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Caroline Champetier on Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt in Margarethe von Trotta's film: "I thought it was a beautiful ingenious idea to give her this part." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Cinematographer Caroline Champetier has worked with Benoît Jacquot, Xavier Beauvois, Jacques Rivette, Arnaud Desplechin, Anne Fontaine, Cédric Anger, Jacques Doillon, Leos Carax, André Téchiné, Barbet Schroeder, Philippe Garrel, Patricia Mazuy, Chantal Akerman, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Claude Lanzmann, and Kevin Macdonald on his Howard Hawks documentary. Her films with these directors include La Fille Seule, Of Gods And Men, Le Pont Du Nord, La Sentinelle, Tokyo! with Denis Lavant, The Innocents, Le Tueur, Ponette, Alice Et Martin, Terror's Advocate, Night Wind, Of Women And Horses, Toute Une Nuit, Too Early/Too Late, and The Last Of The Unjust respectively.

On Margarethe von Trotta: "She had exactly the idea for the beginning of the movie." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

The great Portuguese filmmaker Raúl Ruiz is finally being given the retrospective treatment – and this is only the first part.

Museum of the Moving Image

“See It Big! Holiday Films” includes Desplechin‘s A Christmas Tale, The Shop Around the Corner, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

“Pushing the Envelope:...

For beginning with a dedication to Setsuko Hara, recently departed muse of Ozu and Naruse, Hermia & Helena — the new film by Viola and The Princess of France director Matías Piñeiro — perhaps aligns us to be especially attuned to the Argentinian auteur’s use of female collaborators. One to already emphasize the charisma and big-screen friendly faces of frequent stars Agustina Munoz and Maria Villar, he still seems to have an ability to make them points of representation, not fetish.

Having, in real life, recently relocated to New York from his home Buenos Aires, Piñeiro can obviously be interpreted as having made some form of autobiography. His avatar in this case, Camilla (Munoz), is in New York on an artistic residency after her friend, Carmen (Villar), did the same, only to slightly disappointing results due to the loneliness and lack of personal change she saw in the city.

The film is...

This August, Mubi is paying tribute to the great, but too-often-forgotten, Jacques Rivette. His conspiratorial films, deliciously and collaboratively playing with genre, theatre, painting, literature and cinema itself, constitute the best kept secret of the French New Wave. Only a precious few, including sprawling magnum opus Out 1: noli me tangere (1971), mostly unseen until recently, and his canonical masterpiece that he made immediately after that 12-hour experiment, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), could be described as well known. In a belated tribute to one of our very favorite filmmakers, we're showing three rarities by Jacques Rivette, hardly screened in most countries.Additionally, for those in Los Angeles we're presenting our three films plus Celine and Julie Go Boating at the Cinefamily and for New Yorkers, we're presenting Rivette's 1981 masterpiece Le Pont du Nord at Videology in Brooklyn.Duelle (1976), August 7The Queen of the Night (Juliet Berto) battles the Queen...

Above: French poster for Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, France, 1960).Over the years I have often wanted to write about the films of Jacques Rivette, but I have always been disappointed by the quality both of the posters for many of his films and of the scans available for even the better designs. With the sad news that Rivette has left us this morning at the age of 87—so soon after the triumphant resurrection of his magnum opus Out 1—I feel I should at least showcase the handful of posters that do this great director justice.The best Rivette posters are top-loaded at the beginning of his career. His adaptation of Denis Diderot’s La religieuse, starring Anna Karina, seems to have inspired the most varied work (so much in fact that I will save most of it for a later post). And there are a few other terrific designs,...

