Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.
Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.
The Catholic Jean-Louis runs into an old friend, the Marxist Vidal, in Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas. Vidal introduces Jean-Louis to the modestly libertine, recently divorced Maud and the three engage in conversation on religion, atheism, love, morality and Blaise Pascal's life and writings on philosophy, faith and mathematics. Jean-Louis ends up spending a night at Maud's. Jean-Louis' Catholic views on marriage, fidelity and obligation make his situation a dilemma, as he has already, at the very beginning of the film, proclaimed his love for a young woman whom, however, he has never yet spoken to.
"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle. Julie, and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Mlle. Julie and the other head of the school, Mlle. Cara, in its final months.
Toute la mémoire du monde is a documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being.
The subject of the film was the Hauka movement. The Hauka movement consisted of mimicry and dancing to become possessed by French Colonial administrators. The participants performed the same elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation.
A young woman tries to go to Paris, but her garden and the whole village is flooded with water.
Sagamore Noonan vit reclu dans une ferme de l'Alabama où il distille de la gnôle au temps de la prohibition. Il reçoit la visite de son frère Doc Noonan et de son fils Billy. Une jeune strip-teaseuse et son compagnon gangster viennent troubler leur tranquillité.
This short features a man who is visited by his ex-lover. The moment she arrives, the man starts his constant barrage of speech; the woman doesn't say much. She just mocks the man and pretends she isn't listening. She pulls faces at him and larks about; while the man is trying his best to get her back in his life, then in the next sentence he says he hates her.
Michel Jussieu, a film producer, returns one morning to the cabaret where he forgot his sweater. He discovers the corpse of an extreme right-wing journalist, but immediately he is knocked out. He wakes up in the police station ...
A pickup artist/womanizer named Patrick inadvertently pursues two young women who happen to be roommates.
Roger Blanchard has a busy life. On the family side, he is married and has two children, aged ten and fifteen. On the work side, he holds an important position at the Ministry of Culture. To bolster his social status, he has a mistress to liven up his Saturdays. But nothing is going right. His wife Marion exasperates him, his children irritate him, his job gives him no real satisfaction, his mistress neglects him and his superior, Monsieur Gambaud, gets on his nerves. But when he meets a beautiful young secretary, his life and habits are turned upside down: Blanchard amuses him and gets his way. In revenge, Gambaud warns Blanchard's wife.
A photoshoot on the roofs and in the streets of Paris, under the astonished eyes of the inhabitants.
An African travels to Paris to learn about the construction of tall buildings, but is soon taken up with the oddities of French life.
Serge follows Hélène in the crowded streets of Paris and manages to seduce her. Werther takes Sophie to her dentist, Raoul, who tries to seduce her too.
Annie is a middle-age wife, still sexy and pampered by her husband, Phillippe, who is the owner and general manager of a dynamic company. Under the deluge of sexy Swedish movies, sexy advertising on the streets, sexy intimate clothing in ladies' shops, and even talks about sex and marital infidelity with her mother and female friends, Annie starts feeling left aside by her husband, and trying to attract in a number of ways - and failing. It's not the all-purpose secretary at the office that is keeping him late, it's a tax expert that, asking the most innocent questions, is finding out how Philippe can manage a company without profits, and still manage a home, may be two... with high quality levels.
Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, "Moi, un noir" marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction". The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire for work.
A young woman lives sadly in a small garrison town with a soldier. Little by little, won over by boredom, sadness, total inaction, she develops a relationship with plants and starts talking to plants.
A chronicle of the evolution of the Cuban Revolution, ending with the Bay of Pigs incident and including two interviews with Fidel Castro.
The film shows the members of a voluntary association of young people from Upper Volta who work in Abidjan, Ivory Coast - first at their work, then at a reunion that ends on a dance floor in Treichville. The young people who come to work in Abidjan often form spontaneous associations for mutual help and entertainment, which are called "Goumbés" in Ivory Coast, after the name of a square drum that serves as the rhythmic base to their dance. During a general meeting, the secretary of the association reads the statutes, and it is these statutes that serve as both the backdrop and the commentary of the film.
