Les vendredis d'Apostrophes

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.

In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

55 years ago, on October 1 1968, the first brand advertising spot appeared on the French television screen. Over the next three decades, thousands of creative little films would seduce and build our collective memory. Kitschy or cult spots, humor, slogans, music, stars, gimmicks, grand spectacle or sex appeal: during its golden age, how did advertising convince? Thierry Ardisson has brought together almost 400 advertising clips to relive the era of the conquest of minds and wallets.

A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.

In May 1974, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became President of the Republic and wanted to bring about a new era of modernity. One of his first decisions was to break up the ORTF with the creation of three new television channels: TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3. Three new public channels but autonomous and competing. It is a race for the audience which is engaged then, and from now on the channels will make the war! This competition will give birth to a real golden age for television programs, with variety shows in the forefront. The stars of the song are going to invade the living rooms of the French for their biggest pleasure. This unedited documentary tells the story of the metamorphosis of this television of the early 1970s, between freedom of tone, scandals, political intrigues and programs that have become mythical.

The convoluted and moving story of Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-64) and his novel Life and Fate (1980), a literary masterpiece, a monumental and epic account of life under Stalin's regime of terror, a defiant cry that the KGB tried to suffocate.

During the worst days of World War II, the British government asks the mathematician Alan Turing to unravel the mysteries of the German Enigma encryption machine, an impossible task to accomplish without the invaluable information that Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a disenchanted but greedy German citizen, had been handing over to the French secret services since 1931.

About the Gabriel Matzneff affair and pedophilia in French culture and society from the 1950s to the present day. "It was not very difficult to know who Matzneff was at the time." Vanessa Springora denounces thus, in an interview with the Parisian , the support which benefited the writer Gabriel Matzneff , in the years 1970 and 1980. The author fifties then maintains an affair with the young girl, aged 14 years. A relationship under control that the editor tells in Le Consentement (éd. Grasset), published Thursday. "After having analyzed the work " , the Paris public prosecutor's office announced Friday January 3 the opening of an investigation for "rapes committed on the person of a minor of 15 years".

From the beginning, Hergé's work, Tintin's creator, was conditioned by the ideology of his publisher, the weekly child supplement of a Belgian Catholic newspaper. An exciting analysis of the political meaning of the adventures of Tintin.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

The French controversial author Gabriel Matzneff talks about film/cinema and his taste and flavors, without editing or interruptions. Among a lot of favorable experiences Matzneff mention "The Boy with Green Hair" (1948) by Joseph Losey, "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and directors/auteurs like Marcel Carné and Orson Welles.

A real estate agent leaves behind his beautiful wife to go to Transylvania to visit the mysterious Count Dracula and formalize the purchase of a property in Wismar.

A quiet and inconspicuous man rents an apartment in Paris where he finds himself drawn into a rabbit hole of dangerous paranoia.

The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.

At the height of summer, 18-year-old Cécile is relaxing by the French seaside with her father and falling in love with her new boyfriend. The arrival of her late mother's enigmatic friend turns her world upside down.

On the planet Ygam, the Draags, extremely technologically and spiritually advanced blue humanoids, consider the tiny Oms, human beings descendants of Terra's inhabitants, as ignorant animals. Those who live in slavery are treated as simple pets and used to entertain Draag children; those who live hidden in the hostile wilderness of the planet are periodically hunted and ruthlessly slaughtered as if they were vermin.

An aspiring Hollywood actress, on a visit to a charming North England town, has a brief fling with the town undertaker, who also writes obituaries for the local paper. Returning home, where she works as a waitress at a Japanese restaurant, she tells everyone about the handsome "writer" she met on her trip. Unfortunately, he decides to follow her back to Hollywood, setting up the expected light romantic comedy with asides as the newcomer gains experience about the goings on in Hollywood.

Jean-Marc is a man without qualities living in times that are out of joint. His wife and children ignore him; he's a mid-level government functionary in Montreal doing his job without care. He has an active imagination of sexual conquest, but his only real feelings come when he visits his aged mother, whose health is failing. When his wife leaves abruptly to work in Toronto, Jean-Marc sets out to reorder things with his daughters, his social life, and at work. In a world that at best is a farce, does he stand a chance?

In Belle Époque Paris, a 19th-century Parisian aristocrat falls in love with a lower-class prostitute who seduces him but never loves him.

