FRENCH NOIR
3 - 31 july at Ciné Lumière
"The history of French crime cinema (like that of French crime literature) ironically reveals both a rich indigenous tradition and a love affair with America – an irony contained in the very term film noir, a French expression designed for, and applied to, American cinema. Perhaps no filmmaker concentrates this paradox so strongly as Jean-Pierre Melville, whose work is celebrated at the NFT throughout July. To accompany the NFT Melville retrospective, as well as its celebration of Georges Simenon’s work on screen, cine lumiere presents ‘French noir’, a re-visitation of some of the greatest French crime film classics, from Louis Feuillade’s cult series Fantômas (1913-14) – shown in its entirety over five evenings – Duvivier’s seminal Pepe le Moko (1937), through several 50s and 60s classics (Touchez pas au grisbi, Maigret tend un piège, Tirez sur le pianiste), to new films as yet unseen in the UK.
Over the years France has built the most substantial body of noir crime cinema outside of Hollywood: virtually every major French filmmaker has worked in the genre, from Feuillade to Klapisch – via Duvivier, Becker, Truffaut, Chabrol, Verneuil, Clement, Miller, Corneau and many others, including of course Melville. Similarly, many of the great (male) French stars have appeared in it. With Pepe le Moko, Touchez pas au grisbi and Maigret tend un piege, cine lumiere pays particular tribute to Jean Gabin, but viewers will also enjoy performances by the likes of Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Charles Aznavour and Patrick Dewaere and, in – for them – unusual roles, Thierry Lhermitte and Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Mathilde Seigner’s gutsy policewoman in Tristan may hopefully mark a departure towards more roles for women in this male-dominated genre.
Crime and punishment are age-old themes, the trinity of police, suspect and victim is universal, and the city is the classic habitat for the genre. Within this common framework French crime films have forged a distinct identity while paying continuous tribute to Hollywood – in their poetic or gritty exploration of Paris (including as a nostalgic fantasy in Pepe le Moko), their blurring of the line between law and lawlessness, their world-weary philosophy. From the 1930s onwards, French crime movies have also made notably inventive use of slang. This is true in both indigenous books and scripts and in the translations of American pulp novels published by Marcel Duhamel’s famous Serie Noire (launched in 1946), on which several of the films in the season are based. Indeed, the perennial importance of the Serie Noire may be seen in the fact that Patrick Raynal, current head of the imprint at Gallimard, is one of the scriptwriters of Guillaume Nicloux’s 1999 Le Poulpe, one of the most recent films in this retrospective.
Cine lumiere crime films shown this July come in all shades of noir: Surreal (Fantômas), poetic-realist (Pepe le Moko), glamorous (Touchez pas au grisbi), gritty (Serie Noire), political (Nada), New Wave (Tirez sur le Pianiste), ironic (Le Poulpe), feminine (Tristan), and so on, illustrating the flexibility and vitality of French noir." (Ginette Vincendeau)
Details of the Fantômas showings:
Based on the popular novel by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and beloved of the Surrealists, Louis Feuillade‘s series of five films made for Gaumont features super-criminal Fantômas (Rene Navarre) in a daring set of adventures that pit him against his nemesis, Inspector Juve (Edmond Breon) taking him through all strata of French society.
From mon 14 to fri 18 july, one episode of the serial will be screened after the first film of the evening for the special price of £3.
For more information and the entire series schedule, visit www.institut-francais.org.uk, or contact:
Ciné Lumière at the Institut français
17 Queensberry Place
South Kensington
London SW7 2DT
T. 020 7073 1350