Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

I have been going to press screenings at the Cannes Film Festival for more than twenty-five years, but only twice have I been absolutely sure—blindingly, heart-racingly certain—that I have just seen the future winner of the Palme d’Or. Cannes is a distorting lens that can give an undeserved boost to an ambitious but flawed film, just as it can smother a smaller or more conservative one. But on those occasions, there was no room for doubt; it was like falling in love.

My first such love affair was with Paris, Texas, shown in 1984 (the second was with Emir Kusturica’s Underground, a decade later). The festival jury, which that year included the veteran cinematographer Henri Alekan, who would go on to shoot Wings of Desire for Wim Wenders, duly awarded it the Palme d’Or; it even garnered the affection of a far more persnickety group, winning the International Critics Prize. The awards were all the more surprising in that the film is an unabashed love letter to America, coming halfway through the Reagan era, when Europe in general, and filmmakers in particular, were anything but pro-American. Of course, one might argue that Paris, Texas is in love with a certain idea of America. But in truth, Wenders would probably not have concerned himself with that distinction: the personal always trumps the political in his films.  

Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders

1984

147 min

Color

1.78:1

"All roads lead to Rome Open City,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, playing on the old Italian proverb—and meaning, we can assume, that when thinking about modern cinema, one always has to come to terms with Roberto Rossellini’s seminal film. Indeed, Rome Open City is not just a milestone in the history of Italian cinema but possibly, with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, one of the most influential and symbolic films of its age, a movie about “reality” that has left a trace on every film movement since. It is also the story of a fascinating and atypical adventure in filmmaking, a masterpiece malgré soi, a unique piece of cinema that was the result, in a way, of serendipity.

It all happened in Rome, soon after the liberation of the city by the Americans in 1944, and following the gentle decree by Admiral Ellery W. Stone, heading a commission created to decide the future of the Italian film industry, that since “the so-called Italian cinema was invented by the fascists,” it had to be suppressed. Full stop. Cinecittà, the seat of the best Italian production before the war, was turned into a centro di sfollamento, a homeless camp. The Italian cinema became a desert. It had to begin anew somewhere else. And it did.  

Rome Open City

Roberto Rossellini

1945

100 min

Black and White

1.37:1

Roberto Rossellini’s second postwar film was released in the United States as Paisan, and one can understand why the distributors wanted to use a title familiar to many Americans as meaning “friend” or “countryman” for a work that is at root a reflection on the virtues of fraternity. The Italian title was Paisà, which in Neapolitan dialect can also be an affectionate term for a person from the same village. Rossellini’s collection of stories sketches an image of a whole country—Italy in the year of its liberation from German occupation and fascism—by evoking six very specific local worlds. The individual dramatic episodes trace the path of the liberation of Italy from south to north, but other than that find no immediate unity of tone or theme. The terrible tragedy of the individual murder of the young girl Carmela in the first episode, set in Sicily, and the wholesale massacre of partisans in the final episode, in the Po Valley, might seem to sit uneasily with the comedy of the second episode, in which a drunk military policeman has his shoes stolen by a street urchin in Naples, or with the fifth episode, in which a Franciscan monastery in the north of Italy is shaken to its foundations when it finds itself entertaining a Protestant and a Jew. But Rossellini always has one subject: Italy in the brutal year of 1943–44 and the clash of cultures and languages as the invading Allied armies fight their way up the peninsula.

Paisan was very different in its funding from Rossellini’s first postwar film, Rome Open City, which had been shot on a shoestring. The success of Rome Open City meant that Rossellini could envisage a project with a budget ten times bigger and with American money involved. The result, for the great French critic André Bazin, was for European cinema what Citizen Kane was for Hollywood: an extraordinary advance in the ability of film to capture reality. Welles’s innovation, for Bazin, was formal and technological. He used the new lenses available at the end of the thirties to produce a depth of field that left the spectator free to pick out significance in a more complex image. The complexity of Rossellini’s image and its greater grasp of reality, according to Bazin, was achieved by a strange amalgam of documentary technique and fiction. This is most noticeable in the use of nonprofessional actors; the streets of the towns and cities in Paisan are so vivid because the figures inhabiting them are not actors but the men, women, and children living through the dreadful realities of postwar Italy, including many American GIs. Perhaps the most striking of these performances is in the very first episode. Carmela, who offers to guide the American soldiers because she wants to find her father and brother, was played by an untrained fifteen-year-old, and much of the pathos of this opening section comes from her portrayal.  

