February 5-16, 2015
Tournées French Film Festival
Hippodrome Theatre, 25 SE 2nd Place, Gainesville
La Grande Illusion / Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
Feb. 5, 8pmSet during World War I, this masterwork by Jean Renoir, once hailed by Orson Welles as the “greatest of all directors,” was shot just three years before the beginning of World War II. Renoir, who himself had flown reconnaissance missions during WWI, examines the relationships that form among a group of French officers held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Within this detention center, class, religious, and national divisions increasingly cease to matter: An indestructible fraternity forms among the Breton working-class Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin, a Renoir regular); the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), never without his white gloves; and the Jewish Lieutenant Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio). Even the man responsible for their imprisonment, the German Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), invites Maréchal and de Boeldieu to lunch. As the film historian Peter Cowie once astutely noted, “Grand Illusion escapes the confines of the war movie genre. Scarcely a gun is fired in anger. The trenches are nowhere in sight. Yet through some alchemy, Renoir imbues the film with his passionate belief in man’s humanity to man. . . . The accident of war brings out the fundamentally decent nature of people who in peacetime would be unbending strangers to one another.”
Augustine (Alice Winocour) Feb. 11, 8pm
Alice Winocour’s assured first feature explores the real-life doctor-patient relationship between the nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon) and the illiterate 19-year-old housemaid of the title (played by Soko, best known as a pop singer). After an inexplicable seizure renders half her face paralyzed, Augustine is sent to Charcot’s clinic in Paris, where he has established himself as one of the foremost authorities on “hysteria.” Revered by all, the solemn doctor (who would later be one of Sigmund Freud’s teachers) selects Augustine to be one of the prized patients—under hypnosis, and often naked—used in his weekly demonstrations to other physicians about the possible biological causes of this exclusively female mental disorder. As Charcot continues his work with Augustine, he crosses several ethical lines—a violation that makes her aware of her own ability to fight back. Thanks to Lindon’s and Soko’s intensely committed performances, and to Winocour’s intelligent, non-didactic presentation of the era and its long-outmoded, exploitative practices, Augustine offers viewers an intimate look at the shifting balance between power and vulnerability.
Le Dernier des Injustes / The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann)
Feb. 16, 8pm
Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah—the most monumental record about the Holocaust ever produced—is, above all, an act of bearing witness. In researching his epic work, Lanzmann spent many hours in 1975 in Rome interviewing Benjamin Murmelstein, who was at the time the only surviving president of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt death camp during World War II. These conversations never made it into Shoah but they are here presented with current-day footage of Lanzmann, now in his late eighties, as he walks through Theresienstadt (and other sites of Nazi atrocity) and explains the particular horrors of what happened there. The ghetto, roughly 40 miles outside Prague, served not only as a transit point for Jews before they were shipped to extermination camps but also as a “model Jewish settlement,” a propaganda ploy to convince international organizations that Nazis were treating Jews fairly. Murmelstein is asked by Lanzmann to address, among many other accusations, the charge that he was a Nazi collaborator. His answers are eloquent but evasive; Murmelstein beguiles the director by describing himself as a “marionette that had to pull its own strings.” In this essential document about reckoning with the past, Lanzmann shows that some contradictions are impossible to explain away.
April 13, 2015
Award winning journalist Marie-Monique Robin visits UF
2pm, 404 Grinter Hall
Our Daily Poison, From Pesticides to Packaging: How Chemicals have Contaminated the Food Chain and are Making us Sick”
a talk by Marie-Monique Robin
Marie-Monique Robin is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. She received the 1995 Albert-Londres Prize, awarded to investigative journalists in France. She is the director and producer of more than thirty documentaries and investigative reports filmed in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Robin is the author of The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply (The New Press), Our Daily Poison: From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick (The New Press) and The Photos of the Century: 100 Historic Moments (Taschen), among other works. More recently she published Les Moissons du futur (La découverte, 2012) and Sacrée Croissance (La découverte, 2014)
April 20, 2015
Best selling graphic novelist Annie Goetzinger to visit UF
4:00am- 5:30pm
Best-selling graphic novelist Annie Goetzinger has been published in Circus, L’Écho des Savanes, Fluide Glacial, Métal Hurlant, Pilote, Le Monde. The author of celebrated graphic novels and comic series Casque d’or, Aurore, L’Avenir perdu, Agence Hardy, Le Regard des jours and Marie Antoinette, La Reine fantôme, in 2004 she was awarded the Grand prize « BD Boom ». She is the first woman to win this prize. At UF she will present her latest graphic novel, Girl in Dior, a sweepingly beautiful docudrama on the life of Christian Dior, starting with the launch of his brand in 1947. The girl in Dior is Clara, a freshly hired journalist, fashionista and future Christian Dior model, who serves as the reader’s guide through the busy hallways of Dior.
October 9-10, 2015
Imagining Climate Change: Science and Fiction in Dialogue
“Imagining Climate Change: Science and Fiction in Dialogue” brings together French and American science fiction authors, graphic novelists, scholars, physical scientists and researchers, to discuss the effects of climate change on the physical environment and the human imaginary. As we move into a warmer, drier, and more unstable global climate, climate studies will be more central to our scientific understanding of the world. The distinctive literary form of our time, science fiction bridges elite and popular cultures and engages enthusiasts and critics alike. The study of science fiction is uniquely suited to lively and productive debates of questions of concern to scientists and humanists tasked with forecasting our futures. Participants include Jean-Marc Ligny, Nathaniel Rich, Christian Chelebourg, Andrea Dutton.
November 2015
Month of the documentary, 16th edition
Le son d’Elsa /Elsa’s Sound
Dir. Yves Comeliau. (France 2013, 70 min.)
Thursday 12 November. 4-5:45pm, U.F. Library West 212
Cendres / Ashes
Dir. Idrissa Guiro & Mélanie Pavy (France-Senegal 2014, 75 min)
Monday 9 November, 5:30-7pm, Hippodrome State Theatre
Les Chêvres de ma mère / My Mother’s Goats
Dir. Sophie Audier (France 2014, 97 min.)
Monday 16 November 2015 5:30-7 pm, Hippodrome State Theatre
Garcon boucher / Butcher boy
Dir. Florian Geyer (2013, 49 min.)
Thursday 19 November 2015: 5-7pm, U.F. Library West 212