Ivone Margulies on In-Person Reenactment and Role-Play in French Verité Cinemas
The Department of Art and Art History presents In-Person Reenactment and Role-Play: The Confessional-Performative Turn in French Verité Cinemas, a lecture by Ivone Margulies, Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Ivone Margulies’s most recent book In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema considers what happens once a person replays her own past on camera. What are the redemptive or critical implications of this cinematic form of self-actualization and self-awareness? What are the exemplary, evidentiary, and therapeutic possibilities of this confessional-performative genre modeled on psychodrama and activist role-playing?
Margulies’s talk will focus on French verité and its centrality to this mode of self-actualization, with key examples from classic verité films (Chronicle of a Summer, The Human Pyramid, and Moi un Noir ), as well as a set of post-holocaust reenactments, monologue scenes that configure a post-traumatic aesthetic through sharp delineations of absence (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and The Karski Report).
Ivone Margulies is Professor of Film at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at City University of New York, (CUNY). Her most recent book In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema (2019) was launched with a related series at Anthology Film Archives. She is the co-editor (with Jeremi Szaniawski) of On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations (2019). She is the author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (translated into Portuguese and Spanish) and the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (2003). She has published on performance and realism in French and Brazilian cinemas (Eric Rohmer, André Bazin, Sacha Guitry, and Andrea Tonacci), as well as on moving image artists Steve Fagin, Stan Douglas, Sharon Lockhart, and Ana Maria Maiolino. She co-edited with B. Ruby Rich a Film Quarterly dossier on Chantal Akerman and translated and staged (with Flora Sussekind) Akerman’s Une Famille en Bruxelles in Portuguese.
Image: Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin.
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