Jean Delannoy
Jean Delannoy was a French actor, film editor and film director. Although Delannoy was born in a Paris suburb, his family was from Haute-Normandie in the north of France, he was a Protestant, a descendant of Huguenots, some of whom fled the country during the French Wars of Religion, settled first in Wallonia. Afterwards, their name became De la Noye and Delano, who were on the second ship to immigrate to Plymouth, Massachusetts, he was a student in Paris. He landed a job with Paramount Studios Parisian facilities, working his way up to head film editor. In 1934 he went on to a long career, both writing and directing. In 1946, his film about a Protestant minister titled La symphonie pastorale was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1960, his film, Maigret tend un piège was nominated for a BAFTA award for "Best Film from any Source". In recognition of his long service to the French motion picture industry, in 1986 Delannoy received an Honorary César Award. Delannoy died on 18 June 2008, at the age of 100.
The Beautiful Sailor The Improvised Son The Premature Father Paris-Deauville Casanova Women's Club Nitchevo Michel Strogoff Golden Venus The Black Diamond Macao, l'enfer du jeu L'Éternel retour La symphonie pastorale Les jeux sont faits Aux yeux du souvenir Le Secret de Mayerling Dieu a besoin des hommes La Minute de vérité Napoleon Road Destinées Obsession Marie-Antoinette reine de France The Hunchback of Notre Dame Maigret tend un piège Venere Imperiale Les amitiés particulières Le Lit a Deux Places Le Majordome Le Lit à deux places Les Sultans Action Man La Peau de torpedo Pas folle la guêpe Jean Delannoy on IMDb
The Beautiful Person
The Beautiful Person is a 2008 French film directed by Christophe Honoré. It is a modernized adaptation of the seventeenth-century French novel La Princesse de Clèves. Honoré was inspired to make the film after French president Nicolas Sarkozy criticized the book as irrelevant in regard to modern life. After the death of her mother, Junie transfers to the school, she catches the attention of a lot of people Otto and Nemours, her Italian teacher. In Italian class, a record of Maria Callas singing Lucia plays, which causes Junie to rush out crying, leaving her affairs behind. Nemours swipes it. After this, Nemours pursues her though she has mixed feelings about it, he is so enamored by her that he breaks off his relationships with Florence Perrin, a teacher, Marie, a student. Nemours switches seats with Mathias during a field trip. Marie sees a letter left on the seat and it spreads throughout the student body; this letter is a love letter. Junie, upon reading the letter, becomes upset, believing that Nemours is in love with somebody else.
Mathias goes to Nemours and explains that it was his letter from another boy named Martin and asked him to say that it belonged to the teacher. One of Otto's friends from the Russian language class is asked to spy on her after Junie acts cold to Otto and sees Nemours acting tender to Junie, he mistakes it for Otto confronts Junie about the misunderstanding. She goes home. Otto kills himself the next day by jumping from a high floor at school. After Otto's suicide, Junie skips school for three weeks coming only after Nemours tells Mathias that he will be taking sick leave until the end of the semester. Nemours follows Junie around and she decides to approach him, he asks for some time to talk to her and they are seen running around the city like children. He takes her back to his room, he takes her home. Nemours waits till seven calls Mathias. Mathias comes down and tells Nemours that Junie left yesterday, he is not allowed to say where and to forget about her. Junie said she never wanted to see Nemours again.
Junie is seen on a ship departing for somewhere else. In parenthesis are the corresponding characters from La Princesse de Clèves, where appropriate the historical originals. Louis Garrel as Jacques Nemours Léa Seydoux as Junie de Chartres Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as Otto Clèves Esteban Carvajal Alegria as Matthias de Chartres Anaïs Demoustier as Catherine Agathe Bonitzer as Marie Valois Simon Truxillo as Henri Valois Jacob Lyon as Jacob Tanel Derard as Tanel Martin Simeon as Martin Jeanne Audiard as Jeanne Esther Garrel as Esther Clotilde Hesme as Mme. de Tournon, The Librarian Valérie Lang as Florence Perrin, History Teacher and ex-lover of Nemours Chantal Neuwirthas Nicole, Hostess of the café Sully Jean-Michel Portalas Estouteville, The Math Teacher Dominic Gould as English Teacher Alice Butaud as Russian Teacher Matilde Incerti as French Teacher Chiara Mastroianni as girl in the café Sully The film was shot in four weeks between 27 December 2007 and the 30 January 2008, at the Lycée Molière, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
Several of the scenes were filmed in the streets of Paris and in the metro stations Passy and Quai de la gare. Chiara Mastroianni made a cameo appearance while the character Junie is sitting in the café, she played the equivalent character to Junie in another film adaptation, La Lettre, of The Princess of Cleves. The Beautiful Person on IMDb
Secondary education in France
In France, secondary education is in two stages: collèges cater for the first four years of secondary education from the ages of 11 to 15. Lycées provide a three-year course of further secondary education for children between the ages of 15 and 18. Pupils are prepared for the baccalauréat, which can lead to higher education studies or directly to professional life; the school year ends in early July. Metropolitan French school holidays are scheduled by the Ministry of Education by dividing the country into three zones to prevent overcrowding by family holidaymakers of tourist destinations, such as the Mediterranean coast and ski resorts. Lyon, for example, is in zone A, Marseille is in zone B and Paris and Bordeaux are in zone C. In contrast to the practice in most other education systems, the school years in France are numbered on a decreasing scale. Thus, pupils begin their secondary education in the sixième, transfer to a lycée in the seconde, the final year is the terminale. In French, the word étudiant is reserved for university-level students, collège and lycée students are referred to as élèves.
