Premiere: La Rencontre and Lieux saints

DESCRIPTION

The second part of Alain Cavalier’s autobiographical trilogy and a cheeky short about the toilet: the Russian premiere of the films will take place at Garage Auditorium.

In the 1990s, when the French director Alain Cavalier entered his seventies, his career took a new turn as he started documenting his own life on video.

La Rencontre is the second part of Cavalier’s autobiographical trilogy that started with This Answering Service Takes No Messages (1979) and later continued with Le filmeur (2005). In the diary film combining the playful tone of Agnès Varda with the ceaseless curiosity of Jonas Mekas, Cavalier documents his own life with Françoise Widhoff—his wife and muse, as well as the producer and occasionally the editor of his films. Despite the generally joyful mood of the dialogue-based film, the married couple encounter death everywhere: dead birds and cats, the funeral of Widhoff’s mother, and the terrorist attack in the Paris underground. The antidote for sorrow is love: love redraws Cavalier’s route from work so that instead of having another whiskey in a bar—“joy for the stomach, joy for the mind”—Cavalier heads straight home to his wife.

“Is it possible to capture love on camera?” Cavalier asks himself. With a maniac’s dedication, he gathers a collection of memories: Françoise’s alabaster beads and her legs of a dancer with ten years of practice behind her; her perfume bottles and the heart-shaped stone charm she has given him. In the moving chronicle of one love story, Cavalier does not show faces—neither his nor his wife’s. Instead, he transforms the world of the fragile but lasting objects that surround them into a mirror of what’s inside. Cavalier’s focus on the home space is especially fascinating as the home is generally gendered as a woman’s space, and in French cinema, it is primarily associated with the name of Chantal Akerman, for example, with her work La Chambre (1972).

The provocative short Lieux saints [Holy Places] is a half-an-hour ode to the most unexpected yet important space: the toilet. Testing the boundaries between the private and the public, the place and the non-place, Cavalier films and explores the toilet of a couple he visits and the toilet of the 88-year old lady Jeanne, the toilet in a hospital, and the toilet in his favorite bar, the toilet in the cinema, where he locks himself, nervous before the discussion of his film, and the floral pattern in the toilet of a retirement home, where his 102-year old mother is living her final days. In these “magical places,” as Cavalier refers to the toilet, he revisits the images of restrooms in popular culture, including footage from his own film The Unvanquished (1964) with Alain Delon, remembers his early fascination with an actress, whose picture he studied while sat in the toilet and compares the sound of toilet paper to the rustle of a wedding dress.

The films will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.

QR code and ID will be required in order to visit.

La Rencontre
Director Alain Cavalier
France, 1996. 75 min. 16+

Lieux saints
Director Alain Cavalier
France, 2007. 32 min. 16+

tickets

Standard: 350 rubles
Student: 250 rubles*

BUY TICKETS

 GARAGE cardholders: 175 RUB**

Tickets for seniors, veterans, large families, under 18s, and visitors with disabilities (with one carer): 175 RUB**

We recommend that you buy tickets in advance. All ticket categories are available online.

* Students aged 18–25 on production of relevant ID
** Please show proof of eligibility at the cinema entrance