Lest We Forget

Dubbed by the Village Voice as “arguably the most important European director of her generation,” Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is known for making innovative films that have often earned comparison to those of Jean-Luc Godard or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although she rejects the label of “feminist filmmaker,” Akerman has become a guiding light in making films about the real issues faced by women, employing an experimental, deeply personal approach to her subjects.

A disciple of Godard (who first inspired the then-15-year-old Akerman with his Pierre le fou), Akerman attended Brussels’ INSAS film school and the Universite Internationale du Paris. She demonstrated her devotion to Godard with her first amateur short subject, 1968’s Saute Ma Ville (Blow up My Town), which three years after its completion was entered in the Oberhausen Festival. Working on the fringes of show business in New York in the early ’70s, Akerman became an enthusiastic participant in the avant garde film movement, putting her theories to good use in such European movie projects as Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Tout Une Nuit (1982), and Seven Women Seven Sins (1986).

In 1975, Akerman made her best-known and one of her most influential films, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that was barely shown in the U.S., but which generated considerable response in Europe. Filmed largely in real time, it was an over three-hour-long chronicle of mundane episodes from the daily life of a 40-year old woman who snaps when faced with intense emotion and commits a horrifying crime. This focus on activities and occurrences over traditional narrative and continuity is a typical feature of Akerman’s films (the 1972 short Hotel Monterey consists entirely of shots of people walking in and out of a rundown New York hotel). She is also known for utilizing experimental compositions of light and architectural design, with detached, non sequitur soundtracks to underscore the “action.” In 1996, Akerman made perhaps her most mainstream film to date, Un Divan a New York. A romantic comedy about an American psychoanalyst and a Parisian dancer who agree to switch apartments, it starred William Hurt and Juliette Binoche. Three years later, Akerman ventured to Jasper, Texas, where she made Sud, a documentary about the horrendous killing of James Byrd, Jr., an African-American man who was savagely murdered by three white men. The film was screened at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:79189~T1)

One of the more pleasing by-products of the “Swinging Sixties,” British stage actress Jane Birkin made a huge international impression in 1966 as one of the two nude models (she was the blonde) in Antonioni’s existential feature film Blow-Up. Since that time, Birkin has often as not appeared in bisexual or androgynous film roles; in Roger Vadim’s Don Juan 73 (1973), she was cast as Brigitte Bardot’s lover. In the 1970s, she launched a second career as a popular recording artist, scoring a worldwide hit with “Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus.” She created a sensation of Blow-Up dimensions in 1987 when, as star and screenwriter of director Agnès Varda’s Kung Fu Master, she played a 40-year-old woman carrying on a torrid affair with a 15-year-old boy. The following year, Varda expressed her admiration for Birkin with the feature-length documentary Jane B. par Agnes V. Rightly regarded by European cinephiles as one of filmdom’s most versatile actresses, Birkin has had trouble shaking her earlier sex-kitten image with English-speaking audiences; only her work in 1985’s Dust and 1990’s Daddy Nostalgie has earned the unqualified praise of American critics. Once married to composer John Barry, Birkin then became the wife of French director Jacques Doillon. Jane Birkin is also the mother of actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, star of the 1996 remake of Jane Eyre; Charlotte’s father is composer/director Serge Gainsbourg. —allmovie guide

Bertrand Blier directs erotic buddy movies featuring men who are exasperated by the opposite sex, who perceive of themselves as macho but are incapable of satisfying the women in their lives. In actuality, his heroes are terrified of feminism, of the “new woman” who demands her right to experience and enjoy orgasm. But Blier’s females are in no way villainesses. They are just elusive—and so alienated that they can only find fulfillment from oddballs or young boys.

Going Places (Les Valseuses , which in French is slang for testicles), based on Blier’s best-selling novel, was a box office smash in France. Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere both achieved stardom as a couple of outsiders, adult juvenile delinquents, whose sexual and sadistic adventures are chronicled as they travel across France. They are both unable to bring to orgasm a young beautician (played by Miou-Miou) they pick up and take on as a sexual partner. They then attempt to please an older woman (Jeanne Moreau), who has just spent ten years in prison. After a night together, she commits suicide by shooting herself in the vagina. Eventually, Miou-Miou is sexually satisfied by a crazy, physically unattractive ex-con.

In Femmes Fatales middle-aged Jean-Pierre Marielle and Jean Rochefort, one a gynaecologist and the other a pimp, decide to abandon wives and mistresses for the countryside, but end up pursued by an army of women intent on enslaving them as studs. Again, men cannot escape women’s sexual demands: here, the latter come after the former with tanks and guns. And in Get out Your Handkerchiefs , driving instructor Depardieu is so anxious to please bored, depressed wife Carol Laure that he finds her a lover. Both the husband and the stranger, a playground instructor (Dewaere), feel that she will be happy if she can only have a child. She in her own way does this, finding a substitute for them in a precocious young boy barely into his teens. Handkerchiefs is a prelude of sorts to Beau-Père , which features only one male lead (as does the later Trop belle pour toi , in which Depardieu is at the centre of a love triangle). Here, a struggling pianist, played by Dewaere, is seduced by the refreshingly self-confident 14-year-old daughter of his recently deceased lover. The teenager’s feelings are deep and pure, while the “adult” is immature, too self-conscious and self-absorbed to accept her.

In Blier’s films, men do not understand women. “Maybe one day I’ll do Camille ,” the filmmaker says. “But I won’t do An Unmarried Woman , because I don’t feel I have the right to do it. I don’t know what goes on in a woman’s head. I believe I know what certain men think, but not women.” As a result, the sexual barriers between the sexes seem irrevocable in Blier’s movies. His men are more at ease talking among themselves about women than with actually being with wives or lovers; their relationships with each other are for them more meaningful than their contacts with the opposite sex. There are alternatives to women, such as turning to homosexual relationships (the characters in Going Places sleep with each other when they are lonely or celibate).

Another Blier film, Buffet froid, is also about male bonding: Depardieu, as a psychopathic killer, becomes involved with a mass murderer (Jean Carmet) and a homicidal cop (the director’s father, the distinguished character actor Bernard Blier). However, Buffet froid is mostly a study of alienation in urban society, and the acceptance of random, irrational violence. It is thematically more closely related to Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders than Going Places or Get out Your Handkerchiefs. Quality-wise, Blier’s most recent films have added little luster to his career. However, the film maker seems to have tired of making films about men. Beginning with Trop belle pour toi (Too Beautiful for You) , the most accessible of his latter-career works, his primary characters have been women. Trop belle pour toi does feature a clever take on extramarital relationships. Blier regular Gerard Depardieu plays a car dealer whose wife is beautiful and intelligent; nonetheless, he cheats on her with his otherwise ordinary, chubby temporary receptionist. Despite this intriguing premise and recognition with a Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize, the film lacks the spark and outrageousness of his earlier work.

The director’s other features include Merci la vie (Thanks, Life) , a feminist take on Going Places that sparked controversy upon its opening in France. It is a road movie which chronicles the sexual exploits of two young women, one sluttish and the other naive. Un deux trois soliel (One Two Three Sun) focuses on the plight of a young girl, growing up in a public housing project in Marseilles, who adores her alcoholic father and is mortified by her mother’s affectations.

Bertrand Blier best explains what he attempts to communicate in his films: “The relations between men and women are constantly evolving and it’s interesting to show people leading the lifestyle of tomorrow.”—ROB EDELMAN

Primarily known as a stage director in his native France, Patrice Chéreau has also made quite a name for himself in the realm of cinema with such acclaimed features as Queen Margot (1994) and Intimacy (2001). The Lezigne native crossed from stage to screen with the 1975 thriller Flesh and the Orchid, and the auspicious debut earned its up-and-coming director two César nominations. In 1984, Chéreau shared a Best Writing César with Hervé Guibert for his feature The Wounded Man, and in 1994, Chéreau scored his biggest hit to date with the bloody historical drama Queen Margot. Adapted from Alexandre Dumas’ novel, Queen Margot was nominated for Best Costume Design at the 1995 Academy Awards in addition to taking home top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and the César Awards. Following a pair of successful television endeavors, Chéreau returned to the screen to great success with the emotional drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998). An introspective tale of an artist’s final wish to be buried in his hometown and the friends and acquaintances who see that his wish is granted, the film was nominated for 11 Césars and took home trophies for Best Cinematography, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress. Though his 2001 drama Intimacy drew fire from conservatives for its graphic, lingering sex scenes, the director publicly defended the film with claims that it was about human relationships, and sex was simply one component of many that makes up those relationships. Despite the controversy, the film proved quite a hit in the European market. In 2003, Chéreau documented the fragile relationship between two estranged brothers with the tender drama His Brother. —allmovie guide

The French director Alain Corneau made 16 films in a variety of genres, from Série Noire, the bleak, sordid 1979 drama that featured a compelling performance by Patrick Dewaere as a door to door salesman looking for redemption in the wrong places, to Crime D’Amour [Love Crime], the psychological thriller starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, which opened in French cinemas to critical acclaim a fortnight before his death from lung cancer. “He was a cinema great,” Scott Thomas said, “an absolutely adorable, funny and sharp-witted man.” Corneau was best known internationally for Tous Les Matins Du Monde (All The Mornings Of The World), a delicate, painterly film about the relationship between the Versailles court composer Marin Marais – Gérard Depardieu and his son Guillaume – and his aesthetic teacher Jean de Sainte-Colombe, played by the ever-excellent Jean-Pierre Marielle. First screened at the end of 1991, Tous Les Matins became a word-of-mouth success with over two million tickets sold in France alone, and won seven César awards, including Best Film and Best Director, the following year. “Many people got emotional about this picture, and that made it possible for it to escape cult status,” said Corneau. Tous Les Matins was released in over 30 countries and inspired a revival in French Baroque music and the viola da gamba, a bowed, fretted, stringed instrument which had been prevalent throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Jordi Savall, the Catalan musician who recorded the award-winning soundtrack with Le Concert Des Nations ensemble, recalled Corneau’s constant presence in the studio, motivating and directing them, and displaying the same focus and determination as Sainte-Colombe.

Born in 1943 in a small town in the Loiret area of central France, he developed a passion for cinema when he began accompanying his father, who was a vet, to screenings in neighbouring Orléans. The proximity of a Nato air base helped feed his love of jazz and by the late 1950s he was drumming with a group entertaining officers and servicemen. His fascination for American culture was at the centre of Le Nouveau Monde, his 1995 autobiographical picture, and also informed Is There Jazz In Harlem?, the short film he made in New York in 1969 following his graduation from L’Institut Des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris. After assisting Roger Corman on Istanbul, Mission Impossible (Target: Harry, 1969), he worked with Costa-Gavras on L’Aveu (The Confession, 1970) and struck up a friendship with the film’s lead, the singer-turned-actor Yves Montand, who agreed to play the tough police inspector in the violent thriller Police Python 357, Corneau’s second movie, in 1976. “He got me out of the jam I was in after the terrible failure of my first film, France Société Anonyme,” said the director who worked with Montand again on two further polars – police dramas – La Menace (1977) and Le Choix Des Armes (Choice Of Arms, 1981). The latter also starred Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, who both signed up for Corneau’s next project, the colonial epic Fort Saganne (1984) shot on location in Mauritania, which lived up to its extravagant budget and delivered big audiences despite its three-hour running time.

