The French as Seen by…
In 1988, the Figaro magazine asked to a few famous directors a series of short movies, to celebrate the 10 years of the revue. The thematic : The French seen by - The movies have been released for the French revolution bicentenary. Werner Herzog - Les Gaulois David Lynch - The Cowboy and the Frenchman Andrzej Wajda - Proust contre la déchéance Luigi Comencini - Pèlerinage à Agen Jean-Luc Godard - Le dernier mot
Andrzej Wajda
Jean-Luc Godard
David Lynch
Werner Herzog
Luigi Comencini
Also Directed by Andrzej Wajda
As an aging woman married to a workaholic doctor by chance meets a young man who makes her feel young again. All of this is films by a director making a film about her which cuts in and out of the on camera and off camera drama.
Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.
In what might be termed Russo-Shakespearean noir, a ruthless woman's adulterous affair with a drifter sets in motion a chain-reaction of murder and deception in a remote village in 19th Century Mtsensk.
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem (Solaris). The main character, race car driver Ryszrd Fox, is involved in many car accidents. After each car crash he gets a transplant for one or another internal organ. After a while there is a question: Who really is Ryszard Fox?
A segment of “Love at Twenty” tells the story of a man who rescued a child from a polar bear attack.
A grand and patriotic tale of Poland's struggle for freedom just before Napoleon's war with Russia. Written in poetic style by Adam Mickiewicz, this story follows two feuding Polish families as they overcome their old conflicts and petty lives. However, they are able to unite as one with their patriotic and rebellious efforts to free the country they deeply love from Russian control.
no movie overview
Andrzej Wajda documentary about Polish film.
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 David Lynch
Short documentary of David Lynch building a lamp.
Short piece for the collective film "One Dream Rush."
A series of eight crudely animated shorts written, directed, and voiced by director David Lynch in 2002. The series details the daily routines of a dull-witted white trash man. The man lives in a house along with his frazzled wife and squeaky-voiced child, both of whom are nameless as is the man in the shows.
A short film by David Lynch featuring his son Austin, originally filmed for davidlynch.com
A surreal short film that Lynch made for the 2008 Twin Peaks Festival. It only screened once and is in Black and white. In this film, Lynch is speaking backwards in what looks to be a cross between the floors of Eraserhead and the Twin Peaks Red Room. Sitting next to him is a plastic doll with the face of Laura Palmer.
A short film directed by David Lynch.
A film about a flight of stairs. Directed by David Lynch.
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgangers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
A retired farmer and widower in his 70s, Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.
Two young women find themselves in a dark room where there is a distinctly strange feeling.
Also Directed by Werner Herzog
A Jewish strongman performs in Berlin as the blond Aryan hero Siegfried.
Episode 9 of the series "2000 Years Of Christianity". Director Werner Herzog explores Christianity in the New World including an overview of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and modern day religious rituals in Antigua. Two versions exist of this film, the one called "Christ and Demons in New Spain" features Herzog's voice over.
Jag Mandir is a quiet and often overlooked film in the vast oeuvre of Werner Herzog. Apparently, 20 hours of footage was shot that covered the whole fest and the film hardly presents us a twentieth of that. A native walking into the film in between may well fail to immediately realize that it is his country that is being shown and these are figures from the mythology of various sections of his nation.
In 1966, Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured, and, down to 85 pounds, escaped. Barefoot, surviving monsoons, leeches, and machete-wielding villagers, he was rescued. Now, near 60, living on Mt. Tamalpais, Dengler tells his story: a German lad surviving Allied bombings in World War II, postwar poverty, apprenticed to a smith, beaten regularly. At 18, he emigrates and peels potatoes in the U.S. Air Force. He leaves for California and college, then enlistment in the Navy to learn to fly. A quiet man of sorrows tells his story: war, capture, harrowing conditions, escape, and miraculous rescue. Where did he find the strength; how does he now live with his memories?
Brad has committed murder and barricaded himself inside his house. With the help of his friends and neighbours, the cops piece together the strange tale of how this nice young man arrived at such a dark place.
A chronicle of Gertrude Bell's life, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer, and political attaché for the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Works, legend and murders of Carlo Gesualdo, a notorious Italian composer and murderer from 16th century.
Ten Minutes Older is a 2002 film project consisting of two compilation feature films entitled The Trumpet and The Cello. The project was conceived by the producer Nicolas McClintock as a reflection on the theme of time at the turn of the Millennium. Fifteen celebrated film-makers were invited to create their own vision of what time means in ten minutes of film.
A drama centered on a Texas teenager whose best friend goes on a shooting spree at their high school.
Love is a business at Family Romance, a company that rents human stand-ins for any occasion. Founder Yuichi Ishii helps make his clients’ dreams come true. But when the mother of 12-year-old Mahiro hires Ishii to impersonate her missing father, the line between acting and reality threatens to blur.
Also Directed by Luigi Comencini
In the 15th century, in a poor Italian village, the monks of a modest convent take up an abandoned baby. Unfortunately, for all their efforts, they prove unable to trace his parents. So they set up providing tender loving care to the little boy. Marcellino lives a happy life among the men of God but, as he grows up, he misses his mother more and more. To compensate for her absence, he tends to identify her with the Virgin Mary. One day, the local lord, in search of a child to raise, decides to adopt Marcellino and to bring him up in his castle. He dresses him in rich attire and gives him a strict education. But Marcellino feels miserable there and eventually runs away.Back in his dear convent, he gleefully resumes his former life. He still misses his mother but his life changes when he finds a crucifix in the attic. A wonderful friendship between Jesus and him is born.
Tells a dark story about a young lawyer that falls in love with a strange girl with an unknown past.
The film begins when Eugenio, a 14 year old child, is conduced from his grandparents home outside Rome, to Giancarlo (his father) in the city, by Giancarlo's friend (called "Moustache"). As Eugenio is bothering Moustache, he threatens Eugenio with leaving him in the middle of the country. He finally does it. When Giancarlo finds out, they return for Eugenio, but he is now lost. Meanwhile we're told the story of the child and his relation with the family, and why he feels unwanted.
At the end of World War II, shallow, self-centered Mara is the prettiest girl in her small Italian village; Bebo is a Communist partisan who is finding it difficult to adjust to the dull banalities of life in peacetime. When Mara’s father, a passionate Communist, declares that his daughter will marry the returning hero, her reactions range from joy to bitter resentment.
Marshal Antonio Carotenuto is sent to a remote Italian mountain village named Sagliena. He's anxious to marry, and selects young Gina Lollobrigida as his bride; but she is already in love with his shy subordinate Roberto Risso. Mistaking her headstrong behavior as promiscuity, Carotenuto makes advances towards her, but she spurns him. Forsaking the girl to the arms of Risso, the Marshal decides to settle for village midwife Marisa Merlini. Things become more complicated when Annarella, the midwife, starts demonstrating her love to Antonio. She is hiding a secret and the Marshal soon will be in a difficult situation.
Three episodes of casual erotic character: a porn scriptwriter and his secretary, a man locked up among homosexuals, and a shy man who decides to hire a prostitute over the phone.