THE WALTER READE THEATER

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF: THE FILMS OF MAURICE PIALAT

JULY 9 -12 AND JULY 19 - 29, 2004


left: Police

Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the support of French Cultural Services (New York) and the Bureau de Cinema of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris). Special thanks to Gaumont for creating the prints used for this series, and to INA for providing THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS. Special thanks also to Serge Toubiana of the Cinémathèque Française. Special thanks to Marie Bonnel of French Cultural Services in New York for her tireless efforts on behalf of this project. Thanks also to Sylvie Dargnies, Loic Trocme, Elsa Guillot, Xavier Giannoli, Edith Kramer, James Quandt and Rosine Handelsman. Finally, a very special thanks to Sylvie Danton Pialat for all her help and support in arranging this series and without whom it would hve been impossible to exhibit Maurice Pialat's paintings on in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery. The current issue of Film Comment (May-June 2004) features a special section on Maurice Pialat, complete with discussions of each of his films.

When Maurice Pialat died in early January 2003, it was of course a great loss for all who loved him, as well as for all of those who admired his work. Yet now, in retrospect, having had a chance to review his body of work (10 features, a TV mini-series, several shorts), it seems increasingly clear that Pialat indeed was a towering figure in the contemporary cinema, whose impact and influence continues to be felt - and will for years to come.

Born in rural Cunlhat, Auvergne, in 1925, Pialat came to cinema professionally relatively late in life, after passing through a stage as a painter and through a wide variety of jobs. By the early 1960s he was making short documentaries for French television; in 1968, at the age of 43, he signed his first feature, NAKED CHILDHOOD. Although always supported by at least one section of French critics, production was never easy for Pialat; five of his ten completed features were forced to stop production at some point while their finances were being reorganized. He only really tasted commercial success twice, with WE WILL NOT GROW OLD TOGETHER in 1972 and with TO OUR LOVES (A NOS AMOURS) ten years later.

At least since the early postwar period - and some would say always - a significant segment of critical and theoretical writing on film, especially in France, has focused on the delicate balance between the basic recording capability of the cinema and presence of the author's voice or intentions. The inherent realism of the medium vs. its ability to be endlessly manipulated. Pialat's great body of work represents perhaps the most sustained meditation on that problem. Looking closely, intensely, at the most complex personal relationships, Pialat seems to push realism through to the other side, creating what the critic Joel Magny called the need to use fiction to get the truth.

Many have noted, and he himself discussed, the autobiographical traces in Pialat's films, yet these must be understood less as personal revelations than as simply Pialat's way of starting from what he personally knew best. There's an unruliness to Pialat's work; at times the films seem to veer off into tangents, or characters suddenly act in ways for which we're unprepared. Indeed, Pialat detested what he saw as the "tidiness" of most cinema; for Pialat, whatever structure he brought to his films had to answer first to the experience of life itself. These films are treasures, an extraordinary record of one of the cinema's most perceptive, most unrelenting artist as he encounters and tries to make sense of his own life as well as that of his country. We're deeply honored to be able to present this major retrospective of Maurice Pialat at the Walter Reade, and are only sorry that Maurice can't be here with us. - Richard Peña
All films with English subtitles, unless otherwise specified. Check film descriptions.

Please Note: The Walter Reade Theater endeavors to show the best film prints possible. Sometimes the only available print of an older film is, unfortunately, in poor condition. Please check the individual film descriptions for print condition information. Click here to read a letter from Kent Jones, Associate Director of Programming, addressing the issue of print quality.

NAKED CHILDHOOD / L'ENFANCE NUE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1968; 82m
Pialat made his feature debut at the somewhat advanced age of 43, thanks to the encouragement and production support given to him by Truffaut; the years of dramatic shorts and documentaries clearly paid off, however, for this is surely one of the most confident and accomplished debuts ever. After proving himself to be unmanageable, nine-year-old François is sent away from his adoptive parents in the north of France and placed in the home of an elderly couple, the Thierrys. With them, for the first time, François discovers a kind of peace he had never known before. The non-professional cast shows how effective the use of non-actors can be in the cinema; these actors inhabit their roles, and their world, in ways rarely achieved in cinema.
"The pathos of NAKED CHILDHOOD is all about the zig and zag of disconnection and thwarted emotions. It has at its core a muted, latent violence, a skittish oscillation between love and emotional flight. And because we visually experience the world as François does, the only familiarity we gain is with the fits of violence that punctuate his life. Pialat's problem is to get us there, not to pass judgment on it. To throw light on a life molded by institutional fiat. The film gains its poignancy by eschewing all the usual trite and true paths." - Jean-Pierre Gorin, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Fri July 9: 2 & 6:30; Sun July 11: 1:30

