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And the image created the myth... Bardot as a brunette, blonde or redhead. Bardot in thigh-high boots, mini-dress or swimsuit, Bardot in London, at La Madrague or on a Harley... In all her states, BB sings with Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel: "Bonnie and Clyde", "Comic strip", "Mister Sun"... Reichenbach's camera sublimates the icon.

At the end of the 1950s, French documentarian François Reichenbach spent eighteen months traveling the United States, documenting its diverse regions, their inhabitants, and their pastimes. The result is a journey through a multitude of different Americas, filtered through a French sensibility.

In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made …A Valparaíso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present the film sketches a portrait of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to colour, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town.

Paparazzi explores the relationship between Brigitte Bardot and groups of invasive photographers attempting to photograph her while she works on the set of Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (Contempt). Through video footage of Bardot, interviews with the paparazzi, and still photos of Bardot from magazine covers and elsewhere, director Rozier investigates some of the ramifications of international movie stardom, specifically the loss of privacy to the paparazzi. The film explains the shooting of the film on the island of Capri, and the photographers' valiant, even foolishly dangerous, attempts to get a photograph of Bardot.

Candid interviews of ordinary people on the meaning of happiness, an often amorphous and inarticulable notion that evokes more basic and fundamentally egalitarian ideals of self-betterment, prosperity, tolerance, economic opportunity, and freedom.

Director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Lino Ventura are interviewed about their 1966 film.

Features gourmets chowing down on bats, voodoo practitioners, a chap who has a fetish for being covered in bees and a gal who has the Eiffel Tower tattooed on her behind so she can sell the skin at a later date. These choice cuts are interspersed with the usual parade of prostitutes, transvestites and strippers.

A film considered almost lost even by Garrel, who recently found his negatives. Shot during the events of the May 68, it was made collectively; the film is a merge of Garrel’s and his partners’ points of view, all of them students and filmmakers that participated in the revolt.

A quick look at Auvers-sur-Oise, the place where Vincent Van Gogh spent the final months of his life and where he and his brother were both buried. Produced as part of the "Chroniques de France" TV series.

All of Pialat's Turkish films are uniquely interested in the country — especially Istanbul — as it was, not just as it is at the precise moment that Pialat is filming it. History informs these films in a big way, with the voiceover narration (which incorporates excerpts from various authors) introducing tension between the images of the modern-day city and the descriptions of incidents from its long and rich history. Istanbul is probably the most conventional documentary of Pialat's Turkish series, providing a general profile of the titular city, its different neighborhoods, and the different cultures and ways of living that coexist within its sprawling borders. As the other films in the series also suggest, Pialat sees Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, as a junction point between Europe and the East, between the old and the new, between history and modernity.

In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.

A short film by Walerian Borowczyk in two parts. The first 'panel' follows the morning routine of Leon Boyer who, despite being almost 100 years old, still farms the land, drives a vintage car, and plays with his two dogs. The second panel shows shots of beautiful flowers and a cat, to a recording of Tino Rossi singing 'La romance de Nadir / Je crois encore entendre' from Bizet's opera 'Les pêcheurs de perles'.

Excerpts and fragments from different interviews with Orson Welles making a statement to journalists in fluent French about his career and his conception of life.

In the year that Cannes Film Festival handed out awards to Federico Fellini for La Dolce Vita, L'Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kagi by Kon Ichikawa -- 'Le Sourire' won the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film in 1960. This quiet and intelligent film is a remarkable interpretation of a young monks perspective into a world of meditation, sacred geometry, and coming of age. A tribute to Buddhism, introspection and the wonders of nature...a short but lasting work of art.

Stéphane Mallarmé is one of the many educational documentaries that Éric Rohmer did for the television during the 1960’s. At the beginning of the film, Rohmer states that he has placed in Mallarmé’s mouth words taken from an interview with the writer by Jules Heuret published in 1891.

The underworld (imaginary and real) of Paris, depicted through several sketches. Kaleidoscope of the immoral and nauseating aspects of the capital.

Eric Rohmer leads a conversation with Jean Renoir and Henri Langlois on the art of filmmaker Louis Lumière.

Jaguar, a kind of road movie on foot, tells of the journey of three friends, Damouré, Lam and Illo, on their way to the Gold Coast where they hope to make a fortune in order to return to their village in a few months.

[Here] Pollet made a work that is the very definition of what French critics like to call an ovni or ufo (as in ‘unidentified filmic object’). [It] has been described as being ‘like a comet in the sky of French cinema,’ an ‘unknown masterpiece,’ and an ‘unprecedented’ work that refuses interpretation even as it has provoked reams of critical writing. Its rhythmic collage of images – a girl on a gurney, a fisherman, Greek ruins, a Sicilian garden, a Spanish corrida – is accompanied by an abstract commentary written by Sollers, and only the somber lyricism of Antoine Duhamel’s score holds the film’s elements together. At first viewing, you fear that [it] might fly apart into incoherent fragments. Instead, over the course of its 45 minutes it invents its own rules, and you realize you’re watching something like the filmic channeling of an ancient ritual.

Filmed in 1960 during a break in the production of "Ferry to Hong Kong," this short documentary records Orson Welles’s three-week journey through colonial Hong Kong and Macau. The film documents the refugee crisis and extreme social inequality of the period, contrasting overcrowded rooftops, sampans, hillside settlements, and street life with the city’s visible wealth and colonial luxury. Structured as a reportage essay, the film presents a stark observational portrait of displacement, poverty, and privilege within a divided urban landscape.

A young man finds in an old abandoned farmhouse in Vans in Ardèche some fifty letters and a notebook forgotten there. Back in Paris, he discovers that it is a romantic correspondence between a young peasant girl and a captain during the 14-18 war. The film recreates this love story.

This colorful documentary chronicles the events of the 1968 Winter Olympics in France. The events made international celebrities of skater Peggy Fleming and skier Jean-Claude Killy for their gold-medal performances. The camera accurately catches the speed of bobsleds and downhill racers and ski jumpers as they race for the gold. President Charles DeGaulle is shown observing the action over 13 days, which saw France earn the best performance to date in the winter games.

A Sunday fair with hunger in the air, in a lost Galician village under the black umbrellas of a pitiless rain...

We join the idyllic world of conductor Petre Mihajlovski, whose slow, narrow-gauge Macedonian train was built in 1895, and runs from Prespa to Ohrid. Here are charming scenes of laundry washed by the lake, the soapy water heated in large copper kettles.

While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed "Yanco". This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.

The French director is interviewed in this documentary showing the newly celebrated filmmaker discussing his influences and beginnings along with "Les Mistons" and "The 400 Blows".

"Demain à Nanguila" follows Moussa, a young man who leaves his village for Bamako in search of opportunity but instead encounters hardship and disillusionment. His return home becomes a reflection on rural exodus, tradition, and the challenges facing Mali in the early years of independence.

A short 6-minute essay-documentary by Maurice Pialat on the region in which much of the action of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble unfolds.

Short doc by Maurice Pialat. The first film in the series set at Turkey, Bosphore, is also the only one that was shot in color.

A film shot during the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California around the meetings organised by the Black Panthers Party to free Huey Newton, one of their leaders, and to turn his trial into a political debate. They tried and succeeded in catching America’s attention.

In the 1968 movement in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard made a 16mm, 3-minute long film, Film-tract No.1968, Le Rouge, in collaboration with French artist Gérard Fromanger. Starting with the shot identifying its title written in red paint on the Le Monde for 31 July 1968, the film shows the process of making Fromanger’s poster image, which is thick red paint flows over a tri-color French flag. —Hye Young Min

French director Frederic Rossif presents this historical documentary that coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Stock footage from both World Wars are included with 30 minutes of new scenes filmed especially for the project. The historical timeline is traced from the time Czar Nicholas II is crowned. The emergence of Lenin, his death in 1924, and the later contributions of Trotsky and Stalin give the viewer a sense of death, betrayal, and ideological devotion to the communist agenda. Rossif effectively uses scenes from the landmark 1929 film The Man With A Movie Camera by celebrated director Dziga Vertov. Rossif researched the film archives from several countries in his meticulous gathering of materials for this timely historical feature.

Set in Zaire, the film follows an expedition exploring the crater of the Niragongo volcano of the Virunga chain, whose eruptions are known for their violence and their massive lava flows.

With ghostly eyes looking through the winter landscapes of the plains and villages of Ain, where the sanctified priest the Curé of Ars once lived, Jacques Demy tried to understand this fighter for communal spirituality and his daily torments of mysticism.

Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens follows the course of the famous wind as it originates in the Alps and finds its way to the Mediterranean Sea. Natural sounds and creative camera work provide a mood film showing the effect of the fury of the wind on the life of southern France.

This documentary presents the Vietnam War as seen from within Vietnam, focusing on civilian life, industrial and agricultural labor, and organized resistance under sustained aerial bombardment. Introduced by Bertrand Russell, the film situates the conflict within a broader history of anti-occupation struggles, drawing parallels to World War II resistance movements. Footage includes interviews with Vietnamese leaders, scenes of air defense, and mass political mobilization.

