CLASSIC FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL Continues This Weekend – CLEO FROM 5 TO 7, 35mm Prints of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and AU HAZARD BALTHASAR

The Ninth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series started last Friday and continues the next two weekends — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

All films are screened at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, which this year includes films by two New Wave masters: Jacques Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us,” and François Truffaut’s cinephilic love letter, “Day for Night.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with both Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” screening from 35mm prints. Even more traditional, we also offer a silent film with live music, and audiences are sure to delight in the Poor People of Paris’ accompaniment for Jean Renoir’s classic “Nana.” The schedule is rounded out by such diverse but enduring works as “Au revoir les enfants,” “Blue,” “Cleo from 5 to 7” and “Eyes Without a Face.”

Every program features introductions and discussions by film scholars and critics. The discussions will place the works in the contexts of both film and French history and provide close analyses.

All films are in French with English subtitles.

Here’s the schedule for The Classic French Film Festival’s second weekend:

Friday, March 17 at 7:30pm – CLEO FROM 5 TO 7

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the ’60s with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits the test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, “Cléo from 5 to 7” is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Roger Ebert, who included “Cléo from 5 to 7” in his selection of “Great Movies,” writes that “Varda is sometimes referred to as the godmother of the French New Wave. I have been guilty of that myself. Nothing could be more unfair. Varda is its very soul, and only the fact that she is a woman, I fear, prevented her from being routinely included with Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer and for that matter her husband Jacques Demy. The passage of time has been kinder to her films than some of theirs, and ‘Cléo from 5 to 7’ plays today as startlingly modern. Released in 1962, it seems as innovative and influential as any New Wave film. Unlike most of the New Wave directors, Varda was trained not as a filmmaker or as a critic, but as a serious photographer. Try freezing any frame of the scenes in (Cléo’s) apartment and you will find perfect composition — perfect, but not calling attention to itself. In moving pictures, she has an ability to capture the essence of her characters not only through plot and dialogue, but even more in their placement in space and light. While many early New Wave films had a jaunty boldness of style, Varda in this film shows a sensibility to subtly developing emotions.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Kathy Corley, professor of film in the Electronic and Photographic Media Department at Webster University.

Saturday, March 18 at 7:30pm – LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD – 35mm PRINT!

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal “Last Year at Marienbad” has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the radical master of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel), this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present. The film tells the deliberately ambiguous story of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is simultaneously disturbing and romantic.

The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman describes “Marienbad” as “a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection.” Responding to the film’s formidable reputation, the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum laments: “It’s too bad ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ was the most fashionable art-house movie of 1961-’62, because as a result it’s been maligned and misunderstood ever since. The chic allure of Alain Resnais’ second feature — a maddening, scintillating puzzle set in glitzy surroundings — produced a backlash, and one reason its defenders and detractors tend to be equally misguided is that both respond to the controversy rather than to the film itself. ‘I am now quite prepared to claim that “Marienbad” is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those who cannot see this,’ proclaimed one French critic, even as others ridiculed what they perceived as the film’s pretentious solemnity — overlooking or missing its playful, if poker-faced, use of parody as well as its outright scariness.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Garrick, attorney, board member of the French-preservation nonprofit Les Amis, and former contributor to the davekehr.com film blog.

Sunday, March 19 at 7:00pm – AU HAZARD BALTHASAR – 35mm PRINT!

A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, director Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar — whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) — is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of man. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly. Through Bresson’s unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this seemingly simple story becomes a moving parable of purity and transcendence.

Legendary critic Andrew Sarris writes in the Village Voice: “‘Au hasard Balthazar’ plucks out the roots of existence and presents us with a very morbidly beautiful flower of cinematic art. Bresson’s vision of life and his cinematic style may seem too bleak, too restrictive, too pessimistic for some, perhaps for many. And yet, all in all, no film I have ever seen has come so close to convulsing my entire being as has ‘Au hasard Balthazar.’ I’m not quite sure what kind of movie it is, and indeed it may be more pleasingly vulgar than I suggest, but it stands by itself on one of the loftiest pinnacles of artistically realized emotional experiences.” In the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr provides this equally ecstatic summation: “‘Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished,’ Jean-Luc Godard once said, ‘because this film is really the world in an hour and a half.’ Robert Bresson’s 1966 masterpiece defies any conventional analysis, telling a story of sin and redemption by following Balthazar, a donkey, as he passes through the hands of a number of masters, including a peasant girl, a satanic delinquent, and a saintly fool. Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson’s films, ‘Balthazar’ is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Pier Marton, video artist and unlearning specialist at the School of No Media. Marton has lectured with his work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum, and the Walker Art Center and has taught at several major U.S. universities.

For a rundown of all of the films showing at this year’s Robert Classic French Film Festival, go HERE: http://www.cinemastlouis.org/robert-classic-french-film-festival