May 18, 4:30 PM: Brian Jacobson, "Sulfurous French Cinema and the Political Life/Style ...

Brian Jacobson, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History, The University of Toronto"Sulfurous French Cinema and the Political Life/Style of Gas" This paper is about French cinema’s contribution to the richly agonistic visual politics of French petroleum. It focuses on the two decades after the 1951 discovery of a substantial deposit of sulfur-rich natural gas in the French south—a discovery that had, by the early 1960s, transformed the nation’s economy and its energy politics. Using a series of industrial shorts produced to promote this gas in the 1950s and a film with seemingly little to do with the gas, Roger Vadim’s 1966 adaptation of Emile Zola’s 1871 novel La curée, the paper traces the material and semiotic energy exchanges that entangled the worlds of French art, technology, and science in the early years of the “two cultures” debate.

Date: May 18, 2018
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM