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Death and the French Auteur

A run of French art films where a sensitive man — an aging poet, a recovering drinker, a screenwriter, a war-haunted soldier — drifts through a world already tilting toward death.

Film-school and cinephile canon rather than crowd fare: revered, elegiac, and emotionally heavy work best watched when you want serious art cinema and not comfort, with two of the four genuinely devastating.

• Testament of Orpheus (1960)
• The Fire Within (1963)
• Contempt (1963)
• J'Accuse (1919)
• Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963) — The Resnais war-ghost you filed next to Contempt and never returned to — a 1963 art film where an Algerian-war soldier and a widow drift through a rebuilt town so haunted by the dead that time itself won't settle, the demanding one to finally pull down when these landed.