Cinétracts
A series of 41 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each "tract" espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers' strikes and the events of Paris in May '68.
Jean-Luc Godard
Chris Marker
Chris Marker
Alain Resnais
Jacques Loiseleux
Jean-Pierre Gorin
Philippe Garrel
Jackie Raynal
Gérard Fromanger
Jean-Denis Bonan
Also Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard addresses two filmic letters to young Israeli soldiers who were sentenced after refusing to intervene in the occupied territories.
TV commercial (commissioned by Swiss tobacco company F.J. Burrus S.A.) for Parisienne cigarettes.
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.
The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.
Jean-Luc Godard's poetic meditation on war, violence and defeat. The film is structured in three parts. The three segments are "Hell", "Purgatory", and "Heaven". The first segment is a montage of war images from documentary and fictional sources. The second concerns two young Jewish women attending a European arts conference in Sarajevo. The final segment concerns the after life.
For Ever Mozart is an episodic film that follows a theater troupe from France attempting to put on a play in Sarajevo. Along their journey they are captured and held in a POW camp, and they call for help from their friends and relations in France. Director Jean-Luc Godard presents stories about this troop to ask how one can make art while slaughters like the one in Bosnia are taking place, and he throws in a strong critique of the European Union. For Ever Mozart is one of Godard's most disjointed and difficult films. Its stories sometimes seem to form a whole and at other times the links among them are unclear. One gets the impression that in each episode Godard attempts to start a film only to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue. It features some of the most beautiful shots of tanks in the cinema.
A reworking of extracts from Andre Malraux, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, and GK Chesterton.
Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song. A story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.
Jean-Luc Godard, and Anne-Marie Miéville Four Short Films
The official spot of 22nd Jihlava international documentary film festival, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Also Directed by Chris Marker
Through photos made by the French photographer Denise Bellon, a personnal history of France.
Chris Marker's cat and rat.
Paris 2002. Yellow cats appear on the walls. Chris Marker is looking for these mysterious cats and captures with his camera the political and international events of these last two years (war in Iraq...).
Time travel, still images, a past, present and future and the aftermath of World War III. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and forth, in and out of time, to find a solution to the world’s fate. To replenish its decreasing stocks of food, medicine and energies, and in doing so, resulting in a perpetual memory of a lone female, life, death and past events that are recreated on an airport’s viewing pier.
In seven different parts, Godard, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamees army during the Vietnam-war.
A short film that shows Boundless, Surreal objects that are juxtaposed with our present World. Cars, Motorways, noise of our modern society; A giant city in the distance - all that shrouds this lonely and forgotten island of Dreams. Filmed at the Emeryville Mudflats near San Francisco.
On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. It was the largest protest gathering yet, and it brought together a wide cross-section of liberals, radicals, hippies, and Yippies. Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia only two weeks previously, and, for many, it was the transition from simply marching against the war, to taking direct action to try to stop the 'American war machine.' Norman Mailer wrote about the events in Armies of the Night. French filmmaker Chris Marker, leading a team of filmmakers, was also there.
Berlin 1990 travels the streets and the political landscape of the recently re-unified Berlin. In the tumultuous atmosphere of 1990, we watch Berliners walk through check points manned by soldiers, past street vendors selling sausages and "actual" pieces of the Berlin Wall, and watch as they watch the election results come in for another "new" Germany.
An unexpected response to Pinochet's 1973 coup d'etat in Chile. A Super-8 film apparently found in an embassy -as it's written in the original title-, where political activists had taken refuge after a military coup d'état. But the events -and their setting- are not what they first appear to be.
