Les cent et une nuits

Simon Cinema, or Monsieur Cinema as calls himself, is starting to get old. His palatial home bears witness to what has been his great passion in life -cinema. His home is crammed with films and film memorabilia. He has so many things that he can no longer keep track of them. He employs a beautiful young film specialist, Camille, to help him for a hundred and one nights to organize his things, and his memories. During the inventory we see a large number of cinematic quotes, sequences from other films, as well as a number of actors who arrive at Monsieur Cinema's. The film includes sequences from, among others, Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief(1949), Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and Luis Bunuel's L 'Age d'Or (1930). Some of the cast appear as themselves, but not all. The audience sees, in more or less prominent roles, a parade of well known faces such as Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Jeanne Moreau, Gina Lollobrigida and many more. This is, however, no harmless collection of characters we see at Monsieur Cinema's. Several of them are scheming to either receive part of the inheritance or an original film copy. Camille tries to get Monsieur Cinema to finance her first film at the same time as she has an affair with another visitor to the house. Monsieur Cinema, played by Michel Piccoli, is not as forgetful and tired as we initially imagined, he is planning to celebrate his hundredth birthday in style.Agnes Varda's film is a tribute to film history, or film histories, if we can refer to her compatriot Jean-Luc Godard's tribute to film in his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1989). The title A Hundred and One Nights brings to mind The Arabian Nights, where a princess is forced to tell a new story each night in order not to be killed. In Varda's film, old films meet each other and form through this meeting a new film, a film about film memories or memories through film.Varda herself is a part of the film history she pays tribute to in her film. Of the one hundred years that film has existed, Agnes Varda has made remarkable films, both features and documentaries, for forty years.

Medverkande
Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Henri Garcin: Producent
Dominique Vignet: Manus
Agnès Varda: Foto
Eric Gautier: Musik
Various: Talat språk
French, English