Little did Professor of French Judith Sarnecki know that a visit five years ago to a San Francisco art gallery to see the Picasso exhibition, “The War Years,” would steer her research interests in a new direction. A scholar of modern French literature, especially novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, women authors, and gender issues; her long-time love of cinema as art was stoked by Picasso’s works, launching her on a scholarly investigation of French films made during the Nazi occupation.
Locked away for nearly five decades, much of the material Sarnecki has been studying first became publicly accessible in the mid-1990s, putting her research near the forefront of scholarship that is still in its infancy. She traveled to France last spring for the third time in five years, conducting research on French films produced under Nazi occupation in Paris at the François Mitterand National Library and the Cinémathèque, France’s national film library.
During the past year, Sarnecki presented the papers, “Narrating Paradox: French Cinema Under Nazi Occupation” at the International Conference on Narrative in Washington, D.C., and “Bertrand Tavernier’s Laissez-Passer: An Introduction to the Cinema of the Occupation” at the American Association of Teachers of French Conference in Milwaukee. Her article, “Beyond Collaboration and Resistance: The Cinema of Occupied France, 1940-1944,” appeared in the April edition of the International Journal of the Arts in Society.
Antithetical to the concept of the “blockbuster,” great French filmmakers have defined themselves against popular American movies, says Sarnecki, who has extended her interest in cinema into the classroom. She team-taught a new course Winter Term, Fascism and Film, with Professor of German Brent Peterson, and also used that course as the basis for a tutorial she taught on French documentaries of World War II.
A member of the executive committee of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Sarnecki hasn’t abandoned her other interests entirely for film study. In conjunction with her department colleague Professor of French Eileen Hoft-March, Sarnecki organized and moderated the panel, “Love, Death, and Women’s Lives in French and Francophone Literature,” for the M-MLA’s conference in Chicago last November. A book project with Cambridge Scholars Press has developed from that panel, for which Sarnecki will serve as contributor and co-editor with Hoft-March.
Pictured with Sarnecki are Erica Hamilton ’07, Milwaukee, and Justin Severson ’08, Kaukauna.
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