Maurice Pialat

Pialat's portrait of contemporary France mocks prosperity as a substitute for social and sexual revolution (imdb)

A moody, jaded police detective, while investigating a drug ring, falls for a mysterious woman and is drawn into a shady and dangerous scheme. (imdb)

The final 67 days of Van Gogh's life is examined. (imdb)

Suzanne is 15 and is having sex with many boys, just for fun, but did not manage to really love one of them. Her family does not understand her. The father does not like her behaviour. When he leaves home, the mother becomes a little bit neurotic. And Suzanne's brother Robert, begins to beat her as a punishment... (imdb)

A 10-year-old boy feels unwanted when his mother places him in a home for wayward children. He goes to a foster home where a family of workers finds him to be too much for them. When the unruly child discovers the family plans to give up on him, he drowns their daughter's cat in retaliation... (All Movie Guide)

Dossignan is a very zealous rural priest. The dean Menou-Segrais tries to keep him reasonable. But Dossignan will be tempted by Satan, then will try to save the soul of Mouchette, a young girl who killed one of her lovers. A film about God's grace and mysticism. (imdb)

The film delves deeply into the last days of an affair between a married man and a young woman who have been together for six years. (BFI)

The film recounts with Bressonian sobriety the story of a family coping with the imminent death of their mother. As she slips away from life, she confronts her 34-year relationship with her philandering, alcoholic husband, and comforts her dutiful and affectionate but feckless son, who searches for release from his anguish in anonymous sex. Nathalie Baye is quietly wrenching as the daughter-in-law. (cinema.ucla.edu)

This rawly autobiographical film lays bare the character of a man who seems unable to do anything but demand that the world conform to his desires--and who loses everything in the process. Depardieu embodies Pialat's self-portrait with burly power, plumbing depths of self-absorption and cruelty as a successful bourgeois who muscles his way through life. (cinema.ucla.edu)

Made in 1971 for French TV, this epic film comes from early in the Pialat's belated feature-filmmaking career. It begins in costume drama and an ethnographic view of rural French life during World War One, and in an apparently sentimental tale of war orphans. But then it irises out from costume drama conventions into the transcendental, exploring Pialat*s spiritual themes, as well as the social dynamics, trauma and collective experiences of war. (KG)

This is a short film about a wrestling competition. We see a lot of people in the crowd both men and women alike appreciating, applauding and cheering wrestlers who have come from all parts of Turkey. A lot of honor is at stake as no body wants to lose. For this reason there is a fierce competition. The wrestling matches are held with loud drums playing in the background. A couple of belly dancers also join when there is a break after a wrestling bout. (imdb)

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Istanbul takes into the crowded streets and back alleys of a fascinating city divided between continents. (KG)

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Byzance uses a text by Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453.

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Corne D'Or juxtaposes a poem by Nerval with a powerful study of Ottoman architecture. (KG)

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Maitre Galip is another on Pialat's perceptive studies of children that includes a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. (KG)

The narrator expresses a deep sadneswere s about the state of post-war France, the growing gap between the poor and the rich, the new suburbs and increasing unhappiness. Some of the memorable moments of the film was shots of the new apartments being built in France. (imdb)

Avoiding the clichés of the teen film, Pialat's Graduate First is a minutely observed, uncommonly honest profile of disaffected French youth in a northern provincial city. The film follows the aimless adventures of a group of students who see little point in finishing their baccalauréat when the future promises nothing but dead-end jobs or grinding unemployment. Instead, they drift from bistro to beach, engage in sex, bicker with their uncomprehending parents or set out for Paris. (KG)

An early black-and-white short film by Maurice Pialat from 1961, Janine (16:35) with Hubert Deschamps and Claude Berri as two men who meet casually and find they both love the same woman, a prostitute called Janine (Evelyn Kerr). (DVD times)

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Istanbul takes into the crowded streets and back alleys of a fascinating city divided between continents. (KG)

Impressive sound design, non-linear editing, great 'expressionistic' locations and b&w cinematography, this is an experimental piece for Pialat, a psychological/gothic thriller of sorts... (mubi.com)

Another early experimental short film by Maurice Pialat.

Maurice Pialat's first film, an 8-minute silent work from 1951.

Another early silent short film by Maurice Pialat.

A short documentary by Maurice Pialat. (anonymous)

It comes from a serie of short films made for French televisions around 1964-66 and called "Les Chroniques de France." This is an extra from the French DVD of Pialat's 1991 feature film also entitled "Van Gogh." (anonymous)