WE WILL NOT GROW OLD TOGETHER / NOUS NE VIEILLERONS PAS ENSEMBLE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1972; 107m
View Film Clip!
Jean, a married, middle-aged filmmaker, has been having an affair for six years with Catherine, considerably younger and from a more modest background. He takes her on location for a shoot, but once there he is so miserable that she finally runs away. They soon get back together, only to begin once again the painful cycle of rupture and reconciliation. Pialat's bold film, based on his autobiographical novel, charts the inevitable disintegration of the affair, brilliantly capturing all the emotional nuances of two people who fear being alone more than being unhappy. "Just like Kiarostami 20 years later, Pialat is intrigued by the dramatic pressure cooker that the confined space of the car provides, but where Kiarostami's characters generally look straight ahead as they drive and talk, Pialat's actors sit in a parked car, facing each other - a shift from a sense of life as a journey to life as a static condition, from the freedom of the road to the claustrophobia of the couple. Pialat's characters, like their vehicles, are going nowhere fast." - Dave Kehr, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Fri July 9: 4 & 8:30; Sun July 11: 3:15


THE HUMAN EYE / L'OEIL HUMAIN
Xavier Giannoli, 1999, video; 55m
Preceded by
DROLE DE BOBINE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1950, video; 10m
Preceded by
ISABELLE AUX DOMBES
Maurice Pialat, France, 1951; 6m; silent Xavier Giannoli, whose beautiful debut feature Eager Bodies was one of the highlights of this year's New Directors/New Films program, made THE HUMAN EYE, a terrific, moving tribute to the work of Maurice Pialat, in which many of the director's principal collaborators share their experiences in working with him. A fascinating look at one of the most remarkable, and idiosyncratic, bodies of work in French cinema. Preceding THE HUMAN EYE will be two recently discovered, very early shorts by Maurice Pialat. DROLE DE BOBINE is a comic romp with Pialat as one of the actors, an homage to the silent comedies Pialat admired so much; ISABELLE AUX DOMBES takes a seemingly mundane incident (a woman whose car breaks down on the highway) and imbues it with an almost supernatural sense of dread.
DROLE DE BOBINE is in French and will be shown without English subtitles. It can be understood without subtitles.
THE HUMAN EYE is in French and will be shown without English subtitles. It will have simultaneous translation
Sat July 10: 2:15; Mon July 12: 6; Fri July 23: 2

THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS / LA MAISON DES BOIS
Maurice Pialat, France, 1971, video; 360m
Accepted as a commission from French television, THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS is one of Maurice Pialat's best-loved works. Working with Arlette Langmann, Pialat sets about re-writing the script, but production had to begin so quickly that by the time the cameras start rolling not even half the episodes were completed. Yet the circumstances proved fortuitous: the sharp characterizations and precise narration of the early episodes eventually give way to a looser, more improvisatory style, as once Pialat creates this world he simply allows the audience to experience it. Set during WWI, the basic plot concerns the daily life in a French village, as experienced by a local gamekeeper and his wife who take in children left abandoned in the war. Some children grow accustomed to their new surroundings; others never lose that look of sadness at having been abandoned. At times the war is very far away; at other times, it's right outside their door. "If I had to choose the one film that best allows the viewer to penetrate into Maurice Pialat's universe, I would unhesitatingly choose THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS. This series happily combines a profound naturalism and a strange sense of fantasy, a liberty in its tone where hidden or manifested suffering alternates with an astonishing happiness to be alive." - Joel Magny, Cahiers du Cinema
We are showing a completely re-mastered version of this film on digital video.
Please note: Parts One and Two are separate admissions.
Part One is screening Saturday, July 10th at 4pm; Monday, July 19th at 2:30pm; and Sunday July 25th at 4:45pm.
Part Two is screening Saturday July 10th at 7:45pm; Tuesday July 20th at 2:30pm; and Sunday July 25th at 8:15pm.
These events will be screened on video.

