Cancelled: Tournées Film Festival: The Owl’s Legacy

All college events from March 16 through May 6 have been cancelled. Sign up for Lafayette Arts emails to be informed if this event is rescheduled for later in the spring.

Thursday / March 26, 2020 / 7 p.m.
Landis Cinema, Buck Hall

The Owl’s Legacy is master film essayist Chris Marker’s wildly
digressive, constantly entertaining meditation on Ancient Greece’s
impact on modern thinking and European identity. For two years
in the late 1980s, Marker traveled the world filming conversations
with a variety of scholars, philosophers, and artists (and one cruiseship
operator) and edited them into 13 thematic episodes, each
loosely guided by a word inherited from the Greek, including such
unavoidable terms as “democracy,” “tragedy,” and “philosophy,” as
well as more unexpected entries like “amnesia” and “misogyny.”
The resulting series of films function both as an extraordinary
introduction to the philosophical and political foundations of Ancient
Greece and as a primer in creative, associative thinking, roaming
wide to bring in Simone Weil and Noh theater, the causes of World
War II and—of course—the nature of film-going. In many ways, the
series also presages the age we now inhabit: comparing Athenian
and contemporary democracy, the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis
concludes that the “representation” most of us settle for is closer to
“electoral oligarchy” than the hard work of participatory democracy in
Athens, while in the last episode George Steiner rages at humankind’s
environmental recklessness.

Free for all! No ticket required.

The Tournées Festival is made possible by the FACE Foundation, Africana Studies, the Departments of Foreign Languages & Literatures, Film & Media Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the International Student Association.