Centre Georges Pompidou

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.

In one of his very last projects, Raul Ruiz celebrates the films of his historical predecessor Jean Painlevé, a documentary innovator whose work always blended science with surrealism. Ruiz and friends further perfect the art of mystification. Why it is so difficult to count fish in an aquarium? Ruiz, his loyal actor Melvil Poupaud and his producer François Margolin come up with a wide range of hypotheses. With their bone-dry wit, they keep up the tradition of the French pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions. (IFFR)

An incident with his neighbor sends director Barbet Schroeder on a quest for inner peace.

While researching their subject’s life for their feature My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud, co-directors/writers Gerard Mordillat and Jerome Prieur made a documentary on the famed French actor/writer/poet that died in 1948 at the age of 51.

A video derived from footage Godard kept from his 1981 visit to Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios at the time he was making Passion.

A man awakens to find himself immersed in a real-life scenario of a board game with an ever expanding cartography.

In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing merriment (entitled Beaubourg, la dernière Major !) audience members were invited to observe the daily making of this film, directed by Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, about an inexperienced young journalist (Laure Marsac) sent to the Pompidou to interview a maverick artistic impresario (Thomas Chabrol). The result is an unexpected love story that is also a record of this landmark exhibition, featuring cameos by Raul Ruiz, Paul Vecchiali, Luc Moullet and more !

"For reasons of health, Lee Kang-sheng and I moved to the mountains. We don't have any neighbors. Our house is part of a row of dilapidated houses. I love these abandoned houses. I often walk around in them casually. I think they are beautiful. I said to Lee Kang-sheng: we don't have to go elsewhere to make films anymore. I'll make all my remaining films right here. I got some old chairs and some of my paintings and arranged them in these abandoned houses. And thus, this film was made." Tsai Ming-liang

"Chronicles of the Present Times" - An experimental trilogy. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.

A wordless portrait of sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins shows us the artist in the process of transforming clay into uncanny forms.

Notebook for a past or future film, shot in Los Angeles, Hogg roams the city like a haunted place where memories, anxieties and fantasies mingle.

In this documentary, director Mariana Otero looks at the daily life of a college in the "difficult" commune of Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris.

A documentary about Jacques Lacan and his influence on the main tendencies of modern psychoanalysis. It begins with a series of interviews with psychoanalysts who knew Lacan, and then presents an overview of Lacanian theory and practice that explores what actually happens in psychoanalysis.

Jacques Rozier followed Bernard Ménez's tour in 1984 after the surprise success of his song "Jolie poupée". From a timecoded video in the possession of Jacques Rozier, post-production work was carried out in 2001 under the supervision of the director for his retrospective at the Center Pompidou. The element resulting from this work was digitized by the Cinémathèque française at the Hiventy laboratory in 2021.

Filmed during the exhibition of the painter Dali at Beaubourg.

Upon receiving a series of photographs taken from an ATM security camera, Calle becomes involved in a perplexing fifteen-year investigation. She manages to steal three surveillance tapes, and interacts with strangers, bank employees, and a pawn shop merchant in an attempt to clarify the meaning of money, security, and the anonymous photographs. The images, originally exhibited in an installation entitled Cash Machine, are now presented as the central narrative in this unresolved investigation.

In 1906, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were 24 and 25 years old. The Butte Montmartre is their Parisian sanctuary where artists in need of recognition meet. Braque and Picasso become friends to the point of never leaving each other. For the moment, their paintings do not interest many people; only Apollinaire, then aged 26, and the young gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 22, saw immense potential in them. And in addition to their passion for painting, these four inseparable boys share the same appetite for modernity. Collages, diversions of materials and geometrization of forms: cubism opened the way to abstraction. A revolution initiated by Picasso and Braque, which profoundly changed the course of the history of modern art.

An acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9/11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960s and '70s. By the 1990s, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases. Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster.

A documentary about Louise Bourgeois by director Camille Guichard. Bourgeois created art for more than fifty years and at the time of filming was still creating.