From April 28 to June 13, 2026, the Cinematek will present a Guy Gilles retrospective featuring four of the French filmmaker’s most notable films.
Program:
Earth Light (1970)
Tuesday, April 28 at 8:45 p.m. + opening night (a glass of wine will be provided by the Institut français)
Wednesday, May 13 at 9:30 p.m.
Wall Engravings (1967)
Sunday, May 3 at 2:00 p.m. + lecture on Proust
Tuesday, May 19 at 9:45 p.m.
Repeated Absences (1972)
Saturday, May 9 at 3:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 13 at 7:30 p.m.
Love at Sea (1965)
Friday, May 15 at 7:00 p.m.
Thursday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m.
French filmmaker Guy Gilles has been rediscovered in recent years. In the 1960s, while Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and their associates were introducing the French New Wave to the world, Guy Gilles never managed to make a name for himself. When he died in 1996 from AIDS, his passing therefore sparked neither great commotion nor eulogies. As one film critic wrote about him: his films were aimed at both provincial audiences and gay people.
His films possess a unique poetic cinematic language, where associations and impulses dictate the rhythm of the editing rather than logic or politics. For Gilles, cinema is a form of escape, as it allows him to create escape routes from the real world. His characters are always on the verge of running away, just like his camera, and his editing is fleeting. Gilles’s characters are always souls in search of an escape: toward a Rimbaudian journey, supreme love, their homeland, drugs, or suicide. One of his signature styles, highly revealing, is the alternation between color and black-and-white sequences.
Gilles was born in Algeria to French parents, but he moved to France in the late 1950s and stayed there. However, he never quite felt at home, neither in Algeria nor in France. His own experiences—related to the loss of his homeland(s) and his homosexuality—are clearly reflected in his films.
Like his literary idols Marcel Proust and Jean Genet, Gilles’s work is a meditation on memory set within a fictional, almost mythological world, where the homosexual experience is more of a latent aesthetic strategy than a theme. He gives prominence to the inner lives of outcasts, loners, and misfits. His films are melancholic, nostalgic, enigmatic, and romantic.
