Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Critics are rallying around the Criterion special edition DVD of Costa-Gavras’s benchmark political thriller Z. As Film.com’s Amanda Mae Meyncke cries, “This 1970 Academy Award best foreign film winner is a simultaneous declaration against tyranny and call to arms.” The Dallas Morning News’ Chris Vognar exclaims, “Costa-Gavras’s frenetic masterpiece is no less startling today than it was forty years ago . . . After you watch Criterion’s new edition of Z, delivered in one of the distributor’s customary pristine digital transfers, you might be tempted to stay put, return to the menu, and soak it all in a second time.” And DVD Talk’s Jamie S. Rich writes that this is “a remarkable re-creation of a volatile political tragedy” and “an important, influential picture.”

Leonard Lopate interviewed Costa-Gavras on public radio about Z earlier this year. We told you about it at the time, and you can listen to it again here.

Z

Costa-Gavras

1969

127 min

Color

1.66:1

Anthony Asquith is remembered primarily as the director of Pygmalion, The Browning Version, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all stage-to-screen adaptations comfortable flaunting their own theatricality. Yet as critic Jay Weissberg writes in the latest issue of Sight and Sound, a new BFI restoration of Asquith’s 1928 silent film Underground proves that the son of a prime minister was not, as his detractors claimed, “an aristocrat without a proper feel for realism” but a maker of vivid, socially engaged cinema. This film, his first solo effort as director, is a populist love triangle; Weissberg writes that it is “about the social interactions that can only exist in the confined, democratic spaces of the London Underground” and is marked by “thrilling location work.” Also in the piece, Weissberg delves into the restoration process that brought Underground (which played on October 23 at the BFI’s London Film Festival) to shimmering new life, and composer Neil Brand, who contributed a new musical score, sings the film’s praises.

Pygmalion

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard

1938

96 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Browning Version

Anthony Asquith

1951

90 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Importance of Being Earnest

Anthony Asquith

1952

95 min

Color

1.33:1

If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987). Marking Wenders’s career midpoint like a lightning strike cutting across tree rings, the movie is at once audience-seductive and demanding, holistic and aestheticized. It has beguiled the Wenders aficionado as reliably as it’s absorbed the spiritually hungry civilian, the rogue filmhead, the bookish square, and the nondenominational seeker. It seemed upon its release closer to the effervescent fantasias of Michael Powell, Maya Deren, Georges Méliès, and Jean Vigo, as well as Victorian postcards, than to Wenders’s earlier New German Cinema existentialism, or to the troubled legacy of German cinema as a whole. Even after the two-decades-plus of global exploration that has followed for the filmmaker, it appears to be sui generis, born from its own shadowy nitrate soup.

So, let’s think subjectively, you and I, about possible ways to look at the movie, and if none suit you, others are not hard to find. In thumbnail, Wings of Desire belongs to a trafficked subgenre, the angel-on-earth ballade (Victorian, modern-comedic, or otherwise, and usually trifling), but it’s clear we’re a world away from Raoul Walsh’s goofy 1945 Jack Benny comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight (though perhaps closer, in the first half, to the sylphlike angel presences chaperoning the sermonic fables in Lois Weber’s 1915 dream film Hypocrites). There’s little doubt as to the originality of the experience from the very first airborne camera patrols of autumnal cold-war Berlin. In Wenders’s silvery black-and-white view, this is the paradigmatic city wasteland of its age, still war-torn and withstanding a historicized physical and political schizophrenia like no other, symbolized, like the elephant in the parlor, by the wall itself, snaking through the urban spaces covered with graffiti, obliterating your view, wherever you stand, of the city’s other half. This cognitively dissonant urban experiment had frequently been the grim arena for sixties spy noir, but never had we seen Berlin become Berlin so clearly, so eloquently before. (The more sober and evocative German title translates as The Sky over Berlin.) Of course the city is haunted.  

Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders

1987

127 min

Color & Black and White

1.66:1

The term holiday movie doesn’t have to conjure Christmas carols or miracles at Macy’s. Case in point: the personal, even skewed, films chosen by a few filmmakers as their holiday favorites for a seasonal special section in the New York Times; a couple of them hail from the Criterion catalogue. Jan Chapman, the producer of Jane Campion’s The Piano and Holy Smoke, is particularly enamored of Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding—not a holiday film per se, but its family gathering and celebration invoke the spirit of the season (“All the tragic and comedic misunderstandings and misadventures of a Shakespearean comedy, with a fresh and knowing eye,” Chapman rejoices). Rebecca Miller, director of the upcoming The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, takes the opposite tack, choosing Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, perhaps an anti-holiday film, or, as she writes with affection, “the sort of holiday film that makes you never want to go home again.”

