Probably the closest thing in Paris to summertime baseball, the annual free outdoor film festival at the Parc de la Villette draws thousands of film fans and families to its nightly screenings. With newly added corporate sponsorship, including Ben & Jerry’s “Free Cone Night” and Ciné Cinéma’s “Free Fan Night,” this year’s fest promises to be the movie buff’s equivalent of Bat Day at Yankee Stadium.
The 2007 edition takes the title “First Class and Coach,” offering a selection of French and international classics surrounding themes of class, privilege, and the ever-recurring “rags to riches” storyline of so many Hollywood favorites. Go early, bring a picnic and an extra pullover, and enjoy the show.

Not to be missed:

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
Dir. Orson Welles
July 18
Welles’s follow-up to Citizen Kane is perhaps the greatest unfinished film ever made. Unhappy with his auteurist touch, the studio, RKO, re-shot and re-cut the film’s entire third part while Welles was off making a documentary in Brazil. What remains is a fragmented masterpiece, as impressive in its depth and beauty as it is disappointing, especially when a forced happy ending undercuts the maestro’s incredibly dark portrait of a powerful American family reduced to ruins.

L’enfance nue (1968).
Dir. Maurice Pialat
July 22
When speaking about his first feature L’enfance nue, French director/provocateur Maurice Pialat described it as an “anti-400 Blows.” Indeed, whereas Truffaut’s début offered up a highly realistic albeit romanticized portrait of Paris’s troubled youth, Pialat’s tale of abandoned orphans takes on a raw documentary style devoid of any sentimentalism. Yet beneath the director’s feigned indifference lies a sincere anger that would mark the rest of his powerful oeuvre—anger at a generation of filmmakers (the New Wave) whose films he believed failed to reveal France for what it was and anger at a generation of French that somehow forgot about its children.

Accatone (1961).
Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
August 21
“Aaaayyyeee yoooo – Accatone!” Thus begins poet-cum-filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking début feature—one that would catapult Italian Neo-realism from post-WWII into the turbulent 60’s. Opting for a style (which he called “the cinema of poetry”) at once realistic and symbolic, Pasolini’s story of a destitute pimp struggling to survive in the slums of Rome is also a highly Catholic enterprise, with Accatone (portrayed by the director’s fetish actor Franco Citti) filling in for Christ, accompanied in his desperate meanderings by the tunes of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Featuring knockout photography by Tonino Delli Colli, Pasolini’s longtime cinematographer and future collaborator of Sergio Leone.

Cinema en Plein Air. From July 17 -August 26. Screenings at sundown every day except Mondays. Free. Blanket & deckchair for rent €6.50. Parc de la Villette, 211, avenue Jean Jaurès, Paris 19. Mº Porte de Pantin. 01 40 03 75 75. For full program: www.villette.com