The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his

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Now back in print, the definitive biography of a seminal figure in film history, whom Orson Welles called "the greatest of all directors." Jean Renoir's career almost spans the history years of cinema—from the early silent movies, to the naturalism of the talkies, committed cinema, film noir, Hollywood studio productions, the Technicolor-period comedies and fast television techniques. His film The Grand Illusion remains one of the greatest movies...

Enjoy Agnès Varda's essential classics, shorts, documentaries, and multimedia works, all together for the first time. A founder of the French New Wave who became an international art-house icon, Agnès Varda was a fiercely independent, restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her.

"The fascinating memoir of influential French filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché, one of the industry's most significant pioneers and a trailblazer for female directors. Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) is a unique pioneer of the motion picture, being not only a female filmmaker but also one of the first, if not the first, to make a narrative film. Her career spanned from 1894, when she became secretary to the legendary Léon Gaumont, through 1920, working...

In 1962 Hitchcock and Truffaut locked themselves away in Hollywood for a week to excavate the secrets behind the mise-en-scene in cinema. Based on the original recordings of this meeting, used to produce the mythical book, Hitchcock/Truffaut-this film illustrates the greatest cinema lesson of all time and plummets us into the world of the creator of Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo. Hitchcock's incredibly modern art is elucidated and explained by today's...

Part one: Akerman, in her apartment, reads from a text directly to the camera, describing the problems she encountered making this film. What emerges from this mise-en-scene is a funny, often personal, and always thoughtful confession from this extremely perceptive filmmaker. Part two lets Akerman's films speak for her, taking clips from her extensive filmography and linking them anonymously until they form a new film. There are scenes from "Jeanne...