Christophe Gelly - Visiting Research Fellow 2024-2025

Professor — British literature and film studies

Christophe.Gelly@uca.fr

Research | Bio | Medias | Publications | Articles

Research

Research themes

  • Genres in cinema
  • Adaptation and intermediality
  • Detective genre in film and literature
  • Dystopia and digital culture
  • Film aesthetics

Current Project

Following up from my previous work, which included a book on the theory of reception in film studies, and in the wake of my work on generic writing in the literary and cinematographic fields, I am developing several specific directions initiated in recent years. The first concerns the theorization of the spectator’s relationship to the cinematographic work in interaction with the notion of generic formula. From this perspective, I have theorized the evolution of the dystopian genre in both literature and film, attempting to bring out the meaning of the recent revival of this genre from a diachronic perspective. I believe that changes in the relationship to audiovisual works (through new modes of reception) are essential to understanding this evolution towards what Jost and Gaudreault have called ‘post-cinema’. A second strand of my research concerns the study of intermediality in its various forms. This part is concerned with integrating recent progress in the research on the question of filmic adaptation (Thomas Leitch, Robert Stam) into the wider framework of a dialogue between the arts and the mutual influences of modes of expression. This is how I came to develop the study of television series in a comparative approach to the specificities of film and television adaptation. The subject of this study is Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and its adaptation since 2017 on the VOD platform Hulu. This focus of my research also allows me to make a link with a third axis, which is the evolution of mainstream cinema and its integration of aesthetic proposals from productions less integrated into the mainstream distribution circuit. This current treatment of the hybridity of influences — a phenomenon that has certainly always existed in the seventh art — is a starting point for the analysis I am proposing of James Gray’s work.

Bio

Education and Academic Positions:

  • 1999: PhD from the Université Lumière (Lyon 2), entitled “Le roman policier Anglophone au XIXème siècle: Genèse d’une poétique”, under the supervision of Christian La Cassagnère, summa cum laude with unanimous congratulations from the jury.
  • 2009: HDR from the University of Provence (Aix-Marseille), under the supervision of Max Duperray. The thesis was on the following subject: “Poetics of the Anglophone detective story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – Texts, images and generic contract”.
  • 2000-2009: Senior lecturer in the LLCE English Department at Blaise Pascal University.
  • From February to August 2008: Visiting Professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury (United Kingdom).
  • Since September 2010: Professor of English and American Literature in the English LLCE Department at Blaise Pascal University, then at the UCA.

Administrative Responsibilities:

Christophe Gelly is Professor of British literature and film studies at Université Clermont Auvergne, France. He has worked mainly on film genre, film noir, adaptation and has published two book-length studies on Arthur Conan Doyle (Le Chien des Baskerville : Poétique du roman policier chez Conan Doyle, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, collection Champ Anglophone, 2005) and Raymond Chandler (Raymond Chandler — Du roman noir au film noir, Paris, Michel Houdiard, 2009). He edited the issue of journal Écrans devoted to French literary realism and film adaptation (Ecrans, n° 5, 2016 – 1, Le Réalisme français du XIXe siècle et sa transposition à l’écran) and co-authored a book-length study of Ang Lee’s adaptation of Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Atlande, 2015). He has recently completed a monography on the dystopian genre in literature and cinema (entitled Le Dérèglement du Monde), scheduled for publication in 2024 with the Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

https://celis.uca.fr/le-celis/membres/membres-permanents/christophe-gelly

 

Media

    Publications

      Articles

      • « Woman’s Song and Dance Performances in Film Noir », Christophe Gelly and Delphine Letort, in Film Noir—Light and Shadow, Alain Silver and James Ursini (dirs.), Milwaukee, WI, Applause, 2017, pp. 88-101
      • « Genre and Gender in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2014) », in Women Who Kill—Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era, Christelle Maury and David Roche (ed.), London, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 78-96
      • « “The Abominable Bride” (Douglas Mackinnon, 2016): Sherlock and Seriality » in Exploring Seriality on Screen—Audiovisual Narratives in Film and Television, edited by Ariane Hudelet and Anne Crémieux, London, Routledge, 2021, pp. 213-232
      • « Music, Memory and Repression in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) », Miranda [Online], vol. 22, 2021, https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.36484
      • « Subjectivity and Cinematic Space in Blade Runner 2049 », Christophe Gelly and David Roche, in The Films of Denis Villeneuve, Jeri English and Marie Pascal (dirs.), Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 161-177