The quest for identity was one of Corneau’s constants, developed most effectively in Nocturne Indien (1989), set in India and filmed in English, Le Prince Du Pacifique (2000) made on an island in French Polynesia, and Stupeur Et Tremblements (Fear And Trembling, 2003), shot in Paris in the phonetically-correct Japanese which actress Sylvie Testud learned in three months. After the melodrama Les Mots Bleus (Some Kind Of Blue, 2005), also with Testud, Corneau returned to the polar genre with Le Deuxième Souffle (The Second Wind, 2007), a reimagining rather than a remake of the José Giovanni noir novel first adapted by the influential Jean-Pierre Melville four decades earlier. Corneau’s version featured Daniel Auteuil, Monica Bellucci and Eric Cantona. The director attributed his versatility to the fact that most of his films were based on novels, such as A Hell Of A Woman by the US writer Jim Thompson in the case of Série Noire, or Tous Les Matins Du Monde by Pascal Quignard. —Pierre Perrone

Costa-Gavras is a Greek filmmaker, best known for films with overt political themes, most famously the fast-paced thriller, Z (1969). Most of his movies were made in French; starting with Missing (1982), several were made in English.

Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the left-wing EAM branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned after the war as a suspected communist. His father’s record made it impossible for him to attend university or emigrate to the United States, so after high school Costa Gavras went to France, where he began his studies of law in 1951.

In 1956, he left his university studies to study film at the French national film school, IDHEC. After film school, he apprenticed under Yves Allégret, and became an assistant director for Jean Giono and René Clair. After several further positions as first assistant director, he directed his first feature film, Compartiment Tueurs, in 1965. Costa Gavras was president of the Cinémathèque Française from 1982 to 1987, and again from 2007 to the present. He is a first cousin of recording artist Jimmie Spheeris, filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, and musician Chris Spheeris.His daughter Julie Gavras and his son Romain Gavras are also filmmakers.

In Z (1969), an investigating judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, tries to uncover the truth about the murder of a prominent leftist politician, played by Yves Montand, while government officials and the military attempt to cover up their roles. The film is a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. It had additional resonance because, at the time of its release, Greece had been ruled for two years by the “Regime of the Colonels”. Z won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Gavras and co-writer Jorge Semprún won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Film Screenplay. L’Aveu (The Confession, direction, 1970) follows the path of Artur London, a Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage in the Slánský ‘show trial’ in 1952.

State of Siege (1973) takes place in Uruguay under a conservative government in the early 1970s. In a plot loosely based on the case of US police official and alleged torture expert Dan Mitrione, an American embassy official (played by Yves Montand) is kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a radical leftist urban guerilla group, which interrogates him in order to reveal the details of secret US complicity with repressive regimes in Latin America.

Missing (1982) concerns an American journalist, Charles Horman, who disappeared in the bloody coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Horman’s father, played by Jack Lemmon, and wife, played by Sissy Spacek, search in vain to determine his fate. Nathaniel Davis, US ambassador to Chile from 1971–1973, a version of whose character had been portrayed in the movie (under a different name), filed a US$150 million libel suit, Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 619 F. Supp. 1372 (1985), against the studio and the director, which was eventually dismissed. The film won an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation.

In Music Box (1989), a respected naturalized American citizen (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) is accused of being a Nazi war criminal. The film is loosely based on the case of John Demjanjuk.

Amen. (2003), was based in part on the highly controversial 1963 play, Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy), by Rolf Hochhuth. The movie alleges that Pope Pius XII was aware of the plight of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, but failed to take public action to publicize or condemn the Holocaust. These issues have continued to be disputed, with the Vatican thus far declining to open to historians all of its archives relating to the extent of the Pope’s knowledge during World War II

Costa Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work, especially relevant to his earlier films. Costa Gavras is an expert of the “statement” picture. In most cases, the targets of Gavras’s work have been right-of-center movements and regimes, including Greek conservatives in and out of the military in Z, and authoritarian governments that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing.

In a broader sense, this emphasis continues with Amen. given its focus on the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church during the 1940s. In this political context, L’Aveu (The Confession) provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period.

Gavras has brought attention to international issues, some urgent, others merely problematic, and he has done this in the tradition of cinematic story-telling. Z (1969), easily his most famous work, is an account of the undermining in the 1960s of democratic government in Greece, his homeland and place of birth. The format, however, is a mystery-thriller combination that transforms an uncomfortable history into a riveting story. This is a clear example of how he pours politics into plot, bringing epic conflicts into the sort of personal conflicts we are accustomed to seeing on screen.

His accounts of corruption propagated, in their essence, by European and American powers (Z, State of Siege and Missing) highlight problems buried deep in the structures of these societies, problems which not everyone is comfortable addressing. The approach he adopted in L’Aveu also subtly invited the audience to a critical look focused on structural issues, delving this time into the opposite Communist bloc. —wikipedia

A provocative director whose films offer richly textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema’s most distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current French directors who “has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France.”

Born in Paris on April 21, 1948, Denis, the daughter of a civil servant, was raised in a series of African countries until she was 14, when her family returned to France. She learned about filmmaking as an assistant to a number of notable directors, including Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law), and Costa-Gavras (Hanna K.). She made her directorial and screenwriting debut in 1988 with Chocolat, a lush exploration of colonial life and emotional conflicts in 1950s West Africa as viewed through the eyes of a young French girl. The film, which was inspired by Denis’ own experiences in Africa and those of working amongst the stark Southwest landscapes of Paris, Texas, proved to be a very auspicious debut, screening at Cannes that year and earning both a Golden Palm nomination and a César nomination for Best New Director.

Denis followed her debut the next year with Man No Run, a documentary about Les Têtes Brulées (“the Flaming Heads”), a Cameroon band on their first French tour. She then made S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), a story about two black men, one from Africa and one from the Caribbean, living on the fringes of French society. Like her previous films, it gave specific focus to cultural displacement and racial conflict, themes that would be further explored in J’ai Pas Sommeil (I Can’t Sleep, 1994). Set in a multi-ethnic Parisian neighborhood, the film looked at the various tensions – cultural, familial, and otherwise – at work among various immigrants, including a Lithuanian actress and an expatriate Caribbean family harboring a serial killer. Denis, who occasionally directs for television, next embarked on U.S. Go Home (1994) one part of Tous les Garçons et les Filles de Leur Age, a made-for-TV series depicting the adolescence of nine well-known directors. Denis’ section chronicled 24 hours in the lives of three teenagers trying to lose their virginity in the mid-‘60s. It marked the director’s first collaboration with Grégoire Colin, a young actor whom Denis would also employ in Nénette et Boni and Beau Travail.

The former film, made in 1996, was another coming-of-age drama that centered on the relationship between a lovelorn young man (Colin) and his rebellious, pregnant 15-year-old sister (Alice Houri). It received an enthusiastic international reception and a number of film festival honors, and it was one of the director’s most successful films to date. She followed it three years later with Beau Travail, a military drama based loosely on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. The film garnered a warm reception, with a number of critics commenting on Denis’ ability to capture the gorgeously ascetic physical setting of her story, as well as her success in replacing Melville’s verbosity with a silence that communicated volumes. –AMG

Raymond Depardon is a photographer, a journalist and a filmmaker. He was born into a family of farmers in 1942 in Burgundy and went to Paris in 1958, wishing to be a photographer. He was first taken on as a messenger in an agency and was sent to take photos of an opening-night at the cinema: the movie was none other than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He finally established his own agency, Gamma, together with three reporters, in 1966 ‘not for money but for the freedom’. He suggested to set up a cinema department: ‘we bought an Eclair- camera and tried to make news-films for television in addition to taking news-photograhs… It was then that I learned to hold the camera." When Depardon films people, he is silent. If one has the impression that he always keeps his eyes lowered in the face of the world’s miseries, it is untrue. Raymond Depardon looks as through a lattice and reacts like quicksilver, keeping his deepest, innermost emotion secret, and allows his pictures to speak for themselves. His films are now screened in all international film festivals, from Cannes to Hong Kong. He won a Pulitzer for his photography in Chad. —IMDb

Jacques Deray (February 19, 1929 in Lyon – August 9, 2003 Boulogne-Billancourt) was a French film director and screenwriter. Deray is prominently known for directing many crime and thriller films

Born Jacques Desrayaud in Lyon, France in 1929 to a family of Lyons industrialists. At the age of 12 he went to Paris to study drama under René Simon. Deray played in minor roles on the stage and in films from the age of 19. From 1952, Deray worked as assistant to a number of directors, including Luis Buñuel, Gilles Grangier, Jules Dassin, and Jean Boyer.

Deray’s first film was the drama Le Gigolo released in 1960. Deray was fascinated by American film noir and began to focus on crime stories. Deray’s early work includes Du rififi à Tokyo, an homage to Jules Dassin’s Rififi. Deray’s reputation was established with the 1969 film La Piscine which starred Romy Schneider and Alain Delon. La Piscine was not distributed widely outside France, but the follow-up gave Deray his biggest international hit with Borsalino, a film starring Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo about two small-time gangsters who murder their way to the top in bustling 1930s Marseilles.

Deray became dedicated to the genre that won him favor with audiences and continued to make thrillers, action films, and spy films throughout the rest of his career adapting works of both French and English authors including Georges Simenon, Jean-Patrick Manchette, and Robin Cook. Deray’s last theatrical release was L’Ours en peluche in 1994. Deray worked professionally in television until his death in 2003. On his death, French President Jacques Chirac praised Deray, noting his “innate sense of storytelling and action” and adding that “France has lost one of its most talented filmmakers.” —Wikipedia

Michel Deville (born 13 April 1931) is a French film director and screenwriter.

Deville started his filmmaking career in the late 1950s, paralleling the emergence of the French New Wave directors. He never achieved the level of critical and international recognition of some of his contemporaries such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Chabrol, possibly because of his more conventional filmmaking style. Nevertheless his films, especially his comedies from the 1970s and 1980s, were popular in his native France.

One of Deville’s comedies, La Lectrice (“The Reader”) was probably his biggest success with international audiences. La Lectrice is about a woman (played by Miou-Miou), who finds work reading novels for the blind but gradually finds herself unwittingly attracting a clientele of fetishists who enjoyed being read to. At one time his films were difficult to find in North America but presently(2007) seven of his films are available in DVD in the U.S.

His 1980 film Le Voyage en douce was entered into the 30th Berlin International Film Festival. Five years later, his film Death in a French Garden was entered into the 35th Berlin International Film Festival. —Wikipedia

A remarkably humanistic writer/director whose introspective features often dwell on youthful malaise, French filmmaker Jacques Doillon has an uncanny knack for exploring human nature and the impact of people’s actions on those most dear to them. Perhaps it was his penchant for directing documentary shorts early on that gave Doillon his insight, but by the time he moved into feature territory in the early ‘70s he had suitably mastered the ability to tell a solid and affecting story. In 1979, Doillon was nominated for two César awards for his compelling psychological drama The Hussy, and his 1984 film La Pirate was a Golden Palm nominee at the Cannes Film Festival. By the 1990s, Doillon’s career had gained effective momentum. His 1990 film Le Petit Criminel, which told the involving tale of a troubled adolescent, was nominated for multiple César awards. After his success with film Le Jeune Werther in 1993, the director scored his biggest international hit to date with the 1996 drama Ponette. The tale of a four-year-old girl attempting to overcome the harsh reality of her mother’s sudden and tragic death, Ponette won the hearts of audiences around the world and brought Doillon international acclaim. His youthful 1999 drama Petits Frères, however, didn’t fare quite so well on the international scene, and he faltered somewhat with the 2001 drama Carrement à l’Ouest. Nevertheless, longtime fans eagerly awaited the arrival of Doillon’s 2003 drama Raja, which detailed the romance between a young Moroccan street woman who doesn’t speak French and a cultured French man who doesn’t speak Arabic. —allmovie guide

Martine Franck (April 2, 1938 – August 16, 2012) was a well-known Belgian documentary and portrait photographer, and the second wife of Henri Cartier-Bresson. A member of Magnum Photos for more 32 years, Franck was also co-founder and president of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

Franck was born in Antwerp to a Belgian banker and his British wife, and after her birth the family moved almost immediately to London. A year later, her father joined the British army, and the rest of the family was evacuated to the United States, spending the remainder of the Second World War in Long Island and Arizona.

Franck’s father was an amateur art collector who often took his daughter to visit galleries and museums. Franck was in boarding school from the age of six onwards, and her mother sent her a postcard every day, frequently of paintings. Franck has said that in high school she loved art history, and planned to become a curator.

Franck was often described as elegant, dignified and shy.

In 1966, Franck met Henri Cartier-Bresson, thirty years her senior, when she was photographing Paris fashion shows for the New York Times. In 2010, she told interviewer Charlie Rose "his opening line was, ‘Martine, I want to come and see your contact sheets.’” They married in 1970, had one child, a daughter named Mélanie, and remained together until his death in 2004.

Franck was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, and died in Paris in 2012.

Franck studied art history at the University of Madrid and at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. After struggling through her thesis (on French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the influence of cubism on sculpture) she said she realized she had no particular talent for writing, and turned to photography instead.

In 1963, Franck became an assistant to photographers Eliot Elisofon and Gjon Mili at Time-Life in Paris. By 1996 she was a busy freelance photographer for magazines such as Vogue, Life and Sports Illustrated, and the official photographer of the Théâtre du Soleil (a position she held for 48 years). From 1970 to 1971 she worked in Paris at the photo agency Vu, and in 1972 she co-founded the photo agency Viva.

In 1980, Franck joined the famous Magnum cooperative photo agency as a “nominee”, and in 1983 she became a full member. She was one of a very small number of women to be accepted into the agency. In 1983, she completed a project for the now-defunct French Ministry of Women’s Rights and in 1985 she began collaborating with the non-profit International Federation of Little Brothers of the Poor. In 1993, she first traveled to the Irish island of Tory where she documented the tiny Gaelic community living there. She has also traveled to Tibet and Nepal, and with the help of Marilyn Silverstone photographed the education system of the Tibetan Tulkus monks. In 2003 and 2004 she returned to Paris to document the work of theater director Robert Wilson who was staging La Fontaine’s fables at the Comédie Française.

Nine books of Franck’s photographs have been published, and in 2005 Franck was made a chevalier of the French Légion d’Honneur.

Throughout her career Franck, who was sometimes described as a feminist, was uncomfortable being in the shadow of her famous husband and wanted to be recognized for her own work. In 1970, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London planned to stage Franck’s first solo exhibition: when she saw that the invitations included her husband’s name and said he would be present at the launch, she cancelled the show. Franck once said that she put her husband’s career ahead of her own. In 2003 Franck and her daughter launched the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation to promote Cartier-Bresson’s photojournalism, and in 2004 Franck became its president.

Franck was well known for her documentary-style photographs of important cultural figures such as painter Marc Chagall, philosopher Michel Foucault and poet Seamus Heaney, and of remote or marginalized communities such as Tibetan Buddhist monks, elderly French people, and isolated Gaelic speakers. She cited as influences the portraits of British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the work of American photojournalist Dorothea Lange and American documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In 2010, she told the Times that photography “suits my curiosity about people and human situations.”

She worked outside the studio, using a 35-millimeter Leica camera, and preferring black-and-white film. The British Royal Photographic Society has described her work as “firmly rooted in the tradition of French humanist documentary photography.”—Wikipedia

Bernard Giraudeau (18 June 1947 – 17 July 2010) was a French actor, film director, scriptwriter, producer and writer. Giraudeau was born in La Rochelle, Charente-Maritime. In 1963 he enlisted in the French navy as a trainee engineer, qualifying as the first in his class a year later. He served on the helicopter carrier Jeanne d’Arc in 1964–1965 and 1965–1966, and subsequently on the frigate Duquesne and the aircraft carrier Clemenceau before leaving the navy to try his luck as an actor.

He was married to actress and author Anny Duperey, with whom he had two children; one of them, Sara Giraudeau, has achieved success as an actress.

Giraudeau first appeared on film in Deux hommes dans la ville (1973), and his first film as director was in 1987, though he continued to work as an actor. As a writer, wrote the text of books of photography as well as publishing children’s stories (Contes d’Humahuaca, 2002) and several novels. He was also the reader on the French audio books of the Harry Potter series.

