Jacques Tourneur, Fearmaker
The son of Maurice Tourneur, one of early French cinema’s preeminent directors, Jacques Tourneur ranks among the most fascinating yet most elusive filmmakers of his time. After working as an editor for his father and a director of shorts and B-features at MGM in his adoptive America, Tourneur eventually found a home in Hollywood with the success of his 1942 horror movie Cat People. He went on to make a series of striking low-budget pictures in the 1940s and ’50s: distinct, atmospheric works in a variety of genres (including the landmark 1947 noir Out of the Past), all notable for their wit, irony, and simultaneous precision and ambiguity. Tourneur mixed the uncanny with the psychological, located even the most outlandish premises within familiar spheres, and roguishly circumvented financial constraints through his singular artistry. This winter, the Film Society is pleased to present a wide-ranging retrospective of Tourneur’s body of work, the largest in New York City in decades.
Organized by Dennis Lim and Tyler Wilson in partnership with the Locarno Film Festival, where a Jacques Tourneur retrospective was presented in 2017, curated by Roberto Turigliatto and Rinaldo Censi, in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne.
Acknowledgments:
Academy Film Archive; British Film Institute; The Cinémathèque of the City of Luxembourg; Cineteca di Bologna; Eye Filmmuseum; Library of Congress; UCLA Film & Television Archive
Explore the Jacques Tourneur brochure flipbook or read below.
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Anne of the Indies
Appointment in Honduras
Berlin Express
Cat People
Circle of Danger
The Comedy of Terrors
Days of Glory
Doctors Don’t Tell
Easy Living
Experiment Perilous
Introduction by Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics on Jan. 1
An unsung gothic gem amongst Tourneur’s extraordinary 1940s work, this mood-drenched tale of murder and madness in a turn-of-the-century Manhattan mansion bristles with an air of anxious uncertainty.The Fearmakers
The Flame and the Arrow
Frontier Rangers
The Giant of Marathon
Great Day in the Morning
Introduction by Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics on Dec. 20
Tourneur’s moral and aesthetic complexity elevates this dark, anti-heroic western, a searing exploration of greed, jealousy, and simmering violence in an America on the brink of the Civil War.The Leopard Man
Nick Carter, Master Detective
Night of the Demon
Nightfall
Out of the Past
Phantom Raiders
Stars in My Crown
Stranger on Horseback
They All Come Out
Timbuktu
War-Gods of the Deep
Way of a Gaucho
Introduction by Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics on Dec. 22
Gloriously shot on location on the Pampas of Argentina, this majestic South American Western—in which gaucho bandits strike back against the encroaching forces of civilization—is among Tourneur’s most pictorially ravishing films.Wichita
Jacques Tourneur Shorts Program
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