Jacques Duclos

On October 4, 2018, France celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Fifth Republic. It is a republic born in the throes of the Algerian War and one which—from the day it was founded by General de Gaulle until the presidency of a very Jupiterian Emmanuel Macron—has been assailed as a “Republican monarchy” by partisans of a more assertive parliamentarian state. By revisiting the struggle of those who dared oppose the new regime — only to suffer a crushing defeat on September 28, 1958, when they were barely able to garner 20% of the vote against the constitutional text — this film shines a powerful new light on the origins of the Fifth Republic and its consequences for the next 60 years. It is a constitutional debate that planted the seeds for a complete upheaval of the French political landscape, on the left in particular, and set the country in motion toward what would be called the Union of the Left.

Guy Debord's analysis of a consumer society.

September 28, 1938, war is about to break out. Tension was mounting, as Chamberlain and Daladier on one side, and Hitler and Mussolini on the other, met in Munich. This conference marked the culmination of the weakness of European democracies in the face of the rise of fascism. Through period documents and interviews, author Marcel Ophüls recounts this meeting and recreates the European climate of 1938.

A propaganda film of the communist party of France, showing how the comrades help the proletariat against the capitalists.

March 9th, 1953. A gray, sad day. Clouds float low over the Kremlin towers. A city that unrecognizably grew, prettier and matured - this Moscow froze in solemn grief. The country escorts its father and leader, Joseph Stalin.

This almost 8 hour humongous 1973 documentary by two of the filmmakers who made The Sorrow and the Pity recounts fifty years of the history of France from the 1920s to 1972. It is particularly thorough in documenting the significance and rise to power of Charles De Gaulle. The film's most valuable contributions are its interviews with all sorts of people who lived through this period of history, from Marshall Petain's lawyer (Petain headed the Vichy government of occupied France) to resistance figures, and Frenchmen who fought on the side of the Nazis in Russia.

On June 20th, 1971, thousands of Spanish Republicans from all around Europe meet up in Montreuil, France to take part in an event initiated by the French and the Spanish Communist Parties, to protest against Franco's dictatorship.