The Essence of Forms

Based on unpublished interviews with the family, Jean-Claude Carrière, his writer and biographer, family archives, mini-fictions that dramatize the memories evoked and in constant echo with the upcoming films whose images seem to crystallize over the narrative, we wish to reinterpret Luis Buñuel's work through these decisive years, revealing hidden coherence, originality and beauty.

Paris, 1940. German occupation forces create a new film production company, Continental, and put Alfred Greven – producer, cinephile, and opportunistic businessman – in charge. During the occupation, under Joseph Goebbels’s orders, Greven hires the best artists and technicians of French cinema to produce successful, highly entertaining films, which are also strategically devoid of propaganda. Simultaneously, he takes advantage of the confiscation of Jewish property to purchase film theaters, studios and laboratories, in order to control the whole production line. His goal: to create a European Hollywood. Among the thirty feature films thus produced under the auspices of Continental, several are, to this day, considered classics of French cinema.

An interview with Jean-Luc Godard by Dominique Maillet and Pierre-Henri Gibert, filmed on August 10, 2010 at the Hôtel de Vendôme in Paris.

A genius inventor of forms, Alain Resnais is one of the fathers of cinematic modernity. This portrait, rich in archives, looks back on the career of a discreet non-conformist, in perpetual search of renewal to fight against anxiety.

La Case du Siècle is a French television program launched in 2010 and broadcast on France 5. Hosted by Fabrice d'Almeida, it airs documentaries every Sunday that aim to shed light on the history of the 20th century, both in France and around the world. Through these documentaries, viewers can deepen their knowledge of a specific subject or simply discover a particular era. *La Case du siècle* offers an in-depth look at the events that changed the course of history.

A pioneering post-war female film director, an instigator of the New Wave who was honored by Hollywood in her own lifetime, Agnès Varda has become a source of inspiration for a whole new generation of young filmmakers. With movies like Cléo de 5 à 7, Le Bonheur, Sans toit ni loi, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, she created a quirky, open to the world, sensitive to the disenfranchised, often silly body of work. Always one finger on the pulse, she shook everything up, including cinema itself which she refused to constrict to pure fiction or long-form films.

In the Russian Empire of the 1910s, a group of visionary painters revolutionized the aesthetic norms of their time and opted for radical abstraction. In the years between the seizure of power by the Russian Bolsheviks and Stalinism in the 1930s, the avant-gardists developed a new form of art that ushered in modernism.

The original image or the first image. That of the first film, that of all the promises. The matrix image announcing all those to come. The history of cinema is full of legendary first movies, master strokes rather than test shots. There is a lot to be learned from the early plants of estrean directors who later became great filmmakers.

A short documentary about Georges Franju.

The life and work of the brilliant German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, a cross-border artist who, by leaving Germany and making the whole world his place of work, acquired the objective perspective necessary to portray his country's society better than anyone else while providing a unique and original point of view on the troubled history of the European continent.

Danielle Darrieux - icon and actress of the century: as a 16-year-old, the French actress perfectly embodied what we would call an "It Girl" today. She conquered Hollywood at a young age with elegance and charm. She defied the taboos of patriarchal society. The documentary takes a look back at Darrieux's 80-year career.

Great filmmakers claim the artistic influence of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), a master of suspense, with a unique vision of the world, who knew how to offer both great shows and subtle studies of characters. Beyond the myth of the tyrannical director, a contrasting portrait of a visionary, an agitator, an artist against the system.

A TV weather girl is torn between an older man, a famous married author whom she loves but who won't leave his wife, and a semi-deranged young heir to an industrial fortune who loves her.

In eight films, Jacques Audiard has renewed French cinema, without alienating either the critics or the success. It is only at the age of 42 that he starts directing, after having been an editor and a scriptwriter. In 1994, he directed his first film, "Regarde les hommes tomber", whose conflicting shooting was an ordeal for this misanthropic beginner. It was with "Sur mes lèvres", in 2001, that he forged his cinematographic language: contained lyricism, deliberate imperfection of images, ellipses plunging the audience into a maelstrom of sensations. With each of his films, Jacques Audiard intends to renew himself, at the cost of challenges and doubts always more vivid.