LACMA

Toni
Friday, March 12 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1935/b&w/81 min. | Scr: Jean Renoir, Carl Einstein; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Charles Blavette, Jenny Helia. Celia Montalván, Édouard Delmont

Inspired by a report of a crime passionel within a community of migrant laborers, Renoir decided to make a film entirely on location in Martigues, with its Provençal landscape of vineyards and rocky hills, and to cast nonprofessionals, mostly Italian migrants, in many of the roles. Toni, a simple man with a romantic streak, works in the local quarry and lives with the older Marie; but his easygoing manner disappears when he falls in love with Josepha, a fiery woman tied by marriage to Albert, the foreman of the quarry and a brute. François Truffaut called Toni "a tragedy in which the sun takes the place of Fate," an apt description for a film that portrays the natural world of the migrants with a powerful realism. "I was at pains to avoid the dramatic. My aim was to give the impression that I was carrying a camera and a microphone in my pocket and recording whatever came my way. My dream was uncompromising realism... but I was wrong! While I imagined I was filming a squalid episode based on real life, I was recounting, almost despite myself, a heart-rending and poetic love story."—Jean Renoir.

View the film's trailer here (scroll down).

Swamp Water
Friday, March 12 | 9:20 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1941/b&w/88 min. | Scr: Dudley Nichols; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews

For his Hollywood debut Renoir settled on a script by Dudley Nichols, the author of several films by John Ford, Renoir's favorite American director, that tells the story of a young man living in a backward town who stumbles upon a fugitive from justice and his wild-child daughter hiding in a nearby swamp. Although Renoir may have been attracted to the folkloric elements of the script and its focus on outsiders, he seized on the visual possibilities of the setting and convinced Fox to let him shoot on location. Anticipating by a decade Renoir's subtle use of the Ganges in The River, the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, with its black water and its poisonous snakes, serves as both location and metaphor, a place of danger and refuge around which swirl the tragic events of the story. "A specimen of the Deep South poor white genre, a near-Western and a film noir in the general sense, (the film) draws much of its meaning from rural myth with its abrasive interactions between toil, trade, individuals, the family, the community, and exile."—Raymond Durgnat.

French Cancan
Saturday, March 13 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1955/color/102 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Jean Gabin, Francoise Arnoul, Maria Felix

Godard's comment that "Renoir is French to the tip of his toes" is borne out by Renoir's choice of subject for the film he would make on his return to France after a fifteen-year absence: the birth of that quintessentially French phenomenon, the Cancan. In their fourth film together, Jean Gabin plays the robust impresario Danglard, a womanizer and a theatrical visionary whose ill-timed indiscretion threatens his plans to restore the Moulin Rouge to its former glory. "French Cancan is a tribute to the Paris of Auguste Renoir—though beautifully contrived in the studio, it beguiles us into feeling fresh air on the hills of Montmartre. It is a celebration of music hall and dance—the final set-piece is the explosive debut of the Cancan—but what makes it a great film is Renoir's ability to present the backstage story as a parable about fickle love and the abiding passion of theater. In the end, Danglard voices Renoir's hope that if the show goes on, then life has a chance to surpass and redeem its human failures."—David Thomson.

The Golden Coach
Saturday, March 13 | 9:25 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1953/color/103 min. | Scr: Jean Renoir, Renzo Avanzo, Giulio Macchi, Jack Kirkland, Ginette Doynel; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Anna Magnani, Odoardo Spadaro, Nada Fiorelli, Duncan Lamont

A commedia dell'arte troupe from Italy arrives in an eighteenth-century Peruvian town where the Viceroy, infatuated by the leading actress Camilla, presents her with the fabulous golden coach, a symbol of power, that he intended for his mistress. Built around the vivacious and volatile persona of Anna Magnani and set to the music of Antonio Vivaldi, The Golden Coach is a ravishing comic fantasy that presents the world of the theater as Camilla's first and only true love, a haven from the troubles of the real world to which she returns as the final curtain falls.  "Light and serious, cynical and exquisite, a blend of color, wit and Vivaldi... Anna Magnani tries out a series of love roles in a play within a play within a movie. Magnani with her deep sense of the ridiculous in herself and others, Magnani with her roots in the earth, is the miraculous choice that gives this film its gusto and its piercing beauty."—Pauline Kael.

