Beautiful young housewife Séverine Serizy cannot reconcile her masochistic fantasies with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. When her lovestruck friend Henri mentions a secretive high-class brothel run by Madame Anais, Séverine begins to work there during the day under the name Belle de Jour. But when one of her clients grows possessive, she must try to go back to her normal life.
The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.
A woman is detained at La Conciergerie. She's 37 but her hair are already white. She's suffering from terrible haemorraghe. Her name is Marie-Antoinette of Lorraine, from Austria, and she's living her last four days.
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
A writer returns home to his estate after service in World War I. He has developed a very bad case of depression due to a war wound concerning his genitalia. He contemplates suicide, but recovers after becoming interested in his caretaker's 12 year-old war orphan niece, who now lives in the manor.
Two men, part tramp, part pilgrim, are on their way from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. On their way, they meet a vast assortment of characters—some truculent, some violent, and some bizarre; they experience many adventures—some mysterious, some erotic, some even supernatural.
The story of a young man who meets his own likeness and uses him to fulfill his dreams.
Another planet in the period of medieval times. An employee of the institute of experimental history from Earth, who is send under the name of noble don Rumata of Estor as a spy with a mission to contact the local resident of the institute, arrives in the city of Arkanar. But the resident perishes under an unlucky attempt to make a palace coup, and Rumata have to take his place as the resident. Soon he meets all the horrors of the medieval society - a peasant war, palace coups, mass executions. To continue to be an indifferent watcher of all these horrors turns out to be simply impossible...
When her husband's arrest leaves her penniless, a woman accepts an invitation to move in with a strange couple.
Eva is a singer in a Noah's Ark themed nightclub, where the guests wear animal masks. She is approached by a stranger who claims to know her and to remember her singing Mozart.
Two dramatic stories. In an undetermined past, a young cannibal (who killed his own father) is condemned to be torn to pieces by some wild beasts. In the second story, Julian, the young son of a post-war German industrialist, is on the way to lie down with his farm's pigs, because he doesn't like human relationships.
In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He's decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He's rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humour, sin, and derision lead to salvation?
A company wants to make a play about Mont Valerien resistant fighters who were shot by the Nazis and the French collaborators.
Marie is just out from prison when she runs into Baptiste, a young paranoid needing companionship. In their pursuit of a mysterious briefcase carried by Marie's former lover, they roam the street of Paris, transformed into a giant board game, a maze spotted with mysterious traps, puzzling clues, and chance encounters. Maybe they are bricks in some sinister scheme, maybe they are playing a board game, maybe it's a fairy tale, maybe it's yet something else...
Juliette is a young woman who just can't help lying. She lies to her sister, Sophie, to Sophie's fiancé Martin, and to all the men she attracts with her womanly charms. But when she falls for an older man, a 40-year old lawyer, her reputation as a liar precedes her and she cannot convince him that she really does love him…
Set in 18th century France, a naive 17-year-old orphan named Benjamin is taken in by his wealthy aunt, the Countess de Valandry. There, he is seduced by a variety of women, including a few flirtatious maidservants and neighboring countesses who all want to be Benjamin's "first".
30 year old child enters the new city, riding on a donkey. He says he is the Savior. He has spent no time among men. He is trembling with cold. His clothes are soaked. His mother was overprotective ; his father conspicuously absent. He knows that he must face the mockery, refusal, ignorance and blindness of the men around him. They travel in gangs, in large numbers : soldiers, mercenaries or the like, on majestic, imposing horses. Everything is out of proportion to his thin, bewildered, innocent body ; he is the madman of the new city...
In a desolated world, a martyr is steered by a man giving orders from a control room. His henchmen torture the resistance fighter. Are the parts played by victim and hangman defined as clearly as it seems? Ange Leccia offers a political reflection about the power of images and their manipulative force. —ubu.com
Frankenstein's monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa.
300 kilos of heroin have disappeared in Necrocity, a city of terror—a city of night—where Captain Speed has a gang and the government hides the dead. An experimental crime film considered to be a landmark of Parisian underground cinema.
A French sailor circa 1850, disembarks in a desert Atlantic island, and discovers a woman who had survived for many years her husband and brother, who have died while searching for mysterious valuables. The young couple discover paradise, and its end.
Comedy set at the time of King Umberto I of Monza (Italy) about Maria Sarti, aka Ninì Tirabusciò, actress/singer who caused a scandal with her raunchy dancing.
