Movies: Antonin Artaud

A classic of the silent age, this film tells the story of the doomed but ultimately canonized 15th-century teenage warrior. On trial for claiming she'd spoken to God, Jeanne d'Arc is subjected to inhumane treatment and scare tactics at the hands of c...

A biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political s...

Obsessed with a general's wife, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism....

The young and patriotic student Demachy joins the French army in 1914 to defend his country. But he and his comrades soon experience the terrifying, endless trench war in Champagne, where more and more wooden crosses have to be erected for this canno...

Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Fel...

Adapted from the novel L'Argent by Émile Zola, the film portrays the world of banking and the stock market in Paris in the 1920s....

Two women love the same man in a world of few prospects. In Budapest, Liliom is a "public figure," a rascal who's a carousel barker, loved by the experienced merry-go-round owner and by a young, innocent maid. The maid, Julie, loses her job after goi...

French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families....

A dramatized re-enactment and documentary of the Battle of Verdun as seen by both French and German soldiers, shot on site of the actual battle....

During a trip to Naples, a young French man falls in love with a fisherman's granddaughter, Graziella. They are separated when he must return to France, and Graziella soon dies....

The French-language version of the The Threepenny Opera with a different cast from the German version....

Valerian writes his uncle, colonial millionaire, for money. He meets a quartermaster, Napoleon, who pretends to be a doctor of law. They become friends....

A lieutenant of the French navy, ready to kill himself in despair, renounces his project after spending a night with a beautiful stranger, the Princess of Lystrie....

Frank Castorf has adapted Racine and combined this material with texts by Artaud. His art of theatrical and vital immoderation explores how, when it comes to this classical French author, the tragedy of existence is born from collusions between priva...

A short silent documentary on the making of the 1931 Abel Gance directed film, "La Fin du Monde"....

Koenigsmark is a 1935 British-French drama film directed by Maurice Tourneur and starring Elissa Landi, John Lodge and Pierre Fresnay. The film is based on the novel Koenigsmark by Pierre Benoît. It's sets were designed by the art director Lucien Agu...

Based on Charles Cunat's novel, Surcouf tells a romanticized version of the life story of Robert Surcouf, a French privateer and slave trader who operated in the Indian Ocean from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century....

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Hardly one of French filmmaker Abel Gance's masterpieces, The Torture of Silence nevertheless has more dramatic and psychological value than your average romantic-triangle tale. Simply put, the film concerns a doctor, his wife, and his brother. The d...

A second version of Gance's Napoléon, with sound....