“I was lucky and so excited to discover [Jacques Rozier’s] Adieu Philippine earlier this year in France, because it is very little known and not available in the U.S. It’s my new favorite French New Wave film,” Richard Linklater recently said as he works on post-production on his forthcoming film about the French New Wave.
Now, audiences will finally have the chance to discover Rozier’s rather unheralded work thanks to new restorations coming from Janus Films. “Jacques Rozier: Chronicler of Summer,” a retrospective of the French New Wave filmmaker’s influential career, featuring all five of his features and a selection of short films, will kick off at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center from August 16 through August 22. Featuring several new restorations of Rozier’s signature works, including 4K restorations of Near Orouët (1971) and Maine-Océan Express (1986), the first trailer and poster for the series have arrived.
“It is well-established that the French New Wave forever changed our understanding of what a film could be, playing with both the medium’s formal conventions and Hollywood’s immortal iconography to produce some of cinema’s most stylish and enduringly influential works,” notes the press release. “Yet, for as large as such figures as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Éric Rohmer loom within standard accounts of this incomparably fertile period of film history, less well-known are the works of their contemporary Jacques Rozier, whose 1962 debut feature, Adieu Philippine, was a particular cause for the critic-iconoclasts of Cahiers du Cinéma.”
“Across five idiosyncratic, episodic features, and an assortment of fiction and documentary short films, Rozier distinguished himself from his peers through his fixation on the idea of vacations as theatrical staging grounds upon which his magnetic actors could play and simply be, making him something like a more lighthearted (though no less complex) counterpart to his fellow New Waver, Jacques Rivette. It is remarkable that Rozier’s influence has been so profoundly felt considering how rarely his singular films have screened outside of France.”
Watch below and learn more here.
