Author: Tom Stockman

The 10th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

This year’s fest kicks off with a screening of Bertrand Tavernier’s acclaimed documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the director’s personal reflections on key films and filmmakers. Several of the works he highlights — such as Jacques Becker’s “Casque d’or” and Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï” — are screened at this year’s fest.

The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features New Wave master Jacques Rivette’s visually sumptuous “La belle noiseuse.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with Jean Renoir’s “Boudu Saved from Drowning” and Julien Duvivier’s “Pépé le moko” screening from 35mm prints. Even more traditional, we also offer silent films with live music: St. Louis’ own Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra will accompany two short features by Germaine Dulac, playing original scores created especially for the screening.

The schedule is rounded out by such celebrated and essential films as Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville,” and Leos Carax’s “Lovers on the Bridge.”

Every program features introductions and discussions by film or French 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:

Friday, March 2nd at 7:00 – MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA

Writer/director Bertrand Tavernier (“A Sunday in the Country,” “’Round Midnight”) is truly one of the grand auteurs of the movies. His experience is vast, his knowledge is voluminous, his love is inexhaustible, and his perspective is matched only by that of Martin Scorsese. This magnificent, epic documentary has been a lifetime in the making. Tavernier knows his native cinema inside and out — from the giants like Renoir, Godard, and Melville (for whom he worked as an assistant) to now overlooked and forgotten figures like Edmund T. Gréville and Guy Gilles — and his observations and reminiscences are never less than penetrating and always deeply personal. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes: “Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘My Journey Through French Cinema’ delivers what it promises. Even so, its explanatory title doesn’t begin to convey just how exhilarating or inspiring a documentary this truly is, and how excellent a trip this well-respected French director takes you on. Deep, thoughtful, immersive, specific yet also wide-reaching, it is an exploration of French cinema by one of its own, a cinephile whose formative movie love evolved into a directing career that includes titles like ‘Coup de Torchon,’ ‘Life and Nothing But’ and ‘Captain Conan.’”

Saturday, March 9th at 7:30pm – CASQUE D’OR

Jacques Becker lovingly evokes the belle epoque Parisian demimonde in this classic tale of doomed romance — the French equivalent of the legend of Frankie and Johnny. When gangster’s moll Marie (Simone Signoret) falls for reformed criminal Manda (Serge Reggiani), their passion incites an underworld rivalry that leads inexorably to treachery and tragedy. With poignant, nuanced performances and sensuous black-and-white photography, “Casque d’or” is Becker at the height of his cinematic powers — a romantic masterpiece. Tom Milne in Time Out London enthuses: “This elegant masterwork is a glowingly nostalgic evocation of the Paris of the Impressionists, focusing on the apache underworld and an ill-starred romance that ends on the scaffold…. Signoret, as voluptuously sensual as a Rubens painting, has never been more stunning than as the Golden Marie of the English title; and she is perfectly partnered by Reggiani, seemingly carved out of mahogany yet revealing an ineffable grace in movement, as the honest carpenter who defies the malevolent apache leader (Claude Dauphin) to claim her. Along with ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman,’ one of the great movie romances.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Diane Carson, professor emerita of film at St. Louis Community College at Meramec and film critic for KDHX (88.1 FM).

Saturday, March 10th at 7:00pm – Germaine Dulac Double Bill: THE CIGARETTE (1919) and THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET (1922)

A pioneering filmmaker and feminist, Germaine Dulac toggled between commercial and avant-garde modes, with one of her most famous works, “The Seashell and the Clergyman” (1928), prefiguring surrealism. Dulac’s earliest extant title, “The Cigarette” concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband who believes she is having an affair. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association. Considered one of Dulac’s most feminist films, “The Smiling Madame Beudet” is also a crucial step in her continuing de-emphasis of traditional narrative structures in favor of visual association. The film offers a bleak portrait of marriage and its constraining effects on the woman, while vividly externalizing her dreams of liberation. In her monograph “Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations,” scholar Tami Williams notes that the filmmaker “played a founding role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and social practice. History has overlooked her importance as a pioneer of the 1920s French avant-garde, and as an innovator of a modern cinema. Over the course of her film career (1915–42), Dulac directed more than thirty fiction films, many marking new cinematic tendencies, from impressionist to abstract. She made an equivalent number of newsreels and several documentaries, whose discreet, unobtrusive approach to filming daily life had an important impact on the evolution of nonfiction filmmaking in France.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Lionel Cuillé, the Jane and Bruce Robert professor of French and Francophone studies at Webster University.