A film of Chris Marker and the broadcasting(audiovisual) confederate Group - CFDT(FRENCH TRADE UNION)... For the centenarian of the law of 1884, which we agree to take for point of departure of the labor union, CFDT(FRENCH TRADE UNION) confided to Chris Marker the realisation of a film dedicated to hundred years of syndicalism in France. Chris Marker plans the question in the future and imagines a television news of 2084 for the anniversary of the second centenarian and three possible scenarios: the grey hypothesis, that of the "crisis", " a fearful society which hums and gives itself false safeties in the hope of a balance always questioned "; the black hypothesis, " a world where the technique took the place of the ideologies "; the blue hypothesis, finally, that of the dream and the imagination.
Also Directed by Alain Resnais
Documentary about George Gershwin directed by Alain Resnais with various celebrities speaking on their admiration and affection for Gershwin's music.
In Paris, six people all look for love, despite typically having their romantic aspirations dashed at every turn.
Odile is a business executive looking for a new, bigger apartment. Her younger sister Camille has just completed her doctoral thesis in history and is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours because he's attracted to her. Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.
Directed by Alain Resnais
In seven different parts, Godard, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamees army during the Vietnam-war.
Recovering from an attempted suicide, a man is selected to participate in a time travel experiment that has only been tested on mice. A malfunction in the experiment causes the man to experience moments from his past in a random order.
A chamber drama about a widow and her son who live in an antique shop in Boulogne. The widow invites a man whom she loved twenty-two years earlier to visit. Her son is haunted by Muriel, a young woman whose death he may have caused while serving as a soldier in Algeria. As in Resnais' earlier films, memory is deflected, fragmented, enshrined, and imagined.
In the midst of rehearsals for a new play, amateur dramatics proponents Colin and Kathryn receive the shattering news that their friend George is fatally ill and only has a few months to live.
Contre l'Oubli (Against Oblivion) is a compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville's film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.
Le chant du Styrène is a 1958 French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais. The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.
Also Directed by Jacques Loiseleux
This film shows how two farmers' unions decide to start mass action to obtain a land lease from a landowner, thus enabling the tenant to obtain loans to set up farming facilities.
Also Directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin
A politically oriented film in which images suggestive of a mock western are accompanied by an atttack on all cinematic conventions to date and a debate on the nature and possibility of revolutionary cinema.
Jean-Pierre Gorin interacts with a club of model railroad train enthusiasts and his mentor, artist/writer Manny Farber.
The film's subject is a photograph of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War. It asks what the position of the intellectual should be in the class struggle and points out the irony of Jane Fonda's participation in the photo shoot, which was staged.
Jean-Pierre Gorin examines the lives and cultural background of Samoan street gangs in Long Beach, California.
Documentary by Jean-Pierre Gorin about twin girls who spontaneously developed their own unique language as children.
Jean-Luc Godard's and Jean-Pierre Gorin's interpretation of the Chicago Eight / Chicago Seven trial, which followed the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activities. Judge Hoffman becomes the character Judge Himmler (played by Ernest Menzer) and the defendants become a microcosms of the French Revolution.
A strike at a French sausage factory contributes to the estrangement of a married filmmaker and his reporter wife.
Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.
The film reveals how and why a supposedly revolutionary Italian girl has in fact fallen prey to bourgeois ideology.
Also Directed by Philippe Garrel
The professional and emotional cross-currents between two romantically entwined theater actors played by the director’s son Louis and Anna Mouglalis.
"Clara, screenplay and dialogues of a Franco-Czechoslovak film, the co-director should have been the Czech filmmaker Kadar. Screenplay adaptated in 1989 by Philippe Garrel and students of the University of Paris X (Nanterre). The subject of the film - which is also a love story - is part of the political atmosphere, release the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party has changed both individual for a certain way of seeing and understanding History: political trials, purges in Czechoslovakia, Hungary events of 1956, Algeria war, cold war." - KG
A 17 year old boy goes on a trip with his father and his father's girlfriend.
The story of a father, his 23-year-old daughter who goes back home one day because she has just been dumped, and his new girlfriend, who is also 23 and lives with him.
For those who were young, living under the delusions of love and soft drugs in Paris, May 1968 - even if the guitar is still playing, they can't hear it any longer.
