French Film (375-0-20)

Instructors

Scott P Durham
8474914660
1860 S. Campus Drive, Crowe Hall #2-141
Scott Durham (Ph.D. Yale, 1992) is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French and Italian. His main interests are in 20th- and 21st-century literature, film, and theory, with particular emphasis on Foucault and Deleuze, as well as the Marxist critical tradition. He is the author of Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford University Press) and the editor of a Yale French Studies issue on Jean Genet. He is currently writing two books with the working titles Eurydice¿s Gaze: Historicity, Memory and Untimeliness in Postmodern Film and The Archive and the Monad: Deleuze and the Resistance to Postmodernism.

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-335: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

This course will consider developments in French and Francophone cinema since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the works of directors associated or in dialogue with the "New Wave." We will examine the reinvention of cinematic form by these filmmakers, but we will also explore how such formal innovations may be understood as attempts to respond to the historical events and social processes that transformed French culture in that period, most notably the traumas of the Second World War, the emergence of consumer culture, and the processes of decolonization and globalization. Among the directors whose works will be discussed are Jean Renoir, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Claire Denis and Djibril Diop Mambéty.

Class Materials (Required)

Films and reading will be available on reserve.

Bresson, Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé (A Man Escaped) (1956)
Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Buñuel, Journal d'une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid)
Buñuel, Viridiana (1961)
Denis, J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep) (1994)
Godard, Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)
Godard, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her) (1967)
Haneke, Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown) (2000)
Mambéty, Hyènes (Hyenas) (1992)
Marker, Sans Soleil (Sunless) (1982)
Renoir, La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion) (1937)
Renoir, La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939)
Resnais/Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
Sissako, Bamako (2006)
Tati, PlayTime (1967)
Varda, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)
Varda, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) (2000)

Class Notes

Course conducted in English.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area