Film at Lincoln Center & Janus Films Announce JACQUES ROZIER: CHRONICLER OF SUMMER
Long overdue retrospective will include influential French New Wave filmmaker’s five features and a selection of shorts, featuring new restorations of his signature films- August 16th-22nd
[New York, NY — July 15, 2024] Film at Lincoln Center and Janus Films announce “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.
Born in Paris in 1926, Rozier was at the forefront of the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, and was considered one of the last living contemporaries of that time until his death in 2023. After his first feature, Adieu Philippine (1962), was recognized as “quite simply the best French film of recent years” by fellow New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Rozier returned to the festival in 1971 to debut his second film Near Orouët / Du côté d’Orouët. Rozier followed this up with two more vacation comedies, The Castaways of Turtle Island / Les naufragés de l’île de la Tortue (1976) and Maine-Océan Express / Maine-Océan (1986), the former focusing on the plans of two scheming travel agents and the latter following the dynamics of travelers themselves. Fifteen years later, his fifth and final film, Fifi Martingale, one of the funniest depictions of the theater ever committed to celluloid, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2001. In addition to his five feature films and an array of shorts, Rozier also directed a number of French television shows and a music video throughout his varied career.
On the occasion of an assortment of new restorations of his signature films, Film at Lincoln Center presents a long overdue (and appropriately summer-set) retrospective dedicated to this unheralded legend of French cinema.
For more details, visit the Film at Lincoln Center website.
Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on July 15, 2024.
