Marguerite Duras once said of her friend and frequent collaborator Bulle Ogier, “Bulle is not the nouvelle vague (New Wave); Bulle is absolute vagueness.” One of the few truly risk-taking actresses to emerge from the last golden age of European cinema, the 1960s and 1970s, Ogier is that most malleable and elusive of creatures—cerebral or sensuous as the role demands—bringing an uncommon intelligence and self-restraint to her work with such iconoclastic filmmakers as Duras, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Manoel de Oliveira, Alain Tanner, Robert Frank, her husband Barbet Schroeder, and, more recently, Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis.
The honored subject of this major retrospective of more than 30 features and shorts at MoMA, Ogier is also the author of a brilliant memoir from 2019, J’ai oublié, and the co-author of the screenplays for Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) and Le Pont du Nord (1981), which she wrote with and starred in opposite her daughter Pascale Ogier. “Even the way she enters and leaves [the frame],” Duras observes, “she has incredible self-control. With a natural way of making mistakes, well, it’s extraordinary.”
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film.
Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black, with major contributions from the Triad Foundation, Inc., The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and by Karen and Gary Winnick.
