Call Me Madame
Past Imperfect
Screening on Film
This evening’s event is part of an ongoing series of presentations by visiting and resident film and video faculty members of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard.
Visiting Lecturer Françoise Romand is a director of documentary and fiction films dealing mainly with identity. Tonight’s program features two works, Call Me Madam, recipient of the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1988, and Past Imperfect, Romand’s first full-length feature, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1994.
PROGRAM
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Call Me Madame (Appelez-Moi Madame)
Directed by Françoise Romand.
France, 1986, 16mm, color, 52 min.
French with English subtitles.
In a small village in Normandy, France, a fifty-five-year-old married man and communist activist becomes a transsexual with the help of his/her wife. His teenage son, however, has some qualms.
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Past Imperfect (Passé-composé)
Directed by Françoise Romand.
With Feodor Atkine, Laurence Maslish.
France, 1999, 16mm, color, 95 min.
French with English subtitles.
A war photographer trying to forget his past pulls a mysterious woman out of the sea in Tunisia. She is suffering from amnesia and doesn’t want to deal with her past. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader has called this film "a provocative, troubling and haunting spellbinder . . . beautifully shot and originally conceived. The soundtrack is especially striking."
