Set in contemporary Rome, the film shows through a series of encounters with “ancient” Romans, how the economic and political manipulation by ancient Roman society led to Caesar’s dictatorship. - British Film Institute
Peter Nestler's poetic documentary Verteidigung der Zeit is not only an hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), but also to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work,...
Don Quixote, Luís de Camões, Camilo Castelo Branco and Teixeira de Pascoaes meet in an eternal garden in the middle of a modern city and talk about life.
Every year the Viennale invites a famous director to produce a short film as the festival trailer. In 2014 the choice has fallen on the 105-year old Manoel de Oliveira.
Renato Berta, director of photography who won a César in 1988, this time appears in front of the camera under the direction of Paul Lacoste, who retraces the creative process of the Swiss filmmaker. Between archive images and anecdotes about his shoots with the greatest independent directors of...
Another adaptation from Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò (following "From the Clouds to the Resistance", "These Encounters of Theirs" and "Artemis' Knee".
With L’inconsolable, Jean-Marie Straub continues the mise en scène of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, initiated in 1978 with Dalla nube alla resistenza and followed up in 2006, 2007 and 2008 with Quei loro incontri, Artemis’s Knee and Le streghe – femmes entre elles....
Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time, this is the story of a professor who suffers a seizure which results in total amnesia. As he recuperates he is so different his family deserts him. He gathers knowledge of things outside his specialty for five years, then has another seizure. When...
Joachim Gatti, is the grand-son of the director and filmmaker Armand Gatti. During a demonstration in Montreuil, he lost an eye, hit by a “flashball” fired from a policegun.
At the end of the 19th century, an educated white-collar worker finds himself in the employ of an inventor. As he is neither a "worker" nor an "owner," his position in the inventor's household and in the world at large is equivocal. Despite the difficulties he encounters, he tries to hold onto his...
Document on the city of Le Havre. Luc Moullet sets out to show Le Havre not as a single city centered on its port, but as a multitude of neighborhoods and annexed communes, making Le Havre a city of rare diversity. Commentary by Luc Moullet, said by himself. First part of an aborted "Le Havre...
In this docudrama, the real star is a railroad tunnel. First built, at the instigation of a banker and an engineer, in 1872 under appalling conditions, it was widened to accommodate automobiles in 1972. The tunnel links the Rhineland in Germany with Italy and goes through the Swiss mountains. The...
Also known as “Letter from Venice,” Susan Sontag’s fourth and final film tells of a relationship that is fragmenting as the partners tour the decaying ruins of a hallucinatory Venice.
"At the end of filming Umiliati, Straub and Huillet gave thanks to the cast and crew in a graceful way: by inviting Dolando Bernardini to sing several stanzas from Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century epic poem Jerusalem Delivered." - MoMA
Roger Diamantis owns the Saint-André-des-Arts cinema in Paris. His discovery of the 7th art, his vocation to own a cinema where he could show films that resembled him, and his years in the restoration business to achieve this… He recalls his early days, talks about the filmmakers who found their...
A “filmic re-reading” of Max Frisch's novella Montauk (1974) and of excerpts from his published diaries. It is neither a biographical portrait of Frisch – who was one of the greatest 20th century Swiss writers – nor a filmed adaptation of the novel. Instead, Dindo returns to the locations...
Thirteen Swiss filmmakers, each from their own point of view, chronicle and reconstruct the narrative of Swiss cinema, from its beginning to the present day, and in doing so, retrace the history of the country.
