Lumière d' Eté

Director: Jean Grémillon
Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Madeleine Robinson, Georges Marchal, Madeleine Renaud, Paul Bernard
Runtime: 112' 
Year of Production: 1943

The relationship between films and film history is harsh and Jean Grémillon’s masterpiece is a fitting example. The eras in filming change faster than light, the films that haunt them are assembled in their ownings, which usually are narrowed down by some sort of battering ram. Of course, it is not only films that define an era, there are other ingenious factors, evolution, technology, advertising, or even a war. Grémillon’s film faced the latter - and was “destroyed” by it. Completely? No, since we have the honor of presenting it to you, in all its 79 year splendor. 

In an isolated tower at the top of a mountain, an erotic pentagon becomes the cause of a harsh social satire of classes, written by the silky hand of Jacques Prévert.The film has the aura and styling of poetic realism, No2 enemy in the post-war years when the aesthetic current rapidly exhaled, mainly though it has the No1 defect, that of the manifestly poisonous criticism of the bourgeoisie, who at the time of Vichy and Nazi governing are symbolically represented in the film. In that way, the result was immediately censored everywhere, to attempt the, unsuccessful to this day, confrontation with the immortality of cinema memory after the 2nd World War. In France it remains relatively more known, the few that watched it have placed it in the Alps of cinema next to “The Rules of the Game” and the “Children of Paradise”, but the public’s reputation stubbornly slips. Therefore, your part at our screening is irreplaceable. Ilias Dimopoulos

In collaboration with the Plein-Air Festival by the French Institute of Greece