6th César Awards
The 6th César Awards ceremony, presented by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, honoured the best French films of 1980 and took place on 31 January 1981 at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. The ceremony hosted by Pierre Tchernia; the Last Metro won the award for Best Film. The winners are highlighted in bold: 53rd Academy Awards 34th British Academy Film Awards Official website 6th César Awards on IMDb 6th César Awards at AlloCiné
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement. Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which "emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, preferred the great works of the past to experimentation." As a result of such argument, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films. Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV." He is considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with showing knowledge of film history through homages and references, several of his films expressed his political views. Since the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, a Marxist perspective.
In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top-ten directors of all time. He is said to have "created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." He and his work have been central to narrative theory and have "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard did not attend the award ceremony. Godard's films have inspired many directors including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Steven Soderbergh, D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini. From his father, he is the cousin of former President of Peru, he has been married twice, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films. His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as Bande à part and Pierrot le Fou —was called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine.
Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Odile and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician. His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent, his mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas, she was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod. Relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod and pastor Frédéric Monod. Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, his father moved the family to Switzerland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Godard was in France and returned to Switzerland with difficulty, he spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva. Godard attended school in Switzerland. Not a frequent cinema-goer, he attributed his introduction to cinema to a reading of Malraux's essay Outline of a Psychology of Cinema, his reading of La Revue du cinéma, relaunched in 1946.
In 1946, he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through family connections, mixed with members of its cultural elite. He lodged with the writer Jean Schlumberger. Having failed his baccalaureate exam in 1948 he returned to Switzerland, he lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up. He spent time in Geneva with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco, his older sister Rachel encouraged him to paint, in an abstract style. After time spent at a boarding school in Thonon to prepare for the retest, which he passed, he returned to Paris in 1949, he registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris, but did not attend class. He got involved with the young group of film critics at the ciné-clubs. Godard held only French citizenship in 1953, he became a citizen of Gland, canton of Vaud, Switzerland through simplified naturalisation through his Swiss father. In Paris, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, ciné-clubs were gaining prominence.
Godard began attending these clubs – the Cinémathèque, the CCQL, Work and Culture ciné Club, others – which became his regular haunts. The Cinémathèque had been founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936. At these clubs he met fellow film enthusiasts including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut. Godard was part of a generation for, he has said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread—but it isn't the case any more. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope... a telescope.... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer.... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreame
4th César Awards
The 4th César Awards ceremony, presented by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, honoured the best French films of 1978 and took place on 3 February 1979 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. The ceremony hosted by Pierre Tchernia and Jean-Claude Brialy. L'Argent des autres won the award for Best Film. 51st Academy Awards 32nd British Academy Film Awards Official website 4th César Awards on IMDb 4th César Awards at AlloCiné
1st César Awards
The 1st César Awards ceremony, presented by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, honoured the best French films of 1975 and took place on 3 April 1976 at the Palais des congrès in Paris. The ceremony hosted by Pierre Tchernia. Le Vieux Fusil won the award for Best Film; the winners are denoted in bold. 48th Academy Awards 29th British Academy Film Awards Official website 1st César Awards on IMDb 1st César Awards at AlloCiné
Le vieux fusil
Le vieux fusil is a 1975 French film directed by Robert Enrico, starring Philippe Noiret, Romy Schneider and Jean Bouise. It won the 1976 César Award for Best Film, Best Actor and Best Music, was nominated for best director, supporting actor, cinematography and sound; the film is based on the Massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944. In Montauban in 1944, during the German retreat from France, Julien Dandieu is an aging, embittered surgeon in the local hospital. Frightened by the German army entering Montauban, Dandieu asks his friend Francois to drive his wife and his daughter to the remote village where he owns a chateau. One week Dandieu sets off to meet them for the weekend, but the Germans have now occupied the village, he finds that all the villagers have been herded into the shot. In the château, now occupied by the Germans, he finds his daughter shot and his wife immolated by a flame-thrower. Dandieu decides to kill as many Germans as possible to avenge his family, he takes an old shotgun he used as a child while hunting with his father and sabotages the chateau's bridge before he starts to kill them one by one, taking advantage of his knowledge of the secret passages within the chateau.
