Visiting Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies, Colgate University,
“False Matches: Short Film, Young Cinema and the Situationists”
In a 1960 issue of the journal, Ésprit, Michel Mesnil proposed that, united by their demographic and their cinephilia, dynamic French filmmakers of the late 1950s must be understood as a veritable movement: Jeune Cinéma, or Young Cinema. This same group of directors was attacked by the Situationist International (1957-1972), a postwar avant-garde, as both products and vectors of a society of spectacle. This talk analyzes the differing approaches to cinema which divided these two groups by investigating their common inspirational source: the court métrage, or short film.