Néstor Almendros
An interview with cinematographer Nestor Almendros about his work with French film director François Truffaut. Footage taken from the 1986 German documentary Arbeiten mit François Truffaut
Cameramen and women discuss the craft and art of cinematography and of the "DP" (the director of photography), illustrating their points with clips from 100 films, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing. Themes: the DP tells people where to look; changes in movies (the arrival of sound, color, and wide screens) required creative responses from DPs; and, these artisans constantly invent new equipment and try new things, with wonderful results. The narration takes us through the identifiable studio styles of the 30s, the emergence of noir, the New York look, and the impact of Europeans. Citizen Kane, The Conformist, and Gordon Willis get special attention.
In the year 1935, a teen named Billy Bathgate finds first love while becoming the protégé of fledgling gangster Dutch Schultz.
A short documentary film about fashion designer Giorgio Armani; it shows him preparing for a show and discusses his ideas about fashion, his family history and the city of Milan.
Three stories happening in New York. The first, by Scorsese, is about a painter who creates his works helped by high volume music and an attractive assistant; second, by Coppola, is about a rich and bold 12 years old who helps her separated parents to reconciliate; third, by Allen, is a witty piece of comedy about the impossibility of getting rid of the son's role.
An episode of the show "Océaniques " about the craft and lighting techniques of the legendary French cinematographer Henri Alekan
A documentary about the Cuban Revolution's transition into an authoritarian dictatorship, including repression, imprisonment, torture, and execution of political dissidents, while the rest of the world turned a blind eye.
Hairdresser Nadine Hightower wants to retrieve the risqué photos she once posed for, but when she visits the photographer at his office, he's murdered by an intruder. Nadine talks her estranged husband, Vernon, into going along when she returns to the office, where they stumble across plans for a less than legal construction project. But when Vernon tries to turn the documents into a cash windfall, he and Nadine are pursued by goons with guns.
Rachel is a food writer at a New York magazine who meets Washington columnist Mark at a wedding and ends up falling in love with him despite her reservations about marriage. They buy a house, have a daughter, and Rachel thinks they are living happily ever after until she discovers that Mark is having an affair while she is waddling around with a second pregnancy.
The story of the persecution of homosexuals and intellectuals in Cuba under Fidel Castro's dictatorship, from the beginning of the Cuban Revolution until the early 1980s. Interviews with relevant personalities of Cuban culture who suffered persecution demonstrate that concentration camps for gays existed in Cuba.
In 1930s Southern US, a widow and her family try to run their cotton farm with the help of a disparate group of friends.
Claude Massoulier is murdered while hunting at the same place as Julien Vercel, an estate agent who knew him and whose fingerprints are found on Massoulier's car. As the police discover that Marie-Christine Vercel, Julien's wife, was Massoulier's mistress, Julien is the prime suspect. But his secretary, Barbara Becker, while not quite convinced he is innocent, defends him and leads her private investigations.
Marion is about to divorce from her husband and takes her 15-year-old niece, Pauline, on a vacation to Granville. There, she meets an old love...
Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.
When one of his patients is found murdered, psychiatrist Dr. Sam Rice is visited by the investigating officer but refuses to give up any information. He's then visited by the patient's mistress, Brooke Reynolds, whom he quickly falls for despite her being a likely murder suspect. As the police pressure on him intensifies, Rice decides to attempt solving the case on his own and soon discovers that someone is trying to kill him as well.
Two small children and a ship's cook survive a shipwreck and find safety on an idyllic tropical island. Soon, however, the cook dies and the young boy and girl are left on their own. Days become years and Emmeline and Richard make a home for themselves surrounded by exotic creatures and nature's beauty. But will they ever see civilization again?
In occupied Paris, an actress married to a Jewish theater owner must keep him hidden from the Nazis while doing both of their jobs.
Ted Kramer is a career man for whom his work comes before his family. His wife Joanna cannot take this anymore, so she decides to leave him. Ted is now faced with the tasks of housekeeping and taking care of himself and their young son Billy.
