Class

Hey all,

Things have been going well; I'm sorry I haven't made the time to update the blog in a little while.

A film festival called le Festival des Premiers Plans, recently passed through town. I'm pretty sure this is the biggest event that attracts people to Angers: judging films from all over Europe, film students come down from Paris to take part; directors come to Q&A sessions after the screening of their films, and hotshots like Jeanne Moreau, Bertrand Tavernier, Melanie Doutey and Pierre Lhomme grace the event with presentations of films and round-table discussions. Alain Delon, the poster boy of the festival, decided he was sick and wasn't going to be able to make it. According to some locals, he is allergic to every city in France that isn't Paris.

This festival was the source of great pleasure for me; never before have I been exposed to so many films in such short a time, nor have I had the chance to ask famous people dumb questions, let alone confirm their existence first-person. I think, by the way, that America's pedestal tends to be several meters higher than France's: they manage to remember (somewhat) that stars are less celestial ornaments than plain ol' human beings.

I took full advantage of the opporunity to see old films on the big screen. The festival was doing a retrospective on Jean-Pierre Melville and his followers, which included Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Takeshi Kitano and John Woo. I got to see L'Armée des ombres, Le doulos, and Le cercle rouge; I would have seen more if I didn't have to teach these darn classes! hahaha.

I got to participate in the festival - I got an email from the Anglophone Library in Angers mentioning that the festival was looking for anglophones who would donate their time to "dubbing" films for the jurors and directors who didn't speak French or read French subtitles. For the films not in English, or not subtitiled in French and English, I sat in the front and whispered into the microphone each and every line of about ten films, my voice being carried off into small earbuds scattered about the enormous theater. It was really cool. My favorite film, which shared the first place award with a Franco-Iranian film, was called Eastern Plays. I highly recommend it, along with North, a dark Norweigan comedy.

To take part not only in a film festival, but in the interpretation of a film itself in front of 150+ spectators was a total rush. But that rush was the gateway drug that led me to simultaneous translation for interviews here and there, which really got my heart beating. One essentially must think on two frequencies: to hear in one language and speak in another, without ever falling behind or mistranslating sticky expressions. Not to mention a thorough knowledge of that which is being discussed is compulsory. It was really exciting, and I look forward to doing more work like that in the near future: I don't quite know where or when, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless.

I've started classes at the local university, which is going well. I have a lot of catching up to do in my Latin class, which I have been neglecting for work and dubbing, but I'm enjoying and staying on top of my class on Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Class at the university is a breath of fresh air for me; a reminder that a full time high school teacher might not be my ideal career.

Following the strain of random musings tied in with current events, I've found that French girls are practically timid compared to American girls. Perhaps it's my own shyness, or sheer clumsiness, but I've found it a lot harder to strike up a fulfilling conversation with a French girl my age than with an American girl my age. And as long as I'm dipping my toes in broad generalities, something is to be said for the role opinions play in French society. I've found that people in France (men and women, old and young alike) are much more likely to stick with an opinion or belief than I am. Perhaps that's the California in me speaking, but I find it strange and almost stressful to feel compelled to have a strong opinion on each and every current event or social debate.

I read the first installment of Twilight after all. Thanks a lot, Isabelle... It was a fun read, although I refuse to accept that it was written by an English professor in the US. English high school teacher, maybe; professor? No! Once I've finished Goethe's Faust I'm going to try to really dig into Freud's L'inquietante etrangete (The Uncanny), of which I have yet but scratched the surface.

Ciao!
Ben

PS: I finished Goethe's Faust on Tuesday night and have since started Marlowe's 17th-century version of the story. Luck would have it that a ticket for the opera fell in my lap last night, which was none other than Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust. It was a lot of fun - my first ever opera/symphony! I must say though, that I would have been much happier had it been one or the other, instead of both: I found it hard to appreciate the voices when they were overpowered by the orchestra and vice versa.