Few can claim to have helped give Jean Renoir and Jean-Luc Godard their start. Fewer still can say they also nurtured the young talents of Jean-Pierre Melville, Melvin Van Peebles, François Truffaut, Alberto Cavalcanti, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean Rouch, Michel Simon, and Jean-Paul Belmondo, among countless other filmmakers, actors, screenwriters, and technicians throughout the 20th century.
In celebrating the French film producer, distributor, and art house cinema and studio owner Pierre Braunberger (1905–1990), the founder of Les Films du Jeudi in its various incarnations and offshoots (including Néo Films, Les Films du Panthéon, Établissements Braunberger-Richebé, and Les Films de la Pléiade), this exhibition of more than 60 features and shorts, many of them presented in recent digital restorations, is nothing short of a celebration of independent French cinema itself. Thanks to the work of his daughter Laurence Braunberger, a producer in her own right, Les Films du Jeudi remains one of the few thriving independent film distributors in France today.
Giving praise where it is due, Godard wrote of Braunberger that “many people have loved the movies, my dear Pierre. But very few have been loved by them.” Braunberger, in turn, repaid the tribute by saying that “Renoir and Godard are, in terms of creativity, the two most extraordinary figures I have ever known. Renoir-Godard, Godard-Renoir, Renoir-Godard...! Godard is to cinema what Malherbe was to the French language; Renoir is the greatest director of actors I have ever known.”
Braunberger was a champion of independent French cinema in the tradition of its pioneers, Léon Gaumont and the Pathé brothers. He first supported the emergence of French avant-garde and Surrealist cinema in the 1920s, then the birth of the French New Wave in the 1950s. He brought the structure of the Hollywood studio system to Europe, particularly with respect to the role of the film producer (something he learned as a secretary for Irving Thalberg at MGM), and introduced innovations in sound and camera technology to the industry. In 1929, he took over the beloved Panthéon art house cinema in Paris, equipping it with a Western Electric sound system—making it the first cinema in Paris to screen films in their original English versions—and he continued programming the theater for the remainder of his life.
Braunberger turned the whole idea of the short film into a veritable cottage industry in France from the 1950s through the ’70s, producing and distributing relative unknowns like Agnès Varda, François Reichenbach, Maurice Pialat, Jacques Rivette, and Chris Marker. (“It is therefore only through the short film that young directors can prove themselves,” Braunberger would observe. “What later came to be known as the New Wave began with short films.”) And in addition to supporting and distributing studio directors like Henri-Georges Clouzot, Marc Allégret, and Georges Lacombe, the so-called “Tradition of Quality” too easily dismissed by the young turks of the New Wave, Braunberger also fostered difficult and ambitious projects by some of the greatest filmmakers of the century, including Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread and Max Ophuls’s Lola Montes.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, with Francisco Valente, Curatorial Associate, Department of Film, MoMA. Thanks to Laurence Braunberger, Les Films du Jeudi; the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC-Paris); the Cinémathèque Française; and Transperfect Media.
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 The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund through The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.