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“In every conceivable way, from every possible angle, Pialat's cinema is all about the shock—startling, violent, eternally and teasingly promising—of being alive.” —Kent Jones, Film Comment.
French director Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) didn’t make his first feature, Naked Childhood (1968), until he was 40 but by his early 60s he was one of the most influential—and notorious—filmmakers in the country. On receiving the Palme d’Or for Under the Sun of Satan in 1987, he replied to the openly hostile audience, “I don’t like you either.” Having emerged after the French New Wave, Pialat forged a fiercely independent path for himself beyond movements and critical allegiances. His equally ferocious commitment to a raw, intensely personal and roughhewn reality earned him admirers and critical praise regardless. In his films, narrative gives way to a pervasive instability at the heart of all matters that extends to cinematic form itself. As institutions and social structures fall away, Pialat’s characters pursue their often contradictory and self-destructive needs and desires through feelings of freedom, doubt, alienation and longing, always trapped, it seems, in a relentless, unyielding present. Shaped by his own improvisational strategies, Pialat’s work eschews lessons in morality in favor of a brutal honesty and the immediate, transformative power of recognition. UCLA Film & Television Archive is pleased to present this selection of Pialat’s major works.
Film notes adapted from program notes prepared by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Presented with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Institut Français.
