Description

This panel explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of screen space and its relationship to actual and imaginary places, as well as the manners in which these relations animate and interrogate questions of memory, history, and identity. Catherine E. Clark, Assistant Professor of French Studies at MIT, will present “Touche pas à la femme blanche (1974) and the Modernization of Paris,” an analysis of the production and reception of Touche pas à la femme blanche, Marco Ferreri’s 1974 reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. Shot in the demolition site of Les Halles, Paris’s former central food markets, the film’s juxtapositions of past and present destructions commented on and took part not just in the destruction and reconstruction of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s but also in the media spectacle that accompanied it. Niels Neissen, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, will present “Lynch’s America,” an analysis of the web-serial Interview Project (2009-10), a road trip in search of the American Dream featuring David Lynch. The paper reads Interview Project in the light of Lynch’s characteristic non-ironic irony, but also critiques the project for its mildly reactionary outlook on contemporary US life.

Catherine E. Clark is Assistant Professor of French Studies in the Global Studies and Languages Section at MIT. She is a cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture. Her current book project, Paris and the Cliché of History, explores the intersection of the history of Paris and the history of photography. It tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past from the establishment of Paris’s municipal historical institutions (the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris) to the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” which created an archive of 100,000 pictures of the city. The project combines the history of collecting photographs with a consideration of the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use, alongside prints and paintings, in illustrated books, historical exhibitions, and commemorations. Her article about photographs of the Liberation of Paris is forthcoming in the American Historical Review. Clark is also currently writing about films shot in and around Paris during the 1970s.

Niels Niessen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UofT Cinema Studies Institute. He is working on the book project, Cinéma du Nord: A Critical Fairytale and Attention: Everyday Life in the Internet Era, an online book in progress.

Moderated by James Leo Cahill, Assistant Professor of Cinema and French at the University of Toronto.