Films with: Lubtchansky, William

Belle noiseuse

An intimately epic exploration of the convergence between artistry and eroticism. Edouard Frenhofer is a reclusive painter living in the French countryside with his wife. Their lives are radically upended with the arrival of a younger artist and his girlfriend, who becomes the muse that awakens Edouard's fading passions. Rivette creates a layered character study, while also offering an immersive meditation on the creative process.

DVD 13437

Brigands, chapitre VII Brigands, chapter VII /

This crazy, satirical epic humorously portrays several eras in European history. Though the costumes and regimes change, the film suggests, the human motives of lust and greed remain the same. Jumping back and forth in time, the film condemns its characters to an eternity of irony. In one section, a medieval king named Vano, who has a penchant for exotic torture techniques, executes his wife for being unfaithful. Seamlessly the film flashes forward to the early 1930s, with another Vano, played by the same actor, portraying a low-down thief who suddenly seizes power. Intercut with all of this is the story of a contemporary Vano, a hapless drunk who wanders across the underworlds of Europe.

DVD 2714

Jacques Rivette collection

Duelle: The Queen of the Night battles the Queen of the Sun over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on Earth, specifically in modern day Paris. Noroît: On an island beach a woman vows to avenge her brother's death at the hands of a pirate leader. With help, the woman spies on the pirates and then gets a job as bodyguard to the pirate leader. Merry-go-round: Elizabeth sends telegrams to her old boyfriend Ben in NYC and to her younger sister Leo in Rome to join her in Paris, where she is selling her dead father's estate. When Ben and Leo arrive, a mysterious adventure begins.

DVD 13425

Secret défense

A young scientist discovers, from her brother, that their father's death wasn't an accident, but that he was killed by his business partner and friend.

DVD 1412

Shoah

Over a decade in the making, this monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Claude Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, and other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait in which the past is always present.

DVD 11957