Tag Archives: Florence Gould Hall

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: LOLA MONTES

Ringmaster Peter Ustinov promises “Rumour! Scandal! Passion!” in presenting story of Lola Montès (Martine Carol)

CINÉSALON: LOLA MONTÈS (Max Ophüls, 1955)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 18, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through March 18
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” announces the monocled, whip-snapping Mammoth Circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) as Max Ophüls’s 1955 CinemaScope masterpiece, Lola Montès, begins. “The most sensational act of the century!” he continues, the camera following him in a breathtaking tracking shot as he introduces “a creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty . . . with the eyes of an angel!” Then, with much fanfare, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) arrives like a queen — albeit a circus queen — as the ringmaster tells the audience that they (we) are about to witness “the whole truth of the extraordinary life of Lola Montès.” What follows is not necessarily the true tale of the famed courtesan and entertainer who gained more notoriety for her scandalous love affairs and hourglass body than for her abilities as an actress and dancer. Lola’s story is told in a series of flashbacks showing her with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny), conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau), a young student (Oskar Werner), and, most critically, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (a dashing Anton Walbrook). The episodes reveal her to be both loved and reviled as she struggles to succeed in her career, which ends up taking second place to the men in her life. Ophüls barely shows the cigar-loving Lola performing, instead letting the camera slowly dance around her, often depicting her through window frames, screens, and curtains as if she is a caged animal, all leading to a dangerous grand finale.

Lola (Martine Carol) dreams of a better life in Max Ophüls’s CinemaScope masterpiece

Lola Montès is filled with visual splendor; Jean d’Eaubonne and Willy Schatz’s sets are lush and elegant, and Georges Annenkov’s and Marcel Escoffier’s costumes are beautiful and appropriately extravagant, while cinematographer Christian Matras creates an emotionally powerful palette, bathing Ophüls’s first and only color film in bold reds and blues. (The director of such previous classics as La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and Letter from an Unknown Woman died in 1957 at the age of fifty-four while making Les Amants de Montparnasse.) It’s a dazzling cinematic achievement, one that was initially met with derision, then chopped up by the producers, but finally restored to its exquisite original version, a 35mm print of which will be screening February 18 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be presented by painter Lola Montes Schnabel, and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Claude Chabrol’s The Color of Lies (costar Jacques Gamblin will no longer introduce the film), Claire Denis’s Chocolat (introduced by Mahen Bonetti), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan (introduced by Phillip Lopate).

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

Edith (Dominique Sanda) and François (Richard Berry) find each other in Jacques Demy’s dark but colorful French musical

CINÉSALON: UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE (A ROOM IN TOWN) (Jacques Demy, 1982)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 11, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

From the very opening of Une Chambre en Ville (A Room in Town), French New Wave director Jacques Demy announces that the 1982 musical melodrama is going to be something a little different. As a rising sun changes color over a construction site across the Loire River, what appear to be closing credits run up the screen, set to Michel Colombier’s romantic score, as if the film is ending. But Demy and cinematographer Jean Penzer are only getting started, shifting from black-and-white to color to black-and-white again as they cut to the hard streets of 1955 Nantes, where a shipyard strike is under way. Riot police are in a stand-off with hundreds of male and female strikers, characters on both sides singing instead of talking and shouting — in a scene that eerily evokes Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, which came thirty years later. Soon the intricate plot unfolds, as the striking, and broke, François Guilbaud (Richard Berry), who is renting a room from former baroness Margot Langlois (Danielle Darrieux) and dating doe-eyed Violette Pelletier (Fabienne Guyon), instantly falls for femme fatale Edith Leroyer (Dominique Sanda), Mme. Langlois’s recently married daughter, who is already fed up with her impotent cheapskate of a husband, television salesman Edmond Leroyer (Michel Piccoli). The over-the-top drama plays out in wonderfully garish rooms of deep, intoxicating colors, which are echoed by Rosalie Varda’s (daughter of Demy and Agnès Varda) costumes, which even go so far as to have Violette wearing violet and Edith going bare beneath her luxurious fur coat, with no one changing clothes over the course of the two days in which the story takes place. As the strike continues, the main characters connect with one another in good and bad ways, especially when straight razors and guns are involved.

