They call it La France Profonde, that intense emotional bond of its people with the land that is France. For Americans, the song America the Beautiful provides a useful analogy. Several impressive French landscapes from the collection of the Davies Sisters, Gwendolyn and Margaret, are included in Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales, a special exhibition that opens at the Everson Museum on 9 October.Recommended Fiction:
The Wanderer - (Le Grand Meaulnes) – Alain Fournier, translated from the French by Lowell Bair, with an afterword by John Fowles, New York, New American Library, 1953 (1913)
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, Chelsea Green Publishers, White River Junction, VT: (2005) 1953 843.912 GIO
Letters From My Windmill – Alphonse Daudet, in Alphonse Daudet, translated from the French by George Burnham Ives, New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU
Letters From My Windmill – Alphonse Daudet, in Alphonse Daudet, translated from the French by George Burnham Ives, New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU
Alain-Fournier wrote his incomparable novel of growing up in the countryside just one year before he was killed in the fighting of World War II.
Jean Giono's fable-like story of a lonely shepherd who plants trees in his abandoned valley, turning it into an Edenic garden, prefigures the ideas that the ecological movement would embrace decades later.
Alphonse Daudet's Letters are the work of a man who moves from Paris as he recounts his explorations in the provinces to his Parisian friend. Originally published as a series of articles in the newspaper Le Figaro.
Recommended Films:
The Gleaners And I – Agnes Varda FRE 309.894 GLE
Jean de Floret FRE 791.43 JEA
Manon of The Spring FRE 791.43 MAN
Jean de Floret FRE 791.43 JEA
Manon of The Spring FRE 791.43 MAN
Both Jean de Floret and Manon of the Spring are based on novels by Marcel Pagnol; the films were directed by Claude Berri. Bothe films are set in Provence, after the end of World War I, and the plots deal with the hardships of making a living in the visually beautiful French countryside.
A modern essay on the same theme, in The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda creates a visual essay on gleaning, an ancient agricultural practice, by taking to the road with a camcorder. Varda has said that through filming she came to feel a kinship between her creative process and the work of the people she met. Most people only know of gleaners from Millett's iconic painting The Gleaners (1857). Peasants in rural France have long followed the path of the fall harvest, surviving on the remains of crops that were too small to be swept up by farmers. Varda found many who still practice this humble task, whether digging up potatoes near Lyon or picking apples in Provence.
Through Varda's lens we can imagine contemporary gleaners as critics of consumption and waste in an affluent society. We see a chef who salvages food for his elegant restaurant, a homeless biologist who teaches literature for free, and a man who has lived off trash for ten years. And in a redeeming moment of pure delight, Varda unearths a heart-shaped potato.
Through Varda's lens we can imagine contemporary gleaners as critics of consumption and waste in an affluent society. We see a chef who salvages food for his elegant restaurant, a homeless biologist who teaches literature for free, and a man who has lived off trash for ten years. And in a redeeming moment of pure delight, Varda unearths a heart-shaped potato.
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