Movies: Renato Berta

At the end of the 19th century, an educated white-collar worker finds himself in the employ of an inventor. As he is neither a "worker" nor an "owner," his position in the inventor's household and in the world at large is equivocal. Despite the diffi...

Excerpts from the novel Donna di Messina (1949 and 1964, 1967) by Elio Vittorini (1908-1966)....

This is a small, intense film based on Schoenberg’s opus of the same name with the subtitle “danger, fear, catastrophe”. It deals with emerging fascism and the persecution of Jews, as well as with their historical continuities....

Michel Contat is Emeritus Director of Research at the CNRS, ITEM/CNRS/ENS and a specialist of Jean-Paul Sartre whose novels and theater he has edited in the Pléiade edition and about whom he has written several books. With Alexander Astruc, he made t...

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time ...

Jean-Marie Straub’s new film closes the circle. The years 1954–2013 are displayed as representing a film produced in collaboration with Danièle Huillet. The two had met in Paris in 1954, around the year they came across the text by Georges Bernanos, ...

Davide Pozzi, who oversaw the delicate process of scanning the original camera negative, discusses the restoration of Alain Resnais' 1959 film HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR with cinematographer Renato Berta, a special consultant on the project....

Thirteen Swiss filmmakers, each from their own point of view, chronicle and reconstruct the narrative of Swiss cinema, from its beginning to the present day, and in doing so, retrace the history of the country....

Renato Berta, director of photography who won a César in 1988, this time appears in front of the camera under the direction of Paul Lacoste, who retraces the creative process of the Swiss filmmaker. Between archive images and anecdotes about his shoo...

Jacques Lemonnier of IBM France, Francois Dalle of L'Oreal and other ultrapowerful French moguls are surprisingly candid -- and cold-blooded -- as they discuss their attitudes about business in this startling 1978 documentary. After sounding off abou...

Every year the Viennale invites a famous director to produce a short film as the festival trailer. In 2014 the choice has fallen on the 105-year old Manoel de Oliveira....

The adventures of Rak, who after his dismissal begins to reflect on the meaning of the word work and on the act of working....

More than a land, it is from the lake that this son comes. Raised by a father fisherman, he learned his noises and currents, maybe also its hardness at the same time as that of adults. Lake is also a border, but in the water his drawing is lost: in t...

Also known as “Letter from Venice,” Susan Sontag’s fourth and final film tells of a relationship that is fragmenting as the partners tour the decaying ruins of a hallucinatory Venice....

Kazuo Ohno, Father of the Butoh Dance, first appeared on stage at the age of 43. He left the stage only at the age of one hundred, three years before he died. This short, dialogue-less film presents the exceptional range of expressions that this Japa...

Recently discovered and shown only twice before, Incantati is an alternate ending to Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 2003 film Umiliati — fragment as mini-manifesto....

"At the end of filming Umiliati, Straub and Huillet gave thanks to the cast and crew in a graceful way: by inviting Dolando Bernardini to sing several stanzas from Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century epic poem Jerusalem Delivered." - MoMA...

Document on the city of Le Havre. Luc Moullet sets out to show Le Havre not as a single city centered on its port, but as a multitude of neighborhoods and annexed communes, making Le Havre a city of rare diversity. Commentary by Luc Moullet, said b...

In the summer of 1986, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub were working in the park of an old Sicilian mansion and in a clearing at the foot of Mount Etna shooting Der Tod des Empedokles. Assistant cameraman Jean-Paul Toraille toyed around, so to s...

Peter Nestler's poetic documentary Verteidigung der Zeit is not only an hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), but also to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler of...