Louis Malle Retrospective in NYC

Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle

French director Louis Malle, while certainly celebrated and respected during his lifetime, somewhat lacks the cachet of his French New Wave contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol. A few reasons can be cited for this. One is the eclectic and peripatetic nature of his films. Malle's films took him to many diverse areas of the world; he made films in India, the United States, and England, as well as his native France. Also, his cinematic style wasn't as immediately recognizable and easily imitated as, say, Godard. Malle followed his interests in many different directions, alternating between fiction and documentary, making it difficult to pin him down. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective, "Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle," playing at New York's Walter Reade Theater from June 24 through July 19, is a rare and valuable opportunity to assess this unique filmmaker's place in the cinema pantheon. This near-complete retro shows us the complex variety of his oeuvre, and how he doesn't fit easily into the category of "auteur" promulgated by his contemporaries.

Born in Thumeries, France in 1932, Malle's privileged background (he was heir to a sugar-production dynasty) afforded him the financial independence to pursue his cinematic muse without having to worry about funding or finding a producer. Shortly after leaving IDHEC, France's national film academy, he was asked by oceanographer Jacques Cousteau to co-direct The Silent World (1956), a film based on Cousteau's best-selling book. Featuring impressive underwater photography (much of it shot by Malle himself), the film, while somewhat dated, is still a fascinating study of exploration and the drive to seek out the unknown.