“French Chronicles” is a series of short documentaries on contemporary French life from Pialat's unique point of view, shot in 1965 and 1966: Quartier Latin, Les Champs-Élysées, Pigalle, and La Parisienne et les grands magasins. Also on the program are two recently discovered, very early shorts: Drole de bobine (1950), a comic romp with Pialat as one of the actors, an homage to the silent comedies Pialat admired so much; and Isabelle aux dombes (1951), which takes a seemingly mundane incident and imbues it with an almost supernatural sense of dread. Plus Janine (1962), in which Claude Berri plays a young man down on his luck who nevertheless plans to marry his prostitute-girlfriend. “Juxtaposing scenes that no standard structure could bring together, Janine might be taking place over the course of several hours-or months. Here, already, you can see the singularity of an approach that is realistic in its details but wildly elliptical in its duration” (Elisabeth Lequeret, Film Comment).