Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-26 at 7:32

All about Women

Femmes femmesTwo ageing actresses share a Parisian flat. On their walls, pictures of actresses of movie stars of the Thirties. One still play small parts, the other does small works to live. They act. They re-act their faded glory, they re-act their parts, they act their lives, makingfrom each small event a source of games.

The opening credits instantly places Women Women on the scale of the myths with all these portraits of stars from the golden age of the studios. Written and directed by Paul Vecchiali and co-written by Noel Simsolo (both writers for prestigious French magazine Les Cahiers du cinema), who also plays in it, Women Women is one of the most beautiful and unique child of a generation, the one of the New Wave, nourished with American and French classical films myth. Imaginative transitions, characters starting suddenly to sing (wonderful songs by Roland Vincent), unexpected sudden talkings to the camera, Women Women is constantly inventing. Such are the scenes and dialogues, precisely written and magnified by the two outstanding actresses Hélène Surgère and Sonia Saviange. Passing through violently contrasted emotions, they are moving or seducing, funny or irritating, classy or vulgar, as complex as women can be, incarnating a certain idea of femininity.

To help her friend rehearsing the part of Andromaque, Helene brings up the memory of a dead child and make her express a powerful emotion and we can not tell at this point how sincere it is for the character or even for the actress. Life and acting are mixed and hard to separate. Walking in such uncertain territory, the spectator can only frontally receive the emotion. “What must I believe? What is true in all this?” asks Hélène to her friend who just gave her a great story about money bills found is the streets. All and nothing could be our answer. Everyting is staged and everything is true. The world is a stage, the stage is a world.

The film presentation at the Venice Film Festival made such a strong impression on Pier Paolo Pasolini that he had the two actresses re-acting one scene of the film in Salo the year after. Now available for the very first time in France, the DVD has unfortunately no subtitles. While waiting for an hypothetical English-friendly DVD, keep in mind Women Women is one of the most beautiful films of seventies French cinema and try not to miss it if it ever screens near your home.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Women Women

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-26 at 7:32

ANNE BENHAIEM - Director

Vampyr (1932) by Carl Th. Dreyer.
Vampyr
“It’s one of the films that moved me the most, it also makes me laugh a lot. If I wasn’t so lazy I would write my big paper about the comic in Dreyer and Bresson’s work! Plastically, the film is marvellous, there is something special in the transparency of the images, in the greys, the transparent greys. Each shot is an invention in that film. And it’s never affected, it’s always necessary. He dissociates the camera from what he is shooting, it’s something I really like about his work, something that makes my heart beat. He follows somebody walking and suddenly the camera does something else, it moves for itself. It marked me deeply.”

More information about Vampyr

Anne BenhaiemAnne Benhaïem studied cinema at French cinema school Fémis, in the directors section. She wrote, directed and edited a dozen of short films (Solo tù, co-directed with Arnaud Dommerc, Families Theater starring Helene Lapiower, Humphrey Bogart and the Invisible Woman) and co-wrote with Sophie Fillières (Ouch, Pardon My French) or Marc Cholodenko (writer for Philippe Garrel). We invite you to visit the Facebook page (in French) where she launches a subscription to finance her Film to Come…

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-11 at 6:54

The Enlightened Room

La Chambre obscure
In the 16th century, Aliénor, who inherited the medical secrets of her father, visits the King of France to heal him from a mysterious disease. As she succeeds in curing him, he offers her in return to marry the man she wants. She chooses Bertrand de Roussillon who marries her against his will. As soon as they are married, he leaves their home. Alienor finds out soon that he joined the Republic of Sienna and is in love with another woman: Lisotta.


Adapted from one of the hundred novels of Boccace’s Decameron, The Dark Room follows the French cinematographic tradition of a revisited middle age. The filiation acknowledged by director Marie-Christine Questerbert with Robert Bresson’s Lancelot and Eric Rohmer’s Perceval is obvious as The Dark Room seems to be a kind of son of these two films, with a DNA sharing both its parents genes. A Bressonian minimalism and a Rohmerian taste for language meets there, with a common stylized representation of the times. The original text is rather modern too with its heroin chasing the man she wants and using tricks to put him in her bed, making a woman’s desire in the centre of the intrigue. She is also the one who holds the medicine secrets. Influenced by her research about the paintings of the era, the director made strong aesthetic choices. Quite abstract sets, strong dominant colours highlighted by the cinematographer’s fabulous work (Emmanuel Machuel who worked also on Van Gogh by Maurice Pialat or Money by… Robert Bresson), the production design is amazing. Discreet anachronisms contribute to blur the film’s time references and give it a fantasy taste. In this revisited middle-age, with the fascinating way the director has to represent it, the actors are still the centre of the attention. The cold virility of Melvil Poupaud echoes the boiling determination of Caroline Ducey whose sharp acting gives the character all its complexity. Led by this brilliant couple surrounded by a very well chosen cast, The Dark Room is an enchanting sensual tale.

