French Cinema Under the Occupation

8/12/05 to 8/21/05

Children of Paradise, August 12, 14

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Safe Conduct
- Sunday, August 21 15:00
Bertrand Tavernier's drama based on the WWII memories and lives of his fellow filmmakers. "A rangy, irreverent, episodic odyssey through French filmmaking during the Occupation...one of the very best movies ever made about the life of moviemaking."-Village Voice. Followed by special surprise feature!
Goupi Mains Rouges
- Saturday, August 20 19:00
From Jacques Becker (Grisbi) comes this offbeat film about four generations of a family who run a country inn. Bickering over a hidden treasure leads to a murder, and a mystery, embedded in a personal and comic portrait of peasant life.
Le Corbeau
- Saturday, August 20 21:10
Classic film noir dealing with the effect on a small town of an outbreak of poison pen letters. Within the thriller format, director Clouzot (Diabolique) conducts a study of group psychology in a mood of all-embracing suspicion.
La Nuit fantastique
- Friday, August 19 19:30
Fernand Gravey and Micheline Presle in a freewheeling wartime escapist fantasy by Marcel L'Herbier: "A kind of surrealist screwball comedy, it's part Man Ray, part My Man Godfrey."-Stephen Harvey, MoMA
Douce
- Friday, August 19 21:20
"If ever there was a buried treasure, the delectable Douce is it. Considered Autant-Lara's masterpiece, it is set in Belle Époque Paris and charts the decline of an aristocratic family to symbolize the end of an era and of a moral order."-Cinematheque Ontario
Children of Paradise
- Sunday, August 14 17:30
Please see Friday, August 12.
Le Mariage de Chiffon
- Saturday, August 13 19:00
Very rare! From screenwriter Jean Aurenche and director Claude Autant-Lara, who reveals his genius for "sharp and often sardonic querying of bourgeois values" (Roy Armes) in a romance set in 1904.
Remorques
- Saturday, August 13 21:05
A huge hit in wartime France, with Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan. Director Jean Grémillon's films "capture the sensibility of the times with their wistful romanticism, the fatality of their conclusions, and their attention to social classes."-Dudley Andrew
Children of Paradise
- Friday, August 12 19:30
"This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carné and written by Jacques Prévert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theatre and life…and a film poem on the nature and varieties of love."-Pauline Kael. Repeated on Sunday, August 14.

French Cinema Under the Occupation

8/12/05 to 8/21/05

This series has been selected by the celebrated director and committed scholar Bertrand Tavernier, whose own 2002 film Safe Conduct pays tribute to French filmmakers who, during the German occupation of their country, managed to make films of political and artistic integrity. In his introduction to the series, Tavernier describes the setting for filmgoers and filmmakers after 1940:

France had just suffered a major setback and unprecedented humiliation; a large part of its ruling class-its political leaders, its elite, and its intellectuals-resorted to cowardice and flattery to find favor with the German occupying forces. France was flooded by propaganda. You can imagine the shock people felt when they suddenly saw a film that was intelligent, demanding, intellectually ambitious, and which also rejected any compromise. They must have instinctively and subconsciously understood that the people who made this film...

In order to avoid becoming apologists for either the Vichy regime or Collaboration, some directors turned to fantastic or historical films. These genres served as ruses, enabling them to sneak in critical undertones or dialogue with double meanings, which the audience deciphered perfectly well. Thus these films are full of pleasant surprises. But despite an impressive list of directors who made their debuts in that period, it would be a lie to claim that this was the Golden Age of French cinema, as many journalists and film directors have in the past. Indeed, how could we forget that anti-Semitism drove many Jewish authors to silence or exile; and the deportations, the censorship, or the deaths of artists?

Bertrand Tavernier, 2004

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This series has been organized and circulated by the French Cultural Services, New York, with prints from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our special thanks to Marie Bonnel, for organizing and coordinating the North American tour of this series; and to Gaumont, Janus Films/Criterion Collection, and Empire Pictures for their cooperation. We also express our thanks to the Consulate General of France, San Francisco, for their support.

Bertrand Tavernier's remarks excerpted and condensed from a longer essay. Thanks to George Kaltsounakis, Cinematheque Ontario.