The curriculum is standardized for all French public institutions. Changes to the programme are made every year by the French Ministry of Education and are published in the Ministry's Bulletin Officiel de l'Éducation Nationale, the official reference bulletin for educators; the collège is the first level of secondary education in the French educational system. A pupil attending collège is called collégienne. Men and women teachers at the collège- and lycée-level are called professeur; the City of Paris refers to a collège in English as a "high school."Entry in sixième occurs directly after the last year of primary school, called cours moyen deuxième année. There is no entrance examination into collège, but administrators have established a comprehensive academic examination of students starting in sixième; the purpose of the examination is evaluating pupils' level on being graduated from primary school. The table at the right details the French curriculum. Along with three-to-four weekly hours of physical education, a typical school week consists of some twenty-six hours of schooling.
French language and literature occupy the most time, 4–5 hours per week, followed by mathematics, 4 hours per week. The curriculum is devised by the French Ministry of National Education and applies to all collèges in France and for AEFE-dependent institutions. Académies and individual schools have little margin for curriculum customisation. Teachers compose syllabi per precise government educational regulations, choose textbooks accordingly; each subject is taught by a different "professeur" or teacher. Collège pupils stay in the same class throughout the school year, in every subject, so each year group is divided into as many classes as necessary; the strong belief in teaching in mixed-ability classes means. Class size varies from school to school, but ranges from 20 to 35 pupils; each class has a professeur principal, the link between the teaching staff and pupils. The role of the collège is to prepare students for the advanced subjects of the lycée. At the end of the troisième class, students sit for le diplôme national du Brevet, an end-of-collège examination.
During the last conseil de classe of the year, held in June and administrators decide whether or not a pupil can progress to the next grade. In deciding, they evaluate the student's skills and behaviour. Three outcomes are possible: the student progresses to the next grade. A student asked to repeat a grade can appeal said decision; the decision of the appeals council is final. French parents are not free to choose the state school. Reasons for attending a state school, not their nearest include studying an option unavailable in the school to which they were assigned. For many reasons, many parents consider the allocated school inadequate if they do not like the idea of their children mixing with some of the other pupils at the school; this is the case in poor neighbourhoods with large foreign immigrant populations. In any city, there are "better" lycées and collèges, which parents would prefer their children attend; the two main methods used in such circumstances to get children into a school other than their assigned school are: paying for subsidised private schooling.
A similar trick is used in cases where some classes in a sch
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
Fidelity (film)
Fidelity is a 2000 French drama film written and directed by Andrzej Żuławski and starring Sophie Marceau, Pascal Greggory, Guillaume Canet. Based on Madame de La Fayette's seventeenth century novel La Princesse de Clèves, the film is about a talented photographer who lands a lucrative job in Paris with a scandal-mongering tabloid and becomes romantically involved with an eccentric children's book publisher while resisting the sexual advances of another photographer. Filmed on location in Paris, Fidelity received the Cabourg Romantic Film Festival Award for Best Actress and the Golden Swann Award. Talented Canadian photographer Clélia lands a lucrative job in Paris with a tabloid called La Verite run by scandal-mongerer Rupert MacRoi. Clélia's mother once dated MacRoi years ago while working as a cabaret singer. Once she became pregnant with Clélia, she married Clélia's father. Accompanying her daughter to Paris, she tells Clélia that her strongest principle was honour, encourages her to get married and settle down.
