Glasco chose themes, invited faculty speakers and organized film festivals at Elon in Spring 2010, Fall 2010 and Spring 2012, each featuring five recent French films.

The is a program of the . The festival partners with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy whose aim is to bring French cinema to American college and university campuses. One of its primary objectives is to fund endeavors “that can eventually become permanent and self-sustaining.” 

Recipients of the grant must choose from the list of films offered by the Tournées Festival, contact distributors themselves to arrange payment for public performance rights, and submit extensive post-screening materials and questionnaires. 

Glasco learned a lot in the process of organizing three festivals with the help of the Tournées grant. By charging admission at the three previous grant-supported festivals, she was able to build up a small surplus of funds but hadn’t had the time to organize another festival.

While choosing a theme, films and projects for her course, Glasco had a eureka. Why not have the cinema students organize a film festival? This could be a creative coup for them as well as valuable project-based and experiential learning, and it would constitute a significant part of their class participation grade and foster authentic collaborative learning.

Despite the surplus, there still wasn’t enough money to include five films, so Glasco decided that three would be possible if the French Club, which she mentors, would agree to co-sponsor the film festival and offer support for one film. The officers met and agreed that it was a worthy cause and event for the club and are enthusiastically supporting the endeavor under the stellar leadership of President Nicole Hanrahan. 

Glasco’s French colleagues in the Department of World Languages and Cultures were all on board with putting the festival on their syllabi and including it in their course curricula for the fall as well. And so it began.

Teaching two new 300-level courses this fall, Glasco had her work cut out for her. Her other course “French Cuisine and Culture” offered yet another eureka: food would constitute the theme of her cinema course as well. When she sat down to write the syllabus, she pondered course goals carefully.  

“I wanted the course to familiarize students with a selection of films in French, to increase their understanding of the cinematic art form in France, and to encourage critical thinking and analysis as it regards to the use of images and sound in films” she said, “but I also wanted to encourage cross-cultural comparisons about the representation of food, the role of the restaurant and the concept of cuisine in French and American cinema.”  

Considered by the French to be the “septième art,” cinema holds a special place in French cultural production, but gastronomy is also considered an art form and is much revered in French culture. Glasco explains that “students learn how to ‘read’ French films … by studying a selection of films across the decades from 1938 to 2012 and examining the culture of cuisine in France through an historical lens. The course has also introduced students to the vocabulary of film analysis in French while focusing on representations of cuisine in French film.”

The class is conducted entirely in French and involves pair and group discussions, weekly reading and writing assignments, mandatory film viewings, oral presentations using PowerPoint and digital technology, and a final project involving the creation of a short film. Students have also been collaborating as a class all semester long to organize and put on a three-day French Film Festival during National French Week in early November. And they have done everything themselves with Glasco at the helm as mentor.

“I really wanted to make sure that they took ownership of the project, both creatively and logistically,” Glasco said. “I wanted them to generate the ideas and come up with the tasks to be completed together. I relinquished control completely, gave them the budget and just said go with it. And they did!”

The students chose fashion as a theme, and each film focuses on a single iconic personality from French culture. Now that they have prepared, they are just hoping to fill some seats and looking forward to some enriching conversations. They chose fashion because they felt that something seemingly lighter would help draw audiences to the film showings, but they acknowledged and are intrigued by deeper issues under the surface such as the fact that Coco Chanel dated a Nazi collaborator during WWII.   

On Tuesday, Nov. 4, the documentary “Mademoiselle C” will be shown in McEwen 011 at 7 p.m. It tells the story of Carine Roitfeld, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, and a former fashion model and writer.

On Wednesday, Nov. 5, students will show and discuss “Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel)” at 7 p.m. in McEwen 011 with invited faculty speaker Professor Jack Smith from performing arts. As a costume designer, Smith is positioned to lead a discussion of perhaps the most significant character in the history of French fashion design, Coco Chanel.

The film “L’amour fou (Mad Love)” will wrap up the festival on Thursday, Nov. 6, at 7 p.m. in KoBC 101, LaRose Digital Theatre. It is another documentary that tells the compelling story of Yves Saint Laurent, the French couturier who died in 2008, and his life-long partner Pierre Bergé.

Matthew Antonio Bosch, director of the the LGBTQIA Center, and Paul Geis, associate director of Study Abroad, will lead the discussion. Students procured the rights for public performances from the distributors and learned about the financial and copyright issues that revolve around public film showings on campus in the process. 

All films are free and open to the public. National French Week officially runs November 5-11 this year.

The presentation is the result of Glasco’s latest scholarship into teaching and learning and her experience co-teaching Winter Term pre-departure and study abroad courses in 2013-14 with LD Russell in the Department of Religious Studies.

