De l'utopie sur grand écran : Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le cinéma.

This paper tries to investigate how the utopian thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was shaped in cinema, by the specific means of the seventh art. Different categories of films are defined and analyzed here. First of all, the focus is laid on a biopic made by Swiss director Claude Goretta, Ways of Exile, or the Last Years of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1978). Then, the influence of Rousseau on Alain Tanner and some young Swiss directors is interrogated through several films in which the works of the philosopher are explicitly cited or interpreted. Lastly, the emphasis is put on the influence of Rousseau on cinema schools, such as Italian new realism or the French New Wave, the last one with its key figure, Jean-Luc Godard. In this article, the cinema appears as a way of re-reading classical Utopian systems, but also as a medium capable of fabricating utopias for our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]