France

Review:

The defiantly independent French director Jean-Pierre Melville was an outsider by choice. He financed his films outside of the studio system and built his own studio for maximum independence. He loved American cinema and made his reputation with a brilliant series of cool gangster thrillers, beginning with elegant, elegiac Bob le Flambeur (1955) and culminating in the austere masterpiece Le Samourai (1967), with Alain Delon as an existential assassin, and the heist classic Le Cercle Rouge (1970).

Army of Shadows, adapted from the 1943 novel by Joseph Kessel about the early years of the French Resistance, is the third of Melville’s three dramas set during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II (after his debut feature, La Silence de la Mer [1949], and his 1961 drama Leon Morin, Priest), but by far his most personal. During World War II, Melville was himself a member of the Resistance, worked for French intelligence in London, and served in the Free French forces in the liberation of Italy and France. “This is my first movie showing things I’ve actually known and experienced,” Melville told Rui Nogueria in Nogueria’s 1971 interview book with the director. Kessler’s book is a work of fiction, but the characters were inspired by real life figures.Read More »

Mr.Freedom is a militaristic moron of a superhero. In his secret identity he is a United States sheriff, but when he enters his hidden closet hidden in his office behind a large American flag, he transforms into the patriotic superhuman. He takes orders from Doctor Freedom, the controller of Freedom Inc, who orders him to go to France and stop it from falling prey to the evils of Communism after the death of Freedom’s counterpart, Capitaine Formidable. Getting a less than rapturous welcome from the French, Mr.Freedom decides to save them all anyway…by destroying the entire country and everyone in it if he has to.Read More »

L’aliénation mentale filmée en Lozère, à l’hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Alban : constat sur les malades eux-mêmes et sur la patiente rééducation de leur cerveau par les psychiatres.

Quote:
« C’est un film sur l’impossibilité de montrer la folie, explique Mario Ruspoli dans un entretien accordé au Monde en 1962. Cependant, il est possible de faire passer derrière le miroir, d’utiliser comme tremplin, comme moyen de communication, l’angoisse, qui est le dénominateur commun entre le malade, le médecin et le public. Seul, ce dénominateur commun d’angoisse nous fait pénétrer à l’intérieur du monde de la folie. » Claude Mauriac confirme ces propos : « Parmi les malades non délirants dont la pensée demeure cohérente, les raseurs restent les raseurs. D’où des longueurs. Les autres, les enterrés vifs, font à l’arrière-plan les mêmes gestes toujours recommencés et, toute fraternité oubliée, nous avons peur, parce que nous nous sentons en danger. » Le documentariste explique ses méthodes : « Nous avons mis peu à peu notre technique au point et nous avons utilisé une équipe de trois extrêmement mobile qui permet de filmer en courant, le cas échéant : un cameraman, un homme pour la mise au point, un preneur de son. Pour les interviews dans les fermes, j’ai pensé que si on prenait un interviewer de l’extérieur, les paysans ne diraient rien ; je suis donc arrivé avec des gens du milieu : un docteur, un curé, un instituteur agricole itinérant. L’important, c’est que les gens s’habituent à vous, qu’ils vous connaissent, qu’ils aient de l’estime, de l’amitié pour vous. Il faut les mettre en confiance, il faut qu’ils sachent que vous n’allez pas les trahir, les ridiculiser, les fausser pour leur faire servir une thèse dans le style Mondo Cane. Il faut que les réalisateurs aient une fantastique conscience professionnelle. »
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Synopsis:

Balibar, well-known as an actress and singer, left none of her talents unused in her directing debut. In this eclectic homage to Greek tragedy, Balibar and Léon are free of any convention. With a cameo by Barbet Schroeder.

Jeanne Balibar and Pierre Léon roam in tourist outfits through Paris and prepare a play with a producer who keeps changing her clothes. In a parallel world, another layer if you wish, actors rehearse their texts for a Greek tragedy on the beach at Deauville and at prominent Parisian locations. It is the story of Electra, probably a rather inefficient character, one who perseveres and refuses to give up the battle against injustice.
This absurd, slightly surrealist and occasionally humorous film looks like a theatre performance with its solemn dialogues and mise-en-scène issues. The makers, the actress Balibar and filmmaker Léon, however also use the medium by inserting screenshots of business e-mails – reflections on their plans. In addition, Balibar is a singer and she sings the texts as if the e-mails were edifying lieder. Electra, for Instance is, as one of the characters puts it, a true ‘culture souq’.
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Synopsis:
A film that starts like an odd documentary on ski resorts suddenly declares its subject to be aluminum. And it’s all downhill from there, evoking in chapters the history of capitalism in the 20th century, the death of the God Progress in the valleys of the Alps and the question of the relationship between State and Industry. All’s fair in love and snow.
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Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.
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Synopsis:
Director Alain Resnais’s STAVISKY… is a stylized recounting of the life of Alexandre Stavisky, a masterful swindler who sold thousands of worthless bonds, working his way into a massive financial hole and drowning in a riotous political scandal. The film focuses on his heyday, which came in the years just before his arrest and subsequent death in 1934. Surrounded by an aristocratic class of financiers who, like Stavisky, delighted in transferring enormous sums among a multitude of accounts around Europe, he was an expert at moving money. Stavisky inhabited the lavish wooden parlors and grandiose theaters of Paris, the ocean overpasses and casinos of Biarritz, with sexy cars, planes, and women to get him from place to place. Read More »

Vive le tour is director Louis Malle’s affectionate homage to one of France’s most treasured institutions, the Tour de France cycle race. In this short documentary film, Malle and his camera team marvellously capture the ambience of the Tour: the unbridled enthusiasm of the crowds of spectators, the beauty of the French countryside setting, and the gruelling ordeal of the participants.
We see how the cyclists refresh themselves during their marathon races, the sorry effects of dope-taking, the pain and disappointment of injured cyclists and, finally, the indescribable delight of the victors on the podium. With its eloquent and evocative photography, accompanied by Georges Delerue’s enchanting music, this is less a documentary and more a visual poem which says almost all there needs to be said on the greatest cycle race in the world. James Travers (filmsdefrance)Read More »

Moving back and forth between present and past, Antonieta tells the story of Antonieta Rivas Mercado – a writer, social activist, and important patron of the arts – against a backdrop of the political turmoils of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.Read More »