Programmed March 2025

French Poetic Realism

Featuring a new introduction by critic Imogen Sara Smith Moody, shadow-latticed cinematography; exquisitely wrought dialogue; an intoxicating sense of world-weary fatalism: welcome to the world of French cinema in the 1930s and ’40s, when the style known as poetic realism—rooted in working-class social reality yet heightened by a distinctly Gallic lyricism—flourished. In the hands of masters like Jean Renoir ( La bête humaine , The Rules of the Game ), Marcel Carné ( Port of Shadows , Children of Paradise ), Julien Duvivier ( Pépé le moko , Un carnet de bal ), and Jean Grémillon ( Remorques , Lumière d’été ), the struggle and grit of everyday life was transformed into transcendent art and marginalized antiheroes (often played by the era’s defining leading man, Jean Gabin) took on a romantic air. A key influence on the development of film noir, these masterpieces of atmosphere unfold in a unique world unto themselves—melancholic, dreamy, and beautifully doomed.