Sunday, March 11th at 7:00pm – BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING

Michel Simon gives one of the most memorable performances in screen history as Boudu, a Parisian tramp who takes a suicidal plunge into the Seine and is rescued by a well-to-do bookseller, Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval). The Lestingois family decides to take in the irrepressible bum, and he shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations. With “Boudu Saved from Drowning,” legendary director Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game,” “Grand Illusion”) takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and the anarchic charms of his lead actor to create an effervescent satire of the bourgeoisie.  London’s Telegraph observes: “It’s hard to imagine cinema without ‘Boudu Saved from Drowning.’ Released in 1932, it’s equal parts farce, social satire and existential drama — and one of Jean Renoir’s most enduring works, at once delightful and troubling. Its story — a suicidal tramp is taken in by a do-gooding middle-class home only for him to wreak havoc — explores some of the same territory as Tom Wolfe in his essay “Radical Chic.” It also formed the basis of Paul Mazursky’s ‘Down and Out In Beverly Hills’ (1986)…. ‘Boudu Saved from Drowning’ is blessed by fluid camerawork, beautiful cinematography and riverine rhythms. Simon gives a towering and infinitely merry performance. But it’s the film’s philosophical implications that have fascinated generations of moviegoers.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Jean-Louis Pautrot, professor of French and international studies at Saint Louis University.

Friday, March 16th at 7:30pm – ALPHAVILLE

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Jean-Luc Godard’s irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of the malevolent Alpha 60, a computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s beautiful daughter Natasha (Godard muse Anna Karina), Lemmy must unravel the mysteries of the strictly logical Alpha 60 and teach Natasha the meaning of the word “love.” Calling the film a “hyper-sci-fi-meta-noir, which skylarks about an absurd dystopian future in the wet streets of 1965 Paris,” the Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson describes “Alphaville” as “all totemic genre gestures all the time”: “Everything is a dislocated signifier of totalitarian confusion — language, institutional sex, assassination attempts, scientific lingo, modernist architecture, bureaucracy, human emotion (officially outlawed, but shruggingly prevalent), Anna Karina’s luminous eyes. But it’s all also a Godardian gag, a riff on artifice and the blithe joy of cinematic bullshit. Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, it’s a thing of insensible beauty.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Andrew Wyatt, film critic for Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens and the Gateway Cinephile film blog.

Saturday, March 17th at 7:00pm – THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE

Leos Carax’s “The Lovers on the Bridge” is one of the most spectacularly romantic films of the 1990s, an exploration of the intense, convulsive relationship between one-eyed artist Michele (Juliette Binoche) and alcoholic street performer Alex (Carax’s longtime collaborator Denis Lavant). Paris’ oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, is both their home and their stage as they break up and get back together in increasingly explosive reunions, with the detonations becoming quite literal during a jaw-dropping re-creation of the epic fireworks display that marked the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.  One of the film’s ardent admirers, Stuart Klawans of the Nation, declares: ‘The Lovers on the Bridge’ is one of the most splendidly reckless films ever made — the film that might have torn through the mind of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, after love made him paint his face blue and tie sticks of dynamite to his hair…. While the fuses sizzle near your head, Carax makes a film about orange flames shooting across a black sky; about a subway passage that turns into an inferno; about the thrumming and skittering of a cello sonata, random gunfire, a snowfall out of an old movie musical…. It’s a mistake, a wreck, an absurd imposture — a priceless gift.”

