Paul Fileri
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points
Section 001 (current Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21766
Section 002 (non-Cinema Studies students) // Class # 21767
This graduate course offers a wide-ranging critical survey of French and Francophone cinemas, placing a special emphasis on filmmaking that raises the conceptual, cultural, and political problem of resistance in varying historical contexts of occupation and collaboration, liberation, colonial rule and republican democratic politics, and postcolonial relations of inequality over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. How have films, figures, movements, and practices of cinema in and around France troubled critical and popular understandings of debates over French identity? How have they developed forms of address in moving image and recorded sound that give life to social and political action that is framed as engagement, critique, and contestation pivoting around the complexities of nationhood, empire, diaspora? We will approach this history through narrative features, documentary, and experimental works that sought to challenge established notions of Frenchness as well as French national cinema or Francophone cinema as a unitary object of study, as understood through identifications of language, territory, cultural belonging, and sovereignty. We will consider emblematic figures, institutions, and works, both well-known and still fairly obscure, in relation to major historical developments in cinema and politics from the sound era to the present: Popular Front struggles in the 1930s, Nazi Occupation and Vichy rule during World War II, postwar processes of industrial modernization and crises over decolonization animated by anti-colonial movements for national liberation; postwar postcolonial political conflicts traversing metropolitan France and formerly colonized regions and nations of North and West Africa, Vietnam, and the Caribbean; the worker and student uprisings of May ’68; the mobilization of new social formations and cultural practices around questions of feminism and queer sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond; and more recently, confrontations produced by anxieties over globalization and unemployment, forms of racism, policing, immigration, and asylum. Topics related to screenings, readings, lectures, and discussions will include colonialism and post-colonialism, transnationalism, state censorship and regulation of dissent, labor and collective mobilization, revolution and the figure of the people in republican and militant traditions, immigration and assimilation, displacement and migration, language politics and translation, critique and activism, historiography and the archive. Course taught in English; films with English subtitles or accompanying English translation.