Éric Derobert

Comments

The Sword in the Stone

In my generation (I was born in 1956), the childhood of a cinephile often began with a Walt Disney, regardless of later criticisms of these films.

Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Obviously, this was not the first film to break with the traditional codes of storytelling (far from it!), but it was the first one I saw. And then, we are never done with the bourgeoisie!

The Travelling Players

Mastery of sequence shots and political analysis. The pinnacle of Angelopoulos' work, along with Alexander the Great.

MESSIDOR

It is the emblematic film of the end of utopias. A farewell to the 60s and 70s, a prelude to the neoliberalism that never ends.

Un Coeur en hiver

The heartbreaking melancholy of Claude Sautet's last films, with an increasingly stripped-down style.

71 FRAGMENTE EINER CHRONOLOGIE DES ZUFALLS

Objectification of the world, dryness of the gaze. Michael Haneke's first films will remain the most striking, because we had never seen that before.

Playtime

It's a film that gets more and more hopeless the more you watch it. Because, since then, the modern world that he criticises – and tries to bury methodically in a burlesque slowburn – has really triumphed.

LADY JANE

Robert Guédiguian's humanist cinema is a little more desperate than usual in Lady Jane. The film is acrid, without superego, there it goes!

Después de Lucía

Michel Franco has a sense of editing that shatters the viewer. His scenes never end when you think they will. All of this is combined with a powerful social analysis.

Incroyable mais vrai

The sometimes gratuitous absurdity of Quentin Dupieux's films suddenly collides with a real world portrayed as Dorian Gray. Neoliberalism has entered our heads, implanting its pathological (and not very new) dreams of performance and immortality.

Further remarks

No classic movies in this vote, and yet I love them. But faced with the impossible challenge of choosing between Chaplin and Bergman, I preferred to keep ten films that have profoundly marked my own chronological life, my journey, my rejections, my choices. Nine of these films made an immediate mark on me when they were released. The striking exception to that is Playtime, which suddenly imposed itself on my life as a cinephile 30 years after its production.