Female infidelity leads a man, Jean, to commit suicide. When he is dead his brother, Jerôme, starts having an affair with the same woman, Mary. But… there is a photography left of her first brother, who the second is getting closer to finding – hence the title (6,5 X 11 – an film negative format).Read More »
Based on the story by Honoré de Balzac. Caught in a storm, two young doctors book into an inn for the night and find themselves sharing a room with a Dutch diamond merchant. During the night Prosper steals from the merchant, but when he awakes in the morning he finds the merchant dead and his friend gone. When the stolen property is found on him he is arrested for the crime and executed. 25 years later the innkeeper’s daughter relates the tale to a traveler, who in turn later relates it at a dinner party. At that party is Frederic Taillefer, the missing friend and murderer.Read More »
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MOR-VRAN starts with a shot of the sea, followed by one of the map of the Breton coastline. Next, we see images of the various islands off the coast: harbours, a mill, sheep, a lighthouse, cemeteries. The women are dressed in black. In the port of Brest there is a great hustle and bustle. A sailor pays a visit to the fair and wins a chain. He returns to the island of Sein by boat. As the result of a storm he will never get there. After a few weeks, his body, with the chain, washes ashore. On Sein, people start repairing the damage caused by the storm. A young couple talks about the future, about buying a house and a boat. A widow visits a graveyard. With MOR-VRAN, Jean Epstein continued his series of films about the Breton coast. This documentary was obviously conceived as a silent movie: inserted titles explain the action, while music accentuates the atmosphere. Epstein creates a gloomy atmosphere by using pregnant images: the sea leaves serious scars on the islands off the Breton coast. Nevertheless, life goes on.Read More »
Psychological narrative avantgarde film about a wealthy young businessman who consecutively falls in love with a classy English woman (Pearl), a Russian sculptress (Athalia), and a naive working-class girl (Lucie). Overpowered by weakness, the coward sidesteps the obligations that love affairs impose: rather than living up to his dates he takes his sports-car from an ultra-modern garage and speeds to the fashionable beaches of Deauville. On his way, he is fatally hit by a descending swallow. The film is divided into three segments each of which consists of events the woman experienced. These sequences are embedded in scenes in which each of the three women is telling and casting her mind back to her own love affair. Thus, present, future and past merge and cannot be distinguished clearly. The intertwinement of several layers of time experience, recollection, telling and showing have been regarded as a source of inspiration of Alain Resnais and this film prefigures his “L’Année dernière à Mariënbad” to a certain extent.Read More »
In a village in Brittany, a young maid and an old woman are spinning while the wind blows threateningly outdoors. In spite of the bad omen, the young maid’s boyfriend decides to sail away. Worried, the young maid ask for help to a mysterious old man and his magical crystal ball in order to calm down the rough seas.Read More »
In the kingdom of the Moguls, Prince Roudghito-Sing, a young officer of the palace, falls in love with Zemgali, a captive princess held prisoner and coveted by the Grand Khan. Fleeing the country, he takes refuge in Paris and his presentability allows him to be hired as an actor by a French film company. The trouble is that Anna, the star of the movie, is attracted to him. Which displeases banker Morel, the producer and Anna’s lover…Read More »
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Countess Laure Maresco falls in love with a player, Jacques Prémont-Solène. He loses a large sum and dreams of suicide. Laure prevents her, before learning that her lover has squandered the recipe for a charity party that she attended. His family sends the young man to America to put an end to the scandal. Twenty years later, after a fortune, he returns.Read More »
Set before the French Revolution, the film tells the story of Bernard De Mauprat, a noble orphan, raised by despicable aristocrats, who is saved from the gallows by his cousin Edmée and his father, the knight Hubert De Mauprat. The return of Bernard causes tensions within Mauprat’s family since him tries to win the heart of his cousin Edmée (Knight of La Marche’s fiancée) after obtaining her pledge of loyalty under a certain threat of rape.Read More »
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Jean Bernard, industrial designer, is an only child and has lost his father. He is in love with Blanche Dumas, secretary to a bank manager. One day, he visits his mother who lives in the small village of Livilliers and spends the night there. The next morning, police arrive to arrest him. His mother does not understand what he is accused of and will discover that he would have murdered the banker who was making advances to Blanche.Read More »