THE FILMS OF MARCEL HANOUN
Filmmaker MARCEL HANOUN
Marcel Hanoun is one of the underappreciated directors of World Cinema stature. Since his death in 2012, his body of work remains generally unknown. His unique and varied cinematic career lives at the margins of modernist cinema, of the French New Wave, and even of experimental cinema. Hanoun merits mention alongside Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Garrel, and Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet. Hanoun made films with an uncompromising independence, formal rigor, and unceasing creativity, and his work is long overdue for recognition. Therefore, GME now offers an opportunity for academic re-evaluation of this artist by way of three of the films in his cinematic canon: UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE (1959), OCTOBRE A MADRID (1964), and LES SAISONS (THE SEASONS, 1968-1972).
GME distributes DVD editions of the following Marcel Hanoun films:
OCTOBRE À MADRID
Marcel Hanoun (France)
“An ambitious film, disarming in its simplicity, Octobre à Madrid (October in Madrid) is the prototypical ‘film about film’ that every filmmaker dreams of. That’s what Hanoun has filmed here: the life of the filmmaker as a film in the making; the blurring and reversing of the boundaries between desire and work, film and life.”
- Jean-Louis Comolli
Marcel Hanoun (France)
“Hanoun employs a quiet, contemplative style, using a static camera and images that force the viewer to concentrate on the most quotidian aspects of existence and to accentuate the dichotomy between sound and image which is implicit in all of cinema.”
– Wheeler Winston Dixon
THE SEASONS (LES SAISONS) is a quadriptych, which includes L’ÉTÉ (1968), L’HIVER (1969), LE PRINTEMPS (1970), and L’AUTOMNE (1971).
UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE
Marcel Hanoun (France)
Jean-Luc Godard was passionate about UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE; he praised it as a synthesis of Robert Bresson’s ascetic technique and Italian neorealism’s social content. He said, "UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE comes across as a document, as a clinical statement on reality. And I insist on the word "clinical". Marcel Hanoun presents a film where the suspense does not come from the social aspect of the heroine's mIsadventures, but rather from their pathological aspect. Marcel Hanoun's originality is to have been able to not only describe a dramatic situation, but also to elaborate a woman's character. That's why I like this film."