Ro.Go.Pa.G.
This consists of four short films by different directors. Rosselini's 'Chastity' deals with an attractive air hostess who receives the unwelcome attentions of a middle aged American. Godard's 'New World' illustrates a post-apocalypse world the same as the pre-apocalyptic one but for an enigmatic change in attitude in most people, including the central character's girlfriend. In Pasolini's 'La Ricotta' (Curd Cheese), a lavish film about the life of Jesus Christ is being made in a poor area. The impoverished people subject themselves to various indignities in the name of moviemaking in order to win a little food. The central character is hoisted up on a cross for filming, and dies there. Finally comes Gregoretti's 'Free Range Chicken' in which a family of the materialist culture inadvertantly illustrate the cynical, metallic voiced doctrine of a top sales theorist.
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Ugo Gregoretti
Ugo Gregoretti
Casts & Crew
Rosanna Schiaffino
Bruce Balaban
Maria Pia Schiaffino
Jean-Marc Bory
Alexandra Stewart
Orson Welles
Mario Cipriani
Laura Betti
Edmonda Aldini
Ettore Garofolo
Ugo Tognazzi
Lisa Gastoni
Ricky Tognazzi
Antonella Taito
Elsa De Giorgi
Maria Bernardini
Michel Delahaye
Rossana Di Rocco
Jean-André Fieschi
Vittorio La Paglia
André S. Labarthe
Tomás Milián
Franca Pasut
Gianrico Tedeschi
Carlo Zappavigna
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 Roberto Rossellini
ROME, OPEN CITY is a landmark in film history. Filmed in secrecy during the Nazi occupation of Italy, the film shows a realistic portrayal of the underground resistance in Italy in 1945. The film has strong impacting imagery with its mix of fiction and reality that strengthened Italian Neo-realism and the film industry.
In this evocative, atmospheric biography, Roberto Rossellini brings to life philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who, amid religious persecution and ignorance, believed in a harmony between God and science.
Cardinal Mazarin dies, leaving a power vacuum in which the young Louis asserts his intention to govern as well as rule. Mazarin's fiscal advisor, Colbert, warns against Fouquet, the Superintendant who has been systematically looting the treasury and wants to be prime minister. Fouquet believes Louis will soon tire of exercizing power and overplays his hand by offering a bribe to Louis' mistress to be his ally. She reports this to the king who arrests Fouquet. Louis and Colbert design a brilliant strategy to keep merchants making money, nobles in debt, the urban poor working and fed, and peasants untaxed. Years later, in a coda, we see Louis exercizing the power of the sun.
The tale of two fish in love, threatened by an octopus and saved by an eel.
An exploration of the Centre Georges Pompidou and its surroundings on its opening day in 1977.
Although released anonymously, as was the custom with all films produced by the Italian Navy, La Nave Bianca is the first feature-length effort directed by Roberto Rossellini; it is also very much the work of its co-writer and supervisor Francesco De Robertis. The film combines a documentary look at the Italian Navy during World War II with newsreel combat footage and a scripted love story performed by non-professional actors.
In Nazi-occupied Rome, a beautiful bootlegger, to the chagrin of her lover, gives sanctuary to three escaped POWs: an American pilot, a Russian sergeant and a British major
A biography of St. Augustine as he enters the episcopacy and deals with heresy and the decline of the Western Roman Empire.
Ingrid Bergman notices that her roses have been destroyed. At first she suspects it is her dogs or her children, but later on notices a chicken walking around the area of her roses. (Originally appeared as a segment of the omnibus film "Siamo donne (We, Women)" but later presented separately as a short film.)
Also Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.
The director presents takes and scenes filmed on location in Africa for a film-that-never-was, a black Oresteia.
The capital of Yemen, the city of Sana'a, holds an important part of history within its walls filled with medieval architecture and culture. But that same culture was about to disappear with the country's modernization which came after the civil war in the 1960's. To impeach such modern invasion, director Pasolini pledges to UNESCO for the recognition of Sana'a as a World Heritage Site.
