The Fire Within
Films by Louis Malle - New 35mm Print
Spoiler warning in effect.
"The Fire Within" isn't exactly based on Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" but is certainly inspired by it. Indeed, Malle's hero reads the Fitzgerald story in the days before his suicide, finishing the last page just before he pulls the trigger. So that the two men -- Fitzgerald's and Malle's -- live parallel lives.
Malle is one of the less-known French New Wave directors, and this film never received a U.S. commercial release after its triumph at the 1964 New York Film Festival. So it comes to us now as a rediscovered treasure, a film that would have been influential if only it had been shown.
Malle's character seems superficially similar to Fitzgerald himself. He is a writer, living in Paris, who lived in New York for a while but is now divorced from his wife there. And he is an alcoholic, whose addiction had undermined his confidence in his art and his manhood. We find him living in a rest home, where he voluntarily took the cure and then decided to stay.
He lives in a bemused and private world. He speaks softly to himself, he hums, he moves silently about his room, he toys with esoteric bric-a-brac, he is preoccupied with the enormous thought of his own death. Urged by the doctor to leave because he is "cured," the writer goes to Paris one day and systematically revisits several of his friends. He drinks too much and makes a fool of himself at a party; he questions the fundamental worth of his friends' bourgeois existence; finally he comes back to the home and, hardly seeming moved even now, kills himself.
The film is a triumph of style. It is quiet and indicative. It doesn't explain a lot, but we understand a lot about it all the same. And in the concerned, indifferent, kind, cruel behavior of his friends, we see ourselves acting toward people like him, or acted toward by people like them. Rarely does a film so carefully portray this complexity of personal relationships. (***1/2, R. Ebert)
The Fire Within
Wed March 1, 2006, 7:00 & 9:15, Muenzinger Auditorium
France, 1963, in French, B&W, 108 min
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.