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The Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series starts this Friday, March 2nd. — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema. This year’s fest kicks off with a screening of Bertrand Tavernier’s acclaimed documentary My Journey Through French Cinema, the director’s personal reflections on key films and filmmakers. Several of the works he highlights — such as Jacques Becker’s “Casque d’or” and Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï” — are screened at this year’s fest.

Tickets: $13 General Admission. Cinema St. Louis Members: $10. Students: $10. Webster. U students: Free. Tickets for My Journey Through French Cinema can be purchased Here

All films are screened at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

Friday,...

The 10th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

This year’s fest kicks off with a screening of Bertrand Tavernier’s acclaimed documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the director’s personal reflections on key films and filmmakers. Several of the works he highlights — such as Jacques Becker’s “Casque d’or” and Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï” — are screened at this year’s fest.

The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features New Wave master Jacques Rivette’s visually sumptuous “La belle noiseuse.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with Jean Renoir...

The paths for young cinephiles are, and have been, many: historian, filmmaker, publicist, critic, preservationist, or simply devoted attendee. Frenchman Bertrand Tavernier (“Round Midnight,” “Captain Conan”) has been all these things, and in his three-hour-plus documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema” he takes us on a rapture-filled, illuminating tour of the Gallic classics and unheralded gems that made a World War II-liberated boy from Lyon believe in the infinite possibility of movies. And specifically, the kind his country could produce. Students of this form of narrated diary will surely link it to Martin Scorsese’s own richly immersive “Personal Journey” essay films.

“At the Pathé Journal, I saw a guy next to me open a can of peas, heat it up, and eat it,” recalls Bertrand Tavernier with a survivor’s perverse pride as he describes the widely mythologized Paris movie houses of the 1950s in My Journey Through French Cinema, his smart and gregarious personal tour through the first four or so decades of French sound film. Tavernier himself is one of the most skillful and, in this country, underappreciated French writer-directors of the generation that came after the revolutionary New Wave. In America, he’s probably best known for the Jim Thompson adaptation Coup De Torchon, a film that showcases his dark wit, though his historical dramas (including Captain Conan, Let Joy Reign Supreme, and The Judge And The Assassin) really belong in a class of their own. The best guides to film history are generally opinionated and very personal ...

"The finest Western you'll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation," declares Nick Pinkerton. Segueing into his interview with Bertrand Tavernier, Aaron Hillis, also in the Voice, sums up the gist of The Princess of Montpensier: "Adapted from Madame de la Fayette's classic novel, the film concerns a nubile, wealthy heiress (Mélanie Thierry) who loves a rugged hothead from the wrong clan (Gaspard Ulliel), but is forced by her father to marry another prince (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), leaving her to dwell on the too-modern desire for free will — defiantly bucking against the rigid traditions of her breed." Back to Pinkerton: "The setting always serves the performers rather than vice versa — though the film is also greatly enhanced by the costuming, the rugged French countryside photographed in outdoor-adventure CinemaScope, and Philippe Sarde's baroque-tribal score, its martial and romantic poles matching a tale of...