Soirée Cinéma: Le Corbeau

The film will be presented in French with English sub-titles by Steve Kao and a discussion will follow.

This is a free event, but donations are highly appreciated to support the Ciné-Club and continue building our video library collection.

Please bring snacks to share.

Note: this event will be held at the Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street, adjacent to the Alliance office.  Reservations are not required; please consider coming early to ensure yourself a seat!

A mysterious writer of poison-pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community’s calm surface. Made during the Nazi Occupation of France, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau was attacked by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press, the Catholic Church, and was banned after the Liberation. But some—including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre—recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot’s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate Clouzot’s directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeau brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem. (The Criterion Collection)