The Punishment

Director: Jean Rouch

1962 / 58min / DCP

Screening with Bi Gan's new short film, A Short Story (2022), 15 minutes on Sunday, 10/30

A lesser-known and distinctly different instance of the ethnographic study of his countrymen as seen in the previous year’s documentary Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch’s fiction narrative The Punishment follows a teenager (Nadine Ballot) who, when sent home from her lycée for inattention, wanders aimlessly through the streets of Paris’s Quartier latin, as she does so running the gauntlet through a line-up of variously bothersome, needy, and nasty men. “An extraordinary and extraordinarily rare film about public misogyny.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker