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    Alain Delon’s Best Performances Showcased in a Retrospective

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    The French star is the subject of a series at Film Forum focusing on movies from the ’60s and ’70s, when he became an international sensation.When Luchino Visconti first saw Alain Delon, he is said to have cried out, “It’s him!” Visconti had found his Rocco, the tragic, tender soul of his next film, the 1960 family drama “Rocco and His Brothers.” One of the founders of Italian neorealism, Visconti apparently didn’t bother introducing himself to the young French actor. Perhaps he was tending to the tears that I like to think fell from his eyes when he saw his future star. I like to think that’s how everyone reacts when they initially see Delon, whose beauty has long inspired paroxysms of rapture.This is, after all, a star whose looks over the years have been described as sensual though also insolent, cruel, self-absorbed and androgynous, a word that helps explain why his beauty — as with that of other men whose looks threaten tidy gender norms — makes some viewers uneasy even as it sends others into ecstasy. (“My mother had to put a sign on my pram,” Delon once said, ‘You can look, but you can’t touch!’”) You may want to break out your thesaurus to find your own mot juste to describe Delon, now 88: A selective series that includes “Rocco” and 10 of his other films (he’s made scores more), opens Friday in New York at Film Forum.Delon opposite Annie Girardot in “Rocco and His Brothers.”Film ForumBorn in 1935, Delon had a rough early life by all accounts. After his parents divorced when he was young, he was placed with a foster family and later sent to boarding school. By 17, he was in the military and France’s war in Indochina. A providential trip to Cannes with some friends in 1957 soon found him in the sights of a talent scout working for the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, who wanted to sign the actor to a contract but also work on his English. Delon instead stayed in France, kick-starting a prolific career that rapidly gathered momentum. By the end of the 1950s, he had become known as the French James Dean.You understand why when you dip into the series, which includes some of Delon’s most famous films and a few oddities, all culled from the 1960s and ’70s, when he became a huge star at home and then an international sensation. His breakout came when he played the sly, sinister Tom Ripley in “Purple Noon” (1960), a French thriller adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and directed by Réne Clément. Much of the film’s appeal rests with Delon, a hypnotic, destabilizing presence whose stardom was sealed the moment Ripley peels off his shirt, baring his chest. He repeats this bit of striptease after committing his first murder, a distillation of Delon’s startling violent eroticism.The actor in his breakout role in “Purple Noon.”Film ForumWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Classe Tous Risques’: Bromance in the Dark

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      Claude Sautet’s 1960 existential buddy adventure opens Friday at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration.“Film noir” is a French coinage but France’s homegrown crime movies, a staple of the 1950s and early ’60s, seldom get their due in the United States, however first-rate they might be. Case in point: Claude Sautet’s 1960 slam dunk “Classe Tous Risques,” known in English as “The Big Risk.”Dubbed, dumped, and unreviewed upon its 1963 U.S. release, Sautet’s existential adventure was belatedly discovered some 20 years ago. Largely unseen since, it opens Friday at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration.On the lam in Italy, the veteran mobster Abel Davos (France’s then reigning pug-ugly Lino Ventura) suffers from acute mal du pays. A tough guy who needs only a split second to accelerate from 5 to 50 mph, this volatile ruffian is further humanized as a devoted family man (traveling with his wife and two small boys in tow) and, as the film will reveal, a loyal comrade who expects the same in return.Looking to finance their comeback, Davos and a confederate (Stan Krol) stage a brazen daylight snatch-and-grab on a busy street in central Milan. Their mad dash for the French border involves multiple stolen cars, a diversionary motorbike, a hijacked speedboat, and a beachfront shootout. The partners are separated midway through only to meet again, going in opposite directions on the highway. The escape pauses for an exultant critique: “We’re the greatest!”Its title an untranslatable pun on train fares and insurance policies, “Classe Tous Risque” was adapted from a novel by José Giovanni, a French-Corsican ex-con with an unsavory wartime past and an inside knowledge of French penitentiaries. (The supporting actor Krol was a prison pal.) The film’s bang-bang opening invites the adjective “breathless” and indeed “Classe” has an actual relationship to Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature: Afraid to fetch Abel when he holes up in Nice, his old gang dispatches Eric Stark, a freelance criminal played by the “Breathless” lead Jean-Paul Belmondo.“Classe” and “Breathless” were shot back to back and appeared within weeks of each other in March 1960. “Classe,” however, failed to set the world on fire although the great Jean-Pierre Melville was a fan and subsequently directed his masterly “Le Deuxième Souffle” (1966) from a Giovanni novel with Ventura cast in a similar role. Rereleased in Paris in 1971, “Classe” fared better; championed by the young cinephiles known as “MacMahonists” after their favorite revival theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Look Back at ‘Black Girl’ and Other Ousmane Sembène Films

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      At Film Forum, a retrospective of the Senegalese director’s work shows the care he took in telling female stories.A princess ascends from the water like a siren. The stony gaze of an African mask lures a beautiful maid homeward. The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène rendered myth a visual map that rescued the African past from the sullying grasp of empire. In place of demigods and antiheroes, women were his preferred orbit.The director revealed his enduring preoccupations in the Sembènian heroine: Broadly speaking, she was principled, defiant, inclined to revolt, however outwardly hopeless her odds appeared. Where colonial literature either struggled to translate the finer contours of traditional African gender arrangements or offered only a cursory sketch of their subjection, Sembène stayed attuned to the shades of women’s displacement. He understood, for instance, in “Xala” (1975) how a woman who was too imperious to enter the house of her husband’s second wife could bear, in somber silence, when he took a third, even younger bride, and fractured further what little love was left to her, his first and eldest wife.Feminine multiplicity animated Sembène’s (literary and cinematic) corpus, and he took the cost of his characters’ bravery seriously. Their triumphs come hard-won or not at all. They frequently become the cherished apotheosis of liberation or, where denied by earthly circumstance, rebellion. The director nursed an abiding suspicion of all religion, but his films betray him: If he surrendered in faith to anything, it was the African woman.Dyella Touré as Ngoné in “Xala” from 1975.Ousmane Sembène, via Film ForumOn the occasion of the director’s centennial, Film Forum is hosting a two-week retrospective commemorating Sembène’s work, including the short film “Borom Sarret” (1963), one of the earliest narrative films made in sub-Saharan Africa, a feat that later crowned him the “father of African cinema.” No reading of Sembène (who died in 2007 at 84) is complete without understanding that he considered himself among the griots, a venerable caste of West African storytellers charged with preserving oral tradition. The formal brushstrokes of his compositions contain traces of his tutelage in Moscow, but the Indigenous orality to which he was heir defined his social-realist fables: peopled with all of folklore’s classical archetypes — the trickster, the headstrong princess, the jealous (possibly vengeful) wife — and designed in the shadow of its didactic architecture, replete with curses, the gluttonous elite and resourceful outcasts.For much of the director’s youth, French law prevented Africans from filming in Africa. If the imperial project is, fundamentally, erasure, to interrupt and rewrite history, we see how authorship emerges paramount. Sembène, therefore, regarded the griot as a historian. His early short “Niaye” (1964), about a young village girl impregnated by her father, a chief, would herald persisting themes: A voice-over declares the griots the “only memory of this country” and laments, “Our country is dying of lies and false morality.”Sembène began as a novelist, after he taught himself to read and write in French (many of his films are adapted from his novels and short stories). But the written word, too, inevitably proved an awkward province for his activism; literacy came enveloped in colonial intrusion. Cinema proposed to reconcile the tension among language, text and orality, a conflict he restages in “Black Girl” (1966), his debut feature and perhaps best known work.Ousmane Sembène at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967.Gilbert Tourte/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHe was first compelled to recount the tragedy of Diouana (played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop) after he stumbled across a startling report about a Black maid in a French newspaper. He published “Black Girl” as a short story in 1962, two years after Senegal seized independence. Here, the ingénue becomes a doomed emissary of a long invaded nation, still bound psychically and economically to its interlopers.Diouana abandons her village in Dakar, possessed of quixotic visions of France, where she ventures to work as a nanny for a well-to-do white family. But the fantasy crumbles upon her arrival when the nameless “Madame” thrusts Diouana into the role of housekeeper. Confined to the cramped house, she toils away daily at domestic