The final work by French theatre artist Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With The Judgment Of God (Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu) was commissioned by French Radio but at the last minute the French Radio Director canceled the broadcast. To Have Done with the Judgment of God had its first radio broadcast twenty years later in 1968, and the piece has been influential in radio art circles since.Read More »
Young Autant-Lara’s (1901-2000) avant-garde debut, made a decade before his first feature and two decades before his breakthrough. It features his mother, who was a famous actress, as well as Antonin Artaud, who was a friend of the family.
The films circulates around a triangular love drama with a lot of faux avant-garde effects: filming only hands and feet, rotating camera, dream sequences expressing the tensions between the protagonists etc. etc. Given that this was made many years before Un chien andalou and most of the titles that can be found in Kino’s box sets, this was pretty cutting edge in 1923.Read More »
The last film made by legendary French director Abel Gance, Bonaparte et la révolution (1971) was also his final attempt to release the Napoleonic biopic he had begun in the 1920s. Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927) was over nine hours long, but represented only the first of a planned six-film series. Having failed to get funding for the remaining episodes, Gance revamped his silent film as Napoléon Bonaparte (1935) – adding newly-shot scenes and dubbing his decade-old footage. After other abortive attempts to resurrect part or all of his biopic in the 1950s, Gance gained funding from Claude Lelouch to release Bonaparte et la revolution in 1971. This last version recycles footage from the films of 1927 and 1935, as well as material from his television work of the 1960s. The result is a bizarre mishmash of old and new images, performances, and voices – less a coherent film than a document embodying the whole of Gance’s 45-year involvement with his eternally incomplete project. Read More »