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...

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

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....

An experimental short from 1923 France which offers silent narrative in diverse, optical multi-exposures and severe close-ups offering dense montages which create psychological constructs that unfold a Parisian love affair which turns into a threesom...

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

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 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....

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

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....

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A visitor from the western front tells young children, in a sober commentary, about the battle of Verdun....

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....