La Fondation Gérard Courant

A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.

I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.

Gérard Courant's "Filmed Diary" of December 14, 2011, produced in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Between December 7 and 15, 2011, Gérard Courant was invited by the Dubai International Film Festival, in the United Arab Emirates. It was an opportunity for him to film many "Cinematons" of personalities from the Arab world and to continue his "Film Notebooks" from which he brought back 7 episodes.

On the occasion of the 7th meetings of Digne, Pour un autre cinéma, organized by Pierre Queyrel and which presented a retrospective of Philippe Garrel's cinematographic work, this film is the sound recording of the discussion that the filmmaker made with the audience after the screening of his films Marie pour mémoire, Athanor, Voyage au jardin des morts and Le Bleu des origines.

After 28 years of filming in Super 8 format, Lisa Rovner's Cinématon No. 2116, shot on May 23, 2006, is, following the cessation of production of Kodachrome film, the last film filmed on this cinematographic medium. It should have been the last one altogether if, after much reflection, I had not decided to continue the adventure in digital format. A second camera – a video one, this time – filmed this “historic” event.

Placed under the auspices of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose maxim "The human being has the fate of flowing water", is quoted in the epistle of the film, La Femme qui pleure dans les nuages is a film-poem by Gerard Courant to the glory of nine women engulfed in Alpine and Pyrenean torrents.

Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are like a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.

This film is an audio interview of Louis Skorecki, filmmaker and film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, by Patrice Kirchhofer and Gérard Courant. This interview, later put into images by Gérard Courant, is centred around the feature film Eugénie de Franval, based on Sade's novella, which Louis Skorecki shot in 1974 and which was awarded the prize of "la porte entrouverte" at the festival of young cinema in Toulon in 1975 by the jury composed of Marguerite Duras, Shuji Terayama and Dominique Noguez.

"On the occasion of the premiere of Nel Regno di Napoli in Cannes in 1978, Werner Schroeter gave me an audio interview about this film and about his work in general. Our meeting took place on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, in the midst of excitement of the Cannes festival life, a few days after the screening of Nel Regno di Napoli and in the presence of the photographer Jean-Claude Moireau. Vivre à Naples et mourir is the audio capture of that informal meeting that happened on 20 May 1978 and which is, as per director's wish, more like a casual conversation than an interview in the strict sense of the term (a set of questions and answers).