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Stain on the Snow

"La neige était sale" is based on a novel and play by the phenomenally prolific Georges Simenon. Upon learning that his mother was a prostitute, Frank (Daniel Gélin) dejectedly vows that he, too, will live a life of debauchery. Part of his self-degradation program is to kill someone, and since the story takes place during the Nazi occupation of France, he chooses a German officer as his victim. His steady descent into psychosis and depravity becomes his ultimate undoing.

Stain on the Snow

6.3 1954
Femmes de Paris

Professor Charles Buisson, astronomer and Nobel Prize winner, has just discovered a nova. He informs the other observatories by telephone. Just as he thinks one of them is calling back, he finds himself on the line with a young woman threatening suicide at the Ruban Bleu cabaret, if her lover hasn't joined her by midnight. Intrigued, the professor decides to go and prevent the unfortunate woman from committing suicide. One of his students, who earns her living as an understudy in a knife act, helps him in his investigation, while the school principal and a policeman suspect him of being a prankster or even of selling drugs. For the scientist, it's an opportunity to discover a world of music-hall that he'd never known before: "I thought I knew the sky chart by heart, but there's one planet that was totally unknown to me: Earth. I'll be back!

Femmes de Paris

7.0 1953
Isabelle aux Dombes

Pialat's first film was the short Isabelle aux Dombes, shot in 1951 when the director was 26 years old. The film is an entirely silent montage of documentary footage, ragged experimental techniques — mainly some negative-image inserts — and symbolic psychodrama that's surprisingly not too different from the work that Stan Brakhage would begin making just a year or two later. Images of death proliferate throughout the film, and what started as a loose documentary soon becomes an eerie psuedo-horror piece that's obsessed with death and decay.

Isabelle aux Dombes

5.4 1951
Other Side of Paradise

Complicated intrigues fester in the warmth of Segnac, a charming village on the Cô te d'Azur. The hô teliers' daughter, Violaine, has only a few months to live and loves Blaise d'Orliac, who is closely watched by his mistress Michèle. Old O'Hara is platonically in love with Violaine and encourages Blaise's meetings with the young girl. Michèle interferes. Blaise kills her. O'Hara believes Violaine is guilty and wants to accuse himself. Violaine, on the verge of death, exonerates Blaise. M. Dautrand, who was playing the part of a holiday painter but is really a police officer, decides after reading the girl's diary to leave Blaise in peace. Violaine dies happily.

Other Side of Paradise

5.7 1953
Tick Tack

Conceived, drawn and animated live by a team of patients from a psychiatric clinic, this achievement presents, in the eyes of its author, less interest on a purely cinematographic level than on that of human experience. It is the disturbing wordless story of a woman and a man living in a strange setting where objects are endowed with life that they have chosen to tell us through this theater of shadow puppets in cut out figurines. Their characters will know a tragic fate since carried in the air by balloons, they will finally be devoured by a horrible dragon.

Tick Tack

7.0 1957
In the Manner of Sherlock Holmes

A horrific and, on the face of it, incomprehensible murder has just been committed on the unsympathetic person of a loan shark. The victim's body is found lifeless, but the circumstances of his death are far from clear. For want of anything better to go on, the police immediately suspect a penniless gentleman who had the bad idea and misfortune to be present at the time of the crime. The police don't take the time to look for other possible suspects, and are not at the end of their surprises. A dark story seems to lie behind this imbroglio of incoherent facts.

In the Manner of Sherlock Holmes

7.5 1956
Les Violents

Pierre Tercelin who used to be a prosperous industrialist is now ruined and embittered, having become a mere lock keeper. A widower, he lives with his daughter Evelyne, a music-hall dancer. Claiming he is being persecuted by his cousin Edgar he gets in touch again with another cousin of his he hates, Bernard, a millionaire gun runner,who is also a victim of Edgar. It must be said that both Pierre and Bernard once caused Edgar to go bankrupt... Pierre offers Bernard to join efforts against Edgar. Soon after, Bernard dies of poison, which is only the first of a series of acts of violence. Tiercelin is shot at while going back home, Bernard's son is gunned down while his sister Luciane disappears. Chief-inspector Malouvier - who oddly enough looks very much like the suspect- investigates....

Les Violents

5.2 1958