LOULOU
Maurice Pialat, France, 1980; 110m
It was really with Loulou, first shown at the 1980 New York Film Festival, that the international recognition of Maurice Pialat truly began. Finally able to work with Gerard Depardieu - to whom he had originally offered the lead in The Mouth Agape - Pialat fashions an unsettling tale of physical and emotional obsession. Married for three years to a successful advertising executive, Nelly (Isabelle Huppert, in one of her greatest roles) walks out on him after meeting a rakish, leather-clad lout known as Loulou (Depardieu) at a dance. The husband, André (Guy Marchand), in his way tries to accept on some level his wife's passion for Loulou, while trying to figure out what she can see in a man who seems to care so little for her. "Loulou is as fresh and unsettling today as it was in 1980, so radical in its mixture of sweetness and vulgarity, psychological subtlety and narrative disorder, that makes most of its contemporaries look stodgy and dated….To see the movie again is to realize how few filmmakers in the intervening years have even attempted to chart the vast intricacies, the sparks and the synapses of sexual passion and the particular nature of women's desire….Pialat remains one of a handful of directors genuinely interested in and capable of getting inside a woman's head and projecting her desires onscreen." - Molly Haskell, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Sun July 11: 5:30; Mon July 19: 8:15; Wed July 21: 3

VAN GOGH
Maurice Pialat, France, 1991; 168m
View Film Clip!
"When the film begins, van Gogh is unknown, he doesn't know he's Van Gogh, nor that he has only three months to live and 100 paintings to paint. One doesn't paint a hundred paintings in a state of depression. Van Gogh died having glimpsed happiness." - Maurice Pialat
"Pialat must have chosen such a tired subject precisely because it challenged him so to liberate van Gogh from the sanctimony of bourgeois hagiography. In the process he brought to bear all the earmarks of his provoking, intransigent, dour and thoughtful style. It was Pialat's bold stroke here to make van Gogh not a saintly puppy who just wants to be loved, as in the Kirk Douglas/Minnelli version, but self-absorbed, touchy, shriveled in himself and incapable of loving anything but his work, about which he also harbors insecurities and disgust. …. Key to the success of the film is (Jacques) Dutronc's magnificently lean, crabbed performance, never suing for the audience's sympathy, nor attempting to be charismatic. If anything, although he is in almost every scene, this Van Gogh seems at times a subordinate character, a passive observer of his own life…when van Gogh muses that they keep telling him that he's making vulgar, ugly art, not pretty pictures like Renoir, one can hear some of Pialat's own disgust for that picturesque Gallic charm that represents one pole of French cinema." - Phillip Lopate, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Sun July 11: 7:45; Wed July 28: 3 & 6:30

THE MOUTH AGAPE / LA GUEULE OUVERTE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1974; 85m
"[THE MOUTH AGAPE] begins with a dutiful son, Philippe (Philippe Léotard), accompanying his mother Monique (Monique Mélinand) for radiation treatment in a Paris hospital. After the doctor says she is incurable, a bed-ridden Monique is returned by ambulance to her country home in the Auvergne where she is clumsily comforted by her irresponsible husband Roger (Hubert Deschamps). Philippe persuades his wife, Nathalie (Nathalie Baye), to join him there in spite of his family's antipathy towards her…. Pialat tells his story remorselessly through brutal cuts separating long takes, the most extreme example occurring early in the film and lasting almost 10 minutes: a mainly static camera takes in a casual conversation between mother and son about fidelity, jealousy and their charred past, and then patiently observes them listening to the lovers' parting from Mozart's Cosi fan tutte on a gramophone. How many filmmakers have such confidence in their method? What transcends the inherent misery of these messy lives is Pialat's immense generosity. He never imposes any moral judgment but simply demonstrates how people in their discontent and emotional vulnerability struggle to draw comfort from one another. His camera is both unsparing and tender, achieving a rare truthfulness through a rejection of emotional manipulation, nuanced music and an extreme visual vocabulary." - David Thompson, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Mon July 12: 2:30 & 7:30; Mon July 19: 6:30


