Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Akira Kurosawa’s propensity for adapting European classics—Dostoyevsky (The Idiot), Shakespeare (Throne of Blood), Gorky (The Lower Depths)—earned him a label, both abroad and at home, as the most “Western” of Japanese directors, even though he never saw himself as other than purely Japanese. Indeed, what could be more Japanese for a man of Kurosawa’s epoch and social class than to have been brought up on Shakespeare, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky, on Beethoven and Schubert? He was born in 1910, when the Meiji era’s enthusiasm for foreign culture had not yet been overwhelmed by rising nationalist tides, the son of an ex–army officer and school administrator of distinguished samurai descent. It would be more accurate to say that for the young Kurosawa such European models had already been so thoroughly assimilated as to form part of his native culture; and far from being exotic transplantations, Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths are richly detailed explorations of the periods and milieus of Japanese history in which Kurosawa sets them.

High and Low represents quite a different project: a contemporary rather than a period film, the adaptation not of a European classic but of an American thriller, Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom (1959), in the era before such thrillers enjoyed much cultural prestige. It is the only time Kurosawa ever worked explicitly with material of American origin (although Yojimbo bore a large debt to Dashiell Hammett, then only slightly more prestigious), and he used it not to illuminate a vanished epoch but to produce a map of contemporary Japan that ranges from the complacent and affluent “heaven” to the needy and nihilistic “hell” of the film’s Japanese title, with an efficient police force patrolling the problematic zone where high and low collide. Kurosawa had treated modern themes before, to be sure. But High and Low is more detached in its effect: less heartrending than Ikiru, less savage (though no less contemptuous) in its criticism of corporate life than The Bad Sleep Well, less romantic in its attitude toward criminality than Drunken Angel. The tormented young policeman played by Toshiro Mifune in Stray Dog has grown up, perhaps, to be the coolly restrained detective embodied by Tatsuya Nakadai: seeing everything but keeping his judgments to himself until he really can’t take it anymore.  

High and Low

Akira Kurosawa

1963

143 min

Black and White

2.35:1

A glance at Vampyr should begin with a glance at its Danish begetter, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968), whose relatively restricted output has not prevented him from being spoken of as one of the greatest film directors of all time. The accolade rests not so much on some perceived technical prowess as on the recognition of a very special spiritual integrity: everything he touched—and he touched many different genres in the course of his lifetime—he made inimitably his own. Proud, shy, and reticent in his personal life, he gave all he had to the burgeoning craft of cinema. Somehow or other, the profundity and heroism of that sacrifice are communicated as a felt value in his movies. Each of them has a beautiful seriousness.

The bulk of Dreyer’s filmography—nine films out of a total of fourteen, stretching from his debut in 1919 to The Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928—belongs to the silent epoch. And most of it was made outside his native Denmark. The country had enjoyed a brief golden age of cinema just prior to the First World War, but by the time Dreyer was establishing himself, in the late teens, this flowering was ending, and he was forced to seek his fortune abroad, wherever he could find backers, which in practice meant Germany and France. The Passion of Joan of Arc, his last effort in the twenties, is one of the finest of all silent films—an epitome of the art form as it had developed up to that point—but it was not a success with the public. Notoriously, Vampyr, his next work and first sound film, would fail to find an audience too, and even more disastrously than Joan of Arc did, so it is worth emphasizing that this strange, hermetic, and experimental film was originally conceived of as, if not exactly a “potboiler” (the concept is impossible in Dreyer’s case), then at least something possessing—he hoped—healthy moneymaking possibilities. After the great expressionist outburst at the beginning of the decade that had issued in masterpieces like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), vampires, horror, and darkness were in vogue again toward the end of the twenties—both in Europe and the United States. In films such as The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927) and The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni, 1927), Dreyer discerned, or thought he could discern, instances of a genre where broad popular appeal was allowed to exist within the framework of artistic integrity.  

