Maurice Pialat

A bored wife leaves her husband for an unemployed, petty criminal.

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A slice of life of a group of young working class friends in a Northern French village coming to the end of their school years and embarking upon adult life. The film follows the choices and decisions made for their futures.

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Monique is dying of cancer, lying in bed in the apartment above the store her family owns. Her philandering husband carries on with life, her son remains aloof, and her daughter-in-law wonders if she is witnessing her own decline. They all struggle to express, or feel, their love for one another.

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Jean, a married 40-year-old filmmaker, and his young working class lover, Catherine, engage in a circular series of spectacular blow-ups and tentative reunions, their mutual desire a fire that burns them again and again.

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During World War One, in a small rural French village far away from the front, a gamekeeper and his wife take in children displaced by the war.

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Handed over to foster care by his mother—who's unwilling to give up permanent custody—the now-adolescent François understands that nothing in life is permanent, and his increasingly erratic actions reflect this knowledge.

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A short 6-minute essay-documentary by Maurice Pialat on the region in which much of the action of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble unfolds.

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A report celebrating Lyon, a young and vibrant city that has managed to preserve the vestiges of its ancient past.

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In Brittany, facing the strongest tides in Europe, the world's first tidal power plant is being built. A documentary also known as The Rance Tidal Power Plant.

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Maurice Pialat films the Latin Quarter of Paris in the early 1960s.

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A quick look at Auvers-sur-Oise, the place where Vincent Van Gogh spent the final months of his life and where he and his brother were both buried. Produced as part of the "Chroniques de France" TV series.

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In Noirmoutier, Agnès Varda shoots her eighth film, Les Créatures, starring Catherine Deneuve, under the watchful eye of Maurice Pialat.

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The life of the world's most famous avenue, day and night, as told by Maurice Pialat and Georges de Caunes.

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Pialat roams Pigalle, a two-faced neighborhood frequented at night by cabaret patrons and during the day by local residents.

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Images of Parisian department stores serve as a backdrop for commentary portraying the coquettish Parisian woman.

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Pehlivan focuses on a three-day wrestling competition, an ancient tradition that dates back over a thousand years to the time of the Ottoman Empire, originating in the games the soldiers would play to entertain themselves in between battles. Maybe that's why there's more than a hint of homoeroticism in the way the wrestlers oil themselves up with grease, making sure to cover every inch of their bodies so that their opponents will be unable to get a grip. Pialat's closeups emphasize the men's muscular bodies jammed together and sliding off one another, posed in intimate, twisted arrangements, struggling desperately for a grip on each other's bodies. Arms are jammed down pants, one of the only places there's some potential for a handhold, and the whole thing is very suggestive and sensual, a form of intimate male contact that's sanctioned as a show of strength and masculinity.

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Short doc by Maurice Pialat. The first film in the series set at Turkey, Bosphore, is also the only one that was shot in color.

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Byzance uses a text by Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453. Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. Byzance is one of Pialat’s six Turkish shorts.

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All of Pialat's Turkish films are uniquely interested in the country — especially Istanbul — as it was, not just as it is at the precise moment that Pialat is filming it. History informs these films in a big way, with the voiceover narration (which incorporates excerpts from various authors) introducing tension between the images of the modern-day city and the descriptions of incidents from its long and rich history. Istanbul is probably the most conventional documentary of Pialat's Turkish series, providing a general profile of the titular city, its different neighborhoods, and the different cultures and ways of living that coexist within its sprawling borders. As the other films in the series also suggest, Pialat sees Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, as a junction point between Europe and the East, between the old and the new, between history and modernity.

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Maître Galip is the most poetic and powerful of Pialat's Turkish Chronicles, using the poems of Nazim Hikmet to accompany a series of evocative images of ordinary working class people in Istanbul. This was the film that Pialat himself claimed was the most complete realization of what he was aiming for with his Turkish documentaries. It's not difficult to see why this was his favorite: here he abandons the historical commentary and documentary observation of the other shorts in favor of an emotional emphasis on the lives of the poor and the unemployed.

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La Corne d'or is mostly concerned with religious ritual, examining the mosque (and former cathedral) discussed in Byzance. As a contrast against Istanbul's status as a center of historical religious conflict, Pialat — drawing here on texts by the French poet Gérard de Nerval — also describes the city as a place of strange ethnic and religious harmony, with representatives of various cultures and religions living in close contact. He emphasizes the city's hybrid culture, its blend of Southern European and Arab influences, reflected in both its people and its very construction.

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During a desultory night on the town, two men talk about their experiences with women. One of them disparages his ex-wife, while the other is enamored of the prostitute he was with earlier in the evening. Without realizing it, both men are talking about Janine.

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An essay film critiquing post-war France's urban developments – Pialat states that modernity and suburban convenience have limited Parisian freedom and widened class gaps.

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Impressive sound design, non-linear editing, great ‘expressionistic’ locations and b&w cinematography, this is an experimental piece for Pialat, a psychological/gothic thriller of sorts...

