PARIS REFRAMED: 1960s French Cinema at the End of Empire

This talk will probe the role of the ethnographer Jean Rouch in shaping cutting-edge 1960s French cinema. By tracing the connections among three films—an ethnography filmed in pre-independence Ivory Coast, a French New Wave classic, and a Parisian ethnography made in 1960—I will organically integrate an under-studied contextual element—the end of the French colonial empire—into our understanding of early 1960s French cinema and its relevance today.