Jacques Rozier: Chronicler of Summer
Film at Lincoln Center and Janus Films present a retrospective of the French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rozier’s influential career, featuring all five of his features and a selection of short films.
Jacques Rozier
1962|
France|
110 minutes|
French with English subtitles
In his bold yet playful feature debut, about a developing love triangle between three friends searching for an unscrupulous director in Corsica while on holiday, Jacques Rozier satirizes several major cultural currents of early-1960s France.
Jacques Rozier
1971|
France|
160 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Perfectly capturing both the liberating promise and the melancholic effervescence of summer, Near Orouët is a minor masterpiece of the post–New Wave era and a beautiful meditation on the fleeting nature of youth, love, and time.
Jacques Rozier
1976|
France|
140 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Having set his first two features at seaside holidays, Rozier used the third, The Castaways of Turtle Island, to mock the tourist industry and the “going native” movement, yielding a hilarious comic send-up that could only have emerged from his puckish imagination.
Jacques Rozier
1986|
France|
130 minutes|
French, Portuguese, and Spanish with English subtitles
In Rozier’s quirkiest comedy, a Brazilian dancer’s invalid train ticket for a journey from Paris to Saint-Nazaire sparks a shaggy-dog story that encompasses the adventures of a quick-tempered boatman, his highfalutin attorney, a scheming talent agent, and other memorable characters.
Jacques Rozier
2001|
France|
127 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Rozier’s final film, about a director’s chaotic efforts to overhaul his own play after a successful six-month run, is a joyful compendium of his major themes and strategies as well as one of the funniest depictions of the theater ever committed to celluloid.
Jacques Rozier
France|
88 minutes|
French with English subtitles
This program collects an assortment of Rozier’s masterful short films: the influential Blue Jeans, a kind of breezy study for Adieu Philippine; Le parti des choses and Paparazzi, offering glimpses behind the scenes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963); and In Vogue, an on-the-street snapshot of Parisian fashion trends in the early ’60s.
Film at Lincoln Center and Janus Films present “Jacques Rozier: Chronicler of Summer,” a retrospective of the French New Wave filmmaker’s influential career, featuring all five of his features and a selection of short films. The series will be presented at FLC from August 16 through August 22 and will premiere several new restorations of Rozier’s signature works, including 4K restorations of Near Orouët (1971) and Maine-Océan Express (1986).
It is well-established that the French New Wave forever changed our understanding of what a film could be, playing with both the medium’s formal conventions and Hollywood’s immortal iconography to produce some of cinema’s most stylish and enduringly influential works. Yet, for as large as such figures as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Éric Rohmer loom within standard accounts of this incomparably fertile period of film history, less well-known are the works of their contemporary Jacques Rozier, whose 1962 debut feature, Adieu Philippine, was a particular cause for the critic-iconoclasts of Cahiers du Cinéma.
Across five idiosyncratic, episodic features, and an assortment of fiction and documentary short films, Rozier distinguished himself from his peers through his fixation on the idea of vacations as theatrical staging grounds upon which his magnetic actors could play and simply be, making him something like a more lighthearted (though no less complex) counterpart to his fellow New Waver, Jacques Rivette. It is remarkable that Rozier’s influence has been so profoundly felt considering how rarely his singular films have screened outside of France.
Organized by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan. Presented in collaboration with Janus Films.
