The SUMMER CAMP film series continues this week with French classic THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (*Les Parapluies de Cherbourg*), scheduled for screening this Thursday, June 25 at 5:45 p.m. in FFB-011.
TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqzQn15mFao
*ABOUT THE FILM: *
With its bursts of intense color and its famous commitment to dialogue in song, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg remains a stunning, wholly unique visual and musical experience more than 50 years after its release. French screen legend Catherine Deneuve stars in this melodramatic fable of doomed first love, in which she falls for a working-class man in provincial France before the military calls him away to the Algerian front. Can she wait for his return? Or will she give in to her status-minded mother and settle for another suitor?
Featuring music by celebrated French composer Michel Legrand and winner of the 1964 Palme d’Or, this is director Jacques Demy’s best-known film: acult classic, and a great exploration of the interplay between surface appearance and depth of feeling that contributes to the camp sensibility.
*ABOUT THE SUMMER CAMP SERIES:*
“A sensibility (as distinct from an idea), Camp one of the hardest things to talk about.…To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.” ~Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”(1964)
So let’s watch it instead!
Camp describes a love of artifice, exaggeration, and irony. As a style and way of seeing, camp looks at the world from a perverse angle, poking fun at “the normal” and anything that takes itself too seriously. Camp borrows equally from high and low culture, refusing to be pinned down or defined through a stable set of aesthetic criteria. It’s at once irreverent and esoteric, pushing the boundaries of decorum to hilarious extremes, while also appreciating the less obvious forms of absurdity in everyday life.
*UPCOMING FILMS:*
2 July @ 17:45: She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, USA, 1933)
Introduction by Joanna Mansbridge, AMER
9 July @ 17:45: Grey Gardens (Maysles, Maysles, Hovde, & Meyer, USA, 1975)
Introduction by Kitty Aal, Independent Scholar
The Summer Camp Film Series is co-sponsored by the Departments of American Studies and Communication and Design, along with the Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas. All screenings are free and open to all members of the Bilkent community.