Cinephile
For the Cinephile non-competitive section we have chosen works of brilliant French auteur.
Forgotten French Master | Marcel Hanoun
We’re delighted to present an artist who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Garrel, and Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Marcel Hanoun made films with an uncompromising independence, formal rigor, and unceasing creativity, and his work is long overdue for recognition in Poland.
Hanoun worked on his own wavelength. He was not part of the Nouvelle Vague (Godard, Truffaut), did not quite square with the Left Bank (Resnais, Varda, Marker), and was not part of the generation that succeeded both groups (Garrel, Eustache); nevertheless, he was admired by all.
He debuted his first feature film, „A simple story” (1959), to relatively widespread acclaim – the film was featured at the New York Film Festival, and garnered praise not only from the likes of Jonas Mekas and Noël Burch, but even from sources like Variety and Time Magazine. The rest of his long and productive career, however, was marked by incomprehension and grievous neglect, especially abroad. Despite the sustained advocacy of a handful of admirers (including Mekas, who continued to promote his films throughout the 1960s and 70s, and helped induct three of them – „A simple story”, „Winter”, and „Spring” – into Anthology’s Essential Cinema repertory collection), Marcel Hanoun easily qualifies as one of the most unfairly overlooked and under-screened filmmakers of the past half-century.
Film:
A simple story | France | 1959 | 68’
