Contemporary Gazes on France: New French Directors Reinventing their Cinema
Course Number: 82-209
This course series analyzes contemporary mutations in France as they are seen through the lenses of a new generation of filmmakers. Since the 2000s, these filmmakers - who originated from France's former colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean - have breathed new life into national cinema and highlighted alternative narratives of French society. This semester's course will focus on Alice Diop, currently one of the most successful French filmmakers. Diop is a young Black woman of Muslim culture, born in the urban peripheries, from an immigrant family of modest means. Each of these seven identities alone make her an outsider in a traditionally Parisian, white, bourgeois and heavily male French cinema environment. Taken together, these characteristics form the main thread of this class: the aesthetics, intersectional identities and universalist aspirations of a new cinema that interrogates well-known visions, myths of and stereotypes about France. Alice Diop will visit our class for a weeklong workshop with students.
Units: 9