The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg)

Jacques Demy, 1964, 91 min., restored in 2024
Screening followed by a discussion with Walter Frisch and Jane Gaines

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a 1964 musical romantic drama film written and directed by Jacques Demy, with music by Michel Legrand. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo star as two young lovers in the French city of Cherbourg, separated by circumstance. The film's dialogue is entirely sung as recitative.

It has been seen as the second of four films by Demy films that share some of the same actors, characters, and overall atmosphere of romantic melancholy, coming after Lola (1961) and before The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Model Shop (1969). 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d'Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Original Screenplay (Demy), and Best Original Score (Demy and Legrand), and Best Original Song. 

Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm / Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia, where he has taught since 1982.  He is writing a book on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for a new Oxford University Press series, Oxford Guides to Film Musicals, drawing on research in the French archives of filmmaker Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand that was undertaken with a fellowship at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination at Reid Hall in Paris.  In Spring 2024, Frisch participated in the film music course offered by Professors Jane Gaines and Benjamin Steege, helping create a bridge between musicology and film music studies.  

Jane M. Gaines is Professor of Film, Columbia University, and Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University. She  received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Award and an Honorary doctorate from University of Stockholm. She is author of three award-winning books: Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law (North Carolina, 1991),  Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001) and Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Illinois, 2018) and is working on What Happened?: Documentary Media and Historical Time. She also writes on media piracy, documentary radicalism and moving image melodrama. Her articles on feminism and film, early cinema, and critical race theory have appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Studies, Framework, Camera Obscura, and Women and Performance and most recently In Media Res.

Host or Publisher CU Maison Française