For the past forty years, Eric Rohmer has revived a great French tradition of analyzing emotions and feelings (that of Corneille, Marivaux or Musset), by giving his characters the passion to explain themselves in a subtle language. At the same time, he remains the most coherent filmmaker of the New Wave, thanks to his capacity to describe a society from different points of view--especially those of young women or lonely dreamers... In this three-day symposium on Eric Rohmer, American and French scholars will try to better understand his body of work, in which classical culture meets modernity, and where words meet their reality on the screen.
Eric Rohmer: From the Script to the Screen

Conference

April 26 - 28, 2001

at the University of Chicago,
Film Center of Chicago,
& the Alliance Française de Chicago

Thursday, April 26: Gene Siskel Film Center of Chicago (Columbus Drive & Jackson Bvd.)
7:45 pm Screening of L'Amour l'après-midi followed by discussion led by Zouzou and Dudley Andrew (Yale Univ.)
Friday, April 27: Univ. of Chicago, Film Studies Center (Cobb Hall 307, 5811 S. Ellis Ave.)
Moderator: James Lastra (Univ. of Chicago)
10:00 am Tom Gunning (Univ. of Chicago): "After Bazin: The Dialectics of Realism and Artifice in the Critical Writings of Eric Rohmer"
10:45 am Janet Bergstrom (UCLA): "Rohmer and Murnau"
11:30 am Maria Tortajada (Univ. de Lausanne): "Rohmer and the Mechanics of Seduction"
Moderator: Michel Marie (Univ. de Paris-III)
2:00 pm Marie-Anne Guérin (Univ. de Paris-III): "Love as a 'Miracle' in Rohmer's Movies"
2:45 pm David Heinemann (Columbia Univ.): "Vision and Volition: Narrational Strategies and Character Subjectivity in the Films of Rohmer"
3:30 pm Simon Dixon (Montana State Univ.): "A Man that Looks on Glass: Rohmer and David Hockney"
4:30 pm Hilary A. Radner (Univ. of Notre Dame): "Rohmer and the Americanization of the French New Wave"
5:15 pm Dudley Andrew (Yale Univ.): "Eric Rohmer?s Magnetic Fluid"
6:00 pm Noël Herpe (Univ. of Chicago): "Rohmer and Television"
Saturday, April 28: Alliance Française de Chicago (54 W. Chicago Ave.)
Moderator: Tom Gunning (Univ. of Chicago)
10:00 am Sylvie Robic-de Baecque: (Universite de Paris-X): "Rohmer et le classicisme: la vraie beauté et son fantôme"
10:45 am Michel Marie (Univ. de Paris-III): "De La Punition de Jean Rouch au Rayon vert"
11:30 am Francis Vanoye (Univ. de Paris-X): "Rohmer, Renoir, et le corps féminin"
12:15 am Vincent Amiel (Univ. de Caen): "Rohmer et la crise du récit"
LUNCH Buffet and screening of Eric Rohmer, preuves à l'appui (documentary by André-S. Labarthe).
Moderator: Noël Herpe (Univ. of Chicago)
3:00 pm Zouzou, Françoise Etchegaray, Frederic Bonnaud, Laurent Perrin: brief talks and a roundtable discussion
5:00 pm Screening of a "making of" video previewing the new Rohmer film, L'Anglaise et le Duc.
Entry fees: $7 (Film Center); Free (Univ. of Chicago); $20 (Alliance française).
For more information, contact Noël Herpe: (773)576-4326 or nherpe@uchicago.edu

French and English versions of paper abstracts will be available at the conference.

This conference was made possible with the support of:

The Chicago Group on Modern France, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, the Division of the Humanities, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for International Studies Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation Fund, the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities (University of Chicago), the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Alliance française de Chicago, the French Cultural Services in Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance: please call Dan Bertsche at (773)576-4326 in advance.

Updated: March 28, 2001