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).
Bernardo Bertolucci
PARTNER
1968, 112 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Italian and French with English subtitles.
“Giacobbe (Pierre Clémenti) is a frustrated drama student who is saved from suicide by a man who looks exactly like him. This other Giacobbe is suave and capable of action – qualities the first Giacobbe lacks. As the boundary between the two men begins to erode, Giacobbe II and his revolutionary ideas take over: he builds a guillotine, teaches his fellow students how to make Molotov cocktails, and unleashes a kind of theatrical anarchy onto the streets of Rome.” –Chris Shields, SCREEN SLATE
“An homage to the French New Wave, and more particularly to Jean-Luc Godard, who fascinated Bertolucci when he made this film, PARTNER is a Brechtian patchwork on schizophrenia haunted by the ghosts of Artaud and especially Dostoevsky (whose novel ‘The Double’ is obsessed with the dissolution of moral identity). The critique of consumer society in the context of the 1968 youth revolution is expressed through Roland Barthes, as Tina Aumont recites his essay ‘Soap-Powders and Detergents’ (from ‘Mythologies’), probing their political power of separation and purification. The film also slips in a nod to Cocteau, with Aumont's heavily made-up eyelids evoking ORPHEUS.” –Nina Verneret
Preceded by:
Paola Rispoli JAKOB IL REALE E SOSIA IL VERO (1968, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.)
“In this mysterious and magnificent small documentary, hardly ever seen or distributed…it is April 1968 and Bernardo Bertolucci is shooting PARTNER. We see him doing takes, retakes, discussing and giving directions. With him are the director of photography Ugo Piccone, as well as actors Pierre Clémenti, Tina Aumont, Ninetto Davoli… We can see that cinema for Bertolucci is constant exploration and self-exploration.” –Andrea Meneghelli
Total running time: ca. 125 min.
Fri, April 17 at 7:30, Sat, April 25 at 8:45, and Mon, April 27 at 7:30.
Philippe Garrel
LES HAUTES SOLITUDES
1974, 82 min, 35mm-to-DCP. No dialogue.
“Roland Barthes famously said, ‘Garbo’s is the Face, [Audrey] Hepburn’s is the Event.’ The facial showdown between Idea and Event is played out again in LES HAUTES SOLITUDES, Philippe Garrel’s black-and-white silent film of 1974.” –Jonathan Romney, FILM COMMENT
“Watching LES HAUTES SOLITUDES calls to mind Romain Gary’s suicide note: ‘Nothing to do with Jean Seberg.’ It is above all a portrait: filmed just a few years before Seberg’s disappearance, it captures in documentary fashion her pale, drawn face, her moments of despair, her swallowed pills, the suspension of a smile or a sidelong glance at the camera. Against this, Tina Aumont’s dark-haired silhouette and insouciant youth form a quiet counterpoint – self-absorbed, silky-skinned, unburdened. The PERSONA reference is inescapable. Like Bergman’s film, LES HAUTES SOLITUDES enacts a dialogue between two women who accompany and converse with each other, who embrace and support one another – though the editing keeps pulling them apart.” –Nina Verneret
Sat, April 18 at 6:45, Thurs, April 23 at 9:00, and Wed, April 29 at 9:00. The screening on Sat, April 18 will be followed by a discussion between series curator Nina Verneret and writer and editor Beatrice Loayza.
Philippe Garrel
THE VIRGIN’S BED / LE LIT DE LA VIERGE
1969, 95 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
In May 1968, Garrel joined his friends on the barricades of Paris, and THE VIRGIN’S BED, begun just a few months later, echoes with that period’s rebellious spirit. Clémenti plays a Christ reluctant to assume his earthly mission. As the Virgin Mary, Zouzou attempts to reconcile him with his duty. But Garrel invokes the Christian narrative only to reject a strict retelling of that story. Made without a script and under the influence of LSD, THE VIRGIN’S BED is minimally concerned with traditional religion. With an episodic and non-chronological narrative, Garrel’s film reminds us of the contestatory attitude of the ’68 generation for whom Jesus was a hippie avant la lettre.
