Marcel Hanoun - Octobre à Madrid

An ambitious film, disarming in its simplicity, Octobre à Madrid (October in Madrid) is the prototypical “film about film” that every filmmaker dreams of. That’s what Hanoun has filmed here: the life of the filmmaker as a film in the making; the blurring and reversing of the boundaries between desire and work, film and life. -JEAN-LOUIS COMOLLI

Marcel Hanoun’s film Octobre à Madrid (October in Madrid) (1964) is the film that has most haunted and nourished me for over forty years. With Octobre à Madrid, Hanoun formulated the template for his future artistic practice: the film is dominated by a critical consideration of camerawork and cinematic writing; no attention is given to psychological considerations or dramatic continuity. The filmmaker uses his hesitations, doubts and challenging working conditions as the very material of his work. This is one of the first film-essays of French cinema; it must be seen.
-RAPHAËL BASSAN

Though Hanoun spent much of his career representing mental operations and psychic unrest as the practice of filmmaking, October in Madrid is singularly dense with traces of life outside the mind. It might best be characterized as “a film about making a film about one’s inability to make a film,” yet it nevertheless manages to touch upon something tangible and human amid its playful self-reflexivity. It is a near-masterpiece for anyone who is on intimate terms with the feeling of failure.
-DAN SULLIVAN