Co-sponsored by the German Section of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and CAMS (Center for Advanced Media Studies)

This talk will theorize film adaptation as a form of failed passing in François Ozon’s frequent borrowings from Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder’s queer corpus—in particular, In a Year of 13 Moons (1978)—will be reexamined in light of Ozon’s adaptation of an early Fassbinder script for Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2002) and the more recent fictionalized biopic Peter von Kant (2022). Ozon’s reception of Fassbinder will be read as both as an homage and as a site of contestation, as the later filmmaker engenders himself both in and against the earlier auteur’s image and the genre of queer filmmaking it has come to epitomize.

Ian Fleishman is Chair of Cinema & Media Studies University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a secondary appointment in Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies and serves on the Executive Board of the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. His most recent monograph, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing appeared with Northwestern University Press in December.