Doreen Canto

Strolling through France (Roanne, Nice and Carcassonne) with some excursions abroad (Munich, Montreal, New York).

Two New York women, Kristin and Doreen, live a black and white life, but in color of Gene Tierney, a star of 40’ Hollywood melodrama, while listening to the old songs of Marilyn Monroe. They go from one extreme to the other (from dream to reality, from day to night, from black and white to color), and so travel symbolically through this timelessness. Kristin disappears and Doreen is lost is the big city. Her meetings with Marcel, a filmmaker, then David, a sculptor, accomplish nothing, and she is destroyed by daylight. But her Memory of Gene Tierney triumphs over night and death, and Cinema can continue.

6.2/10

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

6.1/10

Reel 18 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.