Filmmaker: Cathy Crane
Film: Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil
April 8-17, 2008
About the filmmaker:
After working in New York City for 10 years as a stage manager of experimental Off-Off Broadway plays (including the first North American production of Bertolt Brecht’s Roundheads and Peakheads) and working in the music business coordinating international tours for Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin, Cathy Crane turned to filmmaking.
While in graduate school at San Francisco State University, her short experimental narrative films won numberous awards, and she was one of four individuals selected to receive the prestigious Eastman Kodak Scholarship in 1997 as “one of the nation’s most promising talents of the future generation of filmmakers.” Since then, she has received the Individual Media Art Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission (2001), had a one-person retrospective at the Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany (2001), received a Certificate of Merit in New Visions at the San Francisco International Film Festival (2002). In addition, all her short films have been acquired by ZDF/3sat television for broadcast in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (2000, 2002), and were added to the permanent collection of the Forum des Images in Paris (2002). Since joining the cinema production faculty at Ithaca College in 2002 as an assistant professor, she has received every major grant from the college for her first full-length film Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil (2005). She is currently working on an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last, unfinished novel Petrolio.
About the film:
Simone Weil was one of the most compelling and contradictory spiritual thinkers of our times. A pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a former Marxist who discovered the value in religion, a Jew and a Christian who refused to be baptized. Cathy Crane's Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil explores these contradictions through an experimental documentary style, blending elements of dramatic reenactment, historical footage, and spoken word excerpts of Weil’s work into a filmic collage.
Instead of creating a typical biographical documentary with interviews and voice-over narration for historical context, Crane uses a style called mise-en-scene to represent the interior of Weil’s mind. Through black and white cinematography with a careful focus on contrast and camera position, Crane recreates what she calls the “psychic space through which Weil passed while in exile in her own country” during the Vichy reign.
The film itself walks the audience through a number of aspects of Weil’s life during this time, including her discovery of the Christian faith and her ultimate decision to eschew baptism. It shows her struggling with the Vichy statutes that restricted her freedom because of a Jewish heritage she did not fully understand or lay claim to. However, as Crane says in describing the film “it is not simply an account of Simone Weil’s life, but rather the skein of her ideas.”
Opening Short:
Theodore
Directed by Jorge Moran (Fiction)
Thedore knows loneliness, but the challenge of his life is knowing love.
Tour Dates & Locations:
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