Vampyr

Carl Th. Dreyer

1932

73 min

Black and White

1.19:1

A search for films using the word vampire or vamp in the title will turn up dozens of pictures made in the silent era. But this is only because, after the 1915 A Fool There Was (inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire”), in which star Theda Bara plays a glamorously destructive woman nicknamed the Vampire, the supernatural meaning of the term was temporarily eclipsed by its secondary sense as slang for a simple gold-digging seductress or general “bad girl.” As late as Dracula’s Daughter (1936), jokes depend on the double meaning—when the hero ventures out to hunt vampires with hammer and stake, his butler wryly comments, “But I always understood you went after them with checkbooks, sir.” Discounting Louis Feuillade’s Les vampires (1915), which features mysteriously powered supercriminals (including the slinky Irma Vep), and Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927), wherein Lon Chaney’s shark-toothed bloodsucker is ultimately revealed as a detective in disguise, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr is actually only the third major film (and the second talkie) to feature what would become the well-known vampire of popular culture: a bloodsucking revenant who can transform victims into similar creatures and be destroyed by a stake through the heart or the light of the sun. 

I’ve always wondered whether Dreyer had seen Browning’s Dracula (1931), released while Vampyr was in preproduction, or F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). All three feature a young, haunted-looking hero arriving at a remote location and falling under the sway of a malign vampire who dominates the region—but that could as easily be down to coincidence, or the probability that Dreyer derived at least some of his plot from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the foundation of the other two. It’s hard, somehow, to imagine the ascetic, spiritually inclined Dane buying a ticket for Browning’s full-blooded Hollywood melodrama and shivering at the baleful glare of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula. Obviously, he was closer in temperament to the German Murnau, who shot his film in real ruined castles rather than rely on elaborately Gothic studio sets. Like Murnau, Dreyer began his career in European commercial cinema but found his ambitions out of alignment with studio expectations—his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), was initially a flop—and slid toward a more art-house, amateur mode of moviemaking. Murnau worked in the studio systems of Germany and America before making documentaries in the South Seas, whereas Dreyer could mount Vampyr only by finding a wealthy patron, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who financed the film and (under the stage name Julian West) took the leading role. This alone aligns the film more with experiments like Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930) than, say, post-Dracula genre quickies like The Vampire Bat (1933) or Condemned to Live (1935).  

Vampyr

Carl Th. Dreyer

1932

73 min

Black and White

1.19:1

The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled beaches of Persona’s summer escape (shot on the same spot where Bergman eventually built his own house) suddenly buffeted by crystal blue waves. Or the setting for Shame’s detached, ash gray apocalypse made verdant by expanses of lush farmland pasture. To be amid the splendor of Fårö, the Swedish island where Bergman lived for decades and is now buried, sheds new light (often literally) on the works of this most forbidding and visually influential of film artists. Additionally, being there for the fifth annual Bergmanveckan, or Bergman Week, the first since his death in July 2007, has made me reassess my notions of what defines a film festival. Rather than the usual community of film journalists and programmers fighting each other over screenings and proffering instantaneous responses to films once the lights came up, I was surrounded by what seemed like an equal number of local islanders and Bergman devotees who had traveled from far and wide, all of whom were enjoying being outside as much as in the darkened spaces of the theaters. Indeed, Bergman Week is as much about the setting as the artist.  

Through a Glass Darkly

Ingmar Bergman

1961

91 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman

1957

91 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The usual French term for traffic—meaning the movement of motor vehicles—is la circulation. The word trafic can be a synonym for it, but its primary meaning is traffic in the sense of commerce, the exchange of goods. Jacques Tati’s use of the word for his 1971 panorama of car culture is pointed: it is an example of the same ironic franglais he used in calling his previous film Playtime. Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Trafic’s several satirical targets.

Trafic is primarily a film about cars and their effect on the people who drive them, buy and sell them, and occasionally have to jump out of their way. At the time of its release, Tati insisted, in the French publication Show Business (another franglais title), that he was no more opposed to cars than he had been to modern architecture in Playtime: “I’m simply trying to show that individuals change when they’re behind the wheel of a car.” In addition to the drivers themselves, Trafic is concerned, quite literally, with the movement of goods. Here, the director’s perennial alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, is the designer of an innovative camping car manufactured by the fictional French motor company Altra (in reality, the car is an embellished Renault 4L). The vehicle is to be unveiled at a motor show at Amsterdam’s RAI exhibition center, and Hulot undertakes to transport his creation there, accompanied by truck driver Marcel (Marcel Franval) and an American public relations officer, Maria (Maria Kimberly). The film’s founding joke is that the vehicle can’t make its own way to Amsterdam and must be carried—and for all its supposed organizational wherewithal, Altra is unable to find any better transport for it than in the back of an antiquated lorry that constantly breaks down. Tati’s story of failed transportation might be seen as a parodic variation on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), about the moving of a cargo of explosives—except that in Trafic the world itself, rather than the cargo, is explosive.  