On the streets of a damp metropolis lie the corpses of hundreds and hundreds of boys and girls. No one can give them a resting place because of a law enacted by a repressive State. But the young Antigone, with the help of a foreigner, Tiresias, violates this rule in the name of pietas, undermining the established order.
In a castle, somewhere in the Thirld World, Diaz is delirious, dreaming of the power he had in Eldorado, while oppressing the indians, workers and peasants. He is well aware of the menace his old victims represent, while a miracle-making shepherd fascinates and frightens him. Diaz finds a countrywoman, symbol of purity, and prepares a ceremony in his castle resembling his own funeral.
I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.
To repay a debt, Marcel must commit a robbery in a large department store. Unfortunately his booty is intercepted by a gang of thugs.
A stripped-down account of a young man's existential reckoning. "As dust hides a mirror, lust hides the self," reads one of the film's Vedanta-sourced intertitles. And indeed, while the Pierre Clementi protagonist's inner life remains obscure, the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood that offers his temptations appears in harrowing detail.
After having spent a year in Warhol's Factory, painter Olivier Mosset returned to Paris with an appetite for film and began hosting Super 8 nights in his apartment. UN FILM PORNO is a miniature sample.
This satire concerns three French singing idols and their attempt to stay in the public eye. A press conference, backstage hedonism, psychedelia, manipulative managers and disc jockeys are portrayed as the pop culture is thoroughly and effectively lampooned in this independent feature.
A rich business man falls for a young girl and vows to fulfill her dream of becoming a punk rock star.
A journalist preparing a story on extremist youth falls in love with a young radical who fears being killed by his companions when he is unable to commit a political assassination.
The chronicle of two Moroccan families between 1912 and 1956, in the colonial era. A university professor from Fes hires one of his best students as a tutor: Moussa, from Chaouen, who is passionate about drama.
Poupée and her (so-called) brother Paulo share an apartment in Paris. They dream of becoming actors. In the meantime, life goes on, nothing happens, until Poupée meets François.
When his father dies, young lad travels to Milan to attend the funeral and decides to follow in his father's footsteps as a gigolo. He is successful at finding rich women to prey on, but finds himself caught up in a bidding war.
A composition of symbolic, surreal and almost mystic images.
An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.
In 1972, disenchanted about the dreary conventions of English life, 25-year-old Julia heads for Morocco with her daughters, six-year-old Lucy and precocious eight-year-old Bea.
A troubled young woman who lives alone in a rundown house meanders around and one day reveals a hidden talent when she goes into a bar, plays magnificently at the piano, and leaves as mysteriously as she came. Meanwhile, an unidentified man is on her trail and eventually tracks her down to the bar she had visited. As the dragnet around her closes in, it becomes apparent that the young woman's stepmother is behind the effort to locate her. But questions over why she is hiding out and what she is hiding from begin to take on more importance as the history of the young woman starts to surface.
A European man sets up a business in Korea to deal in snuff films. The police quickly catch on to his dealings and attempt to hunt him down.
Wisconsin farm girl Elizabeth Carlson leaves family and her English teacher lover behind and escapes to New York. There she soon makes a career for herself as a fashion model. During a vernissage she's approached by a mysterious man whose motives are unclear...
The struggle between a ruthless leader of a bank robbers and the cops who are determined to put him in jail for long.
A French resistance group free twelve soldiers from a German prison camp, but apparently there's an additional detainee among them suspected of being an enemy spy.
A film by Marc'o
On Christmas Eve, an old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the spirit of his former partner, Jacob Marley. The deceased partner was in his lifetime as mean and miserly as Scrooge is now and he warns him to change his ways or face the consequences in the afterlife. Scrooge dismisses the apparition but the first of the three ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Past, visits as promised. Scrooge sees those events in his past life, both happy and sad, that forged his character. The second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, shows him how many currently celebrate Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him how he will be remembered once he is gone. To his delight, the spirits complete their visits in one night giving him the opportunity to mend his ways.
Lamiel is a poor orphan girl who climbs to the social elite in this 19th-century costume drama. Sansfin, provincial doctor, lives vicariously through her, as he oversees the progress of his female protégé. Defiant and rebellious, Lamiel goes to Paris to escape boredom and to know love.
A mad scientist, Dr. Lerne, performs organ transplants not only between humans and animals, but also with plants and even machines ...
A woman revisits long-suppressed nightmares as she is being chased through an abandoned warehouse by a strange man.
