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June 22, 2009 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Lone Star Film Society
Present Catch the Wave A Film Festival Celebrating the Nouvelle Vague August 13-16 and 20-23
Schedules and ticket information are available at www.themodern.org. Tickets are $8.50; $6.50 for Modern members and Lone Star Film Society members. Advance sales begin two hours prior to each show. Members of Reel People at the Modern and Lone Star Film Society members may purchase tickets in advance by calling the Modern at 817.738.9215. For more information contact: auditoriumprograms@themodern.org.
“There were many film waves in the 1960s which were just that, waves. They broke on the shore and were gone. But the original wave, the French Nouvelle Vague, which crashed upon an unprepared world at Cannes in May 1959 and which brought to the fore filmmakers like Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais, was more like a tsunami. It helped to transform not just French cinema but cinemas the world over. Its effects are with us today.” Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, author of Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960’s.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Lone Star Film Society celebrate the 50th anniversary of the French New Wave with a tribute to the directors who influenced and emerged from the influential Cahiers de Cinema. Screenings include many of the most famous and pivotal, now classic films, from groundbreaking French filmmakers such as Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Claude Charbrol and Jean Luc Godard.
FILM SCHEDULE
Thursday, August 13
Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.
Friday, August 14
A taut, free-wheeling thriller with an ingenious plot, sparkling location photography and a fantastic improvised score by the great Miles Davis, this film established Louis Malle as an exciting new voice in French cinema just as the New Wave was about to crash on to the scene. Critics have found the story contrived, but the film, if not an absolute must-view, is certainly an absolute must-listen.
8 pm
Adapted from a comic novel by Raymond Queneau and occasionally labored in its attempts to find filmic equivalents for Queneau’s extravagant and hilarious wordplay, Zazie dans le metro is a film that succeeds in spite of itself. It is funny in its own right and mordantly perceptive in the way its unflappable and knowing pre-pubescent heroine deflates all attempts to put one over on her.
Saturday, August 15
Breathless
Godard’s first feature and the film that (perhaps misleadingly) came to define the novelty of the New Wave. Petty crook and poseur Michel Poiccard kills a traffic cop and goes on the run. He takes refuge with American paper-seller and aspirant journalist, Patricia. Godard’s elliptical story-telling and the hero’s seeming amorality were equally puzzling - even shocking - to audiences at the time. Now it is a classic.
Sunday, August 16
Robert Bresson’s incomparable tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsion grows, however, so too does his fear that his luck is about to run out. Tautly choreographed and crafted in Bresson’s inimitable style, Pickpocket reveals a master director at the height of his powers.
“Ultimately inexplicable, this concentrated, elliptical, economical movie is an experience that never loses its strangeness.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice.
3:30 pm
Thursday, August 20
Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse (Claire Drouot), young husband and father François (Jean-Claude Drouot) finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attractive postal worker. Le Bonheur examines, with a deceptively cheery palette and the spirited strains of Mozart, the ideas of fidelity and happiness in a modern, self-centered world.
Friday, August 21
The First New Wave film to get a commercial release in Britain, where it did excellent business-thanks mainly (one suspects) to its pervasively decadent atmosphere. Blain plays the country cousin staying in Paris with the sophisticated Brialy while he prepares for his exams. He falls for a girl in his cousin’s smart set, but things do not go well for him. A sparkling film cruel but moral underneath.
8 pm
The most accomplished of Chabrol’s early films. Four shopgirls live entirely for the good times they hope to have when work stops in the evening. But the outer world is as mediocre as the world of work, and the pursuit of love and excitement proves frustrating and, in the case of one of the girls, risky. Superb photography by Henri Decae.
Saturday, August 22
The 400 Blows
Fifty years on from its unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival, Truffaut’s superb feature debut remains an influential landmark in the history of the cinema. Deeply moving yet devoid of maudlin sentimentality, the film centers on Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a 13-year-old constantly in trouble-justifiably or otherwise-with his parents and teachers. Drifting into truancy and petty theft, he soon finds himself at odds with still less sympathetic figures of adult authority. Shot on the streets of Paris, the film exudes an authenticity-emotional, psychological, sociological-surely born of the semi-autobiographical story.
Sunday, August 23
Adapted from an American thriller, Down There by David Goodis, Truffaut’s film is both gentler and (at times) more comic than its hard-boiled original. Charlie (Aznavour) is a piano player in a bar but was once a concert pianist. Meanwhile another aspect of his past in the form of his delinquent brothers is about to catch up with him. Truffaut at his most inventive best.
3:30 pm Coffee Talk
4 pm
In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s Moral Tales series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early thirties, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world, drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After spotting the delicate, blonde Françoise at Mass, he vows to make her his wife, although when he unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the bold, brunette divorcée Maud, his rigid ethical standards are challenged.
The Modern and the Lone Star Film Society gratefully acknowledge:
The British Film Institute
Program notes: Carolyn Schroeder
LOCATION
Museum Gallery Hours
General Admission Prices (includes special exhibition)
CAFÉ MODERN
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©2009, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth