La maison des bois (Ep. 1-3)

La maison des bois will screen in two blocks, Episodes 1–3 and 4–7. Save by seeing the whole series and more Pialat by adding two or more tickets for separate screenings to your cart. Purchase tickets for Ep. 4–7 here.

Long spoken of as Maurice Pialat’s “best film” and rarely seen in proper conditions, La maison des bois returns in a luminous new 4K restoration that finally reveals its quiet, overwhelming force on the big screen. In 1971, at age 45 and with only one feature (L’Enfance nue) behind him, Pialat accepted a commission for French television and transformed it into something unmistakably his own. Working closely with his longtime collaborator Arlette Langmann—credited here as editor but deeply involved in reshaping the script in real time during production—Pialat reworked René Wheeler’s original script episode by episode, crafting a seven-part chronicle that feels at once spontaneous and novelistic in scope.

Unfolding in a village north of Paris over the course of World War I, the series follows gamekeeper Albert Picard (comedian Pierre Doris, cast against type) and his wife Jeanne (Jacqueline Dufranne), who take in three displaced Parisian boys at their home on the edge of the woods. At its emotional center is 10-year-old Hervé (Hervé Lévy), whose father is at the front lines and whose mother has abandoned him. Through his eyes we watch a tightly bound community slowly unsettled by the war’s advancing shadow, though Pialat keeps his camera far from the front, turning instead to kitchens, schoolhouses (where the director himself plays the teacher), catechism lessons, taverns, and country roads. What begins in sharply drawn characterizations and narrative precision gradually loosens into something more impressionistic and immersive, a war epic built from accumulating details—a stolen letter read aloud, a river picnic that recalls Renoir, a mother mourning her son before he has even departed. There is no grand plot, only the steady accrual of departures and absences until the village is irrevocably changed. At once tender and unsentimental, La maison des bois stands as one of the great, underseen achievements of postwar French filmmaking. Restored in 4K by INA. A Janus Films release.