Celebrating the launch of the Quebec and French Canada Research Network (QaFCaRN) with the UK Première of Ghost Artist a film by Steven Palmer.  Along with a round table discussion on the work of Robert Cordier, moderated by Craig Moyes, director, QaFCaRN. 

Ghost Artist (2019, 66 mins.)

A documentary film written and directed by Steven Palmer and Edward RicheRink Rat Productions, with support from the National Film Board of CanadaPremiered at the Atlantic International Film Festival in September 2019.

When a visually arresting film is rediscovered after 50 years in an archival vault, it leads historian Steven Palmer to its uncredited maker, the multi-faceted Belgian-American artist, Robert Cordier, whom he finds still working in the Paris theatre at the age of 82. Featuring the first unshielded footage of a hospital birth to be seen by a mass public, dizzying sequences of brain and open-heart surgery, and bizarre prostheses for thalidomide children,Cordier’s “Miracles in Modern Medicine” caused 20,000 people to faint at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967. As Cordier helps to revive the original film, the great storyteller reveals the 1967 project as more than a simple succès de scandale; rather, it turns out to have been a remarkable avant-garde creation for the masses with a surprising artistic pedigree. Drawing on collaborations with such figures as James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure, Cordier's creative networks provide the background to his eclectic artistic practice, whether it involves directing a Black Arts Movement theatre company (the Free Southern Theater) in the South during the Civil Rights era, making a gender-bending independent movie in early 1970s New York shot by the first woman cinematographer to be credited on a feature film (Deidi von Schaewen), or indeed fulfilling with surrealist brio what might have been an ordinary commission for the Man and his Health Pavilion at Expo67.

Robert Cordier was a Belgian-American filmmaker, stage director, actor, poet and translator who collaborated with James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Ingrid Superstar, Andy Warhol, and others —as well as making 20,000 people faint at Expo67 in Montreal. He died in April 2020.

Steven Palmer is a documentary filmmaker and historian from the University of Windsor, where he held the Canada Research Chair in the History of International Health from 2006-2016.

• Christophe Barnabé (French, Oxford University)
• Mark Betz (Film Studies, KCL)
• Patrick ffrench (Humanities and Health, KCL)
• Kélina Gotman (Performance and the Humanities, KCL)
• Johanne Sloan (Art History, Concordia University)
• Steven Palmer (History, University of Windsor)

• Film: 17:30
• Round table: 18:45
• Reception: 20:00