chores, overworked and mistreated by her employer. In flashbacks, we encounter a different Diouana: spirited, glamorous and, as it happens, perilously myopic.But the most telling sequence occurs when Diouana receives a letter from her mother (perhaps penned by the village schoolmaster, played by Sembène himself). Diouana listens wordlessly as her employers read the letter. They offer to transcribe her response, lies, of course, about her “good health.” But more important, their translation amounts to a symbolic personal (and political) violation; history disrupted, vocal theft. In protest, Diouana reclaims all she has left: her body.If women model the zeniths of revolutionary vitality, it was men, in Sembène’s estimation, who were generally useless. “Xala” dispenses a scalding indictment of Senegal’s government after the nominal expulsion of the white colonists. On his third wedding night, El-Hadji (Thierno Leye), a wealthy member of the country’s ruling class, finds himself afflicted with xala, the curse of impotence. He dismisses the obvious displeasure of his first two wives, both too traditionalist and dependent upon him for any objection to land meaningfully. Only his daughter Rama (Myriam Niang), the same age as his new wife, can truly kindle his rage, for she alone represents the noble independence El-Hadji superficially performs. He dons suits and drinks imported water; she refuses the water and his language. In a testament to their alliances, El-Hadji snaps at Rama, “Why do you always answer in Wolof when I speak to you in French?”In “Emitaï” and other Sembène films, men are considered generally useless.Ousmane Sembène, via Film ForumIn “Emitaï” (1971) — named for the Diola god of thunder — the French army absconds with the village’s young men and demands, too, their rice (a sacred crop) to feed soldiers. While the elders exhort their gods, the women hide the harvest, which they cultivate themselves. Sembène revels in these glimpses of communal ceremony through protracted sequences: a line of women, heads crowned with baskets of rice, maps the winding path from the wetlands home; elsewhere, they bend over, splashing the delicate stalks with fistfuls of river water. For the women’s insolence, the French platoon holds them captive, their silent demonstration dappled in blazing sunlight.But powerful men seem especially susceptible to colonial imposition. In “Ceddo” (1977), amid the triad of Islam, Christianity and the slave trade, the ceddo (nonbelievers) kidnap the princess to ensure the king’s allegiance to their freedom. But the king, flanked by a menacing, ambitious imam and his disciples, realizes too late that any dominion he once held has been usurped, if not foolishly delivered, to these outsiders with their foreign gods. It seems the leadership of men fails to challenge empire efficiently because they pursue some approximation of its power. No wonder that Sembène’s films routinely faced censorship; “Ceddo” and “Emitaï” were both banned in Senegal for years.Sembène was never deterred. His final film, “Moolaadé” (2004), bore him to the outskirts of Burkina Faso for a stringent reproach of female genital mutilation. Four girls flee their impending circumcision and find a noble champion in Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a kindly woman who refused to have her daughter “cut,” much to the disapproval of the community’s elders. Somehow his most harrowing plunge into women’s suffering yielded his most ardent tribute to their courage.The series Sembène runs at Film Forum from Sept. 8-24. More information is at filmforum.org. More

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      ‘Winter Kills’ Returns in New Print at Film Forum

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      Part black comedy, part paranoid thriller, the 1979 movie returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print at Film Forum.A madcap riff on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “Winter Kills,” adapted by the director William Richert from Richard Condon’s 1974 best seller, is part black comedy, part paranoid thriller and — an evocation of cosmic conspiracy that boasts its own conspiratorial back story — part carnival hall of mirrors.The movie, first released in 1979, and then again in 1983 (with its ending supposedly altered), returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print.The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission and established in 1963, was still hotly contested when Condon wrote his novel, a precursor to literary treatments of Kennedy’s death like Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid.” The movie is redolent of Watergate-era films like “The Parallax View” from 1974, but in the age of QAnon it scarcely seems dated. One of the novel’s favorable reviews quotes Condon to the effect that, in contemporary America truths are less important than “the illusion of truths.”Jeff Bridges plays Nick, the younger half brother of a charismatic president murdered by a lone assassin in downtown Philadelphia. Given evidence, years later, of a second gunman, Nick is dragged down a rabbit hole, at once aided and thwarted by his all-powerful