Jocelyn Dupont (Université de Perpignan)
“Walking on the Edge: Filmic Wanderings in Keane (L. Kerrigan, 2004) and Frownland (R. Bronstein, 2007)”
Discutante : Pascale Antolin
In this presentation, Jocelyn Dupont details the stakes of the representation of acute psychopathological disorders—psychoses—in a variety of films, from Hitchcock's seminal Psycho (1960) to Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux (2024). The main point of this conference is to argue that there can be such a thing as a specific poetics of psychosis, allowing filmmakers and viewers alike to cast a more understanding and empathetic glance at mental illness considered as a condition, and not as a pretext for excessive spectacularity.
Jocelyn Dupont is Full Professor in contemporary American literature and film at the University of Perpignan, where he also co-runs the “Poétique et Perception” workshop for the CRESEM Research Group. He has published over 50 articles on contemporary American fiction and film, with a particular emphasis on the issue of “textual pathology”. He is the editor or co-editor of eight collective volumes, among which Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2012) and Spectres de Poe dans la littérature et dans les arts (Le Visage Vert, 2020). His current research focuses on the cinematographic representation of psychiatry and psychopathology in the American feature film from 1945 to the present day, with a book to be published by Bordeaux University Press in the course of 2025.