Beginning with "The 400 Blows," director Francois Truffaut made a series of films about the impetuous Antoine Doinel, in which this is the last. Antoine is now 30, working as a proofreader and getting divorced from his his wife. It being the first "no-fault" divorce in France, a media circus erupts, dredging up Antoine's past. Indecisive about his new love with a store clerk, he impulsively takes off with an old flame.
In 1910, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer. A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire—Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating at once a timeless American idyll and a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor.
Henry Moon is captured for a capital offense by a posse when his horse quits while trying to escape to Mexico. He finds that there is a post-Civil War law in the small town that any single or widowed woman can save him from the gallows by marrying him.
Based on the Henry James short story "The Altar of the Dead", in which a man becomes obsessed with the many dead people in his life and builds a memorial to honor them. This film is also based on other short story by Henry James, "The Beast of the Jungle". It would be the last film Truffaut would act in.
A documentary that follows Dr. Penny Patterson's current scientific study of Koko, a gorilla who communicates through American Sign Language.
An old lady returns from Africa where she made a fortune to find her son in Paris, whom she has not seen in five years, with the intention of bringing him back with her. But this project fails.
At Bertrand Morane's burial there are many of the women that the 40-year-old engineer loved. In flashback Bertrand's life and love affairs are told by himself while writing an autobiographical novel.
A German Marquise has to deal with a pregnancy she cannot explain and an infatuated Russian Count.
After breaking into a house he believes is empty, thief Olivier is caught by the owner, Ariane, who turns out to be a dominatrix. Improbably falling for her, Olivier returns periodically, and an impulsive romance blossoms despite Ariane's profession. Soon Olivier becomes more familiar with her work, even joining in on occasion. However, when he discovers that Ariane has a son, he attempts to "fix" her, hoping to give her a better life.
Adèle Hugo, daughter of renowned French writer Victor Hugo, falls in love with British soldier Albert Pinson while living in exile off the coast of England. Though he spurns her affections, she follows him to Nova Scotia and takes on the alias of Adèle Lewly. Albert continues to reject her, but she remains obsessive in her quest to win him over.
The portrait of a woman going through a terminal illness and the tumultuous lives of her husband and son.
A study of minor events in the adolescence of a boy growing up in small towns. Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after one year of high school, has to go to live with his mother in the south of France. She is a seamstress living in a tiny apartment with her lover Jose, a Spanish farm worker. Daniel would like to continue school, but his mother cannot afford it, so she sends him to work as an apprentice in a moped repair shop. Daniel wiles away his time in the shop, and learns about girls from the other boys in town. When he returns to visit his grandmother next year, it is obvious that he has grown up faster than his old friends.
Filmmaker Barbet Schroeder shows the Ugandan dictator meeting his Cabinet, reviewing his troops, explaining his ideology.
A man who trains fighting cocks vows to remain silent until one of his birds wins a championship.
The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Frederic leads a bourgeois life; he is a partner in a small Paris office and is happily married to Helene, a teacher expecting her second child. In the afternoons, Frederic daydreams about other women, but has no intention of taking any action. One day, Chloe, who had been a mistress of an old friend, begins dropping by his office. They meet as friends, irregularly in the afternoons, till eventually Chloe decides to seduce Frederic, causing him a moral dilemma.
Viviane, a French Consul's wife, is in New Guinea to find exotic feathers for export to Paris. She encounters four European travelers who are en route to "la vallée": The Valley, high in the Guinean mountains, is shown on maps as 'obscured by clouds' and is beyond their previous experiences. Viviane joins their trek to find rare feathers and soon becomes entwined in their journey. Their extended stay with the Mapuga tribe brings a denouement between western and indigenous values before their final quest toward the 'Valley of the Gods'.
Short film about the Mapuga tribe’s feast of pigs with sweet potatoes.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Claude Roc, a young middle-class Frenchman meets in Paris Ann Brown, a young Englishwoman. They become friends and Ann invites him to spend holidays at the house where she lives with her mother and her sister Muriel, for whom she intends Claude. During these holidays, Claude, Ann and Muriel become very close and he gradually falls in love with Muriel. But both families lay down a one-year-long separation without any contact before agreeing to the marriage. So Claude goes back to Paris when he has many love affairs before sending Muriel a break-off letter...
