Yet, one of the biggest successes at the Paris Cinémathèque in the late 80s was a retrospective of British comedy curated by Bertrand Tavernier.
The group's sixth founding member, Graham Chapman, died in 1989, but could turn up: when the group reunited for a retrospective at the Comedy Arts Festival, in Aspen, Colo., they brought out a large urn that they said contained Mr. Chapman's ashes.
What will survive of us is love, Philip Larkin once wrote, and in a weird, unsentimental way, this is necessarily true: only a steady infusion of softness can keep alive even the most hard-edged of forms, and the softness of retrospective love blurs comedy's boundaries even as it reproduces its shapes.
Ben Arnold First in a series of retrospectives from British comedy greats, delivered via carefully collated archive interview footage, starting with one of comedy's most fascinating figures, Kenneth Williams.
He has put 41 Italian productions in the festival's four official sections — nearly twice the 22 of last year — which include a "Controcampo Italiano" list of notionally avant-garde home-grown movies, and a sidebar retrospective of Italian comedies from the 1930s to 1980s.
Pioneering animation, silent film retrospectives, the found-footage comedy world, sobering international docu-tales that make you want to be a better human, talking genitalia classics… anything that commands you to submit to an entirely unique view of the world for a couple hours, they love it.
It will include a bouncy-castle Stonehenge, a retrospective of British women's comedy, extreme sports choreography, a world record improv attempt and, organisers of the London 2012 Festival sincerely hope, the loudest national ringing of bells that has ever been heard anywhere.
Alan Yentob, the BBC head of entertainment, drama and comedy, is considering a retrospective of their work.
At 4 30 p.m. today, at BAM Rose cinemas, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this deadpan 1985 comedy opens a 14-day retrospective devoted to the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki (above).
It sets out Johnson's stall nicely - this is both an affectionate, elaborately imitative homage to a landmark of British comedy and a much darker retrospective than you'll ever find at the NFT.
