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NY Premiere
According to Cavalier,
“the first shots in this film were made in 1994, at which time I
started preferring a camera to a pen as a means of keeping a diary. The
most recent shots were made in 2005; more than ten years of a life
condensed into 100 minutes of screen time…as one would expect with a
film diary of this sort, I made these images alone. What could be more
satisfying to a director who became a filmmaker before ever holding a
camera? Now I can be alone with the person who stands alone in my
viewfinder. My relationship with those I choose to film, and those who
appear before my camera, is much richer than it ever was.”
Warmly received at
last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Le Filmeur (“The Filmer”) is a
remarkable, delicate and immensely touching reflection on Cavalier’s
past ten years. Those years saw the passing of his parents as well as
the emergence of health problems and the markings of advancing years.
The film is made up not so much of the significant moments or events
but those times when the shape and flow of his life became clear to
him. We hope that Mr. Cavalier will be with us in New York to introduce
and discuss his film at the 6:30pm Wednesday March 1 and the 5pm
Saturday March 4 screening.
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Wed
March 1: 2 & 6:30*
Fri
Sat March 4: 5*
*introduction by the
director |
“Basse Normandie is
based on actual events. Protagonists Simon Reggiani and Patricia Mazuy
are also husband and wife in real life. They filmed the creation of one
of Simon’s plays, and then reenacted some of the events surrounding it.
Simon prepares for a one-man show that he will perform largely on
horseback, including dressage. The local government of the region hopes
to use the play to improve its image; with government’s support, it’s
decided that Simon will perform the play before an audience of over
1,700 farmers during an agricultural congress in Paris. The director of
a large stud farm provides Simon with rehearsal space. What follows is
the path that Reggiani had to take in order to create his performance —
a path filled with obstacles ranging from uncooperative stable staff
and a grumpy horse to vocal problems. An intriguing and occasionally
absurd mixture of filmed theater, a making-of documentary, mockumentary
and dressage lesson.” — Sandra den Hamer, 2005 Rotterdam International
Film Festival
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Wed
March 1: 4
Sat
March 4: 9:15
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Le joli Mai offers
a kaleidoscope of responses by French citizens of every stripe to the
first month of peace after the end of the Algerian war. Marker’s
approach is never to interrogate the people he meets with direct
political questions, but rather to engage his subjects with much more
general concerns, such as “Are you happy?” or “Is money important to
you?” The accumulation of these answers and points of view, set against
a lyrical narration spoken by Simone Signoret, makes Le joli Mai
an extraordinary portrait of a moment of transition in French history,
as one sense of national identity was ending while alternatives were
just beginning to be born. A landmark of the direct cinema movement
that deployed the then new lightweight cameras and transportable,
synchronized sound recording devices in the pursuit of a more
observational documentary style.
|
Wed
March 1: 8:45
Wed
March 8: 3:40
|
Before revolutionizing the
feature film with works such as Hiroshima
mon amour and Last Year at
Marienbad, Alain Resnais made a number of remarkable
documentaries that
often anticipate the stylistic explorations and themes found in his
later work.
Banned in France for 12
years, Statues Also Die
traces the devastating impact of French
colonialism on African art. As Resnais’ co-director, Chris Marker,
stated, “We want to see their suffering, serenity, humor, even though
we don’t know anything about them.” Their film shows what happens when
art loses its connection to a culture.
A kind of Borgesian fantasy,
All the
Memory of the World is a lyrical exploration of Paris’s
Bibiothèque Nationale, the French National Library. As Resnais’
camera glides down a labyrinth of corridors past endless rows of books,
one is struck, and put in awe, of the vastness of human experience, and
moreover how little one can ever know of it.
Surely one of the most
remarkable, and unforgettable, documentaries ever made, Night and Fog
burst upon a world that already trying to move away from the memory of
the Holocaust. Juxtaposing period footage, contemporary images of the
former camps and a haunting narration by writer Jean Cayrol, Resnais
attempts to sketch the outline of events too real and yet still
unimaginable.
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Thurs
March 2: 1 & 8:45
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“One of the best documentaries of recent years.” — Jean-Claude Loiseau, Telerama
A total eclipse of the sun took place on August 11, 1999; the north of France, especially the Pays de Caux region in Normandy, was plunged into darkness. Filmmaker Ariane Doublet, who knew the region and its inhabitants, went there a few weeks before the event to see how the locals would respond to the impending descent of curious sky watchers from all over Europe. At first they seem not to care. But gradually they begin to open up, talking about how much their lives are ruled by the rhythm of the seasons and other natural cycles. They begin to realize what a privileged location their farms and fields have become — especially as more and more people start showing up wearing funny glasses. The French title of Doublet’s wry chronicle plays on the double implication of the word terrien — it alludes both to people who work the soil as well as to the inhabitants of the planet Earth (Terre), a succinct description of the close encounter she records between the local and the cosmic.
