Everyday optics: Representations of the French quotidian, 1945–2000

Designating a set of experiences as characteristic of ‘everyday life’ implies a specific idea of what the everyday is, yet the assumptions behind the term are rarely made explicit. The quotidian is more frequently used as a rhetorical tool which takes a certain range of experience as characteristic of larger communities. Rather than treat this concept as a timeless way of being, this dissertation starts from the conviction that the everyday is always situated within specific sociocultural moments; the way it is used changes according to the agenda of the person who invokes it. In this sense, the everyday does not exist: it is always created. “Everyday optics” analyzes how the quotidian is invoked in works by writers and filmmakers such as Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chantal Akerman. In discussions informed by Marxism, phenomenology, film theory, minimalist aesthetics, and narratology, I argue that the visually-charged work I analyze calls into question the mechanics of seeing, interrogating the divide separating objects from their depictions and fictional storylines from extra-textual reality. My first chapter examines the relationship between the theory and practice of the gaze in Henri Lefebvre\u27s Critique de la vie quotidienne and Georges Perec\u27s Un homme qui dort. My second analyzes André Bazin\u27s conception of a cinematic aesthetics of the everyday and its relation to three films about Paris in the 1960s: Chronique d\u27un été by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Le joli mai by Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d\u27elle by Jean-Luc Godard. The final chapter focuses on the relationship between Michel de Certeau\u27s approach to everyday practice and two minimalist works: Chantal Akerman\u27s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Jean-Philippe Toussaint\u27s L\u27Appareil-Photo. Ultimately, I argue that the category of everyday life provides these writers and directors with a virtual terrain in which they can experiment with types of subjectivity, forms of representation, and modes of activism. It is out of these elements that their everyday optics are forged