News

French actor, director and producer Jacques Perrin, a fixture for decades in both French and Italian cinema — where he was best known for his role in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso” — has died. He was 80.

“The family has the immense sadness of informing you of the death of filmmaker Jacques Perrin, who died on Thursday, April 21 in Paris. He passed away peacefully,” Perrin’s family announced in a statement sent to news agency Agence France Press by his son, Mathieu Simonet. The cause of death was not specified.

Born in Paris on July 13, 1941, Perrin, starting in the 1950s, starred in more than 70 films and co-directed others, including the Oscar-nominated “Winged Migration” (2001), in tandem with Philippe Labro, about the voyage of migratory birds which used in-flight cameras and was a box office hit.

The soft-spoken thesp had landed his first leading role starring opposite Italy’s Claudia Cardinale in Valerio Zurlini...

This unheralded story of the French retreat in 1954 Vietnam is one of the best films ever about guerilla combat. The professional French soldiers do what they can to avoid capture, but the new Lieutenant won’t abandon their wounded. The Alsatian top sergeant fought with the Germans ten years before, yet is the best and fairest man in the unit. Director Pierre Schoendoerffer knows of what he films — he was captured by the Viet Minh at the fall of Dien Bien Phu. With the able camerawork of the legendary Raoul Coutard, the movie feels very realistic; we’re told that it was used to teach military cadets.

The 317th Platoon

DVD

Icarus Films

1965 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 95 min. / La 317ème section / Street Date June 29, 2021 / Available from Icarus Films / 29.98

Starring: Jacques Perrin, Bruno Cremer, Pierre Fabre, Manuel Zarzo, Boramy Tioulong, Saksi Sbong.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Film Editor: Armand Psenny

Original Music:...

Cinema St. Louis presents the 11th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival which takes place March 8-10, 15-17, and 22-24, 2019. The location this year is Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium, Forsyth & Skinker boulevards.

he 11th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — presented by TV5MONDE and produced by Cinema St. Louis — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1930s through the 1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features seven such works: Pierre Schoendoerffer “The 317th Platoon,” Marcel Pagnol’s “The Baker’s Wife,” Olivier Assayas’ “Cold Water,” Jacques Becker’s “The Hole,” Jacques Rivette’s “The Nun,” Agnés Varda’s “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” and Diane Kurys’ “Peppermint Soda.”

The schedule is rounded out by Robert Bresson’s final film, “L’argent,” and two 1969 films celebrating...

French director David Oelhoffen, whose latest film, “Close Enemies,” is competing at the Venice Film Festival, is preparing two new politically minded, internationally driven films: “The Fourth Wall” (“Le quatrieme mur”) and “Les derniers hommes.”

“Les derniers hommes” is being developped by Galatée Films, the company co-founded by French actor-turned-producer Jacques Perrin, whose credits include “The Chorists.” The project is based on Alain Gandy’s autobiographical novel, “Légion étrangère Cavalerie,” which chronicles the hellish journey of foreign soldiers who fought on behalf of the French in March 1945 as they struggled to make their way out of the jungle after being defeated by the Japanese army.

Oelhoffen said the project was brought to him by Perrin, who bought rights to Gandy’s novel and is passionate about the subject, having starred in Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1965 film “The 317th Platoon,” which is set in Vietnam in 1954.

“It will be a survival drama...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Films by Michael Almereyda (including the David Lynch-produced Nadja), Sadie Benning, and more are programmed in “The Strange Case of Pixelvision.”

Visconti’s The Leopard and The Damned are playing.

Spectacle

Fans of Asian cinema (or anything remotely outside the mainstream) cannot miss the series on Sogo Ishii, “the godfather of Japanese cyberpunk cinema.

He was one of the few directors of war movies with first-hand experience of conflict

Pierre Schoendoerffer, who has died aged 83, was one of the few directors of war films who had actually lived out the adventures of his soldier heroes. The American film-makers William Wellman, Sam Fuller and Oliver Stone did so, but no other director explored the same subject as single-mindedly and doggedly as Schoendoerffer.

His experiences of combat as a military cameraman and as a prisoner of war during the conflict in Indochina marked his output, most directly La 317ème Section (The 317th Platoon, 1965), about a doomed French unit; Le Crabe-Tambour (The Drummer Crab, 1977), about French officers involved in the fall of the French empire after the second world war; his Oscar-winning television documentary La Section Anderson (The Anderson Platoon, 1967), which followed the lives of Us soldiers in Vietnam; and Diên Biên Phú (1992), about a Us war...

Pierre Schoendoerffer, who won an Oscar for the 1967 Vietnam War documentary The Anderson Platoon, died following an operation at a hospital outside Paris. The exact cause of death remains unclear. He was 83. While still in his 20s, Schoendoerffer served as a cameraman with the French army in the 1950s. As a result, he was present when the crucial fortress of Dien Bien Phu fell to the Vietnamese guerrilla army in May 1954, thus signaling the end of French rule in Indochina. Following his capture, Schoendoerffer spent four months in a Pow camp before being sent back to France. From the late '50s on, Schoendoerffer directed ten films, both narrative and documentary features, most of them related to his war experiences. As quoted in the New York Times, in 1994 Schoendoerffer explained that “the earth of Indochina still clings to my soul, just like the mud of the trenches used to stick to my boots.

With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.