François De Menil

New Yorkers Skip Donahue and Harry Monroe have no jobs and no prospects, so they decide to flee the city and find work elsewhere, landing jobs wearing woodpecker costumes to promote the opening of a bank. When their feathery costumes are stolen and used in a bank robbery, they no longer have to worry about employment — they're sent to prison.

François de Menil has been lit at a three-quarter angle from the left; he glances briefly at the camera and then stares straight in front of him as if avoiding catching the camera’s eye; the right side of his face fades off into deep shadow.

A young man recalls his affair with a young French woman who traveled with him across the United States. They began to drift apart during the trip, and eventually each had affairs with other people before realizing that their relationship had run its course.

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

François de Menil and Monique Alexandre's short portrait of artist Niki de Saint Phalle, shot in 16mm, 1982.

Filmic portrait of Niki de Saint Phalle's HON, a temporary indoor sculpture installation for the Moderna Museet of Stockholm.

Shot as a proposed short film behind Iggy Pop's Ann Arbor, MI estate and summarily rejected by Elektra Records as promotional material for Nico's 1968 album, The Marble Index, Evening of Light is a gothic fantasy in a barren cornfield. Nico's song of the same name accompanies the eerie visuals.

North Star: Mark di Suvero is a 1977 documentary film about Mark di Suvero that was produced by François de Menil and Barbara Rose. Born in 1933, di Suvero has become one of the most recognized sculptors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From about 1975 to 1977, fairly early in di Suvero's long career, filmmaker de Menil and art historian Rose produced this film, which was characterized at the time as "a tribute to the extraordinary work and life of the innovative American sculptor of monumental but delicate constructions." The film shows di Suvero making and installing several of his very large sculptures, and incorporates informal interviews of di Suvero, his mother, and others involved in his career and life at that time. From 1971 to 1975 di Suvero, an American, lived in a self-imposed exile in France in protest of US involvement in war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and the filming spans the end of his exile and his return to New York.

Investigating Tinguely’s working methods, his art, and his inspiration, this film records the artist at work over a ten-year period and documents the design and construction of his monumental sculpture, Le Cyclop. — Anthology Film Archives

In this revealing documentary, patron, collector, and curator Dominique de Menil hangs the 1973 exhibition "Inside the Sight," in conversation with Max Ernst, the 20th-century Surrealist artist. From installation to opening party, the events that transpire, as captured by filmmakers John and Francois de Menil, provide a rare and intimate glimpse into the process of making an exhibition.