CLASSIC FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL Continues This Weekend – DAY FOR NIGHT, EYES WITHOUT A FACE, and PARIS BELONGS TO US

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 third and final weekend:

Friday, March 24 at 7:30pm – DAY FOR NIGHT

This affectionate farce from François Truffaut about the joys and strife of moviemaking is one of his most beloved films. Truffaut himself appears as the harried director of a frivolous melodrama, the shooting of which is plagued by the whims of a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an aging but still forceful Italian diva (Valentina Cortese), and a British ingenue haunted by personal scandal (Jacqueline Bisset). Both an irreverent paean to the prosaic craft of cinema and a delightful human comedy about the pitfalls of sex and romance, “Day for Night” is buoyed by robust performances and a sparkling score by the legendary Georges Delerue.

Describing “Day for Night” as “a hilarious and informative movie,” Time Out asserts that “in the pantheon of films about filmmaking, it strikes a neat balance between the operatic neuroses of ‘8 1/2’ and the warm, pastel-hued nostalgia of ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’” Philip French in the Guardian writes: “Set in Nice’s Victorine Studios, where it was filmed, ‘Day for Night’ is a touching, funny and accurate account of the travails (accidents, disputes, affairs, imbroglios, death) involved in the making of an all-star international picture called ‘Je vous présente Paméla.’ It is a Pirandellian affair, an elegiac celebration of a dying kind of cinema, a meditation on the connection between film and life by Truffaut, who plays Ferrand, the film’s constantly troubled yet dedicated director, a man much like himself. Ferrand compares the process of filmmaking to ‘a stagecoach journey into the far west. At the start you hope for a beautiful trip. But shortly you wonder if you will make it at all.’”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Renée Hirshfield, adjunct professor of film studies at Southwestern Illinois College.

Saturday, March 25 at 7:30pm – EYES WITHOUT A FACE

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance — at a horrifying price. “Eyes Without a Face,” directed by the supremely talented Georges Franju, is rare in horror cinema for its odd mixture of the ghastly and the lyrical, and it has been a major influence on the genre in the decades since its release. There are images here — of terror, of gore, of inexplicable beauty —that once seen are never forgotten.

Declaring “Eyes Without a Face” as “still among the most disturbing horror films ever made,” critic David Edelstein writes: “The storyline is your standard obsessed-mad-doctor saga, one step above a Poverty Row Bela Lugosi feature. But it’s Lugosi by way of Cocteau and Ionesco. It’s the mixture of the clinical and the poetic that gets, er, under your skin.” Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune asserts that the film “is one horror classic that hasn’t lost its power to shock or hypnotize audiences over the years. ‘Eyes’ can still seduce you with beauty and stun you with terror. It’s not a matter of gore or frenzied pacing. Franju’s adaptation of the Jean Redon novel is classically paced and shot, filled with what Pauline Kael called images of ‘exquisite dread.’ ‘Eyes Without a Face’ is a perfect example of how cinematic poetry can transform a seemingly disreputable movie genre. The horror and the poetry intensify each other, just as the chateau’s chic is set off ironically by the howling dogs, the cuts of the scalpel, the sense of death in the shadows.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Andrew Wyatt, film critic for St. Louis Magazine’s Look/Listen arts-and-entertainment blog and the Gateway Cinephile film blog.

Sunday, March 26 at 7:30pm – PARIS BELONGS TO US

One of the original critics-turned-filmmakers who helped jump-start the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette began shooting his debut feature in 1958, well before that cinema revolution officially kicked off with “The 400 Blows” and “Breathless.” Ultimately released in 1961, the rich and mysterious “Paris Belongs to Us” offers some of the radical flavor that would define the movement, with a particularly Rivettian twist. The film follows a young literature student (Betty Schneider) who befriends the members of a loose-knit group of twentysomethings in Paris, united by the apparent suicide of an acquaintance. Suffused with a lingering post–World War II disillusionment (and already evincing the playfulness and fascination with theatrical performance and conspiracy that would become hallmarks for the director), “Paris Belongs to Us” marked the provocative start to a brilliant directorial career.

“Jacques Rivette made his first feature with little money and great difficulty between 1958 and 1960,” says The New Yorker’s Richard Brody of “Paris Belongs to Us.” “Its plot reflects his struggles, and its tone blends the paranoid tension of American film noir with the austere lyricism of modern theatre. Rivette’s tightly wound images turn the ornate architecture of Paris into a labyrinth of intimate entanglements and apocalyptic menace.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum adds: “Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu; Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s title.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Hunt, film critic for the Riverfront Times and former adjunct professor of film studies at Webster University.