Glasco is interested in researching and implementing innovative and effective ways in which students can reap socio-cultural and linguistic benefits from short-term experiences, particularly via meaningful interactions with locals. She and Russell teach GST 267: “Eat, Pray, Love: Sacred Space and the Place of Religion in 21st Century France,” and have collaborated in the past on multicultural/multifaith activities, such as the Tournées French Film Festival in Fall 2012, for which Glasco received a grant from the French Cultural Ministry to organize at Elon and at which Russell was an invited discussant.

Glasco said that major goals for students when they go abroad for any period of time include acknowledging, analyzing, and reflecting on and reacting to the difference between ethnocentrism and cultural relativism as well as making informed comparisons between their own culture and the culture of the host country, not to mention gaining cultural sensitivity to local codes of conduct as a result of local interactions. 

This is particularly challenging in a short-term course. Glasco and Russell decided to maximize time in local settings by setting the course abroad in only two cities: Paris and Montpellier. In this way, students could unpack their suitcases and get a feel for the places while Glasco was also able to take advantage of her many connections in France in order to offer students multiple opportunities to have authentic conversations with both locals and expates alike.

Glasco’s discussion at NAFSA focused on having students consider their own self-portraits while abroad and to consider subverting traditional notions of culture and the identities associated with it. She told attendees that the students’ task abroad is to be able to de-center their own preconceived notions of cultures.

“In the end,” Glasco said, “it’s the transfer of that knowledge and experience gained abroad that counts, and so post-return conversations are key to helping students process their experience in order to realize personal, intercultural and academic growth.”

Glasco and Russell helped a few students maximize the post-return experience by mentoring them for SURF. Glasco’s publication “Preparing Undergraduates for Research Projects in Faculty-led Short-term Study Abroad Courses” in the Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly CURQ on the web mentions Elon’s annual forum and will be in December.  

“Though conducting undergraduate research and studying abroad are extremely valuable experiences for a college student, they often function in their individual vacuums, rarely connected,” she said. “I sought to marry the two by encouraging students to understand their experience abroad as their primary source and to submit abstracts for consideration at SURF as well as researching the topic and finding an audience for the article.”  

Her article, titled “Staging the Structure of Traumatic Experience in Michel Tremblay’s À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou,” examines one of Michel Tremblay’s earliest plays, in order to demonstrate how À toi’s unique theatrical structure opens a space for profound reflections on the nature of psychic reality as it coexists beside objective reality. Defying naturalistic tendencies (despite realistic subject matter and linguistic style), Tremblay’s depiction of the family drama of Marie-Louise, Léopold, Manon and Carmen offers a poignant metaphorical representation of the psychic effects of traumatic events. Through a reading of the play’s text and its scenic structure, it analyzes how Tremblay collapses time on stage in order to establish the theatrical space on another plane of “realism,” demonstrating how the structure of the text itself offers a theory for the functioning of trauma.

• All films are subtitled in English and will be shown in La Rose Digital Theatre in Koury Business Center at 7 p.m.
• Entrance fee is $3 per film per evening: Advance tickets are on sale now (contact me at sglasco@elon.edu or x5813)
• Multicultural themes are featured prominently in all five films and there really is something for everyone.
• Tuesday night’s film is a visually stunning animation and all proceeds from that night’s box office receipts in particular will go to benefit Haiti earthquake relief

Here is the schedule:

1) Tuesday, May 4: Azur et Asmar (Azur and Asmar) [in French and Arabic] deals with racism and cultural diversity

2) Wednesday, May 5: Les Témoins (The Witnesses) Beyond gay versus straight, Techiné’s film is equally committed to exploring other opposites: rich vs. poor, male vs. female, Muslim vs. non-Muslim.

3) Thursday, May 6: Comme un Juif en France (Being Jewish in France) An important documentary that treats the topic from WWII to present day.

4) Friday, May 7: Les Indigènes (Days of Glory) [An Algerian, Franco-Belgian Moroccan collaboration]: 130 000 natives from North Africa and 20 000 Africans fought to liberate France, a country they had never seen before. With a reputation for endurance, sense of orientation and great courage, they were sent to the front lines of the battlefields. Days of Glory relates the forgotten story of these soldiers known as “Indigènes” through four of these courageous men: Yassir, Abdelkader, Saïd and Messaoud. Yassir expects to collect a booty for his services in the army.

5) Saturday, May 8: La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) : This stunning film takes place in the Southern French city of Sète where Slimane, the patriarch of a large and vivacious North African family, is an elderly dockworker. When his job of many years is suddenly no longer secure, he decides to restore an old boat in the harbor, and turn it into a floating couscous restaurant.

We hope to see you there!