In Paris Clélia gives a television interview and talks about her two successful books of photography: a "study of absence" showing empty streets and deserted landscapes, a study of fashion models without showing their faces. While walking the Paris streets taking photographs, Clélia meets Clève, a bumbling middle-aged children's book publisher, preparing to marry MacRoi's wealthy daughter to bolster his flagging publishing house. Clève is attracted to Clélia and invites her back to his office where they make love. Afterwards, she meets Clève's brother Bernard, a Catholic bishop, their father. At the La Verite offices, Clélia finds most of her co-workers to be disillusioned and perverse—all knowing that they "earn their keep on dirt." At her first assignment covering a hockey team that MacRoi purchased, Clélia finds herself in the team's locker room surrounded by naked players celebrating their victory. MacRoi is there and after teasing her about her taking photos of the naked players asks if she'll join his family for a dinner party.
Before she leaves, Clélia has sex with one of the players. At MacRoi's dinner party, Clève loudly declares his love for Clélia before his entire family, including his fiancé, Genièvre MacRoi, the sister of Rupert MacRoi. Genièvre responds by hitting him; that evening, following MacRoi's announcement of the purchase of Clève's publishing company, Clève's father collapses and dies while his son and Clélia look on. Clève asks Clélia never to leave him. At the funeral, Clève confides in Clélia his fears that MacRoi will not respect his family's publishing house now that he owns it, saying, "He massacres all, upright and inneficient and noble." Soon after, Clélia and her mother move into Clève's house. He gives her his mother's engagement ring. In bed she reads lines from a W. H. Auden poem, "This like a dream keeps other time, daytime is the loss of this, for time is inches and the heart's changes, where ghost has haunted lost and wanted, but this was never a ghost's endeavor, nor finished this, was ghost at ease, till it pass love shall not near the sweetness here nor sorrow take his endless look."
Clélia's first portfolio of photos for La Verite creates a sensation and she is congratulated by her colleagues—all except Némo, a sexy young photographer who promptly propositions her upon their first encounter. In spite of her sexual attraction to Némo, Clélia marries Clève in a ceremony marred somewhat by the presence of La Verite photographers and reporters, including Némo. After the wedding, Némo leaves his girlfriend, Ina, a former African princess and Parisian prostitute whom he met investigating the illegal organ trade, he delivers his wedding photos to Clélia's home. Upset at the intrusion, suspecting her daughter is having an affair, Clélia's mother collapses and soon dies. Némo continues to follow Clélia taking photos of her in her house making love to her husband, she learns that Némo was given this assignment by MacRoi, looking to find dirt on Clève. Although she continues to see Némo, Clélia resolutely keeps to her wedding vows in the face of her suitor's continued advances, she travels by train to Normandy to attend a motorcycle event.
During the race Némo crashes, Clélia rushes to his side, revealing her feelings for him. At the celebration afterwards, Némo gets drunk and loud, talking about his investigation into the illegal organ trade and the shady International characters involved; that night he and Clélia take the train back to Paris together. After Némo is attacked by a gang hired by the illegal organ traffickers, Clélia asks him to show her the world he is investigating—a dark world of brutal human fighting to the death. Throughout their time together, Némo continues his advances toward her; when she returns to her home, Clève is convinced she is having an affair, despite her promises that she's never lied to him and will never be unfaithful to him. After learning that his brother the bishop has run off with a married woman, Clève says he will join his brother in Plougastel-Daoulas in Brittany at The Happy Inn. After they make love Clève writes on the bathroom mirror, "Oh but what worm am I the victim of that you unabashed did what I never wished confessed another love and I submissive, felt unwanted and went out?"
After he leaves, Clélia calls the offices of La Verite to inform them of Bishop Bernard's "love-nest" in Brittany, soon the scandal erupts in the news. Clélia watches the television coverage of his public humiliation. Clève does not retur
Manoel de Oliveira
Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira GCSE, GCIH was a Portuguese film director and screenwriter born in Cedofeita, Porto. He first began making films in 1927, when he and some friends attempted to make a film about World War I. In 1931 he completed his first film Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary about his home city Porto made in the city symphony genre, he made his feature film debut in 1942 with Aniki-Bóbó and continued to make shorts and documentaries for the next 30 years, gaining a minimal amount of recognition without being considered a major world film director. Among the numerous factors that prevented Oliveira from making more films during this time period were the political situation in Portugal, family obligations and money. In 1971, Oliveira directed his second feature narrative film and Present, a social satire that both set the standard for his film career afterwards and gained him recognition in the global film community, he continued making films of growing ambition throughout the 1970s and 1980s, gaining critical acclaim and numerous awards.
