In 1832, cholera ravages the Provence in the south of France in The Horseman on the Roof, a 1995 French film directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and starring Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez. In the film (which is based on 1951 French novel Le hussard sur le toit by Jean Giono), an Italian nobleman is being hunted by the Austrian secret police while Italy struggles for independence – as he also faces navigating a culture grappling with illness and quarantine/pandemic. (Languages: French and Italian, Run time: 1 hour 58 minutes.)
Carl Niekerk has broad teaching and research interests, which include German literature and culture since 1750, European perceptions of other cultures, music and literature, and also comparative Dutch studies (including Dutch colonial literature and responses to that literature in contemporary Indonesian writing). He is the author of a variety of publications and is currently working on a project that seeks to reconstruct the history of ‘back-to-nature’ thinking from the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael to the contemporary German author Christoph Ransmayr and filmmaker Werner Herzog; he is also continuing to pursue interests in the history of European Anthropology and Ethnology and in the intersections of literature, culture, and music.
**This program will be limited to 18 participants.**