Trapped inside the castle, the Germans begin to think they are surrounded by many partisans and do not realise that he is, in fact, the only one. When a Resistance detachment drops by, Dandieu refuses their offer to help him and continues his vendetta on his own. With no more cartridges for the shotgun, he collects the flame-thrower which killed his beloved wife and uses it to kill the leading SS officer as he, the last survivor, is about to commit suicide. Alerted by the partisans, the inhabitants of a nearby village and a company of American soldiers arrive to collect the dead. Dandieu is picked up by Francois, but has suffered a nervous breakdown following the aftermath of the slaughter, behaving as if his family was still alive; the film ends with a flashback to one of his happier days now gone, where he and his family had undertaken a bike tour. Philippe Noiret as Julien Dandieu Romy Schneider as Clara Dandieu Jean Bouise as François Joachim Hansen as SS Officer Robert Hoffmann as SS Lieutenant Karl Michael Vogler as Dr. Müller Madeleine Ozeray as Julien's Mother Bruniquel, in the Tarn-et-Garonne department, the village where the film was shot.
Château de Bruniquel, the landmark of the village, where most of the film was shot. Le vieux fusil on IMDb Le vieux fusil at AllMovie Le vieux fusil at Rotten Tomatoes
That Obscure Object of Desire
That Obscure Object of Desire is a 1977 comedy-drama film directed by Luis Buñuel, based on the 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs. It was Buñuel's final directorial effort before his death in July 1983. Set in Spain and France against the backdrop of a terrorist insurgency, the film conveys the story told through a series of flashbacks by an aging Frenchman, who recounts falling in love with a beautiful young Spanish woman, that frustrates his romantic and sexual desires. In recent years, the film has been acclaimed by critics. A dysfunctional and sometimes violent romance happens between Mathieu, a middle-aged, wealthy Frenchman, a young and beautiful flamenco dancer from Seville, played by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina; the two actresses each appear unpredictably in separate scenes, differ not only physically, but temperamentally as well. Most of the film is a flashback recalled by Mathieu; the movie opens with Mathieu travelling by train from Seville to Paris. He is trying to distance himself from his young girlfriend Conchita.
As Mathieu's train is ready to depart, he finds that a bruised and bandaged Conchita is pursuing him. From the train he pours a bucket of water over her head, he believes this will deter her. Mathieu's fellow compartment passengers witness his rude act; these include a mother and her young daughter, a judge, coincidentally a friend of Mathieu's cousin, a psychologist, a dwarf. They inquire about his motivation for such an act, he explains the history of his tumultuous relationship with Conchita; the story is set against a backdrop of terrorist shootings by left-wing groups. Conchita, who claims to be 18 but looks older, has vowed to remain a virgin until marriage, she tantalizes Mathieu with sexual promises, but never allows him to satisfy his sexual desire. At one point she goes to bed with him wearing a laced canvas corset, which he cannot untie, making it impossible to have sexual intercourse. Conchita's antics cause the couple to break up and reunite each time frustrating and confusing Mathieu.
Mathieu finds Conchita dancing nude for tourists in a Seville nightclub. At first he becomes enraged. However, he forgives her and buys her a house. In a climactic scene, soon after moving into the house, Conchita refuses to let Mathieu in at the gate, tells him that she hates him, that kissing and touching him make her sick. To prove her independence, she appears to initiate sexual intercourse with a young man in plain view of Mathieu, although he walks away without witnessing the act; that night he is held up at gunpoint as his car is hijacked. After this, Conchita attempts to reconcile with Mathieu, insisting that the sex was fake and that her "lover" is in reality a homosexual friend. However, during her explanation, Mathieu beats her, causing her bandaged and bruised state seen earlier in the film. Just as the fellow train passengers seem satisfied with this story, Conchita reappears from hiding and dumps a bucket of water on Mathieu. However, the couple reconcile yet again when the train reaches its destination.
After leaving the train, they walk arm in arm. In a mall in Paris, loudspeakers announce that a strange alliance of extremist groups intends to sow chaos and confusion in society through terrorist attacks; the announcement adds. As the couple continues their walk, they pass a seamstress in a shop window mending a bloody nightgown, they begin arguing just as a bomb explodes claiming their lives. That Obscure Object of Desire is most notable for its use of two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, in the single role of Conchita. In his autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel explains the decision to use two actresses to play Conchita: In 1977, in Madrid, when I was in despair after a tempestuous argument with an actress who'd brought the shooting of That Obscure Object of Desire to a halt, the producer, Serge Silberman, decided to abandon the film altogether; the considerable financial loss was depressing us both until one evening, when we were drowning our sorrows in a bar, I had the idea of using two actresses in the same role, a tactic that had never been tried before.
