Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur

Abstract

In the introduction to this volume, “Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur,” editors Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby present an overview of Gondry’s career as well as this volume’s approaches to Gondry’s oeuvre. Born in Versailles, France in 1963, Gondry is an Academy Award-winning transnational (France-USA) and transcultural (French-American) auteur whose body of work as a writer, director, and producer spans multiple genres—including feature film, short film, television, documentary, music video, big budget superhero film, romantic comedy, the road movie, advertisements—and languages (English, French, Japanese). In this respect, Gondry can be considered a contemporary globalized auteur whose films and other works display continuities and eclecticism. In addition, this introduction presents an overview of each of this volume’s sections and chapters in terms of how they identify connections and continuities between Gondry’s films while placing Gondry’s oeuvre in dialogue with French and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural contexts. The introduction puts forth this volume’s main contention, namely that “Gondry is emblematic of transnational auteur filmmaking…crossing aesthetic and cultural borders between national film industries as well as between art and popular cinema and between media” and how Gondry’s oeuvre defies classification according to traditional conceptions of European art cinema.