"Director: Maurice PIALAT"

• Van Gogh (Masters of Cinema) (Blu-ray) | Blu Ray | (30/09/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  One of the greatest films by one of the finest directors of the second half of the 20th century Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh represents an ambitious and crowning achievement in its portrayal of the master painter's final weeks of life almost exactly one-hundred years earlier. Van Gogh depicted by the remarkable actor/songwriter-singer Jacques Dutronc (Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie)) has arrived at Auvers-sur-Oise to come under the care of Dr. Gachet (Gérard Séty) for his nervous agitation. Soon after the arrival of Vincent's brother Théo (Bernard Le Coq) and his wife plein air portraiture and conviviality give way to the more crepuscular moods of brothels and cabarets and the painter's anguished existence tossing between money worries and an impassioned relationship with the doctor's teenage daughter finally meets its terminal scene. With its loosely factual and wholly inspired treatment of the last period of Van Gogh's life Pialat's film applies an impressionist touch to the biographical picture — indeed the filmmaker was himself an accomplished painter and the personal resonance of the subject matter results in an epic major late work. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK and also in a special two-disc DVD edition. Special Features: Gorgeous new restoration of the film appearing in 1080p New and improved optional English subtitles Van Gogh (1965) — a short early documentary about the painter by Maurice Pialat A 10-minute video interview with Pialat from 1991 A 50-minute video interview with Pialat from 1992 Video interviews with actors Jacques Dutronc and Bernard Le Coq; director of photography Emmanuel Machuel; and editor Yann Dedet Deleted scenes Original theatrical trailer 56-Page Booklet containing a new and exclusive essay by critic Sabrina Marques; Jean-Luc Godard's letter to Pialat after seeing the film followed by Godard's tribute to Pialat upon the director's passing in 2003; copious newly translated interviews with Maurice Pialat; images of Pialat's canvasses; rare imagery; and more!

• Sous Le Soleil De Satan | DVD | (22/03/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Positioned somewhere between Bresson's immortal Journal d'un cur'' de campagne and Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster Maurice Pialat's staggering Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan] addresses the torrent of spiritual and intellectual turmoil unloosed among the denizens of a little country parish. It is a film by turns calm and violent buoyant upon the tears of mercy and gurgling with the blood of the Lamb. G''rard Depardieu (Loulou Le Gar''u) is the self-abasing curate tortured by questions about his role in God's plan - before an encounter with a material Satan touches off a powerful revelation. At the crux of his vision is Sandrine Bonnaire (A nos amours. Police) the madly profligate brewer's daughter whose fate ruptures in a blast of gunpowder and the slash of a razor. As events unfurl Maurice Pialat himself provides witness as the seasoned cleric who pronounces the words: God wears us down. One of the great films of faith made by a non-believer Sous le soleil de Satan left an indelible mark on spectators from the very moment of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 - where it won the Palme d'Or for Best Film.

• Van Gogh (Masters of Cinema) (2-Disc DVD) | DVD | (30/09/2013) from £18.88   |  Saving you £1.11 (5.88%)   |  RRP £19.99

  One of the greatest films by one of the finest directors of the second half of the 20th century Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh represents an ambitious and crowning achievement in its portrayal of the master painter's final weeks of life almost exactly one-hundred years earlier. Van Gogh depicted by the remarkable actor/songwriter-singer Jacques Dutronc (Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie)) has arrived at Auvers-sur-Oise to come under the care of Dr. Gachet (Gérard Séty) for his nervous agitation. Soon after the arrival of Vincent's brother Théo (Bernard Le Coq) and his wife plein air portraiture and conviviality give way to the more crepuscular moods of brothels and cabarets and the painter's anguished existence tossing between money worries and an impassioned relationship with the doctor's teenage daughter finally meets its terminal scene. With its loosely factual and wholly inspired treatment of the last period of Van Gogh's life Pialat's film applies an impressionist touch to the biographical picture — indeed the filmmaker was himself an accomplished painter and the personal resonance of the subject matter results in an epic major late work. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK and also in a special two-disc DVD edition. Special Features: New and improved optional English subtitles Van Gogh (1965) — a short early documentary about the painter by Maurice Pialat A 10-minute video interview with Pialat from 1991 A 50-minute video interview with Pialat from 1992 Video interviews with actors Jacques Dutronc and Bernard Le Coq; director of photography Emmanuel Machuel; and editor Yann Dedet Deleted scenes Original theatrical trailer 56-Page Booklet containing a new and exclusive essay by critic Sabrina Marques; Jean-Luc Godard's letter to Pialat after seeing the film followed by Godard's tribute to Pialat upon the director's passing in 2003; copious newly translated interviews with Maurice Pialat; images of Pialat's canvasses; rare imagery; and more!