If I could properly describe the experience of discovering Jacques Rivette‘s films, I’d compare it to entering a room — a big one; sometimes a very big one — in which a conspiratorial game of deception and obfuscation is already underway between a group of handsome men and beautiful women. (Mostly the latter; sometimes only the latter.) While most directors ask you to sit and observe, you’re here invited to nestle somewhere between spectator and active participant, a patron whose close observation compensates for (or enhances) the fact that the plot doesn’t make total sense and associations between players requires some inference. By the time it ends, you’ll (ideally) come away with, if nothing else, the sense that something thoroughly, almost aggressively different has taken place — a mix of “well, what happened there?” with the desire to enter once more. And then again, and then again, and then again.

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.Two uneasy debuts whose directors evince a canny feeling for the way the world, photographed with simultaneous emphasis and naturalism, might be turned inside-out by the camera. Working with a minimum of resources in their first features, these directors' ability to take their characters’ familiarity with their own living spaces (cramped hotel rooms, dingy apartments) and constituent clutter (lamps, drawings, notepads) and turn it against them, cast every anonymous object as part of a larger conspiracy, gives their movies their peculiar, anxious zest.1 It means that, in a similarly wigged-out way in Eraserhead and Paris Belongs to Us, both long gestating projects by nervous filmmakers in their late twenties,...

Spanish director José Luis Guerín is best known in the States for his pseudo-fictional love letter to women-watching In the City of Sylvia, but in fact is a prolific documentary filmmaker and has brought with him to Locarno the lovely and elegant pseudo-documentary L’Accademia delle Muse. Playful and clever as ever, Guerín has collaborated with Professor Raffaele Pinto and several actresses, perhaps students, to stage a false course in philology. The class, populated almost entirely by women, discusses the nature, influence and meaning of muses in poetry, and what starts as seemingly a documentary on this classroom, its teacher and a few select students, subtly evolves into a drama of words and unseen actions.The issues at stake as discourse in the class—what desire means, if it has to be sexual, the difference between a woman and a muse, how a lover influences the beloved and vice versa...

Hong Sang-soo's Right Now, Wrong Then.The lineup for the 2015 festival has been revealed, including new films by Hong Sang-soo, Andrzej Zulawski, Chantal Akerman, Athina Rachel Tsangari, and others, alongside retrospectives and tributes dedicated to Sam Peckinpah, Michael Cimino, Bulle Ogier, and much more.Piazza GRANDERicki and the Flash (Jonathan Demme, USA)La belle saison (Catherine Corsini, France)Le dernier passage (Pascal Magontier, France)Der staat gegen Fritz Bauer (Lars Kraume, Germany)Southpaw (Antoine Fuqua, USA)Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, USA)Jack (Elisabeth Scharang, Austria)Floride (Philippe Le Guay, France)The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, UK/USA)Erlkönig (Georges Schwizgebel, Switzerland)Guibord s'en va-t-en guerre (Philippe Falardeau, Canada)Bombay Velvet (Anurag Kashyap, India)Pastorale cilentana (Mario Martone, Italy)La vanite (Lionel Baier, Switzerland/France)The Laundryman (Lee Chung, Taiwan)Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, USA) I pugni ni tasca (Marco Bellocchio, Italy)Heliopolis (Sérgio Machado, Brazil)Amnesia (Barbet Schroeder,...

Broken SpecsReaders of online criticism probably know the name Ted Fendt for his invaluable French translation work—on this site alone he’s published English-language versions of interviews (with director Jean Eustache and cinematographer Caroline Champetier) and pieces on Straub-Huillet, Bresson, Grémillon, and others. He’s also offered his own perceptive analysis of Paris Goes Away, Rivette’s half-hour Le Pont du Nord rehearsal, and compiled theauthoritative bibliography to Godard’s Goodbye to Language. Less visible, though, has been Fendt’s own work behind the camera—he currently has five narrative shorts to his name, works at once delightfully shaggy dog and rigorously formalist, and they look and feel like little else happening in American independent cinema right now. We’re thrilled to finally present the online premiere of his films Broken Specs (2012) and Travel Plans (2013) on Mubi.Reviewing Fendt’s choice of translation work, you can trace the seeds...

