Film Series:

Films on the Green SUMMER 2019 

French and Francophone Female Directors in 13 Different Movie Screenings

In light of the recent passing of French filmmaker, feminist and pioneer of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda, Films on the Green dedicates this special 12th edition of “Women Behind the Camera” to her memory. This year’s program, highlighting...   Read More

7:30 PM–9:30 PM    Columbia University, Low Library steps

SPECIAL OUTDOOR CINEMA EVENT: OLIVIA (FILMS ON THE GREEN)

Jacqueline Audry, 1951, 95 min.

*In French with English subtitles No RSVPs necessary for this event, seating on the steps of Low Library is plentiful. Set in 1890, an innocent English teenager, Olivia (Olivia), arrives at a small boarding school outside Paris. The majority of the pupils there...   Read More

6:00 PM–8:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Film/Panel Discussion:

Repairing the Invisible

Kader Attia, in conversation with Souleymane Bachir Diagne

To RSVP, please click here. Kader Attia will present his film Reflecting Memory (2016, 48 min.), followed by an in-depth dialogue with Souleymane Bachir Diagne about the idea of "repairing the invisible" in his art and how notions of repair emerge...   Read More

9:00 AM–6:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

To download a PDF about this event click here.

Conference:

WHAT IS SUFFERING WORTH?
PERSPECTIVES ACROSS DISCIPLINES ON THE TREATMENT OF VICTIMS

Franco-American Conference in Law, Criminology, Economics, History and Philosophy

To RSVP, please click here. This interdisciplinary symposium explores a crucial but little-studied issue with growing importance today: what is the value of harm suffered by victims, whether of terrorism, crime or natural disasters. In law, politics,...   Read More

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

Happiness (Le Bonheur)

Agnès Varda, 1965, 90 min.

To RSVP, please click here. One of Agnès Varda's most provocative films, Le Bonheur examines, with a deceptively cheery palette and the spirited strains of Mozart, the ideas of fidelity and happiness in a modern, self-centered world.   Read More

7:00 PM–9:00 PM    MAISON FRANÇAISE 2ND FLOOR, BUELL HALL

Book Club:

Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Moderated by Célia Abele

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6:00 PM–7:00 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Roundtable Discussion:

Expanding the World of Literature 

Tash Aw, in conversation with Mark Mazower

To RSVP, please click here.  How hard is it to remain within our comfort zones when we read and write? How does the writer’s gaze remain unwittingly locked by long-established conventions? As the world’s economic power bases have begun to...   Read More

9:00 AM–2:00 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

To download a PDF about this event click here.

Conference:

Religion and Rituality

Fourth Annual Conference of the Francophone Society of the Philosophy of Religion

To RSVP, please click here.  Rites are a privileged subject matter for anthropology as they allow to subsume under the same concept of religion various practices by which human societies manifest the systems of belief around which...   Read More

6:00 PM–9:00 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Roundtable Discussion:

Critique 13/13 Seminar

Horkheimer and Adorno with Axel Honneth

To RSVP, please click here. Seminar session on the early Frankfurt School with Professors Axel Honneth and Bernard E. Harcourt discussing Max Horkheimer's 1937 essay, "Traditional and Critical Theory," and Theodor Adorno's 1931 essay, "The Actuality of...   Read More

6:30 PM–8:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Film:

Sometimes in April

Raoul Peck, 2005, 140 min.

To RSVP, please click here.  Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) offers a soul-shaking account of the Rwandan genocide as seen through the eyes of a Hutu man fighting to save his Tutsi wife and children as the unstoppable tide of violence...   Read More

6:00 PM–8:00 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Panel Discussion:

In Defense of Democracy and Liberalism

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi in conversation with Adam Gopnik

To RSVP, please click here. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi and Adam Gopnik explore ideas about current threats to democracy, the meaning and value of liberalism, and the rise of populism in the U.S., France, Great Britain and beyond, explored in their recent books,...   Read More

6:30 PM–9:00 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Film/Panel Discussion:

After Hitler: the Untold Story

Olivier WIEVIORKA and David KORN-BRZOZA, 2016, 90 min.

To RSVP, please click here. Documentary film screening and discussion with historian and co-director Olivier Wieviorka about the role of the historian in creating documentary films. In the five years that separated the end of the Second World War from the...   Read More

6:00 PM–7:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Panel Discussion:

The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940-1945

Olivier Wieviorka, with responses by Robert O. Paxton and Mark Mazower

To RSVP, please click here. Olivier Wieviorka talks about his newly translated book, The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2019), a sweeping analytical history of the underground anti-Nazi forces during...   Read More

6:30 PM–8:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Film:

Leadersheep (Tous au Larzac)

Christian Rouaud, 2011, 118 min.

To RSVP, please click here. How did a group of isolated farmers, clueless about politics, manage to win a fight against the French government’s decision to extend a military camp over their land? This documentary focuses on a 10-year long struggle...   Read More

6:00 PM–7:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Lecture:

Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria 

Joshua Cole, with response by Emmanuelle Saada

To RSVP, please click here. Joshua Cole talks about his new book, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell UP, 2019), that explores an episode of anti-Jewish violence in the Algerian city of...   Read More

9:00 AM–6:00 PM    Italian Academy, Amsterdam Avenue

Conference:

The Restitution Debate: African Art in a Global Society

International Conference

To RSVP, please click here. In November 2018, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy released a report that had been prepared for the President of France entitled The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational...   Read More

7:00 PM–9:00 PM    MAISON FRANÇAISE 2ND FLOOR, BUELL HALL

Book Club:

La nuit des temps by René Barjavel

Moderated by Virginie Niedermayer

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6:00 PM–7:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Lecture:

The Notre-Dame Fire, and the Paris Cathedral's Original Fall and Resurrection

Allan Potofsky

To RSVP, please click here. The April 2019 fire that nearly destroyed the Cathedral of Notre-Dame revived a polemic with resonance well beyond France. Should the edifice be reconstructed “as it was” or is the very idea of Gothic...   Read More

6:30 PM–8:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Film:

Polisse

Maïwenn, Emmanuelle Bercot, 2011, 127 min.

To RSVP, please click here. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for 13 César Awards, Polisse follows the daily lives of a tight-knit team of men and women working in the Child Protection Unit of the...   Read More

6:00 PM–7:30 PM    Maison Française East Gallery, Buell Hall

Lecture:

A French Family: from the Caribbean to Dunkirk by way of Algeria

Audrey Celestine

To RSVP, please click here. In this intimate family history that spans from the 1930s to today, Audrey Celestine traces fragments of the lives of three generations of the same family. The history moves from the Caribbean to Algeria and the Mediterranean...   Read More