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François Truffaut goes deep and morbid adapting a Henry James story about a man who chooses to ‘devote himself to his beloved dead.’ He builds an altar-shrine to a departed bride and comrades that didn’t survive the Great War. A sympathetic woman considers aiding him, but his obsession keeps choosing life-negating directions. It’s a weird, morbid but highly understandable tale from the edge of the fantastic. The cinematographer is Néstor Almendros; the film is part of a 4-title François Truffaut Collection.

The Green Room

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

Part of Kino’s François Truffaut Collection, with The Wild Child, Small Change and The Man Who Loved Women

1978 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date February 14, 2023 / La chanbre verte, The Vanishing Fiancée / available through Kino Lorber / 59.95

Starring: François Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, Jean Dast´, Patrick Maléon, Jeanne Lobre, Antoine Vitez, Jean-Pierre Moulin, Serge Rousseau, Annie Miller, Nathan Miller, Marcel Berbert.

Cinematography:...

Take a refreshing plunge into classic French Poetic Realism — pre-noir drama with softer edges and a touch of romantic fatalism. A low-rent hotel on a barge canal is the gathering point for a cross-section of quasi- undesirables. Scandals and crimes aside, they’re a touching, human bunch, as performed to perfection by Louis Jouvet, Annabella, Arletty, Jane Marken, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Paulette Dubost and Bernard Blier. Marcel Carné’s show is also a beautiful production, with Alexandre Trauner designs that recreate ‘reality’ on an enormous scale.

Hôtel du Nord

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1139

1938 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 23, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, Arletty, Paulette Dubost, Andrex, André Brunot, Henri Bosc, Marcel André, Bernard Blier, Jane Marken, François Périer, Dora Doll, Raymone.

Cinematography: Louis Née, Armand Thirard

Production Designer and Art Director: Alexandre Trauner

Film Editor: Marthe Gottie

Original Music: Maurice Jaubert

Written by Henri Jeanson,...

Paris — A True Renaissance Man of French cinema, director, historian and film preservationist Bertrand Tavernier can now claim another title – maestro.

For the past several months, the filmmaker has been working on a project honoring several pioneering French composers, restoring several pieces and putting together a program that he presents on Saturday January 19 in conjunction with UniFrance’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema.

To be held in Paris’ Maison de la Radio, the concert, called “May the Music Begin!” will pay tribute to several classic French films and their composers. As an added lure, the show will premiere three restorations of scores never before played in concert.

The director sat down with Variety to explain both his process and goals on this new venture.

What are the roots of this project?

This project sprung from my passion for music and from the two documentaries that I made, the feature film “My...

You no doubt know of a crazy local or two that mills around your town in a daze, occasionally causing disturbances, but otherwise remains fairly harmless. If you stop to think about it, it’s possible that they may have had an entirely different life with a past rich with fame, fortune and family, but sadly, their final warped reality is often the result of something as tragic as mental illness. In the case of François Truffaut‘s true to life telling of French literary master Victor Hugo’s increasingly demented daughter’s obsessive breakdown in The Story of Adèle H., the vagabond fate stems from haughty infatuation and swiftly disintegrates into detached delirium not unlike those familiar empty faces asking for bus fare or something to eat on your local street corner.

The Story of Adèle H. followed Truffaut’s Best Foreign Picture winning Day For Night, gleaning its...

“A 19th Century Stalker”

By Raymond Benson

The youngest daughter of the great French author, Victor Hugo, was a victim of schizophrenia. Although she was devastatingly beautiful, history tells us that Adèle Hugo was seriously disturbed.

Around the time of America’s Civil War, Adèle became fixated on a British soldier, one Lieutenant Pinson. She followed him across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, where he was stationed, for she was convinced that he loved her and would marry her. In fact, the couple had experienced a brief relationship in England (while Victor Hugo was living in Guernsey, in exile from France), but Pinson ultimately rejected Adèle and wanted no more to do with her. Even though he was obviously a rakish cad, the girl became obsessed with the man and went to great lengths to pursue him.

These days we would call it stalking.

François Truffaut’s The Story of Adèle H.

Elitist and pretentious, or an endangered species? Whatever your feelings, there's no doubt that arthouse movies are among the finest ever made. Here the Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 romantic movies

• Top 10 action movies

• Top 10 comedy movies

• Top 10 horror movies

• Top 10 sci-fi movies

• Top 10 crime movies

Peter Bradshaw on art movies

This is a red rag to a number of different bulls. Lovers of what are called arthouse movies resent the label for being derisive and philistine. And those who detest it bristle at the implication that there is no artistry or intelligence in mainstream entertainment.

For many, the stereotypical arthouse film is Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was a classic art film from the 1920s and Luis Buñuel investigated cinema's potential for surreality like no one before or since. The Italian neorealists applied the severity of art to a representation...

Jean Vigo, 1934

At the age of 29, Jean Vigo died from rheumatic septicaemia, just a few days after the opening of his only feature film, L'Atalante. Those bare facts are a landmark not just in French cinema, but in the larger history of artistic film-making, and of the absolute commitment of film-makers. Moreover, the poetic lyricism of L'Atalante, far from dating, has been more appreciated over the years. L'Atalante is 75 years old, yet its beauty and its harshness are still hauntingly alive.

Three men work a barge (it is named L'Atalante) on the waterways of northern France: Jean, the skipper is young and hopeful (Jean Dasté); le père Jules, a tattooed veteran of the world's oceans (Michel Simon) and a cabin boy. They stop at a small town. Jean meets a girl, Juliette (Dita Parlo), and they are married, while hardly knowing each other. So the barge moves on. It is...