Lucien Bataille

Directed by Henri Fescourt.

The short by Jean Durand begins with his frequent character, Zigoto (Lucien Bataille) reading a boring book. So, instead he goes on an outing in his new car with his friends. The captioning says it's a new '101 horsepower car'--this, during an age when the horsepower of cars actually was between 4-30 horsepower! So, in other words, it's supposed to be a super-fast car.

The Bread Peddler is a 1923 French silent drama film directed by René Le Somptier and starring Suzanne Desprès, Gabriel Signoret and Geneviève Félix. It is based on Xavier de Montépin's novel of the same title.

An early Gaumont short

A French comedy short with Zigoto.

Obsessed with a general's wife, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.

A woman enters a nightclub and slowly begins to open herself up.

An eight part ciné-novel (episodic film) set during the French Revolution, telling the story of the Dauphin's childhood in Versailles, his life at the Conciergerie during the Revolution, and his untimely death.

After serving in the trenches of World War I, Jean Diaz recoils with such horror that he renounces love and personal pleasure to immerse himself in scientific research, seeking a machine to prevent war. He thinks he has succeeded, but the government subverts his discovery, and Europe slides with seeming inevitability toward World War II. In desperation, Diaz summons the ghosts of the war dead from the graves and fields of France to give silent, accusing protest.

When the train workers go on strike, Zigoto terrorizes the town in a hijacked locomotive.

During the stagecoach trip of a frightened group of inhabitants of Rouen, Elisabeth Rousset, known as "Boule de Suif", renders these people a signal service, but comes up against their stupidity and their sufficiency. A little later, Boule de Suif assassinates the formidable Prussian lieutenant whom his friends had nicknamed Fifi and who shamelessly displayed his taste for pillage and his sadistic tendencies.

A mine owner discovers a vein of gold but unfortunately dies. His wife doesn't want to sell the mine and so the forman decides to lock her up in a cottage with a dangerous and hungry leopard.

The story is about a superstitious village, where the mayor has sold a tower to an unknown, who is soon suspected of being the devil.

Just as the streets to hell, to hear it from the travelers, are paved with good intentions, the illustrious police officer Zigoto's brain is full of the most commendable initiatives. While passing before a door, he sees a piece of rope underneath and thinks it his duty to bend down and pick it up. But he's amazed to see that the more he pulls, the longer the cord becomes: "For a thousand prefects - that was his favorite exclamation - do they take me for a pulley?" Upon the arrival of two officers, the men open the door, when all of a sudden a black, horned mass crashes into them.

The film begins with the Count giving an actress a necklace. However, after her performance, the valuable necklace is missing and so the actress goes to hire some detectives to find it. I loved the strange detective agency in the film. The place had a sliding door, chains on the wall and detectives seem to magically appear out of the floor. It was very kooky but fun.

Protéa is the last film directed by Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, one of the early film pioneers in France. The hero of this film is a female spy, an acrobatic Mata-Hari, played by his favorite actress, Josette Andriot, who wore a characteristic costume of a close-fitting black jersey, two years before Musidora achieved cult status with her similar appearance as Irma Vep. This final masterpiece reflects Jasset's popular style: rhythmic action, fantastic realism, rich visuals, an anarchistic philosophy, a disdain for psychology, and an attention to lighting that earned him the nickname “the Rembrandt of the cinema". Although Jasset died shortly after completion, the film had considerable success and Andriot went on to make four more films in the series with other directors.

Once Madame Ducordon discovers the joys of a new fashionable dance, she starts performing it wherever she happens to be.