Cinema Reborn - First Advance News - Max Ophuls SANS LENDEMAIN

Ernst Lubitsch
Patron saint of Cinema Reborn

Hello Folks: Things are starting to move with Cinema Reborn. A separate website has been set up. Its a bit temporary but will be developed fairly quickly and if you bookmark it then you can check to see if there is any special news or maybe some photos, posters and reviews of the films we'll be screening.

As  mentioned previously  Cinema Reborn will be a new and different event and will take place from 3-7 May 2018 (note extra day added) and the venue will be the theatre at the Australian Film Television & Radio School, in the Entertainment Quarter at Moore Park in Sydney.

Cinema Reborn's focus will be on screen heritage and preservation. In its start-up year of 2018, Cinema Reborn will present twelve programs of either recently restored films shown using digital copies or, rarer, film archived-sourced 35mm film prints. All will be presented following best practice in the presentation of archival or screen heritage titles, and will reflect the originally intended experience of their creators. 

Cinema Reborn is intended to shine a light on the long history of the art of the cinema, the world-wide activity of film restoration and the treasures that exist in the world’s film archives.

The first film to be confirmed is an almost unknown French classic Sans Lendemain made by master director Max Ophuls in 1939. The film has recently been restored by French company Gaumont and has since been screened at Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in its annual program of new restorations. MoMA’s website notes are as follows

Each fall at MoMA, Gaumont presents a title from its archives in France. This year, Gaumont President Nicolas Seydoux and CEO Sidonie Dumas introduce Max Ophuls’s rarely seen Sans lendemain (1940), the last film he made in Europe before the eruption of World War II and, indeed, the last film he would make until The Exile, in Hollywood, in 1947.

For Jean Cocteau, who directed her in L’Aigle à deux têtes, Edwige Feuillère incarnated “the queen of snow, blood, voluptousness and death.” In Sans lendemain’s classic melodrama, Feuillère is a “fallen woman”—once respectable but now forced to dance nude in a Montmartre bar to support her young son. She rents an expensive furnished apartment to convince a long-ago lover (Georges Rigaud) that her life has been a happy one.

More perhaps than any prewar Ophuls film, Sans lendemain anticipates his 1955 masterpiece Lola Montès; both films feature a heroine who exposes her body while concealing her soul, trapped in a glamourous environment that is revealed as little more than a cage.

Cinema Reborn will be offering subscription tickets to the entire program from February 2018. Please note also that seating at the AFTRS Theatre is only for 140 people.