Abel Gance

Napoléon Bonaparte

A second version of Gance's Napoléon, with sound.

Lucrezia Borgia

French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families.

The Woman Thief

The woman thief evades a young lady who is onto his game, but then tries his wiles elsewhere on a married woman by attempting to compromise and ruin the husband she is happy with.

Austerlitz

Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself emperor and fights the English, Austrians and Russians in 1802.

The Torture of Silence

A doctor, specialist in pediatrics, has no time for his wife Marthe. She seeks solace in the arms of his brother. Unable to keep up the charade, Marthe attempts to shoot herself, but it is her lover who is mortally wounded.

The Right to Life

A young girl marries a financier knowing he has only a short time to live, so she can inherit his money.Her lover, who has made a fortune away in America, returns and wants to hasten the financier's death.

Four Flights to Love

In pre-World Ward I in Paris, a budding artist, Pierre LeBlanc, falls in love and marries Janine, a dressmaker's assistant. Pierre has a flair for designing clothes, and he and his bride live in a blissful paradise, until the war breaks out and he becomes a soldier. Janine dies in childbirth and, no longer desiring to live, Pierre volunteers for a dangerous patrol behind German lines. While recuperating in the hospital from a wound he received on the mission, Pierre spends his time drawing sketches of dresses. He becomes rich and famous after the war. Years later, after devoting himself to his daughter, Pierre seeks a marriage with a girl no older than his daughter. A conflict develops and to ensure his daughter's happiness, Pierre sacrifices his own plans.

Queen Margot

Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Médicis, celebrates her wedding with Henri de Navarre. Officially, it's a rapprochement between the League and the Huguenots. In fact, it was an opportunity to bring all the Huguenots to Paris and kill them all at once. King Charles IX fails in his attempt on Coligny's life. Queen Margot tries to save her husband from the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre by preventing the annulment of his marriage, forcing Henri to share her bed. Two knights from opposing camps are wounded and, saved în extremis, are hidden together by the queen and her cousin. Margot falls in love with one of them, but has to run to warn her husband of a new attack...

Napoléon Bonaparte

A second version of Gance's Napoléon, with sound.

Lucrezia Borgia

French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families.

The Woman Thief

The woman thief evades a young lady who is onto his game, but then tries his wiles elsewhere on a married woman by attempting to compromise and ruin the husband she is happy with.

Austerlitz

Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself emperor and fights the English, Austrians and Russians in 1802.

The Torture of Silence

A doctor, specialist in pediatrics, has no time for his wife Marthe. She seeks solace in the arms of his brother. Unable to keep up the charade, Marthe attempts to shoot herself, but it is her lover who is mortally wounded.

The Right to Life

A young girl marries a financier knowing he has only a short time to live, so she can inherit his money.Her lover, who has made a fortune away in America, returns and wants to hasten the financier's death.

Four Flights to Love

In pre-World Ward I in Paris, a budding artist, Pierre LeBlanc, falls in love and marries Janine, a dressmaker's assistant. Pierre has a flair for designing clothes, and he and his bride live in a blissful paradise, until the war breaks out and he becomes a soldier. Janine dies in childbirth and, no longer desiring to live, Pierre volunteers for a dangerous patrol behind German lines. While recuperating in the hospital from a wound he received on the mission, Pierre spends his time drawing sketches of dresses. He becomes rich and famous after the war. Years later, after devoting himself to his daughter, Pierre seeks a marriage with a girl no older than his daughter. A conflict develops and to ensure his daughter's happiness, Pierre sacrifices his own plans.

Queen Margot

Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Médicis, celebrates her wedding with Henri de Navarre. Officially, it's a rapprochement between the League and the Huguenots. In fact, it was an opportunity to bring all the Huguenots to Paris and kill them all at once. King Charles IX fails in his attempt on Coligny's life. Queen Margot tries to save her husband from the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre by preventing the annulment of his marriage, forcing Henri to share her bed. Two knights from opposing camps are wounded and, saved în extremis, are hidden together by the queen and her cousin. Margot falls in love with one of them, but has to run to warn her husband of a new attack...

