The impossibility of an island: figures of community in Clément Cogitore’s Braguino

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A webinar with guest speaker, Dr Greg Kerr (University of Glasgow), run by the Transnational Cultural & Visual Studies research theme the School of Modern Languages.

Abstract
Clément Cogitore’s 2017 documentary, Braguino, is centred on a tiny settlement in the extreme remoteness of the Russian taiga, home to a community consisting of a single extended family. Built on values of self-reliance and respect for nature, the settlement’s inhabitants maintain a delicate ecological balance with the resources of the surrounding forest, albeit one that is threatened by aggressive poachers, climate emergency and a bitter territorial dispute. This paper explores the circulation of different figures of community through the film, arguing that Cogitore evolves a distinctive documentary ethics and poetics, in which motifs of absence and an attenuation of authorial control are central.

Biography
Greg Kerr is lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. His primary research specialism is modern French poetry studies, with emphasis on questions of displacement, exile and utopia. His book Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabès, Lubin and Luca: No man’s language was published by UCL Press in 2021 (Open Access). With Dr Véronique Montément of the Université de Lorraine, he co-edited a Modern Languages Open special collection, ‘Between borders: French-language poetry and the poetics of statelessness’ (2019). He is also the author of Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-century France (Legenda, 2013). He is a member of the editorial boards of Forum for Modern Language Studies and the the Irish Journal of French Studies.

Event format & recording
The event will take place online as a Zoom webinar and will not be recorded.

Simultaneous Translation
The event will be delivered in the medium of English. You are welcome to ask questions in the medium of Welsh during the Q&A session. If you intend to do this, please contact mlang-events@cardiff.ac.uk by Wednesday 9 March to request simultaneous translation. Please note that 10% or more of those planning to attend will need to request this provision in order for it to be sourced and will be subject to resource availability.

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