Please note, two screenings:
Sunday, January 20th, 2 p.m.
Sunday, January 20th, 7 p.m.
(LE BALON ROUGE, Albert Lamorisse, France 1956, 34 min., 35mm)
In Lamorisse’s bittersweet classic for all ages, a lonely youngster (Pascal Lamorisse, son of the director) finds his ideal playmate in a frisky and lively inflated toy. Told entirely without dialogue and thrillingly filmed on location in Paris, The Red Balloon is must-see cinema. Followed by WHITE MANE (CRIN-BLANC, Albert Lamorisse, France 1953, 47 min., 35mm) In the rugged Camargue region of Provence, French cowboys hunt for wild horses, but the one they cannot tame is their leader, White Mane. Winner of the Cannes Grand Prix for short film and “one of the most beautiful films ever made” (Pauline Kael), White Mane will be shown with a new English narration soundtrack. New 35mm prints!
Program Notes
The Red Balloon & White Mane
While Albert Lamorisse is best remembered for these two fable-like short films, he began and ended his career as a documentary filmmaker. Appropriately, influential French film theorist and critic André Bazin described White Mane (1953) and The Red Balloon (1956) as “documentaries of the imagination.” The two films tell similar stories about young boys and the possibilities of friendship. On the surface, the films are quite simple. White Mane, set in the Camargue region of southern France, is about a young fisherman, and his attempts to befriend and liberate a hunted stallion. The Red Balloon, set in the Paris neighborhood of Menilmontant, is about a boy (played by the director’s son, Pascal Lamorisse) who finds a balloon that follows him everywhere.
While inherently simple, the films are also complex allegories of the human search for comfort and affection in the face of life’s difficulties. While traditionally considered children’s films, Albert Lamorisse renders the pursuit of dreams in the world around us as something meaningful and heartbreaking, and the films have endeared filmgoers of all ages. Furthermore, the films have become traditional texts for film theorists and students, prompted by André Bazin’s celebration of the films in his famous essay, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.”
Bazin especially championed The Red Balloon because of its minimal use of editing. Bazin claimed, “The Red Balloon is a tale told in film, a pure creation of the mind, but the important things about it is that this story owes everything to the cinema precisely because, essentially, it owes nothing.” Since Lamorisse shows the balloon’s interactions clearly in the same frames as the boy without editing tricks, Bazin claims the film is “essential cinema.” With minimal editing, the film comes closer to reality, even if it is an obviously imagined one, causing the viewer to be more actively engaged in the world of the film.
In addition to the poetic narratives, the films are respected for their beautiful cinematography. White Mane, shot in black and white, is a noticeably bright film. By emphasizing the beautiful whites within the scenery, Lamorisse appropriately blinds us with the wildness of the stallion and the vast rural landscape. Soon after the release of White Mane, Lamorisse took a job as a cinematographer on an experimental color documentary about Guatemala. This experience convinced him to use color for the The Red Balloon. The switch to color allowed Lamorisse to emphasize the vibrant balloon against the dull Paris streets.
The films were great successes around the world, finding an international audience thanks in part to their minimal dialogue. In America, they were particularly popular on the educational circuit, showing for decades in public schools and on public television. Both won the Palme d’Or for short subjects at the Cannes Film Festival. Additionally, The Red Balloon, even with its minimal dialogue, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, making it the shortest film ever to win this distinction.
A former photographer, Lamorisse turned to directing short subjects in the late 1940s, soon acquiring an international reputation for the poetic quality of his short and medium-length films. By the 1960s, he started making complex travelogue documentaries. Frustrated with the vibrations that accompanied shooting from a helicopter, Lamorisse was instrumental in the development of “Hellavision,” a camera mount built especially for helicopter shoots. Sadly, in 1970, while shooting a commissioned piece on Iran, he died in a helicopter crash.
~John Klacsmann and Alice Moscoso, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
For Further Reading
