Interiors and Exteriors

Note: event start time has been changed to 5:30pm.

In conjunction with an exhibition at the Smart Museum, this year-long film series traces the relationship between the emerging generation of avant-garde movements in 1950s France and the surrealist movement, re-established in Paris after the war. These contesting visions of the relationship between interior and exterior life in art and film represent a tense exploration of the personal and the political within reconstruction-era France.

Screening tonight:

Jacques Baratier’s 1950 documentary Désordre (Disorder, 18 min, 35mm) delves into the social and intellectual culture that thrived in the Parisian neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés after World War II. From underground Jazz clubs to literary cafés frequented by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and young poets and artists, Baratier shows the fluid intergenerational creative culture that thrived in 1950s Paris.

Almost two decades later, Maurice Lemaître’s 1969 film Mai 68: Soulèvement de la jeunesse (May 68: Youth Uprising, 28 min, 16mm ) merges the histories of avant-garde practices and youth political culture. Manifestoes read over scratched and appropriated footage of student and worker protests across France in May 1968 seek to identify a shared lineage between avant-garde practices and social and political activism in postwar France.

Curated by Jennifer Cohen and Marin Sarvé-Tarr, PhD students in Art, in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives.