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Mao by Mao

A film-détournement biography of Mao Tse-tung in which the life of the recently deceased Great Helmsman is told in his own words, using quotes culled from various Red Guard publications. The rise to power of the film's namesake appears as the inevitable outcome of a dialectical logical. Or so the voice-over might lead one to believe. If the usual practice of détourned films is for the soundtrack to undermine the image, here the reverse occasionally takes place. The images critique Mao's words. They show that which, even in the official visual record of the times, the narrative elides. The film is dedicated to Li Yhi Zhe, the nominal author of a famous Democracy Wall critique of the Maoist state.

Mao by Mao

6.7 1977
Travail du comédien

We follow the rehearsals and the staging work of Bertold Brecht's play 'Dans la jungle des villes' in 1972 by the company Théâtre de l'Espérance. The three directors: Jean-Pierre Vincent, Jean Jourdheuil and André Engel discuss their joint work of staging and their vision of the play. Interviews with the actors (Gérard Desarthe, Maurice Bénichou, Hélène Vincent), whom we follow at different stages of the work (source: Média Scérén). The film was screened for the 1973 Directors' Fortnight, at the Cannes Festival.

Travail du comédien

NR 1974
The Daughter of the Railroad Crossing Guard

Based on the idea by Roland Topor (screenwriter of Roman Polanski's The Tenant), this very curious completely silent melodrama tells the story of Mona, who has left her father, the railway gatekeeper, after being raped on the train track. She is kidnapped and taken to a Parisian whorehouse. However, a disinherited prince, Dudu who tries to rescue her, is himself kidnapped and forced to serve as a male prostitute. The two captives meet there and fall in love. They are taken away by different rich people - he to an Arab "harem," she to a surgeon's home.

The Daughter of the Railroad Crossing Guard

10.0 1975
Le mariage de Mlle Beulemans

The play takes place in Brussels, where Suzanne Beulemans, daughter of a wealthy brewer, is promised in marriage to Séraphin Meulemeester, son of a rival brewer. Both the young man and his father appear to be particularly motivated by the young bride's dowry. But Séraphin has a rival in the form of Albert Delpierre, a young Parisian intern at the Beulemans brewery, who is secretly in love with the young woman. Albert receives a confession from Séraphin, who tells him that he is having an affair with a worker with whom he has had a child. He promises Séraphin not to reveal anything to Suzanne, but she is informed by Isabelle, the house servant.

Le mariage de Mlle Beulemans

7.0 1978
S'il vous plaît... la mer ?

On a deserted beach bordered by the sea, three characters make incomprehensible movements that sound will later explain. At the same time as these images, some characters dialogue. A couple and a young girl - their daughter? - who remains mute. A dialogue of a great platitude where it is literally question of the rain and the good weather. We then realize that the mute daughter is staging - on the beach - the mother who refuses her desire and the father who makes it impossible. At the end of the film, we see the "parents" at the water's edge leaving the girl alone again.

S'il vous plaît... la mer ?

8.0 1979
Hotel of Free Love

Madame Robert makes ends meet by running a boarding house, as her colonel widow's pension is not enough. A Norwegian pensioner, being young and athletic, starts doing gymnastics in the nude, in plain view of all respectable guests. Instead of being horrified, that leads everyone to express their inner selfs, as well as outer skin. Madame Robert can't take this, and expels all the guests, save the young Norwegian man, whom she considers a pure youth who didn't intend to start an orgy. Soon, she falls to his manly charms, and then invites back her lodgers to make the boarding house more pleasant, or rather, a "hotel de plaisir".

Hotel of Free Love

3.3 1974
Cain from Nowhere

Cain has been traveling for a long time throughout Europe. Back "home" he knocks at the door of his parents' trailer only to be rejected by his hateful mother, who once again blames him for his laziness and once again compares him to his brother Abel, a successful businessman and a right guy, good to his parents and stuff. As for his father, now blind and crippled, he escapes his wife by being permanently drunk and he is of no help. In disgust, Cain runs away from the place and contacts Abel, the perfect son, to borrow money from him. But, although Abel tells him he doesn't mind helping him, Cain shoots him down with a gun found in his brother's car.

Cain from Nowhere

10.0 1970
Lebanon in a Whirlwind

A few months after the incident of April 13, 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were machine-gunned by Phalangist militiamen, the toll is most tragic: six thousand dead, twenty thousand wounded, incessant kidnappings, a semi-destroyed capital. This film traces the origins of the Lebanese conflict, the perception of a society that goes to war while singing. A unique document on the Lebanese civil war. Beyond the religious war, the painting of a social and political reality that has not changed much, more than four decades later.

Lebanon in a Whirlwind

6.0 1975
Promised Lands

Susan Sontag scrutinizes the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict and the growing divisions within Jewish thought over the question of Palestinian sovereignty. Shot in Israel during the final days of the Yom Kippur War. Promised Lands is less straight documentary than visual collage. There are images of combat zones and soldiers, but also everyday street life, desert landscapes, funerals, supermarkets, the Wailing Wall. The soundtrack is snatches of radio, bursts of church bells and gunfire, and an extended voiceover from two politically opposed Israeli thinkers.

Promised Lands

5.6 1974
Le Maître de Santiago

It has been years since Don Alvaro Dabo, the Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, has given up the profession of arms. Now retired in Avila, Castile he lives there in an austere and unadorned residence. Devoting all his time to prayer, he has become contemptuous of the vanity of all earthly goods. Mariana, his daughter, accompanies this proud man's life with admiration and fear. At a gathering of his Order, the knights tell him of a prestigious position in the New World offered by the King. Nothing easier than to make a fortune in such an Eldorado. With this money, he could endow his daughter and marry her to Don Jacinto, her beloved. But will the sainted man agree to, just for the sake of Mariana, stoop to the level of those he disdains?

Le Maître de Santiago

NR 1974
Nothing to Report

In 1956, the professional army of France lacks the manpower to keep the peace in Algeria, the colony which the country is determined to hold on to at any price. For this reason, reservists are called up and subject to an intense period of training before being sent to the front. Rémy March, Alain Charpentier and Raymond Dax are three such young men who have no interest in the military escapade and are reluctant conscripts. What they witness in Algeria will appall and transform them. Rape, torture, executions... there is no end to the atrocities in which they become unwilling participants. No wonder the French military are so willing to proclaim that there is nothing to report...

Nothing to Report

5.8 1973
Come and Work

The story of a Serer village in the groundnut basin of Senegal. Using the words of their ancestors passed on by oral folklore, the villagers trace the history of their village and their difficulties in working their land and living off their produce. Fad'jal is an extraordinary boundary defying film that interweaves ethnographic footage, intimate observation of everyday village life and fictionalised historical scenes. With it, Faye carefully encourages the viewers to reflect both on African history and storytelling, and on the intersection of fiction and documentary.

Come and Work

5.9 1979