Le Joli Mai (1963)

WHO: Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme made this documentary.

WHAT: One of the earliest Chris Marker films I've seen, and one of the best, it's also at 165 minutes one of the longest he made, certainly the longest he'd directed up to this point in his career. A documentary record of Paris during May of 1962, it's a beautiful work that is finally getting more attention after a recent restoration and Cannes screening.  Richard Brody has written an excellent contextualizing piece.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at the Opera Plaza and the Shattuck, through this Thursday.

WHY: The first of Marker's films to get a full theatrical release in this country since his death last summer, Le Joli Mai is now fifty years old and as relevant as ever. With the Pacific Film Archive in the middle of a retrospective of work by Marker's friend Agnès Varda and this Wednesday showing the latest feature by his one-time collaborator Lynne Sachs (in case you missed it Saturday at Other Cinema, screening along with her Marker-assisting project Three Cheers For the Whale), it's a good week to fan interest in the so-called "Left Bank" filmmakers on bay Area screens.

HOW: The latest restoration is available only digitally.

Breathless (1960)

WHO: Jean-Luc Godard directed this.

WHAT: Godard's first feature film. Only one of the most famous and influential art/independent/foreign films ever made. A masterpiece that I find grows in stature with each viewing (maybe that's the very definition of masterpiece). David Hudson collected a large number of excellent articles about the film when it had its 50th anniversary in 2010.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Though (at least in 2013) we're not getting anything close in size to the giant Godard retrospective that New Yorkers were able to see last month, at least local cinephiles get to see at least five of Godard's best features in local cinemas this month, four of them on the giant-sized Castro screen. The Castro plays a Godard every Wednesday in November: Breathless tonight, Weekend on a 35mm double-bill with David Cronenberg's Crash on the 13th, Contempt as a newly-prepared DCP on the 20th, and Band of Outsiders alongside Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 on November 27th, both in 35mm.

The fifth Godard coming to Frisco Bay is perhaps my favorite of all his films: Vivre Sa Vie, his signature collaboration with his wife Anna Karina, screening as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Fassbinder's Favorites sidebar to its retrospective for that director. That'll be November 22nd, the same evening as the final screening in the PFA's current Agnès Varda series, Cléo From 5 to 7. It's an appropriate pairing because, although Varda last night said she was didn't feel particularly close to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (of which Godard must certainly be considered a member), she did recruit him and Karina to perform in the short film-within-film Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) appearing in Cléo.

Varda also noted last night that, although she was alone among female filmmakers to gain notice during the 1960s heyday of the French New Wave, she's become heartened that there are so many French women directing, shooting, and taking other once-male-dominated roles in filmmaking nowadays. Of the nine contemporary French films screening in the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series opening at the Clay tomorrow and running all weekend, female directors outnumber males five to four (only by counting French-Canadian director of Vic & Flo Saw A Bear Denis Côté does the ratio even up to five-five), and the series includes five films shot or co-shot by women cinematographers, including two by Claire Mathon, two by Jeanne Lapoirie, and of course Bastards, directed by Claire Denis and shot by superstar DP Agnès Godard (no relation to Jean-Luc). For a full preview of the French Cinema Now series I direct you to the excellent article by local Francophile and cinephile Michael Hawley.

HOW: Breathless screens in 35mm, on a double-bill with the local DCP premiere of one of Godard's favorite films, Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse. This was the film that inspired Godard to cast Jean Seberg.

The Gleaners & I (2000)

WHO: Agnès Varda made this documentary, and appears in it too.

WHAT: Late in life, Varda has focused her energy on documentaries, weaving personal, poetic essays in visual form.  Inspired by famous 19th-century paintings of "gleaners", and by the French law that allows people to take food from a farmer's field after a harvest, in this film she playfully investigates a wide array of modern gleaners, from artists and anarchists to the Roma.  But ultimately the film is a touching self-investigation, as Varda recognizes her own status as a gleaner of images others would throw away.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00 PM

WHY: I unfortunately was unable to attend last night's screening of L'Opéra-Mouffe and two other of Varda's earlier shorts last night after all, but I'm hoping to be able to pull myself away from other projects to make it tonight. The Gleaners & I is one of my very favorite of Varda's films, one I've seen several times already, and one I'd particularly love to hear the filmmaker speak about in person.

It's hard to think of a more appropriate day to see it than on an election day, as "gleaning" is something inscribed in the French legal system. It's a cold hard fact that much of the quality of life for the materially impoverished is at the mercy of the laws a society enacts, so it's important for all of us to exercise our democratic voice when we have the opportunity to. You won't want to attend tonight's screening guiltily knowing you missed a chance to weigh in on propositions whose passage or failure are likely to increase or decease economic inequality in the region.

HOW: 35mm print with Varda in person.

L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958)

WHO: Agnès Varda wrote and directed this short film.

WHAT: One of the "boni" on the Cinema Guild DVD for Varda's Cinévardaphoto triptych of shorts is an inventive three-way (Varda with Anne Huet & Alain Bergala) interview-film called From the Rooster To the Donkey (Hands and Objects), in which the legendary French filmmaker discusses her parallel career as a short filmmaker, a career that would distinguish her as a major film artist on its own, if only it weren't overshadowed by the many tremendous feature films she's directed since filming La Pointe Courte nearly sixty years ago.

