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.

The immense popularity of the auteurist cinema of such legendary directors as John Ford, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock eventually saw film surpass the novel as the dominant narrative form of our time. As a result, major literary figures – novelists, playwrights, poets soon began to venture into the medium in search of new and unfamiliar ways of seeing and interpreting. This series offers up
a survey of some of the more notable films directed by contemporary writers. Deeply poetic and surprisingly assured, these films challenge the limits of expected narrative structure as well as our assumptions of conventional realism. Their brilliant visual associations offer a fascinating parallel to the literary work of their respective directors and vividly remind us of Astruc’s idea of film as a language independent altogether of literature.

Les mauvaises rencontres.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 20 min
Size: 	725 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x540 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 196 kb/s
BPP: 	0.092
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 64.0 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B595FDE8148F291/Les_mauvaises_rencontres.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/F691A7A974BCB36/Les_mauvaises_rencontres.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Alexandre Astruc – Les mauvaises rencontres AKA Bad Liaisons (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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” .

There are two apparently distinct plots:
– A cop’s widow (Françoise Arnoul) is through with love and she spends her time collecting money for the orphans of the Police, abetted by a bunch of snobs and false friends. Unfortunately the person who was in charge of the money is assaulted and the money is gone. Might this respectable notable of the town be the stealer, after feigning an aggression?

– A warden has two inmates do some repairs in his house. But he’s got a too pretty wife. Two of the men are killed in mysterious circumstances and the survivor, one of the prisoners (Henri Vidal) takes refuge in the widow’s desirable mansion. Love begins to grow between them but is the man a victim of fate as he claims to be?

The screenplay is particularly smart as the two stories meet in the last minutes. There’s also a grandiose finale in a lighthouse, with scenes to rival the best of Jacques Tourneur. Henri Vidal was perhaps never better than here and his pairing with sexy Françoise Arnoul was really a good one.The last scene was particularly harrowing when you know that Vidal was to pass away in December 1959, leaving Belmondo and Delon a clear field.

1.40GB | 1h 30m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A3AEA874631CC54/La_Bete_a_l_affut_(1959).mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Pierre Chenal – La bête à l’affût AKA Beast at Bay (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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…Already known for his roles in The Bitch and Atalanta , Michel Simon is remarkable in the skin of a declassé count. With acerbic social criticism, Ruisseau finely denounces the poverty and the condition of women of the time making their living in cabarets or on the street.
filmsdocumentaires .com

1.90GB | 1 h 41 min | 789×576 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/C9FCFA31A9E3455/Le.Ruisseau.1938.X264.AVIS.PBT.mkv

Language:French
Subtitles:English srt (muxed in)

The post Maurice Lehmann & Claude Autant-Lara – Le ruisseau AKA The Stream (1938) first appeared on Cinema of the World.