Philippe Hériat

Bonaparte et la révolution

Abel Gance's 1971 sound edition of his epic 1927 'Napoleon', which contains much of the silent original, with new material shot and added in both 1965 and 1971, and with sound synchronization from both the 1932 reissue and this version.

Lucrezia Borgia

French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families.

Divine

A country girl (Simone Berriau) finds work as a chorus girl in Paris, gets embroiled with a bad egg, and then finds true love with a good-looking milkman.

Napoléon Bonaparte

A second version of Gance's Napoléon, with sound.

Rothchild

An ex-businessman, ruined and reduced to living under bridges, uses the name of one of his companions in misfortune, Rothchild, to organize a vast scam.

Le sexe faible

The story of Madame Leroy-Gomez, a wealthy divorcee living in Paris. Together with her servant Antoine she schemes to marry off her unmarried children and fix any issues that arise for those already married.

Napoleon at St. Helena

Napoleon at Saint Helena (German: Napoleon auf Sankt Helena) is a 1929 German silent historical film directed by Lupu Pick and starring Werner Krauss, Hanna Ralph and Albert Bassermann. The film depicts the final years of Napoleon between 1815 and 1821 during his period of exile on the British Atlantic island of Saint Helena following his defeat at Waterloo.

Saint Joan the Maid

This relatively straightforward dramatic biography was one of two films commissioned to honor Joan of Arc on the 500th anniversary of her death, but it was soon undeservedly relegated to obscurity in favor of Carl Dreyer's triumphant 'La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc'. The comparison is unfair: Dreyer was an artist, but director Marco de Gastyne certainly proved himself a distinguished craftsman, and his emphasis on the Maid of Orléans early life in Domrémy serves as a picturesque, matching bookend to Dreyer's impassioned courtroom drama.

Sea Fever

The ill-fated romance of a brow-beaten seaport slum café waitress and a young man with a possessive mother, who dreams of going out to sea.

Napoleon

A biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797.

La chaussée des géants

When he was a child, François Gérard got to know Antiope, a little foreigner, in a Paris park. As an adult, he sees her again in her native country, Mingrelia, which is on the verge of revolution. He is then the host of Count of Antrim, who is also Antiope's father. However, once in the presence of François, the young woman does not seem particularly moved, which somewhat puzzles him.

Nothing but Time

The life of a great city (Paris) from dawn until dusk, including the beautiful and the ragged, the rich and the poor.

The Late Mathias Pascal

Mathias Pascal, only son of a once-rich family, marries beautiful Romalinda, who has a terrible mother-in-law. She controls her daughter, and soon his home life becomes a nightmare. His only moments of lights are his mother and baby, but both die on the same day. Shocked, he leaves his hometown and goes to Monte Carlo, where he wins a fortune at the casino. Returning home, he reads his own obituary in a paper. They have found a corpse in a creek and connected it with his disappearance. Mathias, noticing that he is now free from all ties to his old life, decides to start a new one.

L'Inhumaine

A famous singer Claire Lescot, who lives on the outskirts of Paris, is courted by many men, including a maharajah, Djorah de Nopur, and a young Swedish scientist, Einar Norsen. At her lavish parties she enjoys their amorous attentions but she remains emotionally aloof and heartlessly taunts them. When she is told that Norsen has killed himself because of her, she shows no feelings. At her next concert she is booed by an audience outraged at her coldness. She visits the vault in which Norsen's body lies, and as she admits her feelings for him she discovers that he is alive; his death was feigned. Djorah is jealous of their new relationship and causes Claire to be bitten by a poisonous snake. Her body is brought to Norsen's laboratory, where he, by means of his scientific inventions, restores Claire to life.

Miracle of the Wolves

King Louis XI tries to unify France by all means fair or foul, which does not please his powerful rival Charles the Bold. It is against this troubled backdrop that the loves of the daughter of a wealthy bourgeois and the king's god-daughter Jeanne Fouquet and knight Robert Cottereau unfurl in spite of all the obstacles in their way. One of these being a pack of hungry wolves trying to stop Jeanne from carrying out an important mission assigned to her by the king himself.

The Gallery of Monsters

The whimsical Riquet's has kidnapped and married a well-born young girl, Ralda. They travel around Spain performing their act in a circus but Ralda's beauty arouses the director's lust. Furious at being rejected, he opens a lion's cage during Ralda's act, leaving her seriously injured. With Ralda's family on their trail, the young people set off to find a better life elsewhere.

The Flood

In a village on the banks of the Rhone river, Alban, a young farmer, is about to marry Margot. Monsieur Broc, a town hall employee, discovers his daughter is taken with Alban. When he rejects her, she collapses. Suddenly, the river rises and floods the village. One evening, Margot disapears… This peasant drama, adapted from a novel by André Corthis and shot during an actual flood of the Rhone, was Delluc’s last. The human madness is an echo to nature’s fury, magnified by moving images of a Provence submerged by water and mist.

Don Juan et Faust

Crazy scientist Faust tries to take Don Juan's lover away.

El Dorado

In Granada in Spain, Sibilla works as a dancer in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child. The boy's father Estiria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardising the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman. Iliana however slips away from her engagement party to meet her real lover Hedwick, a Swedish painter. Sibilla, in desperation after a further rejection by Estiria, sees an opportunity to blackmail him by locking the lovers overnight in their meeting-place in the Alhambra.

Prometheus, Banker

A vamp seduces a banker and breaks with him when she's obtained all that she wanted.

The Man of the Sea

Nolff, a tough Breton fisherman is happy: his wife has just given birth to a son, Michel. His only wish is to make him a fisherman like him. But when he becomes a man, Michel becomes a good-for-nothing who spends his time in taverns.

Le Carnaval des vérités

Comtesse Della Gentia and her lover Paul attempt to seduce and blackmail a rich neighbour Juan, who is in love with a naïve young friend of theirs, Clarisse. Their plot fails; the Comtesse kills herself at a ball, and her lover re-covers her face with its mask.