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Alain Resnais: French Classics

Presented by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston at Museum of Fine Arts Houston - Brown Auditorium

March 6-March 28, 2010

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The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents Alain Resnais: French Classics.

The career of French filmmaker Alain Resnais (b. 1922) began with shorts in the 1940s and continues through the present (his latest, 2009´s Wild Grass, premiered at Cannes). Although he was part of the French New Wave, Resnais was also associated with Agnes Varda and Chris Marker in the Left Bank Group. Often characterized as intellectual, his most admired films are noteworthy for preoccupations with history, time, and recollection. Yet Resnais himself said in a 1977 interview, "I´ve always refused the word ´memory´ apropos my work… I´d use the word ´imagination.´" This selection of restored prints showcases rare shorts and features from 1950—2006. Additional films screen at Rice Cinema, March 12—14.

The retrospective, which was produced by CulturesFrance under the guidance of Michel Ciment, editor-in-chief of the prestigious film magazine Positif, is supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. In Houston additional support has been provided by the Consulate General of France in Houston, as part of French Cultures Month. Special thanks to Delphine Selles, Elodie Sobczak, Dominique Chastres, Charles Dove, and the Texan-French Alliance for the Arts.

Schedule of Screenings:

French Film Classic: The War Is Over (pictured)
La Guerre est finie
France/Sweden, 1966
Black & White
121 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:
Sat., Mar. 6 7:00 PM

An aging revolutionary (Yves Montand) returns to Paris from Madrid where he was part of the Communist underground´s attempts to remove Francisco Franco from power in Spain.

Preceded by Guernica (directed with Robert Hessens, France, 1950, 13 min., subtitled). Motifs from Picasso´s epic painting are integrated with Paul Éluard´s poetic text on the besieged Spanish town. — National Gallery of Art.

French Film Classic: Last Year at Marienbad
L´Année dernière à Marienbad
France/Italy, 1961
Black & White
94 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:
Sun., Mar. 7 5:00 PM

In a vast château, a man tries to convince a disbelieving woman that a year before, in this same setting, they had been in love. Losing none of its authority nearly fifty years later, Marienbad´s beautiful visual puzzle is the archetype of the sophisticated art film. — National Gallery of Art.

French Film Classic: Night and Fog
Nuit et Brouillard
France, 1955
Black & White
32 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:
Fri., Mar. 12 7:00 PM

"Arguably one of the finest documentaries ever captured on film, Night and Fog opens with the fluid, horizontal tracking of an idyllic, seemingly impressionistic, barren countryside. But this is no ordinary remote open field. It is 1955, and this is postwar Poland at Auschwitz. Using highly unsettling, archival footage recorded during postwar liberation contrasted against the stillness of the modern-day landscape, Resnais creates a powerful, haunting chronicle of cruelty, dehumanization, and denial of personal responsibility. Narrated by concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol, he asks the fundamental question: who is responsible?" — Strictly Film School.

Followed by

All the World´s Memory (Toute la mémoire du monde) (France, 1956, 21 min., subtitled) An exploration of Paris´s National Library of France. Statues Also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi) (directed with Chris Marker, France, 1953, 30 min., subtitled) Banned for years, this was made to raise awareness of the perceived decline in traditional African art forms following colonization and exchange with Europe. The Styrene´s Song (Le Chant du styrene) (directed with Chris Marker, France, 1958, 19 min., subtitled) The making of polystyrene, "a noble material…demanding a great deal of knowledge." — National Gallery of Art.

French Film Classic: Je t´aime, Je t´aime
France, 1968
Color
91 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:
Fri., Mar. 19 7:00 PM

Recovering from an attempted suicide, a writer (Claude Rich) agrees to participate in a time travel experiment that has only been tested on mice, resulting in a malfunction that causes him to relive moments from his past in random order.

"It´s a science fiction tragedy in comic strip images. Resnais is obsessed with time, and perhaps with a profoundly Marxist sense of history as the nightmare from which man is trying to awaken. People weren´t then ready for this quiet mixture of science fiction with a love story as subtle as anything in [Eric] Rohmer or [Jacques] Rivette. But with Chris Marker´s La jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky´s Solaris, it is part of a holy trinity of meditations on the horrors of eternal life."
— Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive

French Film Classic: Stavisky
France/Italy, 1974
Color
120 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:

Fri., Mar. 26 8:00 PM

The saga of celebrated swindler Serge Stavisky (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who rose to political power before a scandalous 1934 fall brought France to the brink of collapse. — National Gallery of Art

French Film Classic: Mon Oncle d´Amérique
My American Uncle
France, 1980
Color
125 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:
Sat., Mar. 27 7:00 PM

Three ordinary people are compared with laboratory mice. In its own whimsical fashion, Mon Oncle d´Amerique is a beautiful exposition on the human condition. — National Gallery of Art

"A riddle which proves that surrealism lives." — film historian Tony Rayns

French Film Classic: Private Fears in Public Places
Coeurs
France/Italy, 2006
Color
120 Minutes

French with English subtitles.

Show Times:
Sun., Mar. 28 5:00 PM

Alan Ayckbourn´s 2004 play Private Fears in Public Places inspired this adaptation about the eternal search for happiness, a comic tale infused with irony.

"One characteristic of many of Ayckbourn´s plays is that the titles are impossible to translate into French. I suggested 104 different titles to my friend [and the film´s producer] Bruno Pésery. One of these was Coeurs. The heart is in continuous movement, it never stops, it was appropriate for the film. I chose the plural, ´hearts,´ and think everyone, the cast and crew, backed me on this." — Alain Resnais