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....

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...

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...

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...

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

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....

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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...

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

One of the most popular melodrama films directed by Abel Gance. A paranoide, fanatical and obsessively jealous husband obducts his own son to bully his wife....

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...

Two sisters struggle to stay on the straight and narrow....

In 1842, during the conquest of Algeria Sidonie Panache disguised as a Soave runs away with her lover who is doing his military service there....

Mathusalem (or Methuselah) is a 1922 play by Ivan Goll, considered a precursor of the theater of the absurd. The 1927 run of the play saw five sequences-- some of Jean Painlevé's earliest film work-- projected against a backdrop of white clouds....

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....

An eight part ciné-novel (episodic film) set during the French Revolution, telling the story of the Dauphin's childhood in Versailles, his life at the Conciergerie during the Revolution, and his untimely death....