The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present
Quai des Orfèvres
When
Wed 30 Aug 2023
A worldly detective (the wonderfully gruff and quizzical Louis Jouvet) investigates the murder of a sleazy film financier. Filled with the seedy and teeming atmosphere of the postwar Parisian music hall, Clouzot’s return to filmmaking after four years is a characteristically earthy, forensically detailed and noir-inflected mixture of social realism, dark humour and cynical psychological study. Widely regarded as one of the key postwar crime films, it won best director for Clouzot at the Venice Film Festival. Co-starring the director’s then-lover, Suzy Delair.
Also screening on Wed 30 August
Program
Gangsters, Guns and Gauloises: French crime cinema, 1945–60
Quai des Orfèvres (1947) – Wed 30 Aug, 7pm
Razzia Sur la Chnouf (1955) – Wed 30 Aug, 9.05pm
Classes Tous Risques (1960) – Wed 6 Sep, 7pm
Le Trou (1960) – Wed 6 Sep, 8.55pm
Rififi (1955) – Wed 13 Sep, 7pm
Panique (1946) – Wed 13 Sep, 9.10pm
About the program
Although film noir is primarily associated with American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, France played a key role in its development, both in its appreciation (the term was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946) and continuation of the genre. It is perhaps fitting that Rififi (1955), considered by many to be the ultimate French noir, was directed by Jules Dassin, an American exiled in Paris. This season provides an important link between pre-war French examples of the genre such as Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) and its apotheosis in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1960s gangster films...
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About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
