Louis Malle

Black Moon

Black Moon

Louis Malle meets Lewis Carroll in this bizarre and bewitching trip down the rabbit hole. After skirting the horrors of a mysterious war being waged in the countryside, beautiful young Lily (Cathryn Harrison) takes refuge in a remote farmhouse, where she becomes embroiled in the surreal domestic life of an extremely unconventional family. Evocatively shot by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Black Moon is a Freudian tale of adolescent sexuality set in a postapocalyptic world of shifting identities and talking animals. It is one of Malle’s most experimental films and a cinematic daydream like no other.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1975
  • 100 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • English
  • Spine #571

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncom­pressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Archival video interview with director Louis Malle
  • Gallery of behind-the-scenes photos
  • Alternate French-dubbed soundtrack
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

    New cover by Yann Legendre

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncom­pressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Archival video interview with director Louis Malle
  • Gallery of behind-the-scenes photos
  • Alternate French-dubbed soundtrack
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

    New cover by Yann Legendre
Black Moon
Cast
Cathryn Harrison
Lily
Thérèse Ghiese
The old lady
Alexandra Stewart
The sister
Joe Dallesandro
The brother
Credits
Director
Louis Malle
Producer
Nouvelles Éditions de Films
Producer
Bioskop Munich
Written by
Louis Malle
Additional dialogue by
Joyce Buñuel
Production manager
Paul Maigret
Director of photography
Sven Nykvist
Editing
Suzanne Baron
Production design
Roland Thenot
Art direction
Ghislain Uhry
Assistant director
Fernand Moszkowicz
Sound
Nara Kollery
Sound effects by
Luc Perini
Musical supervisor
Diego Masson
Music
Richard Wagner

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Sven Nykvist

Cinematographer

Sven Nykvist
Sven Nykvist

Few cinematographers have been as influential as Ingmar Bergman’s close collaborator Sven Nykvist, who helped create such visual tours de force as The Silence, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander. A painter whose medium was natural light, a capturer of souls, Nykvist made every human portrait an X-ray, and every interior—whether austerely white or lavishly chromatic—an expressive canvas. Nykvist first worked with Bergman in 1953, when he was one of three cinematographers assigned to the director’s gloomy, twilit circus tale Sawdust and Tinsel. But their union truly began with The Virgin Spring—that savage medieval folk tale ushered in the new era of unsparing, gorgeously shot psychological portraits and open-air location photography that would take Bergman from the devastating God’s Silence trilogy to the richly life-affirming Fanny and Alexander. His work with Bergman made Nykvist an in-demand industry figure, and he would go on to shoot movies in Hollywood and beyond, for directors like Bob Rafelson, Bob Fosse, Philip Kaufman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Woody Allen. Nykvist died in 2006.