Join us for the launch of Ivan Cerecina’s book Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), accompanied by a screening of Statues Also Die (Les Statues Meurent Aussi) (1953), directed by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet. This event will include a discussion between Ivan Cerecina and Robert Hughes (Curator, Australian Cinémathèque) on the use of montage in French cinema and its aesthetic role in post-World War II France. Copies of Assembly Lines will be available for purchase from the Gallery Shop. Registration essential.
Originally commissioned by the pan-Africanist journal Présence Africaine, Statues Also Die is an essay film exploring how art museums strip African art of meaning and value. The film questions why African objects are relegated to ethnographic display, a provocation that made the film a landmark work of anti-colonial cinema and led to its fifteen-year ban in France. 30mins. Subtitles.
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Ivan Cerecina teaches in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He has been a research fellow at the Cité Internationale des Arts and the City of Paris’s International Artists and Writers Residency Program. His work has been published in Screen, Camera Obscura, and Framework. Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film is his first book.