Striking workers are ready to fight the power in Jacques Demys UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

Striking workers are ready to fight for their rights in Jacques Demy’s UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

Writer-director Demy, who transformed the movie musical in the 1960s with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort (the latter also featuring Darrieux), includes no Hollywood-like set pieces in Une Chambre en Ville, no dancing, no choruses — essentially, no real songs at all. Instead, all of the dialogue is sung by the actors (or dubbed in by someone else) as if in regular conversation. Inspired by a real shipyard strike in his hometown of Nantes in 1955, Demy takes on such concepts as wealth, class, authority, home, family, and, most of all, love — both real and imagined, unrequited and lustful — in the vastly underrated film, which is quite entertaining and very funny despite its dark themes. And be on the lookout for more echoes of Les Misérables throughout. A new digital restoration of Une Chambre en Ville is screening February 11 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be presented by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (introduced by Lola Montes Schnabel), Claude Chabrol’s The Color of Lies (costar Jacques Gamblin will no longer introduce the film), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan.

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING

Jean Renoir’s BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING is a very different kind of shaggy dog tale

CINÉSALON: BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (BOUDU SAUVÉ DÉS EAUX) (Jean Renoir, 1932)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 4, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

After his dog runs away, a homeless tramp jumps into the Seine, only to be rescued by a bookseller who brings him home to stay with his family in Jean Renoir’s 1932 masterpiece, Boudu Saved from Drowning. Adapted by Renoir from René Fauchois’s play — the brief opening scene takes place onstage, announcing that what is to follow is essentially a fable — the depression-era social satire centers on the relationship between the wacky, unpredictable bum, Priapus Boudu (Michel Simon, who also played the lead in the play), and Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval), a bourgeois bookstore owner cheating on his wife, Emma (Marcelle Hainia), with one of their maids, Anne-Marie (Sévérine Lerczinska). Lestingois first spots Boudu while looking through his telescope at the masses on the Pont des Arts, like a filmmaker shooting a documentary; “I’ve never seen such a perfect tramp!” he declares. (Indeed, Renoir regularly comments on the art of filmmaking in Boudu, especially with his use of music, nearly all of which is eventually revealed to be coming from natural sources.) Lestingois helps save the suicidal Boudu, nursing him quickly back to health and letting him stay at the house, much to the chagrin of his wife. Rather than being thankful, Boudu is a whirling dervish of ill manners, breaking dishes, using fancy lingerie to shine his shoes, and daring to eat sardines with his hands. Despite Boudu’s rudeness, Edouard, Emma, and Ann-Marie are all drawn to him in different ways, particularly Edouard, who dresses Boudu in his clothes as if he were a kind of doppelgänger, an alternate version with a completely different set of expectations and responsibilities. But there’s no controlling the bushy-haired Boudu, who reacts to all stimuli like a child who does whatever he wants, not caring about the consequences. One of the keys to the film is that very barrier, the question as to whether Boudu is a conniving tramp who knows exactly what he’s doing or just a pitiable poor soul with no self-control. Boudu — and, therefore, Simon, who gives a towering, spectacular performance, one of the greatest of early cinema — is part Charlie Chaplin, part Buster Keaton, part Little Rascal, and the influence of the character extends to Denis Lavant’s underground creature in Léos Carax’s Merde short in the Tokyo! omnibus and Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine in John Landis’s Trading Places. (The film has also been remade twice; Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills stars Nick Nolte as the tramp, while Gérard Depardieu plays the role in Gérard Jugnot’s 2005 Boudu.)

Michel Simon gives one of the great performances of early cinema in Jean Renoir’s masterful social satire

Renoir, who had previously worked with Simon on La Chienne and On purge bébé, frames each shot with careful precision, from squeezing in a large group trying to help the unconscious Boudu to a more open scene in which a fancifully dressed couple is picnicking in the park, reminiscent of an Impressionist painting, calling to mind, of course, Renoir’s father, Pierre-Auguste. Indeed, the younger Renoir sets apart his interiors from his exteriors in the film quite distinctly; indoors, Boudu feels closed in, unable to sleep in a bed, while outdoors he seems much more at home. At one point he rests off the ground in the doorway to the bookstore, neither inside nor out, caught in between the two worlds. But he ultimately makes his choice, and it’s really the only one available to him. A new digital restoration of Boudu Saved from Drowning is screening February 4 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be introduced by screenwriter and director Henry Bean (Internal Affairs, The Believer), and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (introduced by Lola Montes Schnabel), Jacques Demy’s Une chambre en ville (introduced by Adam Gopnik), and Claude Chabrol’s The Color of Lies (introduced by Jacques Gamblin).

