Sometimes seen as the enfant terrible of French cinema in the late 1980s and early ’90s, chiefly because of the glorious folly that was Les amants du Pont-Neuf, Leos Carax is in fact an enigmatic figure who identifies strongly with the magic and joy of silent cinema. His striking debut feature Boy Meets Girl is set in a moody Paris cityscape peopled by all manner of losers and marginal figures. Alex (played by Carax regular Denis Lavant) contrives at length to get it together with the beautiful Mireille Perrier. The loose construction and doses of philosophising are offset by the film’s vividly conceived visual transformation of the French capital into an evocative monochrome dreamland. Carax’s admiration for silent films at their most surreal or expressionistic has never seemed so clear.

The screening will be introduced by Dr. Alban Pichon from the Universite Bordeaux, who has written extensively on the films of Leos Carax. Dr. Pichon will give a short presentation before the film on French cinema from the 1980s and outline some of the recurring motifs in Carax’s work.