Le palais idéal
A short documentary film about the eponymous work of architecture by the postman Ferdinand Cheval. Text by Cheval, spoken by Gaston Modot. This is the first film about Cheval's creation.
Adonis Kyrou
Director
Also Directed by Adonis Kyrou
Short film for the french TV program "Dim Dam Dom". A love letter to Barbara Steele and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs.
One of filmmaker and expatriate writer Adonis Kyrou's best-known quotes translates roughly as "I urge you: Learn to look at 'bad' films, they are so often sublime." The same could be said of Kyrou's own directorial work in Greece before the advent of the 1967 dictatorship forced him to flee to Paris. This confused mess, the first cinematic attempt at portraying the Greek resistance in WWII, caused quite a stink upon release, as much for its surprising style (recalling that of Bertolt Brecht) as for its subject matter. Reaction to its screening as part of the 1966 Cannes Film Festival's International Critic's Week was heated and divisive, proving Kyrou's later statement by rising above its own inherent silliness to achieve a sort of rarefied critical status. It's bad drama that nonetheless succeeds by dint of audacity more than quality (a comment which could apply equally to the work of many exploitation directors like Jean Rollin whom Kyrou later so lovingly profiled).
Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is a monk who is sexually tempted by an emissary of the Devil, a young girl in monk's robes. After he has committed numerous crimes, it appears that he will be caught and punished by the Inquisition. Instead, he signs up on the Devil's team and wins his freedom.. and eventually, the papacy.
How to make the most of a defeat. How to make money from Napoleon's fiasco at Waterloo.
A man developes an obsession with a wig.
