Produced for television by Claude-Jean Philippe, the « Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma », recounts the history of French cinema from its birth to the beginning of the 1960s. With commentary read by Jean Rochefort.

When political thugs murder an opponent's volunteer and also kill a cop, chief inspector Verjeat believes the politician who hired them is as guilty as the murderous goon. Verjeat's pursuit of the councilman, Lardatte, gets him a warning from his superiors. When he embarrasses Lardatte while disarming a hostage (the dead volunteer's father), Verjeat is told he's being transferred within a week. He speeds up his hunt for the goon and, with Lefévre, one of his young detectives, he engineers a complicated scheme to buy more time before the transfer. How should Verjeat play out his values of honor and duty?

Monsieur Jourdain is a dangerous madman : he wants to share his fortune! His relatives do what any sensible fellow on earth would do: they have him committed to a mental hospital. But Jourdain manages to escape and decides to make everybody happy except... his heirs!

An American star, visiting Paris, falls asleep in the Louvre while a guide comments on Watteau's "Voyage à Cythère". She dreams that the painting's characters, beautiful ladies, escape, scattering across Paris after a tour of the fashion houses.

A Lebanese Christian girl of European origin is attracted to a visiting Muslim chief and rides off with him.When her Christian fiance brings her back,she is punished for her transgression.

The duel between a Czarist general and a lieutenant, over the general's wife, is postponed with war approaching. Years later, the rivals meet again but the general realizes his wife has been faithful to him after all.

Denise Moret joins her husband, Pierre, in Mongolia where he works as a civil engineer. One night she loose a lot of money on the roulette and therefore is forced to borrow money from Prince Lee-Lang. The Prince immediately begins to flirt and make advances towards Denise. Advances she rejects.

A hotel for women-only and catering to working girls is the setting for not being able to get a USA PCA seal-of-approval for this French-film, but New York City's 55th Playhouse played it anyway. Along the way the audience meets the girl who sneaked her lover into her no-men-allowed room and her patch soon turns blue; a young lady with a passionate intensity who chooses another young lady as the object of her affections; the blindly-misguided director of the hotel, another lady of real easy virtue who is not the one who smuggled her lover into her room; and a girl who is only there as a procurer for a slavery ring.

"Adapted from a play by Romain Coolus, whose work Dulac had covered as a theater critic at the turn of the century, this atmospheric and socially inquisitive film tells the tale of an independent, sexually liberated woman (Eve Francis) who is torn between her husband (Gabriel Gabrio) and her lover (Paul Guide). Controversial at the time of its release, Antoinette Sabrier finds Dulac using her bold sense of visual rhythm to achieve a complex portrait of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and a nuanced investigation into human intimacy, with her characters’ emotions expressed through then-innovative cinematic techniques such as slow motion and associative montage. " - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Desire brings out the worst in an actress' suitors-- One a well-to-do patron of London's theatre set, the other a lovestruck loner on the verge of penning a play dedicated to her.

In a village on the banks of the Rhone river, Alban, a young farmer, is about to marry Margot. Monsieur Broc, a town hall employee, discovers his daughter is taken with Alban. When he rejects her, she collapses. Suddenly, the river rises and floods the village. One evening, Margot disapears… This peasant drama, adapted from a novel by André Corthis and shot during an actual flood of the Rhone, was Delluc’s last. The human madness is an echo to nature’s fury, magnified by moving images of a Provence submerged by water and mist.

A fifty year old woman, scarred by a life of disillusionment and regret, returns to the place where she lived twenty years before, to rekindle happier memories. She meets a young woman, the daughter of the current owners of the property, who is on the point of abandoning her home – just as she did, all those years ago...

In Granada in Spain, Sibilla works as a dancer in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child. The boy's father Estiria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardising the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman. Iliana however slips away from her engagement party to meet her real lover Hedwick, a Swedish painter. Sibilla, in desperation after a further rejection by Estiria, sees an opportunity to blackmail him by locking the lovers overnight in their meeting-place in the Alhambra.

A vamp seduces a banker and breaks with him when she's obtained all that she wanted.

Militis, a sailor, returns to a bar where he finds Sarah, the girl he once loved and is still attracted to. However, he is now married to an exotic woman who took care of him during an illness.

Etchégor, a wealthy Basque peasant is in love with the beautiful American Majesty Parnell. Her husband, about to be arrested for theft, seeks to forge an alibi.

A Spanish festival reveals the emotional distance between a woman and a man.

A serial in six episodes: 1) La seconde Marquise de Sombreuse; 2) Le Chateau maudit; 3) Folle; 4) L'Exilee; 5) La Danseuse inconnue; 6) Hallucination et realite. Set in modern day France in a chateau thought to be haunted since the Revolution, a Marquis and his daughter Irene (granddaughter of Marie Antoinette's lady companion) are preyed upon by Latin seductress, Lola, and her brother, Pedro. (Summary by Tami Williams, from the 2018 Il Cinema Ritrovato film program)