France

Synopsis:
‘Pierre, a humble employee in a toy factory, has been married to Anne for just three years, but already he senses they may be drifting apart. To avoid an acrimonious break-up later on, the couple agree to separate. Try as he might, Pierre seems to be incapable of starting an affair with another woman, not even with Véronique, one of his colleagues. At a party given by their friends, Pierre and Anne meet up and settle their differences. They decide to go on an alpine holiday together but their truce proves shortlived…’
– Films de FranceRead More »

The film describes the process of literary creation. Part of the story unfolds in the imagination of Clive Langham, a famous writer who has learnt that he has only a few months of life left and, on the eve of his seventieth birthday, is working on his last novel: a story in which he speaks of himself, his memories and his family. The links and divergences between art and life are underlined. Believing he is describing others, he describes himself, revealing hidden aspects of his personality.Read More »

The consequences of a housewife smoking or not smoking a single cigarette branch out into a dozen separate destinies and parallel universes, each with its own conclusion, in these two French features by Alain Resnais. Adapted and translated from six of the eight comic plays comprising British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges, they can be seen alone or together, and in either order. The project, a tour de force for two actors playing multiple roles (Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azema), succeeded at the box office when released in France in 1993, and as a unit the two films swept the Cesars (French Oscars) for best picture, director, actor, and set design.Read More »

Quote:
Chris Marker’s ethnographic essay-documentary on Siberia, made in 1957, remains fresh and relevant today. Combining fantasy animation (of woolly mammoths and mammoth buildings) and documentary photography shot by Sacha Vierny, Marker displays above all his amazement at the diversity of Siberia, at once almost pre-historic and post-revolutionary. On the film’s revival at the 1982 New York Film Festival, Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey called it “compassionately detached, playful and eclectic…. What still thrills about Letter from Siberia 25 years after it was made is Marker’s sympathetic ethnography, so much against the grain of the partisan American documentaries of the ’50s where the omniscient voice told you how to read each image.” In one hilarious segment, Marker does include that voice – repeating a scene with a Capitalist-propaganda voice-over and then with a Soviet one.Read More »

Ms. Cambronne, of British origin, to whom much has been said the “word” of her husband, the press questions in order to know the meaning. But the general refused any explanation and continues to be silent. Finally, Adele, a pretty maid, will build Ms. Cambronne uttering the famous words in a moment of awkwardness.Read More »

From 1972 until 1974, Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, along with a Chinese film crew, documented the last days of the Cultural Revolution, marking the end of an era. The vast amount of footage they shot was edited into twelve films of varying lengths. Focusing on ordinary people spread over a wide geographic area-many of whom were living and working in collectives-the filmmakers recorded a unique moment in history, and also captured some of the more enduring aspects of Chinese culture.Read More »

Synopsis:
A young girl, rich and orphaned (Emmy LYNN), harrassed by a deprived adventurer (Jean TOULOUT) and by his sister, kills the latter. The adventurer blackmails her. A year later, the girl marries a famous composer, an admiror of Beethoven (Séverin MARS). The adventurer starts courting, secretly, the composer’s daughter (Elizabeth NIZAN) – daughter by a previous marriage. The composer, on finding out that a sordid relationship had existed, in the past, between his wife and the adventurer wrote, on the occasion of his daughter’s engagement, a symphony describing his unhappiness. The composer hereby defines the theme of the 10th symphony: “At the feet of his master Beethoven , a musician distraught by the treason of women, tries to forget and express his sadness”.Read More »

In 1944, a German colonel loads a train with French art treasures to send to Germany. The Resistance must stop it without damaging the cargo.Read More »

Film Review
Georges Franju’s last film for the cinema was to be his second homage to the silent Louis Feuillade crime serials of the 1910s – the first being his inspired remake of Judex in 1963. Nuits rouges is a curious cinematic beast that owes as much to the adolescent American fantasy-thriller serials of the 1940s and 1960s as it does to Feuillade. It is certainly not what you would have expected from a man with a reputation as a serious filmmaker and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, France’s national film library.Read More »