Do you love cinema, the French language, or perhaps both? Or are you still mourning the loss of downtown’s last movie theatre and longing to watch a film in a setting that revives that magic?

The Yale French Department Ciné Club, organized by Apolline Cuchet and Saly Touré, invites you to explore timeless classics and award-winning contemporary films that shape French cinema. From animated films and political dramas to comedies and heartfelt coming-of-age stories, there will be something for everyone! Screenings are open to everyone in the Yale community. Films will be screened in French with English subtitles.

We’re excited to present our fourth screening of the cycle entitled “La Discorde” (Discord) on Thursday, November 7th at 5:30 PM at HQ 136, featuring the critically acclaimed film Le Grand Bain by Gilles Lellouche.

Screened out of competition at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and inspired by The Full Monty (1997), by Peter Cattaneo, this movie focuses on seven men from different walks of life and different generations, but who are all undergoing a personal crisis—depression, divorce, unemployment… These outcasts come together against all odds to form an all-male synchronized swimming team, and to train—and hopefully win—for the world’s championship, they are helped and coached by Delphine (Virginie Efira) and Amanda (Leïla Bekhti), who are both retired synchronized swimmers and medalists. 

Want to take your mind off the current state of the world and have a laugh after a tense election period? Join us for this hilarious film on masculinity and community. If you loved Philippe Katerine’s performance at the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympic Games, you’re going to love him in this movie too. 

The screening will begin with an introduction and will be followed by a discussion.

We look forward to seeing you for an evening of exceptional cinema and stimulating conversation!

Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 5:30pm

 HQ #136

Chantal Thomas’s lecture title: Comment inventer sa chambre à soi: Virginia Woolf, Colette, Patti Smith. 

The University has established the Naomi Schor Lecture Fund to honor and perpetuate the memory of Professor Schor by bringing to the Yale community distinguished speakers on the broad range of topics represented by her teaching and research.  Naomi Schor was a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature and culture, whose writings focused on the novel, but whose interests spanned a much wider area, including feminist theory, women’s and gender studies, the visual arts, interdisciplinary approaches to literature and history, and the relation of universalism, human rights, and citizenship to the more particular national, ethnic, and immigrant identities of America and France.

Speakers have included Joan Scott , Francoise Gaspard, , Margaret Phelan, Linda Nochlin, Judith Butler, Alice Kaplan, Patrick Weil, Roya Hakakian, Griselda Pollock, Susan Suleiman, Maurice Samuels, Pierre Saint-Amand, Anne Garetta, and Roger Cohen.

Dear Faculty, Staff, Students and Friends of the French Department,

We’re excited to present our third screening of the cycle entitled “La Discorde” (Discord) on Friday, October 25th at 6:30 PM at the 53 Wall Street Auditorium, featuring the critically acclaimed film Beau Travail by Claire Denis.

Beau Travail is a visual and emotional masterpiece that immerses viewers in the world of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti. The film centers on the enigmatic Sentain, whose arrival sparks a dangerous jealousy in his fellow legionnaire, Galoup, brilliantly portrayed by  Denis Lavant. Inspired by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Denis artfully navigates themes of longing, rivalry, and the search for identity amidst the backdrop of a harsh desert landscape.

Critics have lauded Beau Travail for its stunning cinematography and poetic exploration of masculinity, desire, alienation, and colonial legacies. Beau Travail has been awarded several prestigious accolades, including the Best Director Award at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize. Join us to experience what many consider one of the greatest films of all time—it’s sure to be a cinematic delight!
The screening will begin with an introduction and will be followed by a discussion.

We look forward to seeing you for an evening of exceptional cinema and stimulating conversation!

Best regards,
 
The Yale French Department Ciné Club

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

 

Adam Shatz

editor and author

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 | 4:30 pm

Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)

L01

 

Humanities Now

Frantz Fanon has been dead since 1961, yet his name is invoked with increasing frequency, and has itself become a kind of Rorschach test in discussions of white supremacy, the Middle East, and settler-colonialism. In his talk at the Whitney Humanities Center, Adam Shatz, the author of a new biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, will reflect on the Martinican psychiatrist’s life, work, and contemporary legacy.

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”

About The Rebel’s Clinic
In the era of Black Lives Matter and the war in Gaza, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. This searching biography tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life—and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and Department of French