France

  • Philippe Garrel – La cicatrice intérieure AKA The Inner Scar (1972)

    1971-1980ArthouseCultFrancePhilippe GarrelThe Films of May '68

    This is a highly experimental French film consisting of no more than 23 camera shots, total. It resembles nothing so much as one of Warhol’s earlier films, except that it is more episodic. Nico of the Velvet Underground portrays a different woman in each of the episodes. The first three concern her “rescues” from Death Valley, Egypt and Iceland by a young man to whom she eventually says “stay away from me.” Following that, she recites from various texts in German, French and English, makes various gnomic observations and encounters various men in various guises. All the men are played either by director Philippe Garrel or Pierre Clementi.Read More »

  • Jean Genet – Un chant d’amour (1950)

    1941-1950EroticaExperimentalFranceJean GenetQueer Cinema(s)

    From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
    Genet’s only film — hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret — is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex; male prisoners in solitary confinement “embracing” walls, ramming them in erotic despair with erect penis, swaying convulsively to auto-erotic lust, kissing their own bodies and tattoos in sexual frenzy. In a supremely poetic (and visual) metaphor of sexual deprivation, two prisoners in adjoining cells symbolically perform fellatio by alternately blowing or inhaling each other’s cigarette smoke through a straw inserted in a wall opening, while masturbating. Like all of Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia. In the end, and after many failures, some flowers — painfully passed from one barred window to the next — are finally caught by the prisoner in the adjoining cell in a poetic affirmation of love in infinite imprisonment.Read More »

  • Alain Guiraudie – Tout droit jusqu’au matin AKA Straight Ahead Until Morning (1994)

    1991-2000Alain GuiraudieFranceQueer Cinema(s)Short Film

    Quote:
    Night after night a watchman hunts for a man who has been repainting the town in the color red.Read More »

  • Claude Chabrol – Merci pour le chocolat AKA Nightcap (2000)

    1991-2000Claude ChabrolCrimeDramaFrance

    Quote:
    When the young Jeanne finds out that she could have mistakenly been exchanged from her cradle with another newborn (the son of a famous piano player), she decides to contact this family. All this will lead to the discovery of dark family secrets and the unveiling of the misdeeds and the hypocrisy of the French upper class members.Read More »

  • Olympe de G. – Une dernière fois (2020)

    2011-2020EroticaFranceOlympe de G.TV

    Salomé is 69-year-old and doesn’t want to grow old in a society that pays little attention to elderly people; thus, she has organized her disappearance. She plans her last evening in detail, as she thinks about the last time she will have sexual intercourse. With the held of Sandra, a filmmaker, Salomé organizes a casting to choose the person with whom she will make love for the last time. But, as she abandons herself to pleasures, she discovers something new: her last time will also be a first time, just like every end is also a new beginning.Read More »

  • Alain Guiraudie – Les héros sont immortels AKA Heroes Never Die (1990)

    1981-1990Alain GuiraudieFranceShort Film

    Quote:
    Guiraudie’s first film concerns two young men engaged in a favorite pastime: hanging out and talking. Specifically, they wait in the square of a small town for a third: the potential funder of their proposed magazine.Read More »

  • Patrice Leconte – Tango (1993)

    1991-2000ComedyDramaFrancePatrice Leconte

    Synopsis (possible spoilers):
    ‘Vincent, a stunt pilot, is acquitted of murdering his wife and her lover. However, a few years later, L’Elegant, the Judge in the case, comes to blackmail him. The Judge’s nephew, Paul, is having trouble with his wife and they demand that Vincent kill her. The Judge, a confirmed bachelor, takes Paul and Vincent on the road to search for Paul’s wife Marie. The three men get on well together, and spend their time discussing their relationship with women.’
    – Will Gilbert (IMDb)Read More »

  • Jacques Doillon – Ponette (1996)

    1991-2000DramaFranceJacques Doillon

    Les Inrockuptibles wrote:
    A 4-year-old child loses her mother. From this violent and irremediable situation, Jacques Doillon builds with Ponette a relentless film on pain and confinement. Contrary to the usual creamy imagery, he recreates with force and truth the magical and cruel world of childhood, a secret universe where adults have no place.Read More »

  • Gilles Delannoy & Isabelle Pierson & Michel Campioli – Carré blanc (1986)

    1981-1990DocumentaryExploitationFranceGilles DelannoyIsabelle Pierson

    Quote:
    so, what we have here is a bunch of journalists gathering up at night in some kind of secret meeting where they share their best stories, for the purpose of selling them to the first issue of a new magazine….so, somehow the action takes places all during one night…and the magazine is going to be a paper, but the stories come in video footage…go figureRead More »

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