Paisan

Roberto Rossellini

1946

120 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative—a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and nameless victims. But this was, of course, a conviction that carried plenty of aesthetic and intellectual, as well as spiritual, consequences, including some that we’re still mulling over today.

Deliberately or not, Germany Year Zero concludes Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy by posing a kind of philosophical conundrum, a fact already signaled by its title, which he borrowed, with permission, from a book by French sociologist Edgar Morin. It was a title that stumped even Joseph Burstyn and Arthur Mayer, the American producers of Rome Open City and Paisan, and the fact that Rossellini, characteristically trusting his instincts, refused to say what he meant by it eventually encouraged them to back out of the project, which was largely financed by the French government. But even when Rossellini later tried to formulate what drove him to make the film—in its dedication to the memory of his son Romano (who died in 1946, at the age of nine, after emergency surgery for an inflamed appendix), or in a statement prefacing its international versions—he tended to contradict himself.

“This movie, filmed in Berlin in the summer of 1947,” he declared in that statement, is “an objective and faithful portrait,” not “an accusation or even a defense of the German people.” Yet objectivity was clearly (and thankfully) the last thing Rossellini had in mind. Even the doom-ridden modernist score by his brother Renzo participates in the sense of unfolding disbelief and horror by suggesting some of the mood of science fiction. And the directive later in the preface to care about these Germans rather than call for any further retribution is actually more consistent with Rossellini’s aims than any “objective assessment” could be. This was a brave and principled stance for him to take at the time, and it still places Germany Year Zero well in advance of most films about war made even today.  

Germany Year Zero

Roberto Rossellini

1948

71 min

Black and White

1.33:1

A BELGIAN IN NEW YORK

It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in New York as by her own past, these early films—including her masterwork, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)—show her unique penchant for combining daring formal experimentation with deeply personal rumination; her austere portraits of dislocation and isolation reflect not only her aesthetic outlook but also her Jewishness, sexuality, and Belgian identity. They would make her, as the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman later wrote, “arguably the most important European filmmaker of her generation.”

Though New York, where she moved in 1971, at the age of twenty, provided the fertile creative ground out of which her style would grow, Akerman had begun experimenting with film back home in Brussels. Enamored of the cinema since seeing Godard’s Pierrot le fou at age fifteen (“I decided to make movies the same night,” she has said), she attended and then dropped out of film school, after which she raised the money for and made, at only eighteen, her first film, the 35 mm short Saute ma ville (1968). Set in a tight kitchen space, this debut in some ways anticipates Jeanne Dielman, though in terms of style and content, it’s actually the inverse of that highly structured look at domestic routine: here, an unbounded camera captures the erratic movements of a young woman, played by Akerman, as she impulsively destroys her kitchen and herself. There’s a French New Wave playfulness to Saute ma ville’s anarchy; the director later called it her Chaplin film.  

La chambre

Chantal Akerman

1972

11 min

Color

1.33:1

Hotel Monterey

Chantal Akerman

1972

62 min

Color

1.33:1

Je tu il elle

Chantal Akerman

1975

86 min

Black and White

1.33:1

News from Home

Chantal Akerman

1976

85 min

Color

1.33:1

Les rendez-vous d'Anna

Chantal Akerman

1978

127 min

Color

1.66:1

Steven Soderbergh’s Che depicts the two military campaigns that defined the rise and fall of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, who became in death a global icon of militant leftism—and of inchoate adolescent rebellion. As the latter, he has been, ironically, a capitalist windfall—the face that launched a trillion posters and T-shirts. Soderbergh’s movie is neither a traditional biopic nor an analysis of Che as the brand that never goes out of style. Rather, it is a detailed representation of guerrilla warfare, shot in a manner that is as close to guerrilla filmmaking as a roughly $60 million production can get. While $60 million may seem like a great deal of money, it’s chump change compared with the average price of studio action pictures, especially since Che is actually two feature-length films, shot on location with thirty-nine days allotted for each, and both with large casts of characters.

