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Serge Daney talks about television in France, about the social role it plays and the role it could play, its ability to welcome and even integrate the "other" into a system of values of which it still is - in spite of everything - the depositary. Its existence of truth, of openness to the world passes through Serge Daney's own biography: that of a man formed by the major art of this century: the cinema.

Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne returns to settle there after some journeys elsewhere. He takes as his motif the Sainte-Victoire mountain close by and paints it more than sixty times in different ways and at every time of year. A strange kind of obstination which it was necessary to examine again.

A still life featuring a large fish, painted in the Dutch manner, The Ray immerses us in the quiet life of familiar objects that the artist took pleasure in depicting. The careful search for the exact placement of each kitchen utensil and each piece of fruit was a long and meticulous process through which Chardin gave his work symbolic or historical meaning.

In 1630, Rubens who is settled in Anvers marries in a second marriage Hélène Fourment. In the huge studio he has had built, he paints several portraits of Hélène, in the garden, in furs, in a carriage, which are minutely analysed in this film. For he does not content himself with making a simple portrait but tries to portray she whom her admirers had compared to Homer's Helen and to transcribe in allegoried form, all the attributes of the femininity.

In this documentary about the exile of two famous French actors in Argentina during and after World War II, the director Cozarinsky returns to Argentina after many years in France and recalls places and events from his childhood, particularly the celebration of the liberation of Paris on in August of 1944, in Buenos Aires's Plaza Francia. Featuring testimony from various authors and acquaintances of Maria (Renee) Falconetti and Robert Le Vigan, the film explores their lives and final years in Argentina.

Stefano Di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta from the 18th century onward, painted this polyptych in Siena between 1437 and 1444 before delivering it, in accordance with his contract, to the Franciscan convent of San Sepolcro near Arezzo. The altarpiece was dismantled starting in 1578, and its various fragments were sold and dispersed. Twenty-six fragments are now scattered across ten museums in London, Berlin, Moscow, and New York… The Louvre Museum holds three of the five panels that made up the main face, as well as two small panels from the predella. Each of these fragments contains numerous clues that make it possible to reconstruct the history of the polyptych and sometimes even to determine their original placement within the whole. Graphic tools and video techniques allow the puzzle to be reassembled and different hypotheses of reconstruction to be presented—hypotheses on which specialists themselves remain divided.

A country road, a couple in a car and an unexpected obstacle. And then the man is going to have to prove his love.

Ten similar faces are printed in black, in two rows, on a big canvas measuring 5,65 meters long by 2 high. Similar, these faces ? Not quite : the viewer can distinguish many little differences, like the variations that might come from a same mould. He can also recognise the face of a famous actress, Elizabeth Taylor, "Liz". Andy Warhol composed this picture in 1963 from a photo of the star and by repeating it ten times thanks to a screen-printing screen. Why this face ? Why this repetition ? Warhol does not reveal the keys to his work easily. He became a painter by chance and seems to choose his motifs arbitrarily. Working in New York in the 1960s, at the heart of the "pop art" movement, could he be a sort of negative reflection of consumer society ? A picture like this, which seems to break with traditional portrait art, can however be deciphered just as well as a more ancient painting...

Rare one-hour documentary about and featuring world-famous composer György Ligeti, known to film fans all over the world because Stanley Kubrick used his music in "2001", "The Shining", and "Eyes Wide Shut". Ligeti revisits his childhood home in Transylvania, talks about past and present, about his life and his music.

The term "white noise" describes the technical application of a certain quality of background noise obtained by emitting constant energy to different sound frequencies. This effectively "cancels out" the frequencies and the equivalent of "silence" is produced. Les Bruits blancs centres on a dual polarity: the Parisian periphery - the perimiter boulevard of Paris - its urban landscape, and the flux of a water current - the St. Laurent seaway which circles Montreal.

A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by French film critic Jean-Louis Comolli on the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine.

This is certainly the most mysterious painting of all the history of painting. Thirty different attempts of finding out the hidden meaning of it have been made without success. The Flagellation is not only the masterpiece of a great artist telling an enigmatic story, it is also the expression of Renaissance's new ideas and art. Piero had a great reputation as a painter and as a mathematician. A few of his paintings show his vast knowledge of perspective. The architecture, the paving, the ceiling, the whole setting of The Flagellation - up to its smallest details - is governed by the laws of perspective. By computing all these datas, it was possible to recreate in three dimensions the exact space that Piero had imagined.

Testimonies from four persons which destinies were brutally thrown out of balance when a tragic event made them lose their autonomy.

London during March of 1996. 1. When all golden turned to shit, 2. Interlude, 3. 1999: Karmakeddon Warriors.

April 1988. While civil war rages in New Caledonia, Michel Rocard, then Prime Minister, invents an unprecedented solution to restore peace: a mission of dialogue composed of seven completely different men, the mediators of the Pacific

The life and virtuosic work of Russian violinist David Oistrakh, once known as King David in the Soviet Union, is chronicled with depth and detail by filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon in this intriguing portrait of an artist. Highlights include a range of performance footage throughout Oistrakh's legendary career, as well as interviews with his son, Igor, conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Blue period, blue traces, blue sponges... Yves Klein deserved his nickname of "Yves the monochrome". Even though he used many other colours, it is the colour of the sky that he chose above all, used over and over again and that he made into not just a mode of expression but a sort of spiritual energy. Klein had the idea of using directly the naked bodies of his models as "living paintbrushes", inventing by his strange sessions, between ritual and striptease, a whole catalogue of new forms. At the same time, intuitively, almost naively, he went through both the history of legendary pictures, the history of the peculiarities of nature and the noble history of nudes in painting. The Anthropométries are both a meditation on imprint, trace, disappearance and coloured variations on the theme of incarnation.

The crazy face of Franck has no gaze, only orifices and excrescences with undefined, undecidabled functions. It's a flesh humanity in opposition to organ humanity.

Reporting incest and withdrawing the charge. The various people the child confides in (doctor, children’s judge, police, social worker, teacher, educator, Family Planning co-ordinator) talk about their discovery of incest, their lack of training, their difficulties and their hopes.

"Les Démons" tells a rather familiar story of a young French man named Franc, who finds an ancient relic in a box hidden away in a cellar. It is soon learned that anyone who touches this relic will become possessed by a demonic entity, and Franc spends the film attempting to fight off this deadly deity.

A professor is entranced by a flower in the garden of his apartment building. It opens up when he gets closer to it but it closes when danger approaches.

A small company valiantly struggles to survive under the respectful yet probing camera of Claire Simon in “At All Costs.” As the docu opens, founder and manager Jihad is off to see his banker. The lack of ready cash to pay his loyal employees, wholesale produce providers and a whole range of other creditors, including the tax-gobbling French government, is omnipresent. From a staff of 14, Jihad is down to three cooks, one delivery driver and a secretary in less than six months. The good-natured pluck of the remaining employees is at the heart of the film. Subterfuges for putting up a brave united front include scheduling food orders from a coin-operated pay phone when the office phone is cut off for nonpayment.

Animated short film presented at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 1995 by students from GOBELINS, the school of image.

Do not believe that God alone sees you and rather discover it as you have never seen it...

The film chronicles Henri Matisse's travels to Tangier as he seeks new motifs for his paintings from a Moroccan perspective. Henri Matisse made two trips to Tangier in early 1912 and in the winter of 1912-1913, seaching for new motifs for his paintings. The lush colors and sensuous imagery of North Africa proved extraordinarily fruitful. Matisse completed twenty-three paintings – many of them master works – and more than sixty pen-and-ink drawings.

During his final years in Rome, Nicolas Poussin painted four works for the Duke of Richelieu evoking the seasons. Considered the painter’s pictorial testament, this series is the culmination of a technically mastered art, a true synthesis of all the elements of the artist’s late style, while also revealing signs of age and illness in its tiny, trembling brushwork. Faithful to Venetian chromaticism, Poussin creates surprising plays of color closely tied to the meaning of each painting. The Four Seasons also represents the four phases of Redemption, the four parts of the day, the four ages of human history, and above all, four biblical episodes: Spring, the Garden of Eden; Summer, the meeting of Ruth and Boaz; Autumn, the bunch of grapes brought back from the Promised Land; and Winter, the Flood.

