CONTOURS: La Belle Noiseuse (1991) / preceded by Akt-Skulpturen (1903) / in partnership with MUBI Canada

Paradise Theatre, Aug. 18 2024

Ten years after abandoning a great unrealized work, “La Belle Noiseuse,” an aging painter (Michel Piccoli) finds inspiration in a new model (Emmanuelle Béart), the fiancée of a rival artist. In Honoré de Balzac’s original story The Unknown Masterpiece, the scenario makes for a tantalizing parable of art-historical change, suggesting that a masterpiece before its time is no masterpiece at all. In his 1991 film La Belle Noiseuse, however, French New Wave director Jacques Rivette offers something quite different: a meditation on the relation between artist and model, one that doubles as a reflection on the complex collaboration between filmmaker and actor. 
 
“I want to break you up to see the inside. I want the invisible,” the painter announces. Much of the film’s absorbing four-hour runtime will chart his attempts to plumb the core of his model’s being, as well as her resistance to the very same. What finally emerges in this struggle for dominance, which is by turns sadistic and sensual, is an enthralling look at the process of artistic creation. 

Liner notes by Lawrence Garcia.

Event photography by Nika Thompson.