In the olden days, what month it was never mattered to movies. But today the late winter months are well-known as a weedy boneyard of mouth-breathing Hollywood castoffs, and we explore it at the cost of our patience, time, shekels, and optimism. For the love of everything holy, stay home — warm, high, popcorned, in pajamas, in chosen company, and with an infinity of choices at your disposal. If you don't, Jupiter Ascending 2 will be your fault. For instance, Jacques Rivette. In many ways the French New Wave's phantom outlaw, Rivette has remained a recalcitrant global giant despite the fact that many of his films — for reasons of extraordinary length and/or distributors' befuddlement — have never been released in the U.S. It took Le Pont du Nord...

 

After a successful run last of week of "In Case Of No Emergency: The Films Of Ruben Ostlund," the Austin Film Society is adding an encore screening of last year's acclaimed Force Majeure this evening at the Marchesa. This is likely your last chance to catch it on the big screen, so don't miss out before the film is released February 10 on home video.

On Sunday evening, fans of Euro exploitation will want to head to the Afs Screening Room where longtime film collector Fred Frey will screen a secret double feature of rare 16mm films from his private collection. The films "will interest those who relish obscure delights." The Jacques Rivette "Essential Cinema" series closes out on Thursday at the Marchesa with a 35mm print of 1981's Le Pont Du Nord. 

Over at the Violet Crown Cinema, the "'Round Midnight" series continues this weekend with Danny Boyle's stylish debut Shallow Grave,...

In my first year at the Festival de Cannes, I think I walked the length of the Boulevard de la Croisette approximately 36 times. At first swarming through this crowded main street is like being trapped in a street fair full of confused rubber-neckers, all wandering in different directions, straining to see something that hasn't quite materialized. Gosling? Glitz? Justin Bieber? Jean-Luc Godard?

On my first stroll down this main drag, I saw Hummer-inspired yachts, an older European couple with his-and-her beige linen pant suits and matching grey-blond severe bobs, and a group of loud American students slugging rosé from the bottle on a bench. The police and bouncers (more so than the festival staff) control the crowds with alarmingly random assertions of authority. "Ne fais pas le rois juste!" shouted one pissed off teen when an officer decides on a whim, seemingly, that only some people are allowed to cross the street.

"Le vieux Paris s’en va!"1

—Rallying cry, late 1800s

"Old Paris is no more (the form of a city

Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart)"

—Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” Fleurs du mal

Paris s’en va. Paris goes away. Paris disappears.

Two women lying next to each other on a bench, wake up. A hard cut to a shot of one of the women approaching a newspaper stand on a Parisian street. She scans the rack of postcards and chooses five with a picture of the Arc de Triomphe. The characters played by Bulle and Pascale Ogier in Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981) could be described as that classic French type, the flâneur, “masking under multiple impressions the void” felt within and around themselves.2 In Paris s’en va (1981), these unnamed characters appear more like spirits, ghosts awoken from a centuries-long slumber by the expansive...

News.

Starting this week, filmmaker, editor, critic and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli will be seeing the premiere of her exquisite short feature Traveling Light, "a small-scale silent (aesthetically “silent”, but with a dense sound mix) charting a trip among friends from New York to Pittsburgh carefully constructed as a string of tiny moments" (Christopher Small), around the world in a variety of venues. The most ambitious on the ground presentation will be at New York's Anthology Film Archives, in whose series "Closely Watched Trains" Traveling Light is showing alongside such other brilliant train cinema as Shanghai Express, Emperor of the North, and The Narrow Margin. For those not in New York, stay tuned for news of the film's online premiere.

As Dave Kehr prepares to take on his new position as Adjunct Curator at MoMA, it has been announced that J. Hoberman will be taking over his video column in...

