As a guest: Jean Douchet mit LITTLE FUGITIVE

Jean Douchet, born three years before Truffaut and a year before Godard, has been following French cinema closely for six decades. As a critic of Cahiers du cinéma, as an occasional actor (in Les 400 coups, among others), as a fellow traveler and enthusiast, and, since the 1980s, also as an analytical and passionate thinker on video and DVD, he belongs to the most important protagonists of Parisian cinéphilie. Sensation – feeling, percept and experience – is the key concept uniting his various ways of dealing with cinema. "To deeply feel a work and to communicate this enthusiasm is already an act of critique. Even if it's only done verbally." Douchet's cinema appearances in Paris are legendary; they have been taking place for many years as "Ciné-Club de Jean Douchet" in the Cinémathèque Française. L’art d'aimer – the title of his best-known text – takes place in the social situation of the movie theater under the immediate impression of the film and in a verbal, improvised and analytical form. At Arsenal, Douchet will speak about LITTLE FUGITIVE (Morris Engel, Ray Ashley, Ruth Orkin, USA 1953) after the screening, a film without which the Nouvelle Vague would not have evolved, according to Truffaut. A boy (like Jean-Pierre Léaud in Les 400 coups), who believes he has killed his brother, flees from Manhattan and rambles through Coney Island for two days (like Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle through Paris).