
Deeper into Nocturama
To lend cinematic context to Nocturama on the occasion of its theatrical run at the Film Society this August, Bonello has selected an assortment of works that were on his mind while crafting his masterful new film.
Bertrand Bonello
2016|
France / Germany / Belgium|
130 minutes|
French with English subtitles
This audacious film from Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent) is both a precision-crafted thriller about a mass-scale terrorist attack on Paris and a provocative exploration of consumerism and millennial disaffection.
John Carpenter
1976|
USA|
91 minutes
John Carpenter’s taut L.A.-set thriller chronicles a small group of cops, administrators, and crooks holed up in a decommissioned police station and their efforts to survive the night when a merciless street gang marks one of them for death.
David Cronenberg
1979|
Canada|
92 minutes
While an unorthodox psychiatrist (Oliver Reed) treats a psychotic patient (Samantha Eggar), her ex-husband tries to protect his daughter as a series of vicious murders befall those connected to him. The Brood is Cronenberg at his most emotionally naked.
Robert Bresson
1977|
France|
95 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Perhaps Bresson’s most explicitly political film, this searing send-up of post-’68 France is among the most chilling cinematic portraits of a historical moment.
Éric Rohmer
1984|
France|
102 minutes|
French with English subtitles
A young interior decorator (Pascale Ogier, Venice Film Festival Best Actress winner) keeps two residences—one with her boyfriend and one without—in Rohmer’s fourth Comedies and Proverbs film, rendered with his signature subtlety and maturity.
David Lynch
1992|
USA|
134 minutes
The prequel to the television phenomenon is Lynch’s harrowing attempt to close the book on both his signature series and arguably his most memorable and tragic character, deceased 17-year-old homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). New digital restoration!
One of the year’s most acclaimed and provocative films, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama doesn’t just confirm its director’s astonishing command of his medium and his willingness to take audacious risks to explore and understand our endlessly complicated present—it is also unmistakably the work of a consummate, learned cinephile. To lend cinematic context to Nocturama on the occasion of its current theatrical run at the Film Society, Bonello has selected an assortment of works that were on his mind while crafting his masterful new film. Including such titles as Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, this series illuminates the rich lineages to which Nocturama belongs: metaphysical masterpieces, hangout films, politically charged genre pictures, works that induce chills and profound reflection in equal measure.
Listen to our discussion of Nocturama and Bonello’s influences, as well as a talk with the director, on The Close-Up:











