Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

In an effort to go green this summer, the Criterion offices were declared a “paper-cup-free zone.” Coffee is now dispensed exclusively into “real” coffee cups (which number roughly in the hundreds), and a lovely array of Janus 50th Anniversary mugs have taken up residence next to the coffee carafe. The watercoolers have been stripped of their paper-cup dispensers, and instead we have a handsome set of drinking glasses in the front and also back in the kitchen. If more offices would make these simple changes it would make such a huge impact on the environment, but I suspect we’ll have to wait for a designer to come up with a fifty-dollar drinking glass reading “This is not a paper cup” for a trend to start.

Assuming we’re all well hydrated and caffeinated, how many Criterion employees does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one, as long as she’s wearing flats. This one was a little skeptical at the sight of a dozen new energy-efficient models lined up on the counter, ready to replace the old, familiar energy-suckers in our entryway and reception area. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping as much unnecessary carbon from the atmosphere as possible, but at first the new bulbs, with their thin white tubes, looked so cold—like typical, joyless fluorescent office lighting. Happily, the glow they give off is actually quite warm, and while looking at the giant L’eclisse poster that faces me across the room I was pleased to discover that Alain Delon (who doesn’t need any special lighting, believe me) looks more attractive than ever.  

In my dreams, Mars keeps changing: gone are the verdant Barsoomian fields explored by John Carter and Princess Dejah Thoris in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels; the arid, canal-laced deserts that witnessed the final exodus of H. G. Wells’s desperate invaders; the mythical cities and false Ohio farmlands of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. As of this writing, the ancient Red Planet of our cultural dreams and nightmares has been under nearly fifty years of assault by science, reason, and an escalating armada of robotic emissaries, yet it manages to keep bouncing back, more enthralling than ever. As science-fiction author Larry Niven once put it (in an introduction to some tales set within his own constantly changing Martian landscape): “If the space probes keep redesigning our
planets, what can we do but write new stories?”

So it was quite surprising to view the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars for the first time in decades and find that it scores most highly for its verisimilitude. Given the scarcity of information then available, the filmmakers did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface were beamed back by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory probe Mariner 4.

Screenwriter Ib Melchior had already made a career of shifting comfortably between nuts-and-bolts reality-based SF (Men into Space, The Outer Limits) and more fanciful monsterfests like Journey to the Seventh Planet and The Angry Red Planet, his directorial debut (another entertaining Martian expedition, this one chock-full of ultranasty, astronaut-devouring beasties). In preparing his heavily illustrated first-draft screenplay for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a film he intended to direct, Melchior was clearly seeking a middle ground: native plant and critter life galore, but this time in support of a lonely astronaut’s internal struggle.  

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Byron Haskin

1964

110 min

Color

2.35:1

Ladies and gentlemen, you will now hear the strange and comical history of how an eighteenth-century English play went through diverse transformations and finally became a hit movie banned by the Nazis . . .

The initial impetus came from Jonathan Swift, provocateur and author of Gulliver’s Travels, who suggested to John Gay that he should write a “Newgate pastoral.” (Newgate was London’s main prison at the time.) Gay rose to the challenge. He based his protagonist Peachum on the notorious real-life criminal Jonathan Wild, stirred in his cynicism about government and police corruption, and framed the entire entertainment as a gutter parody of the fashions for Handel and Italian opera. The Beggar’s Opera was first staged in London in 1728, and it was such a success that William Hogarth was still painting scenes from the show a year later. The authorities were disturbed and threatened by its popularity and refused a performance license to its sequel, Polly. But “ballad opera” was established overnight as a favorite with English audiences.  

The Threepenny Opera

Georg Wilhelm Pabst

1931

110 min

Black and White

1.19:1

In 1956 Nathan kroll, a violinist turned radio composer and producer, asked Martha Graham if he could make a movie about her and her work. Absolutely not, she said. Like many choreographers of her time, she felt that dance could not be successfully filmed. Furthermore, she was frightened of movie cameras, the more so, no doubt, since she was now in her sixties, and showing her age. Unlike stage shows, movies have close-ups. Kroll persisted, however, and Graham finally consented to make the film that came to be entitled A Dancer’s World. The format they agreed on was a free sort of lecture-demonstration. In short dances choreographed by Graham, her company would demonstrate her technique, and give some idea of her art. Between those segments Graham would appear and comment.

During the filming of the dancers, all went well, but when it came time for Graham to step in front of the camera, she panicked. Agnes de Mille, in her biography Martha, describes the scene: “She hung onto the barre, clung to the walls. She couldn’t think what to do with her hands, with her robes, with her feet.” Finally she escaped into her dressing room and locked the door. Her company manager, LeRoy Leatherman, got down on the floor and pleaded with her through the crack under the door. There was no response. The film crew packed up their cameras and went home.  

Martha Graham: Dance on Film

Nathan Kroll

1959

93 min

Black and White

1.33:1

I set out on my first trip to the Toronto Film Festival ready to feast on films and spend relaxed, indulgent, quality time with writers I work with, or hope to work with, as the editorial director here at Criterion. And I wasn’t disappointed on either front. As I had been told, Toronto is the great convergence space for all people film in North America and even farther afield. And with screenings stretching from 8:45 in the morning to 11:30 at night, often ten or twelve at a time, over ten days (almost 350 films in all), I’d say it’s more of an orgy than a feast. I’d been told I’d literally be tripping over friends and colleagues as I dashed from screening to screening (sometimes five a day), and that was certainly, delightfully, true. In fact, unplanned, I almost immediately ran into my Janus associates Sarah Finklea and Brian Belovarac, as well as Film Comment friends Gavin Smith and Nicole Armour, hometown BAMcinématek’s Florence Almozini and Adrienne Mancia, and Criterion contributors Jonathan Rosenbaum (L’eclisse, F for Fake, Kicking and Screaming, WR, Breathless) and Peter Brunette (The Children Are Watching Us, The Flowers of St. Francis, Amarcord), and shared some films with them. There’s something magical, transformative, about being in this kind of environment even with people you know well already: a stress-free openness, desire to share ideas, and travelers’ fellow feeling takes over.

Actually planning a meeting is a bit of an art form, however, one I had to become accustomed to but that I was practicing fairly confidently by the end (if I do say so myself!). What people did before cell phones I don’t know, but I’ve never text messaged so much in my life, and I tapped into levels of flexibility and multitasking I didn’t know I had. I’m especially proud of one bravura quadruple play wherein I met with the Dialogues series programmer before his Ellen Burstyn–introduced screening of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and then was unexpectedly able to watch the whole film (a real treat) while rearranging lunch with the very busy Dennis Lim (Clean, Shaven; Mala Noche), who met me outside the theater minutes after it ended. We spent the next hour or so together before he went off to an interview and I, with only minutes to spare, to a screening of Jonathan Demme’s very moving Jimmy Carter doc Man from Plains. Then I firmed up plans for the next day with James Quandt, senior programmer at the Cinematheque Ontario and recently a prolific Criterion contributor (Pickpocket, Au hasard Balthazar, Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara), checked in with work at home, and ran to catch Alexander Sokurov’s devastating Alexandra, a dreamy, allegorical tale of a Russian grandmother (played by the formidable Galina Vishnevskaya, widow of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich) who visits her beloved grandson on a military base in Chechnya, where he is a stationed officer. (And then there were two more films—and a dinner!)  

Some people have seen an impossible number of movies, and the most astonishing part is that they actually remember them all. Pierre Rissient, who is very much on our minds these days, is one of those. Producer, director, distributor, talent spotter, selector of films for festivals, uncredited advisor to top directors, and éminence grise of world cinema, Rissient alternately cajoles you and bowls you over with his seemingly endless film knowledge, which he lays out as if every word were indisputably true and obvious, and you were lucky to be invited to agree with him. Todd McCarthy has been showing a feature-length doc about him at festivals, starting with Cannes, where Pierre has been a kingmaker for decades. I saw it in Telluride and picked up a lot of history, hearing the tales of his life among filmmakers: immersing himself in cinema alongside Godard and Truffaut at Langlois’ Cinémathèque française, taking Fritz Lang to see Deep Throat, trying to keep John Ford sober and awake on a press junket to Paris. He has been relentless in promoting the filmmakers he believes in, from Abbas Kiarostami to Clint Eastwood to Hou Hsiao-hsien, and, for their part, they credit him with opening the door to the recognition they deserved.

His erstwhile business partner, perennial sparring partner, and fellow champion of cinema since the sixties has been Bertrand Tavernier, director of Coup de torchon, Round Midnight, and more than twenty other films. He is another one of those people who can recite, shot for shot, more movies than I will ever see. He just finished principle photography in Louisiana on a film with Tommy Lee Jones, and all through the shooting he was asking us to send DVDs down to him to show to his actors or his crew or the novelist James Lee Burke, whose novel Tavernier is adapting for the screen. Overlord, Casque d’or, My Man Godfrey, Tanner ’88. Today he forwarded me a comment about Raymond Bernard that someone posted to his DVDBlog. Even if you can’t read French, just scanning down the page, past all the boldface titles, gives you an idea of how many films Tavernier can take in—even when he’s shooting a movie himself. And if you do read French, you’ll be rewarded with a little nugget about Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin. Tavernier scolds us gently for taking Welles too much at his word when he disowned Confidential Report, the version of the film that was originally released in Europe. According to Tavernier, and Rissient, the version released by Louis Dolivet was okay with Welles when originally released, and it wasn’t until many years later that Welles began to cultivate the idea that there was a vision of the film he’d never been allowed to achieve. As with everything Welles, this could be yet another layer of mystification, but Rissient and Tavernier are so plugged in to the arcana of world cinema history that if we hadn’t just been scolded for it, I’d be inclined to take them at their word . . .

Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s door—the disc producer, the head of audio, and a few more of us—running through the same arguments one more time and ending up, once again, at the same conclusion. It all starts when Rainer Werner Fassbinder chooses to shoot Berlin Alexanderplatz , his epic masterpiece, at 25 frames per second (fps). It makes sense, since in Europe television runs at 25 fps, and the film was being shot for European television. But what happens when you need to make a 24 fps HD master? Or a print that will be projected in theaters at 24 fps? Either you do what we’ve done, let the film run naturally at 24 fps—which means the running time will be 4 percent longer and the pitch of the audio will drop down slightly—or you could try to solve the problem with digital processing and pitch correction, crushing 25 frames worth of information into 24 frames.
 

Very few movies count as truly significant milestones in the development of American “indie” cinema during the last quarter of the twentieth century. They include Eraserhead (1977) and Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), as early trailblazers; She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and sex, lies and videotape (1989), as consolidators of a distinctive trend; and Reservoir Dogs (1992), which kick-started a rapidly growing interest in genre and, at the same time, some would say, signaled the beginning of the end. And among these landmark independent films, Stranger Than Paradise unquestionably looms large. Not only did Jim Jarmusch’s second feature as writer-director introduce him as a genuinely idiosyncratic talent and, for many (1980’s Permanent Vacation had not been widely seen), mark the start of an artistically distinguished and rewarding career, it also exerted, in its own quiet way, an enormous influence over what was to follow.

At the time of its release, in 1984, what seemed remarkable about the film was that it managed to do so many new and unusual things yet still seem utterly coher-ent and accessible. For starters, there was its eccentric approach to narrative structure: the sixty-seven single-shot “scenes” separated by black film, and the explicit division of the story into three clear, ironically titled chapters. But there were other formal qualities of note: Tom DiCillo’s black-and-white camera work, which serves Jarmusch’s sensitive feel for the American landscape so well that one recalls Antonioni’s work in Italy or Angelopoulos’s in Greece; and the striking use of music, which successfully juxtaposes Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” with the Bartók-like strains of John Lurie’s score for string quartet. This was a road movie for sure, but one with a difference: unlike most examples of that then still extremely popular genre, Stranger Than Paradise seemed at once wholly American and oddly European.  

Stranger Than Paradise

Jim Jarmusch

1984

89 min

Black and White

1.78:1

It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.

Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a fragment, Stranger Than Paradise was finished and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival just before the dismal summer of ’84: New Morning in America, Ronald Reagan running for reelection. Reagan had his paradise—and Jarmusch?

As modest and self-contained as it is rich and distinctive, Jarmusch’s remarkable synthesis crossed film-school cinephilia with downtown club culture. Jarmusch had studied with Nick Ray at NYU and assisted Wim Wenders on his portrait of Ray, Lightning over Water; he played with a “no wave” band called the Del-Byzanteens and hung out with the crazy Hungarian expats at Squat Theater. Those were the days when the B-52s were regulars at CBGB, when Max’s Kansas City showed Super 8 punk movies, when Nan Goldin’s epic autobiographical slide show was an underground event at the UP Cinema and Ann Magnuson was organizing “Flintstones” evenings at Club 57.  

Stranger Than Paradise

Jim Jarmusch

1984

89 min

Black and White

1.78:1

I was a cab driver once myself (in Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s), and I’ve been sensitive ever since to how the profession is portrayed on the screen. As it happened, I was driving a cab when Taxi Driver came out, and I was offended by its lies about the economic status of a cabdriver. New York cabdrivers were then earning about $100 to $120 per week, just above the minimum wage (the same as we made in Los Angeles). Travis Bickle made $300 to $400 per week, so he was free of the mundane financial worries that bedeviled me. An innocent fantasy? A Marxist would claim that Taxi Driver mystifies capitalist relations of production by magically restoring to the worker’s wages the surplus value extracted by the capitalist (with perhaps a little extra thrown in). I wouldn’t discount this ideological project, but there is more at stake for screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese: it is precisely by relieving Travis Bickle of money worries that they make credible his obsession with metaphysical evil. In any case, they allow us to forget the real evils of exploitation and oppression.

In fairness, I should note that most of my co-workers loved Taxi Driver. Were they dupes of capitalist ideology and metaphysics? No, they just identified with Travis Bickle, and they wanted to be like him. He wouldn’t take shit from anybody, and that was our loftiest ambition.  

Night on Earth

Jim Jarmusch

1991

128 min

Color

1.78:1