French Festival is here this weekend

By Franklin Crawford

Cornell's second annual French Festival starts today and features the most influential specialists in French and Francophone film for a weekend of public film screenings, analysis and discussion.

Titled "French and Francophone Cinematic Futures," the festival runs through Saturday. Admission is free and open to the public, with the exception of tickets for evening screenings at Cornell Cinema. Call 255-3522 for the screenings list.

This year's festival anticipates the next wave of French and Francophone cinema across varied fronts: the influence of Francophone cinema from Africa and Belgium, the redefinition of French cinema by young and established directors, digital cinema on screen, video and electronic installation, CD-ROM and other electronic media.

"The conference offers participants an exciting opportunity to redefine the study of French cinema in terms of recent cinematic reflections on race, colonialism, sexuality, transnationalism and new technologies," said Professor Timothy Murray, director of graduate studies in film and video and acting director of the Society for the Humanities.

Professor Raymond Bellour of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques in Paris will deliver a plenary lecture, titled "Memories, 'Immemory,'" today at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. One of Europe's foremost specialists of film, video and cinematic theory, Bellour will discuss the impact of recent work by Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker.

On Friday and Saturday, Willard Straight Theatre will feature screenings by artists Merzak Allouache, Chantal Akerman, Dani Kouyate, Zaïda Ghorab-Volta, Muntadas, Chris Marker and others working in new electronic media.

Discussions by leading historians and theoreticians of French and Francophone film will follow the screenings. Speakers include: Dudley Andrew, University of Iowa; Réda Bensmaïa, Brown University; Dominique Blüher, University of Paris X, Paris I; Anne-Marie Duguet, Université de Paris; Judith Mayne, Ohio State University; and Maureen Turim, University of Florida.

"Viewing recent French and Francophone film alongside leading international critics provides an unusual opportunity to join in the analysis of the future of cinema and new digital art," Murray said.

In an effort to expand the boundaries of the disciplinary discourse of "French Studies," the festival also features a session in tandem with the conference, "Empire of Readers: Book, Image and Mass Subjectivity in Modern Japan," hosted by Cornell's East Asia Program.

The Second Annual French Festival is hosted by the French Studies Program in collaboration with Cornell Cinema and the Society for the Humanities. It is made possible with special funding from the James B. Pendelton Endowment of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College and is cosponsored by the audiovisual department of the French Embassy in New York City and several Cornell programs.