Gaby Sylvia

In his landmark 1948 essay Birth of a New Avant-Garde, filmmaker Alexandre Astruc advanced the notion of le caméra-stylo (camera pen) which imagined the cinema eventually breaking free of the concrete demands of narrative, where images become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. Greatly influenced by Astruc’s theory, it was only a few years later that in 1954 Francois Truffaut spoke of the director as an auteur, the cinematic equivalent of a novelist, cap able of expressing themselves through recurring thematic elements, distinctive ways of building characters, and, above all, through the deployment and movement of actors and objects within the time and space of the shot.Read More »

User Review by dbdumonteil
Pierre Chenal’s last hurrah-although not his last movie, it’s easily the best of the four thrillers he made when he was back from Argentina. “Jeux Dangereux” the precedent year suggested a return to form for a director who made interesting film noirs in the thirties and a masterpiece in the forties (“La Foire Aux Chimères”). All promises were fulfilled in “La Bete A L’Affut” .Read More »

Synopsis/Review:
Denise, a young orphan girl who has escaped from a convent, believes that her misfortunes have ended when she meets Paul , a young naval officer upon whose ship she has stowed away. Paul, initially seeks to take advantage of her naivety to seduce her before changing his mind and sending her to live with his mother who works in a cabaret while he returns to sea. But the habits of the girl will push her to the brink of prostitution…Read More »