French Film Series Opens Window to the World

BY VERONICA STRICKLER
NOV. 6, 2007

See the world! No passports, no security checks and no immunizations required. Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

This is the opportunity the French Film Series gives students and professors alike - and they don’t even have to leave Oxford.

Every Tuesday evening, Elizabeth Hodges alternately transforms humble old room 40 of Irvin Hall into a lavish cocktail party, a war zone, a picturesque countryside and a slew of other unique cinematic destinations with films in her French course “FRE366: Realism and its Discontents.” All are welcome.

The course itself is designed not only to provide French students with a comprehensive overview of the works of the most respected French filmmakers in history, but also to encourage in-depth analysis of visual technique, style, metaphors and the dynamic between realism and artificiality in film.

The films featured in the course include Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” and the next film scheduled for screening, Mattieu Kassovitz’s “Hate.” These films tackle a variety of issues ranging from racism, sexism, classism and murder to simple aesthetics. While Hodges does not dismiss the significance of such weighty themes, her main concern lies elsewhere.
“I thought maybe I should shift the course less to think about cinema and how it engages with cultural discourse and think this time about it’s realism -- the inherent realism of the photographic image and yet the inherent artifice of the moving image,” Hodges said.

Students in her class watch the films in their entirety, then study them intensively in class sessions -- often scrutinizing single frames for an entire class period analyzing visual queues. But Hodges insists one need not be a French major or film studies minor to find something worth taking away in these films.

“In a world that’s global -- where at the touch of a keypad you can imagine yourself in Paris even if you aren’t actually in Paris -- to be able to see the cultural products produced in the First, Second and Third World is essential,” Hodges said, “especially if we’re going to be a part of the informed global community.”

David Schloss, a Miami English professor with a concentration in film studies, agrees, citing the films as a unique opportunity for students to gain a fresh perspective on the world, especially if they can’t afford to study in Luxembourg.

“Every one of these films are about a world different than suburban Ohio in one form or another,” Schloss said. “They are about different ways of life, and I think are really mind-opening.”

In the past, that “mind-opening” quality has come under fire. While professors like Hodges and Schloss maintain that the issues dealt with in the films presented by the Department of French and Italian are vital to the human experience and intrical to higher education, there are those who would disagree.

In 2003, the French Department and Journalism Program clashed over a screening of the Oscar-nominated film “Ridicule” and a Miami Student opinion piece that followed. The piece, by former Student columnist Aaron Sanders, charged that students in the course for which the film was screened were upset by certain graphic images in the film. In the following weeks, complaints were lodged against Sanders, who was subsequently fired by the Student, and the national media picked up the story.

To this day, French professors like Hodges still harbor tender feelings over the incident.

“It was a very disruptive moment for us. We were absolutely within our rights,” Hodges said. “He was advocating a political position and a very conservative take on something he knew nothing about. If he had actually seen the film and been willing to discuss it with any of us then I think it would have been a very different kind of article.”

“Ridicule” is not part of the current film series, which has received no negative feedback from students or faculty.

Through it all, Hodges, and her colleague Paul Sandro (who teaches the upper-level answer to Hodges’s course: FRE460/560: French Cinema at Work and Play) remain positive about French cinema’s power to expand people’s emotional horizons, and encourage students and professors of all disciplines to share their passion.

“It’s a real nice thing to have more people than are just in the class come to these things,” Sandro said. “They can stick around and talk and form a little community.”

Schloss believes that sense of community can extend far beyond the walls of any Oxford classroom, and may benefit Miami students more than any traditional lecture ever could.

“If you’re having to spend time with life problems of people very different than you it might open up some kind of sense of expansiveness, compassion or at least understanding and recognition rather than outright ignoring or avoiding and resisting,” he said. “An education is a hell of a lot more than just classroom -- or could be.”