father (John Huston, essentially reprising his role in “Chinatown”).A greater mystery than the plot may be the cast assembled by Richert, directing his first nondocumentary, and his shady producers, whose major credit was the soft-core movie “Black Emanuelle.” The always sympathetic Bridges and the ineffably sleazy Huston are supported by the veteran heavies Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden and Ralph Meeker; the international stars Tomas Milian and Toshiro Mifune; and the reliable wackos Anthony Perkins and Eli Wallach, plus the ’50s melodrama queen Dorothy Malone, with the supermodel Belinda Bauer as the requisite woman of mystery. Elizabeth Taylor (uncredited and silent save for a single angry word) was canny enough to take payment upfront. The rest of the cast seems to have been strung along for the duration of the start-stop shoot.As chronicled by Condon in a 1983 Harper’s article no less sensational than the movie, as well as a documentary found on the Blu-ray release, “Winter Kills” was six years in production, during which it was repeatedly shut down for lack of cash. (Drug money was involved. One producer was later murdered, his partner wound up in jail.) While these travails may not be evident onscreen, knowledge of the saga adds to the movie’s sense of imperial hubris — the “Game of Thrones”-style credits announcing the stellar cast, the spectacularly superfluous locations shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Deer Hunter”!?).“Winter Kills” is not always easy to follow — Condon’s convoluted plot has been simplified and the film is consequently riddled with narrative lacunae — but from beginning to end, the gist is always clear. The movie “doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it’s fast and handsome and entertaining,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1979 review in The Times. Preposterous as it is, its vision of total surveillance, constant subterfuge and plutocracy run amok has a measure of social realism.If paranoid thinking is the antidote to chaos, “Winter Kills” demonstrates its appeal. The movie is an article of faith. That it exists at all is something of a miracle.Winter KillsAug. 11-24 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Claire Simon Finds a New Subject: Herself

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      The French director Claire Simon was making a movie about a Paris hospital when she found out she had cancer. So she became a character in her own film.Midway through filming “Our Body,” a sprawling documentary about the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital, the movie’s director, Claire Simon, received some medical news of her own: She had breast cancer.Four weeks into the shoot, Simon had discovered a lump beneath her armpit. But rather than cease production, she decided to improvise and turn the camera on herself.“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon in a recent video interview. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. This changed my point of view entirely; it helped me cope and be calm in the face of my own sickness.”Motivated by the desire to show what she called the body’s “hidden truth,” Simon is but one patient among dozens in her documentary’s celebration of the body, depicted in all its wondrous and terrible iterations. “Our Body” — which played in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and is showing at Film Forum in New York from Aug. 4 — assembles intimate patient-doctor consultations and surgical procedures into something like a volume of short stories. The subjects include abortion, artificial insemination, birth, gender transitioning, menopause and, eventually, disease and death.The veteran French filmmaker, a prolific creator of documentaries and fictional narratives that blur the boundaries between those two modes, has made a career out of turning the experiences of ordinary people into epic tapestries of human life.Often, she begins with a place. A Paris train station provides the setting for two films: “Gare du Nord,” (2013) an ensemble drama about briefly intersecting lives, and “Human Geography (2013), a documentary composed of interviews with the station’s inhabitants.“If you dive into pockets of everyday life, the world becomes very large,” Simon said. In “Our Body,” she added, she was concerned by questions like, “How does our civilization treat the female body?,” and, “What is the relationship between the body and words?”“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon said. