The Nun
(La Religieuse)

Screening on Film

Directed by Jacques Rivette.
With Anna Karina, Liselotte Pulver, Micheline Presle.
France, 1966, 35mm, color, 140 min.
French with English subtitles.

Based on the acclaimed eighteenth-century novel by Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, Rivette’s second feature stars Anna Karina as Suzanne Simonin, a free-spirited young woman who is forced by her parents to enter a convent. Within this cloistered world she encounters church leaders who abuse their positions of power and others who question their calling to serve their faith. Despite Rivette’s reassurances to the censors, the film was banned for two years after its initial release for its tyrannical representation of the Catholic hierarchy.