Mme Smith

Examiner l'histoire de la colonisation française, c'est comprendre le présent. Nous allons étudier certains pays qui ont été colonisés par la France et découvrir leur histoire, leur culture, et leur expression artistique à travers des films particuliers. Faites des recherches préliminaires pour décider quel pays vous voudriez examiner de plus près...

Vous n'êtes pas limité(e) à ces sites, bien sûr. Dès que vous sélectionnerez un pays, continuez vos recherches spécifiques en français et en anglais.

Pour ne pas retaper toutes ces adresses, cherchez-les, coupez-les, collez-les à http://lhs.lexingtonma.org/Dept/WorldLang/smith.html

Voici les exigences du projet:

I. Histoire. Vous allez écrire un résumé de l'histoire de ce pays par rapport sa colonisation (et libération). Racontez les événements les plus essentiels, traçant l'évolution de ce pays et de son peuple sous l'influence française.

Minimum: une page en français, tapée à double espace.

II. Film. Vous allez choisir et regarder un film qui concerne ce pays. Vous pouvez choisir un film qui traite le thème de colonisation, mais ce n'est pas obligatoire. Après avoir regardé ce film, écrivez un synopsis qui comprendra:

* les noms des acteurs et du réalisateur

* l'intrigue, y compris la date, le lieu spécifique, le contexte social etc.

* votre opinion du film

Minimum: deux pages en français, tapées à double espace.

III. Exposé oral. Vous présenterez quelques scènes de ce film à la classe, avec un commentaire en français qui va situer le film dans son contexte géographique/politique/historique/artistique. Vous expliquerez pourquoi vous avez choisi ce pays & film, et vos réactions à ce que vous en avez appris.

Minimum: 5-10 minutes d'explication. Vous pouvez vous servir d'une fiche 3x5, mais essayez de ne pas lire votre texte. Incluez quelques accessoires visuels (une carte, une liste de vocabulaire, les noms/dates/lieux importants).

Outline and film choices le mardi 21 mars (D), le merc 22 (H)
(subject to approval)

Presentations le vend 31 mars - le vendredi 7 avril

*These dates are NON-NEGOTIABLE. Only severe illness can excuse a tardy submission.

Take care in selecting the web sites that you research and cite (note: a bibliography is required!). Not all sites are as scholarly as they seem; even Wikipedia recently revealed some sabotage and bias. Check to see that your sites are supported by universities or other academic enterprises. Also, avoid making generalizations in your report; each event or aspect that you describe should be backed up by reliable facts that you have cross-referenced over the course of your research.

For the first part of your written report (1 page), I do not expect an exhaustive accounting of the country's entire history under the French, but rather a synopsis

of the key events and personalities that have shaped the country. These factors may

or may not figure in the film that you choose to study, but I would like you to explain at least some of them in your oral presentation.

For the second, more personal part of your written report (2 pages), I'd like to know how you responded to the movie as an example of (or exception to) the country's social/political/cultural situation, past or present. First, briefly explain the film's plot and relationship to your chosen country; next, discuss your reactions to specific scenes and to the film overall. Here are some questions to consider:

1. What have you learned about the former colony that enriched your understanding

of the film, or vice versa?

2. How did the plot, actors, setting, and/or tone of the film affect you?

3. Do you see any parallels between the country's portrayal in the film and the

current status of its people within its borders, as well as in France?

In order to maximize our exposure to francophone culture, you are all encouraged to choose different countries. However, some countries offer fewer films than others and in order to facilitate your viewings of the available videos, you may choose films by continent and/or study countries in pairs if you wish. Keep in mind that your history and movie descriptions must be written separately, and you must choose different parts of the movie to share with the class.

Your oral presentation should place your chosen country in its colonial context and then present the movie relative to that framework. Choose a film segment of

5-10 minutes maximum that reveals something informative or unique about the country and/or its people, and be sure to address its significance in your narrative. You should know your content so well that you are not even TEMPTED to read to us! Constant reading will earn you an automatic C- no matter how good your material is.

This project will count as two exams: one written and one oral. The oral exam grade will count as 50% of this quarter's participation grade.

10. 95+ points
Text is well-written and concise, tracing key events in the country's historical, political and/or social evolution since its colonisation and liberation. Additionally, the text offers a compelling personal response to the selected film and its host culture.  

