SOUND AND FURY
(DE BRUIT ET DE FUREUR)
dir. Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1989
95 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 10 PM CLOSED
Considered an important entry in French cinema’s new naturalism from one of the most promising French filmmakers of the Eighties, SOUND AND FURY presents a shocking, surreal, and humanistic look at the tragic lives of impoverished children living in the Paris projects.
Bruno is a teenaged boy who has just moved into a high-rise project with his hard working but absent mother. Other than his pet bird Superman keeping him company, Bruno is alone. The apartment is located in one of the city’s roughest suburbs and Bruno’s involvement with crime seems inevitable. Shortly after, he is befriended by the streetwise but deeply troubled Jean-Roger, and Bruno goes out thieving, destroying property and harming people with a vengeance… hoping to receive the type of attention he so desperately wants at home.
“SOUND AND FURY is less concerned with social problems and their possible solutions than with evoking the pervasive aimlessness of a world that lives entirely in the present tense. The film records the specific details of terrible events without editorial comment… Mr. Brisseau has such authority as a director that he can slip into and out of moments of wildly heightened reality without prompting derisive giggles. The movie is soundly based.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“None of my films are realistic, and certainly not naturalistic, including SOUND AND FURY, even though it touched on a certain social reality. They all contain a shadow zone. I do like to come back to social reality, but I do it through the mixing of genres and the insertion of surrealist elements. When the Cinémathèque Française asked me to select some films that had influenced me to accompany a retrospective of my work, I realized that I’d chosen movies that all assumed an air of realism while completely evading it. Take Alain Resnais’s LA GUERRE EST FINIE: the film seems to deal with the political reality of the time, and yet that isn’t what Resnais filmed. In my own work, the subject is never naturalism but a certain kind of relation to reality. With each film, I try to find a new way to confront these complex relations. Watching one of my movies, you always have to ask yourself if you’re reading it correctly—for instance, should you be laughing at a film that began in such a somber way. During the first screening of SOUND AND FURY, the younger audience members laughed, and I was more or less with them. Meanwhile, the more serious viewers felt the kids had no right to make fun of such things.” – Jean-Claude Brisseau, as told to Frédéric Bonnaud in Film Comment
Special thanks to Altered Innocence and Matthew Sniegoski.