Actor: Catherine Le Couey

One Deadly Summer

In spring 1976, a 19-year-old beauty, her German-born mother, and her crippled father move to the town of a firefighter nicknamed Pin-Pon. Everyone notices the provocative Eliane. She singles out Pin-Pon and soon is crying on his shoulder (she's myopic and hates her reputation as a dunce and as easy); she moves in with him, knits baby clothes, and plans their wedding. Is this love or some kind of plot? She asks Pin-Pon's mother and aunt about the piano in the barn: who delivered it on a November night in 1955? Why does she want to know, and what does it have to do with her mother's sorrows, her father's injury, this quick marriage, and the last name on her birth certificate?

The Seventh Juror

In a moment of madness a middle-aged, married and respectable pharmacist kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, he flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. Eventually her boyfriend is charged with the crime and, in a strange twist of fate, the killer finds himself serving on the jury.

The Hussars

Brigadier Le Gouce and Private Flicot lose their horses during a campaign in Italy. To avoid looking ridiculous, the two hussars cross the country in search of their mounts. But when they are mistaken for deserters, their regiment gives chase.

Women and War

In 1944, in a small village in Calvados, just as the Allies landed, a British plane was shot down. The wounded pilot seeks help. All the villagers, who speak only of resistance, refuse to help, for fear of reprisals. Only the mayor, Dr. Leproux, takes him in and nurses him back to health, then entrusts him to the Resistance. But the Germans get wind of the story and arrest Leproux. He is saved by Major Frantz. But the budding friendship between these two men "doesn't stop the drums", and the war is on.

The Sinners

Au Royaume des Cieux takes place in in a dreadful girls' reformatory. A couple of lovers will try to escape from this living hell.

If I Had Four Dromedaries

Composed entirely of still photographs shot by Marker himself over the course of his restless travel through twenty-six countries, If I Had Four Dromedaries stages a probing, at times agitated, search for the meanings of the photographic image, in the form of an extended voiceover conversation and debate between the "amateur photographer" credited with the images and two of his colleagues. Anticipating later writings by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag (who professed her admiration for the film) If I Had Four Dromedaries reveals Marker's instinctual understanding of the secret rapport between still and moving image.