French

After the death of Victor Frankenstein (Dennis Price), two figures vie for control of his metallic-skinned monster (Fernando Bilbao) and the radical technology that created him: the scientist’s daughter, Vera (Beatriz Savon), and the immortal wizard Cagliostro (Howard Vernon), who is assisted by a blind bird-woman with an unquenchable thirst for blood (Anne Libert). With THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN, controversial filmmaker Jess Franco merged his fondness for old-school horror with his unique and perverse tastes in sex and violence, partly inspired by the garish adult European comics of the early 1970s.Read More »

Director Jean-Luc Godard died on Tuesday September 13 at the age of 91. In April 2019, Elisabeth Quin traveled to Switzerland to speak with the filmmaker on the occasion of the release of his film “Le Livre d’image”. (Re)discover the most illustrious Franco-Swiss artist.
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“In re-viewing our Super 8 films, shot between 1972 and 1981, it occurred to me that they comprised not only a family archive but a testimony to the pastimes, lifestyle and aspirations of a social class in the decade after 1968. I wanted to incorporate these silent images into a story which combined the intimate with the social and with history, to convey the taste and colour of those years.” Annie ErnauxRead More »

As a model, one can see working the essential virtues of the Godardian question in a relatively unknown work from 1978 [recte 1976]—a two-minute video clip for a popular song by Patrick Juvet, Faut Pas Rêver.

As is the case with all the brief forms invented by Godard, this little opus is not in the least a minor work. It is made up of two shots: first, a medium fixed shot of a little girl who is eating an apple for her afternoon snack after coming home from school; she is responding to her mother, whom we don’t see (the voice of Anne-Marie Miéville is recognisable) and who asks her about her day, while the little girl watches, distractedly, a television set that is supposedly broadcasting the song of Patrick Juvet (whom we don’t see either) In this everyday dialogue, we find the emergence of a fundamental critical question that, in the mid-1970s, must have been perceived as quite violent (at that time we were right in the middle of the Giscardian regime, and it would take seven more years for the left to come to power).Read More »

A 15-year-old boy unearths a shocking family secret.Read More »

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This is therefore the latest film shot for the Rohmer Company, a short film of fifteen short minutes, relatively anecdotal in its development but which has at least the merit of reminding us how much Rohmer was the filmmaker of women, never ceasing to film them with grace and nuance. Here it is simply a cut-out, like the ten other shorts in this box set. Yet it is as if one feels a return of Reinette and Mirabelle, in their complicity as in their antagonism; a long introduction follows a discussion they hold on nudity, as a rampart or representation, sliding towards their vision of modesty and puritanism. Read More »

In Paris in the 1920s, a concert violinist meets and falls in love with a stylish young flapper who’s the wife of an old friend. Romaine instigates the affair with Marcel, and carries it forward even as her husband, Pierre, falls ill. She may even be purposely giving Pierre a treatment that adds to his misery. After Marcel returns from a concert tour and Romaine stoops to a new low in abandoning Pierre for an assignation, she reconsiders the affair and takes a drastic step. Three years later, Pierre pays Marcel a visit to demand the truth. Will the jealous and aggrieved Marcel manage a convincing performance?Read More »

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true tale of Bonnie & Clyde, but one that’s much more about Bonnie than her beau, L’Astragale was an immense critical and public success when it was first published in France back in 1965. Written by the young, Algeria-born Albertine Sarrazin – whose autobiographical account of her life as a stick-up girl, prostitute, prisoner and bisexual lover, made her the distaff equivalent of Jean Genet – the novel was first brought to the screen in 1968 by director Guy Casaril, with actress Marlene Jobert (We Won’t Grow Old Together) making a splash in the lead role. (Horst Buchholz, aka Chico from The Magnificent Seven, played her partner-in-crime.)Read More »

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In his fourth film as director and as the only professional actor in a cast of amateurs, Mathieu Amalric stars as Joachim, a washed-up television producer who, after leaving his life in Paris for the United States, returns home for a cross-country tour with a burlesque troupe. Joachim takes the troupe, played by actual burlesque performers with stage names like Kitten on the Keys and Dirty Martini, to show after show in towns along the coast (amusingly, the outline of their travel path resembles a bare breast). Joachim serves only as the ladies’ manager (when he tries to give them performance notes, they reject his advice), but they form a ramshackle surrogate family that – wait for it – comes to stand in for the actual family Joachim left behind. When the venue for the troupe’s planned grand finale in Paris pulls out, he must return to the capital to find another; while there, he reunites with his young children, an ex-lover, and various other people from his past.Read More »