Événement

The Nun @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Jacques Rivette, 1966, 140 min., color, new restoration, DCP projection source

In 18th-century France, novice Suzanne (a luminous Anna Karina) is compelled by her family to take her vows and become a nun. Doing what she can to resist, Suzanne is shuttled between convents with widely different Mothers Superior, ranging from maternal to sadistic to amorous. Based on the novel by Denis Diderot, Jacques Rivettes film was banned on its initial release and its fate became a long-running scandal. New York Times critic J. Hoberman writes: Elliott Stein, an American journalist living in Paris, reported in the British film magazine Sight and Sound that Le Monde ran a day-to-day feature, LAffaire de La Religieuse, to which one opened as if to a daily horoscope or weather report. His article gave examples of the heated discourse Rivettes movie inspired. A writer for the right-wing weekly Carrefour declared: If, in the name of freedom, we let this film be shown, we might just as well throw open the doors of France to all the dirty hairy beatniks of the earth.

Hoberman also notes that the film debuted in the U.S. at the remarkably deep 1968 New York Film Festival: The festival that year included two masterpieces by Jean-Luc Godard (Weekend and Two or Three Things I Know About Her), Robert Bressons Mouchette and John Cassavetess Faces, along with first features by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet; Werner Herzog; and new movies from Bernardo Bertolucci, Milos Forman, Miklos Jancso, Norman Mailer and Orson Welles. Even in this crowd, La Religieuse stood out, less for its notoriety than its brilliant filmmaking and impassioned restraint. La Religieuse is founded on contradictions. The movie is as sumptuous in its color photography as it is austere in its mise-en-scène. Suzanne is victimized equally by repression and license. Her situation simultaneously evokes pre-Revolutionary France and 20th-century Europe. Rivettes direction is both theatrical and cinematic.

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Pete Timmermann, interim director of the Webster U. Film Series and adjunct film professor at Webster U.