In Nazi-occupied France during WWII, a French woman helps two downed Allied airmen to evade capture by the Germans and make their way into neutral Spain.

	
Le.jour.et.lheure.AKA.The.Day.and.the.Hour.1963.576p.BluRay.AC3.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 53 min
Size: 	2.83 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x438 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 291 kb/s
BPP: 	0.306
Audio
#1:  	Multiple languages 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/4181BD9D6978E0E/Le.jour.et.lheure.AKA.The.Day.and.the.Hour.1963.576p.BluRay.AC3.x264-KG.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English, French

The post René Clément – Le jour et l’heure AKA The Day and the Hour (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Ulisse is a naive young man out looking for a job after being released from the army. He drops the offer he gets from a group of fascists to go in with the Fossatis, a family of anarchists (unknown to him).

Che.gioia.vivere.1961.1080p.WEB.AAC.x264-LYCANTROPE.mkv
General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 52 min
Size: 	1.68 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 024 kb/s
BPP: 	0.039
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AAC LC @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A0AE14BACFBE33C/Che.gioia.vivere.1961.1080p.WEB.AAC.x264-LYCANTROPE.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/7431B88514FF6D3/Che.gioia.vivere.1961.1080p.WEB.AAC.x264-LYCANTROPE.french.srt
https://nitro.download/view/6A5BBCCEE1F4A88/Che.gioia.vivere.1961.1080p.WEB.AAC.x264-LYCANTROPE.german.srt

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English, French, German

The post René Clément – Che gioia vivere AKA The Joy of Living (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Near the end of World War II, Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz receives orders to burn down Paris if it becomes clear the Allies are going to invade, or if he cannot maintain control of the city. After much contemplation Choltitz decides to ignore his orders, enraging the Germans and giving hope to various resistance factions that the city will be liberated. Choltitz, along with Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling, helps a resistance leader organize his forces.

Is Paris Burning.1966.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 52 min
Size: 	4.41 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x434 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.282
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s
#2:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s
#3:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Film Historians Daniel Kremer and Howard S. Berger)

https://nitro.download/view/69B4F3F5D6C4570/Is_Paris_Burning.1966.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):English, French
Subtitles:English

The post René Clément – Paris brûle-t-il? aka Is Paris Burning? (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
While some other mid-20th-century directors were pursuing the chimera of “total cinema,” Jean Cocteau was chasing down the dream of a “total art.” But if “total cinema” meant capturing on screen the actual world as it really was, Cocteau’s “total art” meant giving form, instead, to the otherwise impalpable worlds of desire and dream. Both quests were fundamentally unrealistic, but Cocteau embraced this truth in ways both joyously inventive and technically rigorous. The most ambitious and talented fabulist since E.T.A. Hoffmann, Cocteau not only produced a vast and diverse corpus of poems, drawings, plays, sculptures, novels, and libretti, he also wrote and directed a small but astonishing group of films. Beauty and the Beast is the best of his five feature films and the greatest fable of his entire oeuvre—a vulnerable-beast-in-love tale to end all others, from King Kong to Edward Scissorhands.

Much of the film’s deep magic comes from Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast-in-love: In his mid-50s when he made the film, Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais’s triple role (he plays the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be), the actor lends virtuosic as well as symbolic appeal to Cocteau’s cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Between the time of their meeting in 1937 and Cocteau’s death in 1963, the two were often acknowledged publicly as a couple, though they both had other lovers as well. And they spent many of those years living together as a family, on and off, first in a Paris apartment and later in a grand house in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Made in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi Occupation of France, Beauty and the Beast depicts a very different sort of family, a traditional bourgeois family—La Belle’s—that happens to be in serious trouble: divided, penniless, and without a strong patriarch. In other words, la belle France itself. But, if Cocteau’s film in some ways pointed up the nation’s devastated present and uncertain future, it was also one of the first major cinematic triumphs of the post-war era. It helped revitalize France’s film industry, and thus in no insignificant way contributed to the nation’s renascent economic as well as cultural health. However, the film provides no evident “happy ending” for La Belle’s family; Cocteau doesn’t tell us what’s in store for her siblings, for example. Indeed, whether or not the film’s ending is a fully happy one even for La Belle herself remains an open question, just as it did for the allegorized bourgeois national family of post-Occupation France.

And, of course, just as it did for Cocteau himself. Beauty and the Beast is both a national tale and the very personal story of its creator’s sense of himself as a regal but cursed, aging but perennially romantic, gay artist. For all its very genuine and supremely successful appeal to the childlike, it’s also a mature, sophisticated meditation on gay aestheticism, and thus a crucial work in Cocteau’s lifelong project—not just to acknowledge, but also actively to participate in the artifice of the real. From the perspective of this aestheticism, there’s nothing “natural” or given about what appears to us as real. In cinema as in life, Cocteau believed, appearances aren’t mere reflections of reality, but rather the morphing, disturbed, beautiful, hideous creatures of human exertion and contortion. Appearances are visceral as well as visual, and Cocteau’s cinematic art is the art of living hands—like the flesh-and-blood, pre-CGI hands of the young actors who hold the magic candelabras in the famous corridor scene at La Bête’s enchanted castle.

