watchlist_extended

A look at the spirit of New Orleans. First a funeral: Allen Toussaint explains that you arrive slow and cut up afterwards. Then it's food, with a lesson in eating crayfish at Frankie and Johnny's. Next, a St. Patrick's Day party: New Orleans celebrates holidays on the streets. Then it's preparation for Mardi gras, with roots in slave days, when slaves gathered on Sundays to prepare for the one holiday they could celebrate. The Wild Tchoupitoulas society makes Indian costumes to honor the help Indians gave slaves. At Mardi gras, we're with this society parading, singing, and partying. We end with the annual parade for St. Joseph, the saint of the people. More music, dance and ritual.

A musical portrait of Zydeco King Clifton Chenier, who combines the pulsating rhythms of Cajun dance music and black R&B with African overtones, belting out his irresistible music in the sweaty juke joints of South Louisiana.

A portrait of black Creole life in the Louisiana Delta, accompanied by the hot sounds of Zydeco music.

A tribute to the Texas songster, Mance Lipscomb, considered by many to be the greatest guitarist of all time.

A rich portrayal of the lives and music of the French-speaking Cajuns of Louisiana, featuring the Balfa Brothers, Marc Savoy and Nathan Abshire.

Les Blank's poetic documentation of 1967's Los Angeles Easter Sunday Love-In. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2002.

Les Blank's portrait of the great Texas bluesman, 'Lightnin' Hopkins. The film includes interviews and a performance by Hopkins. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2002.

Three cowboys, mistaken for members of an outlaw gang, are relentlessly pursued by a posse.

Two miners agree to guide a mysterious woman, who has appeared in their camp from nowhere, to a nearby town; but soon, because of her erratic behavior, they begin to suspect that her true purpose is quite different.

1974 film by Jacques Tati

Jour de Fête tells the story of an inept and easily-distracted French mailman who frequently interrupts his duties to converse with the local inhabitants, as well as inspect the traveling fair that has come to his small community. Influenced by too much wine and a newsreel account of rapid transportation methods used by the United States postal system, he goes to hilarious lengths to speed the delivery of mail while aboard his bicycle.

The tragic story of a young orphan girl who is befriended by an innocent but emotionally disabled veteran of the French Indochina War.

1971 film by Roman Polanski

1989 film by Pedro Almodóvar

1984 film by John Cassavetes

The story is set during a workers' strike in Nantes in 1955. Steel worker François Guilbaud is one of the strikers, and he rents a room from Margot Langlois, a widow who sympathizes with the strikers although she is herself upper-class. He has a pregnant girlfriend named Violette Pelletier, to whom he becomes less and less attracted, and abandons. When he tries to defend his behaviour, she feels she is treated even more unjustly. He meets Edith Leroyer, a beautiful working-class girl who is unhappily married to a rich but impotent and neurotic merchant, and a part-time prostitute. Unbeknownst to him she is the daughter of the widow. He first meets her in the street and one night she shows up in his room, wearing only her fur coat. They fall instantly in love, but their great passion lasts only one night, for during the demonstration he is shot by the police and dies in Edith's arms.

A bank clerk is drawn into the risky world of a gorgeous gambling addict.

1981 horror film directed by David Cronenberg

1963 film by Georges Franju

2012 film by Abbas Kiarostami