The Metro

A journey in the company of Bernadette Lafont, French Cinema’s most atypical actress. Tracing her career from pin-up girl, to New Wave model of sexual freedom, to drug-dealing granny in the film Paulette, by way of La Fiancée du Pirate and Les Stances à Sophie, this film pays tribute to her extraordinary life and artistic odyssey. Her grand-daughters, Anna, Juliette and Solène, revisit the dreams of Bernadette, in the family home in the Cevennes region where they, like her, grew up. Her close friends, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon, reminisce on their artistic and human complicity. Throughout the film, Bernadette Lafont in person, with her inimitable character actress voice, re-evokes a life in cinema marked with insolence, courage and freedom.

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.

Between 1950 and 1955, Henri Langlois tried to produce, on behalf of the Cinémathèque française, several films devoted to great artists, with their cooperation, by entrusting them with virgin film stock. Wrote Langlois on the unfinished project, epic in scope: "We had the idea of ​​asking poets, painters, scholars, writers and even repressed filmmakers [...] to make films in 16mm, with the means at hand, without taking into account any commercial concern or censorship." What precious little came of the project was eight minutes of film from Matisse and twenty-some from Marc Chagall, released at a later date.

Extract of rushes from the unfinished documentary project written and produced by Henri Langlois on Marc Chagall.

Six films by photographer Paul Nadar in 1896 were combined into a program in 1970 by the Cinemathèque Francaise. It contains four dance routines and two Paris-based actualities.

A woman finds herself mysteriously pregnant. We do not know anything about the father who could be a simple ... bilboquet!

"On 2 March 1974, Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque française, screened a partly impromptu edit of films and fragments from the nation’s silent film production." - IFFR 2019 Programme "It was originally made by Langlois for a presentation whose origins or motives are unclear, as is the thematic or narrative through-line in the epic, though it is said that when he presented the film Langlois was doing something akin to cutting it together live in the projection booth. It definitely goes chronologically through French cinema, definitely avoids a general historiography and obvious citations, and definitely gravitates towards films shot in Paris, yet none of these touchpoints elucidate exactly what Langlois’s epic essay film was intended for. It was found in the Cinémathèque on the shelves only recently and digitized, embalming what feels like a very specific and quite personal guided tour through cinema, with the guide (Langlois) missing." - Daniel Kasman, MUBI