France

Shot in 1967 but not released until 1975, actor Pierre Clémenti’s acid-infused experimental whirlwind of color and music featuring a who’s who of the French 60s underground.Read More »

Positano is an island of the Amalfi Coast that Neptune would have, according to legend, created for the love of a nymph. And it is of love that this film speaks above all, a total and solar love in which family and friends are seized in the same poetic field. Perched on the rocks of the island, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community. Pierre Clémenti stays there for a while and makes images of dazzling sensuality. Beyond Pierre Clémenti’s intimate love of these faces and bodies often naked in this Mediterranean landscape, the film reveals the moving beauty of a utopia where living together could still be achieved in a territory of sharing and permanent creation.Read More »

“Chronicles of the Present Times” – An experimental trilogy comprising ‘Visa De Censure No.X’, ‘Livre De Famille’ and ‘Anima Mundi’. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.Read More »

Pierre Clémenti’s Soleil presents a psychedelic meditation on his life and his detention in an Italian Prison in 1972.

Letterboxd review
★★★½ Watched by Macchiato 16 Apr 2020

Quite hypnotic even without subtitles, seems like an ode to acid tripping. One of those works of accidental beauty.Read More »

“A mother who is determined to do whatever it takes to give her son the opportunities she never had… “Read More »

Romantic melodrama set in 18th century plague-ridden Italy. Elvire (Brigitte Fossey) enters a loveless marriage with the elderly Piacchi (Fernando Rey) and finds herself becoming attracted to their adopted son Nicolo, who reminds her of a man who once sacrificed his life for her.Read More »

300 kilos of heroin have disappeared in Necrocity, a city of terror—a city of night—where Captain Speed has a gang and the government hides the dead. An experimental crime film considered to be a landmark of Parisian underground cinema.Read More »

A man loses his passport on the way back to France after a trip to Algeria.Read More »

Abel Gance’s Marie Tudor was produced by ORTF and broadcast on French television in two parts, on 23 and 30 April 1966. It is an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s play of the same name (1833), and was the first of two productions Gance made for French television – the second being Valmy (1967). Marie Tudor mines historical and literary material familiar from Gance’s earlier work. He had already turned to sixteenth-century history for his Lucrèce Borgia (1935) (which also echoed another Hugo play) and for his script for Jean Dréville’s La Reine Margot (1954) – likewise a literary adaptation (Alexandre Dumas’ novel of 1845). Though modest fare by Gance’s standards, Marie Tudor was one of the projects that marked his return to critical and commercial visibility in the 1960s – starting with Austerlitz (1960) and ending with his last film, Bonaparte et la Révolution (1971). This copy comes from the digital archive of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA).Read More »