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