
About
Feminist theory, film and cinema studies; World War II and Holocaust; television and contemporary culture; theories of national identity; French cinema & culture
"My teaching philosophy draws on my experience as a student at UC Berkeley, where I had the best teachers in the world, and in Paris, where I learned from the best theorists in my field. They are my mentors and my inspiration for the three cornerstones of my teaching philosophy: Passion, Commitment, Compassion. The first means engagement with the material, approaching the challenges of my subject with a sense of surprise and wonder. The second involves a commitment to learning, a commitment to each other, and a commitment to the world at large, making classroom learning relevant to life outside the classroom. And the third sees teaching and learning as a reciprocal process, a sense of community that comes from the connections we establish through education. In my teaching I strive to embody these qualities and I hope that my students, in turn, find these qualities in themselves. "
Biography
Professor Flitterman-Lewis' publications include: To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (1st ed.; Illinois, 1990), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, (2nd edition; Columbia University Press, 1996), New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (Routledge, 1992), and Essay-Chapters in 30 anthologies; articles in 36 scholarly journals. She organized Hidden Voices: Childhood, The Family, and Antisemitism in Occupation France (A symposium on daily life and material culture in France during World War II with an emphasis on the lives of children; Columbia University, Maison Francaise, April 3-4, 1998) and co-founded Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory and Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Croatian, Russian, Basque, and German. Her pioneering study of avant-garde French filmmaker Germaine Dulac was recognized at a major retrospective of the director's work at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, where she was a featured speaker.
Office / Office Hours
Murray Hall, Room 054, College Ave Campus
Courses Taught
- Senior Seminar: Film Theory
- Femme Fatale in Film Noir
- Film and Society
- Film Genres
- Film Melodrama
- French New Wave
- Godard/Resnais
- History/Memory/Social Conscience
- Introduction to Film
- Major Film Makers
- Renoir/Lang
- Surrealism & Cinema
- Theories of Women and Film
- World Cinema in the Cinema
- Introduction to Film
- Topics in Comparative Literature
- Women and Film
Publications
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To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, 2nd ed.
- Information
- Columbia University Press, 1996
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New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond
- Information
- Routledge, 1992
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To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, 1st ed.
- Information
- University of Illinois Press, 1990
- "Memory, Friendship, and History in Au revoir les enfants"
- Site of Infamy: The Vel' d'Hiv in French Cinema"
- "Review of The Queen"
Cineaste: America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, Spring 2007 - "Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies"
Camera Obscura 61.21.1, 2006 - "Review of Army of Shadows"
Cineaste: America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, Fall 2006 - "The Spirit of Resistance: An Interview with Bertand Tavernier"
co-authored with Richard Porton. Cineaste: America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, Spring 2003 - "The Blossom and the Bole: Narrative and Visual Spectacle in Early Film Melodrama"
Cinema Journal 33.3, Spring 1994 - "Fascination, Friendship, and the 'Eternal Feminine,' or the Discursive Production of (Cinematic) Desire"
The French Review 66.6, May 1993
Education
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
MA, University of California, Berkeley
BA, University of California, Berkeley