Directed by Louis Malle, France, 1987
Screening on Sunday 17^th May at 3.30p.m as part of the Friends AGM.

This is in many ways the most personal film of the distinguished French filmmaker Louis Malle. The basic story is taken from experiences in his early years during World War II.

What happened in January 1944 was instrumental in my decision to become a filmmaker. It’s hard to explain, but it was such a shock that it took me several years to get over it, to try and understand it – and, of course, there was no way I could understand it. What happened was so appalling and so fundamentally opposed to the values that we were being taught that I concluded that there was something wrong with the world, and I started becoming very rebellious.

The film is set in a boarding school in occupied France, rather like the one that Malle actually attended. The film develops a narrative depicting a tragic chain of events, but as he recalls, one that was traumatic for the participants as well as the victims.

Malle started out in filmmaking in the 1950s. Even for a noted European director he has worked in unusually wide variety of industries and settings: in France, but also in the UK, in North America and on documentaries made in Asia. Malle comments that he had three great passions: Music, Literature and Film. The role of music in his work is exemplified by the marvellous score improvised by Miles Davis for his first feature, Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, 1957). A good example of the contribution of literature is in the very fine Vanya on 42^nd Street (1994) with its exploration of and homage to Anton Chekhov. Film itself crops up regularly: in today’s feature there is a sequence when the school students watch old movies:

…it was in the following years that they showed films in the school on Sundays, that’s when I saw the first Chaplin shorts. They were projected in this strange format that was rather popular in the late 1930s and 1940w, the 9.5 mm, which had a perforation in the centre – a terrible invention. Chaplin was forbidden during the war by the Germans, not only because he was Jewish but also because he’d made The Great Dictator. But his films, I was told, were still being shown, very discreetly, in schools and cine clubs. It was one of the great memories of my childhood, those Sunday evening, we’d darken the room, there’d be a white sheet, and everyone would sit and watch those films. I chose The Immigrant because, first, it was one of the great ones, and second, it was an evocation of freedom for those Jewish children when they see the Statue of Liberty, America being the Promised Land.

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