Last week’s Café CSE was fantastic, whether you are a film aficionado or not. Keep your eyes peeled and ears opened for more French-related CSE opportunities coming up.
Professors Hudson and Oscarson presented their findings as a sort of discussion. Some of the key points for Francophiles:
What makes a “French film” French? It is because the actors speak in French, the director is French, the funding came from France, the film was intended for a primarily French audience, or …?
The “French” films shown in international cinema last week are excellent examples of this phenomenon. You can get French Cultural Activity credit for watching them, but are they really “French”?
Certified Copy was made by a Persian filmmaker in Italy starring a British man and a French woman, and they transition very smoothly between speaking French, English, and Italian.
Le Havre embodies this question – it is set in a harbor, a nexus point where the world is coming together – and was made by a Finnish filmmaker, in French, but was funded from sources all over Europe. Cinema is an international medium today, but some of the historical landmarks the professors touched on were indisputably French.
A Trip to the Moon, the first narrative film, made in 1902 was very French, and asserted French nationalism. Nationalism is an interesting question in this globalized era. Nationalism was particularly important and prevalent in film in the post- and inter- war periods, to glorify France and unite people against a common enemy. The professors also discussed the
auteur system of filmmaking as opposed to the studio system prevalent in Hollywood. In this
auteur theory, can we define a film based on the director, whose artistic vision we are experiencing?
Professor Hudson suggested reading
“A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” by François Truffaut for more insight into the phenomena of French film and nationalism and the French-ness of the auteur.
The professors suggested new categories for ways to think about film: themes (War), region (European Film), or independent film v. studio film. The concept of nationalism as a category is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, but in this international medium, that now serves international as well as national ends, other categories will help us understand and contextualize these artistic visions in a global world.
