French Fiction Into Film

An archivist in the French National Library once opined that the average French filmmaker is above all a bookworm and that this is what makes French cinema unique. How does fiction enable filmmaking? And how has film reinvented literature? This interdisciplinary course invites students to learn more about the widespread cultural process of film adaptation that has animated French culture for more than a century now. Students proceed chronologically through novels, novellas, and short stories by major authors such as Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Mauriac, Duras, and Sembène, while watching a range of film adaptations based on these works. Directors include Clément, Franju, Ophüls, Renoir, Rivette, and Sembène. These encounters between literature and film are then used as an opportunity to discuss various topics related to the screen adaptation in its social, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions. Attention will be paid to both French literary history and French film history, and we will be particularly interested in the ways in which they can shed light on each other. The aim of the course is to enhance students’ comparative close reading skills and, more broadly, to reboot their relationship to both literature and film, enticing them to ask new questions about each of the two media.

This is a bi-weekly course consisting of lectures on Mondays and, depending on enrollment, seminar-style discussions on Wednesdays. The class is taught in English, but students will have the option to read and write in French. Films are in French with English subtitles.