Sat, April 18 at 9:00, Mon, April 20 at 6:30, and Thurs, April 23 at 6:30.
PIERRE CLÉMENTI PROGRAM
LA RÉVOLUTION N’EST QU’UN DÉBUT. CONTINUONS LE COMBAT
1968, 22 min, 16mm-to-DCP, silent. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.
“Pierre Clémenti’s [1968 film] follows the actor and filmmaker during the May ’68 protests, which occurred during the making of Bernardo Bertolucci’s PARTNER in Italy. The film documents Clémenti’s extensive travels between the demonstrations in Paris and the set of Bertolucci’s film in Rome, thereby capturing his double life as both activist and artist. Intercut with footage of student protests and police presence – which features indelible slogans like ‘Power to the imagination,’ ‘Theater in the streets,’ and ‘Poetry in the Streets’ – are layered images of family (such as his son Balthazar) and friends (including celebrated actor and singer Jean Pierre Kalfon [and Tina Aumont]).” –Jon Gartenberg
POSITANO
1969, 28 min, 16mm-to-DCP, silent. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.
“Perched on the rocks of the island [of Positano], the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became, in 1968, a meeting place for the French ‘underground.’ Clémenti lived in Pardo and Aumont’s house for some time and, in POSITANO, created images of dazzling sensuality. Beyond Clémenti’s infatuation with the faces and bodies he captures, often naked, in the Mediterranean landscape, the film reveals the beauty of a utopia where communal living and creativity was achieved at the height of the late 1960s counterculture.” –Jon Gartenberg
Total running time: ca. 55 min.
Sun, April 19 at 4:30. The screening will be introduced by writer and publisher Stephanie LaCava (whose Small Press Books published a translation of Clémenti’s “A Few Personal Messages” in 2022).
Giulio Questi
ARCANA
1972, 102 min, 35mm. In Italian with projected English subtitles. Print from the CSC-Cineteca Nazionale (Rome).
“To the viewers, this movie is not a story, but a card game. This is why the beginning is not credible, nor is the ending. You are the players. Play well and win.” –opening title of ARCANA
“Madame Tarantino (Lucia Bosé), a fraudulent psychic, runs a clairvoyant practice in which her unnamed son (Maurizio Degli Esposti) is the one who holds genuine supernatural powers. She is as manipulative as he is dark and brooding, which leads to a fixation on a young woman (Tina Aumont). Both corrupting forces – charlatanism and black magic – collide and sow chaos throughout the community.
As the word “arcana” suggests, mystery lies at the heart of the film. It remains deliberately unclear what the film is ultimately about: authoritarian governments, gender-assigned roles, the disintegration of patriarchal society, psychedelics, incest, repressed sexuality.
ARCANA is a parable of the palpable madness of 1970s Milan, where spiritualism serves to exorcise a community confined within the beliefs and superstitions of religion and a suffocating authoritarian society. The style is surrealist in its use of symbols – a donkey hoisted to the roof of a building, for instance – and thriller-like, hypnotic, somewhere between Buñuel and Jodorowsky. A box office failure upon its release, it is nonetheless a film that deserves to be rediscovered.” –Nina Verneret
Sun, April 19 at 6:30 and Sat, April 25 at 6:15.
Tinto Brass
THE HOWL / L’URLO
1968, 95 min, 35mm-to-DCP
“Cult film fans may know Tinto Brass for sleazy epics like CALIGULA (1979) and SALON KITTY (1976)…but there exists an earlier strand of his career, one altogether more offbeat and politically-charged, especially his trio of pop psychedelic experiments: DEADLY SWEET (1967), ATTRACTION (1969), and the trippiest, most mind-boggling of them all, THE HOWL, loosely inspired by the classic beatnik poem by Allen Ginsberg. A beautiful young bride named Anita (Tina Aumont) escapes oppressive modern society by jilting her conformist business tycoon fiancé at the altar and setting off on a wacky, globe-trotting adventure across increasingly bizarre lands. Her travelling companion is Coso, a Charlie Chaplinesque circus clown prone to surreal philosophical musings and outrageous disguises. Together these amiable anarchists visit a sex-club hotel (where Anita gets intimate with guests male, female, and animal), escape from a family of naked bourgeois cannibals living up a tree, encounter an array of talking animals and a philosophy-spouting rock, start a riot in a political prison, liberate a town from a sadistic army, battle a wind-up midget dictator and freak-out in psychedelic orgies with naked hippie girls. […] At the center of the whirlwind rests a super-charged performance from Tina Aumont, who remains articulate and captivating with her extraordinarily expressive, doe-like eyes, no matter how off-the-wall Brass’ imagination gets.” –Andrew Pragasam, THE SPINNING IMAGE
Sun, April 19 at 9:00, Wed, April 22 at 9:00, and Sat, April 25 at 3:45.
