Film in French with English subtitles / Film en français sous-titré anglais.
Discussion in French and English | Discussion en français et en anglais.
Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
About the film
Peau d'Âne dir. Jacques Demy (1970)
In a magical land, a widower king (Jean Marais) decrees that he will wed his daughter, the princess (Catherine Deneuve), because she's the only woman able to match his former queen's beauty. To dodge the incestuous union, the princess—with the help of a magical fairy (Delphine Seyrig)—disguises herself as a donkey and escapes to a neighboring kingdom. There, the donkey-skinned maiden encounters a handsome prince (Jacques Perrin) who falls in love with her. Fascinated by it since childhood, Demy began adapting this 1695 fairy tale by Charles Perrault into a script as early as 1962. Michel Legrand wrote the music.
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.
Camille Taboulay
Holder of a Bachelor's degree in art history, Camille Taboulay was a Critic for Cahiers du Cinéma for 8 years, then screenwriter for cinema and television. She is the author of the book Le cinéma enchanté de Jacques Demy.
Hélène Demy
Younger sister of Jacques Demy, Hélène Demy served as a script assistant for Peau D'Âne.
The place
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