In 2000 he suffered a cancer which led to the removal of his left kidney, with a subsequent metastasis in 2005 affecting his lungs. He said that the cancer led him to re-evaluate his life and understand himself better. He devoted some of his time to the support of cancer victims through the Institut Curie and the Institut Gustave-Roussy in Paris. He died at 07:00 on 17 July 2010 in a Paris hospital, finally losing his battle against cancer. —wikipedia

The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)

Robert Kramer was born in New York in 1940. He studied philosophy and Western European History at Swarthmore College and Stanford University.

In the 1960’s he made his mark as the great filmmaker of the American radical left whose first films painted a portrait of a generation of militants marked by their opposition to the war in Vietnam (In the country, The Edge, and Ice). He was the founder and prime mover of the Newsreel movement. He has travelled to Latin America, North Vietnam in the middle of the war (People’s war), then in Portugal after the April Revolution (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, and Gestos e fragmentos), and in post-independance Angola. Once the most directly political era was over and was captured and represented by Kramer in all its ambiguities and contradictions, he has never stopped reflecting in his films on the “heart of darkness” of the West – that dominating madness that he had shown in Le manteau as a “line that goes through time”.

Soon recognized as a filmmaker of the first magnitude in America by Jonas Mekas and in Europe by “new cinema” circles, Kramer has circulated from the beginning in a realm of discovery as far away from Hollywood as it is from underground and experimental film. In his thirty years of total independence, he has made film his instrument for discovery and used it to reflect on personal and collective experience. His films are at the same time secretly autobiographical and flagrantly open to the world. By mixing document and fiction (a distinction that no longer really makes any sense being there), he invented an artistic form that gets more and more original, malleable, and free and is marked by a polyphonic crossing of voices and characters (more than fifty in Milestones) and by the immediate presence of the filmmaker as witness or conversation partner.

“The man with the movie camera”, the camera person for many of his film, Kramer is, in turn, the first “character” of his works. This is the reason why – in addition to the larger or even monumental films – the “minor” films are important – the videos, the home movies, the video letters, the works done on commission and each time reinvented, as well as the most radical borderline experiences (Notre Nazi, Berlin 10/90, and Ghosts of Electricity). Here we are dealing with a continual and inextricable collusion between art and life, a way of “living through” his own films to the hilt. We are dealing with the acknowledgement that “one day or the other all these films that I’m making will make up a single, long film, a “story” that is always developing”. The practice of using the camera as an extension of his own body and his own mind reaches a strong conclusion in his extraordinary reflection on the mutation of cinema and the world made in Ghosts of Electricity, his latest film.

The great fascination of his personality is also the product of a continuous movement that ignores national boundaries and characterizes his life and his cinema, both perennially in movement. Kramer is the most nomadic American filmmaker, the filmmaker of the voyage and of the “starting place”. He was discovered in Europe and became, in turn, a “European” director. He is more in transit than in exile in Paris. Even here in Europe, he moved to seek the edges of the continent (Walk the Walk).

In his films he has expressed as much the physical energy of the “walker” with the camera on his shoulders as he has expressed the lucid melancholy of the man without a country who has to return to his own territory, to his own “home” sooner or later. In fact, it is exactly Kramer who can today be acknowledged as one of the American filmmakers par excellence of the most recent decades – the one who more than any others has restored his country’s historical and geographical sense, the epic breath and pulsation of the continent, the dissolving ties of the community and the utopia of a new “citizenship”. This happens in those two grandiose crossings of America that are separated by fifteen years, Milestones and Route One USA, the two strongholds of Kramer’s works around which so many other films are placed as they engage in a sort of uninterrupted dialogue with America. – windwalk.net

French filmmaker Patrice Leconte is as notable for his refusal to be easily categorized as he is for his long and productive career. Since making his major directorial debut in 1975 with Les Vécés Étaient Fermés de L’Intérieur, Leconte has established himself as one of France’s most respected directors, at ease tackling subjects ranging from mental illness to sexuality to canny deconstructions of wit and society. He received particular acclaim for his 1996 film Ridicule, winning the admiration of an international audience while furthering his reputation as one of the French cinema’s most treasured figures.

A native Parisian, Leconte was born on November 12, 1947. He decided to be a filmmaker at a very young age, and went on to attend France’s most prestigious film school, I.D.H.E.C. During his education, constant visits to the Paris Cinémathèque aided in his understanding of cinematography culture. After graduating from I.D.H.E.C. in 1969, Leconte went against the cinematic grain, becoming a cartoonist for the French magazine Pilote. He made his living from cartooning until 1975, all the while shooting comic-fantasy shorts. The brand of humor he developed while making these shorts would later become the trademark of his most personal comedies.

In 1975, Leconte collaborated with Pilote colleague Marcel Gotlib to write Les Vécés Étaient Fermés de L’Intérieur (The Toilets Were Locked From the Inside). His first major directorial effort, the film was inspired by films like The Mystery of the Yellow Room and the French whodunits of the 1950s. Unfortunately, despite the presence of the well-known Jean Rochefort (with whom Leconte was to collaborate on a number of projects), the film flopped, its bizarre and sometimes surreal brand of comedy failing to find favor with the French public.

However, Leconte found greater success with his next feature, Les Bronzés (or French Fried Vacation). The 1978 film was the result of his involvement with the famed theater company, Le Splendid, where he wrote comedy and worked with actors like Michel Blanc, Josiane Balasko, and Thierry Lhermitte (who would all go on to star in his films). A blissful satire of Club Med holidays, the film, which featured Serge Gainsbourg’s singing “Sea, Sex and Sun,” proved to be enormously popular; a sequel featuring the same Splendid actors duly followed with the 1979 Les Bronzés Font du Ski (The Bronzés Go Skiing).