Biography of ski instructor, mountain guide, mountaineer and filmmaker-lecturer Lionel Terray. Film-portrait of an emblematic figure of French mountaineering in the 1950s and 1960s, reconstructing the life, the great races and the expeditions of the "conqueror" of the most difficult walls and summits of Europe, the Himalayas, the Andes and North America. Marcel Ichac produced in 1966, the day after the Gerbier accident, this illustrated tribute by bringing together personal archive documents, unpublished animated sequences or extracts from expedition images as well as comments taken from the autobiographical texts of Lionel Terray " The Conquerors of the Useless" and "Battle for Jannu". This film, presented at the Cannes Film Festival, has won numerous awards at specialized film festivals, including the Trente Festival and the Banff Festival.

A documentary look at striking workers in a textile plant in Besançon, France, centering on interviews with workers about their motivations for becoming involved with the union and the struggles of their day to day life.

A photo montage of Cubans filmed by Agnès Varda during her visit to Cuba in 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power. This black & white documentary explores their socialist culture and society while making use of 1500 pictures (out of 4000!) the filmmaker took while on the island.

Processions during a holy week in Valladolid.

A propaganda short made on behalf of the French colonial administration of Algeria.

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a film. The author turns his hesitations, his doubts and difficult working conditions into the constituents of his work”. (Raphaël Bassan)

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

Koumiko Muraoka, a young Japanese woman born in Manchuria and educated in France, wanders through Tokyo while she reflects on identity, memory, and what it means to be Japanese in a rapidly changing world.

Dimanche was supposed to be a didactic film, ordered by the film department of the National Education, intended to evoke the problem of leisure. Bernhard diverts the order and outwits the trap of the ‘thematic’ film. Without resorting to any form of commentary, making use of extraordinary images sublimating common spaces (the boredom of Sundays, the changing of the guard, children playing, a runner in the woods, a football match, …), he constructs with a nifty montage an exceptional work dealing with the sense of void and the fossilisation of the world. (Boris Lehman)

On October 17, 1961, 30,000 Algerians demonstrated peacefully in Paris to protest the discriminatory curfew imposed upon them and to demand Algerian independence. Under the authority of the then Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, the demonstration was brutally repressed, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Algerians. Historians cite eleven thousand arrests, dozens of murders, demonstrators thrown into the Seine, hundreds of expulsions, and just as many complaints that went unanswered; all for a night that would become a blind spot in the national narrative. No investigation, no trial, and certainly no commemoration. The day after the demonstration, Jacques Panijel began filming *October in Paris* to alert the public to the massacre that had just taken place in the streets of Paris. The film was banned by the French authorities. It obtained a distribution license in 1973. It was first shown in theaters in October 2011.

Les inconnus de la terre starts like a traditional feature film: in the beginning of the film all the leading roles are given a short introduction. This is followed by a number of interviews, in which the makers unashamedly appear themselves. They include an interview with a lonely shepherd and one with three unmarried brothers who try to run the parental farm for better or worse. Notwithstanding the fact that this mode of interviewing has now become classical, les inconnus de la terre works rather refreshingly. The film is more than just an enumeration of problems. In an honest way it shows the ties of those involved to the land and to nature, in addition to being a plea for the modernization of French agriculture.

The term caustic designates optically the envelope of light rays undergoing reflection or refraction on a curved and shiny surface.

An essay film critiquing post-war France's urban developments- Pialat states that modernity and suburban convenience have limited Parisian freedom and widened class gaps.

Reportage sur Orly (Reporting on Orly ) is a short film directed and written by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1964. It is a documentary and its existence is attested on other film platforms, such as IMDB (tt0208401) and on written works on film, such as The Encyclopedia of Film (James Monaco, ‎James Pallot, 1991, p. 225), Contemporary Theater, Film and Television (Gale Research Staff, ‎Linda S. Hubbard, ‎Sara J. Steen ‎1989, p. 155) and Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film (Maryel Locke, ‎Charles Warren, 1993, p. 127). It is not known to have been publicly displayed and may have been lost.

Three-part interview with French film director Jean Renoir, conducted by French New Wave director Jacques Rivette.

"I was interested by the fact that some old guy, after the Parthenon’s glamour, devoted himself in a much smaller temple, where there was no white marble, no nothing. All Greek temples are dedicated to Apollo etc, and this particular one was not dedicated to anyone and is in a place where there never was a city nearby, in a kind of wasteland, in a ditch. But, just by going up a bit –you are in the centre of Peloponissos- on a clear day, you can see the sea on both your left and right. I went back there, at least six, seven or eight times, as if I wanted to think or find myself. So, at the temple in Bassae, I made a short 10 minute film and I was lucky enough to encounter two days of clouds and mist between the columns."

Nadja is a guest student, who stays at Cité Universitaire and visits the Sorbonne, while preparing a thesis on Proust; she also likes to stroll about Paris.

Documentary about French playwright and film director Sacha Guitry.