French

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Guy Debord’s final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) (a Latin palindrome meaning ‘We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire’), is structured as a dual reflection on the misery of (then) contemporary cinema, and the memory of those revolutionary moments that might have led to another cinema. The central image of the film is the charge of the light brigade, from Michael Curtiz’s 1936 film of the name, which figures the adventure of the Situationists. This is not simply an image of heroic futility, but the image of the evanescent eruption of the Situationists into history. In his commentary Debord argues that the film is organized by two elemental themes: water, as the representation of the flowing time, and fire, as the representation of momentary brilliance, in which water always drowns out this ‘fire.’ While it would be quite possible to give this a quasi-mystical reading it is, in fact, deeply political.Read More »

The second in a projected trilogy by artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting, Ivul marks the director’s successful return to narrative filmmaking. A family drama in which the close relationship between teenage siblings Alex and his older sister Freya (Leroux) increases to such an intensity that it develops sexual overtones, adding to the cracks in their not so happy home. An astonishingly distinctive and distinguished work located in the French Pyrenees, Ivul deftly blends the avant-garde, high wire performance and assured storytelling. Ambitious, challenging and yet also accessible, this is Kötting’s most sensory and purely satisfying feature to date. (-Curzon)Read More »

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Favraux, an unscrupulous banker, receives a threatening note, signed by “Judex”, demanding that he pay back the people he has swindled. He refuses, and apparently dies after a midnight toast at his masked ball. However, he is only drugged by Judex and locked away. Judex spares his life when the banker’s widowed daughter, Jacqueline, rejects the inheritance. Meanwhile Diana Monti, the former governess, kidnaps Jacqueline to try to get the banker’s money. But Judex is hot on her trail.Read More »

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“De Gérard Blain, on se souvient d’abord de l’acteur qui accompagna les débuts de la Nouvelle-Vague, que ce soit chez Chabrol (le beau Serge , les cousins) ou Truffaut (les mistons). On oublie un peu trop vite qu’il fut également un cinéaste passionnant, laissant une œuvre (huit films) marginale et secrète qu’on aimerait pouvoir découvrir plus facilement.Read More »

Synopsis:
With its title taken from Georges Bataille’s journal Acéphale (literally, a headless man, but figuratively expressing the need to go beyond rational ways of thinking), Deval’s film is the most literary of the Zanzibar works. The film opens with an illustrative image: a head in the process of being shaved, in close up. This image is accompanied not by the sound of an electric razor but an electric saw, suggesting the need to achieve a tabula rasa by radical means. The story follows the adventures of a young man and his friends as they wander through a barely recognizable post–May 1968 Paris. In documenting the by-gone expressions and gestures of the ’68 generation in France, Acéphale becomes something of an anthropological film that reveals the rites and beliefs of the ideological novitiates.Read More »

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Chloé, a fragile young woman, falls in love with her psychoanalyst, Paul. A few months later she moves in with him, but soon discovers that her lover is concealing a part of his identity.Read More »

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Camille, a beautiful fourty-year-old woman, finds a mobile phone that Suzy lost in a station. When Suzy calls her own number, they arrange to meet at Camille’s place so that Suzy can get her phone back. During this encounter, Suzy also meets Clara, Camille’s girlfriend. But they are interrupted by Fabrice, Suzy’s rejected lover, who is drunk and tries to take Suzy back to his place. While Clara takes Suzy to hide in the apartment above theirs, where “Tonton,” a strange old man with a love of yoga, lives, Camille tries to calm down Fabrice. Little by little she consoles him. This is when strange interactions start to occur: Camille becomes passionately involved with Fabrice, while Tonton initiates Suzy into meditation and levitation. Little by little, everyone finds their own path toward happiness, their own place in the game of feelings.Read More »

Bob, a middle-aged gambler and thief, plans a complicated heist. He deals with a number of underworld characters while planning the robbery of the Deauville Casino. Bob eventually hires a gang that includes an ace safecracker. Unfortunately for them, Bob’s nemesis, an old cop who Bob once saved from death, is tipped off after a money-hungry croupier’s wife betrays them. The police are waiting when the gang begins the seemingly impossible task of robbing the casino vault. Meanwhile in the casino, Bob starts to gamble.Read More »

The Moliere players are in their dressing room, getting ready to go on set. One actor mentions to another that his face reminds him of an opportunist turncoat he knew when he was in the Resistance. He then relates the adventure that he had in the Resistance, running an illegal radio station and dodging the Nazis.Read More »