Two actors performing in Strindberg's "Inferno" as God and Lucifer, find themselves competing in real life as well. One of them, Max Monteiro, has spiritual obsession with John Wayne and his way of walking. He and Jean de Dieu, his fellow actor who plays Lucifer and also directs the Strindberg play, engage in a philosophical and spiritual tug-of-war, especially when they meet an author named God, who has plans for another drama to feature both actors.
When her husband's arrest leaves her penniless, a woman accepts an invitation to move in with a strange couple.
Alerted by an informer, the police suppress an ideological uprising, causing the death of one of the participants. The traitor, in order to redeem himself in the eyes of his comrades, pushes them towards a terrorist action. But, once again, at the last moment he refuses to participate out of fear.
Best known for his roles in Belle de jour, Sweet Movie, and many more, Pierre Clementi was also the architect behind a transgressive, high-minded, and disorienting cinema. Like an acid-soaked freefall, Visa de censure n° X is a rush of nudity and color from one of France’s most seductively watchable actors, set to an album's worth of psychedelic prog rock (performed by the Delired Cameleon Family, a group featuring members of French band Clearlight).
Convinced that his family is tainted by generations of evil, Roderick Usher is hellbent on stopping his sister Madeline’s wedding to prevent the cursed Usher bloodline from expanding. When her fiancé Alain arrives at the crumbling estate to claim his bride, Roderick goes to ruthless—even deadly—lengths to keep them apart.
Passionate about music, Julien nevertheless works with a sculptor. One day, he meets young Hermine at a religious bookseller.
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life.
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
"Chronicles of the Present Times" - An experimental trilogy. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.
Pierre Clémenti's Soleil presents a psychedelic meditation on his life and his detention in an Italian Prison in 1972.
A series of events beginning during the German occupation of France showing what might have happened if one thing had gone differently. The premise concerns the assassination of a German officer by a young member of the Resistance.
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
Before Le Pont du Nord Rivette films Paris s'en va, a short film of approximately 25 minutes. He works with the same actors and the same technical team on both films. Henry Chapier who produced the short: "At the beginning of the '80s nobody was interested in Rivette's highly imaginative project Le Pont du Nord. Therefore Rivette came up with a kind of 'transposition' of the themes of Le Pont du Nord in the shape of Paris s'en va. Just like a painter in the Renaissance who does a sketch for a future project."
When Edith Howland's husband abandons her for a younger woman, leaving her with their alcoholic son and his senile uncle, she begins recording details of an imaginary, much more successful life where she has friends and grandchildren. However, this diversion soon grows unhealthy when she becomes slowly convinced that the fantasies are real.
A criminal shows up at a farmhouse with the law on his heels and several million dollars in his possession.
Geneva, 1980s. Three friends in search of themselves. Bruno, an architect, is married to a woman he cannot simply love. Philippe, a more refined journalist, refuses to accept the reality of separating from his girlfriend Sonia. Bruno, the youngest of the three, collects one-night stands...
A year and a half after "Le Lit e la vierge", Zouzou and Pierre Clémenti are in another bed, this time in front of a window, with Sacré-Coeur in the background. Filmed in two days, in July 1970, with a stolen film from the ORTF, this film, a tribute to these two vedettes of the French underground, is of immense beauty. The title is inspired by the silhouette of Pierre Clémenti, evocative, for Lagrange, of the male physicist during the Renaissance. Grandson of Léo Lagrange and nephew of the chief operator Ghislain Cloquet, Yvan Lagrange is two years younger than Philippe Garrel. "Renaissance", his first film, shows to what extent his generation was influenced by Garrel.
Pierre, a young man of Brussels, has lost his job. Unbeknowst to Barbara, the woman he lives with, he has become a pickpocket to survive. He works in partnership with a young Tunisian immigrant he meets every Sunday in an abandoned bus where they share the loot of the week. One day, Pierre finds his accomplice dead in their hiding place. Pierre suddenly realizes that he does not know much about his dead friend. Taking possession of his identity papers, Pierre decides to go to Tunisia to find out who his friend actually was.
A thriller in which the characters are Latin-American exiles living in Paris. It is also a comedy about artists who play at revolution rather than actually participate in one
Roland des Roncesvalles is a legendary knight from the age of chivalry in France. In the 11th-century epic La Chanson de Roland, he is depicted as a key figure in halting the advance of the Arabs into France. In this story, the 10th-century legend is staged by a group of 12th-century pilgrims using the 11th-century poem. Their acting is interrupted by a violent peasant uprising, which kills many of the pilgrims. However, one of the survivors, is converted to the peasant cause and later speaks out in favor of more just treatment for the downtrodden.
