Introduction by Professor Walter Frisch followed by a screening and Q&A with musical cinema specialist Stéphane Lerouge.
Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Film in French with English subtitles / Film en français sous-titré anglais
Discussion in English | Discussion en anglais
About the film
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg dir. Jacques Demy (1964)
Catherine Deneuve plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.
En-chanté: The World of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand
This year 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the beloved French film musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, created by director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand. This bittersweet tale of two young lovers is sung from beginning to end, with no spoken dialogue—a bold and unique idea at the time. To celebrate the anniversary, this series will present it alongside two other classic musical films by Demy and Legrand, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966) and Peau d’Âne (1970). Together, the three form a kind of trilogy, exploring themes of love, separation, regret, and family. All feature the actress whom Les Parapluies helped launch to stardom, Catherine Deneuve. Legrand’s magnificent musical scores range across many styles, including jazz, the romantic, and the neo-baroque. Prior to the screenings, Walter Frisch will present remarks to discuss the social, cultural, historical, and musical contexts of the films within their time and within the careers of Demy and Legrand.
Walter Frisch
Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 1982. Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Schubert to Schoenberg. He has written numerous articles and two books on Brahms, including Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984) and Brahms: The Four Symphonies (1996, 2003). Frisch’s publications on Schoenberg include the book The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 (1993) and the edited volume Schoenberg and His World (1999). His volume in the series, Music in the Nineteenth Century, was published in Fall 2012. His book Arlen and Harburg’s Over the Rainbow appeared in 2017. His latest work, Harold Arlen and His Songs, Oxford University Press, is forthcoming.
Stéphane Lerouge
A specialist in music in film, Stéphane Lerouge is the creator of the discography collection Ecoutez le cinéma ! for Universal Music France (200 volumes since 2000), lecturer at the University of Paris I (1993-2005), music programmer for the Festival Musique et Cinéma d'Auxerre (2000-2008), author of L'Alphabet des musiques de films (Gallimard, 2000), Conversations avec Antoine Duhamel (Textuel, 2007), and co-author of Michel Legrand's memoirs, J'ai le regret de vous dire oui (Fayard, 2018). In 2016-17, he collaborated with Bertrand Tavernier on the musical part of the documentary Voyage à travers le cinéma français. He hosts meetings at the Cinémathèque Française, Forum des Images, Festival de Cannes, and Festival Lumière. He directs the film music section of the Musée Sacem and, in the summer of 2023, co-hosted the program Balades originales on France Musique. In November 2023, he published The Legend of John Williams, a cross-disciplinary anthology of 20 CDs devoted to the famous American composer, with a balance between original soundtracks, songs, and concert works.
The place
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