"This two-part video is a newcomer’s portrait of Montréal. I spent my first winter in Québec in a cold, dark, first floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee while watching the electric meter, wondering how I would pay my bills. At night, I looked at the illuminated “Q” on the Hydro Québec building and imagined how much it cost to keep it lit. In the second section, a man looks for meaning in the tile patterns of the Champ-de-Mars metro station. I took his search to an end more absurd than anything I could hope to enact. The moral of these two tales is: “Don’t lose you sense of humour”. It’s from this cliché that the video derives its title." - Nelson Henricks

In a mimetic approach to that of the great documentarian, Dubosc delivers notes and fragments of their meetings between 1991 and 1992 in New York. In his apartment, Mekas lends himself, with poetry, to the game of the filmer-filmed. Numerous excerpts from his films are inserted into the montage.

In March 1996 the French government decided to expel all African family who did not have papers from the city of Paris. During a six month period of time, the director followed many of the families and got there testimonials about how it felt to be discriminated against by the French on film. Eventually the documentary focuses on one man who emerges at the center of the fight to not to be sent back to Africa. In the end he is sent back to his native Mali, the director and his camera accompany him.

Camera movements on a pine (“Songshù” in Chinese) at dusk when the light is so soft. Film with nuanced hues and Chinese painting graphics.

Euphronios is one of the rare Greek vase painters whose name has come down to us. An exceptional artist, he stopped painting at the height of his career to devote himself to making the vases he had once decorated. He was one of the main contributors to a major transformation that took place at the time: the transition from black-figure to red-figure painting. By comparing them with the known works of the painter, Alain Jaubert reconstructs his career and analyzes his pictorial style.

From the young Ensor, brilliant artist, rebel and relatively unknown, to the esteemed Baron Ensor, who only painted scenes in which he plagiarized himself, Luc de Heusch provides an interpretation of a man and an oeuvre. A Sunday musician, out-and-out misogynist, talented utterer of curses, lover of the mermaid, seller of beach souvenirs, he left dazzling drawings and major 20th century paintings. At the centre of the film is the creative impotence he experienced halfway through his life. The setting is Ostend, queen of beaches, the city that he never wanted to leave, and the North Sea, beautifully photographed. A film on art which provides outstanding answers to the following questions: how to film a scene, how to find a dramatic structure, how to avoid narratives being too educational. The scenes are shot in full screen: the film imposes its format of continuity and narration on the museological ‘framework’.

After having written "Pendant les affaires, les affaires continuent", Denis Robert, journalist at "Liberation" for twelve years, does it again, but this time with a film made with Philippe Harel which is an extension of his book. Subject: business and the people who deal with it, bosses, big and small, judges, lawyers, politicians and fake billers.

Brice Dellsperger's reprise of Brian de Palma's Obsession

“Requiem pour le XXè siècle” is a manifesto against war. It is an elegy. The photograph is connected with images that are part of our collective memory: extracts from newsreels of World War II that have been reworked and transformed through various optical and electronic processes. World War II was a condensation of violence (biological and environmental destructions, racism, ethnic clearing, and persecution of people who are different…) and ongoing wars perpetuate that violence. This work is a metaphorical representation of all past, present and future wars. Constructed on the dramatic tension between the violence of wars and the presence of the intersex hermaphroditic “Angel”: Their eyes are bandaged; they are a symbol for difference, having an ambiguous position: observer, witness, victim or judge.

A century later, Alain Jaubert rediscovered the exact location where Seurat prepared his painting, as well as the studio where he completed it. In March 1886, the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition took place. A 26-year-old unknown artist, Georges Seurat, exhibited a very large canvas there, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A striking light—born of a long reflection on the origins of color perception—a multitude of tiny dots, a landscape treated in a classical manner yet populated with caricature-like figures: the painting caused a scandal. It would give rise to the Neo-Impressionists, or more commonly, “pointillists.” Above all, it would leave a lasting mark on later generations—Fauves, Cubists, and Futurists. Van Gogh himself was deeply influenced by the discovery of Seurat.

Dedicated to one of the major paintings by Auguste Renoir, created in 1876, this documentary combines a meticulous analysis of the artwork with engravings and photographs showing the true “face” of Montmartre Hill at the end of the 19th century.