Fantastique The Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema

Six dreams and nightmares of French cinema by Charles Vanel, Marcel L'Herbier, Edmond T. Greville, Jean Kerchbron, Juan Luis Bunuel and Raul Ruiz

Though rarely thought of as a home for genre filmmaking, France has fostered a long lineage of films at the border between realism and fantasy. Broadly gathered under the term of Cinéma Fantastique, these works often find the magical and the surreal lurking in the ordinary. Uncanny dreams, fleeting visions, or eerie apparitions lift their protagonists out of the everyday, transporting viewers into atmospheric worlds where the usual rules structuring our reality do not always hold. Formally striking and thematically stimulating, these phantasmagorical films blur the boundary between horror and wonder as they place the mysterious and the unexplained centre-stage.

Dans la Nuit (Charles Vanel, 1930) moves from joy to terror as a disfigured miner starts to wear a strange mask. In Marcel L'Herbier's La Nuit Fantastique (1942), a student follows a woman in his dreams. In Edmond T. Greville's Le Diable Souffle (1947), stormy weather and feverish longing threaten to drive everyone mad. A man lives the life of another in Jean Kerchbron's Le Golem (1967), In Juan Luis Bunuel's The Woman in Red Boots (1974) Catherine Deneuve appears to control people with her mind and finally in Raul Ruiz's Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) Marcello Mastroianni stars in four bizarre, intertwining stories.