The Fountainhead
Tuesday, March 16 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1949/b&w/114 min. | Scr: Ayn Rand; dir: King Vidor; w/ Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey

An idealistic architect battles corrupt business interests and his love for a married woman.

View the film's trailer here.

La bête humaine
Friday, March 19 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1938/b&w/100 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux

Lantier, an engineer, suspects that the yard foreman and his wife have murdered a man on his train but, seeing the fear in the woman's eyes, says nothing; his complicity leads to an affair with the woman, but when he falls victim to her duplicitous charms, his fate is sealed and the film hurtles to its pitiless ending. In adapting Zola's novel to the present, Renoir retained the theme of industrial progress as a force that crushes the humanity of ordinary men, and positioned Lantier, a man haunted by a family legacy of alcoholism and madness, as the central character. With its documentary-like opening sequence of a mighty locomotive racing along the tracks from Paris to Le Havre (the cameraman was strapped to the front of the engine) and its chiaroscuro lighting, La bête humaine has an intensity unlike any other Renoir film. "In La bête humaine there is a strong, ever-present rhythm like a heartbeat of the railroad, and the visual melancholic poetry of smoke, soot and steam. This somber melodrama became, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful of Renoir's pictures, a human drama of three poor beings struggling in the cogwheels of their passion. This feeling of doom corresponded with the atmosphere in Europe at the time. The air was charged with the tension of impending war..."—Eugene Lourie, art director.

The Woman on the Beach
Friday, March 19 | 9:20 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1947/b&w/71 min. | Scr: Jean Renoir, Frank Davis, J.R. Michael Hogan; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford

Renoir was invited by his friend Joan Bennett to direct a film for RKO based on a novel about a blind painter, his wife, and the mysterious man she meets on the beach and invites into their life. Renoir stated that he wanted to "make a love story in which there was no love, in which the attractions were purely physical," and, despite the noir casting of Bennett as the femme fatale and Ryan as the archetypal loner scarred by a traumatic past, the final result was not a crime film but a cryptic love story steeped in an atmosphere of impending violence, punctuated by surreal dreams, and set in an isolated house vulnerable to fog and fire. A disastrous test screening led to severe cuts, but the existing version retains considerable power, inspiring the critic Andre Bazin to write: "It is a strange film, stubborn, sincere, elusive, obscure… it remains one of the most sincere and one of the most hampered of Renoir's works." Jacques Rivette writes on the film, "The Woman on the Beach looks like a film made by Fritz Lang…but the tragedy of the film does not stem from the inexorable force of destiny, as in Lang, but from fixation and immobility: each of the three characters is frozen in a false image of himself and his desire… However mutilated it is in comparison to the original, it can be as fairly judged as von Stroheim's Greed. If there was ever a director who conceives each part as a microcosm of the whole, it is Renoir." 

The Southerner
Saturday, March 20 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1945/b&w/92 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Zachary Scott, Betty Field, J. Carrol Naish, Beulah Bondi, Norman Lloyd

Renoir, casting against type, chose Texas-born Zachary Scott to play Sam Tucker, a desperately poor migrant cotton-picker who strikes out on his own, moving his wife, two kids and crotchety old mother onto an abandoned farm; a harsh winter follows but the family's efforts point to a good harvest until a flood washes the crop away. Renoir called The Southerner "the most interesting film I've made here. Another story too simple to tell. A poor family is born, lives, dies…" The film was nominated for three Oscars including Best Director and won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. "A harsh yet human antidote to traditional Hollywood attitudes about 'real people', this is Renoir's most successful American film, loose, free-flowing, honest… so accurate and impressionistic in its view of nature, that you can smell the river and the dead rain after the flood that almost ends their struggle."—Time Out.

