Paul Valéry

September 3rd, 1939. Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany, only two days after the Wehrmacht invades Poland. This day, the sad date when the fate of the world changed forever, the Phoney War began: eight months of uncertainty, preparations, evacuations and skirmishes.

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Women (many of them lesbian) artists, writers, photographers, designers, and adventurers settled in Paris between the wars. They embraced France, some developed an ex-pat culture, and most cherished a way of life quite different than the one left behind.

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Nobel-prize-winning author, social justice crusader, anti-colonialist, adventure traveler, musician, and one-time Communist: André Gide was a larger-than-life character who dominated French letters from the turn of the 20th century to his death in 1951. Directed by Marc Allégret, with whom Gide traveled extensively in French Equatorial Africa, the film was made in the year leading up to the writer’s death.

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Nicole Védrès' chronicle of Paris from 1900 to 1914 is brought to life through the use of original material, all authentic, secured from more then 700 films belonging to public and private collections. A few of the celebrities of the time shown are Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt, and Maurice Chevalier.

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A beach on the shores of the Mediterranean, crushed by the sun, under an implacable blue sky, isolated on a rock like Sisyphus rolling away his bitterness, a man is on the verge of suicide. While ruminating on his fixed idea, he is disturbed by an intruder, a doctor on vacation like him. The man with a fixed idea (Pierre Arditi) declares "I felt in a state of inhumanity", the doctor (Bernard Murat) decked out in all the holidaymaker's accessories: a landing net, an easel and a colored box, comes to invade the morbid loneliness. The importunate debonair begins a conversation that will turn into a philosophical joust where we approach science, Einstein, politics, and the verb. THE MATERIALIST AND THE PHILOSOPHER scrap at speckled foils with the sharpest and most divinely French spirit. Conversation is a balm, an intellectual bandage. The good doctor is a good practitioner and a brave man!

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