France

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“Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime,” which opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater, was shown at the eighth New York Film Festival. The following is from Roger Greenspun’s review, which appeared Sept. 15, 1970, in The New York Times.

Like most of the previous films of Alain Resnais, “Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime” is science fiction of a sort. And like virtually all of Resnais’s previous films, its concern is for the past recaptured. To support this concern it proposes a story, the most fragmented of all Resnais’ stories, dealing with, perhaps intense but nevertheless transitory love affair.Read More »

Movie serial “Vendemiaire” depicts a registering nationalist and regionalism concerns about the effects of the First World War.

« Réalisé dans les derniers mois de la guerre (sa sortie eut lieu en janvier 1919), en décors naturels, dans le Languedoc, ce film est une œuvre maîtresse de Louis Feuillade. Sous couvert d’un drame patriotique sur les civils en temps de guerre (les combats restent hors champ), structuré en un prologue et trois parties (« La vigne », « La cuve » et « Le vin nouveau »), il propose un film dont le réalisme quasi documentaire n’est cependant pas dépourvu de lyrisme et de poésie. Le récit, non chronologique, s’organise selon une narration présent/passé où alternent des séquences concernant les vendanges et le conflit au moment de l’invasion des régions du nord par les troupes allemandes.Read More »

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Centred in the two thousand year old city of Guimarães, three renowned directors, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pêra, explore 3D and its evolution in the world of cinema. How does 3D affect the audience and their perceptions?Read More »

In this documentary about the exile of two famous French actors in Argentina during and after World War II, the director Cozarinsky returns to Argentina after many years in France and recalls places and events from his childhood, particularly the celebration of the liberation of Paris on in August of 1944, in Buenos Aires’s Plaza Francia. Featuring testimony from various authors and acquaintances of Maria (Renee) Falconetti and Robert Le Vigan, the film explores their lives and final years in Argentina.Read More »

Synopsis:
Roger spends the winter in a cabin in the woods at an army base. His husband Frank is on a mission in Djibouti and doesn’t communicate much, while their adopted teenage daughter Roxy is starting to get rebellious. Roger finds support with four women and an attractive farmer/boxing trainer, who are also all divorced from their better halves. They dispel the boredom by philosophising about life, seduction attempts and thinking up nicknames for their private parts.
In four seasons, an ironic melodrama unfolds with absurdist accents and conceptual tendencies. Benjamin Crotty, who grew up alongside an American army base, uses both French and American cultural elements, ranging from eco-architecture to dialogues based on texts from American TV series.
Fort Buchanan is a long version of the short, similarly-named film that was also screened in Rotterdam.Read More »

In a Parisian suburb of Bagnolet two receptionists who work in the lobby of the titular high-rise drift from one enigmatic situation to the next going to the pool, visiting a maze-like sex club and hunting for new employment.Read More »

Where do images come from? This disturbing and essential question is posed by Philippe Grandrieux, and he already imposed it on himself the start, via Sombre (1999) up to the portrait recently devoted to Masao Adachi (FID 2011). From where, then? Maybe from the depths behind our eyes, ungraspable visions, night in suspension, promise of the end of an eclipse, between dream and nightmare. This is the start (and in truth the programme) of White Epilepsy. In a darkness barely broken by light, a mass advances: a nude back, in a long shot entirely centred on the shoulders.Read More »

“Don’t ask me who I am, and don’t tell me to remain the same.” —Michel Foucault

From the history of madness, to sexuality and pleasure in classical antiquity, to the law and penal institutions, the breadth of Michel Foucault’s thought was astonishing.

One of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, Foucault bridged the roles of intellectual and activist, attaining the highest honours of the French academy while using his position to attack the very institutional power that gave him a platform.

Divided into four chapters, FOUCAULT AGAINST HIMSELF focuses on Foucault’s critique of psychiatry, his work on the history of sexuality, the growth of his radicalism arising from his research into the French penal system, the nature of knowledge and underlying structures of human behavior, and his immersion in American counter-cultural movements—in particular the resistance to current social structures that he found among sexual minority communities in San Francisco.Read More »

Synopsis:
Nouvelle Vague marks the beginning of a period in Jean-Luc Godard’s career in which he made films that looked back on his previous work. In these retrospective films, Godard asked himself whether it is possible to continue as a film director under the conditions imposed by international commercial cinema. Appropriately enough, Nouvelle Vague concerns the return of a man (Roger Lennox / Richard Lennox, played by Alain Delon, superstar of 60s and 70s international cinema) who may or may not have returned from the dead.Read More »