• La Gueule Ouverte | DVD | (20/04/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  La Gueula Ouverte (Masters Of Cinema)

• Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble | DVD | (24/08/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Rare is the film in movie-history that can announce the entire movement of it's 'plot' with its title alone. But Pialat's second feature Nous Ne Viellirons Pas Ensemble does exactly that encapsulating all the turmoil and the final end-point of a couple who among themselves once made a commitment - and living together will come to make another one yet. Jean (Jeane Yanne of Godard's Weekend) and Catherine (Marlene Jobert of Godard's Masculin Feminin) are the couple whose every move charts an advancement deeper into an emotional warzone. Theirs is the classic and the tragic case of an emotional abuse centered around a perplexing but powerful interdependency. At last the point arrives that determines the relationship with all its weekend holidays its apologies and submissions can go no further - and in a final shot of genius Pialat discloses all the ways in which the future might be at once liberated and enslaved by the past. Based on a novel by Pialat himself and on the trauma of his own personal life in the years leading up to the film Nous Ne Viellirons Pas Ensemble was a smash-hit at the time of its release - and yet is arguably one of the most upsetting films ever made.

• Passe Ton Bac D'abord | DVD | (24/08/2009) from £11.49   |  Saving you £8.50 (73.98%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The world sometimes seems divided into two camps: those who recall their teenage years as having been an exhilarating dream and those who remember them as having been an infernal nightmarish hell. With all this in mind it might do to describe Passe Ton Bac D'Abord as Maurice Pialat's The Best Years Of Our Lives while bearing in mind all that such a description might suggest. It's an elastic unsparing portrait of teenage life in the suburbs of France from an era when the phrase sixteen candles still might have conjured the image of flames. A group of young actors including several local unknowns - Philippe Marlaud Bernard Tronczyk Patrick Lepczynski and Sabine Haudepin (once the little girl of Truffaut's Jules et Jim) among others - make up the cluster of friends adrift beneath the twilight of their school years. There's drama violence and pot-induced laughs - group holidays indiscriminate sex advances from teachers twenty-five years their seniors attempted moves to Paris and few prospects of passing the bac the final set of exams French students take before embarking into the world to... do what? Marking the last work of Pialat's turbulent cycle of films made in the 1970s Passe Ton Bac D'abord... is the brilliant spiritual sequel to the great filmmaker's feature-debut L'Enfance-nue - picked up again from a vantage ten years on from the lives of the earlier film's protagonists.

• Loulou | DVD | (26/06/2006) from £26.98   |  Saving you £-6.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  One of French director Maurice Pialat's most sexually charged films Loulou is a masterpiece of unabashed eroticism and authentic romance. When married woman Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) meets LouLou (Gerard Depardieu) a charming leather-jacketed stud in a crowded Paris disco she can't resist his lustful style and returns home with him. Loulou turns out to be as passionate in bed as on a dance floor and the film embarks on their freewheeling relationship... As Loulou Gerard Dep

• A Nos Amours | DVD | (22/03/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A portrait of youth in bloom; a tale of one family's dissolution; a reflection upon the danger and the mystery in living. Maurice Pialat's serene perilous masterwork provides the movie romance a definitive check and eminently deceptive balance - the X scratched on top of the O. In one of the astonishing film debuts Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne a free spirit and the vessel for an almost Bront''an choler. She's 16 and men exist - diverse lovers an overbearing brother and the father portrayed by Pialat himself in an unforgettable turn that displays the full magnitude of the cinema giant's tenderness force-of-will and presence of being. Woven through with indelible images and heart-stopping moments (and culminating in the infamous dinner party scene) A nos amours. [To Our Romance. / Here's to Love.] is a pure creation a film that will live so long as there's still either movies or love.

