Screening – Film Club: Tribute to Paul Celan

Celan, the Shoah, and the German language

Tribute on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Paul Celan. Meeting dedicated to the memory of Bruno Schrager, maternal uncle of Paul Celan, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau by convoy 57.

The conversation about man and his work will follow two axes. The first is the historiographical dimension – in the strict sense of the term – of Celanian writing. How did the extermination camps and the atomic bomb in the Six-Day War and in May 1968, Celan record events poetically and how does he write in his poems the history of the 20th century? In a second phase, the linguistic axis will be followed. Installed in France during almost all his life as a writer, Celan could not have written his work in another language than German, in another language than that of the organizers and executors of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.

Sunday, November 15, 2020, 2 p.m. 
Round table: Celan, the Shoah and the German language. 

Participate in the round table: Celan, the Shoah and the German language

Sunday, November 15

Online screening of Wolfsbohne (...) Pois de Loup. from Czernowitz to Mikhaïlivka, documentary film directed by Thierry Valletoux.

France, Cyclope & Compagnie, 22 min, 2019, German, Ukrainian, Romanian, French, VOstfr.

preview screening that traces the footsteps of Paul Celan and his parents in Ukraine.

Presentation of the film by Thierry Valletoux, director:

Journalist and photographer, Thierry Valletoux has long worked for the print media, notably within the editorial staff of Studio Magazine. Passionate about cinema, he became a set photographer with many filmmakers and designed several books with Claude Miller, Michel Blanc and Alain Resnais (published by Actes Sud).  He regularly makes audiovisual recordings, first for the cinema, then around architecture and built heritage. He has also produced intimate portraits. Recently, he has been investigating or interviewing famous photographers for the new magazine LIKE.

Online screening of the film Les Eaux du Boug by Marc Sagnol

France/Germany, documentary, 92 mn, Goupil cinémaginaire, Svidas Production, Traumhaus Studios, 2020.

This film, dedicated to the poet Paul Celan, starts from a quest, an initiatory journey through a country called Podolia, crossed by a majestic river, the southern Boug. During the Second World War, this country was called Transdniestria and was the place of deportation of the Jews from Romania. The film goes in search of places and reconstitutes the itinerary of the deportees from Czernowitz, in Bukovina, especially the mother of the poet Paul Celan, to Mikhailovka, on the banks of the Bug. The beauty of places has no equivalent except the hell into which they have been transformed.

Presentation of the film by Marc Sagnol, director:

Born in 1956, Marc Sagnol is a writer, photographer and director who has been cultural attaché in Germany, Ukraine and Russia. Assistant to Claude Lanzmann for the filming in Belarus of Sobibor, 14 October 1943, 16h (2000), he has since made documentary films devoted to places in Central and Eastern Europe and the destruction of Jewish communities in these countries. Coordinated in 2016 the issue of Les Temps modernes on "Paul Celan, de Czernowitz à Paris". Les eaux du Boug, in tribute to Paul Celan, a film he has been working on since 2012, is his first feature film (2020).    

In partnership with:

With the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah