Kelley Conway’s story sounds more than a little like a Hollywood script: Wide-eyed girl from obscure rural Iowa town grows up, travels to Paris and realizes her dreams. Conway’s tale even involves meeting her hero and a genuinely say-what twist: Last year, she was knighted—yes, knighted—by the French government. (More on that further down.)
It’s all in stride for the soft-spoken Conway, a professor of film studies, director of the Wisconsin Film Festival and the UW Cinematheque, and chair of UW’s Department of Communications Arts.
Conway was born and raised in Knoxville, Iowa, a county seat that’s home to the National Sprint Car Museum—and, at least while she was growing up there, not much of a film and popular-culture scene.
“Let’s just say there were not a lot of opportunities for viewing foreign films,” she laughs.
As a college freshman, Conway took an introductory film class at Carleton College in Minnesota, where she was first exposed to the works of legendary French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, pillars of what’s known as the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The low- budget, experimental vibe hooked her instantly.
“I was intrigued by the ambiguous narratives and the unconventional use of film style,” Conway recalls. “Also, at that point, I was amazed that one could get college credit for studying movies.”
A study abroad program in London not only gave her the chance to see a play and a film every day, but also her first trip into a film archive at the British Film Institute. Among the reels, Conway’s epiphany coalesced.
“I said to myself, ‘I should try to find a way to do this as a career,’” she says.
That path eventually took her west to complete her Ph.D. at UCLA, under the tutelage of Janet Bergstrom, one of the founding editors of the seminal film journal Camera Obscura. A gift to the university from the French American actor Charles Boyer—who had starred in several of the pre-New Wave French films Conway had pored over as a graduate student—allowed her to study in Paris for a year. She ended up staying an additional year and completing a master’s degree at the University of Paris.
“I came from a town so small that French wasn’t even offered as a language in high school,” Conway muses. “To live in France and become proficient in the language was heaven.”
In Paris, it was possible to see more than 300 films a week.
“It’s the norm. You can see the latest film by Bong Joon-ho in the Latin Quarter at 11 in the morning, then go straight to the Cinémathèque Française to catch something by Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang,” she says.
Conway wondered what it was about France that allowed the country to nurture and sustain such a high level of support for film culture. What she discovered was a unique mix of public policy and institutional/individual support. In the United States, films are typically private commercial ventures. By contrast, in France, the National Film Center (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée), part of the French Ministry of Culture, supports the French film industry with a range of grants for production, distribution and exhibition. This funding, combined with tax revenue collected from television and streaming companies, has resulted in one of the most varied and interesting film industries in the world. (Scroll down for a slideshow listing of Conway's favorite French/Francophone films.)
Conway joined the UW faculty in 2000. David Bordwell, eminent film historian and one of the UW film studies professors on the committee that hired Conway, called her dissertation on popular music in 1930s French cinema one of the best he’d ever seen. It eventually became Chanteuse in the City (University of California), Conway’s first book.
“Kelley has established herself as one of the major voices on the history and artistry of French cinema,” says Bordwell.
In 2001, Conway decided to try to stage a retrospective and conference in Madison featuring Agnès Varda, the so-called “Grandmother of the French Wave.” At age 25, Varda assembled a small crew of friends and volunteers and shot La Pointe Courte (1955). The film inspired the New Wave directors to attempt personal, low budget films. Varda confirmed her importance as an unconventional and resolutely independent filmmaker with Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), Vagabond (1985), and The Gleaners and I (2000). From her office in Vilas Hall, Conway cold-called the filmmaking legend in France—and got a somewhat less than enthusiastic reception.
“I seem to recall her saying, ‘Qui êtes -vous? (who are you?) Don’t you have any idea how busy I am? Call me in six months.’ And then she hung up on me,” Conway recalls. Fortunately, the second call went better: Varda came to Madison in 2002, introduced her films to enthusiastic audiences, and eventually opened her film archives to Conway. (“She kept every bit of paper—screenplay drafts, posters, correspondence, everything; to a film historian, it was a treasure trove,” says Conway.) Varda, who died in 2019, was the subject of Conway’s second book Agnès Varda (University of Illinois Press). Her next one’s set to tackle French film culture in the wake of World War II.
During her time at UW, Conway has made a point of extending the same sorts of opportunities that first inspired her. Beginning in 2006, she launched “Film in Paris,” a month-long study abroad program in the French capital. On one of these trips, Conway and a group of 20 UW students met the administrator of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée. In February of this year, Guillaume Lacroix, the French Consul General to the Midwest, recognized Conway as a Chevalier d'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, or Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. France designates up to 200 chevaliers a year, the majority of whom are French citizens. The honor recognizes significant contributions to the arts and literature.
“It felt as though I had come full circle,” says Conway.
