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It was during the production for The Immortal Story (1968) that Jeanne Moreau first confessed, to Orson Welles, no less, that what she really wanted to do was direct. According to Moreau’s biographer, Marianne Gray, Welles replied, “Do it.” Eight years later, the glamorous icon of post-war French cinema and muse for auteurs such as Welles, Malle, Antonioni, Truffaut, Buñuel, Losey and more, wrote and directed her debut feature, Lumiere (1976). She followed it up with another fiction feature, The Adolescent (1979) and a documentary, Lillian Gish (1984). Moreau consciously set out to create a more hospitable cinema for complex, multi-faceted female characters and in so doing, crafted what could be considered a loose trilogy of deeply personal, powerfully affecting films. In speaking about Lumiere, Moreau headed off the inevitable criticism leveled at an actress-turned-director: “At least the women in my film will be real.” The Archive is pleased to present original prints of Moreau’s two fiction features from its collection.
All films directed by Jeanne Moreau and in French with English subtitles.