Sergio Martino
TORSO
1973, 90 min, 35mm-to-DCP
A towering terror from the end of the 1970s giallo boom, TORSO finds director Sergio Martino reveling in the genre’s time-honored traditions while also laying the groundwork for the modern slasher. It delivers copious violence, sleaze, and one of the tensest cat-and-mouse games ever committed to celluloid. A maniac prowls the streets of Perugia, targeting attractive university students. Alarmed at the plummeting life expectancy of the student body, Jane (Suzy Kendall) and her friends (including Tina Aumont) elope to a secluded country villa to discover that, far from having left the terror behind, they’ve brought it with them…
Mon, April 20 at 9:00 and Tues, April 28 at 8:45.
Federico Fellini
FELLINI’S CASANOVA
1976, 155 min, 35mm. In English, Italian, French, and German with English subtitles.
“Fellini’s most extravagant and courageous dream. […] Fellini’s version of the life of Casanova is similar to an effulgent carnival. The film is permeated with a grandiose style, so brilliant in visual effects that the sexuality of the hero becomes more comic than concupiscent. Although Fellini had read most, if not all, of Casanova’s autobiography (twelve volumes!), he makes the episodes of seduction a showcase for his own philosophies of life from youth to old age. The casting, mostly from open calls, exhibits the director’s quest for unusual faces; Casanova is a gallery of grotesques. There seems to be some conjecture about how Donald Sutherland was cast as Casanova, because his enactment of the role is strictly symbolic. The opening sequence of the film, with its stunning imagery of Venice at carnival time, the gigantic head of Venus rising from the Grand Canal, prepares one for an onslaught of memorable images.” –Albert Johnson, FILM QUARTERLY
Tues, April 21 at 7:15, Fri, April 24 at 7:00, and Thurs, April 30 at 7:15.
Ivan Galietti
ANTI STAR TINA AUMONT
2025 (work in progress), ca. 30 min, digital. In English, French, and Italian with English subtitles.
This program features an extended excerpt from ANTI STAR TINA AUMONT, a work-in-progress portrait of Tina Aumont by her longtime friend, artist and filmmaker Ivan Galietti (POMPEII NEW YORK). Through private moments, never-before-seen interviews, and film clips, this homage attempts to reveal the human being beyond the media clichés.
Preceded by:
Frédéric Pardo
HOME MOVIE: NEW YORK
1968, 20 min, 8mm-to-DCP, silent. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.
Total running time: ca. 55 min.
Wed, April 22 at 6:45 and Wed, April 29 at 7:00. Ivan Galietti will be here in person for both screenings!
FRÉDÉRIC PARDO PROGRAM
Artist and filmmaker Frédéric Pardo was a key member of the Zanzibar Group, a radical filmmaking collective in the late 1960s that included Philippe Garrel, Jackie Raynal, Serge Bard, and others. Pardo documented the activities of the Group, and more generally of the radical French culture of the time, by means of numerous 8mm “home movies.” The most widely-screened of these films was shot in 1968 on the Morocco set of Garrel’s THE VIRGIN’S BED, but focuses less on its ostensible stars (Pierre Clémenti and Zouzou) than on the other participants, including Pierre-Richard Bré, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Babette Lamy, and above all, the luminous Tina Aumont. Here we screen the film alongside two of Pardo’s other silent 8mm films that focus on or prominently feature Aumont.
