Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Full-size sidewalks aren’t very common in outer Tokyo, particularly in the many small residential neighborhoods that surround the city for miles. Likely a holdover from when there weren’t as many cars around and people walked in the roads alongside carts and horses, this fact can sometimes prove a problem nowadays, as you’re forced to share narrow streets with buses, taxis, and private automobiles. The problem is amplified at night, and particularly when you’re drunk and stumbling around with someone even drunker than you. This was the situation I found myself in one evening at the beginning of September, as I did my best not only to remain standing but to help prevent legendary Japanese crime and action movie star Joe Shishido from being struck down by a city bus, as we stumbled happily from a small restaurant to an even smaller pub in a tiny suburban neighborhood of Tokyo. But let me back up a little bit . . .  

I Am Waiting

Koreyoshi Kurahara

1957

91 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Rusty Knife

Toshio Masuda

1958

90 min

Black and White

2.35:1

Take Aim at the Police Van

Seijun Suzuki

1960

84 min

Black and White

2.45:1

Cruel Gun Story

Takumi Furukawa

1964

91 min

Black and White

2.45:1

A Colt Is My Passport

Takashi Nomura

1967

84 min

Black and White

2.35:1

One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from part of the world—a Julián Hernández or Corneliu Porumboiu or Bong Joon-ho. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, however, the greatest revelation for me was of an entirely different nature: an incomplete work from a well-known director dead already for thirty-two years. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is the result of a dazzling effort by French movie historian and renowned preservationist Serge Bromberg to bring to audiences the footage from the Diabolique director’s famously unfinished 1964 film L’enfer in some semblance of narrative form. The result is a fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary and look at Clouzot’s genius (which, if you live in the New York area, you can see for yourself, at the New York Film Festival, on October 4).

According to Bromberg’s opening narration, the project was born when he found himself stuck in an elevator with Clouzot’s widow, Inès de Gonzalez, who told the famed film gleaner that she had in her possession 185 cans of original camera negative from the L’enfer shoot, never completed for various reasons, including the lead actor’s walking off the set and the director’s sudden (nonfatal) heart attack. What Bromberg discovered was truly remarkable, and incontrovertible evidence that the film might indeed have been as groundbreaking as Clouzot had always promised it would. The story of L’enfer, which came to Clouzot during a bout of insomnia, involves the paralyzing jealousy a man, Marcel (played by Serge Reggiani), feels toward his new wife, Odette (Romy Schneider), and the pathologically possessive depths to which he sinks during a summer vacation at the famed Côte d’Azur hotel la Colombe d’Or.  

Diabolique

Henri-Georges Clouzot

1954

116 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Le Corbeau

Henri-Georges Clouzot

1943

91 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Wages of Fear

Henri-Georges Clouzot

1953

147 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Quai des Orfèvres

Henri-Georges Clouzot

1947

106 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Forty-six years ago, Last Year at Marienbad opened in London. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet came over for the press screening, and I chatted to them in the lobby of the now defunct Cameo-Poly art house on London’s Upper Regent Street. Resnais was already forty years of age, a full decade older than Truffaut or Godard. Infinitely patient and courteous, he answered questions with a distinctive ease and lack of hesitation. Robbe-Grillet, known up to that point only for his experimental novels, such as The Voyeur and Jealousy, was far more mercurial and voluble, gesticulating furiously to emphasize a fact or opinion.

Robbe-Grillet claimed that the cryptic initials of the characters in Marienbad (A, X, M) had no special significance, “just as in Hiroshima mon amour, the lovers have no names.” He admitted that although many of the tracking shots in the film were outlined in his script, Resnais made them at once more complicated and practical. Robbe-Grillet’s opinions were precise and dogmatic—he hated Bergman (“too metaphysical”), loved Orson Welles, and thought Jacques Demy’s Lola the best film of 1961. On the literary side, he admired James Joyce (though Resnais smiled and admitted he had never read him) and Virginia Woolf, and immensely enjoyed the detective fiction of Graham Greene.

Resnais said that he traveled to Germany in search of a suitably baroque hotel for Marienbad. “We were very excited by the châteaux of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg, outside Munich, and as Robbe-Grillet could not accompany us, I sent him various photos of the rooms and gardens, and he chose the settings [he preferred] from those.”

Resnais also waxed enthusiastic about the 2.35:1 widescreen format, which he had used for the first time in a feature with Marienbad. “I like this better than the normal gauge because it’s less cramped and destroys any impression that the film is a documentary,” he explained. He talked of his pet project, The Adventures of Harry Dickson, based on the American dime-novel detective, which in hindsight remains an unrealized dream. Muriel, his ensuing film, would be shot in color: “Both Hiroshima and Marienbad have worked on a mental level,” he observed, “and I think one can only use color when a film is down-to-earth. And Muriel will be in a realistic key, so—in color!”

Robbe-Grillet passed on last year, but Resnais continues to make features (Les herbes folles was just screened at Cannes, to much acclaim) and still arrives for interviews in the same style of quilt coat that he used on that chilly London morning back in 1962.

Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais

1961

94 min

Black and White

2.35:1

I recently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given me the most pleasure—the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made as well as a showcase for the Russian master’s boldest graphics. But ever since I first saw it in the 1960s, this is a pleasure I’ve often had to apologize for, thanks to the vagaries and confusions of cold-war thinking. This thinking maintained that Eisenstein caved into Stalinist pressures, denounced the montage aesthetic that was central to his best work, and turned out an archaic, made-to-order glorification of a dictator.

Part of the problem has been reconciling the film’s multiple paradoxes—how much it functions as Eisenstein’s autocritique and apologia as well as an attack and glorification of Stalin, meanwhile combining elements of both high and low art at virtually every instant with its tortured angles and extreme melodrama. (Though portions of Part II could be termed inferior to Part I, the moment the film switches to color, using Agfa stock seized from the Germans during World War II, it moves into dizzying high gear—see the video clip below—reminding us that Walt Disney was one of Eisenstein’s favorite filmmakers.) Some critics did take a slightly more nuanced view of things in Part II, but even a few of these writers, such as Dwight Macdonald, wound up adding homophobic invective to their charges, maintaining that Eisenstein’s homosexuality distorted his view of history—a dubious complaint that, as I later discovered, tended to oversimplify Eisenstein’s (bi)sexuality as well as the historical record. At least Orson Welles’s two mixed reviews of Part I—written in 1946, when he was a newspaper columnist and saw the film without subtitles at a special United Nations screening—placed proper emphasis on what might be called Eisenstein’s visual rhetoric, which tends to drown out most other considerations.

Thanks to the remarkably detailed scholarship of Joan Neuberger and Yuri Tsivian, who have both written invaluable monographs about the film and contributed fascinating audiovisual essays to the Criterion DVD editions, we now know that Ivan, far from being any sort of ideological collapse, was in fact Eisenstein’s most courageous gesture, above all in its highly ambivalent and often critical treatment of Stalin. Part I, which was milder overall, may have garnered the Stalin prize, but Part II, whose sexual and stylistic delirium went much further, was banned for a dozen years, following a now legendary February 1947 Kremlin meeting of Eisenstein and his lead actor, Nikolai Cherkasov, with Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov. It appears that Eisenstein agreed to make some cosmetic changes but then edited the film to suit himself, and died just afterward—having already vowed in his diary to work himself to death, after apparently being more appalled than pleased by Stalin’s initial endorsement of his project (according to Russian film scholar Leonid Kozlov).

Even if he never got around to shooting more than a few fragments of Part III (now lost, apart from a test), what Eisenstein left behind in the preceding two parts is surely one of the most complexly nuanced works in cinema history, simultaneously celebrating, critiquing, and analyzing Ivan, Stalin, and himself. What struck me most of all watching it this time was its shameless embrace of excess on all these fronts, registering both as a giddy kind of pop art and as a morbid exercise in medieval history. Despite its discarding of Eisenstein’s earlier montage aesthetic, I don’t think he ever made anything else in his career that was more personal or more expressive.

The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside the stage door at the end of the evening and gathered the signatures of Max, Gunnel Lindblom, and Toivo Pawlo in my program booklet.

Not enough people know that Max was among the most gifted Swedish stage actors of his generation, if not the most gifted, and during his years at Malmö Civic Theatre, he appeared in nine productions under the direction of Bergman, who said at the time: “Max is wonderful. You’ll see, posterity will consider him as one of the greatest actors of our time.”

We really only became friends in the early 1980s, when Max played the Emperor Ming in Mike Hodges’s version of Flash Gordon and was stationed at Shepperton Studios for a stint. I went down to interview him for my book on Bergman, and then one year later, I was invited to visit the shoot of Jan Troell’s The Flight of the Eagle, in which Max played the intrepid, obsessive explorer S. A. Andrée.  

The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman

1957

96 min

1.33:1

Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Godard’s Numéro deux, Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany, and most notoriously, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

The last absence was additionally frustrating in that Akerman had lived in New York in the early seventies, at the moment when structural film was at the height of its local prestige. The lessons of pre-Morrissey Warhol—the power of duration, the effect of monotony, the wonder of people simply “having,” as the Hindus say, “their being”—had only recently been absorbed. The impact of Wavelength’s overdetermined narrative structure was still fresh. Jeanne Dielman has its European (and Asian) precursors, but to me it seemed that Akerman had encountered Snow, Frampton, Gehr, et al. at an impressionable age and put a capstone on their movement.

News from Home (another brilliant assimilation of structuralist cinema, shot by Akerman during her New York stay) was one of the first movies I reviewed for the Voice (splitting the column with Stan Brakhage’s eccentric exercise in political film verité The Governor). Akerman’s film had but a single show at the old Bleecker Street; I insisted on writing it up, even though my editors complained that no one could see it, in part because I hoped that it would spur interest in Jeanne Dielman. Soon after, Akerman’s magnum opus did have its first public screening in New York, also a single show at the Bleecker Street. I reviewed that, too, comparing myself to one of Kafka’s messengers. That Akerman’s subsequent feature, Les rendez-vous d’Anna, was included in the next year’s New Directors/New Films seemed to effectively close the door on her earlier works.  

I have never seen New York look so beautifully grand as it did during my trip to Paris this New Year’s. Maybe I should explain.

It was my great fortune to be visiting the City of Light while the intensely illuminative exhibition Dans la nuit, des images was still on display. For this dazzling presentation, the interior (and thanks to one artist, exterior) of the Grand Palais exhibition hall had been transformed into a multimedia showcase. From December 18 to January 1, once the sun went down, the doors of the Palais would open to a cavernous, multilayered multiplex of sorts, in which about 140 works by some of today’s (and yesterday’s) most renowned visual artists commingled in the dark, their images projected from every possible angle onto screens hanging every which way. Thanks to the guidance of Alain Fleischer, artistic director of Le Fresnoy (the National Studio of Contemporary Arts), there was an embarrassment of avant-garde riches in this massive, free-to-the-public installation, from digital to traditional film projection, and even some interactive works. But for me, the sweetest, most thrilling surprise was being able to see William Klein’s groundbreaking 1958 short Broadway by Light, emanating boldly from an IMAX-sized screen that seemed to intimidate not just us viewers but also the works surrounding it.

Having worked so closely on last year’s Eclipse set The Delirious Fictions of William Klein, I had become intimate with a handful of the works of this important New York photographer turned expatriate filmmaker in France. In my research, I had read a lot about Broadway by Light, which was Klein’s first cinematic experimentation and which many had considered the “first pop film.” On the strength and askew beauty of his first collection of photography, Life Is Good and Good for You in New York, initially published only in Paris, up-and-coming French filmmakers Alain Resnais and Anatole Dauman helped finance this witty, abstract collage of the neon signs, overwhelming ads, and glowing marquees that make up Manhattan’s Times Square.

To my knowledge, this film has never been available in any home video format, and seeing it projected onto such a huge screen (it must have been at least fifty feet high!), I can understand why. It really needs to be seen on a big scale: the film is massive and magnificently disorienting, its sharp, shocking angles and blazing colors purposely defamiliarizing the seemingly familiar. Klein even weaves in a stunning series of shots in which Broadway’s gorgeously garish crimsons and blues are reflected in sidewalk puddles, a moody, noirish touch. In its mix of the crass and the conceptual, one can certainly see how Broadway by Light leads directly to the feverish flamboyance of his surreal fashion takedown Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? and the brash, star-spangled satire Mr. Freedom.

Intensifying this odd experience of looking at images of New York in the Grand Palais was the view from a landing erected in the center of the hall, at eye level with the screen, which made it feel more like you were floating in the image, and was near vertigo inducing.

And then the sun came up. This was, for me, the most miraculous, unexpected moment. The climax to this twelve-minute film becomes more like “Broadway by Sunlight”—as warm morning beams poke through the corners of signs and billboards, the film feels close to a requiem. There were plenty of works by other terrific artists throughout Dans la nuit, des images (including Chris Marker, Michael Snow, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nam June Païk, and Manoel de Oliveira), but none moved me more than William Klein’s first film, which made me, yes, delirious.

The Model Couple

William Klein

1977

101 min

Color

1.66:1

Mr. Freedom

William Klein

1969

92 min

Color

1.66:1

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

William Klein

1966

101 min

Black and White

1.66:1

If I had not seen The Lady Vanishes at the age of seven, I might never have become a film critic.

I was the fifth child of parents well into middle age: clearly an “accident,” as I was ten-years-plus younger than the other four. My siblings were decent enough to me, but they had their own lives to muddle through, with a father often away in the United States selling the antiques my mother shipped out to him. The two girls fought all the time, usually over clothes, the two boys bonded. I wasn’t sent to day school until I was six and seldom met other children. This background ensured that I was (a) a loner and (b) extremely precocious.

I’m not sure just when I started going to the cinema. I suspect it began as a way of keeping me occupied and out of mischief. The series of young, inexpensive maidservants hired by my mother for housework also had the task of keeping me entertained whenever there was a movie my mother considered “suitable” for me at the local theater—suitable meaning no crime or sex. But in the early years of this activity, I can’t recall a single film that had any lasting effect on me. They were not children’s films, and my grasp of their plots was very weak. I think the maids enjoyed them more than I did, but I always wanted to see them out of curiosity, struggling with the intrigue as best I could.

I recall vividly only one occasion. My father must have been in America, my mother scouring the countryside after antiques, because I was left to the mercies of my elder siblings, who decided one evening that they wanted to see a film. It was entitled Murder by an Aristocrat, and I was sworn to the deepest secrecy: Mother must never know! I had no idea what an aristocrat was. The nearest I could get was “oystercrat”: the film would be about someone dropping a large crate of oysters onto someone’s head. However, it was late at night, and I slept through most of it. I woke up briefly, though, just in time to see a person in a black hood climbing into a house through an upstairs window at night, and I was thrilled.

But The Lady Vanishes was different. For one thing, I would have seen it in the afternoon, wide awake. And its combination of very British humor (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne’s bed scene sending me into mild hysterics long before I knew anything about sexual innocence or denial) and the tension of the train held up by landslides in a foreign country, plus a mysterious nocturnal murder, had me hooked long before the lady vanished. The film was very popular, repeatedly revived, and I saw it again and again, never missing an opportunity. It is certainly among Hitchcock’s most perfect films (though not the most profound). If it has a dull or dead moment, I have still not found it. And somehow the name Hitchcock became embedded in my mind: it hadn’t occurred to me before that films had directors, and that these directors were somehow important. I trace my career back to that film, which I still love.

If there is no chapter on The Lady Vanishes in my book on Hitchcock, this is purely because it is too perfect, so transparent that there is little to say. The labyrinthine complexities of Vertigo were far away.

The Lady Vanishes

Alfred Hitchcock

1938

96 min

Black and White

1.33:1

André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s, Cahiers du cinéma, has good claim to be the most influential film magazine ever published. And yet at the same time, he has been curiously neglected. He died at the young age of forty, in 1958, just before the “structuralist turn,” and film theory, more influenced by this turn than any other discipline, more or less comprehensively rejected him in the seventies. Equally, within general French intellectual culture, he has been barely acknowledged, let alone as a major thinker.

