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Dir: Jules Dassin 1955
115 mins 35mm B&W Rated M
French with English subtitles
Jean Servais, Carl Mohner

Blacklisted during the McCarthy era in Hollywood, director Jules Dassin produced Rififi while in exile in France. It is the story of a master criminal, dying of a respiratory illness, who brings together the best career burglars in the business to stage a robbery of an exclusive Parisian jewellery store. This groundbreaking caper film spawned many imitators with its detailed, documentary-like heist sequence running for half an hour without dialogue. The vicious aftermath involves the entire criminal gang in blackmail, murder, kidnapping and shoot-outs. Made on an extremely low budget, Rififi was filmed during the winter in Paris, using real locations rather than expensive studio sets. Dassin gained expertise in actuality filming while making The naked city (1948) which – unusually for an American production of this period – was shot on location in the streets of New York. The outdoor scenes of Rififi were filmed in Montmartre at sites carefully scouted by Dassin, who refused to shoot in sunlight, claiming that he 'just wanted grey’. The heist scene was based on an actual burglary that took place in 1899 along Marseille’s cours St-Louis.
(Also screening Friday 21 September 2012, 7.30pm, as part of Art & About)

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Paris La Belle
Dir: Pierre Prévert 1959
20 mins 35mm Colour and B&W
French with English subtitles
Experimental documentary evoking two eras in Paris. In 1928, Pierre Prévert, with his brother Jacques and Marcel Duhamel, began shooting a documentary called Paris express. The film was never completed. In 1959 the director shot colour footage at the same locations to juxtapose with his original black-and-white sequences.

Paris qui dort/Paris sleeps/The crazy ray
Dir: René Clair 1925
40 mins 35mm B&W
René Clair’s fantastical comedy features a group of people wandering through a 1920s Paris which has been immobilised – suspended in sleep – by a mad scientist with his ray gun. With a taste for visual trickery using the mechanics of cinema, the director shows the squares of the Opera, of Concorde, the streets of Chaillot, silent and empty – as in the photographs of Atget. Only the mad Dr Crase can release the city back into life.

La Première nuit
Dir: Georges Franju 1958
20 mins 35mm B&W
Pierre Devis, Lisbeth Persson
‘It only needs a little imagination for our most habitual actions to become charged with disquieting significance, for the décor of our daily life to give birth to a fantastic world’ – so runs the introduction to this film depicting the nocturnal reverie woven around a runaway boy’s escape to the Paris Metro for a night. Georges Franju’s unique, early short films – which also included Blood of the beasts and Hôtel des Invalides – are one of the summits of post-war French filmmaking. His direct treatment of powerful subjects are a balance of sentiment, brutality and poetry, with a deep compassion for the characters.

La Zone: au pays des chiffonniers
Dir: Georges Lacombe 1928
40 mins 35mm B&W
Poetic documentary of the life of second-hand dealers and rag-traders inhabiting a narrow strip of land between Paris and the suburbs in the 1920s.

Note: There will be a 15-minute intermission.

Prints courtesy Institut Français and French Embassy

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Dir: Robert Bresson 1959
75 mins 35mm B&W Rated M
French with English subtitles
Martin Lasselle, Marika Green
One of the most significant and influential films to emerge from the post-war era in France is a portrait of a compulsive pickpocket who believes he is above the constraints of common humanity and the law. Robert Bresson’s intense masterpiece depicts the mechanics of theft – the 'ballets of thievery’, as fellow filmmaker Jean Cocteau called them – as an erotically and spiritually charged ritual. Location is one of the key aspects of Pickpocket, with Paris truly a character in the film. Michel, the young pickpocket, spends his days working the streets, subway cars and train stations. A realist practising close to the borderline of abstraction, Bresson displays a highly individual directorial style predicated upon absolute austerity of acting, dialogue and mise-en-scène. In an effort for clarity and simplicity Bresson uses rigorous, stripped-down shots and attempts to strip all artificial 'performance’ from the line readings of his non-professional actors – or 'models’, as he refers to them. The result is direct, clear, concise and tautly choreographed. Print courtesy Institut Français and French Embassy.

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Dir: Agnès Varda 1962
90 mins 35mm B&W Rated M
French with English subtitles
Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller
Agnès Varda’s masterpiece follows two hours in the life of Cleo, a successful pop singer, as she awaits the outcome of a critical medical test for cancer. Anxiously wandering the streets of Paris – its cafes, crowds, cinemas, street theatres – she gains a new sense of perspective on her sheltered, artificial life and gradually ceases playing the role her admirers expect of her. Varda once described her film as 'the portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris’. Fusing the immediacy of the cinema verité documentary – which was emerging at this time – with fictional drama, the director follows Cleo’s every step and accounts for every moment. With the retirement of some of the most prolific commercial directors of the first post-war decade, the late 1950s was a period of intense activity and renewal for French cinema. Considered the 'grandmother’ of the French New Wave movement, Varda anticipated this breakthrough with her early films and completed her second feature in 1962. Print courtesy Institut Français and French Embassy.

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Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville 1956
98 mins 16mm B&W Rated M
French with English subtitles
Bob, a retired bank robber and compulsive gambler, masterminds a raid on the casino at Deauville to cover his gambling debts. Jean-Pierre Melville’s distinctly personal study of an ageing gangster is a homage to the vanished Montmartre of the director’s youth. Superficially a genre film dedicated to American cinema, what is astonishing is the extent to which Melville’s gritty, free-wheeling camera style predates the French New Wave – the jump-cuts, jazzy score and visual quotes. ‘This is the kind of film that we want to make!’, exclaimed the young and rebellious Francois Truffaut. Melville set the example for independent filmmaking in the first post-war decade, and Godard acknowledged Melville’s influence, giving him an extended cameo in Breathless (A bout de souffle). Daniel Cauchy, who plays Paolo, Bob’s callow young friend in Bob le Flambeur, remembered that Melville would shoot scenes on location using a handheld camera on a delivery bike, ‘which Godard did in Breathless, but this was years before Godard.’

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Dir: Jean-Luc Godard 1962
80 mins 16mm B&W Rated M
French with English subtitles
Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot
Unable to pay her rent, Nana (Anna Karina), just separated from her husband, begins a slow descent into prostitution. Set amidst the consumerist culture of 1960s Paris – a world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls and pop records – Nana’s life is told in 12 episodes. Using interview techniques, direct sound, long takes, texts, quotation and statistics, director Jean-Luc Godard creates a multi-faceted examination of prostitution based on various documentary studies. The film is dedicated to B movies with echoes of the entire movie repertory of prostitutes. Godard stated, ‘You can either start with fiction or with documentary. But whichever you start with, you will inevitably find the other.’ A multi-faceted portrait of its star, Anna Karina, Vivre sa vie won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1962.

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Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville 1967
101 mins 35mm Colour Rated M
French with English subtitles
Alain Delon, François Périer
A lone assassin, Jef Costello (played by an icy Alain Delon) is fascinated by the Japanese warrior tradition of bushido. He moves through a Parisian underworld in which the inhabitants, no matter how criminal, still live by their own personal codes. Jean-Pierre Melville uses the urban imagery of the gangster film in Le Samouraï to explore loyalty, betrayal, vendetta, friendship, heroism and cowardice. With an affinity towards location shooting which gained him a position as an antecedent to the New Wave, Melville stages a bravura chase sequence on the Paris Métro – a complex network as intricate as that of the city itself. Although a quintessentially French filmmaker, Melville was always a reticent, fringe-dwelling and independent figure. Unlike Godard who merely manipulates isolated elements derived from American cinema, the very ‘sensibility’ of Melville’s films can be traced to this formative influence.