France

Pierre Rissient isn’t famous among French public, but he’s a respected critic who has, over many years of serving as consultant to the Cannes Film Festival and other high profile cinema showcases, pushed then unknown and now famous film directors–Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood and Hou Hsiaohsien, among them–into the spotlight. He also has a long experience in the industry, assisted Godard in the making of ‘A bout de souffle’, produced Rohmer’s ‘L’ Anglaise et le duc’, among other things.Read More »

A musical exploring the complex relationship between an artist and his muse.
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In three acts, we see re-enactments, improvisations and interviews performed and conducted with the inhabitants of Algiers, Kythira Island and Athens. A poetic voyage moving between past, present, and imagination, putting French colonialism and the grave consequences of a collective hubris in focus.Read More »

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Land of Milk and Honey is an absolute departure from Étaix’s narrative cinema. The 1971 documentary was made in the wake of the political and social upheaval that rocked France in May of 1968. The footage that the filmmaker gathered after these events took him the next couple of years to assemble, a plight jokingly referred to in the movie’s opening skit. It’s one of only two times that Étaix appears in front of the camera, and it’s a bit misleading as an intro. The entirely staged segment shows Étaix in discussion with himself, buried in a self-replicating pile of celluloid. We won’t see the star again until the very end of the film, when he amusingly asks his random interview subjects if they’ve ever heard of Pierre Étaix. Many haven’t, and the ones that do definitely have an opinion about what Étaix considers humor. The movie closes with Étaix taking a bow, having just performed a song and dance number in disguise. He exits the stage, and effectively exits cinema.Read More »

After 25 years of married life, Julien and Clemence Bouin have ended up hating each other. Living in a dilapidated house soon to be demolished, their lives are filled with bitterness and regret for the happy past both have lost. When Julien adopts a stray cat and smothers it with affection, Clemence’s suppressed resentment turns to hatred…Read More »

gaze.ie wrote:
Bambi is the story of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, born Jean-Pierre in a small village in the former French colony of Algeria. She struggled in her early life as a boy but found a way out of her colonial life when a Parisian cabaret show came to town. Encouraged and enchanted, she moved to Paris, assumed the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and began her life as a female cabaret star.

GAZE veteran Sébastien Lifshitz lovingly tells her story using long interviews with the charismatic performer, stunning scenes of her return to Algeria and captivating old Super-8 footage from Marie-Pierre’s own collection.

Having overcome a difficult childhood and a tough gender transition, when surgery and hormonal treatments were still in their infancies, ‘Bambi’ is now a radiant woman in her late seventies and one of the most charismatic and engaging people you will ever seen on screen.

Winner, Teddy Award for Best Documentary, Berlinale 2013Read More »

A full decade ahead of the New Wavelet Christian Jacque, Louis Jouvet and a belle equipe were showing the Godards and Truffauts how the Big Boys do it and neither Godard nor Truffaut ever made anything even remotely as good as this and Godard never will. It all comes together like clockwork from Henri Jeanson’s caustic script, written at times with a quill dipped in vitriol, to Christian Jaque’s perfect direction which coaxes performances close to perfection from Louis Jouvet on down. Ludmilla Tcherina is especially effective in her very first film which gives her lots of chances to remind us that she was first and foremost a great ballerina and Francois Perier shines as the callow youth besotted with her to the point of attempted suicide. Louis Seigner was still popping up fairly regularly in films at this time (1946) and etches a standout portrait of a ruthless businessman prepared to sacrifice his son on the altar of Mammon and let us not forget Marguerite Moreno adding yet another unforgettable portrait to her gallery of grotesques.Read More »

A sixteen-year-old boy insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher. Faced with this gifted and unusual pupil, the teacher rediscovers his enthusiasm for his work, but the boy’s intrusion will unleash a series of uncontrollable events. Read More »

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Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing oneself by canceling the existence of another human being is frequently thwarted by the haste and clumsiness of the means, the hot urgency of the killer’s drive overriding his better judgment about the care required to escape detection. His guilt becomes obvious, he gets caught, and that desperately hoped-for happiness flies out the window. Clever murderers—of whom there are, thankfully, many more in fiction and movies than in life—temper their homicidal passion with meticulous calculation, arranging their dark deeds with the tender artifice necessary to make unnatural death look natural. They’re artists, of a sort. And the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect murder or a perfect work of art has never stopped either a murderer or an artist from trying.Read More »