‘Courrier sud’ dramatizes the exploits of a French commercial airline, making the treacherous run from Paris to Africa and back. Pilot Jacques tries to rekindle a romance with old flame Genevieve, now married to a prominent foreign ambassador…

Courrier.sud.1937.DVDRip.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 27mn
Size: 	1.35 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	702x568 ~> 757x568
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 Kbps
BPP: 	0.201
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/4C84EFF46D7CAEC/Courrier.sud.1937.DVDRip.x264.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/1427354F948E48E/Courrier.sud.1937.DVDRip.x264.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French SDH

The post Pierre Billon – Courrier sud AKA Southern Carrier (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

If one were to gather the hundreds of books written about Ludwig van Beethoven, sift through each with a fine-tooth comb, and extract every simple mistake, wild speculation, and outright falsehood, the result would still be nowhere near as fabulous and artificial as this 1936 biopic, which rewrites the composer’s life story into a throbbingly melodramatic tale of genius ignored and love unrequited. Director Abel Gance, best known for his expansive silent classic Napoleon, wasn’t interested in the truth of Beethoven’s life, but instead the romantic ideal of a great man tormented by history; Gance’s Beethoven is merely a variation of the filmmaker’s beloved Bonaparte, triumphant yet scorned by his inferiors in the artistic realm rather than the political. (Needless to say, among the film’s many omissions is Beethoven’s bitter rededication of the “Eroica” Symphony.)

Beginning where every portrait of Beethoven the man must, with the identification of the Immortal Beloved, the film nominates (wrongly) Giulietta Gallenberg, née Guicciardi, reconstructing their brief passion as a lifelong obsession. During each of Beethoven’s struggles–with love, poverty, deafness–thunder cracks against the sky and the opening notes of the Fifth burst onto the soundtrack to punctuate the action. Meet the film on its own novelette-like terms, however, and it can be quite moving, not least for the magnificent presence of Harry Baur in the lead, who captures to perfection the tortured nobility the film foists upon its protagonist. Baur’s conception is as outsized as Gance’s, but also gentler and less sentimental; he humanizes what could have been a treacly salute to a marble statue. An unusual final credit places the actor’s name alongside the director’s, a touching admission by Gance at how indebted his film was to its star.

Beethoven's.Great.Love.1936.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 56 min
Size: 	1.79 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	718x572 ~> 762x572
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.203
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5190270A6F7BADD/Beethoven’s.Great.Love.1936.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/46AD2291EEB7099/Beethoven’s.Great.Love.1936.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU_-_eng.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Abel Gance – Un grand amour de Beethoven AKA Beethoven’s Great Love (1936) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Paris, 1937. Winckler kills his enemy Gordon, a Chicago mobster, from the stage of a Parisian music hall, where he performs telepathy. He pays another artist, Helene, so that she tells the police they’ve spent the night together, which doesn’t fool Callas, the police officer who investigates the murder. He hires one of his fellow officers in order to seduce Helene.

L'alibi.1937.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 23 min
Size: 	1.62 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	788x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.229
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s (Original)

https://nitro.download/view/4E9075DF9CF3C36/L’alibi.1937.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French SDH, Occasional hardocded French for English dialogue

The post Pierre Chenal – L’alibi (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
The composer Roland Samblaca returns to his home town Carcassonne in the South of France with his family. Whilst visiting an ancient castle, he meets and is enchanted by a young woman, Sylvie, who lives in the castle with her adoptive guardian, Monsieur Toulzac. A retired schoolmaster, Toulzac now occupies his time with his research into the ancient cult of a Christian sect of the Middle Ages who glorified death over life. Syvlie believes that she is cursed, having seen her first two lovers die in tragic circumstances. When Toulzac discovers a secret cathedral beneath the castle, Syvlie is compelled to go there. Roland follows, oblivious to the danger that awaits…

Fiancee.Of.Darkness.1945.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 32mn
Size:	2.27 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	790x576
Aspect ratio:	1.372
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 307 kb/s
Audio
French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A60C64F64BE35C9/Fiancee.Of.Darkness.1945.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Serge de Poligny – La Fiancée des ténèbres AKA Fiancée of Darkness (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Gervaise Macquart, a young lame laundress, is left by her lover Auguste Lantier with two boys… She manages to make it, and a few years later she marries Coupeau, a roofer. After working very hard a few more years, she succeeds in buying her own laundry (her dream)… But Coupeau starts to drink after having fallen from a roof, and Lantier shows up… A faithful adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel “L’Assomoir”, depicting the fatal degeneration of a family of workers, mainly because of alcohol.

2.42GB | 1 h 57 min | 782×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/AA5B854DEE3ECFE/Gervaise.1956.BluRay.576p.x264.AAC-stairs.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Japanese (muxed)

The post René Clément – Gervaise (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis wrote:
A well-off young woman decides to become a nun, joining a convent that rehabilitates female prisoners. Through their program, she meets a woman named Thérèse who refuses any help because she says she was innocent of the crime she was convicted for. After being released from prison, Thérèse murders the actual perpetrator of the crime and comes to seek sanctuary in the convent.