Trafic

Jacques Tati

1971

97 min

Color

1.33:1

Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years, as the tastes and preoccupations of respondents have shifted and a few new masterpieces have displaced old classics. But one thing has remained constant: in all of these polls, one title has invariably topped the list, unmoved by passing trends. It is Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971), which for the last twenty-five years has held the official title of “best Canadian film ever made.” While some might claim that other films are equally deserving of this distinction, no one would deny that Jutra’s bittersweet tale of a boy’s coming-of-age in 1940s rural Quebec is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever to come out of Canada.

By the time he directed Mon oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra (1930–86) was already a well-known filmmaker in Quebec. The son of a renowned Montreal radiologist, Jutra was a gifted student who had completed medical school by the tender age of twenty-one. He never practiced medicine, though, for his passion had always been cinema, and he devoted all of his spare time and energy to the seventh art. Encouraged by his family to pursue his artistic vision, he started making shorts when he was still a teenager, and before turning twenty had already won a Canadian Film Award for best amateur film. This first award-winning film, Mouvement perpétuel (1949), a playful experiment in avant-gardist cinema, made a strong impression on celebrated animator Norman McLaren, who invited Jutra to work with him at the National Film Board of Canada. Jutra directed a number of films for the government-funded NFB, which, from its foundation in 1939 until well into the 1970s, was the main production studio in Canada. It was at the NFB that Jutra would realize his masterpiece, Mon oncle Antoine.  

Mon oncle Antoine

Claude Jutra

1971

104 min

Color

1.66:1

Sometimes it’s pretty tough for me to divorce my inner fanboy from the (probably unrealistic) ideal of a business-only, detached producer. One such moment was when I saw that Anthony Mann’s The Furies was a part of our Paramount deal. I think the geeked-out obsessive in me pounced to work on it before the aloof “professional” part of my brain even absorbed the rest of the list.

That’s because Mann is, in my book, one of cinema history’s perfect filmmakers. That’s not to say that I think every film of his is a masterpiece. It’s rare for any director, especially one with a significant body of work, to bat a thousand and judging from comments he made, Mann would have been the first to agree. But the traits that define his work—lean characterization, immaculate and expressive cinematography, conflicted protagonists, hard-hitting action, and Olympian personal drama—pretty much define what I enjoy when I watch a movie.

The Furies has all of these trademark Mann motifs. It’s been, I think, kind of wrongly sidelined in relation to his more famous and rightfully canonized westerns with James Stewart (The Naked Spur, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73 ), so the chance to put it back on the map, so to speak, was a terrific opportunity. It’s a genuinely unique movie, one that blends melodrama, film noir, the western, and even screwball comedy into a single genre-defying work, and did so way before terms like deconstruction and revisionism became everyday catchphrases.

Mann passed away in 1967, but I was excited to see in my research that one of his daughters, actress Nina Mann, had introduced a screening of Winchester ’73 in Los Angeles some years ago. That led me to believe it’d be a pretty safe bet that she’d be happy to talk about her father’s work, and have some solid thoughts about it too. With some excellent leads and help (shout-outs to Jake Perlin, Jim Healy, and Jon Zelazny), I got in touch with Ms. Mann over the phone, and was instantly blown away not only by how knowledgeable she was about her father’s films but also by how articulate her storytelling and recollection process turned out to be.

After getting the ball rolling on a possible interview date and time, I think the fanboy in me slipped out again, and I rambled about how much of an honor it was for me to talk to her, how many of my friends would be amazed that this was happening, and how totally thrilled I was that the interview was going to happen. Absolutely sincere thoughts, but I’m sure I could’ve found a better, more dignified way of mentioning them if my brain hadn’t short-circuited.

When I met Ms. Mann a bit over a month later in L.A. for the interview, things couldn’t have gone better. Her responses were genuinely enlightening, she was a very engaging speaker, and she always found ways to bring her comments back to the film at hand. Trust me, this is a major plus when it comes time to edit, because it creates a lot of nice, ready material and keeps topics focused and relevant. It was one of the most painless edits I’ve worked on.

