La Cabale des oursins

The 1984 short Barres celebrates the ingenious ways one can get onto the Paris Metro without paying.

Bananas, eggs, and tuna: three basic foodstuffs with three wildly different points of origin. Moullet begins with these on his plate but constructs his film by working backwards and finding the sources for these items and how they reach our plates. As Moullet’s investigation deepens, however, the film moves beyond the confines of a simple exploration of food origins into more political and social realms, not only relating to food but also to the medium of film.

A short film based on Henry James' short story "Longstaff's Marriage".

In a cul-de-sac in the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, Leon shares two rooms with his sister Marie. In one, he receives his clients: he is a tailor. In the other, Marie receives her own: she is a clairvoyant. Leon was happy until he learned what Marie was hiding from him. She is actually a prostitute, and Maxime, her supposed fiancé, is her pimp. On the same day, Leon also discovers love in the form of Arlette, a provincial young woman picked up by Marie.

Two young women leave claustrophobic city life behind and move to a small border town. There they meet a border guard, involved in smuggling to and from the country. Both women fall for him, resulting in jealousy.

With little or no embellishment, filmmaker Marguerite Duras offers a simple, often wordless chronicle of a woman's day. She and her friend are seen doing yard work, talking about their families and receiving the occasional visitor. The brightest spot in the day is when a washing machine salesman comes to call.

Less and Less, Luc Moullet’s 40th film, concerns development and expansion, from 1968 to 2010, of the devices based on computers, automats, interactive terminals and others that can be found everywhere.

Sylvain Berg, a "professional" unemployed who spends his time hiking and mountain climbing, and "model" bank employee Benoît Constant, who has just been fired and does not want his wife to find out, both find themselves in Françoise Duru's office at an employment agency. Françoise is secretly in love with Sylvain, so in order to keep him close she convinces her employer to give Sylvain a job he doesn't want, instead of Benoit who not only wants it but also has the right qualifications.

In the French countryside it's the day for peasants to kill a big fat pig. The slaughter goes on for a great part of the day as they work to store 140kg worth of meat.

Two young girls find out, in the hard way, that climb mountains isn't all that fun that people often say it is.

A man with nothing to do all day decides to take guitar lessons. He falls for his music teacher’s flatmate who flirts with him slightly and even has the same name as the Serge Gainsbourg chanson he’s struggling to learn “Laetitia”. Not so much a passionate love story as a finely woven, laconic film about what it’s like to be just that little bit in love.

A bicycle race is held every year in a pass of the Alps called Parpaillon. With the energy of a skillful cyclist perhaps as a great tribute to François, the mailman played by Tati in The Big Day, Moullet makes a comedy by pedaling at a pace that allows him to reinvent the possibilities of film gags.

The first emotions in love with a young man of seventeen: Thomas who understands that his life belongs to him at last. Four young women contribute to his sentimental education.

On the roads of Saintonge, at the entrance of the villages or along the ring roads, strange constructions have been laid out in places that we pass without stopping: roundabouts organized with an obsession for local culture. This film is an opportunity to turn around these postcard landscapes where oysters, parasols and prehistoric women live together.

During the Gulf War, the paths of several groups of characters cross in France’s most desert-like region. The cast is as follows: An astrophysician who works alone with Geraldine in an observatory high in the mountains. He’d like to seduce Geraldine, but she seems to prefer the shepherd who’s been relegated to a shabby hut nearby. A group of filmmakers stuck in the middle of the countryside after their crew went on strike because lunch never turned up. A squadron of stupid soldiers who consider even the most minor incident to be proof of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of France. A maniacal geologist, oblivious of everything, who continues to search for the traces of a tectonic Big Bang in the most inaccessible places.

Carrying on Luc Moullets unfinished screenplay about the theft of la pénélope, a camera created by Aaton and capable of recording equally well in 35 mm and digitally, LA ROUGE ET LA NOIRE is a film in kaleidoscope form. The portrait of Aatons founder, Jean-Pierre Beauviala creator, inter alia, of the time-code and the light cameras used by the New Wave (in particular the bush camera specially designed for Jean Rouch) is centered around the basic plot introduced by two women thieves who talk as voice-overs, and whose identities will only be revealed at the end.