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. Cinema Guild”Our Body” is set in the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital.Cinema GuildBy capturing long, uninterrupted scenes of patients speaking with their doctors, “Our Body,” underscores the alienating nature of medical jargon. Yet these observational scenes also create room for the kind of bracingly personal testimonies that have long characterized Simon’s work. See, for instance, her 2018 documentary “Young Solitude,” a series of frank discussions with suburban high schoolers; or “Mimi” (2003), a kind of hangout movie in which Simon’s gregarious friend Mimi relates her life story as she drifts through Nice, France, her hometown.Simon was also raised in southern France (though she was born in Britain) by a family of painters and writers. She studied Arabic and anthropology in Algeria before teaching herself how to edit and use a camera. In the 1980s, she began making narrative shorts and eventually received a scholarship to attend a prestigious documentary workshop led by Jean Rouch, known as the father of cinéma-vérité.It was around this time that Simon discovered some of her most crucial inspirations, like Raymond Depardon, Robert Kramer and Frederick Wiseman — “my great master,” she said. Wiseman’s influence is apparent in Simon’s fascination with public spaces and lengthy conversations. “The Competition” (2016), a study of the admissions process for La Fémis, France’s most prestigious film school, seems to take up his mantle — Simon herself has described the film as “Wisemanesque.”According to Abby Sun, the director of artists’ programs at the International Documentary Association, Simon’s work nevertheless represents a significant departure from Wiseman’s detached and unobtrusive style.Simon’s movies are “metatextual, and they exhibit a knowing, personal touch. They show her as part of the fabric of the place or situation she’s filming,” Sun said, citing as examples a series of films Simon had made about her daughter, the philosopher Manon Garcia.The relationship between Simon and her subjects helps determine the shape of the film. This connection is key to her form of auteurism.“There’s a clear sense that there’s something collaborative going on, that there’s been a dialogue between the filmmaker and the subject,” said Eric Hynes, a film curator at the Museum of the Moving Image.Simon in Los Angeles, in August. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times“Nowadays, we’re constantly asking, ‘Where’s the consent? How do we know that the subject feels comfortable with what’s being filmed?’,” he added. “Claire has been at the vanguard of what we consider a responsible way of making documentaries for 20 plus years now.”Simon said although she considered herself a sloppy camera operator, she refuses to give the job to anyone else. Looking through the viewfinder allowed her to connect more organically with what she’s filming, she said. “If I’m holding the camera, I’m able to improvise and change my mind and I don’t have to bother with justifying myself,” she said. “As a woman, it’s a huge relief.”Having successfully undergone cancer treatment, Simon isn’t just relieved, she’s energized. Toward the end of the interview in late July, Simon gleefully announced that it was her birthday that day. She had just turned 68. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.“Mr. Wiseman is 93, and he’s made another beautiful one this year, like he does every year,” she added. “That means I’ve got a little time yet.” More

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      ‘The Oak’: A Post-Communist Pinwheel

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      Lucian Pintilie’s newly restored mad farce, now at Film Forum, paved the way for the Romanian new wave.Playing the last days of Romanian communism as frenzied farce, Lucian Pintilie’s “The Oak” is set in a world so despoiled a Hieronymus Bosch landscape might seem bucolic by comparison.First shown in 1992, some three years after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed and a year after a new constitution replaced single-party rule, “The Oak” has been restored and revived for a week at Film Forum. Ensuing decades have scarcely mitigated its power.Following the death of her father, a onetime colonel in the secret police, the disheveled and seemingly demented Nela (Maia Morgenstern) departs the squalid Bucharest apartment they shared and, carrying dad’s ashes in a jar of Nescafé, makes her way to Copsa Mica, the Transylvanian town where she has been hired to teach.The place is a citadel of pollution — industrial and otherwise. Nela is sexually assaulted by a gang of drunken workers. After she is dumped in a hospital bed (its previous occupant unceremoniously relocated to the floor), Nela meets a kindred soul in Mitica (Razvan Vasilescu), a surgeon similarly sent to the Transylvanian back of beyond. Equally unrestrained, Mitica eschews bribes and physically attacks his superiors, often with a fixed grin. The pair team up in a scattershot, anti-authoritarian conspiracy of two.As wildly impulsive Nela, Morgenstern gives a performance no less anarchic than the movie. (It’s a minor irony of cinema history that this whirlwind actress would be best known for her somber portrayal of Jesus’s mother in “The Passion of the Christ.”) She’s so much fun to watch that “The Oak” loses velocity when attention shifts to her cohort.Punctuated with sudden explosions, random mayhem, yelling, cursing, and ringing telephones, “The Oak” is impossibly busy as well as incredibly bleak. Trains stall, bridges flood, trucks crash. The army is perpetually holding drills. The hospital doubles as a charnel house. Officials are ineffectual even in their self-dealing. Ordinary people are