly recommend the work, which should make for an original and hopefully highly sellable book on the intriguing notion of bastardy on screen."- Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, Professor of American Literature and Anglophone Cinema, University of Paris X-Nanterre

Cinema may be called a bastard art in both meanings of the word: because it is usually defined as a hybrid art form, obviously, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it has been able to become formally as well as generically innovative mostly through adulterous relationships, thus making illegitimacy its grounding principle by preferring a blurred lineage to a legible succession. Trying to find what film is referred to in a sequence, therefore, amounts to establishing a clear family tree, which takes no account of the illegitimate unions, natural children and forgotten ancestors that are nevertheless part and parcel of film history. If that quest should still be conducted, its object, it seems, should not be one sole point of reference. The aim of this book is to create the opportunity of studying, and perhaps of rehabilitating, those shadowy corners of cinematographic creation and film memory, and to provide film studies, but also literature and Arts studies altogether, with a newly productive way of using such familiar notions as difference, quotation, reference, blending, hybridity, miscegenation or crossbreeding.