What threw me for a loop, however, was something that I’d never really considered. I guess it was a “given” for the cinemaniac part of my brain that Ms. Mann would have always been invested somehow in her father’s films (after all, he’s only One of the Best Filmmakers Ever, right?), that she would have seen every single one as it was finished, watched the dailies . . . I don’t know, eaten, breathed, lived Anthony Mann movies all of her life. Turned out that couldn’t have been further from the case, and that her “reconciliation” with and appreciation of his work really only happened a handful of years ago, when that aforementioned retrospective played in L.A. The fanboy in me had basically blocked out the concept of growing up in a household with a father who was constantly working (many times on remote locations), and the fact that it was, basically, those great movies that were keeping him away.

After the interview, the sound recordist, Percy, told me that he felt like he was tearing up during some of her responses, and I knew what he meant. I now consider it all the more amazing and genuinely moving that through his movies she found her way back to her father as an artist, and that she so swiftly developed a full yet ever growing appreciation of his work. It was, truly, an honor for me to meet her, and that goes for the fan and the producer sides of me.

I’m also happy to say that Ms. Mann was generous enough to shoot some short asides on various topics for possible inclusion on our website. This one is her recollection about the pure joy her father found in the simple act of storytelling.

The Furies

Anthony Mann

1950

109 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The idea of self-fashioning—of deliberately taking the raw materials of one’s body and mind and transforming them into a work of art—has been with us at least since the Renaissance. Yet no one, not even Oscar Wilde, has so rigorously pursued that grail as Yukio Mishima. Wilde may have quipped about living up to his blue china, but he let his once graceful body grow slack and bloated, and his delicate features droop into jowls. Mishima spent countless hours at the gym, turning himself from a sickly, scrawny youth to a powerful muscleman. Wilde talked subversively, but allowed his subversion to seem like a mere game of naughty jokes and paradox mongering; Mishima turned his strange political ideals into action, and became the general of his own private army. Wilde ultimately allowed the forces of intolerance to catch and ruin him; Mishima composed the final act of his life in his head, and then wrote it in his own blood with a samurai sword. However much that gory act might repel us, it had a terrible lucidity.

Paul Schrader’s beautiful, complex, and at times even thrilling film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is intent on exploring that arduous path to self-transformation: it is a work of art about a man who tried to become a work of art. In his lifetime, Mishima was the only modern Japanese author to enjoy a significant reputation in the West, and it was not with any idea of belittling his literary accomplishments that Schrader (who considers Mishima a great novelist) explained to interviewers that he was less engaged with any of Mishima’s conventional fictions than with the sustained fiction that was “Yukio Mishima."  

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader

1985

120 min

Color & Black and White

1.85:1

Patriotism, or The Rite of Love and Death, poses an unusual question: what impels a novelist to make a film? Actually, few have ever done so. The number has shot up recently, thanks to a surge in China, but for many years the French had the syndrome almost to themselves: Cocteau, Genet, Robbe-Grillet, Duras . . . France took cinema seriously as an art form long before most other countries, so it’s perhaps not surprising that French intellectuals were drawn to the medium. But very few novelists from other cultures followed suit. Might there be an incompatibility between the lines of thought needed to write a book and what Eisenstein called “the film sense”? Anyhow, given that the phenomenon is so rare, what makes some novelists attempt it?

When the Japanese writer Mishima Yukio (1925–70) turned filmmaker for two days in April 1965, to shoot an adaptation of his own short story “Patriotism,” he had at least two primary motives. Let’s take the easy one first. He wanted to create a splash of international notoriety to match the reputation he had already built in Japan. In that sense, the film was a publicity stunt, a gesture calculated to enhance his European profile at a time when he believed himself to be in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He shot and postproduced the film in secret and premiered it at a private screening at the Cinémathèque française in Paris in September 1965. Its first public screening was at the Tours Film Festival (at the time, the world’s most prestigious showcase for short films) in January 1966. As expected, the aestheticized but realistically detailed presentation of a traditional bushi suicide caused a sensation. Some in the audience fainted; Mishima was much talked and written about. Death in Midsummer, the collection containing the original short story, appeared in English translation in 1966, not long after the film’s premiere; it was the seventh of Mishima’s books to be translated.  

Patriotism

Yukio Mishima and Domoto Masaki

1966

27 min

Black and White

1.33:1