The Ice Storm

Ang Lee

1997

113 min

Color

1.85:1

Monsoon Wedding

Mira Nair

2001

114 min

Color

1.85:1

The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire.

And we, spectators always, everywhere,

looking at, never out of, everything!
—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy”

At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a desire.

That’s how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something.

You have a wish.

You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists. And right at the start, simultaneous with the wish, you imagine what that “something other” might be like, or at least you see something flash by. And then you set off in the direction of the flash, and you hope you don’t lose your orientation, or forget or betray the wish you had at the beginning.

And in the end, you have a picture or pictures of something, you have music, or something that operates in some new way, or a story, or this quite extraordinary combination of all these things: a film. Only with a film—as opposed to paintings, novels, music, or inventions—you have to present an account of your desire; more, you even have to describe in advance the path you want to go with your film. No wonder, then, that so many films lose their first flash, their comet.

The thing I wished for and saw flashing was a film in and about Berlin.

A film that might convey something of the history of the city since 1945. A film that might succeed in capturing what I miss in so many films that are set here, something that seems to be so palpably there when you arrive in Berlin: a feeling in the air and under your feet and in people’s faces that makes life in this city so different from life in other cities.  

Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders

1987

127 min

Color & Black and White

1.66:1

Ang Lee has confirmed that his next film will be an adaptation of Yann Martel’s mammoth best-seller Life of Pi, the fanciful tale of a young boy from Pondicherry, India, who survives a shipwreck only to be stranded in a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger as his companion. The 2001 novel has been a hot Hollywood property since its publication; it first emerged in February that Lee had his sights set on it. As reported in the Guardian, the Ice Storm director is still in the scripting and casting stage, and it will likely take him at least two years to finish the film.

The Ice Storm

Ang Lee

1997

113 min

Color

1.85:1

In the spirit of the season, we asked a select coven of horror mavens (including a couple of our own) to write about their favorite Criterion scarefests.

CHUCK STEPHENS
Equinox: The Eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus

There are myriad ways into Equinox, and almost no way out.

I like to start with the eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus, the film’s creepy park ranger and ultimate incarnation of drooling evil: two giant worms of squirming fur threatening further metamorphosis while actor/writer/director Jack Woods contorts the rest of his face into a ridiculous rubber succubus of extraordinarily cretinous sexual desire. Starlet (and future minister) Barbara Hewitt cringes in vain as Asmodeus (his name is that of the Hebrew bible’s king of demons, elsewhere known as the demon of lust) advances upon her—a string of slobber unspooling from his hideous maw and nearly coating the anamorphic excesses of the image with a nauseating scrim of saliva—for there is no escape from this grimacing, groping, leg-humping letch from another dimension!

Hired by producer Jack H. Harris (The Blob) to turn future Oscar-winning Industrial Light & Magic guru Dennis Muren’s independently produced, Ray Harryhausen–induced virgin voyage to the lost continent of stop-motion-style special effects into a theatrically releasable feature film (and soon-to-be classic of late night television horror-whatzit-psychotronica), veteran sound editor Woods (who’d go on to sculpt the sonics on everything from the pilot episode of MacGyver to Critters 2: The Main Course) jumped in face-first. Talk about making your mark on a movie: Woods’s decision not only to rewrite and reshoot Muren’s film but also to star as its narrative-altering new main character ensured that he would sign “his” only film as a “director” in indelible spittle and demon seed—and in so doing, forge one of the darkest statements on the nature of auteurism in twentieth-century film history.

There are, perhaps, easier ways into Equinox. One might start with the debt owed it by such later and better-known horror
hoedowns as Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm and Sam Raimi’s Evil Deads, to name but two Equinox-idated examples of anything-goes cinefantastique. Or one might zero in on the sporty white socks and loafers shown off so enthusiastically by the film’s young supporting star, Frank Boers Jr. (soon to be known to living rooms around the country as Frank Bonner, WKRP in Cincinnati’s unctuously polyestered Herb Tarlek), as he haggles with the demonic Asmodeus over the fate of his friends’ picnic in the woods . . . and possibly the fate of the world itself! “All the money in the world, kid!” Asmodeus gleefully bellows as he tempts young proto-Tarlek into some sub-Faustian folly. Director, tempt thyself!

Such is the genius of Equinox, this extraordinary mutt of a movie that, while directed by far too many, finds in its very directionlessness its most impressive quality of all.