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. 

Sunday, March 18th at 7:00pm – PICKPOCKET

This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsive pursuit of the thrill of stealing grows, however, so does his fear that his luck is about to run out. A cornerstone of the career of this most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, “Pickpocket” is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace, the work of a director at the height of his powers. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader writes: “Robert Bresson made this short electrifying study in 1959; it’s one of his greatest and purest films, full of hushed transgression and sudden grace. A petty thief (Martin Lasalle) becomes addicted to the art and thrill of picking pockets. He loses his friends and fiancee, and begins to live like a monk, concentrating his entire being on his obsessional, increasingly devotional acts of theft. If the film seems familiar, that’s because Paul Schrader recycled great chunks of it in his scripts for ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘American Gigolo,’ and ‘Raging Bull.’ But the original retains its awesome, austere power.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Calvin Wilson, film, jazz, art, and dance critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Friday, March 23rd at 7:00pm – LE SAMOURAI

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trenchcoat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, “Le samouraï” is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture — with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology. Writing in the New Yorker on the film’s original U.S. release, Penelope Gilliatt called Melville “the poet of the implacable. In France he is thought of as the most American of directors, the man who has taken the B picture and the policier to new heights; to us he is apt to seem one of the most French, able to make something artful and full of art out of little, like a chef concocting an idyllic hors d’oeuvre out of mayonnaise and a few raw vegetables.” She describes “Le Samourai” as “a sort of meditation on solitude, embodied in a lonely, rigorous mercenary who assassinates to order,” and praises the film as “cold, masterly, without pathos, and not even particularly sympathetic; it has the noble structure of accuracy.”

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 24th at 6:00pm – LA BELLE NOISEUSE

Winner of Cannes’ Grand Prix in 1991, Jacques Rivette’s “La belle noiseuse” is a free adaptation of Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” infused with elements drawn from a trio of works by Henry James. In the film, the once-famous painter Édouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) lives quietly with his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), in a rambling countryside château in the rural Provence region of France. When young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) visits him with his striking girlfriend, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), the aging and increasingly unproductive Frenhofer finds himself inspired to begin painting again in earnest. At the urging of his agent, he commences work on the painting “La belle noiseuse,” a nude portrait that he left unfinished years earlier (and for which Liz had posed). Pressed by Nicolas, Marianne reluctantly agrees to serve as Frenhofer’s new (and nude) model.  Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum — a longtime enthusiast of the director’s work — writes in the Chicago Reader: “The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been so spellbinding; hardly a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty of twists. With exquisite cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the south of France (mainly at an 18th-century chateau), and drawings and paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. The title translates roughly as ‘the beautiful nutty woman’; it’s also the title of the masterpiece the painter is bent on finishing.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Hunt, film critic for The Riverfront Times.

Sunday, March 25th at 7:00pm – PEPE LE MOKO

The notorious Pépé le moko (Jean Gabin, in a truly iconic performance) is a wanted man: Women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On the lam in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers, Pépé is safe from the clutches of the police — until a Parisian playgirl compels him to risk his life and leave its confines once and for all. Julien Duvivier’s “Pépé le moko” is one of the most influential films of the 20th century and a landmark of French poetic realism. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington raves: “Pépé le moko’ is a timeless romantic thriller that steeps us in one of those great artificial movie worlds that become more overpowering than reality itself. It’s a film with atmosphere so thick and rich you can almost smell it: full of winding fetid streets that steam with spices and intrigue, packed cabarets latticed with smoke and shadows. Directed and co-written by Julien Duvivier, starring Jean Gabin as Pépé, this splendid entertainment is set in ’30s Algiers. But despite extensive location photography, it’s not a real city we see here but a noir metropolis, as fantastic as anything in the Arabian Nights.” Wilmington concludes: “‘Pépé le moko,’ despite its pop origins, becomes, like its imitator ‘Casablanca,’ a powerful statement on cultural exile and doomed romance.”

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.