Claire Simon
Each Life is a Novel
January 17 to February 24, 2025
Here in Austria, the major work of French filmmaker Claire Simon remains almost unknown. Simon, a regular guest with her films at international festivals – her most recent work Apprendre (2024) premiered in Cannes – has been making extraordinary work for over forty years, including both documentaries and features, radically examining the private and political. It is no accident that Annie Ernaux is among her admirers: In a conversation with the filmmaker, Ernaux analyzed the parallels between her own literature and Simon's work, highlighting the similarities in their perception of the world – Claire Simon's work as a kind of filmic autofiction.
Born in 1955, Claire Simon came to film as an autodidact. After studying anthropology in Paris and spending time in Algeria, she directed her first short films in the 1980s, initially finding work as an editor. Her understanding of film was forever shaped by her training at the legendary Paris workshop Varan: She committed herself to a cinema which is directly linked to the everyday and her own biography, and which is marked by as much artistic autonomy as possible. In many of her films, she is not only responsible for direction, script, and editing, but is often her own camerawoman too. She first came to international recognition in the early 1990s with Récréations (1993), a raw documentary study of the almost surreal-seeming recess incidents in her daughter's schoolyard.
The direct relation between her own life (and that of her child) and society is the focus of her filmmaking: This is clear in her star-studded, semi-documentary story of sexual freedom and reproductive rights Les bureaux de Dieu (2008) and the empathetic portrait of a 17-year-old high school student in Premières solitudes (2018). In Le concours (2016), she takes a (self-)critical look behind the curtain of the admissions process at the Parisian film school La Fémis (she was head of the school's directing department) and in Apprendre, too, her new portrait of an elementary school, the microcosmos of a school appears in a thoroughly ambivalent manner.
"Each life is a novel," this credo and her feminist engagement (Simon is a member of the political film group Collectif 50/50) consistently correspond with a kind of filmmaking at the center of which women always play the lead role while resourcefully pursuing the potential of reality and fiction in cinema: There is a straight line from her moving early portrait Mimi (2002) to the chamber drama inspired by a Marguerite Duras text, Vous ne désirez que moi (2021), and her masterpiece shot in a Parisian women's clinic, Notre Corps (2022), which once again brings together the lifelong subjects of her work into a major documentary epic. (Andrea Pollach, Constantin Wulff / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Claire Simon will be at the Film Museum to talk about her films (in English). We will show the Austrian premiere of her newest film Apprendre.
In collaboration with Filmakademie Wien and Institut français d'Autriche
Here in Austria, the major work of French filmmaker Claire Simon remains almost unknown. Simon, a regular guest with her films at international festivals – her most recent work Apprendre (2024) premiered in Cannes – has been making extraordinary work for over forty years, including both documentaries and features, radically examining the private and political. It is no accident that Annie Ernaux is among her admirers: In a conversation with the filmmaker, Ernaux analyzed the parallels between her own literature and Simon's work, highlighting the similarities in their perception of the world – Claire Simon's work as a kind of filmic autofiction.
Born in 1955, Claire Simon came to film as an autodidact. After studying anthropology in Paris and spending time in Algeria, she directed her first short films in the 1980s, initially finding work as an editor. Her understanding of film was forever shaped by her training at the legendary Paris workshop Varan: She committed herself to a cinema which is directly linked to the everyday and her own biography, and which is marked by as much artistic autonomy as possible. In many of her films, she is not only responsible for direction, script, and editing, but is often her own camerawoman too. She first came to international recognition in the early 1990s with Récréations (1993), a raw documentary study of the almost surreal-seeming recess incidents in her daughter's schoolyard.
The direct relation between her own life (and that of her child) and society is the focus of her filmmaking: This is clear in her star-studded, semi-documentary story of sexual freedom and reproductive rights Les bureaux de Dieu (2008) and the empathetic portrait of a 17-year-old high school student in Premières solitudes (2018). In Le concours (2016), she takes a (self-)critical look behind the curtain of the admissions process at the Parisian film school La Fémis (she was head of the school's directing department) and in Apprendre, too, her new portrait of an elementary school, the microcosmos of a school appears in a thoroughly ambivalent manner.
"Each life is a novel," this credo and her feminist engagement (Simon is a member of the political film group Collectif 50/50) consistently correspond with a kind of filmmaking at the center of which women always play the lead role while resourcefully pursuing the potential of reality and fiction in cinema: There is a straight line from her moving early portrait Mimi (2002) to the chamber drama inspired by a Marguerite Duras text, Vous ne désirez que moi (2021), and her masterpiece shot in a Parisian women's clinic, Notre Corps (2022), which once again brings together the lifelong subjects of her work into a major documentary epic. (Andrea Pollach, Constantin Wulff / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Claire Simon will be at the Film Museum to talk about her films (in English). We will show the Austrian premiere of her newest film Apprendre.
In collaboration with Filmakademie Wien and Institut français d'Autriche
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