A rare screening of French filmmaker Robert Enrico’s masterful trio of half-hour adaptations of short stories by Ambrose Bierce based on his Civil War experiences.

With beautiful cinematography, evocative sound design and almost no dialog, Enrico evokes Bierce’s melancholic, dreamlike horror with haunting artistry. Rich and powerfully symbolic anti-war parables, they are also poignant excursions into the universal human psyche. A stunning directorial debut hailed as “a tour de force of visual narrativeo” (The Guardian) and “almost a text-book example of how to make a good film” (The Telegraph), Enrico’s trilogy still stands as an unforgettable example of cinema art at its height.

Today, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (La Rivière du Hibou) (1961) is the most famous of the three shorts, having received top prizes at Cannes, the Academy Awards, and BAFTA; played before Hitchcock’s The Birds during that film’s original British release; and later even aired (in slightly edited form) as an episode of The Twilight Zone. Building on that success, in 1962 Enrico made two more Bierce adaptations, Chickamauga and The Mockingbird (L’oiseau Moquerr).

The three films were briefly released as the feature Au Coeur de la Vie (aka In the Midst of Life in the US). This won the Prize San Sebastián but failed to attract a wider art-film audience, who were more interested in the hipper French New Wave and the more confrontational American avant underground just beginning to bloom. For many years Owl Creek Bridge was a canonical staple in museum screenings and college film courses, but as 16mm film has dwindled it has been largely relegated to occasional Twilight Zone box sets; the other two parts of the trilogy have been all but forgotten.

Rarely shown in its entirety, The Sprocket Society and The Grand Illusion are proud to present hard-to-find 16mm prints of Enrico’s full trilogy (including the original unedited version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge). Unavailable on US DVD.