Saturday June 6, 2026 from 4:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.
In front of the entrance to the Beaux-Arts, the emblematic Ford Mustang 184 from the film A Man and a Woman welcomes visitors: symbol of the filmmaker’s philosophy, speed as the language of desire, movement as the only way to love.
The engine and Love
Claude Lelouch’s cinema is characterized by passion, sincerity, audacity… his dazzling love stories, his romantic vision of existence, the sometimes cruel beauty of chances and coincidences.
What connects all these films is an intimate conviction: we only encounter love in movement. Never stopping. Love is the reward for those who dare to rush – in a car, on the run, in dance, in music. His characters are always beings in motion. Neither superhero nor super villain, he loves everyday life. The engine is never an end in itself: it is the courage to move towards the other. Because stopping, for Lelouch, it’s a bit like dying and to love is first of all to dare to rush towards the other.*
When you’re a man of action like me, you go for it. We look a little in the retro but not too much. Claude Lelouch,
This idea of going for it will lead to the film A Man and a Woman. At the creation of this 7th feature film, Claude Lelouch, in despair, following multiple cinematic failures, left by car from Paris at night. The road takes him to Deauville. In the early morning he sees a woman walking on the beach with her child, a car is driving towards her… the idea for a scenario springs up.
It was a meeting (1976) – Philosophy in its pure state
Nine minutes. A single sequence shot. Paris in the early morning of August 15, 1976, still asleep and deserted. A car crosses the city at crazy speed – red lights blown, forbidden directions ignored, pigeons flying off in disaster at Place du Tertre. And at the end of the journey, on the Butte Montmartre: a meeting with a woman.
This short film is perhaps the work where Lelouch’s philosophy is revealed in its purest form. No dialogue. No story. Only an engine roaring, a city crossed like a declaration of love, and the certainty that someone is waiting for you. No tricks – you have to arrive on time with the 300 meters of reels available. The film is an equation in images: the engine pulses, the action demonstrates, love rewards.
The love that makes you lose your head, disregarding the highway code. He who is in a hurry to love is not subject to accidents. Claude Lelouch, about It Was a Date
Le Boléro – Les Uns et les Autres (1981) – The absolute synthesis
In Les Uns et les Autres, Lelouch films four families – Russian, French, German, American – over three generations, from the interwar period to the 1980s. All are united by a single common thread: the love of music and dance.
The entire film exists only to make its final scene possible: nineteen minutes of Ravel’s Boléro, choreographed by Maurice Béjart, danced by Jorge Donn on the square in front of the Trocadéro in front of two thousand spectators. A unique melody, repeated endlessly, which rises inexorably – like there is only one human story, replayed from generation to generation with the same loving urgency.
I listened to my film before seeing it, and I realized the importance of the Bolero. It was going to be at the heart of the device, since it is the heart of humanity which beats in the film. Claude Lelouch,
Jorge Donn was not a great dance technician. But he had something better: an absolute presence, an authenticity that crossed the screen. Exactly the “scent of truth” that Lelouch has always been hunting for.
The Boléro presented is a second montage by Claude Lelouch produced for the symphonic film show which took place at the Palais des Congrès for his 60th career in November 2022.
Installation — La Sincérité des regards
The last space of this immersion is devoted to views. This device was designed and produced thanks to the assistance of apprentices from Claude Lelouch’s cinema workshops.
On several simultaneous screens, fragments of Lelouch’s work capture those seconds when an actor stops playing and communicates something true. This is what the “scent of truth” is: that elusive moment where the border between fiction and life disappears.
To obtain these flashes of authenticity, Lelouch uses almost clandestine methods: giving the text to the actors in the morning to perform it in the afternoon, filming without warning, shooting in a single take in real locations. Surprise creates truth. Movement releases emotion.
There is a radio frequency between people who love each other. My role is to connect my camera to that frequency. Claude Lelouch,
Interactive screen trailers… 60 years of love of cinema, 51 films!
The trailers are films in their own right in the cinema of Claude Lelouch. Everyone can choose the trailer(s) they want to see. Each film represents a particular love
Love as a destination
Lelouch has often said that life is the greatest storyteller. That its eight billion inhabitants give eight billion different scenarios. But deep down, for him, all these scenarios tell the same story: someone rushing towards someone else, with all their energy, all their speed, all their love.