9.  92 points 
Text explains the country's history as a French colony coherently and effectively. Text provides an accessible film synopsis as well as an interesting discussion of the country's situation as portrayed in the movie. 8.  87 points

7.  85 points 
Text shows evidence of solid research and comprehension regarding the country in question. The writing is coherent, though some redundancies and anglicisms detract from the power of the thesis.

6.  82 points
5.  77 points
Text shows understanding of the country's past and present challenges, but falls short of explain-ing clearly the impact of French colonialism on its people. At times, confused syntax or poor word choice hinder comprehension.

4.  75 points
3.  72 points
Text offers a discussion of the country's colonial history, but the events seem randomly chosen and/or inaccurate. Written expression needs to improve in terms of organization and coherency.

2.  67 points
1.  65 points
Text may show familiarity with the country in question but offers only a fragmentary or superficial story of its struggles. More often than not the writing is incoherent and/or repetitive in its construction.

62-0 points 
Little or no attempt to complete the project.

10. 95+ points
Oral presentation is both informative and engaging, supported by a well-chosen film segment and visuals that clearly define the identity of the country in question. Speaker makes frequent eye contact with the audience while speaking in well-modulated and comprehensible French.

9.  92 points
Oral presentation is easy to understand, thanks to the speaker's animation and visual aids.

Film clip reveals informative and/or unique aspects of the target culture, supported by a clear analysis. Speaker relates well to the audience and looks for comprehension before continuing the narrative.

8.  87 points
7.  85 points
Satisfactory oral presentation. Selected film segment provides an interesting if somewhat limited view of the country's situation; the accompanying explanation is largely relevant and comprehensible. Speaker refers only occasionally to notes and makes an effort to speak clearly in French at all times.

6.  82 points
5.  77 points
Uneven oral presentation. Althought the film clip is topical, it is not fully explained by the narrative. Reliance on monotone speech, written notes and/or franglais tends to distract listeners from the presenter's message.

4.  75 points
3.  72 points
Oral presentation is occasionally hard to follow and/or uninviting to its listeners due to a seeming lack of preparation and/or props. Film segment may be dramatic or interesting but it is not clearly connected to the description of its host country. Presenter reads much of the text and/or makes little eye contact with the audience.

2.  67 points
1.  65 points
Disappointing oral presentation characterized by excessive use of franglais, exclusive dependence on notes and incoherence overall. Film segment is excessively brief and/or unrelated to the oral presentation.

62-0 points
Little or no attempt to complete the project.

Voici les films francophones que je vous ai procurés. Lisez leurs descriptions et décidez si vous voudriez sélectionner un de ces films, ou si vous préféreriez trouver un autre film à étudier. Tous ces films sont en français avec des sous titres en anglais.

Borom Sarret (1963) Ousmane Sembene, sénégalais
Spare masterpiece of protest against economic exploitation. Depicts the typical daily encounters of a cart driver in Dakar, Senegal.

La noire de... (1966) Ousmane Sembene, sénégalais
Sembene's first feature film, known in English as "Black Girl", made a profound impression at several international film festivals in 1966. The evolution of African cinema can probably be dated from this point. Shot in a simple, freewheeling style reminiscent of the early New Wave, it tells a direct, bitter, unambiguous story of exile and despair. The heroine, Diouanna, is a Senegalese maid taken to the Riviera by her French employers. It is only when she is out of Africa that she realizes what being African means: it means being a thing, no longer Diouanna, but simply "the black girl".

Touki Bouki (1973) Djibril Diop Mambéty, sénégalais
Senagalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty's story of two young lovers who long to escape to Paris is a legend in African cinema. Like their New Wave counterparts in France, young Mory and his girlfriend Anta are alienated from their own society and imagine freedom far from the dusty streets of their hometown Dakar. Living at the edge of the heaving, crystal-blue ocean, their dream city doesn't seem so far away, and the lovers embark on an exhilarating picaresque adventure as they try to hustle money for their passage. They try gambling but lose; they steal the receipts of a charity wrestling match, but take the wrong strongbox. Finally, they manage to rob a rich, predatory man and escape in his roadster. Flushed with victory, Mory imagines himself riding triumphantly into Dakar like a Wolof prince, and suddenly Paris with all its mysteries is within their reach.

A rueful parable about fear and freedom, Touki Bouki has all the restless energy of modernity and all the power of traditional African symbolism. Mory's motorbike is accessorized with a pair of cattle horns mounted on the handlebars, and Josephine Baker's sweet voice leads them on through their journey. But the rift between these two worlds is all too real. Though both Mory and Anta board the ocean liner that will take them to their destination, only one of them will stay on to face the truth of realizing a dream.

