The Prize of Peril
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
A television network airs a popular show in which a contestant, broadcast live, must survive for four hours while killers hunt him down throughout the city. François, who is unemployed, enters the contest hoping to win the jackpot, even though no contestant has survived so far. A gripping dystopian film that offers a visionary take on the excesses of the society of spectacle and the commodification of entertainment, featuring a charming Gérard Lanvin and a terrifying Michel Piccoli as an unscrupulous host.
Yves Boisset
Yves Boisset is a French filmmaker and screenwriter. Known for championing a style of cinema that was both popular and, more often than not, left-leaning during the 1970s and 1980s, he has a particular affinity for crime and action films. He frequently directs films that criticize right-wing conservative politics, police or military abuses, everyday racism, and slander, or that offer a scathing critique of the media and a certain type of commercial trash TV.
