The Making of a Man (48 min, 2019) explores courage, cowardice and toxic masculinity across time and place (postwar France, Sweden and contemporary USA). Its point of departure is a play by Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, set in Paris reeling in the aftermath of Nazi occupation.
José Alaniz (University of Washington) and Martha Kuhlman (Bryant University) and Biz Nijdam (University of British Columbia) will discuss the recently published edited collection Comics of the New Europe. This edited collection offers insights into the comics cultures of a number of post-socialist countries including the former East Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and…
The German Film Office is pleased to present Western by Valeska Grisebach as part of its monthly German Movie Nights series. An intense, slow-burning thriller, Western follows a group of German construction workers installing a hydroelectric plant in remote rural Bulgaria. The foreign land awakens the men’s sense of adventure, but tensions mount when Meinhard, the strong, silent newcomer to the group,…
See a Virtual Studio Visit with the Norwegian – American artist Ida Lorentzen in Oslo, Norway during the week of March 12 through 20! Ida Lorentzen is known for her paintings of rooms, spaces and light, with works reflecting both Nordic mystical detachment and stark American realism and filled with a deep reverence to history of places and lived life.…
Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) in conversation with Claudio Fogu (UC Santa Barbara) on the occasion of the publication of his book: The Fishing Net and the Spider Web. Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Palgrave, 2020) The book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or ‘making of’ Italians. While previous scholarship on…
Johannes von Moltke is professor of German Studies and Film, TV and Media, at the University of Michigan. His most recent books include "The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America" and "Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence between Helmuth James and Freya von Moltke 1944-45." For registration, please email germanic@columbia.edu.
This program of documentary shorts is both a stirring introduction to the Beninese/Senegalese filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, considered the first sub-Saharan African film director and a rich overview of the period of African independence and nation-building. Vieyra’s 1955 essay film Africa on the Seine (co-directed with Mamadou Sarr) begins on the banks of the Niger but moves quickly to Paris, “the capital…
Music at the Institute (MATI) Concert Series presents “Dream in Spring” Juliette Kang, violin Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin Thomas Kraines, cello Che-Hung Chen, viola Amy Yang, piano PROGRAM: Serhiy Prokofiev (1891-1953) Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 Virko Baley (b. 1938) Three Songs Without Words for Violin and Piano, based on settings of poems by Emily Dickinson (2001); Partita No. 3…
In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli compared the act of imposing new political orders on an uncivilized population to the carving of a statue from a piece of rough marble: an allusion, according to many scholars, to Michelangelo’s David. Did Michelangelo respond in some way to Machiavelli’s allusion? The University of Pennsylvania is the joint producer of this series—through the Italian Studies section…
Sex, Love, and Letters is the first study of a virtually unexplored cache of letters to Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant, magnetic, and polarizing French feminist and philosopher from ordinary women and men around the world. This author-reader bond was fraught with misunderstanding, thwarted desire, and illusions, but also, Judith Coffin argues, emphatically reciprocal.
