La Pointe Courte is a 1955 French

Cinema of France

The Cinema of France comprises the art of film and creative movies made within the nation of France or by French filmmakers abroad.France is the birthplace of cinema and was responsible for many of its early significant contributions. Several important cinematic movements, including the Nouvelle...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 directed by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style....

. The film was Varda's debut film.

Plot

A young man (Philippe Noiret) arrives at a train station to see his wife. After four years of marriage the couple finds difficulty in their marriage as the husband has left there without her. The couple discuss their lives without settling on their current romantic situation. The man takes his wife back to a train without any clear statement on the couple's relationship. Meanwhile, A government official arrives to see if local fishermen in the village are fishing without permits. In the village a child has died and a fisherman is jailed for fishing without a license while a young man has arranged a marriage between him and his sixteen year old girlfriend.

Production

Varda originally went to La Pointe Courte to take pictures for a friend who could no longer visit her home. After seeing the footage she took she rented a camera to shoot a film about a couple who lived in La Pointe Courte. Varda set up her own co-op and began production. The budget for the film was low budget costing $14,000; roughly one fourth the budget of other feature films of the era including The 400 Blows

The 400 Blows

The 400 Blows is a 1959 French film directed by François Truffaut. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. The story revolves around Antoine Doinel, an ordinary adolescent in Paris, who is thought by his parents and teachers...

and Breathless. No members of the cast or crew being paid during the production.

Themes

In a 1962 interview, Varda spoke of two present themes in the film with "the first being a couple reconsidering their relationship and a village that is trying to resolve several collective problems of survival".

Release

The Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 premiere of the film was in 1956 at the Studio Parnasse. It played with Jean Vigo

Jean Vigo

Jean Vigo was a French film director, who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s and was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.-Biography:...

's documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 À propos de Nice

À propos de Nice

À propos de Nice is a 1930 silent short documentary film directed by Jean Vigo and photographed by Boris Kaufman. The film depicts life in Nice, France by documenting the people in the city, their daily routines, a carnival and social inequalities...

(1930).