CINEMA REBORN - Short notes and links to the selection (3) - Jacques Rivette's THE NUN/LA RELIGIEUSE

Jacques Rivette occupies a remarkable place in the French Cinema. He embarked on his first feature well before the rest of his Cahiers du Cinema colleagues but it wasn’t completed for several years and in the meantime Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol had hit the ground running. Then for his second film Rivette adapted Denis Diderot’s controversial 1760 tale of a nun (played by Anna Karina) forced into convent life and facing beatings, starvation, sexual harassment and attempted rape.

Screened at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, it was subsequently charged with “anti-clericalism” and banned from distribution in France for two years. 

Now the film has such a status it was re-presented at Cannes in 2018 as part of the Cannes Classics series after undergoing a 4K restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna’s L’Immagine Ritrovato laboratory.

The film will be having Cinema Reborn screenings in Sydney (5 May at 1.15 pm), in Canberra at the NFSA’s Arc Cinema (10 May at 6.00 pm) and in Adelaide at the MRC’s Mercury Cinema (15 May at 7.00 pm) 

Click on this link to the Ritz website for the Sydney screening Book tickets to this remarkable French film

To read Adrian Martin’s specially written program Notes Click here