Jean-Claude Biette

Saltimbank

The title reflects the brand of a financial institution, the bank of the Saltim family: Frederic, the younger brother, runs the family bank; his brother Bruno rejected the position of executive director, and chose to fund a theatrical company. Around them, there is a net of family members, friends, and acquaintances who seem to swirl around the banking brothers. Frederic and Bruno are both trying to control the future of their beautiful niece, Vanessa. The coffee shop owners Eve and Jim complicate everybody's life with their intrigues and lies. A strange stage director comes from his foreign exile. And lack of funds suddenly reveals the true colors of everyone - in banking, on stage, and everywhere.

Salò: Yesterday and Today

A thirty-three-minute documentary featuring interviews with director Pier Paolo Pasolini, actor-filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, and Pasolini friend Ninetto Davoli.

The Adolescent

Pierre Léon ingeniously condenses and updates Dostoevsky’s novel about a 19-year-old intellectual reconnecting with his estranged family in his impressive debut feature.

Mange ta soupe

A young man returns to the family home to face a childhood trauma: his brother's suicide, but nobody in the family is willing to help him.

Oncle Vania

Elegantly and carefully, Léon trains his sights both on Chekhov’s famous play written in 1896 and on its earlier, lesser known version entitled "The Wood Demon" (1889), combining the two.

A Tale of Winter

Felicie and Charles have a whirlwind holiday romance. Due to a mix-up on addresses they lose contact, and five years later at Christmas-time Felicie is living with her mother in a cold Paris with a daughter as a reminder of that long-ago summer. For male companionship she oscillates between hairdresser Maxence and the intellectual Loic, but seems unable to commit to either as the memory of Charles and what might have been hangs over everything.

Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert

The full soundtrack to Marguerite Duras' 1975 film India Song, about a French ambassador's wife in 1930s India, is here repurposed with all new cinematography. As we hear all the dialogue of a bygone movie, we travel visually through images of absence and decay, bereft of life. It's the ghost of a film, and a further commentary on colonialism.

India Song

Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.

The Garden That Tilts

Karl, a young killer is to kill Kate, an adventurous lady living in a mansion by a lake. He approaches her but fails to kill her. Instead, he falls in love and becomes her lover ...

The Adventures of Sylvia Couski

The ex-wife of a famous sculptor convinces her lover to remove one of his sculptures from an exhibition and replace it with a live model.

Céline and Julie Go Boating

Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.

The Mother and the Whore

Aimless young Alexandre juggles his relationships with his girlfriend, Marie, and a casual lover named Veronika. Marie becomes increasingly jealous of Alexandre's fling with Veronika and as the trio continues their unsustainable affair, the emotional stakes get higher, leading to conflict and unhappiness.

Le Château de Pointilly

A young woman escapes her father's house and goes to live in the city. There, she realises her father may still be controlling her life through the people she meets.

Othon

Straub-Huillet’s first color film, adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664, which in turn was based on an episode of imperial court intrigue chronicled in Tacitus’s Histories. The costuming is classical, and the toga-clad, nonprofessional cast performs the drama’s original French text amid the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background. Their lines are executed with a terrific flatness and frequently through heavy accents; the language in Othon becomes not merely an expression but a thing itself, an element whose plainness here alerts us to qualities of the work that might otherwise be subordinated.

Suzanne’s Career

In the second of Rohmer's moral tales, he examines the relationship between two friends and a girl who at first appears easily exploited. It is a complex tale of feelings and misconceptions, acted out within the head of the main character, as part of Rohmer's attempt to more easily simulate the mindscape quality of literature within a film.