Cornell's first annual French Festival will give the campus a taste of things French through Nov. 23.
Called La Quinzaine, which means fortnight, the festival, sponsored by the French Studies Program, will include two weeks of lectures, movies, student-initiated round-table discussions, films, recitations, culinary events and concerts.
The festival, which organizers hope will become a permanent institution at Cornell, kicked off with a distribution of 200 pounds of French bread, scheduled to arrive in Ithaca by plane from Paris Wednesday.
"The supplier," said Steven L. Kaplan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of History and co-director of the French Studies program, "is France's most celebrated baker, Lionel Poilane. The loaves are huge, round country loaves that Poilane is donating to the festival."
The theme of this year's festival is "Frenchness-Otherness," and it will include discussions of such "otherness" themes as feminism, homosexuality, blackness, Islamic/Arab immigration and Jewishness as they encounter and influence France and French culture. Lectures and seminars, most in English and which begin tonight, will include such topics as "Women and Resistance: Reappraisals in French History," "How the French See Frenchness Through American Eyes" and "The Archeology of That Silence: The Problem of Queer Speech in the French Theoretical Tradition." French films will be shown, in coordination with Cornell Cinema, including Tavernier's Capitaine Conan and Godard's Contempt,
The two-week festival will end with a Cabaret Night in the Willard Straight Hall Memorial Room, Sunday, Nov. 23, featuring songs of France and Quebec, with singers Frederique and Jean Brassard.
The French Studies Program at Cornell is interdisciplinary and is accessible to all students. For more information on the festival or the program, contact Kaplan at 255-2311 or Anne E. Berger, associate professor of Romance studies and co-director of the program, at 255-1380. See the Chronicle calendar for listings of the festival's lectures for the coming week.