Made as part of the omnibus film RoGoPaG, this short is a hilarious religious farce. At the Cinecittá film studio a director (played by Orson Welles) begins shooting a film dealing with Christ's cruxification. Among the cast is a Jesus who has sex with boys in the bushes, and a peasant who plays one of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus - the actor literally dies on the cross, but not of inflicted wounds, but of indigestion caused by too much cheese.
A wealthy Italian household is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives, seduces every family member and then disappears. Each has an epiphany of sorts, but none can figure out who the seductive visitor was or why he came.
Based on the plot of Euripides' Medea. Medea centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman.
Microphone in hand, Pier Paolo Pasolini asks Italians to talk about sex: he asks children where babies come from, young and old women if they are men's equals, men and women if a woman's virginity matters, how they view homosexuals, how sex and honor connect, if divorce should be legal, and if they support closing the brothels (the Merlina Act). He periodically checks in with Alberto Moravia and Cesare Musatti. Bersani is intrusive and judgemental, prodding those who answer. The film's thesis: despite the booming post-war economy, Italians' attitudes toward sex are either rigidly Medieval (the poor and the South) or muddled and self-censoring (the bourgeoisie and the North).
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Biblical drama follows the life of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Gospel of Matthew from the New Testament. Which focuses on the teachings of Jesus, including his parables, and on their revolutionary nature. As Jesus travels along the coast of the Sea of Galilee, he gradually gathers more followers, leading him into direct conflict with the authorities.
Appunti per un film sull’India is a short documentary film by Pier Paolo Pasolini where he visits India in the search of a king who could give up his body to feed a starving tiger. The film was shot around post-independent India when it was facing grave challenges of poverty, population and caste system. Pasolini narrates the challenges of India and its charms amidst all the problems the country faces. The 33 minute long documentary is composed of short interviews from random people about their opinions on matters such as family planning. The documentary also shows short interviews of journalists and one politician about the challenges of India to modernize without becoming westernized or losing the Indian identity.
Ciancicato Miao and his son, after the death of his wife and mother by mushroom poisoning, are dedicated to find her replacement and have no luck until they find a mysterious deaf mute green-haired woman.
Also Directed by Ugo Gregoretti
Falling somewhere in-between a documentary and a droll drama (more like an enactment of reality, with a wink), this film by TV director Ugo Gregoretti looks in on a variety of social and ethnic situations throughout Italy. Sexual morés are contrasted, from the quaintly out-of-date courtship in Sicily to the sometimes uncomfortably explicit sexual references in the conversations of the youth at the opposite end of the country. Aside from these manners and morals, there is an examination of what happens when mechanized tools of production begin to take away from the human element at factories and in other industrial venues.
Five swindle stories, taking place in five international cities: Tokyo, Japan ("Fumiko's Five Benefactors" by Hiromichi Horikawa); Amsterdam, The Netherlands ("A River of Diamonds" by Roman Polanski); Naples, Italy ("The Road Map" by Ugo Gregoretti); Paris, France ("The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower" by Claude Chabrol); and Marrakesh, Morocco ("The Confidence Man" by Jean-Luc Godard). Godard's segment was not included in the original French cinema release, and Polanski's segment was not included on the 2016 home disc release.
Factory workers struggles over contracts in post-68 Italy documented through original footage.
Based on 1925 Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs, a zoologist finds a way to accelerate embryo growth in chicken eggs to help feed the population after the war. An unfortunate logistical accident makes the country swarmed with dangerous reptiles.
The film documents the trade union battle of the workers of the Apollon printing house in Rome, occupied for a few months after the management decided to fire all the personnel and sell the land on which the factory was standing.
Gregoretti's Il pollo ruspante ("Free Range Chicken") shows an Italian middle-class family with two children traveling via an autostrada (highway) to the site of a real-estate project where they could be interested in buying a detached house.
100 years ago, a terrible earthquake, followed by an equally terrible tidal wave, devastated and largely destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria.