BFMS Lecture and French/Film/Theory Conference
Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:00 am to Fri, Apr 14, 2017, 7:00 am142 Dwinelle Hall and French Library
Luc Vancheri
Join us for two upcoming events in the department of Film & Media!
April 13, 2017
5:00 – 7:00 pm
142 Dwinelle Hall
"From Renoir’s Imaginary Museum to his Christian Imagination: On La Grande Illusion (1937)"
Luc Vancheri
Professor of Film Studies
Université Lyon 2
Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion is one of the most studied films in the history of cinema. However an unrecognized but essential aspect of this film is the visual cultural heritage which draws from such important works of painting as the Issenheim Altarpiece by Grünewald, the Polyptych of St. Anthony by Piero della Francesca or Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation. These iconographic elements of the film are on the one hand a documentation of works from Renoir’s "imaginary museum," and on the other an instrument of art policy at a time of war, standing alongside the works of Georges Bataille, Pablo Picasso and André Malraux. These masterpieces of Western painting were also for Renoir an opportunity to reflect not just on the fate of civilization–a painfully controversial theme during the period between the two World Wars–but also on their links to Christianity as represented by the figure of the Virgin Mary, from Cimabue’s Maestà at the beginning of the film to the nativity scene at the end. This talk by distinguished film scholar Luc Vancheri offers a bold reinterpretation of one of French cinema’s best-loved classics.
Co-sponsored by the Department of French
April 14, 2017
9:00 am – 7:00 pm
French Library, Dwinelle Level D
French / Film / Theory
A colloquium co-sponsored by the departments of French and Comparative Literature, with support from the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Philomathia Foundation.
9:15- 11:15 PANEL 1: Affect and Ontology
Chair: Damon Young
1. Kristen Whissel (Berkeley): "Andre Bazin’s ‘Intangible Phantoms’ and the Uncanny Affect of Stereoscopic 3D Cinema."
2. Benjamin Labé (Lyon 2) : "Various States of Emotions in Film Form : Expressed, Scattered, Shaped"
3. Jean-Baptiste Contargyris (Berkeley/ENS): “La blessure dans le cinéma des Archers"
4. Matthew Evans (Berkeley): “Sunless Faces, Cosmological Deixis: Chris Marker’s Animist Ontology of the Image"
Film"
Chair: Linda Williams
1. Natalya Lusty (Sydney): “Eli Lotar’s Para-urban Visions"
2. LiHe Han (Berkeley): “Back from the Dead: Neo-Surrealism and Deadpan Humor in Le fantôme de la liberté (Buñuel, 1974)"
3. Elizabeth Constable (UC Davis): "Too Old for Heidi and Too Young for Carrie: Catachresis and Affective Absorption in Breillat’s Cinema"
4. Nikolaj Lübecker (Oxford): "The Ethics of the French Feel-Bad Film"
Lunch Break: 1:30 – 2:30
2:30 – 4:30 PANEL 3: Authorship, Politics, History
Chair: Miryam Sas
1. Maya Sidhu (Berkeley): "Reconsidering Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise through his editor, Marguerite Renoir"
2. Rémi Fontanel (Lyon 2): "Cinema and Autofiction : The Author and the Challenge of the ‘I’"
3. Aurel Rotival (Lyon 2): "Cultural Apocalypses and the Disappearance of the Fireflies in 60’s and 70’s European Cinema"
4. Sébastien David (Lyon 2): "An Elusive People: About a Few Films by Sharunas Bartas and Sergei Loznitsa”
Isabelle McNeill (Cambridge): “Ways of Seeing a City: The Rooftops of Paris in Cinema”