3Jul09
It’s often said that there’s never been a movie quite like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. But in paying tribute to this French New Wave landmark on the occasion of its release in Criterion DVD and Blu-ray editions, some critics have noted that its unique style has been so influential on other films that it now might seem . . . strangely familiar.
This “graceful, haunting movie puzzle . . . , photographed in widescreen black and white by the great Sacha Vierny,” has “a visual texture that has exerted an influence over everything from Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to Ridley Scott’s commercials,” writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. And in his Los Angeles Times review, Dennis Lim adds to the list of descendants of this “sumptuous . . . unrivaled conversation starter”: “You can detect its imprint in the death-haunted reverie of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the mazelike structures of Peter Greenaway’s puzzle-box films, the sinister corridors of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.” (The L’s Cullen Gallagher also picks up on that Kubrick connection.)
IFC’s Michael Atkinson, however, sticks with the source, writing that “Resnais’ saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it was originally intended to be: a dream inside a puzzle inside a story that never actually takes place. Is there a better, more eloquent way to define movies?” And Time puts it most simply, on its “Short List of Things to Do”: “It’s still ravishing, confounding, and fun.”
Related: At Paste, Sean Gandert takes a closer look at Resnais’ documentary shorts legacy, specifically two works featured on Criterion’s Last Year at Marienbad editions: Toute la mémoire du monde and Le chant du styrène.
And heads up: Critic John Powers will be on NPR’s Fresh Air today to discuss Last Year at Marienbad (in New York the show airs on WNYC at 3 p.m.). Check back here for the podcast if you miss it!
3Jul09
“If you want a break from all the summer bombast, My Dinner with André is out . . . in a fabulous new two-disc package,” suggests NPR’s Glenn McDonald in a review of the new Criterion special edition of Louis Malle’s 1981 high-minded gabfest. “Here’s a movie that more or less does the impossible: it consists entirely of two friends having a quiet conversation over dinner, and it’s riveting.”
Joining in the dialogue about this “fascinating, deceptively simple movie” is the National Post of Canada’s Chris Knight: “The film flies in the face of the show-don’t-tell rule of moviemaking, but so expertly that, even though you have just spent two hours watching two guys eat dinner, your mind’s eye will take away ideas, images, even sounds that exist only as spoken words.” Jen Chaney, in the Washington Post, writes that My Dinner with André is “cinema’s quintessential conversation.” And perhaps most persuasive is the Dallas Morning News’s Chris Vognar: “Listen to what André Gregory and Wallace Shawn actually say over their epic dinner, and you might just get your mind blown.”
You can also listen to critic Amy Taubin discussing the film on Blogtalkradio’s Back to Midnight program, broadcast Tuesday night and available now in a podcast. In the interview, Taubin (who wrote an essay for the release) analyzes the much-acclaimed (and parodied!) work from a film-critical and personal perspective: she was an actor in the sixties and early seventies and knew actor-writer Shawn and theater director Gregory, and the experimental-theater-world they discuss, well. She also shares her evolving feelings about the film. Today, she says, even more than at the time, “I’m incredibly moved by that idea of a passionate quest to find a transcendental experience, a meaning in life.”
2Jul09
This week, Agnès Varda’s beguiling new film, the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès, makes its U.S. premiere at New York’s Film Forum, and for the occasion A. O. Scott has profiled the indefatigable eighty-one-year-old auteur in a splendid article in the New York Times. In the spirit of her latest movie’s poignant and whimsical journey into the past, Scott takes a look back at the fifty-five-year career of this most introspective artist, beginning with her debut, the groundbreaking New Wave precursor La Pointe Courte (the making of which is prominently featured in the new documentary), and at her marriage to the late Jacques Demy. It’s a worthy tribute to one of our greatest living filmmakers.
Plus, while making the rounds in New York to promote this latest, delightful piece of cinécriture, Varda sat down with Filmmaker magazine for a nice long chat. In the interview, she talks about cinematic risk taking, the importance of traveling, and the film essay.
1Jul09
Almost thirty years have gone by since Wallace Shawn and André Gregory sat down for dinner on the Upper West Side and talked (and talked) their way into film history. So for our new special edition DVD of that encounter, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André, we thought it essential to get those two prodigious pontificators talking on camera again, about their experiences making the movie. For these new interviews, Wally and André chose as their interlocutor filmmaker and friend Noah Baumbach, who came by our offices with his personal crew to talk to each of them, separately. Here’s a taste of the interview with Wally, in which the actor and playwright discusses the impetus for My Dinner with André and those parts of himself he wanted to “destroy” in writing and playing his character.
30Jun09
Quick, how many directors can you name who have pulled a 320-ton steamship over a mountain? Yes, that megalomaniacal masterpiece Fitzcarraldo is just further proof that Werner Herzog stands alone in the annals of filmmaking. And though this tireless artist is still regularly creating vital works, that 1982 film’s legendary production continues to fascinate like no other. Now you can learn all about it firsthand with Herzog’s new book, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of “Fitzcarraldo,” a diary of his three-year journey in the Amazon to realize his outsize vision. Read more about the book, and Herzog, from the Los Angeles Times’s Lawrence Levi, who writes that Conquest “reveals him to be witty, compassionate, microscopically observant, and—your call—either maniacally determined or admirably persevering.” (And Janet Maslin just posted her review at the New York Times, along with an excerpt from this “mesmerizingly bizarre account.”) And, of course, you can see for yourself the arduousness of the Fitzcarraldo shoot, as documented in Les Blank’s extraordinary Burden of Dreams.
