Essential Cinema

Sunday, August 24th at 1:00 p.m.
and Monday, August 25th at 7:00 p.m.
Admission: FREE

All ESSENTIAL CINEMA films screen Sunday at 1:00 p.m. and Monday at 7:00 p.m., and admission is FREE!
See classic art films the way they were meant to be seen - on the big screen in glorious new 35 mm prints!

"This magical and elusive work, which always seems to place second behind "Citizen Kane" in polls of great films, is so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous, that you can't simply watch it, you have to absorb it."
- Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's masterpiece THE RULES OF THE GAME is a devastating satire of the pre-WWII French aristocracy.
Starring Marcel Dalio as wealthy landowner Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, it charts the shifting relationships among the guests at a weekend hunting party on his vast estate. The guest list includes Robert's mistress Genevieve (Mila Parely), from whom he's trying to part, and Andre Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a famed aviator who is in love with Robert's wife, Christine (Nora Gregor). As they begin a dizzy dance of escape and pursuit, their games are observed and echoed by the servants below the stairs. The gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot) is trying to keep the poacher, Marceau (Julien Carette), from poaching on his pretty wife, Lisette (Paulette Dubost), unaware that his boss also has his eye on her. The passionate Jurieu, the only guest incapable of the appropriate hypocrisy, finds Christine in an embrace with a random lover (Pierre Nay), and the startled woman decides to leave Robert and go away with the aviator.
Renoir's masterful control of pacing and mise-en-scene, and his subtle deployment of long tracking shots in multiplanar deep focus, reveals the relations of both groups and individuals as he slowly but surely dismantles the rituals of hypocrisy that make this society run smoothly.

(Jean Renoir, 1939, France, in French with English subtitles, 110 mins, Not Rated)