Apr 28th 2021

On Wednesday, April 28 at 12 pm CST, Block Cinema will host a live discussion of the film series Cinéma Direct Action: 1960s Student Activism in Francophone Documentary. The conversation will feature series curator Tamara Tasevska (Northwestern doctoral candidate in French and Francophone Studies), Scott Durham (Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern), and Nora Alter (Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University and author of The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction).

The conversation will take place over Zoom with live captions at bit.ly/cindirect

The meeting passcode is 100631.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM:

Cinéma Direct Action: 1960s Student Activism in Francophone Documentary is a film series that brings together Francophone filmmakers, Jean Rouch, Michel Brault, and Pierre Perrault, who pioneered innovative documentary forms that reflected a younger generation’s demands for radical change in the 1960s. In THE HUMAN PYRAMID (1961), French cinéaste Jean Rouch collaborates with young black and white lycée students in Ivory Coast, challenging segregation through a hybrid of documentary and fiction. ACADIA, ACADIA?!? (1971), co-directed by Pierre Perrault and Rouch collaborator Michel Brault, follows the student-led struggle for Francophone recognition in New Brunswick, Canada, encouraging its young protagonists to interrogate one another’s beliefs, attitudes, and activist practices through a combination of commentary and fly-on-the-wall observation. Both films wed the observational traditions of ethnography with the subjectivity of art film to imagine cinema as an act of world-making within contested communities: in Rouch’s words, “the camera will not be an obstacle [to] expression, but the indispensable witness that will motivate it.”

For more information about the films in this program and how to access them, go to https://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/cinema/2021/cin%C3%A9ma-direct-action-1960s-student-activism-in-francophone-documentary.html

Program curated by Tamara Tasevska, doctoral candidate in French and Francophone Studies at Northwestern. Co-presented by the Block Museum of Art with the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University.

Official Website

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