Retrospective
Louis Malle tackles all subjects and ignores the prohibitions and taboos that constrain good French society. In 1963, he adapted with The wisp the sulphurous Drieu la Rochelle. In 1974, with Patrick Modiano, a great specialist of the period, he painted in Lucien Lacombe an acerbic portrait of the France of collaboration and the Vichy regime. In the 70s, The little (inspired by the life of photographer Ernest J. Bellocq) and The breath in the heart cause controversy. With the complicity of Jean-Claude Carrière, he delivers with Snowy in May a surreal and hilarious painting of the bourgeoisie put to the test of May 68… But Louis Malle, these are also great popular successes such as goodbye children winner of 7 César in 1988.
The opportunity to see again on the big screen the great actors who accompanied his work: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Aurore Clément who made her debut with the filmmaker, Dominique Blanc… but also Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, Burt Lancaster or Ed Harris. The opportunity also to hear dialogues co-written with Louise de Vilmorin, Patrick Modiano, Roger Nimier or Jean-Claude Carrière.
Thanks also to TF1 Studio and Paramount US
He was born two years after Godard, a few months after Truffaut, but Louis Malle (1932-1995) overtook everyone: at the age of 23, in 1956, he received a Palme d’or for The world of silence(shared with Commander Cousteau), at age 26, the Louis-Delluc Prize for Elevator to the Gallowswhere the trumpet of Miles Davis, met thanks to Boris Vian, serves as a setting for the beauty of Jeanne Moreau surveying the Champs-Élysées. “We were the children of the new Kodak film, the Tri-X, which allowed us to shoot on the street, or in dimly lit interiors, with smaller crews. » (Malle on Malleconversation with Philip French, 1993)
The thirty films – fiction and documentaries – that he shot in forty years bear witness to an unquenchable curiosity, a solid literary culture and great technical mastery. His films pinpoint with audacity and earthiness the upper middle class from which he comes, lovers (1958), whose eroticism caused a scandal, to the Chekhovian saraband of Snowy in May (1989). They scrutinize the gray areas of French society, like Lucien Lacombe (1974), a look at the collaboration which provoked a lively debate, which Louis Malle closed by settling for several years in Hollywood where he shot, in particular, Atlantic City (1980).
To follow, the details of the program of the Louis Malle retrospective.
Image credits: portrait of Louis Malle on the set of Heart murmur :copyright: Vides Films – Marianne Productions – Franz Seitz / DR
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Cinema: the Lumière festival of Greater Lyon announces a Louis Malle retrospective