Regards croisés: France and its Empire in Film

This course explores how metropolitan and colonial France, and later France and its former colonies, imagined one another through cinema over the course of the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. Throughout this period, cinema has maintained a complex and evolving relationship to historical events and circumstances. We will examine the multiple declensions of the film form—state propagandist, scientific observer, subversive critic, sentimental apologist, formal innovator, poetic commentator, detached educator, and others—as it intersected with colonial and post-colonial histories. Drawing on questions emerging from recent scholarship in colonial history and historiography, as well as from post-colonial and film theory, we will explore the intertwined esthetic and political claims that come into play in these multiple cinematic representations of colonial realities and their legacies. We will examine a range of works from French and Francophone filmmakers from the late 19th century to the present, including five films from the M.A. reading list.