French Cinema - vo.rs

A Prophet: Audiard's Prison as a University of Crime

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Most prison films are about survival. A Prophet is about tuition fees. Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film follows Malik El Djebena, a nineteen-year-old French-Algerian who arrives at a French penitentiary with a six-year sentence, no family visiting, no reading skills worth the name, and no protection. He leaves — over the length of the film, in real time that feels like an apprenticeship — as the most dangerous man in the building. What happens between those two points is one of the great screen educations, and Audiard shoots it as exactly that: a curriculum, delivered under duress, in a place designed to teach nobody anything.

La Jetee: The Time-Travel Masterpiece Told in Stills

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

There is a single moving shot in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, and it lasts a few seconds. A woman lies asleep in soft morning light, and her eyes open. Everything else in the film’s twenty-eight minutes is a photograph — hundreds of black-and-white stills, cut together over a narrator’s voice and Trevor Duncan’s music, held long enough that you begin to read them the way you read a comic panel or a memory. When that one image finally stirs, when the sleeping face blinks, the effect is genuinely startling, and Marker has spent the whole film loading the gun. He turns the most ordinary thing in cinema — motion — into the rarest, and by rationing it he makes you feel the difference between a photograph and a life.

Rififi: The Half-Hour Heist Told in Silence

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

For roughly half an hour in the middle of Rififi, nobody speaks. No music plays. Four men break into a jeweller’s on the Rue de Rivoli, and Jules Dassin films their labour in near-total silence — the scrape of a chisel, the muffled tap of a hammer wrapped in cloth, a drill biting concrete, the tiny clink of a tool set down. It is the most famous sequence in the entire heist genre, and it remains, seventy years on, the standard against which every screen robbery is measured. Directors still study it frame by frame. Almost none of them dare copy the silence.

Le Samourai: Melville and the Coldest Hit Man in Cinema

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The film opens on a nearly empty room and holds it. A man lies fully dressed on a narrow bed in the grey half-light, smoke rising from a cigarette, a small bird chirping in a cage by the window. Nothing happens for a long time. Then a title card offers a line about the loneliness of the samurai, attributed to the Bushido, the code of the warrior — an “epigraph” Jean-Pierre Melville is widely thought to have written himself and simply invented a source for, which is the perfect first move for a film so devoted to the beautiful lie of ritual. The man on the bed is Jef Costello. He is a contract killer, and over the next hundred minutes Melville will watch him perform the rites of his trade with the gravity of a priest at an altar.