Short film that examines the different types of ceremonial make-up worn by the Mapuga tribe.
Parisian everyman Antoine Doinel has married his sweetheart Christine Darbon, and the newlyweds have set up a cozy domestic life of selling flowers and giving violin lessons while Antoine fitfully works on his long-gestating novel. As Christine becomes pregnant with the couple's first child, Antoine finds himself enraptured with a young Japanese beauty. The complications change the course of their relationship forever.
In 1798, a feral boy is discovered outside the town of Aveyron, France. Diagnosed as mentally impaired, he is relegated to an asylum. A young doctor named Jean Itard becomes convinced that the boy has normal mental capacity, but that his development was hindered by lack of contact with society. He brings the boy home and begins an arduous attempt at education over several years.
On the eve of his wedding, on holiday on the Lake Annecy shore, a career diplomat visits an old acquaintance, perhaps a former girlfriend. Through her he meets an intense teenager, Laura, and then lusts after her sister, Claire. Whilst Laura attempts to flirt with him, his fantasy becomes focused on wanting to caress Claire's knee.
A German student, Stefan, now finished with his studies, hitchhikes to Paris. There he meets a free-spirited American girl, Estelle, who he follows to Ibiza. The two begin a sad and dark path into heroin addiction. More is Barbet Schroeder's first film, also notable for its soundtrack, which was composed by Pink Floyd.
The rigid principles of a devout Catholic man are challenged during a one-night stay with Maud, a divorced woman with an outsize personality.
Government agents hire a mercenary to infiltrate a crime ring that's selling guns to a right-wing militia in Texas.
Wednesday July 31, 1968, almost six months after the start of the "Langlois affair" which saw the government attempt to oust the founder of the Cinémathèque française, triggering massive support from the biggest names in world cinema, Henri Langlois finally resumed possession of the hall of the Palais de Chaillot and celebrates his return with a tribute to Charlie Chaplin.
Promising young racing car driver Joe Joe Quillico leaves the stock car racing scene in the United States in order to pursue Grand Prix racing in Europe. After limited success he manages to win the Spanish Grand Prix. His love life however, is much less successful and his winning on the track only serves to alienate the woman he loves - with unhappy consequences.
A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.
Eric Rohmer directs this short documentary that narrates the presence of women in French universities as of the time of its release -- 1966. During the film's short run, the narrator continues to point out that during the advent of World War II, only 21,000 women attended college and made only a 30 % of the student body, a number that by the 1964-1965 school year had passed the 120,000 mark. Instead of opting to live according to what was expected of them, now they were joining the work force, trading in aprons for lab jackets and becoming professionals even after getting married.
Daniel needs some money to buy a duffle coat that is in fashion, so he agrees to work for a photographer by dressing up as Santa Claus. He discovers that it is much easier to meet girls when he is in his costume.
Six vignettes set in different sections of Paris, by six directors. St. Germain des Pres (Douchet), Gare du Nord (Rouch), Rue St. Denis (Pollet), and Montparnasse et Levallois (Godard) are stories of love, flirtation and prostitution; Place d'Etoile (Rohmer) concerns a haberdasher and his umbrella; and La Muette (Chabrol), a bourgeois family and earplugs.
Éric Rohmer's short for the portmanteau film Paris vu par (Six in Paris, 1965), concerning a haberdasher and his umbrella. Convinced he has killed a man, Jean-Marc flees and spends an anxious few days waiting for the death of the stranger to be reported in the newspapers...
Nadja is a guest student, who stays at Cité Universitaire and visits the Sorbonne, while preparing a thesis on Proust; she also likes to stroll about Paris.
"...it had no plot. The film was more a study of people's behavior, shot in 16mm with a hand-held camera, which was hidden most of the time. In its execution it was like my New York film 58-59, except that it was filmed in sunlight almost the whole time, on a public beach, and in the cafes nearby. There was no spoken commentary, only the actual sounds and typical Cuban jukebox music." - Nestor Almendros, A Man With a Camera
