Cœurs Sombres | Olivia de Jacqueline Audry

Editorial

In the darkness of the cinema, Cœurs Sombres enters into conversation with the ghosts of the nineteenth century, swept up in the turmoil of love, war and human heartbreak. The great passions of the Romantic era, splendid and suffocating, unfold before our eyes. People love madly, sometimes to the point of forgetting; they venture forth at their own risk.

Sarah Yaacoub

Read the full editorial

Olivia

by Jacqueline Audry | 1951 | France | 1h35

“– Tell me what it’s like to be in love! – No, it’s too terrible to talk about, too delightful to think about.” – Olivia by Jacqueline Audry, 1951

Jacqueline Audry taking over from François Truffaut is, so to speak, a delightful provocation. Audry, a filmmaker erased from cinema history, made around ten films in her time, but was scorned by the New Wave and lumped in with the “tradition of quality” cinema that young critics of the 1950s abhorred. In 1951, Audry replaces the English countryside of Dorothy Bussy’s book, which the author dedicated to Virginia Woolf, with the surroundings of Fontainebleau. First and foremost, Olivia is a coming-of-age story (in period costume, set in 1865) about a British girl at a boarding school for well-brought-up French girls. Yet moral taboos snuff out a first lesbian love, tinged with fascination, at its inception, as the eponymous heroine falls for her magnetic governess, whom some might call manipulative. Olivia’s appearance as a chamber film is deceptive: it more subtly sketches the stifled violence of what goes unsaid, what hides in the gaps. In a Crédit national document responding to a funding request, we read: “a film that requires great taste and tact.”

Practical information

Join the Facebook event

The box office opens 30 minutes before each screening.

We operate on a pay-what-you-can basis (everyone pays what they want/can/feel is fair). We believe pay-what-you-can pricing gives everyone the opportunity to experience what interests them and to value the work done as they see fit.

Membership in the association is required to attend screenings. It is available from 8€ and is valid for one calendar year. You can sign up online! For those who wish and are able, membership is also a way to support us by adding an amount of your choice.

Sign up online

The screenings in the series