Beginning in the late 1980s he was one of the most prolific working film directors and made an average of one film per year past the age of 100. In March 2008 he was reported to be the oldest active film director in the world, he was the only filmmaker whose active career spanned from the silent era to the digital age. Among his numerous awards were the Career Golden Lion from the 61st Venice International Film Festival, the Special Lion for the Overall Work in the 42nd Venice International Film Festival, an Honorary Golden Palm for his lifetime achievements in 2008 Cannes Film Festival, the French Legion of Honor. Oliveira was born on 11 December 1908 in Porto, Portugal, to Francisco José de Oliveira and Cândida Ferreira Pinto, his family were agricultural landowners. His father owned a dry-goods factory, produced the first electric light bulbs in Portugal and built an electric energy plant before he died in 1932. Oliveira was educated at the Colegio Universal in Porto before attending a Jesuit boarding school in Galicia, Spain.
As a teenager his goal was to become an actor. At 17, he joined his brothers as an executive in his father's factories, where he remained for the majority of his adult life when not making films. In a 1981 Sight and Sound article, John Gillett describes Oliveira as having "spent most of his life in business... making films only when circumstances allowed."From an early age, Oliveira was interested in the poverty of the lower classes, the arts and films. While he named D. W. Griffith, Eric von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line as early influences, he was disappointed to have no Portuguese filmmakers to emulate; the Portuguese film industry was highly censored and restricted under the fascist Salazar regime that lasted from the early 1930s until the mid-1970s. His films, such as The Cannibals and Belle Toujours, suggest an affinity with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, he stated "I'm closer to Buñuel. He's a reverse Catholic and I was raised a Catholic.
It's a religion that permits sin, Buñuel at the deepest is one of the most moralistic directors but he does everything to the contrary. I never say that I'm Catholic because to be Catholic is difficult. I prefer to be thought of as a great sinner." Oliveira's first attempt at filmmaking was in 1927 when he and his friends worked on a film about the Portuguese experience in World War I, although the film was never made. He enrolled in Italian film-maker Rino Lupo's acting school at age 20 and appeared as an extra in Lupo's film Fátima Milagrosa. Years in 1933 he had the distinction of having acted in the second Portuguese sound film, A Canção de Lisboa. Oliveira turned his attention back to filmmaking when he saw Walther Ruttmann's documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City. Ruttman's film is the most famous of a small, short lived silent documentary film genre: city symphony films; these films portrays the life of a city through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city's daily life.
Other examples include Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Oliveira said that Ruttman's film was his "most useful lesson in film technique", but that he found it cold and lacking humanity; the discovery of Ruttman's film prompted Oliveira to direct his own first film in 1931, a documentary short titled Douro, Faina Fluvial. The film is a portrait of his hometown Porto and the labor and industry that takes place along the cities main river, the Douro River. Rino Lupo invited Oliveira to show the film at the International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon, where the majority of the Portuguese audience booed; however other foreign critics and artists who were in attendance praised the film, such as Luigi Pirandello and Émile Vuillermoz. Oliveira re-edited the film with a new soundtrack and re-released it in 1934, and again in 1994, Oliveira modified the film by adding a new, more avant-garde soundtrack by Freitas Branco. Over the next 10 years Oliveira struggled to make films, abandoning several ambitious projects and making a handful of short documentaries on subjects ranging from artistic portraits of coastal cities in Portugal to industrial films on the origins of Portugal's auto industry.
One of these shorts was a documentary about the inauguration of the hydro-electrical plant that his father built, Hulha Branca. He first met and befriended Portuguese playwright José
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, designer, playwright and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants Terribles, the films The Blood of a Poet, Les Parents Terribles and the Beast and Orpheus, he was described as "one of avant-garde's most influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte, his father was a lawyer and amateur painter. From 1900–1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre, he left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes. During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver; this was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, numerous other writers and artists with whom he collaborated. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917, it was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. The piece was expanded into a full opera, with music by Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins." He denied being in any way attached to the movement.
Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking; the popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of his friends. In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet, they collaborated extensively and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau got Radiguet exempted from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps, exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize; some contemporaries and commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship.
Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature. There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral and left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les noces by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style, his most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium: Journal of drug rehabilitation, he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929, his account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world.
Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church, he again returned to the Church in life and undertook a number of religious art projects. Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his play La Voix humaine; the story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her departing lover, leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication. Cocteau acknowledged in the introduction to the script that the play was motivated, in part, by complaints from his actresses that his works were too writer/director-dominated and gave the players little opportunity to show off their full range of talents. La Voix humaine was written, as an extravagant aria for Madame Berthe Bovy. Before came Orphée turned into one of hi