Leconte’s next project, an adaptation of the play Viens Chez Moi, J’habite Chez Une Copine (Come to My Place, I’m Staying at My Girlfriend’s), marked the beginning of his long collaboration with Michel Blanc, who wrote and starred in the film. The comedy gave Leconte another smash hit; his next two comedies, the 1981 Ma Femme S’Appelle Reviens (My Wife’s Name is “Come Back”) and 1983’s Circulez Y’a Rien a Voir (Move Along, There’s Nothing to See) — both of which starred Blanc — were not as successful, although they did produce strong ticket sales.

Now established as a director of a certain kind of comedy, Leconte felt the urge to shift gears. So he directed an action comedy, 1985’s Les Specialistes. Although the film was not Leconte’s most impressive, it proved to be his biggest hit, selling more than four million tickets. Its commercial success freed Leconte to do the type of film he had long wanted to do, a road movie about two quarreling friends. The result, 1987’s Tandem, was a study of male friendship (a popular theme in Leconte’s films) whose comedic overtones were shadowed by an increasingly nightmarish quality; the madness exhibited by one of the film’s protagonists was something that Leconte would explore time and again in his future films.
His next two films, in fact, proved to be compelling explorations of different types of madness, whether this madness assumed the form of murder and obsession or was irrevocably linked to sexual desire. The first of these films, 1989’s Monsieur Hire, was a complex examination of the relationship between its titular protagonist (played by Michel Blanc) and the attractive young neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire) he watches night after night. Leconte used the backdrop of a murder as a context for his examination and the result was a dark study in obsession, desire, and deviant sexuality. It was widely hailed by the critics and was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Leconte’s subsequent effort, Le Mari de la Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser’s Husband) (1990), was also a critical success. The story of a man, Jean Rochefort, whose childhood dreams are fulfilled when he marries hairdresser Anna Galiena, it was, like Monsieur Hire, another study of the link between desire and mental illness, albeit one with a lighter tone.

Leconte’s next major project was 1993’s Tango, a black comedy about a man who thinks life would be a lot happier if he could just off his wife. Like the director’s previous films, it addressed themes of madness, sexuality, and male bonding, and featured jarring performances from Thierry Lhermitte, Richard Bohringer, and Philippe Noiret. The film was a considerable success, unlike Leconte’s next two major features, Le Parfum d’Yvonne (1994) and Les Grands Ducs (1996). The relative critical and commercial disappointments of these films, however, were to be more than made up for by his 1996 Ridicule, which was filmed while Les Grands Ducs was being edited.

A comedic dissection of the symbiotic relationship between power and social appearances, Ridicule takes place in the 18th century court of Versailles. However, the social games and acerbic verbal wars it portrays made more than one observer note it was similar in content to a Western, where, as Jean Rochefort remarked, “witticisms have replaced six-shooters.” The film was tremendously popular, chosen as the opening film at the 1996 Cannes Festival. It went on to win four Césars, including Best Film and Best Director.

Leconte then switched gears again, helming 1 Chance sur 2 (Half a Chance) (1998), a humorous action film starring Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Vanessa Paradis. In 1999, he worked with Paradis again in La fille sur le Pont (The Girl on the Bridge) (1999), which also starred Daniel Auteuil. Another road movie/love story/look at mental imbalance, the film was a sensual, light-hearted affair, demonstrating again that Leconte was a director who knew his element, regardless of the period, style, or content of the films he made. —allmovie guide

French leading man Michel Piccoli spent most of his time from 1945 through 1955 on the French stage, primarily with Theatre Babylone and the Reynauld-Barrault Company. He enjoyed nominal film stardom from 1955 onward, though it was not until 1961’s Le Doulos that he truly became “box office,” specializing in worldly, cynical roles. Like Hollywood’s Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Gary Cooper, Piccoli was possessed of that rare gift of being able to adapt himself to virtually any kind of material without altering his essential screen persona. And like those aforementioned actors, Piccoli’s talents suited the prerequisites of a wide variety of directors: not many contemporary performers can claim to have worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras, Luis Bunuel, and Louis Malle. Piccoli’s acting awards include a Cannes Festival prize for 1979’s Salto nel Vuoto and a 1982 Berlin Festival honor for Une Etrange Affaire. In 1991, Piccoli once again won international acclaim for his portrayal of an artist suffering from a creative block in La belle noiseuse. He subseqently continued to do steady work in pictures of varying quality, one highlight being Raul Ruiz’s 1997 Généalogies d’une Crime, which cast Piccoli as a doctor caught up in a murder mystery. In 1976, Piccoli recorded his remarkable career on the page when he co-wrote a semi-autobiography, Dialogue Egoistes. —allmovie guide

While a seminal figure of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais was not, like so many of his contemporaries, an alumnus of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema. In fact, he existed well outside of the sphere of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette, with a dedication to formalism, modernist concerns, and social and political issues not found in the work of his fellow innovators. Focusing repeatedly on themes of time and memory, Resnais drew from the well of serious literature to offer a singular philosophical and artistic vantage point, employing enigmatic narrative structures, lush cinematography, and lyrical editing patterns to create some of the most provocative and controversial work of the period. Born June 3, 1922, in Vannes, France, Resnais began making his first 8 mm films at the age of 14. In 1943 he enrolled at the newly formed Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographie, leaving the following year after declaring his studies too theoretical. He then spent the mid-‘40s working primarily as an actor. Resnais returned to filmmaking in 1945, helming the surrealist 16 mm short comedy Schema d’une Identification.

