French

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The film narrates a utopian abandonment, consensual and festive of the market economy and high productivity. The population decides on a number of resolutions beginning with “We stop everything” and the second “After a total downtime will be revived-reluctantly-that the services and products including lack will prove intolerable. Probably: water to drink, electricity for reading at night, the TSF to say “This is not the end of the world, this is an 01, and now a page of Celestial Mechanics”. The implementation of these resolutions is the first day of a new era, Year 01.Read More »

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One of the great unknown films of the 30’s.
Astonishingly inventive and constantly amusing tale of
a bureaucrat whose dead aunt proves to be irrepressibly alive.
Colin Crisp – French Cinema – A Critical Filmography, Volume 1 (1929–1939)Read More »

Four women from different regions develop friendships during a bus journey across West Africa, as they accomplish an everyday journey while facing the universal challenge of being independent women.Read More »

Gustave Courbet, The Origin of his World
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), painter of real life, the earth, and material things, was so much a part of his era he lost himself in it. He paid for this dearly: wealthy and famous in this youth, he was later obliged to chum out paintings to avoid starvation.
“Only an hour long, Romain Goupil’s 2007 documentary on Gustave Courbet, the great French 19th-century realist painter, still expands your mind and heightens your reactions, with the lucidity and grace of all the best art (and criticism). Courbet was a terrific character, a rebel from the bourgeoisie, who accomplished in paint the revolution that he couldn’t quite manage in life. A lifelong anti-clericist and socialist, he was an important figure in the Paris Commune, a political indiscretion for which he later paid dearly, with exile and bankruptcy.Read More »

PROPOSITIONS
Selected examples of a New Cinema

The continuing demand for high standards is what sets Rouseau’s work apart. What makes this film distinctive is the way Rousseau explicitly returns to the source of his creative inspiration. So here he is at home reciting «Bérénice» to himself, whilst going about his household chores. It verges on the comical: There are repeated shots of him obstinately trying to turn off a dripping tap, or the jubilant close up of bare feet carried away in performing a dance step or two. Combining art with life in such a way, that nothing is compartmentalised, nothing lost – that is the goal. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)Read More »

After being adopted by her aunt, Thérèse Raquin was forced into marrying her sickly cousin Camille at an early age. For the past 17 years, she has been trapped in a loveless marriage, working in her aunt’s haberdashery shop in Lyon to support the husband she has grown to despise. One day, Camille gets himself drunk and has to be carried home by Laurent, an Italian lorry driver. The instant that Thérèse sees Laurent she is attracted to him. He is everything a man should be, not the mean sickly creature she is married to. Laurent is equally drawn to Thérèse and the two embark on a clandestine love affair. When he realises his wife’s infidelity, Camille decides to take her to Paris, to place her with relatives who will cure her of her wanton nature. Read More »

“Est-ce une chose douce et tendre, une chose énigmatique, une chose humaine, une chose à nulle autre pareille, une chose fragile ? C’est une chose tissée de mille choses, douces, fragiles, énigmatiques et humaines. Le Journal de septembre est un voyage intérieur qui se déploie jour après jour d’une forme à une autre, glissant peu à peu d’images du quotidien du cinéaste à des séquences plus intimes et plus surréelles.” — Centre de l’Audiovisuel à BruxellesRead More »

The first film Joris Ivens made when he returned from Eastern Europe is a film poem about Paris and Parisian life on the borders of the Seine river. The film follows the flow of the river through the city of Paris, making a portet of this city and its people living, strolling, sun-bathing, fishing, working, swimming, loving and laughing beside the Seine. The poem written by Jacques Prévert gives the film an extra dimension, and the music, with the recurring theme of a children song, gives it a melancholic touch.Read More »

At the ripe old age of 7, Lina’s started wondering about her well-loved but firmly separated parents. Are they meeting up secretly? Soon, she’s got proof. It’s nuts! Then her mother tells her that she wants another child, as if she, Lina, weren’t enough. And who’s she going to make this baby with, anyway?Read More »