Mid-Century Movie Nights: La Pointe Courte
Fri, May 27, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
SCREENING
Mid-Century Movie Nights continues with a screening of La Pointe Courte, 1955, directed by Agnès Varda, featuring actors Silvia Monfort, Phillippe Noiret.
Set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean village in the south of France, this film tells the dual story of a marriage in trouble and the daily struggles of the hardscrabble inhabitants of the fishing village. Both the cosmopolitan couple and the working-class community are working out their survival in their own ways. In her astonishing directorial debut, Agnès Varda employs two distinct filmic approaches: the scenes depicting the fishing families’ lives are presented in a documentary style and the scenes of the couple involve ground-breaking compositional and editing techniques, setting the stage for the French New Wave to follow. Trained as a photographer, Varda shot this film on a miniscule budget that she self-financed, with no prior filmmaking experience. In the credits, Varda lists herself and the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte as the film’s writers and directors.
This program is free to attend with a suggested donation of $5. Doors open at 7 pm; screening begins at 7:20 pm. Seating is limited to 30; attendance is mask optional.
Mid-Century Movie Nights is a six-film series taking place on Friday nights between May 6th and June 10th, co-curated by Cheryl Clarke and Mina Takahashi. The films, made between 1945 and 1959, give present-day viewers the opportunity to ponder the weight of the post-World War II era on its generation. From Rome to Tokyo, to the US Southwest, then to France, over to the Indian subcontinent, and back to gritty Manhattan, the films ask us to consider their subjects’ alienation, perseverance, and survival. As we witness the 1950s fascist regimes, exploitative working conditions, the loneliness of ageing, the indignities of poverty, the complexity of racial ambiguity, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways racism and sexism play out, we ask ourselves today, what has stubbornly endured, and what has changed for the better?
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Cheryl Clarke is a poet and one of the organizers of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers. Her most recent book is Targets, published by Bushel Editions in 2020. She spends weekends processing books in her partner’s bookstore, Blenheim Hill Books, one of six bookstores in the Book Village of Hobart.
Mina Takahashi is a working collective member of Bushel. She lives in Delhi, edits Hand Papermaking magazine, and is involved in a number of community initiatives including Catskills Unity, Delaware County Citizens for Refugee Support (DCCRS), and Get Woke! Catskills.