October 18, 2022
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Nathalie Schnitzer, « Birthday Speeches at the Cinema: Between Verbal Gentleness and Verbal Violence in the Family Circle », HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société, ID : 10.4000/ceg.16442
This paper draws on a corpus of films to address the theme of the birthday through the lenses of verbal gentleness and its relation to verbal violence. In the three films selected for analysis, Fête de famille by Cédric Kahn, Familienfest by Lars Kraume and Festen by Thomas Vinterberg, the birthday of the patriarch or matriarch is central to the plot. The focus is on birthday speeches, which are meant to honor the person being celebrated, but at the same time risk exacerbating tensions or revealing well-kept secrets. The aim is to shed light on how verbal gentleness and verbal violence intertwine, while considering the specificities of the three works studied in terms of verbal interactions.