End Date :
511 Dodge Hall (Lifetime Screening Room)
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Film School
“A film by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Mère Folle is based on the 1998 novel of the same name by French psychoanalyst Françoise Davione. The film stages a confrontation between the psychoanalyst and her traumatized patients on the one hand, and between this contemporary world and medieval fools on the other. The importance of the film lies in a positive representation of mad(psychotic) people and of a constructive interaction between mad and sane people through which both learn new things that help them live their lives. Within the film medieval ‘fools’ strike, precisely, that balance. They are not mad but play the fool; yet, how do we know what ‘being’ mad is, and how that being is different from playing? Can you play what you are? The film is an out-of-the-box integration of fiction, documentary, and theory.” [excerpt from the film’s website] The screening will be followed with a Q&A session with Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker.