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: CLEO FROM 5 TO 7

Cléo (Corinne Marchand) looks back at her life in Agnès Varda’s Nouvelle Vague classic

CINÉSALON: CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (CLÉO DE 5 À 7) (Agnès Varda, 1962)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 28, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

After getting a biopsy taken and drawing the death card while consulting a fortune-teller, popular French singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begins looking back at her life — and wondering just what’s left of it — while awaiting the dreaded results. The blonde beauty talks with old friends, asks her piano player (Michel Legrand, who composed the score) to write her a song, and meets a dapper gentleman in the park, becoming both participant and viewer in her own existence. As Cléo makes her way around town, director (and former photographer) Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond) shows off early 1960s Paris, expertly winding her camera through the Rive Gauche. Just as Cléo seeks to find out what’s real (her actual name is Florence and that gorgeous hair is a wig), Varda shoots the film in a cinema verité style, almost as if it’s a documentary. She even sets the film in real time (adding chapter titles with a clock update), enhancing the audience’s connection with Cléo as she awaits her fate, but the movie runs only ninety minutes, adding mystery to what is to become of Cléo, as if she exists both on-screen and off, alongside the viewer. A central film in the French Nouvelle Vague and one of the first to be made by a woman, Cléo de 5 à 7 is an influential classic even as it has lost a step or two over the years. A new digital restoration of Cléo de 5 à 7 is screening January 28 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be introduced by French author Catherine Cusset. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (introduced by Henry Bean), Jacques Demy’s Une chambre en ville (introduced by Adam Gopnik), and Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (introduced by Lola Montes Schnabel).

FIAF FALL FSTVL: CROSSING THE LINE

Eliane Radigue and Xavier Veilhan’s SYSTEMA OCCAM kicks off FIAF’s seventh annual Crossing the Line festival

French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Le Skyroom and FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 19 – October 13, free – $30
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

Curators Lili Chopra, Simon Dove, and Gideon Lester have once again put together an impressive, wide-ranging program for the Crossing the Line festival, now in its seventh year. Sponsored by the French Institute Alliance Française and taking place there as well as at other venues around the city, CTL features cutting-edge art, dance, music, theater, discussion, and more from an international collection of multidisciplinary performers, with many events free and nothing costing more than $30. The twenty-five-day festival begins September 19 with electronic music composer Eliane Radigue and artist Xavier Veilhan collaborating on Systema Occam (Florence Gould Hall, $30), a multimedia performance installation that is part of CTL’s “New Settings” series, a joint venture with Hermès; the fashion company will be hosting Martine Fougeron’s “Teen Tribe” photo exhibition at the Gallery at Hermès from September 20 to November 8. In Capitalism Works for Me! True/False (September 20, October 6-9, free), Steve Lambert will keep score in Times Square as people vote on whether capitalism indeed works for them. The award-winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma presents episodes 4.5 and 5 at FIAF of their massive undertaking, Life and Times (September 20-21, $30), accompanied by the FIAF Gallery show “10fps,” consisting of 1,343 hand-colored drawings (September 21 – November 2, free). For “The Library,” Fanny de Chaillé invites people to FIAF’s Haskell Library on September 24 and 26 and the NYPL’s Jefferson Market Branch on September 27 (free), where they can choose books that are actually men and women who will share their stories verbally one on one.

Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Canda look at postcolonial Africa in THE INKOMATI (DIS)CORD

In The Inkomati (dis)cord (September 25-26, New York Live Arts, $20), Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Canda use contemporary dance to examine postcolonial Africa. De Chaillé teams up with Philippe Ramette for Passage à l’acte / Acting Out (September 26-28, Invisible Dog, $30), using absurdist human sculpture to “rationalize the irrational.” Dancer and choreographer Nora Chipaumire will perform the CTL-commissioned solo piece rite riot (October 3-5, Le Skyroom, $30), exploring African stereotypes, collaborating with writer Teju Cole and visual artist Wangechi Mutu. Pascal Rembert’s large-scale A (micro) history of world economics, danced (October 11-13, La MaMa, $20) features New Yorkers discussing how the financial crisis impacted their lives. The festival also includes works by Annie Dorsen, Ernesto Pujol and Carol Becker, Bouchra Ouizguen, Tim Etchells, and Kyle deCamp and Joshua Thorson, in addition to a series of talks and conversations.