Although I made the suggestion as a joke, Silberman loved it, the film was saved. The book does not identify the actress who had caused the "tempestuous argument," though Buñuel makes it clear that she was neither Carole Bouquet nor Angela Molina. In Luis Buñuel: The Complete Films, editors Bill Krohn and Paul Duncan identify the actress as Maria Schneider, writing the following in regard to the idea of using two actresses to play Conchita:... Buñuel found himself proposing it to Silberman when it became clear after three days of shooting that Maria Schneider was indeed not going to be able to play the part. Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina stepped in... Regarding Buñuel's employment of two actresses to play a single character, most critics were charmed, as exemplified by New York Times film critic Vincent Canby's review, "Conchita is so changeable that Buñuel has cast two lovely new actresses to play her—Carole Bouquet, who looks a little like a young Rita Hayworth, as the coolly enigmatic Conchita, Angela Molina as the earthy, flamenco-d
Costa-Gavras
Costa-Gavras is a Greek-French film director and producer who lives and works in France. He is known for films with overt political themes, such as the thriller Z, but he has made comedies. Most of his movies have been made in French, he produces most of his films himself, through his production company K. G. Productions. Costa-Gavras was born in Arcadia, his family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War, his father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he went to France, where he began studying law in 1951. In 1956, he left his university studies to study film at the French national film school, IDHEC. After film school, he apprenticed under Yves Allégret, became an assistant director for Jean Giono and René Clair.
After several further positions as first assistant director, he directed his first feature film, Compartiment Tueurs, in 1965. His 1967 film Shock Troops was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. In Z, an investigating judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, tries to uncover the truth about the murder of a prominent leftist politician, played by Yves Montand, while government officials and the military attempt to cover up their roles; the film is a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. It had additional resonance because, at the time of its release, Greece had been ruled for two years by the "Regime of the Colonels". Z won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Costa-Gavras and co-writer Jorge Semprún won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Film Screenplay. L'Aveu follows the path of Artur London, a Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage in the Slánský'show trial' in 1952.
State of Siege takes place in Uruguay under a conservative government in the early 1970s. In a plot loosely based on the case of US police official and alleged torture expert Dan Mitrione, an American embassy official is kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a radical leftist urban guerilla group, which interrogates him in order to reveal the details of secret American support for repressive regimes in Latin America. Missing released in 1982 and based on the book The Execution Of Charles Horman, concerns an American journalist, Charles Horman, who disappeared in the bloody coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and backed by the United States in 1973. Horman's father, played by Jack Lemmon, wife, played by Sissy Spacek, search in vain to determine his fate. Nathaniel Davis, US ambassador to Chile from 1971–1973, a version of whose character had been portrayed in the movie, filed a US$150 million libel suit, Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 619 F. Supp. 1372, against the studio and the director, dismissed.
The film won an Oscar for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Betrayed based upon the terrorist activities of American neo-Nazi and white supremacist Robert Mathews and his group The Order. In Music Box, a respected Hungarian immigrant is accused of having commanded an Anti-Semitic death squad during World War II, his daughter, a Chicago defense attorney played by Jessica Lange, agrees to defend him at his denaturalization hearing. The film is inspired by the arrest and trial of Ukrainian immigrant John Demjanjuk and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' realization that his father had been a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party; the film won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival. La Petite Apocalypse was entered into the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival. Amen. was based in part on the controversial 1963 play, Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel, by Rolf Hochhuth; the movie alleges that Pope Pius XII was aware of the plight of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, but failed to take public action to publicize or condemn the Holocaust.
Costa-Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Law and justice, legal/illegal violence, torture are common subjects in his work relevant to his earlier films. Costa-Gavras is an expert of the “statement” picture. In most cases, the targets of Costa-Gavras's work have been right-of-center movements and regimes, including Greek conservatives in and out of the military in Z, right-wing dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing. In a broader sense, this emphasis continues with Amen. Given its focus on the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church during the 1940s. In this political context, L'Aveu provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period. Costa-Gavras is a self-proclaimed communist. Costa-Gavras has brought attention to international issues, some urgent, others problematic, he has done this in the tradition of cinematic story-telling.
Z, one of his most well-known works, is an account of the undermining i
