Damia

Documentary on the singer Damia.

Paris, 1482. Today is the festival of the fools, taking place like each year in the square outside Cathedral Notre Dame. Among jugglers and other entertainers, Esmeralda, a sensuous gypsy, performs a bewitching dance in front of delighted spectators. From up in a tower of the cathedral, Frollo, an alchemist, gazes at her lustfully. Later in the night, Frollo orders Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer and his faithful servant, to kidnap Esmeralda. But when the ugly freak comes close to her is touched by the young woman's beauty...

Estelle de Pressendi, famous music-hall singer, was all the rage in the 1910s thanks to her two inseparable impresarios. Twenty years later, then on the verge of death, the singer wants to entrust her daughter Yvonne to them.

A prominent chanteuse on a world tour meets a young fellow European in Singapore, a soldier of fortune who becomes obsessed with listening to her voice on a recording.

A biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797. Originally intended to be the first of six films, director Abel Gance realized the full project would be nigh impossible, and never raised the money to complete the other five. The film's legendary reputation is due to the astonishing range of techniques that Gance uses to tell his story, culminating in the final twenty-minute triptych sequence, which alternates widescreen panoramas with complex multiple- image montages projected simultaneously on three screens.