Series Site
March 14–29, 2026
In a roundtable on Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour published in the Cahiers du cinéma in 1959, Jacques Rivette suggested that “the problems Resnais sets himself in film are parallel to those that [Igor] Stravinsky sets himself in music.” This series will investigate, over four very different programs, what Rivette may have been getting at. Rivette went on to mention Stravinsky’s use of contrast and rupture; he may also have been thinking of the composer’s famous proclamation that music should be “nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a point of repose.”
The French cinema of the early 1960s is known for its distinctive narrative and visual style, but in terms of narrative and visual style, these films also sound very different from what came before. Technological advances allowed for the splicing of recorded sound to create a fragmented soundtrack with rapidly shifting sounds untethered from visual sources, and experiments with serialism and musique concrète in the concert hall paved the way for dissonant scores that pursued a logic independent of plot and image track. At the same time, popular songs acquired unprecedented cultural prestige. These three feature films and selection of shorts showcase the range of approaches French filmmakers brought to imagining a new mode of cinematic sound for the 1960s.
—Mary Ann Smart, Guest Curator