pointlessly bellicose.The movie is sometimes exhausting but never dull. Indeed, the pace is dizzying to the point of disorientation. “You can’t be sure which way is up,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review in The Times, watching “The Oak” was like exploring “a house of horrors in an amusement park in space.”Pintilie, who died in 2018, has been called the godfather of the Romanian new wave — an example for the talented young directors who emerged in the early 20th century. “The Oak” provided a template for the journey-to-the-end-of-the-night absurdism found in Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007). In addition, “The Oak” pioneered a mode that might be called post-Communist grotesque, anticipating the Balkan tumult of the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), the frantic labyrinthine surrealism of Aleksei German’s “Khrustalyov, My Car!” (1998) and the political slapstick of Armando Iannucci’s “The Death of Stalin” (2017).Unlike those three films however, “The Oak” has the quality of a personal exorcism. Made upon Pintilie’s return to Romania after years of self-imposed exile, it is a work of bottled-up fury. The movie’s mad energy suggests that Pintilie, some of whose earlier films were personally banned by Ceausescu, is pounding a stake through the dictator’s heart the better to dance on his grave.The OakApril 28 through May 4 at Film Forum in Manhattan, filmforum.org. More

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      ‘Lumière’: An Actress Destined to Be in the Light

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      Jeanne Moreau’s first film as a director is showing for a week at Film Forum, newly restored and seven minutes longer than its 1976 U.S. release.Movies directed by their stars are a genre unto themselves, one that includes first-person documentaries, avant-garde “psychodramas,” and self-portraits like Jeanne Moreau’s “Lumière” — a movie about a fictional actress in her prime.“Lumière,” Moreau’s first film as a director, is showing for a week at Film Forum, starting March 17, newly restored and seven minutes longer than the 1976 version released in the United States.Moreau doesn’t assume a role in “Lumière” so much as present herself. Not autobiographical, it is a film about acting, or what Yvonne Rainer called the “lives of performers.” Moreau’s character, Sarah, is a benign star orbited by three disparate colleagues. Laura (Lucia Bosè), an Italian actress about Sarah’s age, is married to a producer and oppressed by her social roles as wife, mother and daughter. Somewhat younger, Julienne (Francine Racette) is a narcissistic (or ambitious) stage actress being stalked by an even more narcissistic American star (Keith Carradine). And Caroline (Caroline Cartier), an insecure neophyte, is struggling with exploitative men and an emotionally abusive partner.“Lumière,” which opened the Second International Festival of Women’s Films in 1976, provocatively scheduled before the New York Film Festival that year, is more matter-of-fact than polemical. Several men revolve around Sarah as well. These include the annoying young director who is also her lover (Francis Huster), a saintly older man (François Simon) who helped her survive a personal tragedy, and a moody novelist (Bruno Ganz) to whom she’s taken a fancy. Sarah’s colleagues seem hemmed in by men who are jealous, predatory and selfish, unable to fathom the female solidarity that the film celebrates. By contrast, she is independent.As Sarah is in control of her life (and wardrobe), so Moreau appears confident in her direction of a large and talented cast. One of the busiest actors of her generation, whose résumé included work with some of the world’s greatest directors — Antonioni, Buñuel and Welles, among them — she doesn’t lack for visual ideas. (Curiously, the one movie Sarah cites is Ingmar Bergman’s “Hour of the Wolf,” a gothic tale of an artist’s descent into darkness that is the near opposite of “Lumière.”)Fluid and assured, the movie unfolds in the days leading up to Sarah being presented with a lifetime achievement award — which, in terms of Moreau’s career, might almost be “Lumière.” Moreau as a filmmaker is less vain than honest in presenting herself as a universally admired professional. When she was interviewed by Richard Eder for The New York Times, she explained that, as a child, she used to sneak off to the theater: “I sat there in the dark and watched all these people in the light on the stage. I got so excited. I thought that I was not destined to be in the dark; my vocation was to be in the light.”Onscreen, Moreau projects self-possession. In its final scene, “Lumière” illustrates another showbiz bromide: The show must go on — and it is Moreau’s show. Her resting-face frown may suggest dour determination, but her moments of levity are surprisingly generous. The “lumière” of the title is also, as the French critic Isabelle Jordan ended her review of the film, that of “the most beautiful smile in French cinema.”LumièreThrough March 23, Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Film Forum Director Karen Cooper to Step Down After 50 Years

