Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

LA FILLE DES ÉTOILES: TINA AUMONT

April 17 – April 30

April 17-30, 2026

“I need films more than I need a man or children because when I make cinema I feel like I’m where I belong.” –Tina Aumont

Tina Aumont was born on Valentine’s Day, 1946, in Hollywood, California, the daughter of the “queen of technicolor” Maria Montez and French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. Over her cradle, Cocteau wrote her a poem: she was “la Fille aux étoiles” (the Girl of Stars). Like a star – or a comet – she traversed a chapter of cinema history from the 1960s through the 2000s.

True to her charmed birth, Tina – more than the embodiment of the artistic and sexual freedom of the 1970s – was mythological: she exchanges lines with Pierre Clémenti while reciting Roland Barthes, her eyelids painted in homage to Orpheus in Bernardo Bertolucci’s PARTNER (1968), and plays a young bride who embarks on a psychedelic journey in Tinto Brass’s THE HOWL (1970). She is an irresistible courtesan in two adaptations of Casanova (Comencini’s in 1969 and Fellini’s in 1976), and had already been queen of the bacchanals in Gian Luigi Polidoro’s SATYRICON (1969).

It was while exiled in France that she became, among other things, Philippe Garrel’s muse in LES HAUTES SOLITUDES (1974), which consists of intertwined portraits in sublime black and white of three actresses: Aumont, Jean Seberg, and Nico. Earlier she had appeared, again with Clémenti, in Garrel’s THE VIRGIN’S BED, a non-violent parable denouncing the police repression of 1968.

Her filmography is inscribed within a history of cinema that constantly references itself. Tina’s mythos begins with cult culture and the influence of her mother Maria Montez, who had borrowed her name from the scandalous 19th-century dancer Lola Montez and would in turn give her name to Warhol star Mario Montez. Maria would exert a major influence on the great underground filmmaker Jack Smith, who celebrated her for her performativeness: “She believed and thereby made the people who went to her movies believe.” In 1963, Smith’s NORMAL LOVE and FLAMING CREATURES, as well as Ken Jacobs’s Smith-starring BLONDE COBRA, all paid tribute to Maria Montez.

We must continue to talk about Tina Aumont, just as we celebrate actors and actresses whose lives were marked by the excesses of art and the era: worn-out and fallen stars such as Maria Schneider, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Pierre Clémenti, Björn Andrésen, Ari Boulogne… But we must also remember that the diversity of her films forms a constellation of artistic choices of which she was the initiator – she was a muse who continuously expressed herself artistically but whom cinema never fully recognized.

This series is an homage to Aumont, the woman with cat eyes who discreetly withdrew from the world to the Eastern Pyrenees in 2006. In her final film, LA MÉCANIQUE DES FEMMES (2000) by Jérôme de Missolz, she punctuates her acting career with a monologue that speaks volumes about her subversion and autonomy: “Do you know who I am? A debauchee, lustful, corrupt, unruly, sensual, immoral, libertine, dissolute, voluptuous, naughty, a fucker, depraved, immodest, vicious, and despite all that I want to be loved.”

Guest-programmed by Nina Verneret, who wrote the series introduction.

Special thanks to Carmen Accaputo (Cineteca di Bologna); Jean Azarel; Nico B (Cult Epics); Bret Berg & Jenny Nulf (American Genre Film Archive); Balthazar Clémenti; Eric Di Bernardo (Rialto Pictures); Silvia Finazzi, Simona Agnoli, and Francesco Bonerba (Cinecittà); Ivan Galietti; Matthew Gray (Andy Warhol Museum); Matthieu Grimault & Emilie Cauquy (Cinémathèque Française); Jason Jackowski (Universal); Brett Kashmere & Zachary Epcar (Canyon Cinema); Annamaria Licciardello (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia–Cineteca Nazionale); Jake Perlin & Andrew Adair (The Film Desk); and Julia Petrocelli (Film-Makers’ Coop).

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