Tribute to Julien Duvivier, Ciné Lumière

The French Institute looks back on the work of Julien Duvivier. Cine Lumiere, London will screen three of the director's masterpieces.

The Ciné Lumière in the Institut Français is a Londoner’s best bet for great French cinema, and next month they pay tribute to Julien Duvivier (1896-1967). 

The director was a leading proponent of Poetic Realism, a French film movement of the 1930s, which brought to bear a lyrical tone and heightened aestheticism on depictions of the working class.

Duvivier is sometimes overlooked, partly because not all of his work stands up to the quality of his Poetic Realist contemporaries (Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, Jacques Feyder, and Marcel Carne). 

But patchiness aside, Duvivier can delight with his lyricism, visual delicacy and dark heart. He was adored by Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman. Renoir himself stated “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of [Julien] Duvivier above the entrance….This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet." 

Anyone interested in the history of cinema would do well to take advantage of this rare showcase. 

The three films on offer at the Institut will be La Charrette Fantôme, (1939) an exceptionally dark fantasy film about a phantom carriage driven by a man who dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, Poil de Carotte, an equally sinister ‘Anne of Green Gables’ story about a suicidal young boy whose mother cruelly nicknames him ‘carrot top’ to mock his red hair, and La Bandéra (1935), a wartime drama, following a young man who is attempting to escape his murderous past by joining the Spanish Foreign Legion. 

All films will be shown with English subtitles, so there is really no excuse to miss out on this wonderful opportunity to see the work of an underrated director thrown back into the spotlight.