FFS 366 - Francophone Literature and Cultures

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as MEDS 366) Topic for 2018/19a: Ciné-vérité? Narratives and French and Francophone Documentary Film-Making. The Francophone world has a rich and varied documentary film tradition ranging from René Vautier’s “Afrique 50”, the first anticolonial film, to Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1955), Marcel Ophüls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969), Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: la mort du prophète (1990), Anne-Laure Folly’s Femmes aux yeux ouverts (1994), Jean-Marie Teno’s Chef! (1999), Nicolas Philibert’s Etre et avoir (2002), Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), Moussa Sene Absa’s Yoole, le sacrifice (2010), and Nadia El Fani’s Même Pas Mal (2012). This seminar explores different genres of Francophone short- and feature-length documentaries including works of the historical, social and political varieties, the ‘essai documentaire’, and the ‘auto-documentaire.’ We use this palette of audio-visual essays as a springboard both to examine the specificities of this genre’s form and the ways they interrogate the burning issues they seek to analyze, and to gauge the extent to which they frame – and perhaps even define – the French and Francophone cultures they depict.

Patricia-Pia Célérier.

One 2-hour period.