The River
Saturday, March 20 | 9:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1951/color/99 min. | Scr: Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Nora Swinburne, Patricia Walters, Thomas E. Breen | Restored by The Academy Film Archive in cooperation with The British Film Institute and Janus Films. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

This sublime adaptation of a novel by Rumer Godden, who was raised in India and collaborated during the shoot, was a challenge to bring to the screen: the first Technicolor film shot in India, it involved heavy equipment and long delays in printing the dailies; the cast was almost entirely nonprofessional; local festivities and superstitions interfered with the normal pace of production; and the locations needed frequent adjustments to reflect a year of seasons. The story is narrated by Harriet, now an adult, who recalls her life in India at age fifteen, the year that Captain John came to visit; and through her eyes we follow the day-to-day routine of a British colonial family, share her adventures with her closest companions, an Indian girl and her little brother, contemplate the natural beauty and mysterious culture of a foreign land, and experience the pain and joy of first love. In time with the flow of the ever-present river, the film has a measured pace that chronicles life with its sudden bursts of tragedy and pleasure.  "Like Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1953), The River has survived falling out of fashion to re-emerge as a touchstone for a certain kind of modernity in cinema. It's a self-conscious, reflective film that draws on the 'reality' of India but does so to immerse us in the spiritual drama of its central character. None of the principal characters in The River find immediate happiness; instead, they learn to overcome frustration and despair… Unlike conflict-centered Hollywood narratives, which invariably end in resolution, Renoir's films tend to show that not all problems are soluble."—Ian Christie. 

View the film's trailer here.

At the Circus
Tuesday, March 23 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1939/b&w/97 min. | Scr: Irving Brecher; dir: Edward Buzzell; w/ Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx

The Marx Brothers team up to keep a circus from going bankrupt.

View the film's trailer here.

Grand Illusion
Friday, March 26 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1937/b&w/104 min. | Scr: Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim

Renoir became an international figure with the commercial success of Grand Illusion, which was acclaimed for its pacifist and anti-war sentiments. Widely seen in Europe with the exception of Germany where the Jewish character was deleted and Italy where it was banned, the film played across America, remaining fifteen weeks in a New York first-run cinema, garnering both an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and the endorsement of FDR. The story, a series of dramatic episodes, each with its own shading propelled forward by the desire to escape, is set during World War l and centers on three French soldiers held in a fortress prison by the Germans—Lt. Maréchal (Gabin), a former auto mechanic, Captain de Boïeldieu (Fresnay), a career officer, and Rosenthal (Dalio), a banker from a nouveau-riche Jewish family—who establish a friendship across class lines and a fraternity with the other French prisoners. The most striking relationship however is trans-border, between Boïeldieu and Von Rauffenstein (von Stroheim), the German commandant, who are bound by their aristocratic lineage and their espousal of the values of a prewar Europe. Von Stroheim, with his neck and chin clamped into a metal brace, is a powerful screen presence—the epitome of Prussian will—and his studied performance is unique in Renoir's work. "Grand illusions are doubtless the dreams which help men to live. The theme of illusion is scattered throughout the film: the illusion of sexuality fostered by soldiers in women's costumes; the illusion of liberty behind every attempt to escape; the illusion of approaching peace; the illusion of hatred that arbitrarily divides men who in reality are not separated by anything; and the illusion of boundaries and the wars which result from them."—André Bazin.

The Elusive Corporal
Friday, March 26 | 9:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1962/b&w/99 min. | Jean Renoir, Guy Lefrance; dir; Jean Renoir; w/ Jean-Pierre Cassel, Claude Brasseur, Claude Rich

A Parisian army corporal (Cassel) is captured when the Germans invade France, but with the help of two friends, and later alone, he goes to absurd lengths to break out of various Nazi prisons. By turns humorous and sentimental, this slight tale is informed by Renoir's trademark humanism, and the scenes in the prison camp display his sharp eye for regional and class differences, even under the yoke of common suffering. "Renoir is clearly not interested in how prisoners escape but why. Whereas Grand Illusion was concerned with the idea of fraternity, The Elusive Corporal is concerned with the idea of liberty. Whereas the earlier film suggested that class differences were more decisive than national differences, the later film suggests that liberty means something different for each man."—Andrew Sarris.