FIAF OPEN HOUSE

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma will be presenting an exhibit of drawings as well as episodes 4.5 and 5 of LIFE AND TIMES at FIAF this fall

French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall and Tinker Auditorium, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Le Skyroom and FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, September 10, free, 6:00 – 8:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

The French Institute Alliance Française is getting ready for the fall season, highlighted every year by its multidisciplinary Crossing the Line festival, with a free open house on September 10. From 6:00 to 8:00, visitors will be able to sample French wine and cheese in Tinker Auditorium, check out the Nature Theater of Oklahoma drawings exhibit “10fps” in the FIAF Gallery, receive beauty treatments in Le Skyroom, explore the new digital library Culturethèque, meet author-artist Gwenaëlle Gobé (The Diary of Stephanie: Electoral Surge) in the Haskell Library, watch Ruben Toledo’s short animated film Fashionation in Florence Gould Hall (with Toledo introducing the 7:00 screening), and take mini-French classes in the sixth-floor Language Center. Look for twi-ny’s preview of the 2013 Crossing the Line Festival next week.

HIGHLIGHTS OF CANNES FILM FESTIVAL WITH GILLES JACOB / MOVIE NIGHT WITH PAUL SCHRADER: PICKPOCKET

Michel (Martin LaSalle) eyes a potential target in Robert Bresson’s highly influential masterpiece PICKPOCKET

PICKPOCKET (Robert Bresson, 1959)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, July 30, $10, 12:30, 4:00, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, July 30, $16, 7:30
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Robert Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket is a stylistic marvel, a brilliant examination of a deeply troubled man and his dark obsessions. Evoking Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Martin LaSalle made his cinematic debut as Michel, a ne’er-do-well Parisian who lives in a decrepit apartment, refuses to visit his ailing mother (Dolly Scal), and decides to become a pickpocket. But it’s not necessarily the money he’s after; he hides the cash and watches that he steals in his room, which he is unable to lock from the outside. Instead, his petty thievery seems to give him some kind of psychosexual thrill, although his pleasure can seldom be seen in his staring, beady eyes. As the film opens, Michel is at the racetrack, dipping his fingers into a woman’s purse in an erotically charged moment that is captivating, instantly turning the viewer into voyeur. Of course, film audiences by nature are a kind of peeping Tom, but Bresson makes them complicit in Michel’s actions; although there is virtually nothing to like about the character, who is distant and aloof when not being outright nasty, even to his only friends, Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) and Jeanne (Marika Green), the audience can’t help but breathlessly root for him to succeed as he dangerously dips his hands into men’s pockets on the street and in the Metro. Soon he is being watched by a police inspector (Jean Pélégri), to whom he daringly gives a book about George Barrington, the famed “Prince of Pickpockets,” as well as a stranger (Kassagi) who wants him to join a small cadre of thieves, leading to a gorgeously choreographed scene of the men working in tandem as they pick a bunch of pockets. Through it all, however, Michel remains nonplussed, living a strange, private life, uncomfortable in his own skin. “You’re not in this world,” Jeanne tells him at one point.

Michel (Martin LaSalle) can’t keep his hands to himself in Bresson classic

Bresson (Au hasard Balthazar, Diary of a Country Priest) fills Pickpocket with visual clues and repeated symbols that add deep layers to the narrative, particularly an endless array of shots of hands and a parade of doors, many of which are left ajar and/or unlocked in the first half of the film but are increasingly closed as the end approaches. Shot in black-and-white by Léonce-Henri Burel — Bresson wouldn’t make his first color film until 1969’s Un femme douce — Pickpocket also has elements of film noir that combine with a visual intimacy to create a moody, claustrophobic feeling that hovers over and around Michel and the story. It’s a mesmerizing performance in a mesmerizing film, one of the finest of Bresson’s remarkable, and remarkably influential, career. In a scheduling quirk, Pickpocket is screening on July 30 at two different locations in the city. First, at 12:30, 4:00, and 7:30, it will be shown at FIAF, concluding the CinémaTuesdays series “Highlights of Cannes Film Festival with Gilles Jacob,” consisting of works chosen by festival president Jacob in honor of the glamorous event’s sixty-fifth anniversary. Also at 7:30, it will be presented at the IFC Center by writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Affliction), who called the film “an unmitigated masterpiece” in his extensive 1969 two-part review in the Los Angeles Free Press and told Sheila Johnston in a 2003 interview for the Telegraph, “I adore Pickpocket and can watch it endlessly. To me it’s as close to perfect as there can be.”