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Thur March 2: 2:45
Fri
March 3: 8:45
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An intimate, picaresque
inquiry into French life, as lived by the country's poor and its
provident, as well as by the film's own director, Agnès Varda.
The aesthetic, political and finally moral point of departure for Varda
are gleaners, those individuals who pick at already-reaped fields for
the odd potato, the leftover turnip, and in previous generations were
immortalized by the likes of Millet and van Gogh. Varda isn't
particularly interested in immortalizing today's gleaners but in
investigating the reasons that lead the anonymous (desperate and
quixotic both) and the celebrated (including a famous chef) to sift
through our detritus. Along her journey, Varda constructs a portrait of
France that is every bit as modern as the digital camera with which she
does her filming, and in the process comes up with her finest, most
effective work since Vagabond. Presented at the 2000 New York Film
Festival
|
Thurs
March 2: 4:30
Sat
March 4: 7:15
|
Jean-Luc Godard once claimed
that the greatest achievement of the cinema of the 60s was eliminating
the distinction between fiction and documentary. Arnaud des
Pallières’ debut feature, Drancy
Avenir, is one such work that
seems set on blurring these boundaries. In the first of three stories
that make up the film, the last Holocaust survivor laments not having
left an enduring account of the horrors he witnessed. In the second
tale, a young historian is doing research on the concentration camp
that operated in Drancy, outside of Paris; discovering that the site of
the camp is now occupied by a large housing project called “La Muette”
(the Silent), the world of the Final Solution and contemporary Europe
begin to blur. In the final tale, a ship’s captain recounts a journey
up an uncharted river towards a little-known civilization. Des
Pallières creates a moving meditation on the lingering impact of
the Holocaust by juxtaposing these seemingly unconnected stories.
|
Thurs
March 2: 6:15
Fri
March 3: 4:30
|
One of the first films to
look at Paris’s burgeoming “banlieue,” the “suburbs” surrounding the
city that were already becoming filled with immigrants, the poor and
the working class, Love Exists denounces the urban planning that had
led to the creation of what would soon be seen as ghettos.
followed by
“There was once a tiny
country. So tiny that it resembled more a theatrical stage. Two to
three times a day the country is inhabited by its small citizens. The
country is named the Schoolyard and its citizens are children. Director
Claire Simon’s Recreations is a suggestive and in places surrealistic
study of the children's fantasy world.... In the micro-world of the
Schoolyard emerge micro-bonds and micro-power relationships, which in
many ways are reminiscent of the adult world, yet are guided by its own
rules. Thanks to cameras located at the height of the children's eyes
we do not see the hustle and bustle of the five-to eight-year-old
children from above, but become part of their world.“ — 2005 One World
Festival Catalogue (Prague)
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Fri
March 3: 2 & 6:30
|
“When we set up contacts with everyone in summer 1995, explaining our intentions, most people including the unionists asked, ‘We would like to contribute but who would ever be interested in these old stories?’ I didn’t want to make an antiquated or a nostalgic film. 20-year-olds consider it a historical film. It describes a vanished world: large industrial companies in left-wing suburbs, a kind of company culture, a sense of belonging which has disappeared and been replaced with insecurity, the fear of the loss of jobs. And yet, despite predictions by officials about the workers’ situation, it remains basically unchanged, the way others predict the death of cinema.” – Hervé Le Roux
One of the monuments of contemporary documentary cinema — and not only in France —Reprise offers a provocative re-evaluation of the tumultuous and by now mythical events in May of 68 and their aftermath. On June 10, 1968, students from the Parisian film school, IDHEC recorded the end of the strike at the Wonder Factory in Saint-Ouen. A young woman worker refused to go back to work. After director Hervé le Roux saw a photograph of her in Cahiers du Cinéma he began a long search for this “heroine,” a search that charts the changes in French radical politics over the past 30 years.
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Sun
March 5: 12:30
Thur
March 9: 1
|
“Saia, The Shadows, was
entirely filmed at night, on a frontline located at about fifty
kilometers north of Kabul. Neither documentary, nor fiction, Saia
depicts, in an impressionist mode, the ambiance and the routine of the
war in Afghanistan. On one side, the Talibans, on the other, the forces
of the resistance of commander Massoud. The enemy positions are
sometimes separated only by a couple hundred yards. Saia is not a film
on the war but a film in the war.” – Florent Marcie
followed by
In 1943, Maurice Rossel was
the only International Red Cross representative to go to Auschwitz,
when it was working at maximum efficiency as a death camp. He claimed
to have witnessed no horrors — except for skeletal prisoners who gazed
at him as "a visitor from the living" — and enjoyed a pleasant
half-hour chat with the "elegant" camp commander. Rossel also headed
the Red Cross delegation in June 1944 to inspect the "model ghetto" at
Theresienstadt. As Claude Lanzmann questions him about his impressions
of this totally staged showplace, the self-possessed, silver-haired
Rossel betrays his enduring prejudices: struck to this day by the
"servility" and "passivity" of the Jews, Rossel remains impassive. In
this shattering conversation with a perfectly civilized gentleman,
Lanzmann documents how the Holocaust could have been allowed to happen
by a world full of "decent" human beings. Presented at the 1999 New
York Film Festival.
