Melville 100

June 8–August 12, 2017

This retrospective marks the centennial of the great French director whose American-inspired crime films helped set the New Wave in motion.

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  • Le Samouraï

  • Army of Shadows

  • Bob le flambeur

  • Léon Morin, Priest

  • Le cercle rouge

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Le Samouraï

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1967

    Imported Print

    Thursday, June 8 7 PM

    Alain Delon embodies cool as a solitary, silent Parisian killer flitting between hits and flings in this essential, influential assassin film. “Achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty” (Slant).

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  • Army of Shadows

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1969
    Saturday, June 10 6 PM

    Melville’s drama of the French Resistance, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret, “grips tighter than a Gestapo handcuff. . . . A film of noirish compositions and fantastic cool” (The Independent).

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  • The Silence of the Sea

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1949

    Imported Print

    Sunday, June 11 7 PM

    A German officer in occupied France falls in love with his “host’s” niece in Melville’s spare debut. “A concentrated, sensitive, interior film” (David Thomson). With short 24 heures de la vie d’un clown.

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  • Le Samouraï

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1967

    Imported Print

    Friday, June 16 8:30 PM

    Alain Delon embodies cool as a solitary, silent Parisian killer flitting between hits and flings in this essential, influential assassin film. “Achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty” (Slant).

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  • Les enfants terribles

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1950

    Imported Print

    Sunday, June 18 7 PM

    Jean Cocteau collaborated with Melville on this poetic, moody adaptation of Cocteau’s novel about the obsessive love between a brother and sister. “One of French cinema’s greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds” (Criterion Collection).

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  • Bob le flambeur

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1956
    Saturday, June 24 6:30 PM

    “The cinematic Birth of the Cool, Melville’s drollest, most likable gangster movie. . . . Exceedingly light on its feet” (Village Voice).

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  • Army of Shadows

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1969
    Sunday, June 25 7 PM

    Melville’s drama of the French Resistance, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret, “grips tighter than a Gestapo handcuff. . . . A film of noirish compositions and fantastic cool” (The Independent).

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  • Léon Morin, Priest

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1961

    New Digital Restoration

    Wednesday, June 28 7:00

    Two of the French New Wave’s most iconic actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, star as a cleric and a Communist drawn together through love. “A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo” (Criterion Collection).

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  • Le deuxième souffle

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1966

    Imported Print

    Friday, July 7 7 PM

    Aging gangster Lino Ventura escapes from jail but winds up being sucked into one last heist in Melville’s well-drilled policier.

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  • Quand tu liras cette lettre

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, Italy, 1953

    Imported Print

    Friday, July 14 8:30 PM

    A sleazy loverboy on the Riviera meets his match in his young victim’s older sister—a nun (Juliette Gréco) just out of the convent—in this delirious combination of French fatalism, postwar despair, noir angles, and heated melodrama.

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  • Léon Morin, Priest

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1961

    New Digital Restoration

    Sunday, July 16 7:00

    Two of the French New Wave’s most iconic actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, star as a cleric and a Communist drawn together through love. “A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo” (Criterion Collection).

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  • Two Men in Manhattan

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1959
    Sunday, July 30 7 PM

    A French journalist uncovers the death of a French diplomat in New York in Melville’s low-budget, semi-documentary noir.

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  • Le doulos

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1963
    Thursday, August 3 7 PM

    Serge Reggiani suspects Jean-Paul Belmondo of being a stool pigeon in this Melvillean roundabout of ambiguity and betrayal.

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  • Le doulos

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1963
    Saturday, August 5 6 PM

    Serge Reggiani suspects Jean-Paul Belmondo of being a stool pigeon in this Melvillean roundabout of ambiguity and betrayal.

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  • Le cercle rouge

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1970
    Sunday, August 6 7 PM

    Alain Delon and Yves Montand in Melville’s “dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters, and cigarettes” (Los Angeles Times).

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  • Un flic

    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1972
    Saturday, August 12 6:30 PM

    Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, and Richard Crenna star in Melville’s last feature, a consummate Sartre-by-way-of-Simenon heist film of remarkable set pieces and an even more remarkable sense of nihilism.

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