In 1958, Roberte is appointed president of the board of censorship under
the Fourth French Republic. During the war, she served in the French
Resistance, but now she is a respectable dignitary, leading a settled bourgeois
existence. She is married to an older man, Octave, a professor in ecclesiastical
law who has some very peculiar tastes in art. A model of virtue and
respectability he might be in his public life, but Octave suffers from strange
voyeuristic impulses that compel him to attend exhibitions of living tableaux
which his wife finds perverse and disturbing. Roberte is further traumatised
when her husband introduces her to someone who witnessed the terrible events
that she experienced during the war...
Franz Kafka's letters to his fiancée Felice Bauer not only reveal a soul in torment; they also give us a harrowing self-portrait of a man appalled by his own existence.
In the 1920s French cinema was at its most varied and stylish - witness the achievements of Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein and Jacques Feyder.
The cinema of Japan is noteworthy for its purity, subtlety and visual impact. The films of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa are sublime masterpieces of film poetry.