Films with: Vierny, Sacha

Belly of an architect

Stourley Kracklite, a burly middle-aged American architect, is in Rome to organize a large-scale exhibition of the work of Etienne-Louis Boullee (1728-1799), a visionary French architect. His wife Louisa is along, and a little bored with his cerebral fixations. Surrounded by Roman art and architecture--whose perfect scaling and Classicist surfaces he has always admired--Kracklite is overcome by narcissistic jealousy. Amidst the graceful clean domes, virile statues, and sturdily parallel columns of Roman monuments, Kracklite suspects Louisa of trying to poison him as his prodigious gut begins giving him searing pains. Anxious and paranoid, he's undone by his fear that despite his internal inspirations, an architect is a speck of a thing compared to what he builds--huge, material spectacles that far outlive their progenitors.

DVD 11953

Drowning by numbers

Three generations of women, all with the same name, rid themselves of their unwanted husbands one by one and each in the same way: they drown them. The local coroner agrees to declare each of the deaths accidental in return for sexual favors. But when things don't go exactly as planned, he devises a final game that could result in the undoing of them all.

DVD 11950

Hiroshima mon amour

A Japanese architect and a French actress engage in a brief intense affair in Hiroshima in 1959. Both deal with their personal memories of World War II--he by articulating his firsthand experience with nuclear disaster, she by remembering her traumatic affair with a German soldier.

DVD 1800

Nuit et brouillard Night and fog /

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, this piece documents the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust and contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps' quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage.

DVD 1802