Carolyn Durham

Inez K. Gaylord Professor of French Language and Literature; Chair of French

I teach three courses in the Film Studies Program. Comparative Film Studies and Francophone Film are both Category I courses taught in English; I also teach a Category III course in French on Fiction and Film.  In keeping with my interest in the cross-cultural study of film, I have published a book on Hollywood’s relationship with French cinema:  Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their America Remakes (1998).  More recently, I have focused on the construction of Paris in both American and French films in articles such as the following: “Sighting/Siting/Citing the City: The Construction of Paris in Twenty-First Century Cinema,” PostScript 27 (2007);  “Finding France on Film:  Chocolat, Amélie, and Le Divorce, French Cultural Studies 19 (2008); “Bridging the Gaps: The Construction of Paris in Luc Besson’s Angel-A,” Studies in French Cinema, 11.2 (2011); and “Songs, Sex, and the City: Reconfiguring Borders in Christophe Honoré’s Les Chansons d’amour,” French Review 86.2 (2013).  I have also published articles on adaptation: “Auterism and Adaptation in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un Long dimanche de fiançailles,” French Review 81 (2008) and “Original Adaptation in Fred Varga’s and Régis Wargnier’s Pars vite et reviens tard,” French Review 85 (2011). I love all genres of cinema although I am particularly fond of self-referential films that disrupt established conventions; hence my continued fondness for the French New Wave, and Jean-Luc Godard in particular.  Film allows us, in the words of Marcel Proust, “to possess other eyes, to look at the world through the eyes of others.”