France

Description: Based on a true story. The story is set on the sweeping French countryside where Serge Duval, a veterinarian, lives with his wife, Elisabeth and their two young children. One day, their beloved son Olivier vanishes mystically, without a trace. Unable to accept the loss of her favourite child, the mother, Elizabeth, redirects her anguish and guilt at everyone. Little by little the fragile family falls apart. Six years later Olivier suddenly appears again, now as a teenage boy living on the streets of Paris, but is he really their missing son?Read More »

SYNOPSIS
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.Read More »

Tom Ricks, an American novelist in his forties, moves to Paris in the hope of patching things up with his estranged daughter. But nothing goes quite as planned. His resources depleted, he must stay at a shabby hotel and work as a night watchman. Just when he thinks he has touched rock bottom, a mysterious and sensual woman named Margit suddenly enters his life. Together they embark on a passionate love affair which gives rise to a series of inexplicable events. It is as if a strange force has taken control of Tom’s life…Read More »

This collects nearly all of Truffaut’s extant correspondence, many were lost or simply never kept, a few have been withheld for personal reasons but what does remain still amounts to a very hefty and remarkable body of letters.

Perhaps this is a more enjoyable book to leaf through and let something catch your eye than to read in a strict chronological fashion. That said the early sections that capture the eventful years of Truffaut’s late adolescence do possess quite a narrative thrust of their own: selling your friends most treasured possessions behind his back, a suicide attempt, desertion from the army, military incarceration…Read More »

Synopsis:
This is a documentary film by Chris Marker. It employs Marker’s standard rostrum camera technique, filming historic photographs and paintings of whales and the whaling trade. It also contains real-life footage of whaling and harpooning. Marker sides with the hunted mammals in this film and comments negatively on the clinical instrumental relativism of whaling.Read More »

Amazon.com review:
François Truffaut’s lavish and fun 1973 comedy-drama about a film production is a clever hall of mirrors, with Truffaut himself playing a director, and his most important actor in real life, Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows), portraying Jacqueline Bisset’s immature costar. Day for Night is full of tales undoubtedly told out of school and repeated here in camouflage, and one can’t help but be impressed with the stylistic and technical means by which Truffaut captures the adventurousness of a full-budget shoot. The cast is very good all around, with actors in some cases playing fictional thespians and in other cases playing members of the crew. A sequence set to thrilling music by Georges Delerue celebrates the whole art of filmmaking as seen from an editor’s perspective–it makes one want to drop everything and shoot a film of one’s own. –Tom KeoghRead More »

Plot Summary:..
Four erotic tales from in various historical eras. The first, ‘The Tide’, is set in the
present day, and concerns a student and his young female cousin stranded on the beach by the tide, secluded from prying eyes. ‘Therese Philosophe’ is set in the nineteenth century, and concerns a girl being locked in her bedroom, where she contemplates the erotic potential of the objects contained within it. ‘Erzsebet Bathory’ is a portrait of the sixteenth-century countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins, while ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ concerns an incestuous fifteenth-century orgy involving Lucrezia, her brother, and her father the Pope.Read More »

Quote:
“For legendary producer Pierre Braunberger (Shoot The Piano Player), it was the most enticing of challenges: Invite the three most controversial directors in modern erotic cinema to indulge their fantasies in one daring film. The result remains one of the most uniquely sensual motion pictures of our time.

In the first story from director Just Jaeckin (Emmanuelle, Gwendoline), a castaway sailor is rescued by a tribe of succulent native women – led by the stunning Laura Gemser of Black Emmanuelle fame – who soon reveal their most unusual appetites. Then director Shuji Terayama (Fruits Of Passion) explores the haunting tale of a Japanese boy seduced by the riddle song of a village madwoman. And in the bold adaptation of a short story by De Maupassant, director Walerian Borowczyk (Immoral Women, The Beast) reveals the torrid liaison between a Parisian gentleman, a Follie Bergere prostitute and an unexpected surprise that hides in the night.”Read More »

André Antoine and the Realist Tradition

After its humiliating defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, France went through a social revolution. Over the next twenty years, many of its long-standing artistic traditions, such as the classical style of Academy painting, would be cast off in favor of new approaches, such as Impressionism. Live theater was one of the few holdovers from the pre-war era — formulaic pieces spoken by actors in dull declamatory style. But change was coming, voiced by the prophet of naturalism, novelist Emile Zola. “A work must be based in the real . . . on nature,” Zola wrote in Naturalism in the Theater. Zola explained that a playwright must observe facts, with no abstract characters or invented fantasies. Rising to meet this challenge, actor, and theater director André Antoine (1858-1943) founded the Theatre Libre, essentially a community theater, dedicated to showing new work by innovative writers. Antoine also staged works by controversial playwrights from outside of France, such as Ibsen and Chekhov. Under Antoine’s guidance, French theater became serious and legitimate. What is less known about Antoine is that he was also a film director, and a vital link in the development of the ‘realist tradition’ that has so enriched world cinema(…)Read More »