Courses

French 3058-Advanced Oral Communication: La Vie Contemporaine—Kevin Bongiorni
This class will focus on contemporary France. We will read about and discuss contemporary issues. Students will also be required to participate in a number of out of class activities including on the street interviews and participation in the Fête de la Francophonie Américaine in Troyes.

French 4915-Independent Work—Kevin Bongiorni and Rosemary Peters
Permission of Instructor required

French 2154-Intermediate Oral Communication—Rosemary Peters
The goal of this course is to improve students’ comfort and fluency in spoken French, through oral practice around day-to-day living. By the end of the 5-week course, students can expect to be able to perform oral tasks at various skill levels, including asking for directions; buying a métro/train ticket; shopping at the marché; asking about/discussing the weather; making a hotel reservation; ordering in a restaurant; interviewing native speakers; answering questions about themselves, their families, their studies; exchanging money; summarizing a short reading passage; describing an activity in detail; offering opinions on a film; conducting substantial conversations with native speakers; conducting a sustained phone call in French; leading a class discussion about a recent event, experience or conversation.

French 2801-French Classics in Translation: Writing Père Goriot's Paris: The Past and Future City—Rosemary Peters
What is a city? This course will focus on the experience of Paris as a place & a personality, through an in-depth reading of Honoré de Balzac’s 1834 novel Le Père Goriot. In Balzac’s novel, we encounter the ghosts of Paris’s pasts, from medieval urban organization to Revolutionary economics, Napoleonic social nobility to early industrialization that will propel the city from the past into the present and future. Students will examine how the Paris of today remains influenced by events and inventions of the nineteenth century, through the lens of how the Paris represented in 19th C writing was shaped by the preceding centuries. Through museum visits, walking tours, short readings, films and cultural activities, students will gain insight into the many natures and identities of Paris, its architecture, its flavor, its history and its vision for the future.

*French 4031-The French Film: The French New Wave and Beyond—Kevin Bongiorni (June 16 – July 1)
This is an intensive seminar studying the French New Wave cinema that came into being during the period of 1958-1962. This movement in cinema was marked not only for its ideas and innovations, but it also established a new generation of young filmmakers—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, and Claude Chabrol among them—who would transform cinema in a way that would influence and change cinema and art around the world.

*CMST 3013 & FREN 4031 will be taught in two sequential modules; together they survey the entire history of French cinema.

Film and Media Arts 4001-Advanced Topics in Film and Media Arts: Experimental Video—Trish Suchy
No filmmaking experience is required. This course is a hands-on workshop in which we will experiment with formal elements of filmmaking in digital video projects. Through experiments with mise-en-scene and montage, we will explore the visual and acoustic vocabularies of the screen, with emphasis on the French avant-garde. Course projects are designed to take full advantage of our location in Paris as well as the milieu of French experimental filmmaking. The course will include a field trip to the Institut Lumière in Lyon, where French filmmaking began.

CMST 3013- French Cinema, 1895-1958—Trish Suchy (June 1 – June 15) In 1895 on a screen set up in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, the very first cinema audience watched in amazement as their world moved before their eyes in films presented by the Lumière brothers, and in the decade that followed, the magical films of Georges Méliès showed how the cinema could construct as well as reflect a world. Paris has remained a capital of cinema. We will follow its development from the fin-de-siecle inventions of the Lumières to the comic brilliance of Jacques Tati in the late 1950s. Along the way we will experience the “unchained cinema” of Abel Gance, the surrealist film experiments of Man Ray, Dali, and Buñuel, the romanticism of Jean Vigo, the poetic realism of Jean Renoir, and the crime and complex politics of postwar French noir. The course features a special trip to the Institut Lumière in Lyon and an excursion to the Cinémathèque Française.

Art 1013-Studio Art Abroad—Todd Hines
No experience required. Fundamentals of drawing and composition will be covered through structured pen and ink drawing assignments. Subject matter will include landscape, architecture, and still-life. Classes will be held in various locations throughout Paris including parks, cathedrals, and monuments.

Art 2883-Water Media Painting—Todd Hines
An introduction to the medium of watercolor. Basic drawing and painting skills are necessary. Subject matter will include landscape, architecture, and still-life. Classes will be held in various locations throughout Paris including parks, cathedrals, and monuments.

Art classes will visit the Musee d’Orsay and The Louvre. Optional visits to Monet’s water lily gardens and Van Gogh’s resting place will also be offered. For art students an overnight trip to Nice in the south of France will be organized and include a visit to the Matisse museum.