Risk And Reinvention: The Films of Louis Malle

8/4/05 to 8/26/05

Burt Lancaster and Louis Malle during the filming of Atlantic City

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Past Films

Place de la République
Thursday, August 4 19:30
A simple premise for a fascinating film: in 1972, Malle and crew observed and talked to Parisians. With short Vive le Tour, a dazzling, intensely physical study of the Tour de France.
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And the Pursuit of Happiness (Free Screening!)
Thursday, August 4 17:30
The new face of American immigration-Ethiopian, Cambodian, Laotian, Central American-was captured for the first time in Malle's 1986 documentary of his trip across the U.S. "An examination of the contradictory pressures of assimilation and cultural fidelity."-Chicago Reader
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The Fire Within
Friday, August 5 21:20
The influence of Malle's mentor Bresson can be seen in this stylish early masterpiece following the last days of a disaffected playboy as he searches Paris society for a reason to live. "A small gem, polished to perfection."-Time Out
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Zazie dans le Métro
Friday, August 5 19:30
This New Wave film introduced Zazie, a little girl with a foul mouth who runs amok on the streets of Paris-in a nice way. An orgy of outrageous sight gags and visual games, and brilliant art direction by William Klein.
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Lacombe, Lucien
Saturday, August 6 20:50
In Vichy France, a young peasant drifts into the sway of local Nazis, giving support to the idea of the banality of evil. One of Malle's greatest films, "beautifully considered, complex, disquieting."-N.Y. Times
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Murmur of the Heart
Saturday, August 6 18:30
Famous as the ultimate coming-of-age movie, this is so much more, with its lovingly observed picture of French bourgeois life in the 1950s. "An exhilarating film."-Pauline Kael
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Calcutta
Thursday, August 11 19:30
This travelogue of near-hallucinatory images caused a stir in 1969, offending some with its portrait of India and leaving others dismayed by its willful refusal to impose a storytelling order. "Malle has used his camera to record and witness and it is a revealing, bitter but pulsating insight into Calcutta and India."-Variety
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Human, Too Human
Thursday, August 18 19:30
In 1972, Malle filmed the workers and workings of a Citroën automobile factory and created this real-life counterpart to Chaplin's Modern Times. The film itself is a chain de montage (assembly line) at times as dispassionate as Bresson, at others as comic as Tati.
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God's Country
Thursday, August 25 19:30
Tiny Glencoe, MN, is the subject of Malle's unobtrusive but probing look at "Le Middle West" in 1979 and 1985. An essential time capsule of an idiosyncratic America, haunted by post-Vietnam tremors and the ravages of Reagonomics. "A slice of cultural and social history, as well as a fascinating dramatic portrait."-London Film Festival
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Au revoir les enfants
Friday, August 26 19:00
Malle's late-career triumph, set during the war, when to be a child was hard, to be a Jewish child, a nightmare waiting to happen. "Reasserts the elegant dreaminess of Malle's most passionate work."-East Bay Express
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Atlantic City
Friday, August 26 21:05
Against the surf and fading pink surface of Atlantic City, an aging mobster's dreams flourish in this brilliant and offbeat film starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon.
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Risk And Reinvention: The Films of Louis Malle

8/4/05 to 8/26/05

The French director Louis Malle (1932–1995) was an auteur theorist's bête noire. If his films had one thing in common, it was the director's resolve to make each film different from the last. He began as cinematographer for Jacques Cousteau and assistant to Robert Bresson, and throughout his career, alternated between narrative features and documentaries; sometimes he made films that were both, and so recognizably neither. Malle also frustrated criticism with a style that has been variously described as “academic,” “neutral and elegant,” with “a too-reverent respect for production values.” He was, in other words, the consummate professional, and it was this that allowed him to take a new risk with every film.

This is not to say that we can't find threads in his work leading from the features to the documentaries: he was a sensualist, a romantic, he loved jazz and was fascinated by cultures. He liked to look. His documentaries took him to India and across the United States; his fiction features probed the sexual and political taboos of his day. “The premises of most of my films are difficult to accept,” he said. “In Murmur of the Heart I tried to make a taboo like incest seem normal….It's the same with my interest in India….I am fascinated by what I don't understand.”

We present a selection of some of our favorite and least shown films from Malle's prolific career, the better to understand it. Keep an eye out for a new print of Malle's first feature Elevator to the Gallows, which opens commercially in Berkeley in mid-August; for a Malle series at the Balboa Theater, also in August; and for his epic documentary Phantom India to be released on DVD by Criterion.

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The touring series Risk and Reinvention: The Films of Louis Malle is organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in collaboration with Nouvelles Éditions de Films S.L., Janus Films, and the Criterion Collection, with the support of French Cultural Services. Special thanks to Manuel Malle, Michael Barker, Marie Bonnel, and Sarah Finklea.