GRADUATE FIRST / PASSE TON BAC D'ABORD
Maurice Pialat, France, 1979; 85m
Appearing during a cycle of French films centered on the exploits of high school students, GRADUATE FIRST completely avoids the nostalgia and moralism that characterized the genre; instead, he powerfully captures the moment when his characters realize that, for them at least, there is no more "youth" ahead of them, only the terribly predictable lives of their parents. "In the cliché version of the typical French family, every time a child asks for more freedom, asserts his identity or daydreams about the future instead of wholly devoting himself to his studies, the father is required to say "Passe ton bac d'abord!" - Graduate first! Here Pialat uses the expression ironically. The film's gang of teenagers, the children of miners and factory workers, as well as several orphans, could not care less about the bac (final qualifying exams) and their studies, from which they expect very little. They already have their lives, which boil down to friends, love affairs, sports, parties and group vacations. They get married, cheat on each other, and disappear just like adults. They expect nothing from society, and they realize that they have to make their own way in the world." - Jean-Baptiste Morain, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Mon July 12: 4:15 & 9:15; Tue July 20: 6:30

TO OUR LOVES / A NOS AMOURS
Maurice Pialat, France, 1983; 102m
View Film Clip!
An astoundingly dysfunctional family produces a lovely teenager, Suzanne (the incomparable Sandrine Bonnaire, in her screen debut), whose appetite for sex is seemingly insatiable. Typically, Pialat makes no directorial judgments about the people he observes so discreetly; yet, by his casting himself as Suzanne's father, Pialat seems to invite us to join with him in his character's attacks against his wife and her brother, both monsters of neurotic self-absorption. Pialat isn't interested in simplistic readings that reduce Suzanne's sexual odyssey to a search for the love her family denies her, or to flight from intimacy. As naturally, as inevitably, as a clock marks the passage of a summer day, TO OUR LOVES measures the fateful moments that drain away Suzanne's youthful promise. "…with TO OUR LOVES, Pialat finally took that extra step and came into his own, finding himself exactly where he should have been - and where he'd always wanted to be. He was able to take that step because this time he had something new, something miraculous, something by the name of Sandrine Bonnaire. Pialat picked her out of the crowd, saw the light inside her, and then assigned her this impossible mission, at the crossroads of so many real lives. And she pulled it off. It's simply one of the most magical encounters ever recorded by a movie camera: Pialat and Bonnaire, father and daughter, two artists at the top of their form." - Jean-Michel Frodon, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Tue July 20: 8:15; Fri July 23: 6:30; Sat July 24: 2

POLICE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1985; 113m
A gripping policier about a clutch of drug dealers in France, a thoroughly contemporary moll (Sophie Marceau) who lies her life into reality, and a burnt-out cop who's fated to fall for her. Pialat's motley crew of crooks and flics - it's often hard to tell them apart - work and play in memorably mean streets, tacky bars and seedy police precincts, The world of POLICE is fluid; a heart or a life or a suitcase full of loot can be carried away in the blink of an eye, suddenly, where all was routine, everything is at risk. But POLICE is also a cinematic manifesto, the story of a man caught between the crushing routine of his job and the search for truth that continually slips through his fingers. The man is Inspector Mangin (Gerard Depardieu), to whom everyone lies, all the time. He is also Maurice Pialat, who defies the laws and codes of the cop genre, and who is ready to disrupt an orderly shoot at a moment's notice if it means getting closer to the sacred flame of truth….Pialat offers a documentary investigation of a shadowy universe, a classically structured police intrigue, and an allegory in which the dubbing of sound is the ultimate falsehood. A report, a story and a moral."
-Frédéric Bonnaud, Film Comment, May-June 2004
Fri July 23: 4:15 & 8:45; Sat July 24: 4:15