A spoiled teenager spends the summer at the French Riviera with her rich, widower, playboy father, but when his old flame resurfaces, she resolves to keep her frivolous lifestyle at all costs.

An 18th century poet travels through time in search of divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he has a series of enigmatic encounters with symbolic phantoms with whom he muses about the nature of art and his own career. Ultimately, the poet strives to achieve his rebirth as a celestial being.

Middle-aged businesswoman Paula Tessier rejects the advances of her client's amusing 25-year-old son, Philip Van der Besh, but reconsiders when her longtime philandering partner begins yet another casual affair with a younger woman. She soon learns that May-December romances with older women are frowned upon in society.

Paris, France, during the First World War. While thousands of soldiers die every day on the battlefields, Henri Landru, a seemingly respectable furniture dealer, married and father of four children, relentlessly feeds his own sinister factory of death.

On the eve of revolution, French activist and author Marquis and his talking penis, Colin, await judgment in the Bastille for allegedly plotting against the state. While Marquis dedicates himself to his art and Colin longs for action, the provocative pair unwittingly rouse the interest of competing ideological factions.

A model tells a television crew about her dreams of a life with prince charming all while fending off the lecherous advances of a horde of men.

The setting is Les Fauvettes School for Girls just after WWI, where sternly Teutonic headmistress Ingrid Caven vies with Catherine Jourdan, a morphine addicted, fabric fetishist gym teacher, for the sexual favours of liquid eyed nymphet Scyluna. Meanwhile the chaplain conducts a nude exorcism.

Six Prague residents pursue bizarre rituals. Mr. Peony builds a chicken costume to wear while enacting homicidal fantasies toward neighbor Mrs. Loubalova, who does the same dressed as a dominatrix. Their mail carrier, Mrs. Malkova, inhales tiny balls of bread. Newsstand operator Mr. Kula obsessively watches the broadcasts of news anchor Mrs. Beltinska, whose husband regularly scrubs his body.

Four intertwining stories of bizarre occurrences in Paris featuring a man who was stolen away by fairies, a professor who becomes a tramp, the lovers who inherit a chateau – and the last tale that connects all that has gone before.

The mistress of a wealthy man misses material comforts when she leaves him for a younger lover.

Gilles Lantier, a young reporter on the AFP newspaper, is suffering from a nervous breakdown. Realising that neither his friend Jean nor his girlfriend Eloïse can help him, he decides to stay with his sister Odile, who lives near Limoges. At a party one evening he meets a wealthy bourgeois woman named Nathalie Sylvener. It is love at first sight, and on his return to Paris, Gilles tells Eloïse that he is now devotedly attached to another woman. Although Nathalie agrees to live with him in Paris, she rejects Gilles' offer of marriage. It is not long before the couple have settled into a routine and their passion begins to cool. Then Nathalie suddenly disappears from Gilles' life...

Salomé Lerner just finished writing an autobiography. She goes to a TV show called "Apostrophes", hosted by French TV showman Bernard Pivot. Pivot then imagines a film that could be created from her gripping story. A film entirely made of music because after seeing the young pianist Erik Berchot, Salomé believes seeing her long lost brother, who was a musician as well. A brother she had lost along with her parents in 1943. However, the Lerners did in fact escape the gestapo and might have based themselves in Paris...

Théodore, a strange and shy parisian man, discovers a song with supernatural power. An old jazz classic from the 1920s which will be make instantaneously make two people love each other. He has to find this song to seduce Amandine, the love of his life. His investigation leads him to New York City, where he meets a community of young jazzmen.

"Droit de Réponse" (Right of Reply) is a French debate program broadcast between December 12, 1981 and September 19, 1987 on the TF1 channel, presented by Michel Polac and produced by Maurice Dugowson. Broadcast live on a weekly basis, on Saturdays from 8.30 p.m., the right of reply has been the source of many controversies, due to the various speakers who have come to present their point of view on the show (which leads to famous scandals , remained in the memory of viewers), but also for the variety and relevance of the topics covered, which ensured the success of the program on the air for several years. On French television, this program is considered by some observers as a “pioneer program in terms of controversy-show or clash, in modern language”.

Kunhikuttan, a famous Kathakali dancer, meets Subhadra, a woman from an upper caste family, who falls in love with his character rather than himself.

Alix is a woman of 27 looking for the only thing she is incapable of: love.