Xala (1974) Ousmane Sembene, sénégalais
Sembene's savage and hilarious satire of the modern African bourgeoisie was heavily censored in Senegal. Forsaking the more obvious (and politically acceptable) targets of European exploitation and racism, Sembene here zeroes in on a far touchier subject: the entire blackfacing of white colonial policies after independence was granted. The hero of the film is a self-satisfied, westernized Senegalese businessman who is suddenly struck down with the "xala", an ancient Senegalese curse rendering him impotent. His vain search for a cure becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of Africans achieving liberation through dependence on western technology and bureaucratic structures.

Chocolat (1988) Claire Denis, française
A young French woman returns to the vast silence of West Africa to contemplate her childhood days in a colonial outpost in Cameroon. Her strongest memories are of the family's houseboy, Protee - a man of great nobility, intelligence and beauty - and the intricate nature of relationships in a racist society.

The film's formal structure prioritises the role of memory, enabling the narrative to explore the problematic dyadic relationships of a past colonialism. Conveyed with a dry sense of humour, Chocolat opens with the adult, France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), watching an African man and his son indulge in the warm waters and soft dark brown sand of the African coast. France later accepts a lift from this man, and her childhood memories are conjured by the landscape. Colonial life is then examined through the visually detailed portrayal of the people and events of everyday life seen through the eyes of the child France (Cécile Ducasse), who lives with her young parents: local administrator father, Marc (François Cluzet), and mother, Aimee (Giulia Boschi). The central figure of France's memory is Protee (Issach Bankolé), their house servant and her only friend. The crash of a plane in the nearby mountains brings unexpected houseguests whose arrival shatters the evenness of Aimee and Protee's relationship, a relationship burdened by intense mutual but unattainable desire.

Afrique, je te plumerai (1993) Jean-Marie Teno, camerounien
Afrique, je te plumerai provides a devastating overview of one hundred years of cultural genocide in Africa. Director Jean-Marie Teno uses Cameroon, the only African country colonized by three European powers (German, French, and British), for a carefully researched case study of the continuing damage done to traditional African societies by alien colonial and neo-colonial cultures. Unlike most historical films, Afrique, je te plumerai moves from present to past (and from color to black & white), peeling away layer after layer of African cultural forgetting. Teno explains: "I wanted to trace cause and effect between an intolerable present and the colonial violence of yesterday... to understand how a country could fail to succeed as a state which was once composed of well-structured traditional societies."

Teno begins with present-day cultural production in Cameroon, examining press censor-ship, government controlled publishing and the flood of European media and [school] books. He next looks at his own eurocentric education during the 1960s. "Study, my child," he was told, "so you can become like a white man." Condescending [European] newsreels from the 1930s reveal that France conceived its "civilizing mission" as destroying traditional African social structures and replacing them with a colonial regime of "évolués": black Africans, Western-educated and, Teno emphasizes, indoctrinated to accept European colonizers' language, values and superiority. 

Survivors of the Cameroonian independence struggle recall how the French colonial rulers eliminated any popular nationalist leaders, and, on the eve of independence, installed a corrupt, bureaucratic African regime -- neocolonialism -- which continues to serve Western economic and political interests, to pillage the country, and deny democracy and basic human rights to the people. Director Teno tells a story that still applies to many modern-day African nations, suggesting that post-colonialism is not "post" at all; it has merely taken a new and insidious form in Africa today.

Beau travail (1999) Claire Denis, française
Beau travail had its US premiere at the New York Film Festival of 1999, followed by a limited release in select cities. "Select" is the key word here, as Beau travail is clearly a film for a specialized audience - dialogue is minimal, and events are indicated rather than dramatized. But for those willing to take the cinematic leap, Claire Denis has created a film that is breathtakingly visual and unique.

Instead of doing a literal adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Denis uses it as a starting point. Beau travail is a memory piece that takes on the hypnotic quality of a fever dream; Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), banished from the Foreign Legion and living in present-day Marseilles, looks back on his Legionaire days and the episode that brought about his downfall - his jealousy and persecution of the virtuous, self-sacrificing Sentain (Gregoire Colin). Stationed in the northeast African nation of Djibouti, a remote area of blue skies, blazing sun, sparkling sea, and barren rock, Galoup and his men live the correct, rigid life of the Legionaire - spotless and well-creased unforms, demanding physical labor, and ritualized exercise and gymnastics. Except for those evenings when they cut loose at the local disco with their beautiful African girlfriends, they live in a hyper-masculine, male-only domain. But when Sentain's heroics lead to growing popularity with both his fellow Legionaires and the unit commander, Forestier (Michel Subor), a resentful Galoup embarks on a course of action that leads to his own destruction. The final scenes of him in a disco - alone, isolated, and spinning out of control - are unforgettable. Claire Denis, who as a young girl lived near the Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, tells her story with alternating images of stark despair and staggering beauty. Film buffs on the lookout for something original should take on Beau travail - it's a memorable and rewarding experience.