30Jun09
With the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing nearly upon us (which we’re celebrating at Criterion with new DVD and Blu-ray special editions of the 1989 documentary For All Mankind), the brave men of the Apollo missions are once again making headlines. And as a recent New York Times profile by James C. McKinley Jr. reminds us, few have stood out for their postspace lives like Apollo 12 moon walker Alan L. Bean, who hung up his astro-boots in 1981 (after eighteen years with NASA) to become a full-time painter. The article—written on the occasion of a show of his work in July, during the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s anniversary commemoration—looks back at Bean’s artistic aspirations and how they finally coincided with his outer space experiences, and also provides a slide show of his canvasses and images of him at work in his studio. (Our new For All Mankind releases also include a video program about Bean’s artwork, with its own gallery of paintings.)
Also read about another out-of-this-world guy in a short and sweet Q&A with Buzz Aldrin from the New York Times Magazine, in which the second man to walk on the moon chats about the future of NASA and his new memoir, Magnificent Desolation.
26Jun09
Seemingly nonchalant, impeccably crafted, borderline delirious, My Dinner with André is the result of an inspired collaboration among its actor-writers, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, and its director, Louis Malle. In the nearly three decades since its 1981 debut, this tiny independent movie has inspired myriad prose pieces and a slew of witticisms that riff on its title. Nothing, however, captures its eccentricity and perhaps the reason for its effect on viewers as neatly as this line from Vincent Canby’s New York Times review: “At times,” Canby wrote, “My Dinner with André suggests a reunion of Christopher Robin (Mr. Gregory) and Winnie-the-Pooh (Mr. Shawn) thirty years after each has left the nursery to pursue separate careers in the theater.” And, indeed, the film evokes the exalted space of childhood friendship, where confidences are exchanged and imaginations run wild without fear of judgment.
The film is a deceptively simple two-hander. A playwright and actor named Wallace Shawn (played by playwright and actor Wallace Shawn) walks through the dilapidated streets of a not-yet-gentrified SoHo on his way uptown to have dinner with the theater director André Gregory (played by the theater director André Gregory) in a sleekly appointed restaurant of André’s choosing. On his way to this meeting with a man he once regarded as a close friend and his most valued colleague in the theater but whom he hasn’t seen in many years, Wally, as he is known to his friends, muses about how much he dreads seeing André again. He’s heard that the director is in a bad way; having spent the last few years traveling around the world in search of transcendent experiences, he has recently been seen sobbing on the street and talking to trees.
25Jun09
Robert Koehler takes a long “second look” at Death of a Cyclist in the summer 2009 issue of Cineaste, sizing up Juan Antonio Bardem’s 1955 political melodrama in terms of Spain’s national identity and the legacy of neorealism. Check it out on the magazine’s website. And while you’re there, also worth a read is David Sterritt’s web-exclusive book review of Joe McElhaney’s Albert Maysles, which examines the idea of Maysles as an auteur.
24Jun09
The following tribute to Sacha Vierny by Alain Resnais (pictured together above, Resnais left) was published in the October 2001 issue of Positif. It is based on an interview conducted by François Thomas and was translated for Criterion by Nicholas Elliott. Vierny, one of the most influential European cinematographers of the past fifty years, shot seven of Resnais’ features, including Last Year at Marienbad, Stavisky . . . , and L’amour à mort, and was also a faithful collaborator of Raoul Ruiz’s and Peter Greenaway’s. He died in May 2001.
My earliest memories of Sacha Vierny go back more than half a century, to our first meeting in 1948 or 1949. I can’t remember if we met through a phone call, a chance encounter in a stairwell, or at the counter of a brasserie. I had shot a few 16 mm films in Kodachrome, one of the first monopack color processes, which combined three ultrathin emulsion layers on a single strip of film (this was before Eastmancolor). So Vierny introduced himself with: “We won’t have Kodachrome in professional 35 mm for several months. I’d like to talk with you about the ups and downs of your experience with color film.” He was exaggerating—my knowledge was empirical but limited—and I was truly flattered that someone in the business wanted to talk shop with me. Probably I was a little sorry that I wasn’t a cameraman. Had I been in better health, I would have applied to the cinematography department at the IDHEC [Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, the French state film school] rather than the editing department. But to be a cameraman you had to be able to climb up Mont Ventoux carrying a 35 mm camera and its tripod on your shoulder, with cartridges and batteries in tow. In any case, we hit it off right away. When I made some short films a few years later with the great cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, Vierny served as his assistant. Then I asked him to shoot Le chant du styrène in color CinemaScope. I even asked him to appear in a scene, as the only human being you really see—face on, shot from the waist up. He was very photogenic.