|
Mon
Mar 6: 1:30
Wed
Mar 8: 6
Thurs
Mar 9: 4:45
|
“The magnificent Starting Place is one of those rare
films that add distinctly to our knowledge of the world and that
enhances our perceptions of things, sounds and relationships. In 1969
Kramer went to North Vietnam to make a film. The urgency of the need to
oppose the Vietnam War was a “starting place” for many Americans,
including Kramer’s friend Linda Evans, whom we meet in an extremely
painful sequence. Returning to Vietnam, Kramer finds the survivors of
the country’s political struggles, above all with the struggle to
preserve history, memory and meaning. The beauty of this film derives
partly from his ability to convey love for his camera’s subjects, from
his attentiveness and responsiveness to their looks. One of the wonders
of Starting Place is its
extraordinarily sensual soundtrack. I’ve seen three Kramer films, and I
have no doubt that he was a real filmmaker, one of the only ones.” —
Chris Fujiwara, Boston Phoenix
|
Mon
Mar 6: 3:45
Thurs
Mar 9: 6:40
|
followed by
Two important early examples
of the documentary in France. For À
Propos de Nice, Jean Vigo and his cameraman Boris Kaufman went
down to the capital of the French Riviera and shot many hours,
sometimes clandestinely, of the city and its inhabitants; the result
was this stirring, provocative portrait of Nice that stands among the
best of the era’s “city symphonies.” Those
of Our Land was made by a very young Sacha Guitry (later one of
France’s finest actor/directors) as a kind of counter-propaganda
exercise against Germanic claims for the superiority of their “Kultur.”
Guitry introduces us to 12 French luminaries, including Sarah
Bernhardt, Monet, Rodin, Degas, and August Renoir. Shot silent with an
early amateur camera, this was “a celebration of French creative
genius,” according to its director, that showed these artists in the
act of creating, or at least pretending to be creating. In 1939, Guitry
added spoken commentary to the film, which is the version that will be
screened at the Walter Reade.
|
Mon
Mar 6: 5:45
Tue
Mar 7: 1
|
“During the summer of 1995 the patients and
personnel got together to prepare a play. The film records the ups and
downs of the process, as rehearsals give way to the final performance,
but beyond this theatrical adventure, ‘Every Little Thing’ describes
life at La Borde, the day-to-day existence, time, the seemingly
insignificant details, the loneliness and the fatigue, but also the
moments of collective merriment and the extreme attention all devote to
one another.” – Nicolas Philibert
For years one of France’s most respected documentary filmmakers,
Nicolas Philbert burst into international prominence with the release
of his To Be and To Have, his
marvelous and delightful study of a rural
schoolteacher. In Every Little Thing,
for many his masterpiece,
Philibert offers a sensitive portrait of one of France’s most famous
psychiatric institutions, La Borde. The result is a powerful look at a
special world with its own rules, practices and structures.
|
Mon
Mar 6: 7:15
Tue
mar 7: 2:30
|
“…after twelve years of
litigation, nine trials and two postponements, Adriano Sofri, the head
of the radical leftwing movement Lotta Continua, along with two
militants in the organization, were condemned to 22 years for the
murder of Police Superintendent Luigi Calbresi on May 17, 1972. This
verdict was based only on the last-minute testimony of a “ex-militant,”
Leonardo Marino, the weakness of whose testimony and the incoherence of
his accusations were clearly demonstrated during the twelve years of
judicial hearings…. In the 1997 book The Judge and the Historian, historian
Carlo Ginzburg shows in detail how much these “witchcraft trials”
resembled what was visited upon his friend Sofri. In Jean-Louis
Comolli’s film the historian re-traces the various incoherencies and
political manipulations that defined a trial that simply defied logic.
His performance, brilliant as well as implacable, is filmed by Comolli
in a simple but effective manner. Archive images demonstrate the facts
of the case, as Carlo Ginzburg emphasizes and traces every detail
ignored by the judges.”—Jean-Michel Frodon, Le Monde
|
Mon
Mar 6: 9:15
Tue
Mar 7: 4:30
|
Veteran photographer and
filmmaker Raymond Depardon's look at the inner workings of a Parisian
courtroom is a fascinating study of clashing egos and dueling
rhetorical styles. Within a deceptively simple framework, Depardon
gives us an absorbing and entertaining sketch of contemporary French
society, as a parade of African immigrants, pickpockets, threadbare
artists, and self-righteous academics come face to face with the
formidable judge Michèle Bernard-Requin. She's tough, more than
a little bemused, and understandably tired of all the shenanigans she
has to witness. Far more than a documentary on the frustrations of the
legal system, The 10th District Court
is a film about the endless complexity of human behavior.
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Wed
Mar 8: 1:30
Thurs
Mar 9: 8:30
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