Cinema

(de voertaal van deze avond is Engels).

Jeffrey's Underground Cinema has been showing neglected and forgotten films for the last decade. This night:  

THE BEAR  1988
(L’ours)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud
94 minutes
In English with English subtitles

Although French director Jean-Jacques Annaud made some mainstream productions (The Lover, The Name of the Rose) he also made some out right peculiar movies on the side. One example would be a movie called Quest of Fire, that focused on the invention of fire by cavemen, and had no comprehensible language in it at all. Another example would be this movie – which is a bizarre story about bears. Once again, there’s not much language in it, and it is exactly what it says in the title – we follow around some bears for the entire movie, and somehow it actually works magnificently.

It’s about a baby cub that gets separated from its mother, and is taken care of by an elderly bear. I’m not kidding, that is what it’s about… and what’s more is that it includes bear dream sequences! It’s beautifully shot, and the acting of the real bears is nothing short of incomprehensible and mind-boggling. They are fantastic. In fact, when the movie came out there was a petition started by the public to get the elderly bear, Bart, nominated for an Academy award for best actor. This organised campaign was cut short when the academy refused to consider a non-human for the competition. 

The screenplay was written by Gérard Brach, who was a kind of wild card, and had spent time in mental institutions, and hung out with the surrealists. At one point, he began writing film scripts and ended up working with Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Konchalovsky and Roman Polanski. You might think that the film was made for children from the description, but once you see it, you understand that it wasn’t.

What can I say, this is an emotional, thrilling and imaginative flick that seems impossible, but here it is. Everything is acted out with real bears, and once in a while, in a few key sequences animatronic bears were created. Movies like this would never be made today, instead they would be produced with ridiculous, hollow, charmless CGI effects that have none of the magic. 

With a short introduction by Jeffrey Babcock

20:30 (doors and bar open at 20:00)
Free entrance / no reservations
We advise you to come early: max. 70 people /
no admittance after 20.30