The DVD is available as of February 23, 2010 with optional English subtitles and includes a preface by Hervé Joubert-Laurencin.

Francis Chérasse

More information about The Dark Room

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-11 at 6:50

The Shock of the Worlds

Petits Morceaux Choisis“The body is comparable to a sentence which demands to be disarticulated so that its true contents can be recomposed through an endless series of signs.”It’s with this quote from Hans Bellmer, a major artist of the surrealistic movement, that the movie opens. As a true treatment, in both substance and form, of a unique documentary of which the narrative progression based on ideas and images is not the least of its qualities.

After taking interest in the ravages of the Serbo-Croatian conflict (Les vivants et les morts de Sarajevo, 1993) and having investigated the implications of the September 11 events (New York Ground Zero, 2002), Radovan Tadic confronts East and West with a structuralist approach, which Roland Barthes wouldn’t have disapproved. By using apparently unrelated facts, the director progressively spins a web of leads, intersecting, overlapping and taking root in fields so diversified that they’re incongruous. From post-Cold War soviet espionage to the creation of the Shinkansen -the Japanese equivalent of the French TGV- and his aerodynamic platypus-based profile, each one is processed with several points of view -psychoanalytical, theological or metaphysical- in order to define all their possible facets. But rather than giving in to the most complete abstraction, it’s with an avalanche of practical examples, often comical, always fascinating, that the reflection takes shape. Mentioned repeatedly as necessary to the balance of the world, the duality that governs it (love and hate, reality and fantasy, light and darkness) is made explicit on the screen by a journey to Greenwich, at the exact place where the meridian originates.

If these “small chosen pieces” are more than delightful, it’s also thanks to the unconventional people that compose them. Over and above the incontrovertible experts, physicians and psychoanalysts, we are introduced in particular to a dominatrix and her relationship with the male sex or to the evocation of cannibalism by one of his most famous fans: Issei Sagawa, the ‘Japanese cannibal’ who hit the headlines in the early 80’s after having cut, cooked and eaten a Dutch student at his home in Paris. The ‘ultimate proof of love’ as he likes to repeat. Thus, from a contributor to another, from facts to images, from extravagant analogies to voluntarily far-fetched demonstrations, the topics intertwine each other in a strangely consistent way, following a logical absurdity specific to Surrealism. And if Radovan Tadic doesn’t really answer the questions he brings up, it’s foremost because he values the journey over the destination -a truly stimulating intellectual process for whoever will accept to play his riddles.

Mathieu Col

More information about Ten Easy Pieces

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-11 at 6:00

CECILE BABIOLE - Multimedia Artist

Impaled (2006) by Larry Clark.
Impaled“Larry Clark has this very special talent to make those young men so comfortable that they show themselves with all their kindness and naivety. He manages to get things many documentary makers can’t get. I don’t know how he does that, he must put them in condition, i don’t know if he cheats, but he manages to reach a complicity which makes them forget everything and open up. It’s a sociological document about nowadays sexuality which is quite unique and which says a lot about the standardization of young Americans sexual lives -totally biased by what they see on the internet. What they say about the way the girls must be is crazy. And they -the girls- comply with that. It’s not a male chauvinist problem, they all play the game!”

More information about Destricted

Cecile BabioleFrom industrial music in the 1980s (with the band Nox) to an exploration of electronic and digital cultures in our day, Cécile Babioleʼs artistic trajectory has evolved laterally, cutting across the realms of music and the visual arts. Far from de rigueur interdisciplinarianism, her works move back and forth between one language and another, bleeding each code into the other in an ongoing reinterpretation of the relationship between image and sound.
Whether staged in the public realm (streets, busses) or in private venues (galleries, concert halls), her latest installations and performances (RPM, Shining Field, Doom, Iʼll be your Mirror, Circulez yʼa rien à voir, Reality Dub, Crumple Zone…) question our prevailing systems of representation –from an original and ironic angle.

