28Apr08
The simplicity and emotional clarity of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 The Red Balloon have made it one of the most beloved films of all time. The narrative is deceptively airy and pared down: Pascal, a young Parisian boy, retrieves a balloon tied to a lamppost, only to discover that it seems to have a mind and personality of its own. At times the balloon follows him around like a loyal dog, at others like a teasing best friend; the two form an almost inseparable bond, one that only an uncaring world would dare untether.
From this modest premise, however, grows a work of breathtaking, elemental wonder—one that, despite its seemingly effortless naturalism, also required a host of cinematic tricks. It’s easy to imagine a boy and his faithful balloon companion; it’s something else to visually realize such a relationship on-screen. Lamorisse began as a documentarian, which makes this flight of fancy, his greatest success, all the more surprising. Rather than using his camera to straight-forwardly survey an environment and its people, here he had to rely on the persuasions of cinematography, editing, and sound—and some very thin threads—to make his audience believe in magic, that his titular character was a plausible living being, emoting and reacting without the benefit of a voice or even a face. In a sense, The Red Balloon is one of the all-time greatest examples of pure cinema. And as it’s geared toward children, it elegantly serves both as an introduction to the basics of film grammar and, at least for its legions of young American fans through the years, as a peek at a different culture. Call it My First Art Movie.
28Apr08
After watching White Mane (1952), viewers shouldn’t be surprised to learn that its director, Albert Lamorisse, began his career as a documentarian. With its lingering views of the harsh, windswept plains of southern France’s rugged Camargue region and its insistent, detailed attention to the behavior of the wild horses that inhabit it, White Mane often seems as much a classic nature documentary as a fanciful children’s narrative. It’s this grounding in reality that makes the film such a singular experience, one celebrated by the seminal French film critic, and champion of realism, André Bazin. White Mane gives the sense of life as it’s being lived, in one of the world’s more inhospitable outposts, while also sustaining a gripping storybook clarity.
White Mane was Lamorisse’s major cinematic breakthrough, winning the Grand Prix for best short film at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. Like his next film, the sensational hit The Red Balloon (1956), this is a story of outcast youth, lost innocence, and ultimate transcendence, predicated on the relationship between a boy and a nonhuman, inherently inarticulate protagonist. In this film, Lamorisse establishes the close, tender relationship between the boy—here a prepubescent fisherman, Folco (Alain Emery)—and his friend, the horse White Mane, through a commanding voice-over narration and lovely, economical cinematography and editing.
28Apr08
Adapted from Holling C. Holling’s classic, Caldecott Award–winning children’s picture book of the same name, originally published in 1941 and still in print today, Paddle to the Sea is director Bill Mason’s paean to nature. Following the travels of a tiny, wooden canoe from a cabin in the Nipigon woods of west Ontario to the expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, Mason’s film, like the carved toy boat itself, is subject to the tides and turns of the ever-changing earth. “Paddle to the Sea” is the ultimate passive protagonist: whittled by a young boy from a piece of pine and carrying an expertly carved Native American figure, the foot-long form glides and floats with the whims of nature, its face ever smiling, even when encased in wintry ice.
The film was a labor of love for Mason. The Winnipeg-born photographer and canoe aficionado adored Holling’s book for its fanciful yet reality-grounded storytelling, and successfully pitched a big-screen version to the National Film Board of Canada. Covering a distance of twenty-two thousand miles over a period of almost two years and in every season, Mason took the exact route through the Great Lakes and down the Saint Lawrence River illustrated in the book—both a visualization of Holling’s work and a pilgrimage.
21Apr08
Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), one of the first Spanish films to win the critics’ prize at a major European festival, was crucial in launching the modern Spanish cinema. Bardem came directly from his triumph at Cannes to the Salamanca Congress, a national film conference organized by Objetivo, a left-wing film journal that he and others started in May 1953. The congress was attended by Spanish filmmakers, both from the left and the right, who were united in condemning the Francoist cinema. Bardem delivered the diagnosis, which was quoted nationwide: “Spanish cinema is politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, industrially crippled.” When describing what a progressive cinema could be, he clearly had Italian neorealism in mind: “The problem of Spanish cinema is that . . . it does not bear testimony to our time.”
With its emphasis on depicting “Italy now,” neorealism offered Spanish filmmakers an alternative to the falsity not only of Francoist cinema but also of Hollywood melodrama. Unlike Hollywood’s three-act stories focused on individualized heroes, neorealist films strove to reveal as much about social context as characters. Neorealism relied on long takes and long shots to keep characters connected to the background, a fusion documented within the depth of field. The social context functioned as a narrative field containing many interrelated stories; that’s why the protagonist usually emerged out of a crowd of similar characters and why the narrative remained minimalist and open-ended. These films trained spectators to read people’s gestures and patterns, without needing them explained by the dialogue or by a heavily plotted story. At the end of Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952), even the clever little dog can decipher these nonverbal signs, which is what saves both himself and his master from being run over by a train. Bardem adopted this subtle visual language in the mid-1950s as an effective means of getting around Franco’s censors—a strategy that was later elaborated in the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
21Apr08
There’s an irony to the fact that Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu lived his life as a bachelor, for he made some of the world’s most insightful, lived-in, and emotionally authentic films about marriage and parenthood. Today he is primarily known for his late-career family portraits, such as Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), but even in his early years at Shochiku Motion Picture Company, Ozu was drawn to contemporary domestic turmoil. And though in his first working decade he also plied other popular genres (gangster pictures, romantic melodramas, student comedies), it was the family he would return to time and again.
