Wednesday 31 October - Diana Greenwald (Wadham) and Jamie Steele (Exeter University)

JOINT SESSION
17:00 - 18:30
Fitzjames Room I, Merton College
Drinks and nibbles provided  

Diana Greenwald (Wadham)

Painting the Provincial: A Statistical Analysis of Rural Imagery at the Paris Salons, 1790-1881

 

 Millet, The Angelus, 1859

Abstract

During the 19th century, educated urban Frenchmen created thousands of books, articles and images depicting and analyzing rural France and its inhabitants. Academic analyses of this fascination and its motivation have been couched in anecdotal terms. Using quantitative methods and a previously untapped data set—catalogues of the roughly 130,000 paintings displayed at the Paris Salon between 1790 and 1881—this project charts how images of rural life developed over the course of the century. It also explores how this development related to the economic and social modernization of France.  

Diana Greenwald is a second year M.Phil. candidate in Economic & Social History at Oxford. Her dissertation applies statistical methods to the study of 19th century French art. For her undergraduate degree, she studied Art History and Economics at Columbia University.

Jamie Steele (Exeter University)

Imag(in)ed Space of the Regions: the creation of a regional cinema aesthetic in the works of the Dardenne Brothers and Bouli Lanners

 

Still from La Promesse (1996)

Abstract:

The current state of Europe is changing, as it re-discovers its roots and its regions. This is neatly exemplified by the European Union’s ‘Europe of the Regions’ mantra, which has promoted the conflicting ideals of sub-state and supra-national notions of identity. This paper therefore aims to open up the possibility of categorizing cinemas regionally, by utilizing the federal state of Belgium as a paradigmatic case study. In Belgium, the recent regionalization of film funding institutions has redrawn the cultural cartography, and has clearly signaled that the national exposition of identities is no longer relevant to the denizens of the federal state. I will hence engage with the spatial discourse of the Walloon region as a relational space of flows (i.e its relations with France, use of the French language and migration) and its effects upon the filmic opuses produced in the region. I will explore to what extent the Belgian/ Walloon culture of self-doubt and identity crisis, which is oft perceived in relation to their position under a French cultural model and the creation of a monoculture, is actually re-produced on screen. In order to nuance the notion of a Walloon regional screen culture, I will consider the alternate approaches to the region, its peoples and its landscapes by the Walloon filmmakers the Dardenne Brothers (in particular Rosetta, 1999) and Bouli Lanners (El Dorado, 2008). 

Jamie Steele is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. His area of study is interdisciplinary, blending together French language studies, and ‘La Francophonie’, with Film Studies. His PhD research focuses upon the national film production
 of Belgium to explore the transnational connections forged between nation-states in Europe predicated upon a linguistic allegiance. At Undergraduate level, he studied French at Exeter University. He was recently published in the Spring Edition of the Trespassing
 Journal, with the article entitled ‘A Cinema without Borders: exploring the notions of culture and identity in the cinema of the Dardenne Brothers’.