After the jump, writers Michael Atkinson, Marc Walkow, Michael Koresky, and Susan Arosteguy on their favorite scary films from the collection.  

Fiend Without a Face

Arthur Crabtree

1958

92 min

1.33:1

Jigoku

Nobuo Nakagawa

1960

101 min

Color

2.35:1

Carnival of Souls

Herk Harvey

1962

83 min

1.33:1

Equinox

Jack Woods

1970

82 min

Color

1.33:1

Sisters

Brian De Palma

1973

93 min

Color

1.85:1

With fifty-six terrific entries and more than six hours of content, it was difficult to pick a winner of the Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest, but we finally came to a decision. Selected by Criterion staff members and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles director Chantal Akerman, first place goes to Jon Pivko’s methodical, menacing meat loaf movie, Cindy Griffith, 42 Carlton Road, Hopewell, NJ. Pivko will receive a new PlayStation 3, Criterion’s reference Blu-ray player. You can see his film below, and then be sure to watch the five honorable mentions. Thanks to everyone who participated and made the contest such a great success, including our Audience Award winner and runners-up.

Grand Prize winner:

CINDY GRIFFITH, 42 CARLTON ROAD, HOPEWELL, NJ

Click through to watch the honorable mentions.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman

1975

201 min

Color

1.66:1

For the new issue of Interview magazine, Wes Anderson sat down in Paris with another of our favorite contemporary auteurs, Arnaud Desplechin, who interviewed him in anticipation of the November release of Anderson’s animated Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox. As you can imagine, these movie-mad men—of the funny-sad family dramas The Royal Tenenbaums and A Christmas Tale, respectively—had a lot to gab about, from Paris weather versus Texas to their different takes on reading Proust. Of course, their most energetic discussion had to do with their favorite directors. Here’s a short exchange in which Anderson describes how Scorsese and Bogdanovich opened his eyes to a world of classic filmmakers.

DESPLECHIN: You’ve seen a lot of movies. I wonder if you learned to watch a lot of films from someone like Martin Scorsese. One could say that there are two kinds of directors: those who love to see films and those who actually don’t see that many.

ANDERSON: If you are going to pick directors that make you feel like you should watch old films, I think that would be Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich. There are so many films I was introduced to by them in one way or another. For example, on the laserdisc commentary of Raging Bull [1980], Scorsese mentions something about Michael Powell, and I had never heard of the Powell and Pressburger films before. From Bogdanovich, I think I first learned about Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey. Bogdanovich saw everything. He had this metal file cabinet with drawers filled with notes. Every time he saw a movie, he typed up a little card that would list the title, director, writer, description, the date he saw the movie, and what he thought. He’d give it a rating. Then if he saw it again, he’d take the card and add a note: “I saw it again, and actually I thought it was a little better this time.”

DESPLECHIN: Do you do that?

ANDERSON: No.

DESPLECHIN: I think it’s a critic thing.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson

2001

110 min

Color

2.35:1

A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin

2008

152 min

Color

2.35:1

Who speaks of Howards End these days? Who expounds on the virtues of this magnificent drama, whose traditional style seems almost as distant as its Edwardian setting? Seen today, years past its 1992 release, it strikes one as not only the ultimate accomplishment of the Merchant Ivory team but also the high-water mark of a certain kind of filmmaking, a landmark example of movies of passion, taste, and sensitivity that honestly touch every emotion. Below its exquisitely modulated surface, this film may set off lasting and heartfelt reverberations in the viewer; every time you see it, it moves you in different ways.

Certainly, Howards End was appreciated in its day. Made for only eight million dollars, it received nine Oscar nominations, including for best picture, director, cinematography, and supporting and lead actress, for Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson. The latter won, along with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script and Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker’s art direction and set decoration. But the film seems to have been half-forgotten precisely because of those old-fashioned qualities once heralded as its strengths. Beyond its already distant source material—E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel of families in love and conflict—it offers filmmaking techniques that owe nothing to the flash and dash of contemporary movies. Yet alongside an elegantly unfolding script and impeccable acting across the board from people like Anthony Hopkins, as well as Redgrave and most especially Thompson, extravagant directorial flourishes would have just gotten in the way.

After creating a number of films in Edwardian dress, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory knew how to be more than merely faithful to the look of those times—they knew how to make that world seem genuinely inhabited. From production designer Arrighi, who was after “how people lived, not a set,” to costume designer Jenny Beavan, who wanted “real clothes made in an authentic way,” the level of realism in Howards End is all the more convincing for its having been so casually accomplished.  

Howards End

James Ivory

1992

142 min

Color

2.35:1