Erik Ulman @ Senses of Cinema wrote:
Robert Bresson’s first feature, Les Anges du péché is a fascinating film, both intrinsically and in its relation to the rest of Bresson’s oeuvre. The script, fashioned by Bresson in collaboration with the Dominican priest Raymond Bruckberger and the noted playwright Jean Giraudoux, concerns the Sisters of Bethany, an order of nuns devoted to working with female ex-convicts. The film’s protagonist is a well-to-do young woman, Anne-Marie (Renée Faure), who joins the order out of a passionate sense of mission. On a prison visit with the prioress, she meets an inmate named Thérèse (Jany Holt), who rebels continually against her unjust confinement for theft. Upon her release Thérèse kills the man responsible for her imprisonment, and takes refuge in the convent. Here Anne-Marie tries to effect Thérèse’s spiritual transformation, but her obsession intensifies Thérèse’s resentment and jeopardizes her relations with her fellow nuns. For her disruption of convent life Anne-Marie is expelled, but secretly returns nightly to pray at the tomb of her order’s founder. When she becomes deathly ill, she is discovered and readmitted to the fold; and, upon her death, Thérèse undergoes a change of heart, delivering herself to the police and to her just punishment.

In one scene, each nun receives at random a maxim which constitutes a particular spiritual instruction, and is an emblem of her particular destiny. Anne-Marie’s is a quotation from St. Catherine of Siena: “If you hear the word that ties you to another human being, do not listen to any others that follow—they are merely its echo.” As in Pickpocket (1959), in Les Anges Bresson traces the “long route” by which such a tie may lead to redemption. Anne-Marie’s project of saving Thérèse, conceived before she even meets her, ultimately succeeds but only via a tortuous path: Thérèse’s revenge for false imprisonment with real murder, Anne-Marie’s disruption of and expulsion from her order, her alienation, even torment of Thérèse, and ultimately her own death. This route to Anne-Marie’s saintly fulfilment and Thérèse’s transformation passes through continually ambiguous terrain, in which will, destiny, and chance become indistinguishable, and in which saintliness and criminality not only work side by side but mingle: as Roland Barthes observes, “Throughout the film, we have felt that Good was not so separate from Evil, that between these two powers there were certain espousals, so to speak, which united them to the point of creating a homogenous substance, as in life itself.” (1) Bresson touches here on an ambiguity that one finds in later films: where does sin meet sanctity? The sinful arrogance of Anne-Marie is also the agent of her achievement; guilt makes Thérèse’s redemption possible. Bresson leaves precise ascription of motive or nature open, making everything resonant with implication: a lovely example is the moment in which Anne-Marie gives Thérèse a kiss in the prison, and Thérèse apparently unconsciously wipes her brow. Has her temperature risen from Anne-Marie’s kiss, in some recognition of its erotic or spiritual undertones? Or does it merely register fatigue at pushing her soup cart?

One finds in Les Anges another characteristically Bressonian paradox, namely the proximity of liberation and imprisonment. It is Thérèse’s return to prison that marks her liberation from hatred; it is Anne-Marie’s love for the world that leads her to renounce it. (The theme of discipline and imprisonment is not only characteristic of such later Bresson films as Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé [1956], however, but is of the film’s time. In a useful essay, Tony Pipolo observes that the nuns’ rescue of an ex-convict from her old associates resembles a Resistance operation; (2) although, by contrast, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the film is actually not far from Pétainist values. (3))

Thematically characteristic though it is, Les Anges remains unquestionably more conventional than Bresson’s later work. It is talkier, more eloquent, than the later films, which tend to neutralize dialogue in favor of more specifically filmic rhetoric (elliptical editing, for example). In keeping with this, the acting style is also distant from Bresson’s later requirements: with Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Les Anges is one of Bresson’s two features to use professional actors, who offer performances far more expressive and “actorly” than can be found in the impassive downward glances of the later films. This was a source of serious dissatisfaction to Bresson, who in his Notes would caution himself against drawing “tears from the public with the tears of your models” instead of “with this image rather than that one, this sound rather than that one, exactly in their place;” (4) but I find the performances beautiful. Surely Faure’s bright, warm eyes and proud gaiety are indelible, and Holt is wonderfully sullen and subterranean.

In addition, Les Anges is visually lusher than later Bresson: as in Les Dames, cinematographer Philippe Agostini favors rich blacks and luminous whites, creating images that seem almost opulent next to the more muted contrasts of the films photographed by L.-H. Burel or Ghislain Cloquet, or the hard surfaces of a late film like L’Argent (1983). Also, the film score is far more obtrusive than Bresson would later tolerate: he would later write that “Music takes up all the room and gives no increased value to the image to which it is added.” (5) Whereas the late films allow no non-diegetic music, and those between Un Condamné and Une Femme douce (1969) permit only severe punctuations by classical or baroque pieces, Les Anges features a relatively abundant score by Jean-Jacques Grünenwald (who also wrote the music for Les Dames and Le Journal d’un curé de campagne [1951]), which gives the film what Keith Reader suggests is a sulpicien, or kitschy religious, quality. (6) For my part, I like the music very much, such as the offbeat determination of the march that opens and closes the film, and the poignant melody and modulations as Anne-Marie tearfully burns the photographs that still connect her to her past.

However distant from his later work it may be, Les Anges du péché remains not only recognizably a Bresson film, but one of great power. I imagine that few will forget, for example, its final sequence: underscored by Grünenwald’s effective music, shifting here from orchestra to the authoritative unanimity and religious overtones of the organ, Bresson’s camera tracks Thérèse’s hands into the waiting manacles of the police in a filmic gesture of absolute precision and expressive force.

http://nitroflare.com/view/639BEDC7380E658/Les_Anges_du_Peche_%281943%29.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (.srt), Italian (vobsub), German (vobsub), Spanish (vobsub)

The post Robert Bresson – Les anges du péché AKA Angels of Sin (1943) first appeared on Cinema of the World.