The Politics of Gender in French Cinema

Wednesday, April 14 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
(Conference in English)

Co-sponsored by the Department of French, the Institute of French Studies, the Department of Cinema Studies, the CNRS/NYU International Research Center.


New Wave Cinema created a new image of woman which is inseparable from modernity and auteur cinema. However, this image is largely shaped by patriarchal culture. This talk explores how the image of woman that is constructed in New Wave films is essentialized and associated with passion, and thus embodies an image of the feminine that combines sexual freedom with death.

Geneviève Sellier is a professor of Film Studies at the Université de Caen (France); she is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and currently a Visiting Professor at the MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) She is the author of Masculine Singular : French New Wave Cinema (Duke University Press, 2008) and the coauthor (with Noël Burch) of La Drôle de Guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930-1956 (Nathan, 1999).
 
Location: La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington Mews.