February 28–March 10 . Tickets: Filmlinc.Org What I Saw at the Pictures by Russell Banks
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School’s Out School’s FEBRUARY 28–MARCH 10 . TICKETS: FILMLINC.ORG WHAT I SAW AT THE PICTURES BY RUSSELL BANKS This year’s American ambassador for Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, the novelist Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction) is an avid cinephile and Francophile deeply influenced by French film. Banks is currently working with French director Bertrand Tavernier on his next film. nce a week, usually on a So by the late 1950s and early Saturday afternoon, in my small- 1960s, as we entered adult life, we were Otown New England childhood suffering from a weird kind of cognitive in the 1940s and early 1950s, we went to dissonance. We had been told and shown “the pictures” or “the picture show.” As by the moving pictures that, in the real in The Last Picture Show. We didn’t go world, right and wrong were absolutes to the cinema or to a film or even to the and easy to distinguish from one another. movies. This three- or four-hour afternoon We were told and shown that adult interlude in the dark—with cowboys men and women had clearly defined and Indians, Tarzan and Jane, Abbott roles, responsibilities, and relations, and and Costello, the Three Stooges, Tom & any violation or confusion about those Jerry and Disney cartoons, triumphant matters would be severely and correctly World War II movies, and the occasional punished. We were told and shown by Technicolor romance or historical those moving images that America, costume drama—was our reward for even when it fell short of greatness (The having suffered all week under the Grapes of Wrath and All the King’s Men authoritarian yoke of the adults who ran and Citizen Kane), was still the greatest our country and our schools, churches, nation that ever existed on earth. and families. We were postwar and Yet it was becoming increasingly McCarthy-era American boys and girls, clear to us that in the real world undiscriminating, easy to thrill and amuse, distinguishing right from wrong was and escapist. Though we did not know it, difficult and sometimes impossible; that our vision of the real world (whatever that good men and women often behaved was) was being subliminally shaped by badly to one another and especially to what we thought was only a short-lived children and the powerless; that cruel, Saturday afternoon escape from that real unjust, and exploitative acts usually world. We thought it was idle diversion; it went unpunished; that certainty of any was, in fact, programmed pro-American kind was mostly inaccessible, and moral propaganda. ambiguity, emotional conflict, and political RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA oppression were everywhere. Even in life, like mine, was controlled by obtuse, America. Our vision of the world, shaped shape-shifting, self-absorbed, hypocritical as it was by the moving pictures, did not adults, who were themselves controlled correspond to our growing experience of by malignant authority figures, mostly the world. That was the power of those off-screen, like invisible puppeteers. picture shows. They could disregard and Truffaut’s stutter-step pacing, alternating diminish our felt, known experience of with seemingly interminable long shots, reality and even displace it. was the pacing of my subjective reality. By 1959, pummeled by this cognitive The film was a whole new kind of picture dissonance, I was a 19-year-old beatnik show, a new realism, one that portrayed poet, con man, and petty criminal living the world in the way that I had personally, in Boston. A friend, a more cosmopolitan secretly experienced all my life. beatnik poet than I, directed me to the It was for me a strictly personal old Brattle Theater in Cambridge, where revelation. I had no idea that there was I saw François Truffaut’s The a cinematic revolution 400 Blows. A revelation! going on in France that a A swift dissolution of that decade later would radically dissonance, an immediate revise the conventions untangling of the knot of of American film as well, conflicts and contradictions influencing at a profound between the world as artistic and technical level revealed and dramatized by the work of writer-directors the American picture shows like Scorsese, Coppola, of my childhood and youth Schrader, Altman, and and my subjective experience of the Cassavetes. I was not a reader of Cahiers world to that point. du cinéma and had never heard of André The 400 Blows confirmed and Bazin and had no notion of the Nouvelle validated my felt social, emotional, Vague. But after The 400 Blows, I knew and moral reality. The poor, buffeted, what I wanted to see at the picture misunderstood Antoine Doinel (movingly show. Soon I was a regular at the Brattle portrayed by the teenaged Jean-Pierre Theatre and the Exeter, taking deep dives Léaud) was me, the teenaged Russell into the work of Godard, Bresson, Varda, Banks, standing alone on the shore Resnais, and their cohort. Suddenly