Rousseau’s Environmentalism in Pierre Maillard’s La Faute à Rousseau

Abstract

To celebrate the 300th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, Swiss director Pierre Maillard invited filmmakers from around the world to contribute to a collection of cinematic interpretations of Rousseau’s work. Directors were given carte blanche to treat any aspect of Rousseau’s thought in a short film lasting no longer than four minutes. Released in 2012 under the title La Faute à Rousseau (Blame it on Rousseau), the fifty-five short films that make up the collection shed light on the place that Rousseau occupies in the twenty-first-century imaginary. The filmmakers come from eleven different countries in Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia, and they range from early-career film school students to accomplished directors, such as Nicolas Philibert and Alain Tanner. One of Pierre Maillard’s objectives in initiating the project was to demonstrate the modern relevance of this eighteenth-century thinker—in his words, to demonstrate that “Rousseau speak[s] to each one of us directly and with a contemporary voice, far beyond the eras, the places, the customs, the social ranks and generations” (Maillard 3). Distributed internationally, the films were screened at tercentenary celebrations and film festivals all over the world.1