The experience of living through two periods of depression and the quiet expectation of a third has endowed a filmmaker with the capacity to perceive the true beauty of life and to capture it on film. He films everything he sees, without favour and without preference, providing it awakens within him a feeling of love. His only worry is that he feels he may have lost some part of that essential quality of his art: innocence…Read More »
Vrai faux passeport was produced by Godard as part of the Pompidou Center retrospective and the Voyages en Utopie exhibition held in Paris in 2006.
The film opened the film retrospective -one of the most complete dedicated to Godard until then- the same day the exhibition was opened to the public.
Those interested in the Godardian adventure at the Pompidou Center should check Morceaux de Conversation avec Jean Luc Godard by Alain Fleischer , Reportage amateur (maquette expo), short film codirected by Godard and Miéville and also Godard, le dos au musée essay by Anne Marquez which summarises the tumultous birth of this major event. Die hard fans will also need to look for Voluptes Grand Master by Korean Paris-based photograph Wori Seung Chol, the very rare unofficial official catalogue of the exhibition.Read More »
Sexy Barbarella roams 41st-century space with her blind guardian angel, Pygar. Directed by Roger Vadim; actors Jane Fonda, John Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O’Shea, David Hemmings, Marcel Marceau, Claude Dauphin
In this notorious film version of the popular French comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest, Jane Fonda plays a sexy yet innocent space-age heroine in the year 40,000 A.D. who never gets herself into a situation that requires too much clothing. BARBARELLA opens with the titular heroine stripping down to nothing in zero gravity among strategically placed credits. From there Barbarella embarks on a mission to find a peace-threatening young scientist named Duran Duran (Milo O’Shea) by order of the president of Earth. En route, she’s attacked by killer dolls, is strapped into a contraption known as the Excessive Machine, and falls in love with a blind angel.Read More »
Quote:
Perhaps in stark reaction to the soft porn delusions of Hamilton’s work, Breillat decided to approach the subject of a young adolescent’s sexual education with a clarity and honesty rarely found in art in general, let alone film. Getting audiences to confront and deconstruct the cultural baggage they bring to sex remains at the centre of her more recent films Romance (1999), À ma soeur! (2001), Sex is Comedy (2002) and Anatomy of Hell (2004), but 36 Fillette, to this viewer, strikes the perfect balance between polemic, critique and compelling psychological study.
The film’s title refers to a little girl’s dress size and the little girl in question is 14-year-old Lili, played with chilling conviction by Delphine Zentout.Read More »
It all began (as things Rivettian tend to do) auspiciously enough. There were to be four films in a series originally entitled Les Filles du Feu (after Gerard de Nerval) before the more expansive Scenes de la vie parallele replaced it. Each would center on a “non-existent myth” of a battle between goddesses of the sun and the moon for a mysterious blue diamond that has the power to make mortals immortal and vice versa. Each film was to be in a different genre: a film noir, a pirate adventure, a love story, and finally a musical – the last-mentioned of whose scenario particulars hadn’t been completely worked out when the four-film project went into production. Two films were ultimately completed – Duelle (the film noir) and Noroit (1976, the pirate adventure). But two days into the shooting of the third, Histoire de Marie et Julien the metteur en scène (as Rivette always chose to call himself, auteurism be damned) suffered a nervous breakdown, and the entire project fell apart – though traces of it linger in Merry-Go-Round (1981, a paranoid conspiracy jape that has everything but the goddesses) and the semi-demi-musical Haut/Bas/Fragile (1995).Read More »
Synopsis
The story of the cheat begins and ends with personal misfortune. When he was a young boy, our hero was caught stealing money from the family shop. As a punishment, he was not allowed to join his family on their picnic. They ate mushrooms and died of food poisoning, he survived and was placed in the care of his unscrupulous aunt and uncle, who intended to rob him of his inheritance. Years later, our hero ends up as a croupier in a casino at Morocco. There, he is about to embark at what looks like being a very lucrative career – as a professional cheat. Read More »
One of the most expensive French films of the immediate postwar years, L’Affaire du Collier de la Reine is primarily a vehicle for the formidable Vivian Romance. The star plays an aristocrat in the court of Louis XVI, who helps engineer a scheme to divest the Queen of her royal necklace. On the verge of success, the “heroine” is found out, and forced to submit to whipping and torture. Read More »
Description: Synopsis
Waiting for Happiness depicts life in the seaside town of Nouadhibou in Mauritania. A young man, Abdallah (Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed), visits the town, where his mother lives, before emigrating. He feels disconnected from his people because he dresses in Western clothes, and he does not speak the language, but he connects in small ways during his stay. A taciturn elderly electrician, Maata (Maata Ould Mohamed Abeid), teaches an energetic boy, Khatra (Khatra Ould Abdel Kader), his trade, while a traditional singer (Nema Mint Choueikh) teaches a talented young girl hers. One would-be émigré washes up on the beach amid massive ships long ago run aground. Abdallah’s mother vainly urges him to follow traditional customs while he’s in town. Nana (Nana Diakite) tells Abdallah a sad tale about tracking down the father of her lost child in Europe. The film jumps forward in time at several points, and eventually both Khatra and Abdallah try to leave the village.Read More »
Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.Read More »