Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Five years ago I produced my first DVD of a film by Ingmar Bergman. The film was Wild Strawberries, and I remember the thrill of working on a film that I knew was beloved by so many. Since then I have produced DVDs of many Bergman films, including Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander. Currently I am working on an edition of Sawdust and Tinsel.

Through these projects I have been privileged to come into contact with many of Bergman’s longtime friends, lovers, and collaborators. Yet the master himself remained elusive. Several times I attempted to get an interview with him to no avail. Still, as I circled around his entourage and heard their stories, and watched and read countless interviews that the filmmaker had given over the years, I felt like I came to know him.  

It’s hard to think of an artist who better exemplifies the obscuring ebb and flow of film history than Raymond Bernard. Once a director equally admired by critics, fellow artists, audiences, and studio heads, Bernard is now, even among film scholars and French-cinema junkies, nearly forgotten. Perhaps it’s because his grand successes were part of a film movement that fell out of fashion almost as soon as it had emerged. Bernard established himself in the late 1920s and early 1930s with big-budget prestige productions influenced by, and sometimes based on, nineteenth-century romantic literature and created to compete with the Hollywood spectacles of the time. Both a contract director and an engaged artist, Bernard made a handful of unforgettable films during this short-lived flowering of ambitious French studio production, which soon withered in the face of economic pressures and new political urgencies. Before long, the influential poetic realist movement would arise and overshadow Bernard’s heyday for decades to come.

The son of belle epoque playwright Tristan Bernard, Raymond began his career as an actor, making his screen debut at age twenty-two, with Sarah Bernhardt, in Jeanne Doré (1915), adapted from his father’s play. Illness prevented him from fighting in World War I, so, in 1916, he joined his father at Gaumont studios, where the senior Bernard was serving as screenwriter for then debuting silent-film master Jacques Feyder. Raymond quickly moved from assistant director to director and, under contract, made a series of popular films. But his breakthrough came in 1923, when he was asked to replace director Robert Boudrioz on a troubled Louis XI costume drama, The Miracle of the Wolves. Bernard pulled off this enormous spectacle with great skill; predating Abel Gance’s Napoléon by three years, The Miracle of the Wolves was considered France’s first great national epic.  

Les misérables

Raymond Bernard

1934

279 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Wooden Crosses

Raymond Bernard

1932

113 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Andrei Tarkovsky’s objective in Ivan’s Childhood (1962) was, in his own words, “to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director.” He succeeded brilliantly: this austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.

Not yet thirty years old, Tarkovsky had just graduated from VGIK (the Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography), the world’s oldest educational institution of its kind. Ivan’s Childhood had already been in development at Mosfilm but had been put on hold, so it came as a lucky break when the property was handed to Tarkovsky. The script was based on a novella by Vladimir Bogomolov but was reworked by Tarkovsky and his friend Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (later an important Russian director in his own right, mostly known for 1979’s Siberiade). The fourteen-year-old Nikolai Burlyaev, who was cast in Konchalovsky’s debut short, The Boy and the Pigeon (1961), was selected to play Ivan.

It was natural for Soviet directors looking to break into the mainstream to make war-themed films. At the time, much of the official discourse on Soviet identity was still largely shaped by the shadow of World War II. Closely observed by the powers that be, war movies were the most likely type of film to be shown at international festivals and get proper distribution. But the new wave of war films differed from earlier socialist realist efforts, which mostly featured glorious Homo sovieticus fighting the Nazis under Stalin’s bright guidance, as seen in Mikhail Chiaurelli’s emblematic Fall of Berlin (1949). Beginning with Mikhail Kalatozov’s Cannes winner The Cranes Are Flying (1957), the most acclaimed war films of the period—which also included Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man (1959), and, later, Rezo Chkheidze’s Father of the Soldier (1964)—moved away from combat and focused instead on the individual ordeals and suffering of those whose lives are irretrievably crippled by war. Ivan’s Childhood is remembered alongside those notable films of the short-lived thaw that broke out of the propaganda mold and gave war the face of true human anguish.  

