The Cinema of Louis Malle

June 23, 2005 11:28 AM

I felt I was pretty much prepared technically but I had this huge hole in my apprenticeship — dealing with actors. I had no experience of that. I had been filming fish for four years.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be presenting Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle (June 24 - July 19). This extensive retrospective will include all of the great director's feature films and nearly all of his documentaries, including the rare seven-hour Phantom India. After its run at Lincoln Center, the retrospective will go on tour across the U.S. and Canada. Malle’s thriller Elevator to the Gallows will also receive a US theatrical release this summer. (via The Criterion Collection). More inside. — —
posted by matteo (5 comments total)

There are people who unknowingly shape you—whose chosen paths in life and work you recognize and lay claim to as your own. There are filmmakers whose voices you look to while discovering your own personal obsessions. Their stories are your stories; inside their images, you catch your own face.
I was eleven years old when I first saw Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien at a movie theater on the Champs Elysées in Paris.

-- Jodie Foster

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The Passions of Louis Malle
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Philip French on Louis Malle
posted by matteo at 11:31 AM on June 23, 2005

"Elevator" trailer (direct link, big-ass .mov file)

Louis Malle on “Elevator to the Gallows” (.pdf file)
posted by matteo at 11:34 AM on June 23, 2005

This just goes to show where filming fish can lead. I'm a big fan of Malle's work.

Maybe, before they can ever film actual humans, Hollywood directors should first be compelled to spend several years filming denizens of the briny deep. It couldn't hurt.
posted by troutfishing at 12:35 PM on June 23, 2005

I had been filming fish for four years.

This has got to be one of the all-time great movie quotes. Once again, I wish I were in NYC. Since I can't be, can I plead with those of you planning to go to this series to also see MOMA's Edward Yang mini-festival? These are some of the best movies I've seen in the last few decades; you may have seen (or at least heard of) Yi-Yi, but A Brighter Summer Day is completely unknown here in the US—I only got to see it because Godfrey Cheshire chose it for an "unknown movies" festival at the American Museum of the Moving Image and raved about it in NY Press. As he says in his review of Yi-Yi:

Chief among those unseen masterpieces, Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s astonishing, four-hour teens-in-turmoil epic A Brighter Summer Day (1991) not only eluded the nets of American distributors, it was also passed over by the Cannes and New York film festivals, a blunder that looked ever more embarrassing as the film’s critical reputation built throughout the decade. Recently I asked a Cannes programmer who was on duty at the time how the oversight could have happened. With a frown, he said, "Festivals make mistakes." (Here insert history’s riposte: "No shit.")

(Um, /derail...)
posted by languagehat at 1:55 PM on June 23, 2005

Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto will be screening ten Malle films from July 15 until August 20.
posted by jmcnally at 8:27 PM on June 24, 2005