Les Films de la Pléiade

Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.

Thomas is a young man who rebels against society after witnessing his father's suicide. He embarks on a marginal and increasingly violent existence with Malvina, a woman he meets, as they attempt to escape societal pressures. Their journey ultimately leads to their internment in a mental asylum, a bleak outcome reflecting their futile struggle for individual freedom.

Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.

"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress Julie and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Julie and the other head of the school Cara in its final months.

Study of the passengers of a steamship during a Mediterranean cruise. (uniFrance)

An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.

The Catholic Jean-Louis runs into an old friend, the Marxist Vidal, in Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas. Vidal introduces Jean-Louis to the modestly libertine, recently divorced Maud and the three engage in conversation on religion, atheism, love, morality and Blaise Pascal's life and writings on philosophy, faith and mathematics. Jean-Louis ends up spending a night at Maud's. Jean-Louis' Catholic views on marriage, fidelity and obligation make his situation a dilemma, as he has already, at the very beginning of the film, proclaimed his love for a young woman whom, however, he has never yet spoken to.

A young couple of burglars, waiting for trial, marry in jail. Annick writes down her observations of the women's ward. When she hears that her lover must serve a twice as long prison sentence, she plans their escape.

A pickup artist/womanizer named Patrick inadvertently pursues two young women who happen to be roommates.

Miléna is living in her grandmother's baroque château when the rich lady dies. The lawyer Miguel, who had a previous relationship with Miléna, insists the other two grandchildren, Fifine and her brother Jean-Paul, visit the château for the reading of the will, even though they have been estranged from the family at an early age. However Robert, who had been living with Fifine in an open relationship, arrives and impersonates Jean-Paul. Robert falls for Fifine's cousin Miléna while Fifine has designs on Miguel. In the meantime, the butler César is focusing his lecherous intentions on Prudence, the maid he had just hired.

Choreography of familiar gestures that the author was able to spice up with a peculiar and original perspective.

A mondo-movie on the theme of women, with interviews and mock reports: plastic surgery, transvestites, Victoria Nanquin stripper, divorce and jealousy, dance classes, modeling school, nude modeling, prostitution in the woods, Miss Françoise masseuse, Miss Spaghetti contest.

A photoshoot on the roofs and in the streets of Paris, under the astonished eyes of the inhabitants.

A day in a little café of Paris.

Annie is a middle-age wife, still sexy and pampered by her husband, Phillippe, who is the owner and general manager of a dynamic company. Under the deluge of sexy Swedish movies, sexy advertising on the streets, sexy intimate clothing in ladies' shops, and even talks about sex and marital infidelity with her mother and female friends, Annie starts feeling left aside by her husband, and trying to attract in a number of ways - and failing. It's not the all-purpose secretary at the office that is keeping him late, it's a tax expert that, asking the most innocent questions, is finding out how Philippe can manage a company without profits, and still manage a home, may be two... with high quality levels.

Four prisoners are gathered in the same cell. Each tells the others how he got there.

Four young people, tired of working life, decide that they can earn money from crime than they can from work. The film follows their training at the first "crime school", as well as their work.

Guy Gilles' 1962 short on the wintertime in Paris.

This film brings to life a vanished world: that of the Warsaw Ghetto, destroyed by the Nazis after the 1944 uprising. Two authentic "reconstruction" sources have been used to this end: photographic and cinematographic documents recorded at the time and discovered in Poland, East Germany, Israel and France; and the oral testimonies of 44 survivors, invited to evoke their personal tragedy in front of the images put before their eyes.

(auto-translation: LA CINÉMATHÈQUE FRANÇAISE ) Using a subjective camera, set to music by Bela Bartók and text by Arthur Rimbaud, François Reichenbach offers a highly singular vision of the American megalopolis. (MIFF:) These are no ordinary travel notes brought back from America by filmmakers; they are not enthusiastic records of skyscrapers and crowds. but disturbing aspects of a hallucinatory world of concrete and metal, glaring light and haunting shadow. The film is notable for its dramatic use of colour, and music from Bela Bartok's ballet "The Miraculous Mandarin". (a-t:) F.B. confides in his memoir 'Le monde a encore un visage' (1981): "When I went to New York for the first time, I'd brought along a Bell & Howell 16mm camera whose instructions I hadn't read. I didn't know how to use the film, and inadvertently loaded some rolls that had already been printed, which resulted in these strange superimposed images. A well-known process that I had reinvented by accident".