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      Karen Cooper, who took over the nonprofit cinema in 1972 and transformed it into a $6 million-a-year operation, will step down in July after five decades.When Karen Cooper took over Film Forum in 1972, the theater was a projector and 50 folding chairs in a loft on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, showing what were then known as underground films. The annual budget was $19,000. Cooper projected the films — sometimes herself — on a single 16-millimeter machine no larger than a microwave.“I’d say to someone, ‘I show independent films,’ and they’d say, ‘You mean pornography?’” Cooper, 74, recalled with a laugh in a recent conversation at the nonprofit art house cinema’s offices, now located across the street from the theater in Greenwich Village.But now, Cooper, who has become synonymous with Film Forum — which has grown into a four-screen space with a $6 million-a-year budget and an influence that reaches far beyond New York City — is stepping down from the director role she’s filled for half a century, the organization announced on Monday.“I’ve thought about this for years,” said Cooper, whose last day will be June 30, though she will remain on staff as an adviser. “I wanted to have a smooth transition.”Succeeding her will be Sonya Chung, 49, the theater’s deputy director, who began working at Film Forum in 2003 as the director of development. Chung, who has a master’s degree in fiction writing from the University of Washington, in Seattle, left in 2007 to write and publish two novels (she also taught literature and writing for three years at Columbia University and for nine years at Skidmore College, both in New York). She returned in 2018 as a programming consultant and a member of the advisory committee, and was hired as deputy director in February 2020.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.Jostling for Best Picture: Weighing voter buzz, box office results and more, here’s an educated guess about the likely nominees for best picture.“Sonya has great taste and a way of articulating it,” Cooper said. “It immediately occurred to me when I met her — unbeknownst to Sonya — that she had the ability to be the director of the theater.”Cooper has been the director of Film Forum since 1972.Emma Howells/The New York TimesCooper was a newly minted 23-year-old Smith College graduate when she took over the theater founded by two film buffs, Peter Feinstein and Sandy Miller, in 1970. Over her 50-year tenure, she built a beloved cultural institution that has introduced the work of now-prominent filmmakers to American audiences, earning the affection of critics and patrons alike.She has led the theater through three relocations — Film Forum moved to its current space on West Houston Street in 1989 — and oversaw a $5 million expansion and renovation in 2018 that upgraded the seating, legroom and sightlines in all screening rooms and added a fourth, which increased the venue’s capacity to nearly 500 seats.Cooper said she was most proud of working to broaden the scope of Film Forum’s programming, introducing audiences to major German filmmakers of the 1970s like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. She was also honored to have programmed the New York premieres of ambitious documentaries such as “Asylum,” Peter Robinson’s 1972 look inside the psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s therapeutic community of people with schizophrenia living together in a group home in London; and Spike Lee’s “Four Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala.It’s the meticulously curated slate of new films — which Cooper, Chung and the artistic director Mike Maggiore map out on a dry erase board in the cinema’s offices as far as six months in advance — that serves as part of the draw for Film Forum’s approximately 200,000 visitors each year, along with a robust lineup of classic films programmed by the repertory artistic director Bruce Goldstein, a concession stand menu of decadent baked goods and a robust lineup of talkbacks with filmmakers.Chung says the biggest challenge facing Film Forum, which is one of the few theaters regularly to feature independent movies in New York, is competition from streaming services. It can be tough, she said, to convince people who’ve become used to watching at home to bundle up, take the subway to the theater and pay $15 for a night out.One solution, she said, is creating a memorable experience that people can’t get anywhere else. They recently hosted Q. and A. events with the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb, who directed the documentary “Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and the film’s subject, the book editor and her father Robert Gottlieb; as well as with the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose dark tale about the life of a donkey, “EO,” has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. Both events sold out, she said.