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Producer · 1917–2003

Serge Silberman

8: briefs
13:00: average
104 min: in total

On film.briefs8

Bob le flambeur

Jean-Pierre Melville · 1956

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 heist film follows ageing gambler Bob as he plans a raid on a Deauville casino. Shot on location in Paris and Deauville by Henri Decaë, it moves with unhurried precision, treating criminality as habit rather than transgression. Its influence on the French New Wave stems less from innovation than from its disciplined use of space, silence, and repetition. Roger Duchesne anchors the film with quiet authority; the heist fails not through chaos but through Bob’s fatal, human lapse — losing track of time at the roulette table. A film of tone over twist, form over function.

Diary of a Chambermaid

Luis Buñuel · 1964

Luis Buñuel’s 1964 Diary of a Chambermaid adapts Octave Mirbeau’s novel with Jean-Claude Carrière, following Jeanne Moreau’s Célestine as she navigates a decaying provincial household in late-1920s France. Rejecting surrealism for restrained realism, the film traces how power, prejudice and violence settle into routine — through glances, footwear, leaflets and wills. Roger Fellous’ cinematography treats interiors like crime scenes; Moreau’s performance hinges on withheld reaction. It ends not with justice but consolidation: the system endures, reshaped but intact.

The Hole

Jacques Becker · 1960

Jacques Becker’s 1960 film The Hole reconstructs a real 1947 escape attempt at Paris’s La Santé Prison with forensic calm. Five inmates — played largely by non-actors, including one actual participant — dig a tunnel beneath their cell floor using scavenged tools and stolen time. The film avoids drama in favour of procedure, silence over score, and group rhythm over individual arc. Its power lies in accumulated detail, moral ambiguity, and the quiet collapse of trust when freedom arrives — not as rescue, but as a choice no one can fully explain.

The Milky Way

Luis Buñuel · 1969

Luis Buñuel’s 1969 film follows two French vagrants walking the Camino de Santiago, encountering historical Christian heresies, doctrinal disputes, and theological contradictions staged with documentary precision and surrealist detachment. Shot in straightforward colour by Christian Matras and written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, it treats dogma as performance, time as collapse, and pilgrimage as recursion — not redemption.

The Phantom of Liberty

Luis Buñuel · 1974

Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist film stitches together unrelated episodes — a firing squad in Toledo, a Parisian dinner around toilets, a missing girl no one sees — linked only by chance and recurring motifs. With Edmond Richard’s unadorned cinematography and Hélène Plemiannikov’s elliptical editing, it dismantles narrative, decorum and causality to expose the arbitrariness of social order. A late-career distillation of Buñuel’s belief that liberty is illusory, governed not by will but by accident and impulse.

Ran

Akira Kurosawa · 1985

Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic reimagines King Lear as a Sengoku-period warlord’s collapse, grounded in Japanese history and his own artistic mortality. Shot across volcanic plains and ancient castles, it uses wide compositions, deliberate pacing, and Emi Wada’s award-winning costumes to build a world where chaos is not disorder but the inevitable residue of violence. With Tatsuya Nakadai’s monumental performance and Toru Takemitsu’s dissonant score, Ran sustains its 160-minute duration through material conviction rather than exposition — a film that trusts time, silence, and scale to carry meaning.

That Obscure Object of Desire

Luis Buñuel · 1977

Luis Buñuel’s 1977 swan song adapts Pierre Louÿs’s novel into a stark, absurdist study of erotic fixation. Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, a wealthy Frenchman obsessed with Conchita — portrayed interchangeably by Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. Framed as a train confession and punctuated by unexplained terrorist violence, the film refuses psychological coherence, using repetition, structural disjunction, and deadpan tone to embody desire as irrational, inescapable, and faintly ridiculous.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Luis Buñuel · 1972

Luis Buñuel’s 1972 surrealist comedy follows a group of French bourgeois and a South American ambassador as they repeatedly fail to share a meal. Structured around five thwarted gatherings and four interwoven dreams, the film uses repetition, deadpan performance, and seamless shifts between reality and fantasy to dissect ritual, class, and the quiet violence of politeness. Shot by Edmond Richard and edited by Hélène Plemiannikov, it won the 1973 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.