- When:
- Friday, April 25, 2008, 7:00pm - 7:00pm
- Description:
- The 1929 film Finis Terrae opens the two day symposium Jean Epstein's Interdisciplinary Cinema and the French Avant-Garde. The symposium on Jean Epstein - filmmaker, theoretician, poet, and critic - aims to expand our understanding of Epstein's diverse oeuvre and his involvement with the French avant-garde movements, especially in cinema's late silent era. In Finis Terrae, two young men, Ambroise and Jean-Marie, have an argument over a broken bottle of wine and a missing knife. Ambroise falls ill when a cut on his hand caused by a piece of broken glass becomes infected. His colleagues just think he is being lazy when he stops working and they ignore him. However, when Jean-Marie finds his missing knife and goes to see Ambroise he realizes that he is seriously ill. Epstein created this work amongst the islands of Brittany using local residents and crews from Ouessant. (Jean Epstein, 1929, 81 minutes, 35mm print courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française)
- Co-sponsored by Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, the France Chicago Center, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, the Mass Culture Workshop, and the New Media Workshop
Finis Terrae
introduction by Tom Gunning