“Especially post-pandemic, when we have so much streaming overload, younger people are antsy for an IRL experience,” she said, using the acronym for “in real life.”Chung also wants to cultivate a younger and more diverse audience, with a particular focus on people of color from outside the theater’s white, more affluent neighborhood. For the last several years, she has created a young members program and developed partnerships with cultural and community-based organizations like Girls Write Now, a creative writing and mentoring nonprofit for young people from underserved communities in New York City; and ArteEast, a nonprofit that presents work by contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas.And now, starting this month, the theater’s internship program — which places three college students each semester in roles in the theater’s repertory program, outreach and administration departments — will be paid.“We decided we should pay them in order to attract a more diverse group of young people to be able to work here,” Chung said.As for Cooper, a longtime resident of the far West Village who walks to work each day, she will remain an active member of the organization’s programming team. She’ll continue to represent Film Forum at the Berlin and Amsterdam film festivals. She intends to maintain her schedule of watching at least 500 films per year. She’ll continue to focus on fund-raising for the nonprofit, which raises approximately $3 million of its operating budget each year.“I never thought I’d stay here 50 years,” she said. “But where would I go? What do they say — the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things?“I’m a hedgehog,” she said. “I know one thing — how to run a movie theater.” More

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      ‘The 400 Blows,’ a Directing Debut That Still Astonishes

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      In 1959, François Truffaut premiered his first film, about a Parisian boy playing hooky, and moviemaking hasn’t been the same since.One of the most impressive debuts in film history, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” created a sensation at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and elsewhere. It was voted the best foreign film of the year by New York film critics — a movie that “brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.Showing for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration, the movie is not only crucial to one’s film education but well worth revisiting.“Amazingly, this vigorous effort is the first feature film of M. Truffaut, who had previously been (of all things!) the movie critic for a French magazine,” Crowther noted. As a critic, Truffaut was particularly harsh on French “quality” films — so much so that Cannes denied him accreditation in 1958. Revenge was swift when he returned the following year and won the award for best director. (Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus” received the Palme d’Or. The third French film in competition, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” came up empty.)“The 400 Blows” has two stars. One is the then-14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and thus began a career as the embodiment of the French new wave. The other is the city of Paris — gray, grimy and glorious — the arena for Antoine’s fleeting joys and petty crimes.Antoine is an unwanted child, as was Truffaut. Punished by his teacher, rejected by his self-centered mother (Claire Maurier), he plays hooky, runs away from home, steals a typewriter, gets busted trying to return it, is booked by the cops and winds up in reform school. The movie is full of actual incidents from Truffaut’s childhood, including his fabricating his mother’s death as an excuse for truancy. Few movies have been so personal.“The 400 Blows” is dedicated to the critic André Bazin, Truffaut’s mentor, who died just as the movie began shooting. The early scenes of the boy’s classroom misadventures strongly recall “Zero de Conduite,” the 1933 sendup of French education, directed by Truffaut’s great influence, Jean Vigo. There are other, more inside references, including the unlikely notion that Antoine’s parents might see a quasi-underground work-in-progress by Truffaut’s colleague Jacques Rivette, “Paris Belongs to Us.”“The 400 Blows” is a landmark film for several reasons. It was likely the first openly autobiographical commercial feature, and as such caused Truffaut’s parents considerable distress. It also introduced one of the 1960s’ most resilient clichés — the concluding freeze-frame close-up. Truffaut got the idea from Harriet Andersson’s accusatory stare at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika” (as noted when Antoine steals a lobby card of Andersson’s “Monika”). But building on the wistful refrain that runs throughout, “The 400 Blows” ends on a note of sadness all its own.Truffaut and Leaud returned several times to the character of Antoine Doinel. Film Forum is showing “The 400 Blows” with rotating screenings of later films like “Stolen Kisses” and “Love on the Run.” The character survives and even thrives. Yet it is the heartbreaking last shot of “The 400 Blows” that will fix his identity for as long as there are movies.The Four Hundred BlowsSept. 23 through Oct. 6 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org More