SEPTEMBER
Le Pont Du Nord
Thursday , September 5 at 7pm + Saturday , September 7 at 2pm JACQUES RIVETTE Le Pont du Nord dir . Jacques Rivette , France , 1981 , 35mm , French with English subtitles , 129 min .
A puzzle , a hallucinatory cinephilic fever dream and a spellbinding , through-the-looking-glass thriller as only French New Wave titan Rivette could make , Le Pont du Nord plays like the darker , conspiracy-theory-obsessed cousin of the director ’ s beloved Céline and Julie Go Boating . This tale of two women follows ex-con Marie ( Bulle Ogier ), who is just out of prison , and Baptiste ( Bulle ’ s reallife daughter Pascale ) for a surreal , labyrinthine odyssey through a wintry Paris , replete with mysterious clues , codes , traps , and spies . — BAM
“ The ensuing journey is at once playful and tense , loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy that suggests each new wrinkle of the plot were being dictated by a roll of the dice . ( Like many of Rivette ’ s films , Le Pont du Nord was largely improvised by the actors .) Watching the film now , on the occasion of its first release in U . S . theaters , it seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers — Spike Jonze , Charlie Kaufman , Michel Gondry — and expanded our sense of the possible .” — Scott Foundas , Film Comment
Friday , September 6 at 7pm JACQUES RIVETTE Céline and Julie Go Boating dir . Jacques Rivette , France , 1974 , 35mm , French with English subtitles , 193 min .
Introduction by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum .
Like a Borges story swathed in a silk kimono , the maze-like turns of the epic-length Céline and Julie Go Boating are so welcomingly sensual , you ’ ll be just as likely to laze in the film ’ s warm beauty as you will be to decipher its Byzantine puzzles . A story about storytelling , Jacques Rivette ‘ s self-referential classic centers on the fanciful world of two women literally lost in the stories they tell each other . Crimson-curl-topped librarian Julie ( Dominique Labourier ) sees brunette Céline ( Godard regular Juliet Berto )— for the first time — as she ’ s dazedly staggering through a park . But then , as they rapidly become best friends , the weird connections proliferate : Julie is hooked on magic , Céline is a professional magician ( with a haughtily bizarre act ); Céline pretends to be Julie at a meeting with an old flame , Julie hilariously and disastrously subs for Celine at an important audition ; and they both take turns as the nanny at the house Céline had been fleeing from originally . Céline and Julie go from sharing a story about a haunted house to being part of a story about a haunted house — or is it a real haunted house that has been called up by the story ?
The film blurs the line between the telling of the story and the story itself , as Céline and Julie , like Alice in Wonderland , become part ihousephilly . org