Past Events

In early 2009, Wiseman was on the scene at the titular Parisian cabaret to closely document the preparations of an avant-garde new show called Désirs. While an elevated peep show seemed unlikely terrain for Wiseman, he provides his typically unrivaled examination of the machinations of what makes the production: the audience, the performers, the financiers and the legacy to which they all belong.

In this gut-wrenching true-crime story set in 1933 Paris, Huppert plays an angelic-looking teenage dreamer leading a double life as dutiful student/daughter by day and scheming sex worker by night. As Violette’s resentment grows more extreme, her rebellion turns literally poisonous toward her ineffectual, possibly abusive father and overbearing mother.

Following six underground films as the Dziga Vertov Group, Godard and Gorin returned to the commercial film industry and a somewhat traditional narrative work. Jane Fonda and Yves Montand star as a bickering couple held captive in a sausage factory, emphasizing the personal dimensions of politics via their unresolved feuding. Gorin took on most of the directing duties and synthesized Godard’s iconic tricolor aesthetics with post-Brechtian dramaturgy and Jerry Lewis-inspired pranks.

In a seaside town, desolate and shuttered for the winter, a stranger arrives. Soon, a second man appears, and the perfect set up for a neat little drama is underway. The underknown Allégret contributes a late era twist on French realism, which will be a significant discovery for many.

A program of three animated short films tells the stories of finding a community despite our differences. Delicately drawn, with a comic touch, these films remind viewers that despite moments of difficulty, no one is truly alone, and that magical things often await just beyond the edge of the familiar

Followed by a conversation with Jean-Pierre Gorin and David Fresko

A “Groucho” Marxist riff on the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial is one of the Dziga Vertov Group’s most theoretically dense and comedically outrageous works. Godard and Gorin both appear and partake in this burlesque comedy to the fullest, which thoroughly mocks the U.S. justice system as well as the American New Left. Paired with Godard in America, a documentary following Godard and Gorin on a Grove Press-sponsored US college tour.

L’Alliance New York is honored to welcome Jean-Pierre Gorin for his long-awaited return to New York to present a special program of three of his films and three films he has selected which, as he did for several decades in his legendary classes, reintroduce and vindicate bygone treasures of French cinema.

Followed by a conversation with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Kent Jones

Renoir’s people’s love story and immigrant tale, propelled by crime and tragedy, was shot on location in Southern France, a region not often showed on screen to that time. Renoir, always leading with his heart, remarkably presents themes and style predating their adoption by major cinematic movements, namely Neo-Realism and the New Wave.

Introduced by Jean-Pierre Gorin

One of France’s greatest filmmakers, and long overlooked abroad in favor of his contemporaries, Grémillon made a series of films as strong as any in the heady days of the 30s and early 40s Gallic film production. Among many masterpieces, this poetic melodrama, made under the Occupation, is of a pair with Toni in their analysis of class, as Jean-Pierre Gorin will discuss.

On Monday, June 1, 2026, L’Alliance New York will proudly honor Petrossian with the Art de Vivre Award presented at a reception in our Skyroom, followed by dinner at Le Bilboquet.