Of course, that's not necessarily a huge feat in our video-on-demand world. And I do have a job that necessitates being au courant of current cinematic releases. But I sometimes scare myself with the amount of time I spend in darkened movie houses. Shouldn't I be out jogging or something?
Ah well, the distinctive celluloid offerings in these parts are just too multitudinous to resist. Take, for example, the French Cine-Club of Palo Alto, the least conspicuous entity in Palo Alto's triple crown of film (the Stanford Theatre and the Landmark Theatres being the other two jewels). The 21-year-old bastion of francophone films is usually discovered by expatriate French within a few weeks of their landing in Silicon Valley. They descend on the Palo Alto Cultural Center on Wednesday nights, parched and wan, desperate to drink from the fonts of Truffaut, Godard, Malle and Renoir.
This is not just hyperbole. The French take their film tres serieusement, says Helene La Roche-Davis, a friend of the late Truffaut and the founder and energetic leader of the Cine-Club, which met everywhere from the Stanford campus to the New Varsity before settling in at the Cultural Center about a decade ago.
"Traditionally, in French film, the director is like an author who has very close artistic control of the film," says La Roche-Davis, a French film and literature professor at the College of Notre Dame who received her doctorate from Stanford University and collaborated with Truffaut on a book about his 1960 masterpiece, "Shoot the Piano Player."
"The film is not a 'product,' but a work of art," La Roche-Davis continues. "It's much closer to individual people's lives--psychologically, sociologically. It's not a question of a happy ending or a lot of action happening very fast, but a question of really feeling the emotion of the individual, of following the psychology of the individual."
Of course, what can be so nourishing to the French soul and cinematic psyche can, to some Americans--even this American, whose favorite all-time college class was Les Films de la Nouvelle Vague--sometimes appear to be obscurely abstract or self-consciously arty. Or, in other words: lots of long, long close-ups of ripe-lipped, beautiful-but-troubled women staring sadly into space while music swells in the background and we wonder which one of her many lovers she is thinking of.
Which leads me to the best aspect of the Cine-Club, which, by the way, is always open to the public, French-speaking or not (all films are subtitled). The evening's screening in the Cultural Center auditorium, is always followed by a little reception--with wine, bien sur, and sometimes even a little brie and crackers or goodies from a local patisserie. Discussions of the merits and shortcomings of the evening's film are lively and cross-cultural, offering interesting perspectives on the unique art form that is French cinema.
"Although the film is the focus of the evening, the idea is that it is sort of a French cultural center, too," says La Roche-Davis of the Cine-Club. "We always have free French newspapers out on the tables, literature for people to take. We have good coffee and cookies before the film. We sort of connect and talk . . . People have asked me why we don't move to a bigger theater, but I love the atmosphere at the Cultural Center. It's cozy, not like a commercial venture. When we were at Stanford or at the Bijou, I felt like the club was just being swallowed by the space."
The proportion of attendees who are native French speakers has increased dramatically over the years, La Roche-Davis says, but she stresses that the group is open to all.
"We get everyone," she says. "All ages, senior citizens, young people."
Tonight, Nov. 8, La Roche-Davis will be screening Louis Malle's 1966 comedy "Viva Maria," starring Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. The film starts at 8 p.m., but get to the Cultural Center auditorium early for the coffee and cookies. Admission is $6. For more information, call 329-2366 or 325-3831.
Monica Hayde is the Weekly arts and entertainment editor.
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