Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film follows two women who enter a looping, magical-realist narrative housed in a Paris mansion, gradually learning its rhythms and rewriting its ending. Built on repetition, collaboration and patient observation, it models fiction as a space to inhabit rather than interpret.
Set in occupied Paris in 1942, Monsieur Klein follows art dealer Robert Klein as he is mistaken for a Jewish namesake and drawn into a vortex of suspicion, paperwork, and erasure. Directed by Joseph Losey and starring Alain Delon, it uses Kafkaesque structure and austere craft to explore identity as a fragile, administratively conferred status — culminating not in revelation, but in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup and deportation to Auschwitz.
Agnès Varda’s 1981 documentary Mur Murs observes the painted walls of Los Angeles, focusing on Chicano-led muralism in working-class neighbourhoods. Shot on location with minimal intervention, it pairs static images of murals with layered narration and interviews, treating walls as sites of communal memory and political expression. The film avoids exposition, instead trusting texture, duration, and specificity to convey meaning.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 essay-film follows a Parisian housewife who prostitutes herself by day, using her routine as a lens to examine consumerism, advertising, the Vietnam War, and the banlieue as ideological infrastructure. Built from fragmented scenes, whispered narration, and deliberate interruptions, it rejects narrative for inquiry — asking not what happens next, but how meaning is produced, circulated, and dissolved in modern life.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 Weekend follows a bourgeois couple’s disastrous road trip through a hallucinatory French countryside, where narrative collapses into allegory, history bleeds into farce, and revolution ends in cannibalism. Shot by Raoul Coutard and edited by Agnès Guillemot, it is a formally radical, politically abrasive essay-film that treats cinema as a site of ideological combat — not storytelling.