The motor pulses. Action demonstrates. The music carries away. The look reveals. And now, thanks to the masterclass, you know it from the inside: love on screen is not a cinema illusion. It’s life captured on the fly, by someone who decided, more than sixty years ago, to never stop chasing after it.
At the end of all this movement – at the end of the night road in A Man and a Woman, at the end of crossing Paris in C’tait un rendez-vous, at the end of the nineteen minutes of Boléro, at the end of your own improvised scene with him – there is always someone waiting. This is Claude Lelouch’s cinema. A meeting. And this meeting today is with you.
Three seconds of happiness can justify sixty years of hassle. Claude Lelouch,
Saturday June 6, 2026 from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
A conversation without a net
Claude Lelouch will host an exceptional masterclass in the company of Jean Ollé-Laprune and Yves Allion, co-authors of his book Cinema, it’s better than life. In the very spirit of his cinema – without a prepared script, without definitive formulas – he shares his method, his relationship with actors, the birth of his films, the fundamental role of music, and the permanent hunt for the “scent of truth”.
There’s one thing no one else can do. This is Claude Lelouch explaining to you, live, how he creates love on screen. Why he films himself. Why he sometimes gives a different text to each actor. Why he chooses music before knowing what he is going to film.
As part of this sleepless night, Claude Lelouch will host an exceptional masterclass accompanied by Jean Ollé-Laprune and Yves Allion, co-authors of his book Cinema, it’s better than life – for an open, lively conversation, in its own spirit: without a net, without a prepared script, with the audience as a partner. Because only Lelouch can make Lelouch.
Only people who act exist. Claude Lelouch,
Nothing is written in advance
At the heart of the masterclass, Lelouch develops his deepest conviction: in life as in cinema, nothing is written in advance. We never know the end. The screenplay is not a road map – it is at most a starting point. What matters is what happens along the way: the actor who says a line wrong and reveals something truer than the intended text, the light that changes at the last moment, the passerby who enters the frame without having been invited.
These accidents, these derailments of reality… Lelouch does not fight them. He expects them. He hopes for them. He considers them as gifts.
Chance is God who travels incognito. Claude Lelouch,
This sentence sums it all up. Chance, for Lelouch, is not a threat to the story – it is his most precious chance. Chance is life that invites itself onto the set.
He calls these moments “miracles”. Not in the religious sense, but in the cinematographic and human sense of the term: those seconds when something happens in front of the camera that should never have happened, that will never happen again, and that alone contains more truth than hours of preparation. A trembling look. A smile that hesitates. A silence that says it all. These are the miracles that Lelouch spends his entire life watching for – the camera on his shoulder, his eyes always open, ready to capture the unpredictable.
I believe in miracles. I’ve made a few. And most of the time, I didn’t know I was doing one at the time it was happening. Claude Lelouch,
This is why his masterclass will be unlike any other. He will not come with prepared answers or definitive formulas. He will come with his curiosity, his attention, and this inner disposition that has always been his: being ready for something unexpected to happen. Including in this room. Including with you. Everyone arrives with these feelings and mood of the day.
Créer ensemble et créer en directÂ: the improvised scènes
The masterclass takes place in two stages. First, Lelouch recounts his free figures – those moments where he abandons the script because life offers him something more beautiful than what he had expected.
Secondly, he invites the public and surprise guests to join in the dance. With volunteers chosen from the room, he improvises small love scenes according to his method: no learned text, no rehearsal, no prepared staging. A canvas, an emotion to achieve, and the camera rolling. Chance does the rest. The miracle, perhaps, will happen.
I treat my actors the way life treats me: with surprises, incomplete information, and the certainty that the most important thing will happen in the moment. Claude Lelouch,
A living archive
These improvised scenes will be filmed. Some, if they contain this scent of truth that Lelouch recognizes at first glance, will be able to join the living archive of the exhibition. The public will no longer be just a spectator – it will become, for the duration of a sleepless night, an actor in a Lelouch-style love story. A story of which no one, not even him, knows the end in advance.
The entire masterclass will be broadcast live on the city’s YouTube platform and recorded for broadcast throughout the school throughout the evening.
A signing session
At the end of the interactive experience, a signing session is organized by the Librairie Points Communs with Claude Lelouch, Jean Ollé-Laprune and Yves Allion for the book Cinema is better than life.
