The term film maudit, the ‘cursed film’, has its origins in a 1949 festival curated by, amongst others, Jean Cocteau, André Bazin, Robert Bresson, René Clément, and Henri Langlois. The purpose of the festival was to celebrate films that had been unfairly maligned or overlooked on their original release. The IFI Films Maudits Season runs 3rd-24th August with a wide ranging selection of ‘cursed films’ dating from 1932 to as recently as 2011.
Examples of this original sense of the term film maudit from the IFI Season include William Friedkin’s 1980 gay S&M thriller Cruising that met outraged protest from the New York gay community and critical derision on release; François Truffaut’s 1964 Silken Skin which is now considered by some to be one of his best but which screened at Cannes at a showing that Truffaut later described to a friend as “a complete fiasco”; and similarly John Frankenheimer’s chilling Faustian sci-fi Seconds which was received with such hostility at Cannes that Frankenheimer refused to leave Monte Carlo for his post-screening press conference.
In the years since the term was first coined, film maudit has come to be used in a much broader sense, often applied more to films which have suffered a troubled production history, regardless of their eventual reception on release. In this vein the IFI season includes one of cinema’s most notoriously trouble productions and financial disasters, Michael Cimino’s 1980 Heaven’s Gate which as good as ended his career, bringing down the venerable United Artists studio with it. Yet this epic Western now has a number of critical champions and the film has justifiably begun to emerge from the shadow of its past. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret is one of the more extreme examples of recent years, dogged by lawsuits and by artistic struggles this extraordinary coming-of-age film features a tour-de-force performance from Anna Paquin and met a tidal wave of critical acclaim on its release (a mere six years after it was filmed).
The IFI Films Maudits Season is an excellent chance up your own mind about which films are being rightly and wrongly reappraised by contemporary critics, and to think about which contemporary films, currently dismissed, may in the future play to rapt audiences unable to understand how their greatness was not immediately appreciated. Critics, studios and audiences can be disastrously short-sighted and misguided but the stakes for the artists are huge: as Orson Welles put it when talking about the studio’s interference in his 1942 flop-turned-acclaimed-classic The Magnificent
Ambersons, ‘they destroyed Ambersons, and it destroyed me.’
Tickets are available now at the IFI Box Office on 01 679 3477 or online at www.ifi.ie.
IFI Films Maudits Season Schedule
Freaks – August 3rd 16.00
The Magnificent Ambersons – August 4th 18.15
Silken Skin – August 6th 18.30
L’Eclisse – August 10th 16.00
Seconds – August 13th 18.15
We Can’t Go Home Again – August 16th 16.00
Margaret – August 17th 16.00
Cruising – August 23rd 16.00
Heaven’s Gate – August 24th 16.00