Conservator’s Choice: Directors in Short
Program One
One of France’s most important documentary filmmakers, Georges Franju established an international reputation with this poetic portrait of the slaughterhouse of La Vilette in Paris. The work of the abattoir is depicted with painful directness and in stark contrast to the calm domesticity of the surrounding Parisian suburb. In attempting “to restore to documentary reality its appearance of artifice,” he created a classic postwar document with forcefulness and poetry that remain undiminished today.
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New Domestic Animal (Nova domaca zivotinja)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev.
Yugoslavia, 1964, 16mm, black & white, 8 min.
In Makavejev's eight-minute ironic masterpiece, he compares the utilitarian domestic horse and its successor, the automobile.
Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story, The Overcoat, Jack Clayton’s charming interpretation stars Alfie Bass as a store clerk who goes to great lengths to acquire the eponymous outerwear.
In this futuristic tale selected from The Oldest Profession, an anthology film about prostitution, Godard presents a man who rejects a prostitute who only provides sexual gratification in favor of one who speaks but does not touch.