Institute of French Studies Colloquium
Haiti: the Unfinished Independence
Jean-François Brière, University at Albany, SUNY
Jonathan Katz, Associated Press
Margaret L. Satterthwaite, NYU School of Law
Chelsea Stieber, NYU (moderator)
One year after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, this panel seeks to reflect on enduring challenges to Haiti’s sovereignty, over two centuries of independence. Participants will explore the economic and political burden of the indemnities levied by France in the nineteenth century, and the relationships with the rising U.S. power. They will address the role of NGOs in Haiti before and after the earthquake, and discuss the current political situation and the future of the sovereign state.
Wednesday, February 16, 6:15 p.m. (note time)
LOCATION: Michelson Theater, Rm. 648, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway
ERIC LE ROYChef de Service, Archives françaises du film (CNC); vice-président, Fédération internationale des archives du film
Occupation, Collaboration, Résistance, 1940-1944:
Short Propaganda Films Made in France
Screening of rare, newly restored, politically controversial shorts, made under Vichy. Introduced by French historian and archivist Eric Le Roy, who oversaw their preservation.
Schedule:
Les Corrupteurs (The Bribers)
29 mn, France, 1941 Director: Pierre Ramelot
Les Corrupteurs was the leading French film of anti-Semitic propaganda made during the German occupation of France. Conceived of as an educational film, Les Corrupteurs is a drama which includes archival images. In cartoonish form, the film conveys shameful justifications for anti-Semitic laws, arrests and imprisonment, and is accompanied with repugnant commentary. Despite its mediocre directing by a jack-of-all-trades of French film, Les Corrupteurs is important testimony of anti-Semitic propaganda under the Vichy regime. This medium-length film was screened prior to Henri Decoin’s feature-length Les Inconnus dans la maison, an adaptation of Simenon’s novel.
Le Jardin sans fleur (The Garden without Flowers)
8 mn, France, 1942 Director: Louis Merlin
A story about the nightmare of falling birthrates: the world is suddenly deprived of its flowers. We see a village going to ruin because it has no children. It contains a short excerpt of a speech by Pétain.
Français, souvenez-vous (France, remember!)
2 mn, France, 1944 Director: Georges Jaffé
An educational documentary with statistics (unemployment figures from 1940 to 1944) that attribute the disappearance of French unemployment to the “fraternal” reception of French workers in German factories. “Work for France and peace in Europe.” The film’s images of workers in German factories were taken from reportage films made by France-Actualités. According to a contemporary, “The dialogue caused such hysterical laughter in cinemas that the film was screened only for a short time.”
La France est foutue (France is Going to the Dogs)
6 mn, France,1942 Director: unknown
A young French functionary makes an appeal to his fellow citizens that France, even if occupied, must maintain its ideals and values: “France!” home of collective labor, proud of its culture, traditions and educational system... It now must face the black market, the American threat and Argentine tango. France is Mermoz, Racine, Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, Chartres, Pasteur, Saint Vincent de Paul and Charles Péguy. “France, a missionary country and mankind’s greatest hope!”
Autour de Brazzaville (Around Brazzaville)
25 mn, France, 1944 Directors: François Villiers, Germain Krull
The film opens with the words of General De Gaulle: “The crime of the Armistice was surrendering as if France were not an empire” (August 1940). This empire is described in this documentary using Africa as an example (Brazzaville became the symbolic capital of the Free French Forces). The film moves from the sinister episode at Montoire to the arrival of De Gaulle, Leclerc and Pleven in Douala in 1940. A presentation follows of French Equatorial Africa in terms of geography (water, territorial development, public works – bridges, the Congo-Ocean railway, airlines), climate (the different kinds of resources: natural rubber for military purposes, cotton, coffee, palm oil, gold), and from a strategic and human point of view (importance of native manpower, which the filmmakers show at work “in age old landscapes”). The film also mentions the French colonial administration, which is active in the fight against sleeping sickness, training health assistants, building hospitals, maternity wards, orphanages and schools (that “allow them to free themselves of the strange habits of native women”), and of course the missions that must face “a society dominated by a primitive spirit.” The finale shows marching Senegalese riflemen: “Free France rises from the equatorial forest.”
Sponsored by Cinema Studies, La Maison Française, Remarque Institute, NYU/CNRS Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Science
Thursday, February 17, 7:00 p.m.
SARAH KAY
Professor and Chair, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University; author of The Place of Thought. The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry; co-editor, The Troubadors: An Introduction and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature
Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading
Sarah Kay explores the impact on medieval readers of the fact that medieval books are produced in a context involving the systematic exploitation of animals, and written on parchment that is made from their skins. Connections sparked between this parchment support and the content of texts copied upon it can produce an uncanny short-circuit between reader and page, whereby the page may appear as a phantasmatic double of the reader's own skin, whether as an envelope or as an opposing face. Reading becomes charged with affect; and the categorical distinction between human beings and other animals insisted on by medieval philosophy is undermined. An ethics of reading is one that responds to this ethos of the medieval page.David and Goliath, bas de page in Princeton MS 82, fol. 244v.
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