The Wages of Fear
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.
Winner of the Berlin International Film Festival's Golden Bear, and the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'or in 1953
In a Central American village, unemployed European immigrants are hired by the manager of an American oil company to put out a huge fire in an oil well. To do this, they must drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerine for 500 km, in a rugged landscape, without exploding.
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Henri-Georges Clouzot was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. Clouzot is best remembered for his work in the thriller film genre, having directed The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955), which are critically recognized as among the greatest films of the 1950s. He also directed documentary films, including The Mystery of Picasso (1956), which was declared a national treasure by the government of France. Clouzot in one of four filmmakers, alongside Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Altman and Jafar Panahi, to have won the top prizes at the major European film festivals, namely the Golden Lion (in Venice), the Palme d'Or (in Cannes) and the Golden Bear (in Berlin), although the latter two awards were given to the same film (The Wages of Fear), which is no longer possible today.