HOME MOVIE: TINA AUMONT (1968, 8.5 min, 8mm-to-DCP, silent. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.)
HOME MOVIE: ON THE SET OF PHILIPPE GARREL’S ‘LE LIT DE LA VIERGE’ / HOME MOVIE, AUTOUR DU ‘LIT DE LA VIERGE’
1968, 39 min, 8mm-to-DCP, silent. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.
GARREL, NICO, FREDERIC ET TINA, APPARTEMENT RUE DUPONT DES LOGES (1970, 16.5 min, 8mm-to-DCP, silent. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.)
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sun, April 26 at 4:00.
Robert Siodmak
COBRA WOMAN
1944, 72 min, 35mm. With Maria Montez.
“At least in America a Maria Montez could believe she was the Cobra Woman, the Siren of Atlantis, Scheherezade, etc. She believed and thereby made the people who went to her movies believe. […] Don’t slander her beautiful womanliness that took joy in her own beauty and all beauty – or whatever in her that turned plaster cornball sets to beauty. Her eye saw not just beauty but incredible, delirious, drug-like hallucinatory beauty. The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into sets. They achieved only inept approximations. But one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and truth.” –Jack Smith
Preceded by:
Jack Smith JUNGLE ISLAND aka REEFERS OF TECHNICOLOR ISLAND (1967, 15 min, 16mm)
“Jack Smith’s 1967 program ‘Horror and Fantasy at Midnight’ featured a number of individual titles – ‘film clips from the subterranean chambers of Dr. Madman!’ – including REEFERS OF TECHNICOLOR ISLAND/JUNGLE ISLAND, SCRUBWOMAN OF ATLANTIS (both in ‘Livid Color!!’), RATDROPPINGS OF URANUS, MARSHGAS OF FLATULANDIA, THE FLAKE OF SOOT, and OVERSTIMULATED. The latter aside, REEFERS/JUNGLE ISLAND is the only one of these found as a stand-alone film – it also received the most press. Jonas Mekas’s Village Voice review cited a movie that ‘starred a most beautiful marijuana plant, a gorgeous blooming white queen with her crown reaching towards the sky.’ At some point, Smith combined this with footage of another queen – Mario Montez – seemingly shot on the beach in Florida.” –J. Hoberman
Sun, April 26 at 6:00 and Tues, April 28 at 6:45.
Jack Smith
NORMAL LOVE
1963, 120 min, 16mm. With Mario Montez.
“Backed by Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith embarked on a ‘commercial’ follow-up to FLAMING CREATURES in mid 1963: ‘I spent my summer out in the country shooting a lovely, pasty, pink and green color movie that is going to be the definitive pasty expression. All the characters wear pink evening gowns and smirk and stare into the camera.’ The Great Pasty Triumph, known briefly as The Pink and Green Horrors and eventually retitled NORMAL LOVE, was very much a film of its season. With the exception of several scenes staged around the Moon Pool, a candle-lit, incense-shrouded, mirror-strewn altar to Maria Montez, which Smith had assembled in the midst of an East Village apartment, it was strictly back to nature – shot variously in rural New Jersey, on Fire Island, in Queens, and at Old Lyme, Connecticut. The dominant colors are pink and green – fittingly, one scene is a ceremonial watermelon feast. ‘Rubens. Arabian Nights. Chinese Masters. Monet,’ Jonas Mekas rhapsodized after seeing the first rushes. In fact, NORMAL LOVE suggests a pastoral, pastel-colored conflation of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, THE MUMMY’S HAND, and THE SPIDER WOMAN; for Smith’s fellow Montez-enthusiast Ronald Travel, NORMAL LOVE was a work that obviously drew ‘its look, its feel, its colors, images, and backyard fairy moth sheen directly from WHITE SAVAGE.’” –J. Hoberman
Sun, April 26 at 8:00.
Plus:
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Jack Smith
FLAMING CREATURES
1963, 45 min, 16mm, b&w
Fri, April 10 at 6:45.
