Margaret C. Flinn is Associate Professor of French and of Film Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–39 (Liverpool University Press, 2014), as well essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone feature and documentary film, film theory, new media art and comics studies, with particular interest in the intersections of race, gender and disability.

“Elle s’appelle Sabine: chiasmus and care.” French Screen Studies 22:1, 44-59.

This article proposes a chiastic reading of Elle s’appelle Sabine, examining how director Sandrine Bonnaire folds time. She represents her sister, the subject of the film, in the present and past, but also offers points of comparison between herself and her sibling. The film has a doubled set of ethical challenges: documentary ethics and ethics of care implicate Bonnaire both as filmmaker and as sister. In turn, Sandrine and Sabine together direct those ethical challenges towards the viewer and the state.