Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut became filmmakers after having been enthusiastic Alfred Hitchcock fans. Today, we would like to know how and why their approach to the “British master of Hollywood” could change the notion of “the author” in cinema. How did it nourish their personal growth in filmmaking during the 1950’s? Chabrol, Rivette, and Rohmer have agreed to participate in our questioning and we are using hours of Hitchcock sound recordings that François Truffaut gave us. Lastly, Luc Moullet and Charles Bitsch, who were also zealous fans of Hitchcock, express their points of view and explain his historical impact.

A scholarly old man is moved when the young Asphodele, exploited by the Bohemians, asks him to guide her. He then adopts her. Graduate of the Sorbonne, she marries a newspaper editor known for his anti-German campaigns during the war. A painter is mysteriously killed at a party. Protéa leads the investigation…

An hour and a quarter on an unknown planet: the Earth seen on a minute scale. The inhabitants: outlandish creatures, insects and other grass and water animals. The scenery: the impenetrable forests of grass, dew-drops as big as balloons… The film explores this new world – an ordinary meadow – over the course of a summer’s day: a day, a night and a second dawn. But a single day is like a season in this minute world. A whole decade for an insect whose life-span can be counted in weeks.

In 1945, René Vautier is a young Breton of 21 years and former resistance fighter awarded the War Cross medal a year earlier. After his graduation from IDHEC (today, La Fémis), he leaves for the Ivory Coast to shoot images for the French Education League. The aim of the movie is to show French high school students how villagers live in French West Africa. The young director gets there without any prejudices regarding the French occupation in Africa… He shoots… But the authorities blame him for not respecting Pierre Laval’s 1934 decree which banned all shooting in French West Africa without the governor’s consent. Tracked down during the 10-day filming and officially expelled, he flees from Bamako and illegally films his 600-mile journey: marks of oppression, repression, burnt down villages and other Human Rights violations. After several months spent in Africa, he will manage, with the help of Africans, Breton fishermen, judges and customs officers, to bring the reels back home. A last ploy at the police station of Reuilly in Paris will enable him to save a quarter of his film stock and edit the movie Afrique 50…

With this rare documentary, the viewer is taken inside the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes. What was really taking place in these factories that were the first to be occupied by its workers as the events of May 1968 were beginning to unfold? These revolutionaries were a different bred from the bourgeois students demonstrating in the streets of Paris.

Even today, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the indicator of wealth the most quoted by the media, by economists, journalists and politicians. What is it that makes us continue to advocate an increase in GDP, no matter if it, to take up Robert Kennedy’s expression, “measures everything except what makes life worthwhile”?

Indices, the new film by Vincent Glenn, exposes the aberrations of a mode of calculation that adds as a positive the clean-up costs to disasters, and which continues to be widely used to determine the “quality of life” of nations.