Subtitles:

English (SDH), English, none

Extras:

Malle's weird surrealist fantasy updates Alice in Wonderland into a future society where men and women are engaged in deadly combat, seemingly coexistent with an alternative comradeship of talking rats and enchanted unicorns. Malle offers no explanation for his heroine's visionary odyssey through a world in which all history runs parallel with all realities. Yet a logic is there, even if its reference point is jabberwocky. A black moon, in astrological terms, refers to the time of chaos that preludes some cataclysmic change. And like Malle's other films around this time, Black Moon hopefully posits a social revolution in which such outmoded concepts as innocence and sin will appear in new guises..

Excerpt from TimeOut London located HERE

Louis Malle has never been the sort of filmmaker critics could easily pigeonhole in terms of his style and interests. He's worked in practically every film genre (thriller, social satire, melodrama, documentary, etc.) and his restless curiosity has led him to explore a vast array of subjects from underwater life (The Silent World, 1956) to sexual liberation (The Lovers, 1958) to life under the Nazi occupation (Au revoir les enfants, 1987). Yet, for even an iconoclast like Malle, his 1975 film Black Moon is unlike anything he's ever done before or since. "Opaque, sometimes clumsy, it is the most intimate of my films," he once said. "I see it as a strange voyage to the limits of the medium, or maybe my own limits."

The idea for Black Moon came to Malle while he was finishing production on Lacombe, Lucien (1974). "It began with the fact that I wanted to shoot the film in my own house," the director said in an interview with David Bartholomew for Cinefantastique magazine. "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." Malle also wanted to work again with the legendary German actress Therese Giehse whom he had just directed in Lacombe, Lucien and was famous as the first actress to play Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht's landmark play.

Gary Tooze

June 6th, 2011