Impulses and Abstractions: Sound and Music in 1960s French Cinema

March 14–29, 2026

In a roundtable on Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour published in the Cahiers du cinéma in 1959, Jacques Rivette suggested that “the problems Resnais sets himself in film are parallel to those that [Igor] Stravinsky sets himself in music.” This series will investigate what Rivette may have been getting at in linking Resnais to the great modernist composer—and will show that the French cinema of the early 1960s was just as playful in its approach to sound as to image.

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  • Jacques Rivette: Paris Belongs to Us, 1961

  • Alain Resnais: Last Year at Marienbad, 1961

  • Agnès Varda: Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962

  • Chris Marker: La jetée, 1962

  • Alain Resnais: Le chant du styrène, 1957

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Upcoming Films

  • Last Year at Marienbad

    Alain Resnais
    France, 1961

    4K Digital Restoration

    Saturday, March 14, 7 PM
    Introduced by Mary Ann Smart

    Alain Resnais’s elegant, labyrinthine puzzle, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and starring Delphine Seyrig, features a very dissonant, challenging score by Francis Seyrig that is almost entirely played by solo pipe organ, matching the Baroque interior of the chateau setting.

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  • Modes of Cinematic Sound: Short Films

    Friday, March 20, 7 PM
    Introduced by Mary Ann Smart

    This eclectic program features shorts that range from a completely abstract exercise in combining image and sound (Images pour Debussy) to a commercial film advertising a new synthetic material (Le chant du styrène) to a political documentary about the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters (Octobre à Paris).

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  • Cléo from 5 to 7

    Agnès Varda
    France, 1962
    Sunday, March 22, 2 PM
    Introduced by Jeff Fort

    Shot entirely on the streets of Paris, Cléo from 5 to 7 chronicles two hours in the life of a pop star. A classic work of the French New Wave with a score by Michel Legrand, with some lyrics by Agnès Varda herself.

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  • Paris Belongs to Us

    Jacques Rivette
    France, 1961
    Sunday, March 29, 4 PM
    Introduced by Mary Ann Smart

    One of the seminal films of the French New Wave, with cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and others, this is a Langian thriller updated to 1960 in a brilliantly realized Paris. “A masterpiece of Left Bank paranoia” (Village Voice).

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Past Films