View Cécile Babiole’s website

More information about The Good Old Naughty Days [Deconstructed]

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-05 at 12:17

Berlin Film Festival 2010

février 11, 2010àfévrier 21, 2010

Berlinale 2010

Official Competition :

Caterpillar by Koji Wakamatsu
En Familie by Pernille Fischer Christensen
En ganske snill mann by Hans Petter Moland
If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle by Florin Serban
Greenberg by Noah Baumbach
Howl by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Jud Suesse by Oskar Roehler
How I Ended This Summer by Alexei Popogrebsky
Mammuth by Benoit Delepine, Gustave de Kervern
Please Give by Nicole Holofcener
Puzzle by Natalia Smirnoff
A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop by Zhang Yimou
Shahada by Burhan Qurbani
Submarino by Thomas Vinterberg
The Kids are All Right by Lisa Cholodenko
The Killer Inside Me by Michael Winterbottom
Tuan Yuan by Wang Quan’an
Bal by Semih Kaplanoglu
Der Räuber by Benjamin Heisenberg
Na Putu by Jasmila Žbanić
Sherkarchi by Rafi Pitts
The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-02 at 7:20

The films in the shadow

Petits morceaux choisis2010! Dissidenz is back from its maternity leave (just in time for the Year of the Tiger)! The end of the year was the occasion to fill up the site with new DTR (Download-To-Rent) films (or films you can watch on video on demand) and we had to organize the life of all of them: fictions or documentaries, we couldn’t just make them available in the worldwide web vast ocean without guiding you to each one of them and highlight them all. From the iconoclastic Ten Easy Pieces to the frightening reality of The Camorra School by Nico Di Biase, through the hilarious Death’s Glamour by Luc Moullet or the exquisite Dark Room by Marie-Christine Questerbert (which will be available on DVD on February 16), we are happy to introduce little gems of a different cinema to be discovered since December 23.
If you’re a French speaker, do not hesitate to discover the series The Craft in the Shadow and Profession Producer by Emmanuel Chouraqui, which highlight less known cinema jobs but which are as important for the creation of films. Through interviews of professionals, discover the craft of a cinematographer, a sound engineer, a film distributor and many more. On the producer side, meet with established personalities in French cinema (Martine Marignac, Paulo Branco, Robert Guediguian…), who share their vision of their work. Captivating!

View the new releases available on video on demand

View the full list of films available on video on demand

Fontaine Le Glou

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-02 at 7:20

MARIE-CHRISTINE QUESTERBERT - Director

The Grissom Gang (1971) by Robert Aldrich
Pas d'orchidées pour Miss Blandish
“It’s the story of a rich girl, who is kidnapped by small crooks, and the way she struggles with them, with her knowledge of the upper class, to try to get away from it, not being raped etc… It’s fantastic. At the end she almost falls in love with one of the kidnappers who has mercy on her. At the end he lets her out –the police discovered where they were– but he goes out first to prevent her from being shot and gets shot. The man falls and she runs to him, moved by him giving his life for her and because she has feelings, slave feelings in fact, for him. Because she runs to him, her father who is a pure WASP rejects her. It’s an incredible film.”

More information about The Grissom Gang

Synopsis: Miss Blandish (Kim Darby), a young well-to-do heiress suffering from the emotional strain of overprotective parents, is kidnapped by a group of money-hungry thugs and thrust into a world of slums and poverty. As the Grissom Gang holds her for ransom, Miss Blandish begins a torrid love affair with their murderous leader, Slim (Scott Wilson), throwing a wrench in the family’s plans to free her. Darby gives a complex and sultry performance as the pouty riches-to-rags debutante whose attraction to Slim seems driven by a spiky mixture of love, sex, and masochism.

Marie-Christine Questerbert
An actress in Luc Moullet’s films A Girl is a Gun and Anatomy of a Relationship, Marie-Christine Questerbert also appeared in More by Pascal Bonitzer or Diary of a Seducer by Danièle Dubroux. She directed short films and a feature-length film in 2000, The Dark Room, which was presented at Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival and which will be released on DVD with optional English subtitles on February 16, 2010.

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-01 at 7:20

New releases on Video On Demand

Dissidenz presents rare fictions or documentaries available for the first time on video on demand (download-to-rent): discover unusual programs at a rate between 1.99 and 4.99 euros, and watch them as much as you want for 72 hours at home! A great idea in these cold times!…

THE CRAFT IN THE SHADOW: a series by Emmanuel Chouraqui featuring those from the crew we less hear about but without whom a film could not be made. For each craft, a professional tells us about his everyday work.

The Craft in the Shadow: Nicolas Becker – Sound Effects Engineer
The Craft in the Shadow: Michel Burstein – Press Agent
The Craft in the Shadow: Jean-François Camilleri – Film Distributor
The Craft in the Shadow: Patrick Cauderlier - Stuntman
The Craft in the Shadow: Duran Duboi – Special Effects
The Craft in the Shadow: Francis Lai - Composer
The Craft in the Shadow: Laurent Lafran – Sound Engineer
The Craft in the Shadow: Françoise Menidrey – Casting Director
The Craft in the Shadow: Philipe Murcier – Dubbing Actor
The Craft in the Shadow: Christine Parat – Artistic Agent
The Craft in the Shadow: Arnaud Potier - Cinematographer
The Craft in the Shadow: Jean de Trégomain – Production Manager
The Craft in the Shadow: Marie-Joseph Yoyotte - Editor

PROFESSION PRODUCER: a series by Emmanuel Chouraqui featuring producers -those who make the films exist. A tough job, not often rewarding, for passionate people only.