Mon oncle Antoine (1971) Claude Jutra, canadien
Claude Jutra's masterwork is a perceptive, subtle, and emotionally devastating portrait of pre-Quiet Revolution Québec that traces the vast personal and political fissures about to tear open the rural Catholic heartland. It is also a lyrical film full of charm and macabre humour. It is set in a small mining town in the eastern townships in the 1940s when the general store was the crossroads of village life. On Christmas Eve for a few hours the villagers forget their poverty and converge on the store for gossip and revelry. In the midst of it all is Uncle Antoine, the town's undertaker, with his ribald humour whetted by occasional recourse to the gin bottle, and always somewhere in the background is his nephew, 15-year-old Benoît, observing it all&emdash;the hypocrisy, joy, despair, carnality, class tension, and strange melancholy of the adults around him. Some fine acting, Jutra's episodic narrative structure, and his inspired use of landscape&emdash;enhanced by the memorable camerawork of Michel Brault&emdash;render unforgettable this portrait of a sad, wintry town and the end of innocence.

Mon oncle Antoine is one of the few Quebec films to have reached a wide theatrical audience in English Canada; critics across the country, in polls commissioned by the Toronto Inter-national Film Festival in 1984 and 1993, voted it the "greatest Canadian film of all time."

The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000) Patrice Leconte, français
La veuve de Saint-Pierre is one of those brooding, romantic costume dramas that only the French seem to do well these days. Far from being escapist fare, it is a dark, often profound meditation on the human condition and the vagaries of the human heart.

In 1849, on the remote French island of Saint-Pierre off the coast of Newfoundland, an illiterate fisherman commits a drunken, senseless murder and is sentenced to the guillotine. But since the island has no guillotine, or "widow-maker", the governor must send for one--a process that will take years. Meanwhile, the fisherman is imprisoned in the island fortress; the wife of the garrison commander (Juliette Binoche) takes pity on the condemned man and sets out to rehabilitate him, with the help (at first reluctant, later wholehearted) of her loving husband (Daniel Auteuil). Soon the captain and his wife are defying the governor in their attempts to help the condemned man--with tragic consequences.

La veuve de Saint-Pierre works on several levels: as a romantic drama; as a denunciation of capital punishment and the cruelty of confusing the letter of the law with justice; and as a brilliant delineation of the nature of love, courage and self-sacrifice. Eduardo Serra's photography of the wintry landscape of Saint-Pierre (actually Nova Scotia) is marvelous, and the acting deserves the highest praise. By now, of course, everyone knows how exquisite Juliette Binoche is, and she is as good as ever here. But the thespian honors in this movie go to Daniel Auteuil, an actor of masterful subtlety and power, who makes Gérard Depardieu look like a double order of "jambon à l'os."

The Barbarian Invasions (2003) Denys Arcand, canadien
A somewhat lovable epicurean womanizer (Rémy Girard as Rémy) is dying of cancer in the hallway of a crowded Quebec hospital. His accomplished millionaire son Sebastian (Stéphane Rousseau) decides that as a fitting last gesture of love for his partially estranged father he will make dad's last days as happy and comfortable as possible. To this end he gets him not just a private room, but a private floor in the basement of the hospital by bribing the right people. He recruits a handful of Rémy's old friends and ex-lovers to come and visit him amid sumptuous servings of food and wine. He pays some ex-students to come and remember their not exactly beloved teacher. And finally he gets a strayed family member Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance) to procure and administer heroin to Rémy for his pain.

Girard is excellent in the part (although he carries a bit too much weight for a guy about to die of cancer); but what makes this an outstanding film is the award-winning script and direction by Denys Arcand. This is a movie that is witty, honest, funny, sentimental (but not too sentimental), deeply human, candid about life, love, sex, and death, and filled with the kind of sharp, satirical dialogue that all screenwriters wish they had the ability to write. Bottom line: this film won a slew of international awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004.