We are delighted to announce the third event of the French Postgraduate Seminar series taking place at the IMLR on March 8th! Come join us in room 234, Senate House from 5-7 pm, Tuesday the 8th of March for what promises to be an exciting and thought-provoking seminar on visuality. The event will be followed by a ‘wine and nibbles’ reception. Please see below for the titles and abstracts of the two talks:
Borders, Bodies and Nationhood: Ethnicity in Contemporary French Horror Cinema (Alice Haylett Bryan, King’s College London)
Proust, Futurism and the Artistic Eye (Kate Brook, King’s College London)
Borders, Bodies and Nationhood: Ethnicity in Contemporary French Horror Cinema
Alice Haylett Bryan, King’s College London
This paper will explore how the films of the new wave in French horror cinema between 2004 and 2014 reveal socio-political concerns about the changing state of the nation and the family. Previous scholarly research on the resurgence of the genre in France has interpreted these films as expressing the fear of the threat of the foreign other, with the victims’ bodies standing as doubles for the nation under attack from increased immigration and cultural diversity. However, these arguments overlook the onscreen and offscreen roles that French citizens who are first or second-generation immigrants, or of mixed descent, play in these varied works. Through an analysis of three films from this period – Sheitan (Kim Chapiron, 2007), Frontière(s) (Xavier Gens, 2007) and La Meute (Franck Richard, 2010) – this paper will propose that it is not just the fear of the migratory or national other that drives the production and reception of these films, but also an anxiety over the white French citizen who is increasingly turning towards more extreme ideological beliefs. In contrast to the ethnically diverse city-dwelling protagonists, the killers in these films are white inbred yokels engaging in incest, cannibalism and sadistic torture. Instead of depicting white France under threat, these films allow for a more progressive reading of the movement as revealing the French nation’s fear of itself during a period that was giving birth to the revival of far-right support and the return of the Front national.
Proust, Futurism and the Artistic Eye
Kate Brook, King’s College London
Painting, visuality and aesthetics are pervasive themes in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. How the painter perceives the world, as opposed towhat s/he perceives in it, is a defining question of the modernist era, and one with which Proust, through his fictional artist, Elstir, engages enthusiastically. This paper takes questions of visuality and aesthetics as axes around which Proust can be brought into dialogue with his contemporaries in the avant-garde, with whom he is rarely compared. It considers contrasting yet comparable ideas about the functioning of the artistic eye, or indeed of the artistic sensorium, as they are explored in Proust’s novel and in the writings of the Italian Futurist painters, particularly those of their most vocal theorist, Umberto Boccioni. Proust/Elstir’s aesthetic principle of precognitive vision, which separates artistic perception from habitual visual structures, and the Futurists’ implication that vision cannot be separated from other forms of subjective experience, are ideas that may not be so drastically divergent as they initially seem. I consider, too, their complex and sometimes uncomfortable intersection with other cultural phenomena, namely visual technologies such as the camera and the X-ray, and the effect of these phenomena on the status of the artistic perceptive faculty.
IMLR official: http://www.sas.ac.uk/support-research/public-events/2016/french-postgraduate-seminar
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The French Postgraduate Seminar at the IMLR group:
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Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1713816668842155/