For some time now, however, particularly in the work of Serge Daney, Bazin has been making something of a comeback, and a double conference—“Opening Bazin”—held in late November at the Université Paris Diderot and early December at Yale University, looks likely to lead to a comprehensive reevaluation of this remarkable thinker. The Yale event was extraordinary not simply for the eminence of the critics gathered, both from France and America, but for the striking fact that almost all of them had done considerable original research for the event, many in the archive of Bazin’s complete writings that Dudley Andrew has established at Yale. The picture that emerged at the conference was of a thinker whose fundamental engagement with the nature of cinema makes him an essential reference point as the cinema finds new forms, both in museums and on the Internet, while remaining the key crystallization of value in the entertainment industry. Bazin lived through two crucial moments in the history of cinema—Rossellini and neorealism, which provided him with his most important theoretical and critical examples, and the birth of the New Wave, which in the films of Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, would live out his ideas.

The 400 Blows

François Truffaut

1959

99 min

2.35:1

Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard

1960

90 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Flowers of St. Francis

Roberto Rossellini

1950

87 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Flash back to September 1968. The Swedish Film Week in Sorrento, Italy, with its alfresco suppers and its excursions to Capri and Pompeii. Ingmar Bergman was expected, and he and Liv Ullmann were assigned a luxurious villa for the duration. But Ingmar pleaded an ear infection, and Liv was left to cope with the paparazzi, as well as a screening of Shame and some formal receptions with Princess Christina of Sweden.

We had not met, but one evening I was taken to Liv’s villa by Gunnel Hessel, at that time the Scandinavian equivalent of Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons. Liv received us in a vast, somber salon that might have suited Garbo in all her solitude. She appeared ill at ease with her duties in Ingmar’s absence, although her natural charm overcame her embarrassment and uncertainty. Here was a woman clearly under the gun, reluctant to embrace celebrity.

Flash forward to the winter of 1972. I had visited the offices of Paul Kohner, a veteran Hollywood agent who represented Bergman and his actors in America. When I returned to my hotel, the phone was ringing. “Would you like to introduce Cries and Whispers at a special Academy screening for the foreign press tonight?” asked Kohner. “But I haven’t even seen the film yet,” I protested. “No problem,” purred Kohner, “you can talk about Liv.”

So I fumbled my way through the presentation, keenly aware that this was the first film Liv and Ingmar had made together since their breakup at the end of the sixties. At a dinner at Skandia afterward, a journalist approached Liv’s table and “accused” her of lesbianism. I’ll always remember Liv’s red-faced indignation: “Just because Ingrid [Thulin] and I caress each other . . . !” She was more poised, but still getting used to the brazen attitudes of Hollywood. And she was never, one felt, happy in fluff like 40 Carats and Lost Horizon. Instead, she has adored the theater, “the moment of absolute quietness—then there’s real communication between you and an audience,” she told me long ago. None can forget her greatest triumph in the United States, playing Nora to Sam Waterston’s Torvald in A Doll’s House at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.

Flash forward to December 2004. The European Film Awards in Barcelona, and a conference on the craft of acting in European cinema. Liv delivers the keynote address—a magnificent, eloquent speech that for months afterward would be cited by actors and critics alike. “In my profession as an actor,” she said, “my material is the life I am living and the life I am watching, the life I am reading about and the life I am listening to.” Finally she was at ease, gracious and forthcoming, having achieved so much as an actress, writer, and director. Her own memoirs, Changing, had matched Ingmar’s own The Magic Lantern for candor and perception. And so long as Bergman’s Persona and Scenes from a Marriage, or Troell’s The Emigrants, are screened, Liv’s stature will be unquestioned. Almost imperceptibly, she has indeed “changed” from a passionate, ingenuous girl to a mature and sagacious personality. One thing, though, has remained constant through the decades—her warmth and thoughtfulness for other people, exemplified in her work with UNICEF and the International Rescue Committee.

Happy birthday, Liv!

Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman

1978

90 min

Color

1.66:1

Cries and Whispers

Ingmar Bergman

1972

91 min

Color

1.66:1

Scenes from a Marriage

Ingmar Bergman

1973

169 min

Color

1.33:1