La chienne
Saturday, March 27 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1931/b&w/95 min. | Scr: Jean Renoir, Andre Girard; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Michel Simon, Janie Marèse, Georges Flamant

Heading home late from an office party, Legrand, an unassuming clerk whose hobby as an amateur painter provides relief from a boring job and a shrewish wife, intervenes in an argument between Lulu, an attractive young woman, and Dédé, her inebriated companion and abusive pimp. Manipulated by the couple, who plan to fleece the naïve old man, Legrande rents a comfortable apartment to house his illicit lover and to display his paintings, but happiness is short-lived: faced with mounting debts, the theft of his canvasses, and Lulu's brazen betrayal, he descends into madness. Renoir's first sound film is one of his most visually inventive: in the prologue, Punch and Judy puppets debate whether the film is a serious social drama or a comedy of manners; on occasion the camera moves outdoors to observe the action through the window; and mirrors and reflections are used throughout to visually underscore the pattern of hypocrisy, treachery, and moral ambiguity. It is typical of Renoir that this sordid melodrama, with its flawed creatures and immoral ending, is a film in which the dominant emotions are tenderness and pity.

La Marseillaise
Saturday, March 27 | 9:15 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1938/b&w/132 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Pierre Renoir, Lise Delamare, Louis Jouvet

A neorealist fresco of the early days of the French Revolution, produced in the heady atmosphere of the leftist Popular Front and funded by the trade unions, La Marseillaise begins in Marseille where five hundred volunteers are preparing to march to Paris to participate in the capture of the Tuileries and the fall of the monarchy. Around this historical episode Renoir depicts the lives of the protagonists, who come from every segment of society; in the opinion of François Truffaut "he is careful to avoid the artifice and stiffness inherent in a period film... and succeeds perfectly in humanizing thirty or so major characters by using details from everyday reality." For the critic André Bazin, "Renoir demythologizes history by restoring it to man" noting that "the aristocrats are marvelously individualized... Renoir gives each character a precise and subtle style. The most developed from this point of view is Louis XVI." The same detail can be found in the dialogue: according to Truffaut, La Marseillaise "is the richest in culinary vocabulary of any Renoir film," and Georges Sadoul wrote that "the Marseillaise troops were played by actors from the south of France, trained by Pagnol to speak dialect." Sadoul concludes by noting that "there is no idealization in the film and no dramatization; its impact lies in its naturalness, and its attempt to portray human details against a background of history."

Moonfleet
Tuesday, March 30 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1955/color/86 min./Scope | Scr: Jan Lustig, Margaret Fitts; dir: Fritz Lang; w/ Stewart Granger, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, Viveca Lindfors

A British buccaneer is torn between three seductive women in Fritz Lang's first Scope film.

View the film's trailer here.

Diary of a Chambermaid
Friday, April 2 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1946/b&w/91 min. | Scr: Jean Renoir, Burgess Meredith; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Paulette Goddard, Burgess Meredith, Hurd Hatfield, Francis Lederer, Judith Anderson

Célestine, the saucy chambermaid in Octave Mirbeau's sardonic novel, joins the household of a decadent and eccentric aristocratic family, determined to seduce a wealthy man. But in this theater of deceit and delusion, her forthright manner provokes reactions she cannot control. Working with a group of friends—Paulette Goddard, whom he admired and envisioned as Célestine; her then-husband, Burgess Meredith, co-author of the screenplay; and Eugene Lurie, production designer on The Rules of the Game—Renoir created a completely artificial French milieu on sets that were "bathed in that aquarium light so typical of Hollywood" (in the words of André Bazin) where his cast of masters and servants act out their tragic farce. "Humiliation festers at the heart of every person in the film. Ultimately it leads them not into humility but into a desire to revolt and a desire to dominate others. All relations are based on a struggle for power, every one of these people want control. The film is a drama of domination."—Pierre Leprohon.

