Nos stars

“A pink moving screen will stand at the entrance to the theatre, in the night. One hour before the screening a projectionist will show Griffith’s Intolerance on this screen. The start of the film will be announced at 8.30 but no one will enter before 9.30. During these 60 minutes of waiting, people on the first floor of the building will shake out very dusty carpets, and someone else will throw ice water on the heads of those spectators waiting for the screening. Some actors who have infiltrated the crowd will insult other actors on the first floor. At this moment only, and to stop the beginning of a scandal, the doors of the theatre will open…”

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.

A young couple out for a walk decide to take a stroll through a large cemetery. As darkness begins to fall they realize they can't find their way out, and soon their fears begin to overtake them.

A young woman inherits the house of Jean Michel but she is haunted by strange dreams and numbers. She has no idea that this is the beginning of the 'the night of clocks', which opened for those who have sinned, the dead which are not dead...

A young man falls in love with a beautiful woman being chased by sinister masked figures at night. He tries to track her down, and learns she's being held captive by his father and colleagues who believe she's a vampire.

The "Films Imaginaires" are made up of only texts, filmed in cardboard boxes for the screen, of various works already shown to the public at the time, and which have been printed here or there, then gathered in the larger edition of my "Œuvres de Cinéma". The simple passage into photograms, then into the projection of these texts, with sound, transforms these "films" into another kind of film creation, even more advanced.

Maurice Lemaître had the ambition to make a really creative film about the revolt of May 68. For this, he did not renounce any of his filmic audacities and he managed to plunge into this new thematic dimension the cinematographic inventions put in In its previous achievements.

Documentary about notorious actor/director Erich Von Stroheim.

Excerpt from the film's soundtrack: - Hélène Richol: Why do you call your film "Fin de tournage"? - Maurice Lemaître: First of all because most of my films have a title relevant to the cinema: ever since "Le film est déjà commencé ?", "Votre Film", etc. (...) And then because when I thought of doing this film, I was very depressed... not in good shape... And I thought that this would be my last film.

This film, first titled La poubelle du labo (The Lab Trashcan), and after L'Enfer du cinéma (Cinema's Hell), has been projected for the very first time in September 1968 at the French Cinémathèque. It can be considered as the cinematographic equivalent of Tristan Tzara's method on how to make a dadaist poem by putting words in a bag, and it mostly rises from Isidore Isou's film enthusiasm. The film has been made in fact out of elements of film strips found in the trashcan of a film development laboratory, that have been subsequently taped together bit by bit following the exact order they were originally gathered.

A trailer of Maurice Lemaître's films. One finds in this work some of the techniques used by Maurice Lemaître that are blossoming and that are applicable to his own work, thus becoming an auto-promoting instrument. A game on the nature of film that is addressed to the particular genres that are the propaganda film and the advertisement film.