The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 19-25
Modesty, or Immodesty (1991)
Directed by Hervé Guibert
Guibert was a photographer and a writer known best for autofictions. He passed away in 1991 at age 36 after living with AIDS, a condition that he wove into his work. His hourlong self-record was commissioned for French television, filmed over nine months between 1990 and 1991, and aired a month after his death. In it, Guibert follows himself with a small Panasonic camera during what have become very challenging daily routines. We see his self-proclaimed old man’s body dressing itself in his Paris apartment, using the restroom, taking medicine, and going to doctor’s appointments while his mind reflects with sadness and mordant humor on its condition. A point of special quiet and positive energy comes during a trip he takes to refresh himself on the Tuscan island of Elba; throughout the work, he talks with two great-aunts about whether he should commit suicide or stay alive, a choice to which the film itself responds with equal measures of pain and beauty.
It’s quite possible that Light Industry’s screening of Modesty, or Immodesty (which will be introduced by the writer Bruce Hainley) is the film’s first public screening in the United States. New English-language subtitles have been made for the occasion by Christine Pichini, who beautifully renders both the lows and highs of speech that Guibert sought to express—the mundane searchings and mumblings heard throughout conversation he holds with other people on-camera, as well as the rigorous, forceful compositions that he shares with us in voiceover. These writings express a part of him that remains in good spirits and health. Aaron Cutler (October 24, 7:30pm at Light Industry)
