Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

The Mysteries of Paris: Jacques Rivette's Out 1 Revisited

In June 2015, forty-five years after OUT 1 was made, the filmmakers went to Paris to interview cast and crew members and to revisit some of the film’s most significant locations. THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS features new contributions from actors Bulle Ogier, Michael Lonsdale and Hermine Karagheuz, cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, assistant director Jean-François Stévenin and producer Stéphane Tchal Gadjieff, but also rare archival interviews with actors Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Michel Delahaye and, most prominently, illuminating statements by director Jacques Rivette himself from two different archival interviews.

Les variations Dielman

Found footage using Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.

Out 1

While two theater groups rehearse plays by Aeschylus, two solitary individuals wander the Parisian streets hustling the populace for cash.

Le Bon Plaisir

Claire's handbag is stolen. It contained a letter written ten years previously by the man who is now the French President. In the letter, he urges his pregnant mistress to have an abortion. Claire immediately alerts the President's men. From that moment, the machinery of state swings into action.

Memoirs of a French Whore

Marie is nineteen and bored in her little suburban life with no future. In a café, she meets the charismatic and beautiful Gerard. Blinded by adoration, Mary decides to leave her parents and her clerk job to live with the man she considers as the love of her life. But Gerard is a pimp, who soon forces her into prostitution. From within homes to out on the streets, the young woman gradually discovers a world of decay and violence.

Emmanuelle 3

Emmanuelle and her architect husband continue their amoral lifestyle in the Seychelles. But when a casual dilliance between her and a film director starts to turn serious her husband shows very traditional signs of jealousy.

The Apprentice Heel

After a car accident in which his mother dies, Antoine Chapelote decides to change his life and become a con-artist. He meets a young girl Caroline who helps him with his scam.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores and takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.

Playing with Fire

A banker hires a seedy detective to find his daughter and keep her safe from kidnappers.

A Full Day's Work

A father plans to kill in the same day the nine members of the jury who condemned his son to death.

Love Is Gay, Love Is Sad

In a cul-de-sac in the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, Leon shares two rooms with his sister Marie. In one, he receives his clients: he is a tailor. In the other, Marie receives her own: she is a clairvoyant. Leon was happy until he learned what Marie was hiding from him. She is actually a prostitute, and Maxime, her supposed fiancé, is her pimp. On the same day, Leon also discovers love in the form of Arlette, a provincial young woman picked up by Marie.

The Crook

A thief known as Simon the Swiss faces up and downs in his criminal profession.

The Happy Sixties

Monica, a wife and mother, is dissatisfied with his routine, conventional life. Her husband, Pablo, decides that the best thing for her and her children is to spend the summer in Cadaqués.

Political Portraits

Dedicated to Dieter Meier. voice-over by Gregory Markopoulos, reading an excerpt in English translation of Paul Valéry’s L’Homme et la nuit (Man and the Night).

Portuguese Vacation

Françoise and her husband Jean-Pierre invite some friend couples to spend a weekend in their large villa on the Portuguese coast. What follows is a romantic intrigue, with each character discovering a little more about themselves.

L'Immortelle

A melancholy man meets a stunning, mysterious woman while he is traveling, and discovers she may or may not be involved in a prostitution ring. She disappears after their relationship lasts a few days, and though he searches for her, those around him pretend not to know who he is speaking of.

And Satan Calls the Turns

On a sun-kissed beach, six people linger lazily, each confident of fulfilling his or her desires before the day is out. A wealthy heiress, Emmanuelle, has designs on a handsome adolescent, Ivan, but his interests lie elsewhere. Having gratified Emmanuelle’s womanly needs, Ivan immediately sets out to make his next conquest, the mistress of a well-known writer...

Le Bel Âge

Steph, Jean-Claude and Jacques work in a Parisian art shop, but they mainly work in the field of eroticism, which they conceive as a wide-ranging field of exercises and experiments.

Fool’s Mate

Claire is a chic young Parisian woman married to a somewhat older husband, Jean As the story opens, she leaves her husband playing baroque music at the piano, telling him she is off to see her sister, Solange. In reality she meets her lover, Claude at his apartment; After some idle chatter and love-making he tells her a story of the shriveled heads that the Jivaro Indians used to give their lovers as tokens of affection but, as she shivers in disgust, he gives her a mink instead. How will they hide it from her husband?

Impressions de New York

(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".

Orpheus

A poet in love with Death follows his unhappy wife into the underworld.