Marcel L'Herbier

Produced for television by Claude-Jean Philippe, the « Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma », recounts the history of French cinema from its birth to the beginning of the 1960s. With commentary read by Jean Rochefort.

Adapted from the novel L'Argent by Émile Zola, the film portrays the world of banking and the stock market in Paris in the 1920s.

In Granada in Spain, Sibilla works as a dancer in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child. The boy's father Estiria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardising the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman. Iliana however slips away from her engagement party to meet her real lover Hedwick, a Swedish painter. Sibilla, in desperation after a further rejection by Estiria, sees an opportunity to blackmail him by locking the lovers overnight in their meeting-place in the Alhambra.

A scandalised Frenchman returns from Africa where he has been involved in illegal trading of mines (resulting in the deaths of many African miners). His bourgeois family are wary of the shame that he will bring so he must try to redeem himself and his family's name.

The film depicts events between the Fashoda crisis in 1898 and the 1904 signing of the Entente Cordiale creating an alliance between Britain and France and ending their historic rivalry. It was based on the book King Edward VII and His Times by André Maurois. It was made with an eye to its propaganda value, following the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and in anticipation of the outbreak of a Second World War which would test the bonds between Britain and France in a conflict with Nazi Germany.

A poem to love and patriotism soon after the end of World War I. A highly original and poetic film using many experimental camera techniques, which proved too fanciful for many but which established Marcel L'Herbier's reputation as a talented innovator. This is the director's debut film and it is considered the second impressionist film, the first being Abel Gance's, 1918, La Dixième symphonie (The Tenth Symphony).

Monsieur Jourdain is a dangerous madman : he wants to share his fortune! His relatives do what any sensible fellow on earth would do: they have him committed to a mental hospital. But Jourdain manages to escape and decides to make everybody happy except... his heirs!

The whimsical Riquet's has kidnapped and married a well-born young girl, Ralda. They travel around Spain performing their act in a circus but Ralda's beauty arouses the director's lust. Furious at being rejected, he opens a lion's cage during Ralda's act, leaving her seriously injured. With Ralda's family on their trail, the young people set off to find a better life elsewhere.

Denis, a poor student in philosophy, works as a night porter in the Paris market of Les Halles in order to pay for his studies. Constantly weary, he falls asleep and dreams of a beautiful girl in white, Irène, with whom he falls in love.

A famous singer Claire Lescot, who lives on the outskirts of Paris, is courted by many men, including a maharajah, Djorah de Nopur, and a young Swedish scientist, Einar Norsen. At her lavish parties she enjoys their amorous attentions but she remains emotionally aloof and heartlessly taunts them. When she is told that Norsen has killed himself because of her, she shows no feelings. At her next concert she is booed by an audience outraged at her coldness and she decides to visit the vault in which Norsen's body lies.

Dedicated to men, natives and French, which under the leadership of General Lyautey, made modern Morocco. After a historical prologue where we see Clemenceau yield to the entreaties of Lyautey, we are witnessing the arrival of settlers on Moroccan soil with the rapid rise of one of them: the ambitious Bourron. Similarly it has conquered the land from scratch, Bourron could conquer a woman, Christiane, who followed him not without confessing his love for another man. It is this love that Bourron will use later to acquire a forest of olive trees, which he believed to be the symbol of its success. Christiane accept but never forgive her husband...

Catherine's technique to sell her clocks is to blackmail illegitimate couples such as Jacques and Gisèle. However when Gisèle's husband Pierre walks in on them, Catherine pretends to be Jacques's lover to save the day. Jacques then gets caught up in her schemes when the next couple she deals with turn out to be jewel thieves who kidnap them.

Story of the Siberian monk Gregory Rasputin and the hold he exerted over the court of the last Russian czar, Nicholas.

The adventurer Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, descendant (by the left hand) of the king of France Henri II, and who claims to be "Countess de la Motte", imagines a tortuous plan to steal a magnificent diamond necklace that the queen Marie-Antoinette refused to buy from the jewelers Boehmer and Bassange.

Philippe Lutcher, an anarchist, fires a shot at Clara Stuart, a famous stage and screen actress, but only wounds her. The star, through affectation and curiosity to know his motives, pleads in his favour at his trial, but he rebuffs her pity. After he has served 18 months in prison, they meet and fall in love.

A woman suffers ill repute when she deserts her husband for a fling with an adventurer and gives the lover jewelry to pay the hotel bill. Will the husband be understanding and forgive her?

Clarisse cheats on her husband with a vain insurance agent. Zamore, the cuckold (and a magician) wouldn't let his wife be stolen so easily. Poiret and Serrault play the rivals in this twisted love story. A poetic absurd fantasy.

After the death of her mother, Germaine moves in with her father in a small town near the Rhône river. She falls in love with a young man, Alban, already engaged.

Mathilde Strangerson, the daughter of an eminent scientist, narrowly escapes being murdered in her own bedroom by an unknown assailant. As the room was locked from the inside, no one can understand how the attacker managed to enter or leave the room. Reporter and amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille arrives on the scene to protect Mathilde and resolve the mystery of the yellow room.

Denise Moret joins her husband, Pierre, in Mongolia where he works as a civil engineer. One night she loose a lot of money on the roulette and therefore is forced to borrow money from Prince Lee-Lang. The Prince immediately begins to flirt and make advances towards Denise. Advances she rejects.