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A central figure in French cinema, Bertrand Tavernier has an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft of filmmaking akin to the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. The sense of history he possesses is seen in both his narrative and documentary, the latter of which is perhaps best exemplified in his recent film My Journey Through French Cinema. Clocking in at 3.5 hours, that 2016 documentary has now received a follow-up expansion with an eight-part series and we’re pleased to debut the U.S. trailer.

Titled Journeys Through French Cinema, the director-writer-actor-producer explores the filmmakers that most influenced him, how the cinema of France changed when the country was German occupation, the unknown films and filmmakers he admires (with a focus on female directors), and much more. From better-known filmmakers such as Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Demy to ones in need of (re)discovery such as Raymond Bernard, Maurice Turner,...

Danièle Delorme and Jean Gabin in 'Deadlier Than the Male.' Danièle Delorme movies (See previous post: “Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 Actress Became Rare Woman Director's Muse.”) “Every actor would like to make a movie with Charles Chaplin or René Clair,” Danièle Delorme explains in the filmed interview (ca. 1960) embedded further below, adding that oftentimes it wasn't up to them to decide with whom they would get to work. Yet, although frequently beyond her control, Delorme managed to collaborate with a number of major (mostly French) filmmakers throughout her six-decade movie career. Aside from her Jacqueline Audry films discussed in the previous Danièle Delorme article, below are a few of her most notable efforts – usually playing naive-looking young women of modest means and deceptively inconspicuous sexuality, whose inner character may or may not match their external appearance. Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (“Open for Inventory Causes,” 1946), an unreleased, no-budget comedy notable...

Above: Bedrich Dlouhy’s 1970 poster for Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950).Flipping through the website of the incomparable Czech poster store Terry Posters the other day, I came across an artist whose name I hadn’t known before. I was aware of some of Bedřich Dlouhý’s posters: his split-screen design for Věra Chytilová’s Something Different was one of my favorites in Isabel Stevens’s recent piece on Chytilová’s posters in Sight & Sound, and I knew his designs for Rashomon, Red Desert, The Pink Panther and 8 1/2, but I had never put two and two together that they were by the same designer.Part of the reason I didn’t know more of his work is that most of the films Dlouhý worked on in the ten years that he was designing posters (from 1962 to 1971) were films from the Eastern Bloc that are little known here. Films from Hungary, Yugoslavia...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 22, 2013

Price: DVD $24.95, Blu-ray $29.95

Studio: Olive Films

Bourvil (l) and Jean Gabin star in the 1958 French film version of Les Miserables.

French filmmaker Jean-Paul le Chanois’s 1958 film version of Les Miserables is considered to be one of the greatest epic drama movie adaptations of Victor Hugo’s renowned novel.

Jean Valjean (Jean Gabin, Remorques) is paroled after serving 19 year term in a hard labor prison for stealing some bread. After spending a night in a missionary, he tries to steal some silverware, but he is set straight by a kindly bishop (Fernand Ledoux) who protects him from the police and makes him promise that he has to become a new man. Nine years later, Valjean has become a wealthy industrialist and a mayor. He eventually befriends Fantine (Daniele Delorme), a single mother turned prostitute and risks everything when he comes to her aid, after she...

Italian film director celebrated for his insightful short films

The film director Vittorio De Seta, who has died aged 88, was best known for his short films. A selection of these, made in Sicily and Sardinia in the 1950s, was presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2005 Tribeca film festival in New York. Scorsese described De Seta's style as that of "an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet". The film historian Goffredo Fofi has hailed De Seta as an Italian director "to be remembered alongside the Rossellinis and De Sicas, the Antonionis and the Fellinis"; he also deserves to be remembered alongside the great poetic documentary makers, such as Robert Flaherty, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright.

De Seta was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an aristocratic landowning family from Calabria. He enrolled in the navy during the second world war and, after the armistice in 1943, refused to sign allegiance...

According to a title card at the end of Laissez-Passer, Bertrand Tavernier's fact-based drama of the French film industry in wartime, Maurice Tourneur hated the scripts of the few movies he made post-wwii. So there's that.

But his last film, Impasse des Deux Anges (1948), fascinates. If the script has a flaw, it's that it takes a very simple, predictable story (actress runs away from groom the night before her marriage, with an old lover who's also a jewel thief—pursued through the night by gangsters, they conclude their relationship so she can move on) and attempts to reinvigorate it at regular intervals with dizzying tonal shifts, implausible new characters and sub-plots, and ghostly, somnambular flashbacks. But the flaw is also a strength, since it makes the film jazzy, offbeat and strange.

As the "two angels" (though the title really refers to a dead-end street where they made love in...