Black Moon (1975 film)

Black Moon is a 1975 French/West German avant-garde film directed by Louis Malle and starring Cathryn Harrison, Joe Dallesandro, Therese Giehse, and Alexandra Stewart. Shown at the 1975 New York Film Festival, it was distributed in the United States by 20th Century Fox. Despite the film's location in France the film's dialogue is in English.

The surreal mise en scene centers on Lily, a confused teenager (Cathryn Harrison) who witnesses a war between the sexes and finds herself involved in numerous dream-like situations at a country estate. An underlying subtext offers a commentary on the Women's Movement of the 1970s. The film is dedicated to Therese Giehse, who plays the character of The Old Lady, who died shortly after the end of the film.

Malle himself has said about this film: ""Opaque, sometimes clumsy, it is the most intimate of my films. I see it as a strange voyage to the limits of the medium, or maybe my own limits."[1]



Contents
[hide]  *1 Plot  ==Plot[ edit] == The world is embroiled in a war between men and women, and to escape it Lily (Cathryn Harrison) retreats into fantasy world on a country estate in which a number of surreal and unusual events take place. Naked children are used to round up pigs and sheep. On the estate are three people, a man, Brother Lily (Joe Dallesandro), tending to the upkeep of the grounds. He does not speak but somehow communicates through touch. His sister, Sister Lily (Alexandra Stewart). also helps on the estate with rounding up sheep. The Old Lady Therese Giehse ia a demanding bedridden woman who communicates with a large rat, and also operates a ham radio next to her bed. When she is hungry, she seeks milk and is breastfed by Sister Lily, and later by Lily.
 * 2 Cast
 * 3 Production
 * 4 Critical reception
 * 5 Awards and honors
 * 6 Home video
 * 7 References
 * 8 External links

Lily pursues a unicorn around the estate. It later turns up in the Old Lady's room, and Lily prepares to breastfeed it. ==Cast[ edit] == ==Production[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">The film was shot in Malle's own 200-year-old manor house and its surrounding 225-acre (0.91 km<sup style="line-height:1;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">2 ) estate in the lush, wild Dordogne valley in Quercy, near Cahors, called "Le Coual," or "The Crow's Call."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-tcmart_1-1" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1]  The house and grounds were actually the beginning inspiration for the film, according to Malle in an interview inCinefantastiqu: "It began with the fact that I wanted to shoot the film in my own house. Black Moon certainly comes very much from the place where I live, the kind of countryside around the house. There's something very ancient, maybe archaic, about it, also something...hostile."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-tcmart_1-2" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1]  Malle also said that the film was influenced by his admiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
 * Cathryn Harrison as Lily
 * Therese Giehse as The Old Lady
 * Alexandra Stewart as Sister Lily
 * Joe Dallesandro as Brother Lily

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Malle hired Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, to shoot the film, and wanted there to be no scenes in which there was direct sunlight. They shot indoor scenes on sunny days until the light was right for the exterior shots.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-tcmart_1-3" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Knowing that the film would be difficult for audiences as a full-length feature film, Malle considered releasing it in a much shorter version, and actually prepared a one-hour cut, removing scenes that he felt did not work.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-tcmart_1-4" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1] ==Critical reception<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">At the time of release, Black Moon received mixed reviews and vanished into obscurity. It has since been screened at theatrical revivals and aired on the Turner Classic Movies channel.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Film critic Jeff Stafford wrote about it: <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:inherit;">Walking a fine line between fantasy and reality with the two occasionally merging, Black Moon refuses to conform to a conventional storyline and a description of the fantastical events that take place could easily give one the wrong impression and misrepresent the cinematic experience Malle intended. The director was well aware of this, saying "I don't know how to describe Black Moon because it's a strange melange - if you want, it's a mythological fairy-tale taking place in the near future. There are several themes; one is the ultimate civil war...the war between men and women. I say the 'ultimate civil war,' because through the 1970s we'd been watching all this fighting between people of different religions and races and political beliefs. And this was, of course, the climax and great moment of women's liberation. So, we follow a young girl, in this civil war; she's trying to escape, and in the middle of the wood she finds a house which seems to be abandoned. When she enters the house, she obviously enters another world; she's in the presence of an old lady in bed, who speaks a strange language and converses with a huge rat on her bedside table. She goes from discovery to discovery - it's a sort of initiation." The film has obvious connections to the writings of Lewis Carroll as well as other films from the same period such as Robert Altman's Images (1972), which shares a similar fascination with unicorns, and Ingmar Bergman's bleak war allegory, Shame (1968). Malle freely admitted that Black Moon "conveys my admiration for and curiosity about Alice in Wonderland. And in the part I deliberately cast this English girl, Cathryn Harrison..."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[2] <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Pauline Kael, probably considered the dean of American film critics at the time, said about Black Moon: <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:inherit;">Louis Malle is temperamentally unsuited to the meandering, enigmatic, post-apocalypse fantasy he attempts here; he's a sane man trying to make a crazy man's film...There's no obsessive quality in the disordered vision, and no wit. It's deadly." Jean Roy of Cinema concurred, adding "what is really inadmissible here is that Malle has everything: 20 years of experience behind the camera; Therese Giehse, the creation of Brecht; Joe Dallesandro of Andy Warhol's Dracula [1974], in which he showed us the acting potential he had hidden; Sven Nykvist, Bergman's cinematographer for 30 years. And with all this, the film accomplishes nothing.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-tcmart_1-5" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1] <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Other critics differed. Susan Sontag said it was "mesmerizing", and Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it "intensely personal and so very beautiful".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-tcmart_1-6" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1] ==Awards and honors<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Black Moon was the winner of two French César Awards for sound and cinematography. ==Home video<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">A digitally restored version of the film was released by The Criterion Collection in June 2011.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[3]