This lecture explores the many facets of François Ozon’s twenty-five-year career, from his early, critically-acclaimed 1990s shorts to his more contested, generically diverse full-length films. The provocative, seemingly antithetical phrase “mainstream queer auteur” used to refer to Ozon, and borrowed from film scholar Kate Ince, attests to the filmmaker’s unique ability to direct films with an auteurist vision that also happen to attract large audiences on the one hand (mainstream vs. auteur), and his commitment to “de-dramatize” queerness, allowing it to seep into commercial filmmaking, on the other (mainstream vs. queer).
