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No longer out of reach, Marcel Pagnol’s stunning 3-feature saga of love and honor in a French seaport is one of the great movie experiences — and the most emotional workout this viewer has seen in years. The tradition of greatness in the French sound cinema began with gems like these, starring legendary actors that were sometimes billed only with their last names: Raimu, Charpin. Those two, Pierre Fresnay and Orane Demazis are simply unforgettable — it’s 6.5 hours of dramatic wonderment.

Marcel Pagnol’s The Marseille Trilogy

Marius * Fanny * César

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 881-884

1931 – 1936 / B&W / 1:19 flat full frame, 1:19 flat full frame, 1:37 flat full frame / 127 * 127 * 141 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 20, 2017 / 79.96

Starring: Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, Fernand Charpin, Alida Rouffe, Paul Dullac, Robert Vattier, André Fouché.

Cinematography: Ted Pahle, Nicolas Toporkoff, Willy Faktorovitch

Original Music: ?, Vincent Scotto, Vincent Scotto

Written by Marcel Pagnol

Produced by Ted Pahle,...

Mubi's retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.The late 1970s marks a stylistic departure for Walerian Borowczyk, as the Polish director moved away from a controlled, painterly style and toward a ‘corporeal’ style, wherein changes in aesthetic choices allowed him to explore the human body in greater depth than in his previous films. While the liberal portrayal of sex and sexuality (lending itself to the liberal portrayal of bodies, human or otherwise) is present in Borowczyk’s live-action films as early as his anthology Immoral Tales from 1973, the preoccupation with the body specifically comes to the fore with the films Behind Convent Walls (1978), Immoral Women (1979), L’armoire (1979), Lulu (1980), and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). It is in this four-year period that the viewer will notice Borowczyk's moving away...

Assessing the Legacy of Ken Russell’s Masterpiece 45 Years Later.

Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) holds the distinct honor of simultaneously being the most controversial and the most banned film of all time. It is a film lauded by film critics as a masterpiece, one that routinely tops Must See and Best Film lists, and yet it is still largely unavailable on DVD and has never been released without the interference of heavy handed studio censorship and edits. It is a film that critics encourage viewers to watch via an illegal stream, simply because it must be seen. So what is it about The Devils that makes it so beloved by everyone but the studio holding the key to its release?

The History

The Devils is based on The Devils of Loudun, a 1952 book by Aldous Huxley, as well as The Devils, a 1960 play by John Whiting. All three tell the story of the 1632 possession of 27 nuns...

Sympathy for The Devils: The Suppression of Ken Russell’s Delirious, Incomparable Masterpiece

Despite the pronounced pedigree of its origins, Ken Russell’s glorious 1971 film The Devils is still mysteriously unavailable in the United States. An infamously plagued reception continues to usurp deserved attention away from its subversive content, though a growing legion of champions within the critical arena which had once sacrilegiously abandoned it has resulted in its growing recuperation.

Based, very loosely on a 1952 novel by literary giant Aldous Huxley depicting the downfall of 17th century French priest Urbain Grandier, it relates an incidence of hysteria and mob mentality run amok in the totalitarian paradigm of the Catholic Church. Russell, his project backed by none other than Warner Bros. studio itself, crafted an off-putting extravaganza of a film (shall we say, making Huxley’s text more Grandier) depicting events decried as pure blasphemy.

Wit unabashedly blunt sexual...

"Tadeusz Konwicki, a prominent Polish writer and filmmaker whose works during the communist era lampooned the authoritarian Soviet-imposed system, has died," reports the AP. And Radio Poland notes that as a screenwriter, "he is noted for adapting Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's novella Mother Joan of the Angels for Jerzy Kawalerowicz's cult 1961 film, which deals with possession in a 17th century nunnery. Among many other scripts, he also worked with Kawalerowicz on the epic adaptation of Boleslaw Prus's novel Pharoah. Konwicki likewise achieved success as a director with such films as Jump (Salto), the 1965 movie that became a favorite of Martin Scorsese. He also directed his own adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz's novel The Issa Valley, returning to the Lithuanian countryside of his youth." » - David Hudson...