As protean as he is prolific, Soderbergh has applied his astonishing directorial intelligence and energy to almost every genre of filmmaking, reenvisioning them from a contemporary perspective and through the use of cutting-edge moving-image technologies. With Che, he adds the war movie to his filmography, and an epic one at that: in length, scale, and narrative breadth, it’s simply a bigger film than any other Soderbergh has put his hand to. But Che is also built like a procedural, from microscopic details of the daily life of a band of guerrillas taking on the official armies of two countries. This kind of internal contradiction is the structuring principle underlying all of Soderbergh’s films—not in a Marxist sense but in a formal or aesthetic one. And it is even more evident in the relationship between films he conceived in close proximity to each other. The sexy, extroverted Out of Sight (1998) and the melancholy, introspective The Limey (1999), for example, are more dazzling as a pop art romantic coupling than either is singly, and the two social-issue blockbusters Erin Brockovich and Traffic, both Oscar winners in 2000, are a similar pair of opposites, the former focused on a single heroic character, the latter on three inter­woven narratives. In the decade when Soderbergh was directing the glossy blockbuster caper movies Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), he was also making a series of fast-and-dirty, microbudgeted indie flicks: Full Frontal (2002), Bubble (2005), and The Girlfriend Experience (2009).  

Che

Steven Soderbergh

2008

261 min

Color & Black and White

In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of actors, and his interest tends to fan out over many characters, whose mixed strengths and flaws jolt the viewer out of easy identification with any of them, compelling instead a more complex, deferred, time-capsule-release sympathy. This environmental, novelistically long approach, with its digressive and converging plotlines, is admirably suited to the family romance, a specialty of Desplechin’s, with A Christmas Tale his greatest example.

His fascination with the bonds of family distinguishes Desplechin and many French filmmakers of his generation from their New Wave predecessors. That famous movement’s auteurs disdained Freudian psychology (at least at first) and rarely embedded their protagonists in familial contexts; think of Godard, whose characters spring to life in an existential present, with no hint of having had parents, much less grandparents. The important generation of French directors that followed, including Philippe Garrel, Maurice Pialat, Jacques Doillon, Catherine Breillat, Olivier Assayas, and Desplechin (born in 1960, the same year the New Wave crested internationally), may be heavily identified with the formal freedom and nonstudio look of that earlier era, but they’ve also been much more inclined to pursue parent-child connections, perhaps because they are offspring, so to speak, of the groundbreaking New Wave. For example, Garrel casts his own father and son in his movies; in his lovely Summer Hours, Assayas traces the fortunes of a family at the point of dispersal; and Desplechin focuses relentlessly on family dynamics, from his first film, La vie des morts, up through The Sentinel, My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument (where the collegial circle becomes a second, substitute family), Esther Kahn, Kings and Queen, and now A Christmas Tale.  

A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin

2008

152 min

Color

2.35:1

For twenty years, the remains of television’s self-proclaimed golden age lay dormant in the vaults of the commercial networks. I remember traveling, as a young researcher for NBC, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the old shows of the fifties were stored, and seeing canisters labeled “Marty” and “Patterns” collecting dust. Until the late seventies, there was no economic or technological imperative to revive this history of the earliest era of television, when live, one-time-only events were the norm and network programs on film, with continuing characters, pioneered by I Love Lucy and Dragnet, were still novelties. Influential books like Erik Barnouw’s The Image Empire delineated the “short, surprising, brilliant” epoch of live television drama and comedy, but no one had the ability to review the legacy. Most of the golden programs had been seen once and then locked in the memory of the original television audience.

But in the late seventies, this began to change. The industry was being transformed by the cable and videocassette revolutions, and the new markets needed distinct programming. Executives discovered the warehoused kinescopes of the live programs, films shot off the monitor that earlier had not been considered good enough for national rebroadcast. Now, though, the technology existed to rejuvenate the video and audio of the kinescopes, and these programs suddenly became valuable to cable programmers and VHS distributors. The so-called lost Honeymooners episodes of the early fifties became one of Showtime’s shining jewels of the eighties. At the same time, baby boomers were discovering that television defined their generation as much as music. Shows such as Saturday Night Live satirically re-created those black-and-white days, emphasizing TV’s role in shaping the countercultural sensibility.  