His first inclinations, when he started out in the silent mid-twenties, were toward comedy. A fan of Hollywood films, especially those of comedy directors Harold Lloyd and Ernst Lubitsch, Ozu chose to apprentice under Shochiku filmmaker Tadamoto Okubo, a skilled practitioner in the art of the popular nonsense-mono, in which slapstick sketches were strung together with just a sliver of plot. Ozu would eventually weave such absurdities into the fabric of his own films, though unlike the nonsense films his were firmly grounded in everyday experience—humanistic and warm yet always informed by the sad realities of life, not unlike the concurrent work of Charlie Chaplin in the United States.
17Apr08
Judging from many of the reactions we get from viewers, there’s a gratifying sense of discovery that accompanies each new Eclipse release. That comes as little surprise to us, since that same feeling is as alive and well here in the Criterion offices. One of the most pleasurable things about embarking on each new Eclipse series is the excitement of delving into a chapter of film history that’s been cobwebbed by years of neglect. Though throughout our first ten releases there have been a number of known quantities (Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu), there have also been as many true revelations, some from filmmakers of whom we only had cursory prior knowledge, if even that. When the name Raymond Bernard was first uttered “on five,” all we could offer were blank or quizzical stares; yet when those screeners of Wooden Crosses and Les misérables started making the rounds, you could almost hear the collective exclamations of “Aha!” billowing about the halls. The sheer enjoyment of the latter was especially a relief for those of us who had screeners for future Criterion and Eclipse projects piling up in our homes and didn’t necessarily have five hours to spare—fleet, rich, and rewarding,
Les misérables was, for me, one of 2007’s sweetest retro surprises (along with other movies, Criterion-related or otherwise, like Cría
cuervos . . . , Antonio Gaudí, Bonjour tristesse, J’entends plus la guitare, and Black Christmas, all of which make going to the multiplex seem a fruitless chore).
Despite veritable eureka moments scattered about all the following sets (for Carlos Saura’s Blood Wedding, or Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, especially for Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert’s feature-length smack-down game of Sassy and Sassier), my next true revelation came when encountering the films in series nine, The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. Only generally knowing of Klein as a famed abstract New York photographer of the fifties and sixties (and even then only having seen a sampling of his work in online forums), and as a maker of documentaries (his subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali to Paris fashion), I had no idea what to expect from his fiction films, all made after he permanently relocated to Paris. That they turned out to be as boldly experimental and in-your-face subversive as his photography, and as politically charged and visually daring as primo 1960s-era Godard, made researching and writing about these films a pleasure, the process as exuberant and fascinating as the set’s eventual title would suggest.
14Apr08
Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years after World War II. It was, along with John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959) and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1960), one of the first of the low-budget independent movies that suggested the existence of a uniquely New York style of filmmaking, documentary-like and expressively unpolished (though Blast of Silence has more plot, and a much more tightly constructed screenplay, than Cassavetes and Clarke would likely have felt comfortable with). It’s among the very few works in the history of cinema to boast a voice-over narration in the second person. And it is, hands down, the best movie ever made about a common, important, and unjustly neglected American experience: the really bad business trip.
The film’s protagonist, Frankie Bono (played by Baron, who also wrote and directed), is a Cleveland hit man with a contract to terminate—for reasons he neither knows nor cares to know—a middle-management New York mobster named Troiano (Peter H. Clune). The killer comes to town by rail, arriving, appropriately, at Penn Station, which was, like him, doomed: less than five years after Blast of Silence was shot, the old station we see in the opening scenes was demolished. Frankie doesn’t last nearly as long.
1Apr08
As a generation of artists passes, the deaths often seem to come eerily close together, amplifying their individual achievements. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost The Naked City screenwriter Malvin Wald, then the incomparable Richard Widmark, and now hear the incredibly sad news of Jules Dassin’s death. Somehow it feels wrong to learn of such events via e-mail—effectively flattening our communication such that the message of a great director’s passing sits side by side with “Lunch?”
Interviewing Dassin remains one of the highlights of my life, and I got to do it twice (both times with the help and contribution of the inimitable Bruce Goldstein). What still strikes me a few years later is how gracious he was. As a person, he belied the “great director as tyrant” stereotype—there was something elegant, sophisticated, and almost gentle about him. For one thing, as much as we tried to get him to talk about the blacklist, he was extremely reticent to do so. He refused to “name names,” which I suppose would have been out of character. He would only specifically mention people who had gone out of their way to combat the hysteria—especially pointing out Gene Kelly. But Dassin refused to talk about the people who had taken the easy way out. The one person whom he reserved the right to speak ill of was Roy “I Can Tell in Five Minutes If a Person Is a Communist” Brewer.