• L'Enfance-nue | DVD | (22/09/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  One of the earth-shaking feature debuts in the history of cinema Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance-nue (Naked-Childhood) provides a perspective on growing-up that rejects both sentimentality and modish cynicism. Its unflinching but also warmly accommodating outlook on childhood attracted Fran''ois Truffaut to take on the role as co-producer of Pialat's film - which ironically exists as much as a response to Truffaut's own debut The 400 Blows as that film was to the 'cinema of childhood' that came before the New Wave. First-time actor Michel Tarrazon plays the young Fran''ois a provincial orphan whose destructive behaviour precipitates his relocation from the home of a long-term foster family to the care of a benevolent elderly couple. In the course of this transition Pialat's film presents the turbulence of Fran''ois's unmoored existence and his explosive reactions to the contradictory emotions it engenders. This is the naked portrait of a soul's - and an entire society's - dysfunction before the moment of reconciliation. L'Enfance-nue represents the ideal introduction to the films of Maurice Pialat - an artist whose work resides alongside that of Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel at the summit of the post-New Wave French cinema. One discovers in his pictures a raw and complicated emotional core which as in the films of John Cassavetes reveals upon closer examination a remarkably rigorous visual aesthetic and a facility of direction which lifts both seasoned actors and debutante amateurs to the level of greatness. Coupled here with Pialat's poetic and brilliant early short L'Amour existe (Love Exists 1960) L'Enfance-nue is the first masterpiece of an artist whose work has had an incalculable influence on contemporary directors as diverse as Bruno Dumont Olivier Assayas Michael Haneke and the Dardenne brothers among others - and whose 2003 passing led Gilles Jacob president of the Festival de Cannes to declare: Pialat is dead and we are all orphaned. French cinema is orphaned.

• Police | DVD | (22/09/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  Maurice Pialat's Police delivers on the raw promise of its title insofar as much of its action qualifies as an insistently 'procedural' descent into the Paris drugs underworld. But the hyper real route that the film takes to arrive there before veering into a zone of dangerous emotional play contributes to a disorienting adventurous and ultimately tremendously exciting experience unlike any 'police-thriller' ever before conceived. The iconic G''rard Depardieu (who also collaborated with Pialat on Loulou Sous le soleil de Satan and Le Gar''u) plays Mangin a cop whose brutal method of investigation finds its obsessive outlet in an attempt to crack a Tunisian narcotics ring. It is when Mangin enters into close acquaintance with the defiant Noria (expertly played by Sophie Marceau in one of her first screen roles) that the film proceeds to chart an unexpected emotionally ambiguous course - and the lines between 'right' and 'wrong' and 'power' and 'freedom' terminally blur. Written with Catherine Breillat (director of The Last Mistress Anatomy of Hell Fat Girl) but relying in equal measure upon Pialat's improvisatory control (directing among others his star-actress from A nos amours Sandrine Bonnaire) Police is a genre-defying excursion rivaled only by John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in the pantheon of cinema's most idiosyncratic thrillers.

• Van Gogh | DVD | (26/09/2005) from £14.98   |  Saving you £9.01 (60.15%)   |  RRP £23.99

  Pialat's stunningly beautiful portrait of Van Gogh's last days widely acclaimed as the best film about the artist ever made stars Jacques Dutronc whose powerful performance earned him a Cesar award for Best Actor. The film is set between May and July 1890 in the French village of Auvers where Van Gogh went to consult the local physician Dr Gachet and to convalesce from his year long stay in an asylum. This was a period of great activity when he painted a new canvas every day inclu