The Golden Age of Television

478 min

Black and White

1.33:1

“The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump,” writes Naples native and best-selling Italian muckraker Roberto Saviano somewhere near the conclusion of his extraordinary 2006 “nonfiction novel” Gomorrah, a seethingly cogent and literarily constructed indictment of the Camorra, Italy’s largest organized crime syndicate. Far older and much more widespread than the country’s other Mafia networks, the Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta, the Naples-based Camorra—or “the system,” as it is often simply referred to—is the machine that drives most of Italy’s (and, increasingly, the world’s) organized crime, and much of the country’s illicit and licit economies. Drugs, high-fashion textiles, weapons, construction, shipping, and waste management “solutions”—all these and more fall under the Camorra’s voracious and remorseless purview, but for Saviano, who has spent years studying and explicating the organization’s relentlessly lethal economic turbine, it is only by pawing through the contaminated landfills and human detritus the system leaves in its wake that one can truly come to grips with the devastation inherent in its design. For the Camorra, Saviano mordantly suggests, the dump is like a garden: a kind of upside-down Eden, profitably sown with poisoned industrial sludge, watered with the sweat and blood of those who work and struggle to survive within it, and fertilized with the bodies of anyone who might foolishly stand in its way.

Saviano’s Gomorrah quickly became a runaway hit in Italy (with more than a million copies sold domestically, and translated into more than thirty-three languages) and made headlines around the world. But for the author, the price of success has been high: since October of 2006, Saviano has been obliged to live under police protection, even as his neojournalistic masterpiece has gone on to become one of the most highly acclaimed and enthusiastically received Italian films in recent times. For their cinematic adaptation, director Matteo Garrone and a small garrison of screenwriters distilled Saviano’s fantastically digressive and often brilliantly nonlinear rhizomatic sprawl into five tersely told narrative threads, touching on every tentacle of the Camorra’s slimy socioeconomic reach: from the moral and material strains suffered by the haute couture master tailor Pasquale, who risks his life for a few fleeting moments of hard-won professional respect, and the automatic-weapon-powered rites of passage undertaken by the puny Ciro and Marco, a pair of doomed Scarface wannabes, to the hapless vulnerability of the sunken-eyed bagman Don Ciro, the corrupting of the androgynous, prepubescent camorrista-in-waiting Totò, and finally, the central antagonism between Italian box-office star Toni Servillo’s toxic waste management specialist, the dapper, despicable Franco, and his young protégé, Roberto, the film’s moral conscience and a stand-in for Saviano. Garrone weaves these stories together in a series of artfully designed and almost inevitably brutal set pieces, cannily encasing them in the sounds of Naples’s propulsively danceable, neomelodic music. The result is a blisteringly modern tale of organized tyranny and disorganized human chaos, in which each of the story’s strands accrues the timelessness and ineluctable gravity of a passion play or parable. And yet this is no biblical Gomorrah: with no God in sight to punish the wicked, Garrone, like Saviano, sees all too well the ways that the wicked of southern Italy’s Campania region have developed instead a system for annihilating themselves, one freshly rotting corpse and chemically contaminated county at a time.  

Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone

2008

137 min

Color

2.35:1

“Well, this isn’t exactly a team sport,” assistant coach Mayo quips sarcastically to star skier Johnny Creech after overhearing him complain about renegade team member David Chappellet. It has been argued for quite a few decades now—and to the point of tedium—whether filmmaking is a team sport or, in the end, essentially an individual event. But in the case of Downhill Racer, one of the best of the many adventurous, probing, and bracing films Hollywood made (sometimes in spite of itself) from roughly 1967 to 1975, it was the fortuitous combination of contributions by three singular talents—actor (and uncredited producer) Robert Redford, director Michael Ritchie, and writer James Salter—that shaped the picture’s flinty personality, questioning nature, and striking physicality.

Downhill Racer is the story of a determined loner from Colorado who, having earned a spot on the American ski team upon the injury of another athlete, single-mindedly pursues the goal of winning, with a total disregard for protocols and personal niceties. David Chappellet is a heel, a good-looking backwoods hick who hides his ignorance and social unease with a defiant impenetrability. In real life, he’d just be a prick; in the film, he joins the plentiful ranks of antiheroes who helped define American movies of the era. Even forty years ago, Chappellet seemed like an icy, recalcitrant character, and his clamped-down, emotionally inaccessible nature no doubt played a part in the film’s commercial failure. But his stubborn antiauthoritarianism was standard-issue equipment at the time—think Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Dustin Hoffman in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Hopper’s Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H—so while his attitudes were purely selfish rather than intellectually worked out, his instinct to buck the system and go his own way did not then seem as extreme as it does today.  

Downhill Racer

Michael Ritchie

1969

101 min

Color

1.78:1