This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.

Strolling through France (Roanne, Nice and Carcassonne) with some excursions abroad (Munich, Montreal, New York).

La Cinémathèque offered the filmmaker Marcel Hanoun to make a retrospective of his work, a new film, the one of his choice: a "free" film, which means free to the filmmaker of to see and hear what he wants, who he wants, and, ideally, to make it known and heard by everyone.

A cello player is asked by her daughter why she suddenly interrupted her musical career… The voices and images of the two women intertwined with the author’s give way to thought, vision. Confessions of lives dedicated to creating.

Feature film.

The short film is like a journal page of film making. On making a film (in 1966) in Barcelona. On assembling together surviving fragments of the film, but not as a vestige of something for ever lost, but rather an occasion for making a new film of all sorts of fragments: images in Barcelona (in 2008/9) that echo images of the older film; images of making films (Hanoun's own, Boris Lehman's; other friends'); images of a storm in Biarritz; fragments of conversations...

Film produced as part of the Festival Pocket Films Forum Images.

Marcel Hanoun, one of the most innovative of filmmakers, gives us what he names "a lesson in cinema." Frederique Devaux and Michel Amarger filmed this piece at his country house, composing an abundantly rich portrait. Film clips and sparks of theoretic bravura testify to the feverish creativity and the drunken agitation behind which lurks the ever-composed voice of the filmmaker.

Amours décolorées is a cinematographic poem to the glory of Mariola San Martin, model, stylist, dancer and Spanish photographer.

Film about Marcel Hanoun at work while making his film Les amants de Sarajevo in 1993.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

Two New York women, Kristin and Doreen, live a black and white life, but in color of Gene Tierney, a star of 40’ Hollywood melodrama, while listening to the old songs of Marilyn Monroe. They go from one extreme to the other (from dream to reality, from day to night, from black and white to color), and so travel symbolically through this timelessness. Kristin disappears and Doreen is lost is the big city. Her meetings with Marcel, a filmmaker, then David, a sculptor, accomplish nothing, and she is destroyed by daylight. But her Memory of Gene Tierney triumphs over night and death, and Cinema can continue.

Reel 7 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

On a Mediterranean cruise, a young man hired as a tour guide is intrigued by the beauty of a female interpreter hiding behind her sunglasses. He makes advances to her by venturing into a series of strange stories.

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a film. The author turns his hesitations, his doubts and difficult working conditions into the constituents of his work”. (Raphaël Bassan)

Marcel Hanoun wedding by Jonas Mekas