Introduction

Summary

Quebec screenwriter and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s nimble creative spirit is reflected in his varied body of work, which counts ten feature films and seven short films. From the earlier, primarily French-language films that he wrote and directed – Un 32 août sur terre (1998), Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009) and Incendies (2010) – to the Canadian-Spanish coproduction of the enigmatic Enemy (2013), to his critically and commercially successful Hollywood films – Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Dune: Part 1 (2021) – Villeneuve explores questions of alterity and interculturality, of language and identity, of memory and forgetting, of violence and retribution.

This volume of ReFocus: The International Directors Series engages with multiple aspects of Villeneuve’s cinematic production, from his earlier auteur films to his major blockbusters. This collection provides a comprehensive analysis of several key aspects of Villeneuve’s film production; some of these have not yet been studied by scholars and others are being explored in new ways. These include technical/formal elements representative of Villeneuve’s films (sound, score, shots, camera movement, editing, cinematic space, non-linear storytelling, temporality); the cinematic representation of several important themes (national and cultural identity; gender, maternity and reproduction; trauma, embodiment and memory; identity, alterity and subjectivity; time and temporality; monsters, aliens and Replicants); and Villeneuve’s position as both a Quebec and Hollywood director.

In engaging with a filmmaker whose output is as varied – linguistically, contextually and with regards to genre – as Villeneuve’s, our volume achieves three main goals. Firstly, it comprises a collection of essays that touch on all of his feature films, including the recently released Dune: Part 1, in order to investigate the specificity of each of them and, conversely, to see which formal or thematic elements span all of his oeuvre. Secondly, it presents several chapters that engage with two or more of Villeneuve’s films, as well as two chapters that deal with his identity as a Québécois director, allowing us to examine his position between the two substantially different North American cultural contexts of Quebec and Hollywood. Finally, this volume constitutes a much-needed contribution to film studies in its presentation of the works of a major Hollywood director whose cinematic output has not yet been the object of sustained critical study.