A film by Yvan Lagrange.
The owner of a suburban boarding school is found murdered. The culprit will be unmasked thanks to the ingenuity and courage of the good Janine and a student, named Nadine.
A young man recalls his affair with a young French woman who traveled with him across the United States. They began to drift apart during the trip, and eventually each had affairs with other people before realizing that their relationship had run its course.
A document of the mental universe of a schizophrenic. Starring Pierre Clémenti.
French thriller written by Jean-Claude Carriere.
Directed by a friend of Étienne O'Leary, this film missive, whose words are images, was held in very high esteem by Pierre Clémenti.
Stefano Augenti, an ambitious advertising executive, meets a curious hippie named Count Mateo Tiepolo and they form a strange bond. Seeking an escape from his unhappy marriage, Augenti is lured by the Count into a bizarre plot to kill each other's relatives.
A (temporary) leave of many friends who are my truest world, with the attempt of getting them together in an ideal summary conceived to support me during my being far away. –A. L.
This loose adaptation of the Victor Hugo classic shifts the story to Italy and back in time, with the deformed protagonist meeting Lucrezia Borgia instead of Queen Anne. Also, Gwynplaine is renamed Angelo (Jean Sorel) with his disfigurement represented by a single broad slash across his mouth, crude yet convincing. The story (not credited to Hugo) is a swashbuckler pitting the disfigured acrobat against the henchmen of the Borgias.
Report on the young people of the yéyé period and pop music. Jerk at the Palladium, Beatles, press clippings, questions about the impact of fashion (long hair and accoutrements) and modernity, youth, change, freedom.
Homemade footage of parties, travel, and everyday life.
Positano is an island of the Amalfi Coast that Neptune would have, according to legend, created for the love of a nymph. Perched on the rocks of the island, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community. Pierre Clémenti stays there for a while and makes images of dazzling sensuality. Beyond Pierre Clémenti's intimate love of these faces and bodies often naked in this Mediterranean landscape, the film reveals the moving beauty of a utopia where living together could still be achieved in a territory of sharing and permanent creation. Flow of perceptions of consciousness, visual impressions, physical impregnations, the work of Pierre Clémenti is an ode to sensuality and "life-cinema".
After an adventurous life, Patrick has settled in the Camargue and bought a manade where he raises bulls, while the "riziers" gradually invade and transform the land. On the very day the bulls are being branded, Patrick sees Robert, a long-lost comrade just out of prison. He takes him in and asks for nothing, despite the general hostility. In fact, Robert begins by poaching young Paco, son of the gardian-chef, by offering to rob a bank; then he covets his friend's almost-fiancée, Zeffa; finally, he organizes a devastating expedition against the rice farmers, in short, he behaves like a real "dog in a poke", sowing discord and brawl everywhere.
The journey on the edge of an ocean of a poet, two terrorists, a film-maker, a reporter and two lovers, in search of a ship leaving for Nowhere. A ship like hope for all those who wait: the misguided, the misaligned, the displaced, the exiles that we are at certain times, that we are one day or another, a little earlier, a little later.
Adèle lives in the shadow of her husband, Ferdinand, a painter. After her father's death, they leave the provinces for Paris. She refines his paintings and comforts him. Thanks to her brushstrokes, Ferdinand discovers fame and success. And love in all this? Sacrificed on the altar of creation...
Antenna gives a snapshot of the 1970s. The film is a typical work by Ditvoorst: freedom of the individual, the desire for a utopia that does not come true, the lonely and misunderstood artist, the aversion to the state, bureaucracy and religious authorities, absurd side characters etc. The film has little dialogue and is largely told through the images of cameraman Jan de Bon
The story of revolutionary woman Manon Roland.
The vogue for video wills being all the rage in the United States, the 'I Am' team asked celebrated personalities and anonymous viewers to make their video wills, each reacting according to their temperament.
Flore is the son of a king, Blancheflore the daughter of a slave. The two children grow up together until they reach adolescence, but when the adults see the love between them blossoming, they decide to separate them. In this beautiful adaptation of a 13th-century tale, the staging, sets and costumes give us the impression of being immersed in medieval miniatures.
Marc'O, Philippe Garrel, Bulle Ogier, Jackie Raynal and others retrace the life and work of actor, filmmaker, painter and writer Pierre Clémenti.
A television adaptation of Jean Cocteau's surréalist take on the tragedy of Oedipus.