An ice-cream seller lusts after the female employees in his shop.

The former famous painter Frenhofer lives quietly with his wife on a countryside residence in the French Provence. When the young artist Nicolas visits him with his girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer decides to start again the work on a painting he long ago stopped: La Belle Noiseuse. And he wants Marianne as model.

We follow 24 hours in the life of a being moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man.

At a Spanish cloister, a celebrated French general of the Napoleonic Wars recognizes the voice of one of the nuns and recalls how, five years ago, she was the Duchess of Langeais, and he her most persistent suitor.

Boris and Sandra meet and immediately love each other with a lively passion. Enough to help them fight the best enemy of their love: addiction. That of Boris on drugs, that of Sandra in Boris. Linked, attached to each other, reclusive but alive, they will try to live their love in a closed circuit. In doing so, everyone will discover in themselves an unexpected strength and humanity.

An homage to Greek tragedy.

Anna, Joyce, Claude and Lucia are all students under the tutelage of Constance Dumas, a renowned film instructor. Lucia moves in with the other girls. Soon after, she is attacked on the street outside her home and saved by a mysterious stranger.

A librarian, a gangster's ex-lover and a woman who has recovered from a coma spend an eye-opening summer in Paris.

When he loses his position as a powerful government minister, Vincent is dropped by his pretty mistress and must begin life anew, without the privileges of power. As he gradually becomes acquainted with milieus which he d either forgotten or never known and a host of sometimes eccentric, often remarkable everyday people, Vincent really begins to start living again.

A couple goes on a hike in the woods, and the woman refuses to return.

Jeanne d'Arc has succeeded in lifting the siege on Orléans and Charles VII has been ordained King of France. However, she is injured in her failed attempt to take Paris, weakening her position at court. When she is finally captured and put on trial, she finds both her life and the sanctity of her body at stake.

A young architect, Luca Fabiani, arrives in Venice to restore an ancient building in the Jewish ghetto. Here he discovers that on the top floor there is an apartment still inhabited by Elio Sorani, an elderly writer who has been living in seclusion for years, immersed in his memories. Elio is often visited by Giulia, a young woman who exchanges furtive and quick conversations with him. Giulia has an art gallery, where she meets with the man she is having an affair with, the Russian Sacha, an art critic who has now become a mediator of paintings between Italy and Russia. After overcoming an initial moment of mistrust, Luca and Elio become friends, and Elio gives Luca the manuscript of an unpublished novel, which Luca believes will enable him to reconstruct the writer's past.

After biologist Sylvie discovers her brother Paul trying to steal a gun from her lab, he explains that he wishes to avenge the death of their father whom he suspects died at the hands of his business partner.

Convinced that only she can lead France to victory against the invading English, Jeanne d'Arc leaves her childhood home to plead Charles, heir to the French throne, to allow her to guide his troops on the battlefield.

A fearless Antigone, refusing to allow the dishonored body of her murdered brother Polynices to be devoured by vultures and dogs, defies the Thebian tyrant Creon by burying him.

A brief, fictionalized time period in the life of Professor Kant. The story is set in Kant's hometown, Konigsberg; it chronicles his last few years prior to his death in 1804 at the age of 80.

A young man enters a brothel and sees a staged narration of a Chinese folk tale concerning a female pirate.

Vincent lives in a village, along the Rhône. Every morning he goes to the factory to work, and in the evening he takes care of his family. One day, he decides to go on a trip with the money given by his father.

More than just an abbreviated form of "La Belle Noiseuse", Rivette re-cut his footage with some important differences in point of view - this one being more from Marianne's point of view

Excerpts from the novel Donna di Messina (1949 and 1964, 1967) by Elio Vittorini (1908-1966).