Elena et les hommes
Friday, April 2 | 9:15 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1956/color/98 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Ingrid Bergman, Jean Marais, Mel Ferrer, Jean Richard, Juliette Gréco

The first act of Renoir's effervescent romantic comedy is set in the 1880s on Quatorze Juillet, a patriotic holiday complete with military maneuvers and carnival crowds celebrating in Parisian streets decked out with colorful banners. A radiant Ingrid Bergman stars as Eléna, a beautiful but impoverished countess who drives men of all stations to fits of desperate love. When Eléna elicits the fascination of a famous general, she finds herself at the center of romantic machinations and political scheming, with the hearts of several men—as well as the future of France—in her hands. As Renoir himself has acknowledged, Eléna, with its mise en scène of rooms and hallways, its madcap pursuits and changes of costume, its character types and broad strokes, mirrors The Rules of the Game. "Thirty years of on-the-set improvisation have made Renoir the preeminent technician in the world. He does in one shot what others do in ten. And the others take shots to say things that Renoir can dispense with entirely…There has never been a freer film than Eléna. In form, the brilliant audacity of simplicity. To the question, What is cinema? Eléna replies: More than cinema."—Jean-Luc Godard.

Read an extensive, illustrated discussion between Andy Rector and Craig Keller on the film and its relation to Renoir's other works here.

Nana
Saturday, April 3 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1926/b&w/150 min. | Scr: Pierre Lestringuez; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Catherine Hessling, Jean Angelo, Werner Krauss, Claude Autant-Lara

Nana, the ninth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which includes La bete humaine, tells the story of Nana Coupeau, a streetwalker and music hall performer. Rising to high-class cocotte, she destroys a string of wealthy lovers—among them Count Muffat, whose faithfulness earns him humiliation after humiliation—before dying a horrible death from smallpox. In Renoir's ambitious adaptation, Nana is played by Catherine Hessling, Renoir's wife and a former painter's model for Auguste, and Werner Krauss of Caligari fame plays the count. The film cost a million dollars to make and was a commercial failure due mainly (according to Renoir) to the public's inability to accept Hessling's extreme performance: "She was not a woman at all but a marionette... I restricted Catherine's makeup to a thick white base; her eyes and mouth were completely black. She became a kind of puppet-a puppet of genius." François Truffaut writes, "There are various characteristic themes here: the love of spectacle, the woman who chooses the wrong vocation, the actress trying to find herself, the lover who dies of his sincerity, the showman. It is the first of Renoir's films in which acting took precedence over the story and the plastic elements. It was made under the influence of Foolish Wives which explains why Nana is one of only two Renoir films in which money plays an important role."

Live musical accompaniment.

Boudu Saved from Drowning
Friday, April 9 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1932/b&w/85 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Michel Simon, Marcelle Hainia, Charles Granval

Michel Simon gives one of the most memorable performances in screen history as Boudu, a Parisian tramp who takes a suicidal plunge into the Seine and is rescued by a well-to-do bookseller, Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval). The Lestingois family decides to take in the irrepressible bum, and he shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations. With Boudu Saved from Drowning, Renoir takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and the anarchic charms of his lead actor to create an effervescent satire of the bourgeoisie. "Boudu is a simple shaggy-man story told in an open way and it is the openness to the beauty of landscape and weather and to the variety of human folly that is Renoir's artistry. He lets a movie breathe... Renoir went out of the studio and so Boudu provides a photographic record of an earlier France that moved to a different rhythm, and because of the photographic equipment, is seen in a softly different light. The shop fronts look like Atget; the houses might have modeled for Bonnard."—Pauline Kael.

The Testament of Doctor Cordelier
Friday, April 9 | 9:10 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1961/b&w/95 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Jean-Louis Barrault, Teddy Billis, Michel Vitold

Renoir's free adaptation of the Jekyll and Hyde story was made for French television on a small budget and is distinguished by its icy black-and-white images and its lucid abstract style. "Dr. Cordelier, an eminent psychiatrist, seeks to prove the existence of the soul by causing it to materialize. Experimenting on himself he creates the alter ego of Opale who is bestial, cruel and destructive… The interest and novelty of this version lie in Renoir's masterful use of Jean-Louis Barrault (Children of Paradise) who was chosen for the contrasting qualities of his dry, classical acting and his light, nimble, ethereal miming. Thus the change in the character is the result of a complete physical transformation. Barrault's abilities give Renoir a wide latitude in expressing the intellectual thrust that informs his film."—Jean Douchet.