Leos Carax followed his short film Strangulation Blues (1980) with the tragic Boy Meets Girl in 1984. Starring Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier, Carax’s first feature announced a new and exciting presence in both French and World cinema. Boy Meets Girl premiered in May 1984 at the Cannes Film Festival in the Independent Critics Week section, certainly a great venue to premiere a film and quite an impressive place to show a first feature as well. This film introduced many of the themes and cinematic problems that Carax would continually return to in his later films, such as a chance encounter between two people, failed romance, meditation on silent and contemporary cinema, and poetic treatments of Carax’s own biography.

Boy Meets Girl is an intense depiction of a social outsider and the way this outsider relates to the world around him. Alex (Lavant) is a tiny and timid Parisian. His screen...

Photo © 2013 Wild Bunch - Alcatraz Movies - Arte France Cinema - Pandora Film Produktion.

Bastards [Les salauds] begins, like Garrel's Un été brûlant, at night, with a suicide. An explanation for the gesture will never come, although, through the film's near imperceptible ellipses, it comes close. A film of profoundly somber gloam, of loneliness and anger and even stifled madness, of complicity and solitude, its sadness is almost absolute.

A torrid string connects a cast predominantly made up from Claire Denis' family of actors: Vincent Lindon, Michel Subor, Alex Descas, Grégoire Colin. There are so many of them that they stand out as coming from somewhere before, some shared place, and their figures seem at once human and also something more so, grander, archetypal. (Lola Créton creates a similar effect in a small role with such a brief but so recognizable presence that it both reaches outside the story, as well as expanding something within.

★★★★☆ The English translation of French maestro Jacques Rivette's debut feature Paris nous appartient (1962) is "Paris belongs to us". It could also have easily been the title of his 1981 oddball offering Le Pont du Nord. Coveted by cinephiles for years, this Masters of Cinema rerelease is most welcome. It's a magical work of blazing intelligence and imagination which sees Paris as a labyrinth full of hidden narratives and emotional fault lines. At just over two hours, it's a relatively short film for Rivette, but its rambling structure lets him pack a lot in; from the post-68 French mindset to generations in transition.

Le Pont du Nord follows an enigmatic treasure hunt undertaken by Marie and Baptiste, played by real-life mother and daughter duo Bulle and Pascale Ogier respectively (the latter would go on to win the Best Actress award at the 1984 Venice Film Festival). After being released from prison for involvement in a bank robbery,...

News.

The Criterion Collection has announced its batch of new releases for September, and we're particularly excited for this set: A new issue of The Seventh Art is now online, meaning there's a few great video interviews (Paul Schrader, Margarethe von Trotta, Barbara Hammer) well worth your time to watch. Steven Spielberg & George Lucas are predicting that the film industry will implode.

Finds.

Above: Writing for the Independent Cinema Office, our own Adrian Curry takes a look at "The Aesthetics of Film Festival Posters" Above: via Revista Lumière's Facebook page, a photo of Jean-Luc Godard being arrested during May '68 in Paris. Via David Hudson and The Keyframe Daily, Daniel Ludwig has some insight from the set of Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage:

'On this particular drizzly day in Nyon by Lake Geneva, Ludwig, sitting in the back of a silver Mercedes Sl 500, is driven at breakneck speed,...

My, those Cinema St. Louis guys are tres occupé! Hot off the heels of their Q-Fest (the St. Louis Gay and Lesbian Film Festival), the Classic French Film Festival starts up this week at the same location. Discover the French culture! The Classic French Film Festival is sponsored by TV5MONDE USA , the French channel in the Us. I’ve never watched it but I’m sure it’s very French!

A downloadable Pdf of the fest’s program can be found Here

http://www.cinemastlouis.org/sites/default/files/downloads/2013/fffest2013_3lores.pdf

The Cinema St. Louis page about the event is Here

http://www.cinemastlouis.org/classic-french-film-festival

All films will be shown in the Winifred Moore Auditorium, Webster University’s Webster Hall, 470 E. Lockwood Ave.

$12 general admission, $10 for students and Cinema St. Louis members, free for Webster U. students

This is the Fifth Annual Classic French Film Festival,...