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.

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Not really epic material, this is a fated romantic drama (a typically French quality) set against the exotic background of the Foreign Legion and, actually, a remake of Jacques Feyder’s 1934 film LE GRAND JEU.

The plot involves a successful young lawyer (Jean-Claude Pascal) who, due to a shady deal, finds himself penniless and separated from his wife (Gina Lollobrigida). Stranded in Algeria, he’s persuaded to join the Foreign Legion where he befriends a couple of similar losers (played by Raymond Pellegrin and Peter van Eyck). All three lodge in the tavern run by an ageing fortune-teller (Arletty) and occasionally go out in search of a good time with the local girls eventually meeting up with one who’s a dead-ringer for Lollobrigida! Soon, the buddies fall out over her (and one of them even winds up dead, an event which Arletty had actually predicted!) though the girl, naturally, is drawn to the hero (even if her sweet-natured character differs from that of his materialistic wife). At the end, Pascal does run into the latter and discovers that they have nothing more in common which, therefore, gives him free rein to start life over with his new-found love.

This was one of the first international efforts Siodmak made following his spell in Hollywood (to which he returned sporadically thereafter). Consequently, while his best work may have been behind him, the director manages to lend a reasonable amount of style to the melodramatic (even unlikely) proceedings.
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1.63GB | 1 h 38 min | 745×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8AAB8188FDDB2B4/_KG__Le_grand_jeu_(Robert_Siodmak,_1954).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/990D4B657D4B125/LeGrandJeu1954.srt

Language:French
Subtitles:English,French

The post Robert Siodmak – Le Grand Jeu AKA Flesh and the Woman (1954) first appeared on Cinema of the World.