This summer, Cinematheque Ontario, in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Toronto, is offering two series on French filmmakers. The first one, from July 11 to July 17 will present films from Jean Eustache, whereas the second one, from July 25 to August 20 will focus on the work of filmmakers Alains Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Bad company : the films of Jean Eustache

Few retrospectives promise the revelations of this, a look at one of postwar cinema’s most legendary bodies of work: the films of Jean Eustache (1938 - 1981), which have gained an almost mythical status due to their unavailability in North America.

Influenced by the French New Wave, which he was both a part of and apart from, Eustache has exerted a profound influence on the following generations of French filmmakers, with his confessional, often raw and desperately sexual portraits of a generation adrift, including the monumental The mother and the whore. Both tender and vehement, much like their maker, Eustache’s films provoke and inspire in equal measure.

His volatile, brilliant career was short-lived; "the most independent of French directors and the least understood" (David Braun), Eustache committed suicide at the age of forty-three.

Schedule and whole article by James Quandt, Senior Programmer, Cinematheque Ontario

Memory, montage, modernism : Alain Resnais & Alain Robbe-Grillet

Prompted by the availability of a number of new prints from France, the Cinematheque Ontario returns to the subject of one of its most successful complete retrospectives, Alain Resnais, and appends four impossible-to-see films by recently deceased novelist and director Alain Robbe-Grillet to reveal the connections (and differences) between these two artists, welded forever in the history of cinema by their epochal collaboration, Last Year at Marienbad, and by their shared reputations as masters of modernism.

Schedule and whole article by James Quandt, Senior Programmer, Cinematheque Ontario