Profession Producer: Maurice Bernart
Profession Producer: Frédéric Bourboulon
Profession Producer: Paulo Branco
Profession Producer: Robert Guédiguian
Profession Producer: Didier Haudepin
Profession Producer: Francine Jean-Baptiste
Profession Producer: Martine Marignac
Profession Producer: Michel Propper

DOCUMENTARY GEMS AND RARITIES TO DISCOVER

Murder of a Hatmaker
by Catherine Bernstein
Au premier faux pas by Patrick Benquet
Ceci est une pipe (This is a Blowjob) by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic
Investigation Into the Invisible World by Jean-Michel Roux
State of Weightlessness by Maciej Drygas
Grass by Mathieu Levain and Olivier Porte
History of a Secret by Mariana Otero
The Lullaby by Maciej Drygas
The Budding Fourth Estate by Jean-Pascal Boffo
The Good Pupil by Pascal Quaregna
Father Glasberg by Julie Bertuccelli
The Loan, the Chiken and the Egg by Claude Mouriéras
The Black Blood of Medea by Nico Di Biase
The Loneliman of the Château Du Fresne by Pierre Beuchot
The Camorra School by Nico Di Biase
The Absentees by Catherine Bernstein
The Spirits of Koniambo, in the Kanak land by Jean-Louis Comolli & Alban Bensa
The Sour Grapes by Catherine Bernstein
The Man from the Roubines by Gérard Courant
New York Year Zéro by Radovan Tadic
Oma by Catherine Bernstein
Because They Killed Ibrahim by Alain Dufau
Ten Easy Pieces by Radovan Tadic
Factory Dream by Luc Decaster
Schizophrenia by Vita Zelakeviciute
On the Tracks of the Fox by Stéphane Chopard
Living the Invisibles by Dirk Dumon
Yvette Good Lord ! by Sylvestre Chatenay

RARE FICTIONS, CURIOSITIES AND MUST HAVE

Céline by Jean-Claude Brisseau
This Filthy Earth by Andrew Kötting
Gallivant by Andrew Kötting
Home by Ursula Meier
In Absentia by Stephen & Timothy Quay
The Dark Room by Marie-Christine Questerbert
Life As It Is by Jean-Claude Brisseau
Jan Svankmajer’s Cabinet by Stephen & Timothy Quay
Death’s Glamour by Luc Moullet
Lorna’s Silence de Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne
The Shipwrecked of the D17 by Luc Moullet
Workers for the Good Lord by Jean-Claude Brisseau
The Cremator by Juraj Herz
Mondo Mulloy by Phil Mulloy
Rembrandt Fecit by Jos Stelling
Singapore Sling by Nikos Nikolaidis
The Christies by Phil Mulloy
A Monkey on the Back by Jacques Maillot

Published by Dissidenz 2009-11-28 at 5:57

Nikita Mikhalkov, mother Russia

Nikita MikhalkovBorn from a family of artists -his father was a poet, an author amongst other things of the Soviet Union anthem- and brother of Andrei Konchalovsky (Siberiade, Runaway Train), Nikita Mikhalkov is one of the most important director of Russian post-second world war cinema history. A filmmaker and an actor, he starts in 1974 with Friend Among Strangers, Stranger Among Friends, a Siberian western with a virtuoso direction, before he directs Slave of Love, homage to the cinema pioneers and his first masterpiece. In 1977, Mikhlakov brilliantly adapts Anton Tchekov in Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano then Alexander Volodine in Five Evenings in 1979. Oblomov, directed in 1980, stages one of the most popular character in Russia, an emblem of laziness, created by Ivan Gontcharov. Family Relations in 1981, deals with humor of the westernization of Russia through the visit of a countryside old woman to her daughter living in the city, and it’s with Without Witness in 1983, that the first part of his career stops before the international consecration with Black Eyes in 1987.

Constantly flirting between drama and comedy, singing the eternal slave soul, Nikita Mikhalkov wrote some of the most beautiful pages in Russian modern cinema history. Exploring the human soul as much as the Russian identity, his cinema is one of an aesthete and a poet, as moving as astonishing. Available for the very first time in France on DVD, his first films are now gathered in box-sets that finally allow us to fully enjoy the work of this one of a kind artist. The DVDs also include interviews with the director, the writers and the composers and commentaries about the films by French film critic Pierre Murat.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Nikita Mikhalkov Set 1
More information about Nikita Mikhalkov Set 2

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