"Tadeusz Konwicki, a prominent Polish writer and filmmaker whose works during the communist era lampooned the authoritarian Soviet-imposed system, has died," reports the AP. And Radio Poland notes that as a screenwriter, "he is noted for adapting Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's novella Mother Joan of the Angels for Jerzy Kawalerowicz's cult 1961 film, which deals with possession in a 17th century nunnery. Among many other scripts, he also worked with Kawalerowicz on the epic adaptation of Boleslaw Prus's novel Pharoah. Konwicki likewise achieved success as a director with such films as Jump (Salto), the 1965 movie that became a favorite of Martin Scorsese. He also directed his own adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz's novel The Issa Valley, returning to the Lithuanian countryside of his youth." » - David Hudson...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2014?

Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2014—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2014 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2014 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Mother Joan of the Angels

Written by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Tadeusz Konwicki, and Jerzy Kawalerowicz

Directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz

Poland, 1961

Tales of possession run deep through any religious or formerly religious society. They may act as a primitive explanation for madness, a cultural example of the physical manifestation of evil, or, on some occasions, a political tool. Though the horror of these events comes in accounts early enough to be placed in the Old Testament, there exists an intellectual horror of possession that pervades the modern world. Though not explicitly speaking of possession, René Descartes hypothesized an omnipotent “evil demon” thought experiment that may help with our idea of the “self”. The idea goes that this demon may be altering the physical world around us, such that our bodies, our environment, all our sensations, as well as the fundamentals of logic and mathematics may simply be an illusion. Whatever is left,...

Above: a Polish poster by Waldemar Swierzy for Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Poland, 1961).

Starting next Wednesday, New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center, in association with Milestone Films, will kick off "Martin Scorsese presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema," a must-see 21-film retrospective that will eventually tour the U.S. and Canada.

To accompany the series, Posteritati is mounting an exhibition in Lincoln Center of original Polish posters for most of the films in the series: a rare chance to see some of these masterpieces in the flesh. Where the film series highlights great auteurs like Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, Wojciech Has and Krzysztof Kieslowski, the exhibition will feature their equivalents in graphic design such as Wojciech Fangor, Franciszek Starowieyski, Roman Cieślewicz, Andrzej Pągowski and Waldemar Świerzy. For those of you who can’t be in New York to see the show, I will be posting some...

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting a filmmaker who was a juror at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. One of the movies in competition was Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Faraon (Pharaoh), an epic of court intrigues in ancient Egypt, and nearly fifty years later he could still describe the opening scene shot for shot.

As the shrill, discordant musique concrete score fades and the credits end, we are looking down upon a featureless expanse of rocky desert. We could be watching from space. A scritchy-scratchy sound is heard, and moments later we realize we're much closer to the Earth's surface, as two scarab beetles enter, wrestling over a ball of dung. The miniature battle immediately seems like a grand metaphor for human endeavor. With a thump, a big Polish-Egyptian head eclipses our view, and this brownface witness then jogs through the serried ranks of two thousand Russian soldiers dressed as Egyptian warriors,...

Cristian Mungiu's prize-winning film is a powerful and sombre meditation on faith and friendship in present-day Romania

Eight years ago the appearance of Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu, a stoical, grimly funny story about the ghastly legacy of the Ceausescu regime, won a major prize at Cannes. It was soon followed by Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and seemed to confirm that something remarkable was happening in the Romanian cinema. Now, after a longish wait, Mungiu has made another feature, Beyond the Hills, a painful and exacting picture that confirms his position as a film-maker of the first rank.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days was set during a single wintry afternoon and evening in 1987 during the rule of Ceausescu and centres around two female students sharing a room in a bleak university dormitory. One is blond, honest, self-sacrificing, the other dark-haired,...

★★★☆☆ Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) is perhaps a film you watch because you feel you should. Like reading Dickens, if your passion is for books, or visiting the Tate Modern if it's art, Kawalerowicz's cult work is pre-requisite, though not necessarily easy viewing for fans of cinema. This depiction of demonic possession in a 17th century Polish convent, starring Lucyna Winnicka in the titular role with support from Mieczyslaw Voit and Anna Ciepielewska, remains a visually stunning exercise of startling cinematic imagery.

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