Ivan’s Childhood

Andrei Tarkovsky

1962

95 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The celebrated divot points manfully toward the crest of the next hill, and the next, and the next, and to the horizon after that. Always forward! Into the sunset! Kirk Douglas is on the move: a wagon train of grimace, howl, and unlaunched sputum. What a range of expressions Douglas has stored in his utility belt! Whether he’s chopping maniacally at redwoods in The Big Trees (1952), pruning his ears in Lust for Life (1956), languishing on his cruciform in Spartacus (1960), or hurtling down a mountain pass with Cyd Charisse at the wheel in Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), he manages to best even the most energetic of his parodists. (The most energetic of his parodists is, of course, Joe Flaherty of SCTV, who always seemed on the verge of his own “stroke of luck” as he and his prosthetic chin grappled with Kirk’s storehouse of facial gymnastics.) Ace in the Hole (1951) might be Kirk’s best-of album, though: from his feeding of Platonic shadows to Richard Benedict’s imprisoned cave schlub (and to the reading public outside), to his jolly, echoing rendition of “The Hut Sut Song,” to his unlikely last-act transmogrification and sacrifice, Douglas, like his character, sells by overselling. And we buy!

Kirk was obviously determined from the outset to give the very best of his very best to Billy Wilder and Ace in the Hole, but then when in his career was he not? (Perhaps he took a breather during the making of 1977’s Holocaust 2000.) Still, he is pitched at ninety-five miles an hour plus for the duration of this movie, and when his fame-drunk newspaperman barks out, “Pulitzer Prize!” the twin p’s are like dumdum bullets from an ack-ack gun. Chuck Tatum’s mirror duets with hapless spelunker Leo Minosa (whose name suggests a fruity and inoffensive morning-bracer cocktail, and whose manner does nothing to dispel the notion) are conducted in the style of, say, a theatrical presentation of the work of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, or of a group of children telling ghost stories with a flashlight held under their chins; but Kirk’s acting transcends even this Wilderian hyperstylization.  

Ace in the Hole

Billy Wilder

1951

111 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively honorable hero. This emotional snake pit, the darkest of Wilder’s dark meditations on American folkways, takes place under the relentless sun of a flat New Mexican desert. The noir is interior—inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layers of self-induced moral grime.

The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indictment, and a flop when it opened (and again when it was released as The Big Carnival), points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the leading man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal. Rarely, if ever, have there been such brutally antipathetic leads in a mainstream film as Kirk Douglas’s scoop-or-die reporter and Jan Sterling’s breathtakingly callous victim’s wife. However prophetic Wilder’s vision of a press and a public drunk on sensation, this issue ends up seeming almost peripheral to two main characters so monstrous in their mutual, and mutually despising, selfishness that it’s astonishing the movie got released at all.  

Ace in the Hole

Billy Wilder

1951

111 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Adapted from the famed samizdat novel of the French Resistance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s first feature, Le silence de la mer (1949), despite critical and commercial success, gained its director little glory: overshadowed by the book and the celebrity of its author, Vercors, Melville got credit for supplying a beloved narrative with serviceable illustrations. What Melville achieved with that film, however, was something much more impressive, and difficult: a story in which psychological subtleties are conveyed in purely visual terms—with a glance, a pause, the movement of a hand. Melville’s hypnotic rendering of a chamber work in which only one of the three characters ever speaks on-camera (until the very end) was probably the only innovative French film of its moment.

All but a handful of shots in Le silence de la mer show the characters—an uncle, his niece, and the German officer they have been forced to quarter but refuse to address—in a single room, and in this the film has curious affinities with Sartre’s No Exit (which makes an even more extravagant case than Melville’s work for the conclusion that “hell is other people”). Yet the film’s most remarkable achievement is the way it sustains a mood of naturalism even while it theatricalizes the character who speaks.  

Les enfants terribles

Jean-Pierre Melville

1950

106 min

Black and White

1.33:1

After making his international reputation in the sixties with a series of eerie existential parables written by Kobo Abe and scored by Toru Takemitsu, and then losing it with the raw, uncharacteristic Summer Soldiers (1972), the increasingly reclusive Hiroshi Teshigahara all but abandoned filmmaking for more than a decade, concentrating instead on other artistic pursuits and passions—calligraphy, ceramics, painting, bamboo installation, opera, and ikebana (his father was founder and master of the world-famous Sogetsu School of Ikebana).

He enjoyed something of a late-life critical renaissance when he reemerged as a filmmaker in the eighties, with Antonio Gaudí, but Woman in the Dunes (1964) remained his most—almost his only—celebrated film in the West. The Face of Another (1966), like Woman in the Dunes one of the Abe-Takemitsu collaborations, continued to languish in undeserved obscurity.  

