French

Quote:
Jean-Luc Godard, pioneer of the New Wave, has always delighted in breaking rules. Even with almost 90 features to his name, the long an established master still shows the same glee thumping his nose at convention as he did over thirty years ago, when he burst on the scene with “Breathless.”
His latest film, “Notre Musique,” is a unqiue blend of almost abstract cinema, fiction, and documentary. It opens with a montage entitled “Hell,” which shows real and fictional footage of carnage: soldiers, atrocities, war. As brief as it is, the relentless and strangely beautiful barrage of violence is enough to make anybody despair of the human race.Read More »

Reviews:
Although Eric Rohmer’s fresh, unadorned style rarely sits heavily on his films, The Romance of Astrée et de Céladon, his adaptation of 17th century writer Honoré d’Urfé’s 5th century fable of affronted love, not only features an usual absence of intellectual banter, but is more importantly the lightest and silliest the director has been in ages. These are not pejorative descriptions—the film’s wholesome delight in d’Urfé’s modest whimsy amongst the 5th century Gauls of druids, nymphs and many amorous declarations of assured sincerity and flighty infidelity, the director’s own sweet, unexpected eroticism, and the film’s gentle spirit simply make a work that is light, lovely, and strange.
– D. Kasman (D-kaz.com)Read More »

This series was released by Madman Films in Australia last year with an Introduction by the excellent Adrian Martin and, more importantly, completely new subtitles.Read More »

Quote:
Present-day Chad. Adam, sixty something, a former swimming champion, is pool attendant at a smart N’Djamena hotel. When the hotel gets taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel. Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated. The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. The authorities demand that the population contribute to the “war effort”, giving money or volunteers old enough to fight off the assailants. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son…. Read More »

Quote:
Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy, who together and separately had been making films for 30 years, began a new one in April, 1990. It was about his childhood memories. If you have seen Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a musical set in a garage and featuring singing mechanics, you may have guessed that Demy grew up as the son of an auto mechanic. “Umbrellas” won all the awards – the prize at Cannes, the foreign language Oscar – and Demy made such others as “Lola” and “Donkey Skin,” often centering around the songs he remembered from his youth.Read More »

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Corne D’Or juxtaposes a poem by Nerval with a powerful study of Ottoman architecture; Istanbul takes into the crowded streets and back alleys of a fascinating city divided between continents. Byzance uses a text by Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453; Maitre Galip is another on Pialat’s perceptive studies of children that includes a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.Read More »

From Stephen Holden review in NYT: “In his unsettling urban panorama, “The Town Is Quiet,” the director Robert Guédiguian invests the French port city of Marseille with the same epic sense of drama that infused Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” Raw, wrenching and more starkly tragic than Mr. Altman’s satire, “The Town Is Quiet” evokes a similar vision of a city as a teeming organism in violent, spasmodic flux.Read More »

The Italian neo-realist influence that is so evident in René Clément’s Oscar-winning 1949 film Au-delà des grilles is also felt in this quirky romantic comedy, through its use of real locations (mostly in the bustling centre of London) and fluid, documentary-style photography. Along with some of his contemporaries (notably Georges Franju and Jean-Pierre Melville) René Clément had started to trail-blaze a new kind of cinema, departing from the conventions of the quality tradition that had grown stale and predictable by the early 1950s, and laying the groundwork for the French New Wave. If you did not know that Clément had directed Monsieur Ripois, you might easily mistake it for an early offering from one of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers – Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle or François Truffaut.Read More »

Synopsis
Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, as acts of both revenge and kindness render him front-page news. Also starring the blue-eyed phenomenon Michèle Morgan in her first major role, and the menacing Michel Simon, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) starkly portrays an underworld of lonely souls wrestling with their own destinies. Based on the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, the inimitable team of director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert deliver a quintessential example of poetic realism and a classic film from the golden age of French cinema.Read More »