In this "bonus", Varda discusses L'Opéra-Mouffe a.k.a. Diary of a Pregnant Woman, placing it as the first short film she made on her own volition. (O saisons, ô châteaux preceded it but that was a commissioned work she feels less than passionate about.) She says:

I was pregnant. I shot on La Mouffe, the rue Mouffetard, a documentary about its people. Back then, the neighborhood was mostly cafes and poor people. It was really a poor area. There were no toilets. Just buckets put out every morning. And there was the market. I shot the film with the impression that the more fulfilled I was, [...] the more I saw how poor the people on that street were. I wanted to blur the line between the belly that eats and the belly that makes a baby. I did that film on my own, with my own money. [Actor] Gérard Philipe's wife lent me a camera. [...] I quickly understood that the desire to make a short film was enough, or nearly. Especially now, with all these little cameras to borrow. You can do a lot with very little. I don't worship poverty, and I don't worship money. What does seem important is the ability to move quickly from desire to realization.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program starting at 7:00 tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Tonight's screening of L'Opéra-Mouffe along with two other Varda-directed shorts (the Frisco Bay-made Uncle Yanco and Black Panthers, neither of which I've seen in full) is not just an opportunity to see rarely-screened works on the big screen; it's an opportunity to do so with one of France's great living directors in person. On her way to Hollywood, where she will be the Guest Artistic Director at AFI Fest (wish I were able to go this year), Varda will be visiting Berkeley to appear with her short films tonight, and with her tremendous The Gleaners & I tomorrow. Both screenings are said to be sold out, so if you don't have tickets already, you're probably out of luck (though arriving at the PFA early with a "I need a miracle" sign couldn't hurt). There are still tickets available to see the remaining programs in the PFA's Varda tribute, Le Pointe Courte in 35mm Friday and Cléo From 5 to 7 in a new DCP in two and a half weeks, but Varda will not be on hand for those showings.

Varda was involved in writing French dialogue for Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris, which screens in 35mm this Thursday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, making it possible to see a Varda-related film four out of five weeknights this week.

HOW: L'Opéra-Mouffe and Uncle Yanco screen in 35mm tonight, while Black Panthers screens in 16mm, the latter two in new restorations since their last PFA appearance in 2009.

Written On the Wind (1954)

WHO: Douglas Sirk directed this.

WHAT: One of the best-known of Sirk's high-gloss melodramas made for producer Ross Hunter. I've historically preferred Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life myself, but I feel like it's about time I took another look at this one too. Tag Gallagher calls it the director's "fullest expression of [the] “Faust” theme". 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:50 PM.

WHY: This screens as part of the PFA's Fassbinder's Favorites mini-series; a sampling of the German cinephile-director's most cherished films made before his own career began in the late 1960s. All but one of the four selections screen on the same night as a Fassbinder film at that venue; tonight's screening is preceded by one of Chinese Roulette. The odd one out is Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, which screens November 22nd, the same night that Cleo From 5 To 7 closes a short series of Agnès Varda's films inspired by her trip to the PFA this coming Monday and Tuesday.

HOW: 35mm print.

Jacquot (1991)

WHO: Agnès Varda wrote and directed this, based on the childhood reminiscences of her husband Jacques Demy.

WHAT: The Pacific Film Archive's current Jacques Demy series is not just the most complete in Frisco Bay history because it's showing fourteen of the French director's films. It's also screening three films about Demy made by his wife, then widow Agnès Varda, all in 35mm. Two of these seem much like the kinds of documentaries often seen on high-end DVD releases, although The Young Girls Turn 25 is not found on the Miramax release of The Young Girls of Rochefort, and The World Of Jacques Demy can only be viewed awkwardly excerpted on DVDs for Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Model Shop, etc. 

Jacquot is, by contrast, a re-enactment of Demy's childhood, a catalog of his inspirations, and the last "fiction" feature film made by Varda to this day, although she has made quite a few documentaries and shorts in the meantime. It was speaking to the camera in her superb 2008 autobiographical doc The Beaches of Agnès that she made her first public comment on the fact, known more as rumor beforehand, that her husband had died of AIDS complications. She and other friends held this secret in "affectionate silence, totally respectful of Jacques, who didn't talk about it." As other voices in the documentary relate, "back then, in 1989, AIDS was considered a shameful disease," and "it was taboo."  Jacquot was begun and completed as Demy was dying, and for the cast and crew making the film was a way of accompanying the director in his final months. According to Varda, the film finished shooting on October 17, 1990, just ten days before her husband's death.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, at 7:00.

WHY: Even if you're not planning to be a completist and attend everything in the PFA's Demy series (or, as I'm considering, at least everything unseen previously), there are many reasons to consider making tonight's screening one of your selections. First of all, Agnès Varda, the so-called "grandmother" of the French New Wave (though she was born just a few years before Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol & François Truffaut, and is in fact younger than Alain Resnais & Jacques Rivette) and one of the world's greatest living filmmakers. Of those I've seen, I can't think of a single film of hers that isn't about reflection and mortality, and though I haven't seen Jacquot, its circumstances of production seem right along that line. 

There's also Agnès Godard, who was one of three cinematographers on Jacquot (according to the PFA note, she shot "the longest segment" of the film). Anyone who enjoyed this Godard's appearance in Berkeley last month, and only wished for more examples of work from earlier in her career, this is your chance to get a look at a key work made the same year as her first of fifteen (thus far) credits as cinematographer for Claire Denis.

Finally, the general topic of French cinema. This might be the last good chance I get to mention it beforehand, so I thought I'd point out a refreshing program coming the Castro Theatre August 7th & 8th: a two-day booking of a 35mm double-bill of Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic starring Catherine Deneuve, and Claude Sautet's Max Et Les Ferrailleurs starring Michel Piccoli. Deneuve and Piccoli, of course, have both featured in films for Demy and for Varda, including The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Young Girls Turn 25.

HOW: 35mm print