The Face of Another

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1966

124 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Of the varied media the artist Hiroshi Teshigahara mastered, filmmaking is the one he let go. Upon the death of his headmaster father, in 1979, he assumed the full responsibility of leadership of the Sogetsu flower arrangement school, in which his sister had been far more active than he. He would return to film in later years, as the revered headmaster himself, but in a far more solemn and far less sensual mood than that which marked his greatest, earlier works.

The feature film Woman in the Dunes, his 1964 collaboration with novelist-playwright-scenarist Kobo Abe, stands at the high point of his filmmaking career and constitutes the most eloquent of his several works with Abe. Using the textures of his pottery and the grand scale of his floral constructions, Teshigahara brings to Abe’s text the full force of his nonverbal artistry of chiaroscuro, of shapes and surfaces, of speed and languor. From his work as a potter, which harks back to the gently curved shapes, rough surfaces, and muted glazes of vessels associated with the refinements of a late sixteenth-century Japanese tea ceremony, he lends a sculptural beauty to the sands of Woman in the Dunes, bringing them to life as a key player in the drama of a man and a woman pitted against the elements and each other. As the heir to Sogetsu, one of the world’s foremost schools of ikebana flower arrangement, Teshigahara moves between the extreme delicacy of an art-alcove vase for setting off a hanging scroll painting and the imposing drama of gigantic blooming forests constructed on a stage and animated with moving lights and music. Woman in the Dunes, set almost entirely in a single house, shows both his powerful staging and his love of fine, almost microscopic, detail. Add to all this the brilliantly expressive yet nonintrusive score by Japan’s most distinctive film-music composer, Toru Takemitsu, and every cinematic element combines to support the powerful interaction of a stranger who misses the last bus out of an isolated village and the widow in need of a helper who accepts him as a gift from the collective.  

Woman in the Dunes

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1964

147 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker, designer, flower artist, potter, calligrapher; Takemitsu as composer, poet, musical theorist, philosopher; and Abe as novelist, playwright, director, theater innovator. Individually, they transformed every area of artistic endeavor they turned to, and they are among the small handful of Japanese writers and artists who have had a significant, lasting impact on international culture.

In the mid-1960s, these three artists came together in a series of extraordinary film collaborations that shocked their more conventional countrymen and instantly won enthusiastic response abroad. Through work intended principally for Japanese audiences, the three struck a chord that harmonized unexpectedly, but perfectly, with the sensibilities and existentialist instincts of the international avant-garde. Their four films—Pitfall (1962), Woman in the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966), and Man Without a Map (1968)—set Japan center stage in the intellectual discourse of a world seeking answers to questions about identity, human existence, and the alienation of modern man in urban society. The first three of those landmark films are collected in this box set.  

The Face of Another

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1966

124 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Pitfall

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1962

97 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Woman in the Dunes

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1964

147 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Pitfall is the kind of semiuncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector. Impressively anomalous and consistently unpredictable, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1962 first feature manifests a literally fugitive quality. Opening in restless midstride, with a desperate miner fleeing with his small son down a dark alley, skipping out on a slave-labor existence, it proceeds to gravely leapfrog from one narrative strand to the next, with an unfussy disregard for the linear. Living on the cheap and off the grid, Pitfall’s sparse array of nervous, wobbly humans are stalked by a universe they scarcely apprehend, let alone comprehend, all fast on their way to becoming phantoms.

Mining supplies the film’s hellish governing metaphor, such as it is. But misdirection and misunderstanding are Teshigahara’s specialties here: straggling people bombarded with confusion, developing an especially persuasive and exacting strain of displacement in the process. From the doomed man (Hisashi Igawa) and his pint-size boy (Kazuo Miyahara, a staring tyke with the ornamental qualities of a bad-luck charm) to a tame, candy-vending doxy in an abandoned mine camp, these figures are newsprint cutouts strung from the end of civilization’s rope. They have no place to go but down: fifteen minutes into the movie and our running man has humiliatingly signed on at another mine, with impoverished circumstance serving as a conveyor belt taking him straight to his imminent demise.  

Pitfall

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1962

97 min

Black and White

1.33:1