alr

Woman in Chains
(La Prisonnière)

Screening on Film
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
With Laurent Terzieff, Elisabeth Wiener, Bernard Fresson.
France, 1968, 35mm, color, 106 min.
French with English subtitles.
Print source: Tamasa Distribution

Clouzot's unsettling last film offers a variation of his recurrent grand theme of torturous love, here in the form of a dangerous love triangle set in the Sixties Paris art world. The story of a chic gallerist whose discerning taste only hints at the strange sexual obsessions that eventually lure a wide-eyed up-and-coming artist into his kinky den, La Prisonnière returns to Clouzot's idea of corrupt business as the driving metaphor for the 20th century, with civilization doomed by the unfair "wages,” be they pecuniary or psychosexual, that sustain yet ultimately destroy it. Clouzot's only full-length feature in color, La Prisonnière concludes with a hypnotic barrage of psychedelic Op-Art abstraction directly borrowed from his ill-fated and abandoned feature, L'Enfer.

Part of film series

Read more

The Complete Henri Georges Clouzot

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf

Read more
a close-up of a Bissau-Guinean woman wearing a scarf on her head and looking directly at the camera with a slight smile

Le Dépays + Sans soleil

Read more
Peter Sellers wearing a large hat with "ME" embroidered on it, and gripping a Pilgrim-like collar

Carol for Another Christmas

Read more

Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy