Week 40/2025

This week, De Cinema is showing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a film that irrevocably influenced American cinema. Marion Crane, weighed down by her circumstances, seizes the chance to start anew by absconding with $40,000 of her employer’s money. Her journey leads her to the remote Bates Motel, presided over by Norman Bates and his unseen mother. Remembered above all for its infamous shower scene, Psycho endures because it cuts to the quick of our anxieties: the fear of crime, of the law, of madness, and of disappointing our mothers. This screening is part of the “Mommie Dearest”-series, in which De Cinema explores the power of motherhood and our perception of the “ideal” mother in cinema.

On Tuesday, KASKcinema screens Carrie (1976), Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. Few filmmakers have embraced Hitchcock’s legacy as openly as De Palma, who borrows and transforms the master’s techniques into his own filmic vocabulary. Vertigo’s circling embrace reappears in the prom sequence of Carrie, where adolescent dreams dissolve into a nightmare. Echoes of Psycho also resound in Pino Donaggio’s score, whose piercing violins pay homage to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking strings. The screening will be introduced by media scholar Ben De Smet, in collaboration with Film-Plateau.

On Thursday, Palace pays tribute to Chantal Akerman, who passed away on 5 October 2015, with a screening of her debut feature Je tu il elle (1974). On this occasion, filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, once a student of Akerman at Harvard, will introduce the screening via video. The commemorations continue on Sunday at CINEMATEK with Demain on déménage (2003). The screening, preceded by a presentation of make-up and costume tests by cinematographer Sabine Lancelin, will be shown in a restored version.