The film opens with an excerpt from a 1961 article in “France Soir”, recalling a decade of social unrest fuelled by rock music, echoing debates between sociologists and psychiatrists, then leaving readers to decide for themselves. François Reichenbach adopts the same approach in À la mémoire du rock, leaving viewers and their sensibilities to weigh up the phenomenon for themselves. A poetic portrait of young people giving in to the power of early rock, the film kicks off at the wellspring of freedom of expression and frenzied crowds: the large concert hall, namely, the Palais des Sports, where a “Massive Rock Superparty” is taking place. The names of famous rock stars might feature in the credits and technical spec, (Johnny Hallyday, Vince Taylor and Les Chaussettes noires), but we see them without recognising them; they are not the centre of attention. Even the music seems distant – this is not Reichenbach’s main concern; he prefers to stimulate our senses differently, going to the heart of the act of observing, or observing right at the heart of things, up close to the audience, scrutinizing the emotional youngsters who make up that audience. The film is shot through with a kind of melancholy: a dancer has hurt herself, youngsters are running on empty, adults are uneasy, the stars have left the stage… and so on to the end, since all this must come to an end, by dint of blows if need be, and everyone must go home. Boccherini’s String Quintet No. 5 plays to memories of dance and sweat; at the end of the ecstasy, a touch of pure joy recorded by Reichenbach.

Matthieu Grimault

Look out, “flower power” but of the “interpretation of dreams” kind: and here dreams are all about ferns, not flowers – as in the smash-hit song Madame reve by Bashung. According tothe relevant dictionary, a dream about ferns reflects joy and good fortune in one’s personal relationships. In dreams, a fern symbolises protection. Dreaming about ferns denotes gentleness and tender feelings in one’s life. In dreams, a fern can presage a deep, true love. Sometimes, dreaming of ferns heralds the coming of new and meaningful encounters. However, if the fern is dry, pay attention to your state of health. As though in search of an elusive flower in a secret garden, somewhere between classical painting and salon art in the style of Pierre et Gilles ahead of their time, Francois Reichenbach films his cherished travel companions, his Ganymedes in Ektachrome, in pure simplicity. Nus masculins is a loving and gentle home movie out in the open, contrived yet candid. Unapologetically gay. Rebel without a cause. Happily naked. Suggestion and modesty, disinhibition, pathfinding games and glances create a charged eroticism which would make even Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger blush. “In the prayers that imprison and free you”, Bashung all over again. Was this intimate journal meant to be read? Was this film known to Gus Van Sant?

“Dimension, Existence, Culture and Identity all splinter and are left behind. Pink Sound, brothers and sisters. Pinkness. It’s dark. It’s… flat. It is unexplainable… it is peaceful… it is love… …it is…” (Gus Van Sant, Pink, 1997).

Émilie Cauquy

One of the most moving documents of human agony and joy to emerge from World War II, Le Retour follows the liberation and homeward journey of French prisoners from Nazi concentration camps from August to October 1945. From their disbelieving, sunken faces to the hospital recoveries and finally to their journey home by foot, truck, and plane, the camera captures their profound expressions of fear, anticipation and bliss. Confrontations at the border checks, the US airlift over France, and the tentative smiles on the men’s faces as they arrive by train and watch for familiar faces are rendered unforgettably by Cartier-Bresson’s adroit camera. By concentrating on this single event, he has said more about the separation and destruction of war than hours of combat footage. “In the face of great catastrophe and human tragedy,” says film historian Richard Barsam, “the artist is often mute; in reflection he finds that simplicity is the only technique by which to capture the magnitude of the events before him. Cartier-Bresson is such an artist.”

Circulating Film Library Catalog, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1984

Jean-Claude Biette left France at 23 without a word to his family so as to escape military service … The Algerian war was over when he went absent without leave in autumn 1965, but the period of compulsory national service was still 16 months … This key episode in Biette’s life is essentially the subject matter of La partenza. The young man’s “departing”, as told to a friend, takes place in a specific location: Parma and the surrounding area … The young man is played by Giuseppe Bertolucci, whose father was the poet and organiser of Parma’s film club, Attilio Bertolucci, a friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini; Biette had become Pasolini’s occasional French teacher, assistant and the subtitler of some of his films … Here, the colonial “peace-making mission” in Algeria … becomes Bourguiba’s socialist Tunisia, where a young teacher at odds with authority wants to go to teach children. La partenza is one of the four Italian shorts by Jean-Claude Biette … It is part of a trilogy of portraits, all filmed in 1968: Attilio Bertolucci and Sandro Penna are the portraits of two great Italian poets. Accordingly, La partenza, is a portrait of the former’s son and the hidden portrayal (under the phenomenology of an escape) of a high-minded prodigal son as well as a poet of life.

Hervé Joubert-Laurencin

Considered the first example of an anthropological documentary made in Italy and, for some people, a forerunner of the language of neorealism, it tells the story of the pilgrimage undertaken every year on the first Sunday after Pentecost by people from the Ciociaria region and Abruzzo to the Sanctuary of the Most Holy Trinity in Vallepietra, on Mount Autore. The culmination of the feast day is the so-called “weeping of the spinsters”, a prayer chanted by the young unmarried women of the area. It was the first of only two films made by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini, a refined intellectual who made a name for himself after the Second World War as an art and reportage photographer. In the early 1930s, he was hired by the production studio Cines as assistant director to Ludovico Toeplitz and collaborated on the writing of some screenplays with Mario Soldati and Alberto Moravia. Despite winning an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1939, the film was heavily cut by fascist censorship to less than half the leght of the film due to its use of excessively archaic and crudely realistic imagery, which portrayed rural Italy (“a non-conformist short film in which folklore took on a decidedly polemic value” according to Roberto Nepoti) in a way that was not in line with the aesthetic canon of the regime. Pozzi-Bellini, rediscovered today thanks to the research of scholar Elisabetta Giovagnoni, managed to save the original version by depositing the negative at Cinémathèque française, thanks to the help of his friend Henri Langlois. Twenty years later, Gian Vittorio Baldi returned to the same locations to shoot another short film by the same name.