Two teenagers, Pascal and Christiane, run away from their home together. Wandering on the streets, they are taken up by a few random things, a brief encounter with a student protester, the Rolling Stones magazine, and an essay in the newspaper titled "How to tell your parents you are pregnant". Then they steal a car and land in a desolate mansion on the outskirts of town. Short of other means of entertainment, they dance in the hall and play games like young kids, wrestling in the woods, chasing each other, dressing up in costumes and playing pretends. They also talk about their problems with their own families. Their games and conversations alternate with interviews of adult people, a university professor, a parent and a TV director endeavouring to explain the youngsters’ behaviours.
Two teenagers, Marie and Jésus, love each other and want to live together. But their parents are against this idea. When Marie gets pregnant, her mother forces her to get an abortion and to leave Jésus… As its religious yet impious title implies, the film depicts Marie in a hodgepodge of biblical references. Amid imageries of the pop chaos of the 60s - the golden age of Barthes, Lacan, Debord, Marx and Coca-Cola - is the iconography of the Holy Trinity, scattered, flipped around and all out of place: Marie is blended with Mary Magdalene, Jésus is confused with Joseph. As the story unfolds, we dive slowly and surreptitiously into a youthful world of cries and revolts, mutism and withdrawal, madness and fabulation.
The silent film centres on a young couple and their four-year-old son who are fleeing in the face of an unknown but still considerable menace, as if they were stalked by a war that can only be seen on their faces and through their gestures. They move away from their house and then run through the fields, cross roads and eventually come to a desolate landscape. As the trio flees into the unknown, an intangible sense of menace steadily increases, threatening to expose the profound psychological trauma within their enigmatic family. But the child progressively comes off the terror that has taken hold of them. In this landscape of desolation and unease, we see the weakest aspect of beings, and this little boy stages his revolt.
The film tells the devastating story of a Parisian couple who fall in love and then fall to pieces, descending into drug addiction and mutually-enforced self-destruction. Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker. One evening, in a villa near Paris, he meets Elie, who is an actress. The two fall in love after having a one-night stand. Elie tells Jean-Baptiste that she has a little boy, whose father is an actor. Swann, the child, thus enters Jean-Baptiste’s life. Jean-Baptiste and Elie try to build a life together, and “the couple” almost achieve something close to happiness when the child is around. Until Elie goes on tour with her theatre troupe and Jean-Baptiste falls into a nervous breakdown…
The protagonist, young poet François falls in love with a beautiful sculptor, Lilie. Focusing more around atmosphere than narrative, the film follows François, Lilie, and their group of disaffected friends as their initial enthusiasm for revolution is replaced by creeping decadence and a gradual erosion of their ideals, which culminates in a retreat to a mansion in the woods where they hang out and smoke opium. The group of young students find themselves standing on the threshold of a new era; or at least that’s what it feels like, and they explore all the ways they can find to distinguish their lives from those of their parents.
After a devastating breakup, heartbroken twenty-three-year old Jeanne has nowhere else to stay in Paris other than the small flat of her university professor father, Gilles. But when Jeanne arrives, she discovers that her father’s new girlfriend has moved into the flat as well: Ariane, an optimistic, lifeloving young woman, who is the same age as Jeanne. An unusual triangular relationship emerges among the three as both girls seek the attention and favor of Gilles, as daughter or lover. Initially rivals, a friendship tentatively develops between the young women. Each is looking for their own kind of love in a city filled with possibilities. They find common ground with each other despite their many differences.
Directed by: Dennis Hopper
Written by: Peter Fonda / Dennis Hopper / Terry Southern
Starring: Peter Fonda / Dennis Hopper / Antonio Mendoza
Plot:
In an epic journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans, motorcycling drug dealers Wyatt and Billy head out on their choppers on a psychedelic journey. They stash their money away in their gastank and set off for a trip across America, on their own personal odyssey looking for a way to lead their lives.
DEATH BY HANGING
Directed by: Nagisa Ôshima
Written by: Tsutomu Tamura / Mamoru Sasaki / Michinori Fukao / Nagisa Ôshima
Starring: Kei Satô / Fumio Watanabe / Toshirô Ishidô / Nagisa Ôshima
Plot:
The film opens with a scene of an execution chamber at the corner of a Japanese prison yard, where R., a young ethnic Korean prisoner, convicted of raping and killing two Japanese girls, is hung. He survives the execution but loses his memory. The prison officials who witness the hanging debate what to do with him since Japanese law forbids the execution of an individual who does not recognize their crime. They decide that they must persuade R. to admit his guilt by reminding him of his crimes. So they act out their idea of both his early life and his crimes, in an effort to evoke his memory. Yet carried away, in an overzealous moment of reenactment, one of the officials actually re-commits one of R.'s crimes. Meanwhile, in the death chamber, a Korean girl whom R. seems to know and whom he calls "sister" appears. She tries to convince R. that his crime was actually caused by Japanese imperialism. And her appearance invokes something both in R. and in the officials…
THEOREM
Directed by: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written by: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Starring: Terence Stamp / Silvana Mangano / Massimo Girotti / Anne Wiazemsky
Plot:
A handsome, enigmatic stranger arrives at a bourgeois household in Milan and successively seduces the son, the mother, the daughter and the father, not forgetting the maid. Then, as abruptly and mysteriously as he arrived, he departs. Unable to endure the void left in their lives, the father hands over his factory to the workers, the son abandons his vocation as a painter, the mother abandons herself to random sexual encounters, and the daughter sinks into catatonia. The maid, however, becomes a saint.
THE CREMATOR
Directed by: Juraj Herz
Written by: Ladislav Fuks
Starring: Vlasta Chramostová / Rudolf Hrusínsky / Jirí Menzel
LUCÍA
Directed by: Humberto Solás
Written by: Julio García Espinosa / Nelson Rodríguez / Humberto Solás
Starring: Raquel Revuelta / Eslinda Núñez
Plot:
The story is told in a novel way in three separate episodes in Cuban history: the Cuban war of independence, the 1930s during the regime of Gerardo Machado and the 1960s, each centred around a woman called Lucía. Her different social classes are corresponded to the three stages of Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Socialist Revolution. The first episode is set in 1895, when the Cuban nationalists were warring against the Spanish rule. Lucía is an aristocrat with ruffles at her throat. She fall in love with a stranger who claims to be apolitical and elopes with him. It turns out that he was simply using her to discover the nationalist' secret headquarters and he abandoned her during their escape. In the end Lucía kills her betrayer. The second Lucía is a daughter of the middle class, flees her parents' world of canasta parties and takes off with Aldo, a young revolutionary. The last Lucía is a stunning young field worker, newly wed to a hulk.