The Parisian Lens

Catalog description

This course explores Paris through the combined approaches of geography, history, poetry, photography, literature and film. Paris as the center for ambition and crime (Balzac, Villon), the preferred location of the flâneur (Baudelaire), its outskirts as the land of delinquency and rebellion (Apollinaire), contemporary Parisian attitudes (Robitaille), the city as labyrinth for surreal adventure (Breton), New Wave counterculture (Godard), the terrain for post-colonial nightmares (Haneke), contrary-minded freedom seekers (Renoir) and student rebels (May '68). We will also look at the French role in making Paris perhaps the world's most active nostalgia factory via the photography of Robert Doisneau and the films of Truffaut. Conducted in French.