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Belle de jour (French)
Location
Main screening room
Date
December 19th, 2023
Duration
100 min
Cycle
Coq-à-l'âne !

This end-of-year cycle is an opportunity to bring together some of the finest 35mm prints in our collections.
The criteria that led to this selection:
a) the rarity of the chosen movie on film
b) the effect of contrast (period, style, culture) between one film and the other
c) the quality of conservation of the print

The Dailies
Directed by
Stephanie Creaghan
Language
French or English with French and English subtitles
Origins
Quebec
Year
2021
Duration
30s to 1m30s
Genre
Video art
Format
Digital
Synopsis

Stephanie Creaghan's The Dailies is an ingenious series of very short works in which video art and cinema overlap. Nineteen titles from this series are featured in our December program as a dreamy and intimate tribute to the cinephile experience.

Stephanie Creaghan makes work about how violence inserts itself into communication, combining different pathways (like audio and video) to uncover these latent forms of manipulation to bring to light the undiscussed/repressed.

The Dailies
Belle de jour
Directed by
Luis Buñuel
Language
French with English subtitles
Actors
Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Françoise Fabian, Macha Méril
Origins
France, Italy
Year
1967
Duration
100 min
Genre
Comedy-drama, eroticism
Format
35 mm
Synopsis

Séverine loves tenderly her husband, a young and handsome surgeon, but is nonetheless sexually frustrated, having much less conventional desires. After learning from a friend of her husband's about the existence of a luxury brothel, she begins to prostitute herself in the afternoon, acquiring the nickname Belle de jour.

Belle de jour

Luis Buñuel

Born in 1900 in Aragon, Spain, Luis Buñuel studied with the Jesuits before moving to Madrid to attend university. There he met Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, and became close to the Dadaist movement. In 1925 he moved to Paris and became the assistant of Jean Epstein. Influenced by surrealism, he directed, with the collaboration of Dalí on the screenplay, Un chien andalou and then The Golden Age. The latter was more widely distributed, but caused a scandal and inaugurated the long list of censorship acts that would be directed at Buñuel's works, regardless of the period, for their sense of provocation, their political scope and their independence of spirit. The filmmaker worked for a time in Spain, but the civil war broke out and he left for the United States, before finally going into exile in Mexico, where he shot most of his work for almost twenty years. From the 1960s onwards, he returned to France to film, beginning a fruitful collaboration with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who co-wrote all of his last films. Since his death, Buñuel's work has continued to be one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Photo: Collections of the Cinémathèque québécoise

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À lire sur notre blogue

Luis Buñuel, celui par qui le scandale arrive : Buñuel avait beau avoir le goût du scandale, ceux qui ont émaillé son parcours de cinéaste ont, à n’en pas douter, toujours dépassé ce qu’il avait fantasmé. Il suffit de s'en remémorer quelques-uns pour constater que la dimension subversive de son œuvre déborde largement de la simple provocation, et ce dès ses débuts.

About Luis Buñuel
Filmography
Jean-Luc Godard en 9 minutes - Blow Up - ARTE
Jean-Claude Carrière - Meeting Buñuel - Web of Stories (2010)
Interview with Luis Buñuel - Venise Film Festival (1967)
Cinéastes de notre temps - Luis Buñuel (1963)
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