In 1965, Ingmar Bergman directed “Persona”, a cult film that sums up all the obsessions of the Swedish master, born a hundred years ago. This Arte TV documentary explores the film, based on interviews with film critics, collaborators and the maser himself. Read More »
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René Clair’s exuberant anti-capitalist satire À nous la liberté was one of the early triumphs of sound cinema and is still considered one of the all-time greats of French cinema. The film is a light-hearted comic tour de force, erupting into unbridled farce in a few places, and yet it also offers an intelligent reflection on one of the major social preoccupations of the time: the gradual dehumanisation of mankind through technological progress. In characteristically humorous vein, Clair gives us a speculative glimpse of the future in which human beings are reduced to quasi-machines to meet the remorseless capitalist imperative for ever greater efficiency and increased output. The demoralising repetitiveness of life on the factory production line mirrors the endless monotony of the prison scenes at the start of the film, and both contain echoes of the Fascistic nightmare that would overrun most of Europe in the 1930s. In an era of immense social and technological change, Clair poses a timely question: what is man’s destiny, to be a free individualist or a robotic slave to corporate greed?Read More »
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The story follows a filmmaker whose life is sent into a tailspin by the return of a former lover just as he is about to embark on the shoot of a new film.Read More »
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It starts out like a fairy tale: there’s a queen, a king and their beautiful children, Pauline, Anaïs and Guillaume. But it’s a bit more complicated, a little more funky than that.
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Emilie Brisavoine, who was discovered as an actress in independent films such as La bataille de Solférino [+] by Justine Triet and short film Peine perdue by Arthur Harari, presented her documentary Oh La La Pauline! [+] in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival Tous Écrans. The documentary had its world premiere in the ACID section of Cannes.Read More »
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When his wife leaves him, a young French actor, François Combe, moves to New York to work for a television company. One evening, he meets an attractive young woman, Kay Larsi, in a bar. She is as lost and unhappy as he is, alone after her friend and flatmate Jessie left her. François and Kay become lovers, initially renting a room in a hotel before moving into François’ apartment. When François finds out that Kay is not only the wife of a diplomat, but also a wealthy countess who ran off with a gigolo, he begins to have doubts about the relationship. Then Kay announces she must return to her home in Mexico to visit her sick daughter… Read More »
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The happiness of a newly-married couple, Henry and Jeannie Saint Clair, is shattered when the husband is made a paralytic in an automobile accident. The wife still loves him, although he is incapable of any physical love. She is slowly drawn into a short-lived affair with a handsome athlete, Robert Vanier. When the husband learns of the affair, he commits suicide. But the wife cannot forget him and she sends her lover away.Read More »
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Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.
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Cannes Palmes d’Or winner ‘The Class’ follows a year in the lives of a class of junior high students who present a microcosm of society.
A fully sustained immersion in the academics, attitudes and frequent altercations of a group of junior high school students, “The Class” marks Laurent Cantet’s return to the sharply observed social dynamics and involving character drama that distinguished his 1999 debut, “Human Resources.” Talky in the best sense, the film exhilarates with its lively, authentic classroom banter while its emotional undercurrents build steadily but almost imperceptibly over a swift 129 minutes. One of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year, it will further cement Cantet’s sterling reputation among discerning arthouse auds in France and overseas.Read More »
Erik Satie’s work is at the heart of modern music. However, who was Satie? An elusive genius or a visionary misanthrope? The film tries to sketch an identikit of the musician through his notes and the places he lived in. Musicologists mostly agree in describing Satie’s music as inhabited by voids and holes. The long pauses between one musical passage and the other are musical structures unto themselves; therefore, the filmmakers create a dissonant Satie-like universe in which empty spaces are adjacent to eloquent passages. Like a mysterious flower visible only to the eye that is willing to dance with its charm, the film unfolds little by little through mental associations and creative juxtapositions. There are no answers in the universe inhabited by the ghosts of Satie’s creations. Architectural forms and recollections from desires and acts of creative hubris compete to create a new world, which ultimately is the image of a new and more seductive pleasure principle. Satan Satie is a film that pushes against the boundaries of cinema.Read More »
In expressive, melodic tones, the fraternal pair debate God’s true message and intent for His creations, a conflict that leads their followers – in extravagantly choreographed song and dance – towards chaos and sin.
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Moses and Aaron finds Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, through their exemplary craft, transforming a familiar Biblical tale into a borderline-surreal cinematic opera of seemingly endless possibility. In expressive, melodic tones, the fraternal pair debate God’s true message and intent for His creations, a conflict that leads their followers — in extravagantly choreographed song and dance — towards chaos and sin. Set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force, Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera opens us to the stimulating worldview of a filmmaking duo whose masterful efforts are finally coming to light.Read More »