Barberousse

A journalist attempt to stop a mysterious criminal : "Barbe rousse".

Poliche

Didier Méreuil, affectionately called Poliche, is in love with Rosine, a beautiful girl, so he does everything to please her. She does not love him, and accepts a seductive airplane pilot who proposes to her. One day, she discovers that the funny man is just a front behind which there is a serious Didier. She will try to make up and live with him - but the gap between them is already too large.

Napoleon

A biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797.

Cyrano and d'Artagnan

Duelist and poet Cyrano de Bergerac and musketeer d'Artagnan meet and team up to stop the conspiracy against King Louis XIII of France.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Convinced that his family is tainted by generations of evil, Roderick Usher is hellbent on stopping his sister Madeline’s wedding to prevent the cursed Usher bloodline from expanding. When her fiancé Allan arrives at the crumbling estate to claim his bride, Roderick goes to ruthless—even deadly—lengths to keep them apart.

Autour de Napoléon

Captain Fracasse

Out of love for an actress, Isabelle, the Baron de Sigognac joins a traveling troop en route to Paris. When an actor dies, he takes over his role: that of Captain Fracasse.

The Mask of Horror

A mad sculptor, searching for the perfect realization of "the mask of horror", places himself in front of a mirror after smearing blood over himself with the glass of an oil lamp. He then swallows a virulent poison to observe the effects of pain.

Deadly Gas

Hopson, a prestigious scientist, studies the effect of snake venom to cure many diseases of mankind. His son enlists in the army when the Great War breaks out. A series of circumstances will lead the scientist to change his way of thinking about values ​​and principles that until then he had as immovable.

Around The Wheel

Blaise Cendrars' AUTOUR DE LA ROUE (1923), a behind-the-scenes short documenting the production.

La Roue

Sisif, a railwayman, saves a young girl named Norma orphaned by a train crash and raises her as his own daughter alongside his son, Elie. As she becomes an adult, Sisif grapples with whether to tell Norma the truth about her parentage.

14 juillet 1953

A color test film of the Proterama process created by Abel Gance.

The Life and Loves of Beethoven

Lyrical biography of the classical composer, depicted as a romantic hero, an accursed artist.

Tower of Lust

France, the beginning of the XIV century. Every night, Queen Margaret of Burgundy and her two sisters arrange orgies, to which beautiful nobles are invited. The young men were brought blindfolded, and after a night of love they were killed and their corpses thrown into the river, because the queen was afraid that her husband would learn about her adventures. One of her lovers managed to escape death. He knows the secrets of the queen, knows that she once gave birth to a son from him, claims that he has evidence that Margarita wanted to kill her father and blackmails her.

J'Accuse

The story of two men, one married, the other the lover of the other's wife, who meet in the trenches of the First World War, and how their tale becomes a microcosm for the horrors of war.

The End of the World

The plot concerns a comet hurling toward Earth on a collision course and the different reactions to people on the impending disaster.

Spécial cinéma

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.

Omnibus

Omnibus was an arts-based BBC television documentary series, broadcast mainly on BBC1 in the United Kingdom. The programme was the successor to the long-running arts-based series 'Monitor'. It ran from 1967 until 2003, usually being transmitted on Sunday evenings. During its 35-year history, the programme won 12 Bafta awards. Among the series' best remembered documentaries are Cracked Actor, a profile of David Bowie, and Rene Magritte, a graduate film by David Wheatley, 'Madonna: Behind the American dream', a film produced by Nadia Hagger, and a profile of the British film director Ridley Scott. For a season in 1982, the series was in a magazine format presented by Barry Norman. The series was replaced by 'Imagine' hosted by Alan Yentob.

Cinépanorama

Marie Tudor

Based on the play by Victor Hugo, portraying the rise, fall and execution of Fabiano Fabiani, a fictional favourite of Mary I of England.