Between 1964 and 1967, Resnais directed a string of 16 mm silent films, known collectively as the “visite” series, profiling a number of noted artists, among them Lucien Coutard, Felix Labisse, Hans Hartung, Cesar Domela, and Oscar Dominguez. He also helmed La Bague, a mime-drama starring Marcel Marceau, and Journee Naturelle, a study of artist Max Ernst. The 1948 piece Van Gogh proved so successful in its original 16 mm form that it was subsequently remade in 35 mm, winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Academy Award. Further art films followed, including 1950’s Gauguin, Guernica (a study of the famed Picasso masterwork co-directed by Robert Hessens), and Les Statues Meurent Aussi (a politically charged essay on native art among France’s African colonies co-directed by the great Chris Marker). The early half of the 1950s was largely a fallow period for Resnais. His film work was limited to only two editing projects, Paul Paviot’s 1952 effort Saint-Tropez, Devoirs de Vacances and Agnes Varda’s 1955 work La Pointe Courte. Finally returning to the field of short films in 1955, he began collaborating with noted literary figures, a trend which continued throughout his career. The first such partnership was with writer Jean Cayrol, with whom Resnais teamed for his 1955 breakthrough Nuit et Brouillard, a brilliant, powerful account of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps. Again, however, a follow-up was slow in forthcoming, as he next edited Nicole Vedres’ Aux Frontieres de l’Homme. The 1956 Toute la Memoire du Monde, a short about the Biblioteque Nationale, was next, and in 1958 Resnais worked with writer Raymond Queneau on Le Chant du Styrene, a commissioned work about the manufacturing of polystyrene.

However, the true follow-up to Nuit et Brouillard was 1959’s landmark feature Hiroshima Mon Amour. Written by novelist Marguerite Duras and photographed by Sacha Vierny, it brilliantly fused the past with the present and poetic imagery with stark documentary footage to arrive at an alchemical kind of filmmaking without obvious precedent. The picture launched Resnais to the front lines of the New Wave, alongside Godard and Truffaut, and was a major critical and commercial success the world over. In 1961, he returned with L’Année Derniere a Marienbad, another unqualified masterpiece even more radically experimental than its predecessor. Penned by Alain Robbe-Grillet, it was less a film than a beautifully composed riddle, one which pushed the formal boundaries of filmmaking while proving to be a surprising commercial success as well. With 1963’s Muriel ou le Temps d’un Retour, Resnais left behind the stylistic flourishes of his previous work, focusing instead on a more subtle and emotional kind of storytelling. La Guerre est Finie followed in 1966 and marked his return to experimental narratives by means of a series of foreboding flash-forwards, a technique Resnais described as the “future conditional” tense of filmmaking. When 1969’s Je t’aime, Je t’aime proved a financial disaster, he disappeared from sight for half a decade, resurfacing only in 1974 with Stavisky. Resnais next made 1977’s Providence, his first English-language feature. Upon returning to France, he helmed 1980’s playful Mon Oncle d’Amerique, the first unqualified hit of his career. La Vie Est un Roman followed in 1982, with Amour à Mort on its heels in 1984. In 1986, Resnais filmed the ambitious Mélo, an adaptation of a 1929 melodrama by a forgotten playwright named Henry Bernstein. The 1989 I Want to Go Home closed out the decade, and in 1993 he won a number of French Cesar awards for the two-part, five-hour Smoking/No Smoking, based on Alan Aykbourn’s stage cycle Intimate Exchanges. The director’s tribute to the legendary TV writer Dennis Potter, On Connaît la Chanson, followed in 1997.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:108005~T1)

Born in 1947 in Paris to stage director Jean-Marie Serreau and writer Genevieve Serreau, Coline grew up as a young girl surrounded by artists.

After high school, she decided to follow her parents’ lead and embraced an artistic life and career. While studying literature and classic and modern dance, she joined the Conservatoire de Musique and began taking trapeze lessons at Annie Fratellini’s Circus School. On her way to becoming an accomplished artist, she set her sight on drama and began to study with Andreas Voutsinas (also the teacher of Jean Reno). After l’Ecole de la rue Blanche, she joined the Comédie-Française", appearing for the first time on stage in 1970. She would later appear on stage in Café de la Gare by the side of Romain Bouteille, Coluche and Patrick Dewaere.

After revealing her talent in a wide range of productions, including productions in Cafés Theatres and repertoire classics (especially Shakespeare’s Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It in the Avignon Drama Festival in 1976) she started writing and finished her first screenplay in 1973 (On s’est trompé d’histoire d’amour based on the book by Jean-Louis Bertucelli). Two years later, she directed her first short for television – Le rende-vous, which was followed by the documentary Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent. Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent screened in competition at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival and her reputation as a feminist artist began to take shape. That same year, she directed her first fiction feature, Pourquoi pas! (Why not?). In 1979, she focused on TV (Grand-mére de l’Islam) and a live performance of Sophocle’s Oedipe Roi for the RAI.

After the unnoticed Qu’est-ce qu’on attend pour être heureux?, in 1982, she encounterd worldwide success with Trois hommes et un couffin (1985) in which three men are confronted with girl power.

In 1989, she embraced another struggle: interracial tolerance through the love story of a CEO and a black cleaning lady in Romuald et Juliette. This was followed by, La crise, (and success once again) thanks to its harsh, yet humorous depiction of a generation confronted with unemployment, divorce and family crisis.

In her following movie, La belle verte, she directed herself playing the part of an extraterrestrial that discovers a plant ravaged by the excess waste left by the consumption of society. While audiences failed to show much interest in this environmental tale, Coline Serreau met success again five years later with Chaos. Nominated in six different categories at the 2001 César Awards, the ferocious Chaos is a story denouncing society’s lack of courage. —Theatre School at DePaul University