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Ruby Alcow becomes assistant manager of a factory, twenty years after failing his baccalaureate five times, engaging in absurdist shenanigans with his coworkers. Pialat's early short film made for Olivetti's end-of-year party, where the filmmaker was then a sales representative; an homage to silent era slapstick comedy.

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A Catholic holiday in a rural village in Auzelles, the filmmaker's native region in the Massif Central.

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Pialat's first film was the short Isabelle aux Dombes, shot in 1951 when the director was 26 years old. The film is an entirely silent montage of documentary footage, ragged experimental techniques — mainly some negative-image inserts — and symbolic psychodrama that's surprisingly not too different from the work that Stan Brakhage would begin making just a year or two later. Images of death proliferate throughout the film, and what started as a loose documentary soon becomes an eerie psuedo-horror piece that's obsessed with death and decay.

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TV series directed by Varda in which she gives thoughts to her favorite images and why she is drawn to them (in short one minute segments per image)

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Reel 24 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

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Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

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In a deliberately erratic and disjointed fashion, this film follows the adventures of Bernard (Jean-Pierre Leaud). A young man from the provinces, he makes his pilgrimage to Paris and seeks adventure while living on a barge.

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Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after a year of high school, goes to live with his mother in the south of France; a harsher environment which rapidly changes his perception of friends, work, and women.

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Marcello Mastroianni, Isabelle Adjani, Alain Delon, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen... the biggest stars in cinema were welcomed by Christian Defaye on his show Spécial cinéma. Between intimate confessions from actors and immersion in the world of the greatest filmmakers, Christian Defaye took viewers on a journey into the fascinating world of cinema for nearly thirty years.

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During World War One, in a small rural French village far away from the front, a gamekeeper and his wife take in children displaced by the war.

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When his young son is killed in a hit and run accident, Charles Thenier resolves to hunt down and murder the killer. By chance, Thenier makes the acquaintance of an actress, Helène Lanson, who was in the car at the time of the accident. He then meets Helène’s brother-in-law, Paul Decourt, a truly horrible individual.

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Documentary about the making of Maurice Pialat's 1969 film "L'Enfance nue" (Naked Childhood).

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Filmed in Paris in 1964, this documentary short follows two fifteen-year-old girls from the city’s 16th arrondissement as they move through leisure, conversation, and social encounters. The film records their views on adulthood, relationships, and the future, capturing a moment of transition between adolescence and adult life.

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Ruby Alcow becomes assistant manager of a factory, twenty years after failing his baccalaureate five times, engaging in absurdist shenanigans with his coworkers. Pialat's early short film made for Olivetti's end-of-year party, where the filmmaker was then a sales representative; an homage to silent era slapstick comedy.

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A bored wife leaves her husband for an unemployed, petty criminal.

Open details →

A slice of life of a group of young working class friends in a Northern French village coming to the end of their school years and embarking upon adult life. The film follows the choices and decisions made for their futures.

Open details →

Monique is dying of cancer, lying in bed in the apartment above the store her family owns. Her philandering husband carries on with life, her son remains aloof, and her daughter-in-law wonders if she is witnessing her own decline. They all struggle to express, or feel, their love for one another.

Open details →

Jean, a married 40-year-old filmmaker, and his young working class lover, Catherine, engage in a circular series of spectacular blow-ups and tentative reunions, their mutual desire a fire that burns them again and again.

Open details →

During World War One, in a small rural French village far away from the front, a gamekeeper and his wife take in children displaced by the war.

Open details →

Handed over to foster care by his mother—who's unwilling to give up permanent custody—the now-adolescent François understands that nothing in life is permanent, and his increasingly erratic actions reflect this knowledge.

Open details →

A short 6-minute essay-documentary by Maurice Pialat on the region in which much of the action of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble unfolds.

Open details →

Pehlivan focuses on a three-day wrestling competition, an ancient tradition that dates back over a thousand years to the time of the Ottoman Empire, originating in the games the soldiers would play to entertain themselves in between battles. Maybe that's why there's more than a hint of homoeroticism in the way the wrestlers oil themselves up with grease, making sure to cover every inch of their bodies so that their opponents will be unable to get a grip. Pialat's closeups emphasize the men's muscular bodies jammed together and sliding off one another, posed in intimate, twisted arrangements, struggling desperately for a grip on each other's bodies. Arms are jammed down pants, one of the only places there's some potential for a handhold, and the whole thing is very suggestive and sensual, a form of intimate male contact that's sanctioned as a show of strength and masculinity.

Open details →

Impressive sound design, non-linear editing, great ‘expressionistic’ locations and b&w cinematography, this is an experimental piece for Pialat, a psychological/gothic thriller of sorts...

Open details →

Ruby Alcow becomes assistant manager of a factory, twenty years after failing his baccalaureate five times, engaging in absurdist shenanigans with his coworkers. Pialat's early short film made for Olivetti's end-of-year party, where the filmmaker was then a sales representative; an homage to silent era slapstick comedy.

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