A Day in the Country
Saturday, April 10 | 7:30 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1936/b&w/40 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Sylvia Bataille, Georges D'Arnoux, Jeanne Marken, Jean Renoir

On a Sunday in 1880, a Parisian businessman takes his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's fiancé to the countryside for a picnic on the banks of the Seine, where two passing oarsmen stop and flirt with the mother and daughter; when their men go fishing, the two women accept the offer of a boat ride, and their afternoon on the river becomes a interlude they will always remember. Adapted from a story by de Maupassant. Renoir's film was shot near the town of Marlotte, where Cezanne lived, and captures like no other film the landscape, fashions, and atmosphere of impressionist painting. "The love scene on the island is one of the most beautiful in all of cinema. It owes its effectiveness to a couple of gestures and a look from Sylvie Bataille that have a wrenching emotional realism. In the space of a few frames she expresses all the disenchantment, the pathetic sadness that follows the act of love... Renoir manages to transcribe this feeling visually by use of the superb storm sequence."—André Bazin.

The Rules of the Game
Saturday, April 10 | 8:20 pm
The Films of Jean Renoir
1939/b&w/110 min. | Scr: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch; dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Nora Gregor, Marcel Dalio, Jean Renoir, Paulette Dubost, Gaston Modot

Buoyed by the success of Grand Illusion and La bête humaine, Renoir formed his own production company to make a film constructed around a group, in his words, "to depict a class… to show a rich, complex society where, to use an historic phrase, we are dancing on a volcano." In conceiving a film about the dangers facing contemporary European society, he cloaked his criticism in "the form of eighteenth-century French comedy," allowing him to populate his scenario with masters and servants, scheming aristocrats, saucy maids, and cuckolded husbands, all of whom are caught up in an intricate plot driven by gossip, jealousy, and mistaken identity. Into this game, set in a chateau owned by the Marquis de la Chesnaye where his sophisticated guests have assembled for a weekend of hunting and parties, comes an outsider who does not respect the rules and in so doing brings the comedy to a tragic conclusion. Using deep-focus photography that captures both background and foreground action, and long takes that allow the camera to follow the narrative from room to room, Renoir moves invisibly among the characters, whose romantic intrigues, social rivalries, and human foibles are observed by an unblinking eye that refuses to judge. In viewing this multilayered masterpiece today, one is struck by the film's audacious blend of farce and realism, the lightness in Renoir's touch, the deftness and speed of the storytelling, the tour de force editing of the hunting sequence, the brilliance of the acting, the wit of the dialogue, the individuality of the characters and the timelessness of their concerns. As a work of art it is both modern and classic; it is a film about history and it became part of history. To add to the complexity, Renoir cast himself as the character Octave who, like his off-screen counterpart, "directs" the onscreen action. Though far from omnipotent or faultless, he connects with all the major characters in the film—he's the only character comfortable hanging out with the servants—and very often "guides" them with his enthusiasm or advice. Octave is the movie's glue.

View the film's trailer here.

Program Notes

Friday and Saturday screenings begin at 7:30 pm unless otherwise noted. There is a ten-minute intermission between features on a double bill. All programs are subject to change. Films are in 35mm unless otherwise indicated. Foreign-language films are subtitled in English. Many films are unrated and may not be appropriate for younger viewers. If a film is listed as "sold out," a standby line will form one hour before the screening. Any cancellations or seats that become available will go to people waiting in this line. Please note that there is no guarantee that everyone in the standby line will be accommodated.

The Leo S. Bing Theater is equipped with a DTS digital sound system courtesy of Universal Pictures, an SDDS digital sound system courtesy of Sony Cinema Products, and Dolby digital sound.

The 2009–2010 film program is made possible by the generosity of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable in partnership with Ovation TV.

$5 second film only of a double-feature; no advance purchase.

$2 Tuesday matinees.
$1 Tuesday matinees, seniors (62+).

Where to Buy
Buy tickets at the museum box office (tel. 323 857-6010) or online. Many programs sell out so try to purchase in advance.

Included
Your film ticket covers both films in a double bill, except where noted, and includes entrance to the museum galleries as well.

Film Department
Tel. 323 857-6177
Ian Birnie, Director
Bernardo Rondeau, Program Coordinator
Pauline Posner, Volunteer

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