GME Distributes Films by Marcel Hanoun, Including UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE, Which Plays at Anthology Film Archives This Month
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STILL: UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE (1959) BY MARCEL HANOUN. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
“Marcel Hanoun theorized a cinema in which the word and image were separated and given equal value… he employs a more quiet, contemplative style, using a static camera and images that force the viewer to concentrate on the most quotidian aspects of existence and to accentuate the dichotomy between sound and image which is implicit in all of cinema.” —Wheeler Winston Dixon
As part of their Essential Cinema series, a collection of films screened on a repertory basis, Anthology Film Archives will show Marcel Hanoun’s UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE (1959) on February 23rd at 6:45pm. GME distributes this title to the North American university market as both a DVD and a DSL file. Additionally, we distribute Hanoun’s OCTOBRE À MADRID (1964) and THE SEASONS (LES SAISONS) (1968-72) on DVD and DSL — the latter being a “quadriptych” made up of Hanoun’s films L’ÉTÉ (1968), L’HIVER (1969), LE PRINTEMPS (1970), and L’AUTOMNE (1972). This publication of THE SEASONS also comes with a 100-page booklet about each of the films and includes an interview with Hanoun as a bonus feature. These three DVD editions are published by Re:Voir Video and distributed by GME to the North American institutional market.
UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE — a moving minimalist drama following an impoverished single mother looking for work — premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival alongside Francois Truffaut’s landmark French New Wave feature THE 400 BLOWS. There, it won the Grand Prix Eurovision and was championed by fellow Nouvelle Vague auteur Jean-Luc Godard, who heralded the film’s “originality” and praised it as “a clinical statement on reality… a film where the suspense does not come from the social aspect of the heroine's misadventures, but rather from their pathological aspect… [Hanoun] not only describe[s] a dramatic situation, but also… elaborate[s on] a woman's character.”
Despite the plaudits it received — even American critics, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, dubbed the film a “masterpiece” and credited it with creating “a new kind of filmic reality, a fugue-like narrative form which infuses a simple story with unnatural beauty and power” — UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE and Hanoun’s filmography at large hardly receive the same amount of latter-day academic and cultural attention as the films of Godard, Truffaut, and other New Wave directors.
GME is proud to make Hanoun’s films available for institutional acquisition, with the intent of furthering this underrated artist’s legacy and reaffirming his station not only among the great filmmakers of the French New Wave, but global cinema at large.