The Sadness Will Last Forever: ‘À nos amours’ (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Before becoming a director, Maurice Pialat had been a painter. In his youth, he adored Van Gogh. Later in life, he spent years imagining a project about the last months of the Dutch painter, culminating in his 1991 film, Van Gogh. Despite all this, in a 1992 interview, Pialat remarked: "Van Gogh was quite unlike me". Quite unlike him, but not so unlike him as to not cling onto his last words and hurl them against the people seated at this dinner table – his family in the fiction, but also his film family, his group of collaborators...

Motion, Propagation, Transmission: ‘Devil in the Flesh’ (Marco Bellocchio, 1986)

Marco Bellocchio’s 'Devil in the Flesh' starts with a shot of several, interconnected buildings: a high-angle view encompassing the three areas where the action of the eight-minute opening sequence will take place. He draws a precise diagram of the struggle at the centre of the film: madness, besieged on all sides by two institutions – church and school (a third, psychiatry, will make an appearance later) – that are both seduced and horrified by its manifestation...