In the kingdom of the Moguls, Prince Roudghito-Sing, a young officer of the palace, falls in love with Zemgali, a captive princess held prisoner and coveted by the Grand Khan. Fleeing the country, he takes refuge in Paris and his presentability allows him to be hired as an actor by a French film company. The trouble is that Anna, the star of the movie, is attracted to him. Which displeases banker Morel, the producer and Anna’s lover…Read More »
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In Nerven, writer-director-producer Robert Reinert tried to capture the “nervous epidemic” caused by war and misery which “drives people mad”. This unique portrait of the life in 1919 Germany, filmed on location in Munich, describes the cases of different people from all levels of society: Factory owner Roloff who looses his mind in view of catastrophies and social disturbances, teacher John who is the hero of the masses and Marja who turns into a radical revolutionary. Using different fragments the Munich Film Museum could reconstruct this forgotten German classic which is a historic document and anticipates already elements of the Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.Read More »
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Countess Laure Maresco falls in love with a player, Jacques Prémont-Solène. He loses a large sum and dreams of suicide. Laure prevents her, before learning that her lover has squandered the recipe for a charity party that she attended. His family sends the young man to America to put an end to the scandal. Twenty years later, after a fortune, he returns.Read More »
PLOT: A kabuki actor’s mistress hatches a jealous plot to bring down her lover’s son.Read More »
This is the only movie the great French actor Charles Vanel (‘The wages of Fear’ by H. G. Clouzot) wrote and directed (he also directed a short film ‘Affaire classee’ in 1931) during his long career (the longest career of any film actor from 1908 to 1988).
A man (played by Vanel) who is working in a mine has recently married a beautiful young woman (Sandra Milovanoff, an actress who have worked with Sacha Guitry and Rene Clair among others). They strongly love each other but everyday they have to live separated because he has to go to work. One day, three children decide to make some tricks nearby the mine. Their ‘games’ have a very dramatic ending because part of the mine collapse and the man is injured and trapped under the rocks. After the rescue, the man survives but he is completely disfigured to the point that he has to wear a mask when he is in public and even in front of his wife. The happiness he and his wife were living in their everyday life starts to fade.Read More »
Movie’s themes : French experimental of the 70’s, Time
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“Claudine Eizykman’s Bruine Squamma (bruine: a kind of mist which absorbs and reflects light, and squama: a sliver of the epidermis which is shed from the skin), is impressive for the way it is organised and its jamming of a series of sporadic images, infinitely repeated and varied, with no narrative impulse whatsoever. Nothing but flashes, explosions, extinctions, splashes of images which succeed one another, shift forward or back, are superimposed, as in a game of transparent cards.”
Boris Lehman in La relève, 25/11/77.Read More »
Set before the French Revolution, the film tells the story of Bernard De Mauprat, a noble orphan, raised by despicable aristocrats, who is saved from the gallows by his cousin Edmée and his father, the knight Hubert De Mauprat. The return of Bernard causes tensions within Mauprat’s family since him tries to win the heart of his cousin Edmée (Knight of La Marche’s fiancée) after obtaining her pledge of loyalty under a certain threat of rape.Read More »
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One of the most important films of French avant-garde cinema, displaying Claudine Eizykman’s theory of “cinematographic energy” as well as creating kinetic movements capable of shaking up the world and revealing its heterogeneity.Read More »
Considered by many to be the first great American horror film, John S. Robertson’s DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE allowed stage legend John Barrymore to deliver his first virtuoso performance on film. Blending historic charm with grim naturalism, this version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is one of the more faithful of the many screen adaptations of Stevenson’s story (though greatly influenced by T.R. Sullivan’s popular stage treatment), recounting a visionary scientist’s ill-fated attempts to unleash the human mysteries that dwell beneath the shell of the civilized self.Read More »