As Executive Director of the French Film Office UniFrance Films USA, the leading proponent of the Frenchfilm industry in the US, Catherine Verret-Vimont had a unique opportunity to casually photograph many of the visiting French directors and actors.
New York mon amour, A View of French Cinema by Catherine Verret-Vimont, opens at the Furman Gallery at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theatre. Catherine Verret-Vimont has put together an exhibition of 95 photos capturing the likes of, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Reno, Danièle Thompson, Costa-Gavras, Barbet Schroeder, Bulle Ogier, Benoît Jacquot, Bruno Dumont, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Claude Lelouch, Patrice Chereau, Arnaud Desplechin, Xavier Beauvois, Lambert Wilson, Jeanne Moreau and so many other French actors and filmmakers we all know so well.
Acclaimed Photographer/Filmmaker/Artist William Klein comments:
“Catherine Verret has been for years the ambassador of French cinema in the US, she has also been the photographic eye of Paris in New York. I wasn’t aware of her second career.
Seeing her photographs, I’m knocked out and a bit jealous. She has not only captured the most delicious and peaceful invasion of great French actors and directors but created an essential family album with everyone we admired and loved.
De Tocqueville opened the way for a French take on the US, Catherine has become the Française à New York. An essential witness to the French cinema’s conquest of New York.
Depardieu, Deneuve, Huppert, Costa-Gavras, Claude Berri, Varda, Tavernier, Bouquet, Claire Denis…
How we’d like to know them. Who wouldn’t want to show New York to Depardieu and Deneuve? And vice versa.
A pity, it’s too late. But thanks to Catherine Verret not completely. We get to know them better. We’re grateful, so many thanks, she was there and now so are we.
Paris à New York, quel beau cadeau. A moving film of years of work with a unique vision.”
William Klein, An american in Paris</em.
As cultural critic and author Leslie Camhi writes, “A family, with its grand passions, profound complicities, and complicated histories invisible to all but the most knowing eye–such is the image of French cinema that the photographs of Catherine Verret-Vimont reveal to us. Who knew that for some three decades, this tireless advocate of her nation’s cinema, who as Director of the New York office of UniFrance Films, introduced a new generation of French auteurs and actors to American audiences, was also wielding her camera, with infinite discretion and with lightening speed, to capture the network of relationships that brings film to life? (Full disclosure; Verret-Vimont took one of my favorite pictures of myself, a young film critic at the time, without my ever knowing it). Employing diplomatic stealth and an artist’s intuition, Catherine remained alert to every nuance of gesture and expression; a director’s intense gaze settling upon his favorite actor; an auteur and his producer, heads inclined, conniving in a corner; the casual intimacy, born of long hours of creative work together, that unites megawatt stars or newly minted ingénues and their directors. These photographs also speak of another love story—that one between the world of French cinema and the city that is part fantasy, and part second home to it.”
New York mon amour, A View of French Cinema by Catherine Verret-Vimont, is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in association with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and UniFrance Films.
On view until October 4th, 2011
The Furman Gallery at the Film Society of Lincoln’s Center’s
Walter Reade Theatre
165 West 65th Street
New York
