Carol Mavor Offers New Course, Spring 2005

Immemory: A Graduate Seminar on Proust, Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman

Art 357-001 T/TH 11:00-12:30, Hanes Art Center 116

Proust writes of the tiny bite of the scallop-shaped madeleine cake ("so richly sensual under its severe religious folds") soaked in tea, which triggers the most pure form of memory, his famed involuntary memory: "this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me." This course will explore memory (and love) as embodied by Proust and select films by the French filmmaker Chris Marker and the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

Students need not have any experience with Proust before attending this seminar, nor will they be expected to have read any of the volumes.

Text and films to be considered:

1. Chris Marker's interactive CD-rom, Immemory (1998). The reader investigates "zones" of travel, war, cinema, and poetry, navigating through photographs, film clips, music and text, as if physically exploring Marker's memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st century In Search of Lost Time.
2. Select volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27).
3. Chris Marker's films: La Jetee (1962), Sans soleil (1982).
4. Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). This film also featuers a Madeleine and has been a source of inspiration for Marker.
5. Chantal Akerman's films: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and La Captive (2000). Both films have been heavily influenced by Proust. La Captive is not only a representation of Proust's Search (Volume V, The Captive) it is also at play with  Hitchcock's Vertigo.
6. The topic of memory as attended to in select texts by Wiliams Benjamin, Giles Deleuze, Roland Barthes and Hayden White.
7. Everyone will participate in Hayden White's visit to our campus on Saturday, March 5, to further develop what relationships between  memory, history, fiction, and "the humility and powers of the madeleine." (White is author of Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, etc.).

What interests me is history, and politics only interests me to the degree that it is the mark history makes on the present. (Marker)