Beauty and the Beast is a gorgeously ethereal film, but also one with sinews and bones and blood…and semen: The spilled pearls that magically self-assemble in La Bête’s palm during one of his failed erotic encounters with La Belle are just one example of the film’s abundant traces of the spunk of Cocteau’s consciously queer artifice. Such traces may be less “obvious” here than in Cocteau’s more explicitly homoerotic works. And yet it’s precisely the questions and challenges of visibility—of what’s obvious and to whom and why—that the film so masterfully explores. To better appreciate this, one has but to ponder the wildly complex, erotic interpenetrations and displacements among Marais’s three characters and the actor whose body fleshes them out.

In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Cocteau—the better to realize the unreal—directed that an actual arrow be shot into Marais’s back, fortified with cork beneath his Avenant costume. If that doesn’t yet amount to “total art,” it certainly comes close to a total commitment to the quest.

Jean Cocteau - (1946) Beauty and the Beast.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 33mn
Size:	1.85 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 117 Kbps
Audio
#1:	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps (Philip Glass’s opera "La Belle et la Bête")
#3:	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 128 Kbps (Commentary with film historian Arthur Knight)
#4:	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 128 Kbps (Commentary with writer and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling)

https://nitro.download/view/874C82322ACAF8D/Jean_Cocteau_-_(1946)_Beauty_and_the_Beast.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jean Cocteau & René Clément – La belle et la bête AKA Beauty and the Beast (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

At Oslo in 1945, a French doctor, Guilbert, is abducted by a group of Nazis and taken aboard their submarine. The Germans plan to evade capture by the Allies by steering a course for South America. Guilbert finds himself in the company of several unsavoury fugitives, including a Gestapo chief, a German general, an Italian industrialist and a French journalist who collaborated with the Nazis. When news of the armistice is received, mutiny breaks out aboard the submarine.

Les Maudits.1947.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 42 min
Size: 	1.95 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.235
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/0CCA14E8CD1E17C/Les_Maudits.1947.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post René Clément – Les maudits AKA The Damned (1947) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Jill is surprised and angry when her computer-genius boyfriend decides to quit his job in a big company for unclear reasons. But when her children disapear mysteriously and seem to have been kidnapped, she wants to know more, and discovers that she may be caught in a DEADLY TRAP…

Review:
Strange, paranoid thriller that reminded me a lot of Don’t Look Now, only played as a political drama rather than a horror film. Not one of Faye Dunaway’s best known roles but she dominates the film as a mother who thinks she’s losing her mind and the love of her brooding husband, played by a young, almost unrecognisable Frank Langella. Director René Clément made another slow burner that I really liked, Rider On The Rain, starring Charles Bronson. The Deadly Trap seems to have disappeared in movie circles but it’s worthwhile tracking down.
— Jeremy M. (Letterboxd)

1.43GB | 1h 37m | 720×550 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/55440F0106B514D/La_maison_sous_les_arbres_(The_Deadly_Trap)_(1971)_–_Rene_Clement.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/EC73C69616C5969/La_maison_sous_les_arbres_(The_Deadly_Trap)_(1971)_–_Rene_Clement.srt

Language(s):English,French
Subtitles:English (for French parts)

The post René Clément – La maison sous les arbres AKA The House Under the Trees AKA The Deadly Trap (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

L’Arabie interdite (1937)

Documentary made in Yemen (and first film ever shot in this country) under the leadership of archaeologist Jules Barthou. During the adventure of this film, René Clément will serve four days in prison for having concealed a camera under his clothes, then will be captured by rebels and threatened with being shot. The majority of the negatives will be seized by the guards of Imam Yahia, and it is with the remaining rushes that Clément will edit what becomes The Forbidden Arabia, a film entrusted to the Musée de l’Homme in 1965 where it is forgotten until that ethnologist Claudie Fayein unearths it and has it restored.

“This medium-length film abounds in superb and striking images, bringing together the desire to give the most precise possible idea of ​​the country and the artistic research, very striking in terms of colors where pale shades and black predominate, while red , conveyed by sartorial and other details, comes to produce chromatic accents that run through the film.” (Denitza Bantcheva, “René Clément”, Editions du Revif, 2008)

1.44GB | 50m 00s | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/CD7B2DC6846DB9C/L’Arabie_interdite_-René_Clément__1937).mkv
or
https://tezfiles.com/file/72afd6a02a64e/L%27Arabie_interdite_-Rene%D0%BB%E2%94%82_Cle%D0%BB%E2%94%82ment__1937%29.mp4

Language(s):French
Subtitles:None

The post René Clément – L’Arabie interdite (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.