UNDER SATAN'S SUN / SOUS LE SOLEIL DE SATAN
Maurice Pialat, France, 1987; 103m
View Film Clip!
Gérard Depardieu is the tortured Father Donissan, a Normandy parish priest for whom life is nothing but an endlessly protracted struggle with Satan. He meets his spiritual match in Sandrine Bonnaire's Mouchette, a pretty, unholy wreck of a girl who longs for redemption, and whose essential innocence makes her all the more terrifying. Where most filmmakers - even Dreyer - hone in on the joy at the heart of sainthood, this unrelentingly tough adaptation of renegade Catholic/Royalist author Georges Bernanos's first novel takes a hard look at religious belief, the feeling of rage at a God who is omnipresent yet eternally unavailable. It's also a film about the pain of being a saint, the psychological torture above all - Donissan is forever on the lookout for evil, which might be hidden behind the kindest acts or the most wondrous miracles. Pialat's austere, darkly intense movie is a chamber work of the harshest beauty, accumulating power as it moves from one spiritual duel to the next, and culminating in a final struggle with death itself - a truly astonishing moment. With the director himself in a wonderful performance as Donissan's spritual counselor Father Menou Segrais. Winner of the Palme d'Or (Best Film) at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
Sat July 24: 6:30; Mon July 26: 2:30 & 6:30

LE GARÇU
Maurice Pialat, France, 1995; 102m
Maurice Pialat's final work has the feeling of a kind of last testament, a kind of looking back and summing up of a filmmaker's life and approach to filmmaking. Inspired by the birth of his only child, and co-written with his wife Sylvie Danton, the film begins with Gérard (Gérard Depardieu, extraordinary), a successful Parisian professional, deciding whether or not to leave his wife, Sophie (Géraldine Pailhas), for his mistress. During a family vacation on the Isle of Mauritius, Sophie decides she's had enough and heads back to Paris, taking the couple's young son, Antoine (played by the director's own son) back with her. Moving in and out of relationships with women has pretty much defined Gérard's adult life; yet the connection he feels - or wants to feel - to his son is something he's never experienced and doesn't know quite how to handle. Meanwhile, Gérard's own father, nicknamed "le garçu (the kid)" in the local dialect, is dying in his home village, dredging up the difficult history of that relationship. Composed, atypically for Pialat, of many short scenes and shots, the film feels structured around a series of emotional gestures and outbursts rather than the lines of a traditional narrative.
Sat July 24: 8:45; Thurs July 29: 2:30 & 6:45

SHORTS BY MAURICE PIALAT: PROGRAM ONE
TURKISH CHRONICLES / CHRONIQUE TURQUE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1964; approx. 46m
LOVE EXISTS / L'AMOUR EXISTE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1969; 21m
JANINE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1962; 16m in French without subtitles.
Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Corne D'Or juxtaposes a poem by Nerval with a powerful study of Ottoman architecture; Istanbul takes into the crowded streets and back alleys of a fascinating city divided between continents. Byzance uses a text by Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453; Maitre Galip is another on Pialat's perceptive studies of children that includes a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. One of the first films to look at Paris's burgeoning "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. In Janine Claude Berri plays Claude, a young man down on his luck who nevertheless plans to marry his prostitute-girlfriend. His friend, Hubert (Hubert Deschamps), older and separated from his wife, tries to talk him out of any kind of commitment. "Juxtaposing scenes that no standard structure could bring together, JANINE might be taking place over the course of several hours - or months. Here, already, you can see the singularity of an approach that is realistic in its details but wildly elliptical in its duration." - Elisabeth Lequeret, Film Comment, May-June 2004.
Sun July 25: 1; Mon July 26: 4:45 & 8:45

SHORT FILMS BY MAURICE PIALAT: PROGRAM TWO
FRENCH CHRONICLES / CHRONIQUES DE FRANCE
Maurice Pialat, France, 1965-66, video; approx. 60m, French without subtitles, English summary provided.
FAMILY SHADOWS
Maurice Pialat, France, 25m, French without subtitles, English summary provided (replacing VILLAGE OF CHILDREN, which is unavailable)
After his experience filming in Turkey, Pialat was commissioned to create a series of short documentaries on French life. Each is a revealing look at contemporary life from the singular perspective of Pialat. Several are portraits of Parisian neighborhoods: Quartier Latin, Les Champs-Elysées, Pigalle, The Parisian Woman and the Department Stores (La Parisienne et Les Grand Magasins). There's also a film about La Camargue, the shooting of which would later be referred to in We Will Not Grow Old Together. Also of special interest is a short about van Gogh, a subject that would continue to haunt the ex-painter Pialat until he was able to finally make the feature Van Gogh in the early 90s.
Sun July 25: 2:45; Thurs July 29: 4:45 & 9

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