Produced for television by Claude-Jean Philippe, the « Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma », recounts the history of French cinema from its birth to the beginning of the 1960s. With commentary read by Jean Rochefort.

When political thugs murder an opponent's volunteer and also kill a cop, chief inspector Verjeat believes the politician who hired them is as guilty as the murderous goon. Verjeat's pursuit of the councilman, Lardatte, gets him a warning from his superiors. When he embarrasses Lardatte while disarming a hostage (the dead volunteer's father), Verjeat is told he's being transferred within a week. He speeds up his hunt for the goon and, with Lefévre, one of his young detectives, he engineers a complicated scheme to buy more time before the transfer. How should Verjeat play out his values of honor and duty?

Militis, a sailor, returns to a bar where he finds Sarah, the girl he once loved and is still attracted to. However, he is now married to an exotic woman who took care of him during an illness.

The tragedy of a man, about to kill himself, contemplating his past in a series of flashbacks.

In Granada in Spain, Sibilla works as a dancer in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child. The boy's father Estiria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardising the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman. Iliana however slips away from her engagement party to meet her real lover Hedwick, a Swedish painter. Sibilla, in desperation after a further rejection by Estiria, sees an opportunity to blackmail him by locking the lovers overnight in their meeting-place in the Alhambra.

A vamp seduces a banker and breaks with him when she's obtained all that she wanted.

Denise Moret joins her husband, Pierre, in Mongolia where he works as a civil engineer. One night she loose a lot of money on the roulette and therefore is forced to borrow money from Prince Lee-Lang. The Prince immediately begins to flirt and make advances towards Denise. Advances she rejects.

After the death of her mother, Germaine moves in with her father in a small town near the Rhône river. She falls in love with a young man, Alban, already engaged.

Adapted from a play by Romain Coolus, whose work Dulac had covered as a theater critic at the turn of the century, this atmospheric and socially inquisitive film tells the tale of an independent, sexually liberated woman (Eve Francis) who is torn between her husband (Gabriel Gabrio) and her lover (Paul Guide). Controversial at the time of its release, Antoinette Sabrier finds Dulac using her bold sense of visual rhythm to achieve a complex portrait of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and a nuanced investigation into human intimacy, with her characters’ emotions expressed through then-innovative cinematic techniques such as slow motion and associative montage.

Etchégor, a wealthy Basque peasant is in love with the beautiful American Majesty Parnell. Her husband, about to be arrested for theft, seeks to forge an alibi.

A fifty year old woman, scarred by a life of disillusionment and regret, returns to the place where she lived twenty years before, to rekindle happier memories. She meets a young woman, the daughter of the current owners' of the property, who is on the point of abandoning her home just as she did, all those years ago...

A serial in six episodes: 1) La seconde Marquise de Sombreuse; 2) Le Chateau maudit; 3) Folle; 4) L'Exilee; 5) La Danseuse inconnue; 6) Hallucination et realite. Set in modern day France in a chateau thought to be haunted since the Revolution, a Marquis and his daughter Irene (granddaughter of Marie Antoinette's lady companion) are preyed upon by Latin seductress, Lola, and her brother, Pedro. (Summary by Tami Williams, from the 2018 Il Cinema Ritrovato film program)

Monsieur Jourdain is a dangerous madman : he wants to share his fortune! His relatives do what any sensible fellow on earth would do: they have him committed to a mental hospital. But Jourdain manages to escape and decides to make everybody happy except... his heirs!

Desire brings out the worst in an actress' suitors-- One a well-to-do patron of London's theatre set, the other a lovestruck loner on the verge of penning a play dedicated to her.

A Lebanese Christian girl of European origin is attracted to a visiting Muslim chief and rides off with him.When her Christian fiance brings her back,she is punished for her transgression.

An American star, visiting Paris, falls asleep in the Louvre while a guide comments on Watteau's "Voyage à Cythère". She dreams that the painting's characters, beautiful ladies, escape, scattering across Paris after a tour of the fashion houses.

Coveted by two different men, a woman turns to a third man instead.

No synopsis available yet.

Young women search for love whilst living in a cheap Parisian boardinghouse that does not allow men.

Shot circa 1926, these two screen tests are made up of various takes for two films by Alberto Cavalcanti and Jacques de Baroncelli.