Paul reflects on the summer he met Angèle and Frédéric as he watches his friend being laid to rest.
Athanor (Nico) is searching for fire. A flame is always at the foreground. Nico naked in tombs, looking at herself in circular mirrors, Nico in castles, keeper of the fire. Nico and Musky as medieval princesses. Athanor is a film about fire.
A composition of symbolic, surreal and almost mystic images.
A personal portrait of the American actress Jean Seberg.
30 year old child enters the new city, riding on a donkey. He says he is the Savior. He has spent no time among men. He is trembling with cold. His clothes are soaked. His mother was overprotective ; his father conspicuously absent. He knows that he must face the mockery, refusal, ignorance and blindness of the men around him. They travel in gangs, in large numbers : soldiers, mercenaries or the like, on majestic, imposing horses. Everything is out of proportion to his thin, bewildered, innocent body ; he is the madman of the new city...
Also Directed by Jackie Raynal
“My purpose in filming NOTES ON JONAS was not to make a portrait per se. As a film editor, I was mainly curious to know about his editing technique. When I tried to get an interview, Jonas played his accordion, his tuba, his harmonica… He even organized a jam session in the basement of AFA. I wondered: ‘Is Jonas too shy to let himself be interviewed by a woman?’ Enlisting a cameraman to shoot the film instead of me did the trick. Jonas invited us to his loft on Broadway and to his editing room. How happy I was to be watching as he gave me a long master class.” –Jackie Raynal
directed by Jackie Reynal, from 2003
Deux fois is a 1968 experimental film by Jackie Raynal. Raynal stars in the film, her first as a director; she had previously worked for several years as a film editor, most notably for films in Éric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" series (she was, reportedly, the youngest professional editor in France at the time). The film's title, which literally translates as Twice and is sometimes translated into English as Twice Upon a Time, refers to the occasional repetition of scenes or actions.
Autobiographical film about Loulou (Jackie Raynal) who seeks a job as an editor on Broadway, shares a loft in Soho and marries an entrepreneur.
She had been a director. He had been a film critic. Lockdowned in their flat, rue des chaufourniers, he begins to carry out household chores, which she would take charge of criticizing.
A documentary by Jackie Raynal about the artistic movement Zanzibar.
A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.
In a black bath, Jackie Raynal introduce her film Deux Fois to Metrograph in NYC.
A tribute to Raynal’s parents, who were Resistance fighters and communists in the South of France during World War II. The interviews with those who worked together to save the persecuted are unmistakably moving, at once intimate and sprawling.
A comedy about New York and its eccentric inhabitants. A french filmmaker comes to New york to show her film at MOMA. Fascinated by the city, she decides to stay.
Also Directed by Gérard Fromanger
In the 1968 movement in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard made a 16mm, 3-minute long film, Film-tract No.1968, Le Rouge, in collaboration with French artist Gérard Fromanger. Starting with the shot identifying its title written in red paint on the Le Monde for 31 July 1968, the film shows the process of making Fromanger’s poster image, which is thick red paint flows over a tri-color French flag. —Hye Young Min
Also Directed by Jean-Denis Bonan
Paris, in the 1960s. A series of crimes troubles the public tranquility. On March, 22, 1968, Hélène Picard, a prostitute sentenced to death two years before for several murders, is killed by executioner Louis Guilbeau. Immediately, the violent crimes, similar to Hélène’s ones, go on again. In parallel, Louis is having an affair with the police woman in charge of the investigation… What are the obscure relations hidden behind the executioner and the mysterious killer? Who is this dark man in reality?
Monsieur Meuçieu wants to escape from an absurd society, in vain.
The questioning of an individual lost in the society of man.
In a world where everything is forbidden except what is obligatory, a man recalls what led him to work in a very strange fast food restaurant.
A primer on French film director Marcel Carne's career through interviews with critics and close creative collaborators.
An interview of French film director Marcel Carné by Didier Decoin