Recommended

"For me," Luc Moullet wrote, "there isn't intelligence and stupidity, but intelligence-stupidity." A Cahiers critic who championed Samuel Fuller as an "intelligent primitive," Moullet turned to directing well after his comrades (Godard, Truffaut, et al.), and has been playing catch-up ever since. With one exception, the movies in International House's "5 Comic Films" showcase are emphatically unserious, teetering concatenations of moth-eaten gags splintered with Dadaist verve. Moullet has said his "main aim is to make people laugh," but he lacks the killer instinct of a natural comedian. Even though his features typically run less than 90 minutes, they're never rushed; for all their frenetic dislocations, they're somehow restful.

Fond of barren landscapes, blackout gags and Sisyphean slopes, Moullet is, like the Parisian rebels of May 1968, "Marxiste, tendence Groucho," a slapstick anarchist who expresses his hostility to the modern world by refusing to take it seriously. In The Comedy of Work (1987), the series' most recent salvo, mountaineers stop off between Peru and Everest to sign up for unemployment benefits, while a construction worker brags of working overtime to pay for his second home, only to drop dead and be buried in his own trench. It's hard to say whether Moullet expects to get a laugh from a line like, "I had to fall in love with a Stakhanovite!" or from the oddness of attempting to mine humor from an obscure Soviet movement. Chances are, he'd be happy with either.

Moullet's earliest features, represented by Brigitte and Brigitte (1966), bear the unmistakable imprint of his friend Godard, but even when Moullet's movies come second, they feel like the originals. Band of Outsiders may have come first, but Brigitte is a fresher, more inventive take on Parisian youth culture, liberated from Godard's grumpy ambivalence. Rather than would-be gangsters, Moullet's protagonists are two identically named but radically dissimilar college students: a right-wing brunette from the Pyrenees and a blonde communist from the Alps. Moullet indulges Godardian cinephilia, cramming in a Sam Fuller cameo so brief it makes his appearance in Pierrot le fou seem positively indulgent, while simultaneously lampooning it: One ardent movie buff proclaims his desire to "die watching a film," while another pulls a list from his pocket to prove that Alfred Hitchcock is the third-worst director of all time. (Brigitte is preceded by Attempt at an Opening, a wicked, deadpan short purportedly detailing Moullet's lifelong attempts to open a bottle of Coca-Cola.)

A Girl Is a Gun (1971) pulls a bait-and-switch on the psychedelic Western. In striped pants and a floppy pageboy, New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud plays a gunslinger pursued through a barren, shape-shifting wilderness, aided, or maybe misled, by a heavily tanned, blue eye-shadowed vixen (Rachel Kesterber). Originally titled Une aventure de Billy le Kid, Moullet's bricolage oater was aptly, if impossibly, described by its creator as "a marriage of Duel in the Sun and Les dames du bois de Boulogne." Generally comic, Moullet's dislocations reach an unsettling pitch; the movie's sideways leaps induce a bit of Sartrean nausea. Dubbed into purposefully awkward English, Girl gives the stick-thin Léaud a booming Randolph Scott bass, the better to intone lines like, "Just beyond the snow is the Mexican border," and "I wondered how they found my trail so fast. Now I know. They got a dog." It's hard to imagine the movie working as well in its original language.

The series' most atypical entry is Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), co-directed with Moullet's wife Antonietta Pizzorno. With Moullet as himself and Christine Hébert as an obvious Pizzorno stand-in, Anatomy dissects in painful detail the sexual dysfunction in its makers' marriage. Hébert demands clitoral orgasms, and Moullet lamely parries, "It's just a matter of an inch or so -- it's all part of the same system." Calling himself "the first victim" of the sexual revolution, Moullet paradoxically comes off the better of the two, or at least the more willing to bear the ugliest parts of himself; even a joke sequence observing that sewer holes are perfectly sized to swallow up film canisters betrays a trace of vaginal horror. After an abrupt false ending, Pizzorno appears for a three-way postmortem in which she laments not playing herself, a self-reflexive U-turn that only underscores the movie's mood of failure. Appropriately for a film so concerned with castration anxiety, both versions end with a woman saying, "Cut."

After its Philadelphia run, the Moullet retrospective will travel to New York, Boston and other cities, and, sadly, curator Michael Chaiken will go with it. After four years heading Film at International House, Chaiken and his unparalleled collection of bootleg videotapes will be heading north to Manhattan to work with famed documentarian Albert Maysles. A stalwart keeper of the flame, Chaiken's programming has inestimably enriched the city's film culture, bucking anti-repertory trends and giving sustenance to the faithful (including a few alt-weekly critics I can think of). His departure impoverishes an already punchy film scene, whose thready pulse City Paper will take in coming weeks, but Chaiken hopes to continue curating for I-House on a contract basis, and of course, our loss is Maysles' gain. As they say in Barton Fink, we'll be hearing from that kid -- and I don't mean a postcard.

Luc Moullet: 5 Comic Films International House, Jan. 20–22