Le samouraï · in French with English Subtitles / Alliance Française
Saturday, Apr. 13 · 1:30 p.m.
810 N Dearborn St
Chicago, IL 60610
The devilishly handsome Alain Delon plays Jeff Costello, a contract killer, in a career-defining performance in which not even the character’s armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him.
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Mondays at Doc Films
Claude Chabrol: Neo-Noir Master
Programmed by Kathleen Geier
In 1997, Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that Claude Chabrol was “the most neglected filmmaker of the French New Wave.” That is all the more true in 2019. The last major Chabrol retrospective in Chicago was 20 years ago and, as Farran Smith Nehme has remarked, “it is ridiculously hard to see some of his best films.” Few of his features are available on DVD or streaming, and a number of those of those that are–including some of his greatest films of the 60s and 70s–have been released in poor quality transfers.
Part of the problem is the man’s sheer productivity. Between the release of his debut feature, Le Beau Serge, in 1958, and his death in 2010, Chabrol made over 50 fifty films. Andrew Sarris observed that “his extensive body of work recorded the manners and places of his time with the fervor of a Balzac.” His two major cinematic influences were Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang and as Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out, “it is in the play between Hitchcock’s subjectivity and Lang’s objectivity that Chabrol’s best work usually takes shape.”
If it’s a Chabrol film, there is usually a murder. He frequently adapted noir writers like Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon and most of his cool, witty, formally elegant films can be characterized as neo-noir. They also frequently embody a pointed social critique, most often aimed at the French bourgeoisie, whom he viewed satirically but not entirely unsympathetically. Though we can only present a small sampling of his work, it is our fondest hope that this modest retrospective helps kick-start a full-scale Chabrol revival.
4/1/2019 @ 7:00 PM – Les Bonnes Femmes
4/8/2019 @ 7:00 PM – High Life
4/15/2019 @ 7:00 PM – La Femme Infidèle
4/22/2019 @ 7:00 PM – Le Boucher
4/29/2019 @ 7:00 PM – La Rupture
5/6/2019 @ 7:00 PM – Wedding in Blood
5/13/2019 @ 9:30 PM – Chicken with Vinegar
5/20/2019 @ 7:00 PM – Betty
6/3/2019 @ 7:00 PM – La Cérémonie
For more information: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/dev/calendar/2019/spring/mondays.shtml
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Claire Denis in Chicago
French director Claire Denis will be in Chicago to present her latest philosophical sci-fi movie Highlife, three days after its official release in the US. Join us for the free screening and post-film Q&A, moderated by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Professor Daniel Morgan of the University of Chicago.
One of a handful of filmmakers who can credibly lay claim to the title of World’s Greatest Living Director and Artist, Claire Denis creates films that speak as much through words as they do through movement, rhythm, and texture. Profound and empathetic studies of outsiderhood, immigrant alienation, the ravages of colonialism, and the mysteries of love and desire, her films are not so much watched as experienced in a full-sensory head-rush of sound and image.
High Life – Movie in English
Claire Denis, France/USA/UK/Poland, 2018
Anyone familiar with her work knows that a Claire Denis sci-fi film will not be like any other sci-fi film, but High Life is even stranger, bolder, and more sexual than expected that will recall at times the science fiction of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. Set aboard a ship populated with death row inmates employed in dangerous space exploration, this masterwork is more concerned with internal galaxies and the black holes of man than interstellar wonders. Starring Robert Pattinson, André Benjamin, and a magnificently tressed Juliette Binoche, High Life also features a mesmerizing score by Denis’ frequent collaborator Stuart A. Staples of Tindersticks.