films between a life as a petty criminal and an were like works of literature to me—high as-yet uncreated life as a writer. Antoine’s art, possibly the highest art of my era, life, though lower-middle-class Parisian, capable of shaping my imagination was mine. I saw it in gritty, urban black and intellect in ways that would make it and white and shifting shades of gray, possible for me to become someday an not in day-glo Technicolor. Antoine’s artist myself. Image: The 400 Blows (Sedif/Les Films Du Carosse/Janus/The Kobal Collection) FOR TICKETS VISIT FILMLINC.ORG Photo by Sedif/Les Films Sedif/Les by Photo Du Carosse/REX/ShutterstockDu OPENING NIGHT 2016 Nicol ©Claire RUSSELL BANKS PRESENTS NEW YORK PREMIERE THE 400 BLOWS THE TROUBLE WITH YOU (LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS) (EN LIBERTÉ!) François Truffaut, France, 1959, 99m Pierre Salvadori, France, 2018, 108m When film critic François Truffaut was A heartfelt performance from Adèle Haenel challenged to put into practice what he’d anchors the latest comic whirlwind by Pierre been preaching, he chose to tell the In the Courtyard Salvadori, whose played at story of a 13-year-old wild child in Paris Rendez-Vous in 2015. Haenel’s Yvonne is whose adventures were based on his coping with the loss of her husband (Vincent own adolescence. Rejected or rebuffed Elbaz), a fellow police investigator and by school, family, and community, young something of a folk hero in their small Riviera Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) sets town. After she discovers that his golden out on his own, propelled toward one of reputation is totally fabricated, with one faux the most famous of all movie endings: the heist resulting in the jailing of an innocent legendary snapshot of a childhood on the jeweler (Pio Marmaï), Yvonne strives to brink. The 400 Blows marked the birth of salvage this man’s fate—and in the process Jean-Pierre Léaud as crown prince of the tumbles through slapsticky fisticuffs and French New Wave, and of Truffaut as its romantic intrigue. This Cannes Directors’ runaway auteur. Fortnight standout serves up a hilarious yet tender story of integrity and redemption. Saturday, March 2 1:00pm Preceded by: LES INDES GALANTES Introduction by Russell Banks and Directed by Clément Cogitore Serge Toubiana France, 2018, 5m Thursday, February 28 6:30pm, 9:00pm Introduction by Pierre Salvadori and Pio Marmaï before both screenings RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA U.S. PREMIERE U.S. PREMIERE AMANDA COINCOIN AND THE EXTRA- Mikhaël Hers, France, 2018, 107m HUMANS (COINCOIN ET LES Vincent Lacoste leads Mikhaël Hers’s Z’INHUMAINS) poignant new feature about trauma and Bruno Dumont, France, 2018, 200m its aftershocks. At first, David (Lacoste) is Bruno Dumont’s sequel to Li’l Quinquin just beginning to figure out life in his early revisits its ragtag characters in a new twenties, helping his sister (Ophélia Kolb) absurdist epic that reckons with xenophobia raise her 7-year-old daughter, Amanda in northern France. As gobs of ectoplasmic (Isaure Multrier), and gently initiating a gunk falls from the sky without warning, romance with a pianist (Stacy Martin, the teenage Coincoin must again evade Nymphomaniac). This era of placidity the spluttering police captain Van der is brutally ruptured, and a grief-stricken Weyden and his deputy Carpentier as they David must assume new responsibility for zoom through sparse pastoral vistas, on Amanda as a potential guardian. With an the hunt for clues. Although they’re utterly understated directorial touch, Hers creates ill-equipped to connect these splats to the a touching story of resilience deepened by sudden materialization of identical twins delicately nuanced performances. around town, their moments of prophetic lucidity are as surprising as they are reveal- Saturday, March 2 6:00pm ing. Across this expansive canvas, Coincoin Q&A with Mikhaël Hers and the Extra-Humans channels Jacques Tati, Antonin Artaud, and Invasion of the Saturday, March 9 1:30pm Body Snatchers into a deadpan fever dream, wholly singular and undeniably Dumont. Sunday, March 3 1:00pm FOR TICKETS VISIT FILMLINC.ORG NEW YORK PREMIERE GIRLS OF THE SUN THE FRESHMEN (LES FILLES DU SOLEIL) (PREMIÈRE ANNÉE) Eva Husson, France/Belgium/Georgia/ Thomas Lilti, France, 2018, 92m Switzerland, 2018, 111m Thomas Lilti, whose hospital drama An unshakable Golshifteh Farahani, as Hippocrates played Rendez-Vous in 2015, Bahar, the commander of an all-female unit draws upon his experience as a doctor of resistance fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan, holds once again for this affectionate tale of the center of Girls of the Sun. Bahar’s squad- two medical-school freshmen. Antoine ron is comprised entirely of former captives (Vincent Lacoste) is beginning his third who survived a massacre in Corduene, attempt at the first year, which culminates and their rage to fight stems from the grief in a cutthroat entrance exam before one of witnessing the slaughter of their loved can even opt into the medical concentra- ones.