Unknown history of cinema on french television
Television has long been considered, mistakenly, as off the film world’s radar. If we look closely, however, a great deal of French or foreign filmmakers have continued to find commissions or airtime from television networks, ever since the generation of the Nouvelle Vague. The retrospective presents many extremelly rare films, still unreleased in cinema theaters.
"Television has long been considered, mistakenly, as off the film world’s radar. If we look closely, however, a great deal of French or foreign filmmakers have continued to find commissions or airtime from television networks, ever since the generation of the Nouvelle Vague. Works for television by directors as important as, for instance, Claude Chabrol, Catherine Breillat, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rozier, or Chantal Akerman, still constitute the least well-known areas of their filmographies. This field represents a rather vast continent that is still largely unexplored, in which the most daring formal experimentation (Philippe Grandrieux’s Live anthology) rubs shoulders with the perpetuation of fantastic (Télévision de chambre) and serial traditions (Georges Franju’s The Man Without a Face), whose directorial lines become bolder in terms of their technical or theatrical format. Television is still film, but with a home around it, set within a domestic interior in which it appears at once more solitary and more intimate. In short, the ideal place to work towards a secret counter-history of cinema.” Mathieu Macheret, critic and co-programmer of the retrospective
This program will be partly shown at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the second half of 2018.