Roger Leenhardt
Directing
Biography
Roger Leenhardt (23 July 1903 – 4 December 1985) was a French writer and filmmaker. Born in a bourgeois Protestant family, this brilliant student of philosophy was very soon fascinated by cinema. Through a cousin, he started working for the newsreel program Éclair Journal and in 1934 set up his own production company with René Zuber, "Les Films du Compas," later known as, "Roger Leenhardt Films.” As a critic in the journal Esprit, he was considered one of the most perceptive observers of pre-war France and strongly influenced André Bazin and the entire "Nouvelle Vague.” Thanks to his series of articles known as "La petite école du spectateur," cinema became considered as an art and a language in its own right. Leenhardt also contributed to other journals, such as Fontaine, Les Lettres Françaises, and l'Ecran français, in which in 1948 he delivered his famous cry, "Down with Ford! Long Live Wyler!" In 1949, he fostered the creation of the cinema club Objectif 49 of which he was the co-president with Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau. Destined to promote a new cinema d'auteur, the club resulted in the creation in Biarritz of the Festival of Cursed Films [Festival des Films Maudits]. Beginning in the 1950s he presided over the French Association for the Promotion of Cinema [Association française pour la diffusion du cinéma] which organized a traveling festival, Cinéma Days [Les Journées du cinéma] (1953–1960). Finally, in 1955 Leenhardt participated in the creation in Tours of the International Days of Film [Journées internationales du film] which became the Festival of Tours. Specialized in short films, the festival brought together the foremost filmmakers, including François Truffaut, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Roman Polanski, Robert Enrico, and others. His documentary works are numerous and include the creation of more than 60 short films and the production of a similar number. There are two main categories of his work: Portraits of great writers (e.g. François Mauriac, Paul Valéry, Victor Hugo, etc.), and portraits of famous painters (e.g., Monet, Pissarro, Bazile, etc.). He also made a film on the origins of photography (Daguerre ou la Naissance de la photographie, 1964) and another on the invention of cinema (Naissance du cinéma, 1946), a masterpiece of pedagogical and intelligence. Privileging his artist vision, Leenhardt made only three feature-length fiction films: Les Dernières Vacances [fr] (1948), Le Rendez-vous de minuit [fr] (1961), and, for television, Une fille dans la montagne (1964). Moreover, Roger Leenhardt appeared in three films as an actor. In Les Dernières vacances, he is the teacher. Jean-Luc Godard chose him to be the character "Intelligence" in Une femme mariée (1964) and François Truffaut chose him as the publisher in L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977).
Known For
At Bertrand Morane's burial there are many of the women that the 40-year-old engineer loved. In flashback Bertrand's life and love affairs are told by himself while writing an autobiographical novel.
The Man Who Loved Women
A superficial woman finds conflict choosing between her abusive husband and her vain lover.
The Married Woman
A woman becomes distressed by the resemblance between the plot of a film and the reality of her own life. But what is reality: life or film?
Midnight Meeting
Documentary devoted to the architectural and urban planning designs of Le Corbusier. The architect supports his in-depth reflection on the city and its necessary adaptation to modern life with plans, drawings and images, particularly Paris, whose revolutionary development dreamed of by Le Corbusier is exhibited here. Its first projects will remain at the stage of a model: the modernization plan for the city of Algiers. Some will be created by other architects: Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, UN Palace in New York. From the post-war period in less than 10 years, Le Corbusier created large housing units in Marseille, Nantes, a chapel in Ronchamps, a factory in Saint-Dié, a town in Chandigarh in India. Through diagrams, the architect presents his theory of the "radiant city", the mathematical key modulor of his work as well as his project for reorganizing the countryside, industrial and urban cities into a grouping around a cooperative system.
Le Corbusier, l'architecte du bonheur
A minstrel, barred from entering a castle, is given a magic flute that can manipulate movement.
The Magic Flute
A schoolboy remembers his last holiday in the big house of his family in the country, before it was sold.
The Last Vacation
Balzac is a 1951 short documentary film by French director Jean Vidal. It is a biopic on the work, life, and loves of the French playwright and novelist Honoré de Balzac, his evolution as a writer and how his individual works fit into the design of La Comedie Humaine. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1952 and won first prize for best director at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival the same year.
Balzac
No description available.
Le Beatnik et le minet
A short historical documentary by Roger Leenhardt and Jean Pierre Vivet that chronicles the eleventh-century invasion of England by William the Conqueror, using images of the Bayeux Tapestry to illustrate the story. As described by Erik Barnouw ("Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film"), the film creatively animates the embroidered scenes to bring the Norman Conquest to life.
The Norman Conquest of England
In an isolated house, in Brittany, live two sisters around whom gravitate a whole series of strange characters. Between the eruption of the vagrant voyeur and that of the couple in love, the youngest kills her eldest and goes mad.
Love Around the House
Short documentary film on and around the color red
Le rouge
The prehistory of the cinema as we know it today, with its great inventors: Marey, Muybridge, Reynaud, Edison, the brothers Lumière and their great inventions: the kinetoscope, the praxinoscope, the chromophotograph, the film camera.
The Birth of Cinema
No description available.
Trois portraits d'un oiseau qui n'existe pas
This documentary short shows how a dry, semi-barren piece of desert that had been the object of conflict between two neighboring tribes in Morocco can be transformed by modern farming methods--including irrigation canals, mechanized forms of planting and harvesting--and can result in peace and cooperation between the two tribes instead of war.
New Ways for Old Morocco
One of France's greatest drawing talents characterizes himself, his life and work with his own lithographs.
Daumier
Traces the development of the animated cartoon from a 19th-century children's toy to modern Disney cartoons. Includes a complete animated show as it would have looked in the 1890s.
Animated Cartoons: The Toy That Grew Up
A short documentary about the construction of the parisian subway in the 50s.