Princeton French Film Festival, founded just last year by Yassine Ait Ali, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of French & Italian, is true testament to the power of the public humanities. The 2024 iteration, which I had the pleasure of attending, featured an incredibly passionate and impressive slate. The opening night screening was a showing of The Braid (La Tresse) written and directed by Laetitia Colombani, which was preceded by a book discussion on Colombani’s source material held at the Princeton Public Library. The film, which is in French, Italian, and Hindi, united various spheres of the Princeton community while also highlighting cinema from nearly every corner of the Francophone World. The first event I attended was a Tuesday night screening of the Alice Diop’s 2022 Cannes breakthrough, Saint Omer: a gorgeous, nuanced story of two Senegalese-French women, one of whom is an author, and the other is a student on trial for infanticide. The screening, held in McCosh 10, was followed by a question-and-answer session with Diop. It was in French, which I cannot speak. Nevertheless, it was clear that Diop was passionately responding to the crowd’s questions, despite her admitted jetlag.

Wednesday was for legendary film critic Richard Brody ‘80 (and one of the original writers for The Nassau Weekly). He dropped into East Pyne that afternoon to discuss his love of cinema, all the way from Princeton to The New Yorker, where he has written since 1999. During the fall of his freshman year, Brody attended a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless organized by the campus film society, after which he decided to dedicate his life to movies. At the time, Brody didn’t feel a strong connection to contemporary Hollywood films. In Breathless, Godard references Humphrey Bogart in dialogue. Brody confesses that he did not even know who the Hollywood legend was at the time. However, Breathless, one of the seminal films of the French New Wave, represented a “cinema of youth” and “insolence” that completely changed his perspective on film as an artform. The French New Wave was driven by young filmmakers who were also critics for Cahiers du Cinema, one of the most important global voices in cinema. They first introduced the now intuitive concept of auteur theory, where the director is considered the primary artist of a film. Brody posits that France was the ideal breeding ground for this transition of film into a subject of serious artistic and academic consideration because he views Paris as France’s D.C., Hollywood, and New York. There is an artistic, political, cultural, and cinematic convergence that facilitates a continuity between the arts in a way that does not exist in the United States. The New Wave gave cinema its deserved legitimacy. The rise of film studies presented a new conflict, however, between that of academics and critics. A select few have been able to bridge this divide, including one of Brody’s earliest influences, Gillberto Perez. Perez, a physics graduate student who wrote film criticism in his spare time, was the only professor of film studies at Princeton during Brody’s time. According to Brody, Princeton was not totally hospitable for Perez. He left for Sarah Lawrence in 1983, but they remained close until his passing in 2015. 

That evening, Brody screened the 2023 film Passages at the Garden Theatre, followed by a Q&A discussion with Yassine. Brody quipped that Passages, made by an American director, co-written by a Brazilian screenwriter, and starring German and British actors, was the best French film of last year. He concedes that nationality is hard to pin down with cinema, and that it is more valuable to discuss the flow of culture and the ways in which ideas move. Passages follows a Paris-based film director, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), asphyxiated by sexual and romantic confusion. We watch as he is pulled between his husband (Ben Winshaw) and new lover (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It is a beautiful, sensual film that, on the surface, reads as a “really engaging portrait of an asshole.” Brody, however, doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as a story of a man liberating his passions: Tomas ends the film heartbroken and alone, but his life has gotten bigger. Brody calls the film’s final sequence “a happy ending without happiness.” 

When asked what he thinks of contemporary film criticism, Brody speaks joyfully. He thinks it is far superior now to when he was coming up. The tastes of critics are much more interesting, mostly thanks to the democratization of criticism allowed by the internet. Social media is a “hellhole” and a “boon,” he says. He lives in fear of missing great films, a fear that grows with the proliferation of filmmaking. Richard Brody seems to believe that the proliferation of criticism, as carried out by people of all ages across the internet, can be a necessary counterbalance. After all, the French New Wave was started by a group of 20-year-olds at a magazine. Look how that turned out.