Les Films de la Pléiade

The Catholic Jean-Louis runs into an old friend, the Marxist Vidal, in Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas. Vidal introduces Jean-Louis to the modestly libertine, recently divorced Maud and the three engage in conversation on religion, atheism, love, morality and Blaise Pascal's life and writings on philosophy, faith and mathematics. Jean-Louis ends up spending a night at Maud's. Jean-Louis' Catholic views on marriage, fidelity and obligation make his situation a dilemma, as he has already, at the very beginning of the film, proclaimed his love for a young woman whom, however, he has never yet spoken to.

Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.

Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.

"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress Julie and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Julie and the other head of the school Cara in its final months.

A pickup artist/womanizer named Patrick inadvertently pursues two young women who happen to be roommates.

A young woman tries to go to Paris, but her garden and the whole village is flooded with water.

Toute la mémoire du monde is a documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being.

Sagamore Noonan vit reclu dans une ferme de l'Alabama où il distille de la gnôle au temps de la prohibition. Il reçoit la visite de son frère Doc Noonan et de son fils Billy. Une jeune strip-teaseuse et son compagnon gangster viennent troubler leur tranquillité.

Annie is a middle-age wife, still sexy and pampered by her husband, Phillippe, who is the owner and general manager of a dynamic company. Under the deluge of sexy Swedish movies, sexy advertising on the streets, sexy intimate clothing in ladies' shops, and even talks about sex and marital infidelity with her mother and female friends, Annie starts feeling left aside by her husband, and trying to attract in a number of ways - and failing. It's not the all-purpose secretary at the office that is keeping him late, it's a tax expert that, asking the most innocent questions, is finding out how Philippe can manage a company without profits, and still manage a home, may be two... with high quality levels.

The subject of the film was the Hauka movement. The Hauka movement consisted of mimicry and dancing to become possessed by French Colonial administrators. The participants performed the same elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, "Moi, un noir" marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction". The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire for work.

This short features a man who is visited by his ex-lover. The moment she arrives, the man starts his constant barrage of speech; the woman doesn't say much. She just mocks the man and pretends she isn't listening. She pulls faces at him and larks about; while the man is trying his best to get her back in his life, then in the next sentence he says he hates her.

Claire is a chic young Parisian woman married to a somewhat older husband, Jean As the story opens, she leaves her husband playing baroque music at the piano, telling him she is off to see her sister, Solange. In reality she meets her lover, Claude at his apartment; After some idle chatter and love-making he tells her a story of the shriveled heads that the Jivaro Indians used to give their lovers as tokens of affection but, as she shivers in disgust, he gives her a mink instead. How will they hide it from her husband?

Miléna is living in her grandmother's baroque château when the rich lady dies. The lawyer Miguel, who had a previous relationship with Miléna, insists the other two grandchildren, Fifine and her brother Jean-Paul, visit the château for the reading of the will, even though they have been estranged from the family at an early age. However Robert, who had been living with Fifine in an open relationship, arrives and impersonates Jean-Paul. Robert falls for Fifine's cousin Miléna while Fifine has designs on Miguel. In the meantime, the butler César is focusing his lecherous intentions on Prudence, the maid he had just hired.

A short documentary on the chateaux of the Loire in France was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau.

Roger Blanchard has a busy life. On the family side, he is married and has two children, aged ten and fifteen. On the work side, he holds an important position at the Ministry of Culture. To bolster his social status, he has a mistress to liven up his Saturdays. But nothing is going right. His wife Marion exasperates him, his children irritate him, his job gives him no real satisfaction, his mistress neglects him and his superior, Monsieur Gambaud, gets on his nerves. But when he meets a beautiful young secretary, his life and habits are turned upside down: Blanchard amuses him and gets his way. In revenge, Gambaud warns Blanchard's wife.

An African travels to Paris to learn about the construction of tall buildings, but is soon taken up with the oddities of French life.

Le chant du Styrène is a 1958 French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais. The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.

Serge follows Hélène in the crowded streets of Paris and manages to seduce her. Werther takes Sophie to her dentist, Raoul, who tries to seduce her too.

Four young people, tired of working life, decide that they can earn money from crime than they can from work. The film follows their training at the first "crime school", as well as their work.