Saturday     11:30
The Chopin House
2024, 12 min., French/English

Director: Occitane Lacurie

In Mad Men, secretarial work is operated by women seated outside the offices where the male characters work as actual copywriters in the advertisement firm Sterling-Cooper. In the final season, something happens that is to materially disrupt women’s work: a massive computer is installed in the middle of the firm’s floor, engendering an existential crisis among the male creative team. But, while I was watching the show, I felt that the real menace posed by this machine is rather regarding the other workforce of the series: the secretaries. Their realm, the open space between the offices, functions as a sort of black box where the copywriters abandon not only their coat and hat but also all kinds of documents, information and input that are to be processed outside of the frame…

Occitane Lacurie is a French researcher and a video essayist. She is currently a PhD student in visual studies at the École des Arts de La Sorbonne and a teaching assistant at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in film studies. As a video maker, her work focuses on the way common media and images can be used to unveil invisible phenomena and untold chapters of the history of ideas. Her last video, xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone), was one of the two pieces awarded best audiovisual essay at Marienbad Film Festival 2024