Maurice Pialat

9/3/04 to 9/30/04

Loulou |September 16, 25

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
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Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Van Gogh
- Thursday, September 30 7:30pm
The artist's world in the last two months of his life is drawn with period feeling harking back to the Impressionists. "An extraordinary portrait of the artist as common man."-Sight & Sound
Le Garçu
- Saturday, September 25 7pm
"With the great natural of French cinema, Gérard Depardieu, as an absent, philandering father, Le Garçu is an acute and provocative portrait of an oversized ego punctured by the avid spontaneity of a small child."-New Zealand Int'l Film Festival
Loulou
- Saturday, September 25 9pm
A bourgeoise leaves her husband for a working-class layabout in this absorbing study of desire. "Loulou is as fresh and unsettling today as it was in 1980. [Depardieu and Huppert are] so explosively real and mercurial and spontaneous, that it's hard to think of them as acting."-Film Comment
Under Satan's Sun
- Friday, September 24 7:30pm
Depardieu displays his range as an actor in this film about a parish priest for whom life is an endless struggle with Satan. Sandrine Bonnaire costars. "A chamber work of the harshest beauty, accumulating power as it moves from one spiritual duel to the next."-Film Society of Lincoln Center. Winner, Cannes Palme d'or.
A nos amours
- Friday, September 24 9:30pm
"The best film of the year revolves around a teenage girl (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her disruptive erotic power over her own family. Pialat must have put his actors through hell, but they came back with things you've never seen in a movie before."-Village Voice, 1985
Police
- Thursday, September 23 7:30pm
Depardieu stars in this policier about a burnt-out cop, a Tunisian drug ring, and an elusive lover. "Pialat offers a documentary investigation of a shadowy universe, a classically structured police intrigue, and an allegory."-Film Comment.
Loulou
- Thursday, September 16 7:30pm
A bourgeoise leaves her husband for a working-class layabout in this absorbing study of desire. "Loulou is as fresh and unsettling today as it was in 1980. [Depardieu and Huppert are] so explosively real and mercurial and spontaneous, that it's hard to think of them as acting."-Film Comment. Repeated September 25.
The House in the Woods
- Sunday, September 12 3pm
Special admission, $10/$6. A six-hour film in seven episodes, shown with dinner break. One of Pialat's most beloved films, commissioned for French TV, The House in the Woods tells of life in a French village during WWI, centering on a gamekeeper and his wife who take in children left abandoned in the war.
Graduate First
- Saturday, September 11 7pm
The '70s saw a spate of French films about teens discovering their sexuality, but Pialat's slice-of-life portrait of kids in a northern mining town has the brutally compassionate sense of reality for which he is acclaimed.
French Chronicles and Early Shorts
- Saturday, September 11 8:45pm
A series of documentary shorts offers a revealing look at French life from Pialat's singular perspective. Of particular interest is one on Van Gogh. In French only.
The Mouth Agape
- Friday, September 10 7:30pm
In the story of a man (Philippe Léotard) watching his mother die of cancer, Pialat "simply demonstrates how people in their discontent and emotional vulnerability struggle to draw comfort from one another."-Film Comment. "An incandescent masterpiece if ever there was one."-Sight & Sound
Police
- Friday, September 10 9:15pm
Depardieu stars in this policier about a burnt-out cop, a Tunisian drug ring, and an elusive lover. "Pialat offers a documentary investigation of a shadowy universe, a classically structured police intrigue, and an allegory."-Film Comment. Repeated September 23.
A nos amours
- Thursday, September 9 7:30pm
Introduced by Jean-Pierre Gorin. "The best film of the year revolves around a teenage girl (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her disruptive erotic power over her own family. Pialat must have put his actors through hell, but they came back with things you've never seen in a movie before."-Village Voice, 1985. Repeated September 24.
We Won't Grow Old Together
- Saturday, September 4 7pm
Pialat's daringly autobiographical story of a couple unable to break up is also a feminist film, concerning a woman extricating herself from a partner who delights in degrading her. Jean Yanne, Marlène Jobert star.
Turkish Chronicles
- Saturday, September 4 9:10pm
A compendium of poetic and visually striking short films shot in Turkey, and set to literary texts. In French only.
Naked Childhood
- Friday, September 3 7:30pm
This tender but unflinching study of an orphaned boy whose erratic, aggressive behavior leads him to be passed from one set of foster parents to another is "a film in which nuance is everything...the performances are stunning."-Time Out. With short L'Amour existe.

Maurice Pialat

9/3/04 to 9/30/04

When Maurice Pialat died, in 2003, too young at the age of 77, Film Comment called him “the most important French filmmaker since Robert Bresson.” This spring, the magazine devoted the better part of an issue to giving this giant of French filmmaking his due here. We are pleased to present Pialat's films to a Bay Area audience, as part of this rediscovery of a director whose career, like his art, was carved by going against the grain.

A contemporary of the French New Wave directors, Pialat nevertheless came to filmmaking a decade later, thus missing the “wave” that might have made his work, so full of the “shock of being alive,” as Kent Jones wrote, better known. Pialat's films are centered in the less glamorous quarters of French family life, often with autobiographical elements and featuring little-known actors (he discovered Sandrine Bonnaire as a teenager for A nos amours, and found the “unknown actor” in Gérard Depardieu many times). He works in the medium close-up, the shot distance that allows the most intimacy and access with no comforting egress. (When he breaks from this, the effect can be overwhelming.) If his dramas are intensely focused, this is not to say they are tightly harnessed, quite the opposite: he edits for emotional, not narrative, coherence. Pialat's searing intensity and mercurial volubility, both as director and actor, can keep us on the edge of our seats. What makes these films drill to the core of truth is the sense that the actors are inhabiting the moment, not the script, and that surprise will ensue. As Jacques Dutronc, who starred in Van Gogh, said, “His films are moving paintings, not quite dry.”

Judy Bloch

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Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, under the curatorship of Richard Peña, with the support of French Cultural Services (New York) and the Bureau de Cinéma of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris). Special thanks to Gaumont and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for creating new prints for this series, and to INA for providing The House in the Woods. Special thanks to Marie Bonnel of French Cultural Services in New York for her tireless efforts on behalf of this project, and to Serge Toubiana of the Cinémathèque Française. A very special thanks to Sylvie Danton Pialat for all her help and support in arranging the series. Thanks also to Sylvie Dargnies, Loic Trocme, Elsa Guillot, Xavier Giannoli, James Quandt, Rosine Handelman, Eric Le Roy, and Manuela Padoan.

The presentation of the series at PFA is funded in part by Consulate General of France, San Francisco, and French Cultural Services, with the generous assistance of Chérif Castel, Cultural Attaché, Consulate General of France, San Francisco.