News

Bodard worked with iconic directors Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Claude Miller.

Legendary French producer Mag Bodard, who worked with iconic directors Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Claude Miller, has died at the age of 103-years-old.

Bodard, whose heyday was in the 1960s and 70s, got her first producer credit in 1962 on Norbert Carbonnaux’s comedy The Dance, featuring Françoise Dorléac in her first starring role opposite Jean-Pierre Cassel.

The crew featured production designer Jacques Saulnier, who would go on to work closely with Resnais,...

It's 100 years since the first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu was published, but a definitive cinematisation of Proust's epic novel has so far proved elusive

This year has been punctuated by a rash of anniversary-themed books and articles anticipating the first world war centenary, and indeed attempting snapshots of how Europe looked and felt in 1913, eerily poised on the precipice. The other centenary is similar in many ways: on 8 November 1913, Marcel Proust published the first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, his monumental novel about memory, mortality and art, the belle époque, and the leisured and aristocratic classes of Paris, a city crammed in Proust's pages with the most vivid and extraordinary personalities, destined to be swept away by the Great War.

Fourteen years ago, at Cannes, I saw Raúl Ruiz's superlative screen adaptation of the final volume: Time Regained, in which the narrator,...

Michel Deville can't, or shouldn't, be considered forgotten, can/should he? He's still alive, and his last film was as recent as 2005 (Un fil à la patte, with Emanuelle Beart). Among his past works available with English subtitles are moderately acclaimed minor classics like On a volé la Joconde (The Mona Lisa Has Been Stolen, 1966), Death in a French Garden (1985), Le paltoquet (1986) and La lectrice (1988)—the last three made back-to-back in the eighties during Deville's hottest period internationally. Although it's hard to figure out how the same filmmaker could be responsible for the variety of Deville's work, which ranges from deadly serious political drama to quirky slapstick. Amid this confusion of disparate styles, Deville tends to disappear the more intently one looks for him.

And certainly we can't consider Francoise Fabian a forgotten star, can we? She too is still alive and is still working solidly, and her credits include...