Un carnet de bal (Spiel der Erinnerung)

Christine de Guérande (Marie Bell), a well-to-do and still young widow, finds the dance card from her first ball. She was just 16 years old at the time. Now, over a decade later, she decides to travel back into her own past and seek out all her former dance partners, whose names are immortalized in a ball booklet. But the return to a time when a promising future seemed to be on the horizon for the young men, fueled by a melancholy longing, turns out to be a carousel of disappointed illusions from station to station. Un carnet de bal was a huge success with audiences and popularized the episodic film genre. (R.E.) Bertrand Tavernier: "The inspiration, the visual ingenuity and the emotional power of the first flashback, the first evocation of the ball, left me speechless."

Photo: Austrian Film Museum