Les canaux de Paris: Un patrimoine révélé

A storm of Modernism swept through the art worlds of the West in the early decades of the twentieth century, uprooting centuries of tradition. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France. For an incandescent moment from 1905 to 1930, Paris was the magnetic center for radical innovation and experiment, and the Mecca for creative talents who would change the course of art throughout the Western world.

Louis Malle presents his entertaining snapshot of the comings and goings on one street corner in Paris.

Paris, at night. This is where Jeni, Wenceslas, Christine, Pascal and the others live. Homeless, they haunt the streets and bridges, and corridors of the metro; on the edge of a world where society no longer offers protection. They face us and they talk.

The 1900 Paris World's Fair as seen from Trocadéro.

Les dessous secrets de Paris

Métro, une ville sur les rails

Megalopolis

Soumaya Sarkis is a 78-year-old Lebanese woman narrating the story of her life briefly.

A poetic ode to the River Seine, Ivens' distinguished camera eye surveys its lively banks and step-stone canals with a vérité candor, a beguiling elan.

A vertical journey through a Parisian social housing estate. From dawn till dusk, floor by floor, different cultures and atmospheres talk to each other in a tender way.

Documentary examining Bokassa's rule in the Central African Republic using the testimony of witnesses and visits to key sites.

Gustave Folcher, a French farmer, wrote in his 1939 diary that the summer had been long and hot. He was not alone. Many other anonymous French men and women wrote of the beauty and warmth of those summer months and how threats of war were far from their minds. Through home movies, diaries and letters, One Last Summer describes the final weeks of peace in France and the mix of blindness, denial and prophetic clear-sightedness of those facing the war that was about to unfold.

In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a fascinating, confrontational, often uncomfortable butting of heads between the filmmakers and their subject, in which the author visits the Bastille and other Parisian landmarks and reflects on revolution, colonialism, and what it means to be a Black expatriate in Europe.

Dans les coulisses du métro de Paris

Tour Eiffel : La Grande Épopée

Disneyland and its Secrets

EMPIRE OF THE MOON wryly deconstructs the experience of being a tourist. Paris, gorgeously photographed in black-and-white, is the setting for cultural explorations ranging from the mundane to the sublime, as visitors trek from icon to icon, snapping the same photos, climbing the same steps and at times experiencing the transformative wonder they came to find.

The film tells of the radical life-search by the Swiss writer Paul Nizon, born 1929 in Bern, Switzerland, who became what “he was meant to be” in Paris. Now 90-year-old, Paul Nizon grants insights into his life and work in a self-ironic, direct manner. The intimate portrait of a great literary outsider emerges, for whom the risk of life and the risk of writing merge into one and the same work of art.

Paris, Latin Quarter. A small cinema that is both famous and marginal, Action Christine. The cashier has taken her camcorder and takes us to this public place, her workplace. Place of life, of passage, of meeting, a window open on the street, behind the hygienic phone, it is the daily life of the cashiers and the openers punctuated by the alternation of surging entrances and idle intersession.

Czech painter and illustrator Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) ranks among the pioneers of the Art Nouveau movement at the end of the 19th century. Virtually overnight, he becomes famous in Paris thanks to the posters that he designs to announce actress Sarah Bernhardt’s plays. But at the height of his fame, Mucha decides to leave Paris to realize his lifetime project.