France

from allmovie guide.com

The shortest of French filmmaker Jean Vigo’s two feature-length films, Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is also arguably his most influential. The overtly autobiographical plotline takes place at a painfully strict boys’ boarding school, presided over by such petit-bourgeous tyrants as a discipline-dispensing dwarf. The students revolt against the monotony of their daily routine by erupting into a outsized pillow fight. Their final assault occurs during a prim-and-proper school ceremony, wherein the headmasters are bombarded with fruit. Like all of Vigo’s works, Zero for Conduct was greeted with outrage by the “right” people. Thanks to pressure from civic and educational groups, this exhilaratingly anarchistic film was banned from public exhibition until 1945. Among the future filmmakers influenced by Zero for Conduct was Lindsay Anderson, who unabashedly used the Vigo film as blueprint for his own anti-establishment exercise If…. Read More »

synopsis – AMG:
In this satiric comedy-drama from France, Paul (Mathieu Amalric) is an assistant professor of philosophy disenchanted with teaching and distracted enough that he can’t (or won’t) finish the dissertation that would allow him to become a full professor. Esther (Emmanuelle Devos) has been his girlfriend for nearly a decade; while he’s no longer happy with the relationship, he has trouble working up the courage to break it off. He’s smitten with Sylvia (Marianne Denicourt), the lover of his best friend Nathan (Emmanuel Salinger); Paul and Sylvia had a brief fling two years ago, and he can’t get her out of his mind. However, once Paul gives Esther her walking papers, he starts chasing after Valerie (Jeanne Balibar), while also keeping his eye on Patricia (Chiara Mastroianni), the girlfriend of his cousin (and roommate) Bob (Thibault de Montalembert). It’s hard to imagine Paul having much time to think about anything else amidst all this romantic tumult, but when Rabier (Michel Vuillermoz), a former friend, gets a top spot in Paul’s department, it leads to an ongoing argument that both adds to and reflects the turmoil of his romantic life. Amalric’s performance earned him a 1997 Cיsar Award as Most Promising Young Actor. — Mark DemingRead More »

Fourteen year old Julien is in love with his cousin, Julia. This is one of polemic photographer and director David Hamilton’s most famous films. Hamilton is very well knor for the way he explores nudity, specially teens, on his works.
Read More »

Quote:
A group of students go to the Eden club where they play bizarre and cruel games including fake Russian Roulette, strange rituals, rape, blood-drinking and poison, until a mysterious stranger appears and ups the ante. After a bloody magic trick, he provides an African drug to a girl who sees a montage of fearful images and then slowly appears to live them, wandering into a strange fluid factory and into a postcard of Tunisia, where murders, S&M sex, dancing and a nonsensical plot of kidnapping and torture in order to locate a painting take place. The film is an experience, a reality created by illusions, hallucinations and drugs, with bizarre visuals and details emerging little by little as some images develop into scenes, albeit incoherent ones.Read More »

Quote:
Robbe-Grillet turned once again to painting and literature for inspiration in his next film. In 1976 he had written a ‘picto-novel’, La Belle Captive, which reprinted some of Magrittes’s paintings including La Belle Captive itself. His 1983 film of the same name used paintings by both Magritte and Edouard Manet as a launching pad, each painting a ‘generation cell’ for the film’s ideas and narrative. Magritte’s Belle Captive is a great painting – formal, poetic, mysterious, it hints at all sorts of possibilities. The drawn curtains open onto a beach and sky. In the stony foreground there is an easel and a painting that visually links the world behind the curtain with the vista in the distance. It’s an audacious, inspiring work that’s a self-conscious reflection on the process of painting, but is also eerie and enigmatic, exuding a strange beauty.Read More »

IMDB:
A poor woman, with no money for Christmas presents, tucks her three children in for the night, on Christmas Eve. Later, a poor, old beggar comes to her door and she lets him in to rest and warm up. When he suddenly leaves, she follows him to the front door of a church, where she finds an abandoned baby. The woman takes the baby home to care for it, even though she has almost nothing. Her acts of kindness are repaid with a Christmas miracle. Written by Detour 1945 Read More »

In 1951, French writer Jean Genet presented a screenplay called “Les Rêves Interdits/L’Autre Versant du Rêve” to actress Anouk Aimée as a wedding gift. He then proceeded to sell the rights three times without telling her. Eventually the script was reworked by Marguerite Duras and filmed by British director Tony Richardson as Mademoiselle, with Jeanne Moreau in the title role.Read More »

Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly’s Rose, c’est Paris is both a photographic monograph and a feature-length film on DVD. This extraordinary work of art, in two different but interlocking and complementary formats, defies easy categorization. For in this multi-layered opus of poetic symbolism, photographer Bettina Rheims and writer Serge Bramly evoke the City of Light in a completely novel way: this is a Paris of surrealist visions, confused identities, artistic phantoms, unseen manipulation, obsession, fetish, and seething desire.Read More »

Quote:
The House was reviewed a little less favorably than Bartas’ earlier films (regular cinemagoers having given up long ago), but personally I found it his most beautiful film yet.

Bartas does tend to repeat himself, it’s true. Reviewers love his grim shadowscapes, shot in B/W, of anonymous, more or less lonely, drunk or disheveled men and women stumbling through a haze of cold forests, smoky houses and city wastelands in seemingly arbitrarily fashion – but even they get, I assume, weary of it.

(Contrary to what you might think based on the above, there is nothing gothic about Bartas’ depressed realities; and he himself insists, whenever somebody dares suggest a socio-political interpretation, there’s nothing Soviet about it either. It’s existential. No matter, to me his ‘The Corridor’ still serves as a brilliant visual summary of the comfortless, hopeless human condition of the former Soviet Union).
Read More »