Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Today, most people’s knowledge of George Bernard Shaw doesn’t extend much further than his classic comedy Pygmalion. But the legendary playwright and theater critic (1856–1950) wrote more than sixty plays. In February, we at the Criterion Collection will do our part to bring some of these works back to the public consciousness with the release of the Eclipse series George Bernard Shaw on Film, featuring three adaptations of Shaw plays: Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Androcles and the Lion, all graced with the author’s superior wit.

We’re not the only ones touting Shaw these days: for the past four years, actor, playwright, and Shaw aficionado David Staller has been working tirelessly to ensure that the writer’s enormous achievements aren’t forgotten. In 2006, with his theater company, the Gingold Theatrical Group, he began Project Shaw, which consisted of monthly public readings of every Shaw play, featuring major actors and held at the Players Club on Gramercy Park South in New York. The group finally finished the series in December 2009, and is kicking off a new Shaw season this week, featuring a selection of the most requested titles (first up: 1894’s Arms and the Man). I had a conversation with Staller about Shaw’s legacy, what his work can mean to readers and viewers today, and how he used cinema to get his message to a wider audience.—Michael Koresky  

Major Barbara

Gabriel Pascal

1941

131 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Caesar and Cleopatra

Gabriel Pascal

1945

138 min

Color

1.33:1

Androcles and the Lion

Chester Erskine

1952

98 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Me and Orson Welles is the latest film from director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused). Set in late-1930s New York, it’s both a nuanced, entertaining look at Orson Welles’s early career as founder of the Mercury Theater and a charming coming-of-age comedy about a stagestruck teen (played by Zac Efron) who ends up cast in Welles’s groundbreaking production of Julius Caesar. We posed some questions to Linklater regarding this somewhat unexpected new film, about his take on the genius at its center and the amazing acting discovery who inhabited him. Me and Orson Welles is currently playing in limited release, and coming to more theaters across the United States. —Michael Koresky

What led you to make a film about Orson Welles, and specifically about his early years with the Mercury Theater?

It’s become a fairly obscure moment in his career, given the ephemeral nature of the theater and the more notorious work in radio and film that was just around the corner for him. In that way, I always referred to this as a sort of Young Mr. Welles: everyone knows what’s coming in his future, but it’s interesting to see the seeds of all the greatness, as well as the traits that might cause him some trouble in the future—it’s all there to be reflected on. He’s only twenty-two years old here, and you can feel he is pushing his own boundaries, and maybe discovering he really doesn’t have any, both artistically and personally. More than anything else, though, I saw it as a wonderful story about youthful ambition and creating art in a collaborative environment. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a film about making a film, but making a film about a theatrical production is pretty close to home.  

Slacker

Richard Linklater

1991

100 min

Color

1.33:1

The Complete Mr. Arkadin

Orson Welles

1955

105 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Wes Anderson’s surprising latest endeavor, the stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox, is out in theaters now and garnering terrific reviews. We thought we’d catch up with our friend and ask him some questions about this charming labor of love, which he answered while shuttling by train between New York and Boston to promote the film.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou incorporates animation, and others of your films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) have the texture and framing of comic strips come to life. What made you turn to all-animation now?

Well, I’ve been thinking about doing an animated movie for about ten years—since before we made The Life Aquatic or The Royal Tenenbaums, in fact. Henry Selick was the animator of the stop-motion sequences in Life Aquatic because he and I were already working on putting together Fantastic Mr. Fox. We met when I approached him about that film. Stop-motion has always had a special, sort of magical appeal for me. There is nothing else quite like it. The form itself has enormous charm. I was looking for material to do in stop-motion, sort of like the way you might want to find certain material that would allow you to work with a certain actor.  

Bottle Rocket

Wes Anderson

1996

91 min

Color

1.85:1

Almost a decade ago, Catherine Breillat, one of contemporary cinema’s great provocateurs, gave us Fat Girl (À ma soeur!), a disturbing and graphic look at the pitfalls of adolescent sexuality from the point of view of a pair of young sisters. With her latest film—which recently had its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival—Breillat has returned to the subject of little girls playing with desire: Bluebeard is a very Breillat version of the well-known (and famously violent) bedtime story, about the beastly nobleman who cuts off the heads of his many wives, as well as a film about the sexual politics of fairy tales. And though at times it is a fastidiously faithful adaptation, it has a tantalizing, even hilarious twist: a wraparound device in which two very young contemporary sisters read the gruesome story in their attic and provide commentary. We sat down with Breillat while she was in town for the festival and discussed sibling rivalry, adolescence, and fairy tales. —Michael Koresky

Like Fat Girl, Bluebeard is a film about the power dynamics between sisters, both the little girls reading the fairy tale and the sisters in the story itself. Are these taken from your own sibling relationships?

After Fat Girl, my sister was very angry with me. And that has only ended now with Bluebeard. She’s seen the film and finds it magnificent, and we’ve been reconciled. But the problems between sisters are very complex. They deal with jealousy, with love, with rivalry, and their relationships are even more difficult in the teenage years, when sexuality is just coming out. It’s more complex because one of the two always seems more desirable, more attractive, while the other sister is more in the background, more of an observer, as you see in Fat Girl. The younger sister inevitably thinks she’s more intelligent than the older sister; when I was a young girl I was convinced I was far more beautiful than my older sister, and it was only as a teenager that I realized that she was far more attractive, and that was a big disappointment.  

Fat Girl

Catherine Breillat

2001

86 min

Color

1.85:1

Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How Can It Be?, The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat) and documentary (So Far from India, India Cabaret, The Laughing Club of India), and made all over the globe (India, the United States, and Africa), these works form an impressive—if, for many, hidden—body of work. Now nearly all of them are available, as part of the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray special editions of Nair’s comic family drama Monsoon Wedding.

Nair is very busy these days: her latest feature, the Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia, premieres Friday, and her new short Kosher Vegetarian, starring Natalie Portman and Irrfan Khan, opened last week as part of the omnibus New York, I Love You. So we were thrilled to get a few moments of her time to talk about her dual creative life.—Michael Koresky

You toggle regularly between short and feature films—more, it seems, than most filmmakers of your stature. Is there something about the short-film format you find particularly appealing?

I really enjoy the challenge of telling a complicated story in very little time. It has a freewheeling aspect and yet a rigor to it. I love that. And many people I know do that for commercials and stuff, but I love to do that for a narrative. I’d rather make short films that mean something and that can be used forever than, say, a perfume commercial—which I’ve also done. So The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat [1993], for example, came out of wanting to tell something very complex but in a short period of time. I am attracted to that.  

Monsoon Wedding

Mira Nair

2001

114 min

Color

1.85:1

Our favorite Manitoban, Guy Maddin, cheerfully grim chronicler of storybook psychosexuality and charmingly modest self-mythologizer, is in Paris now for a special event. Though just fifty-three and very much still working, the filmmaker is the subject of a complete career retrospective at the Centre Pompidou titled Guy Maddin: The Magician from Winnipeg, running through November 7. Before embarking on this voyage, Maddin—whose Brand Upon the Brain!, the final installment of his cheekily titled Me Trilogy, is in the collection and who has written for us—answered some questions about the honor.—Michael Koresky

A complete career retrospective at the Centre Pompidou . . . not bad for such a young guy. How did it all come about? And you know, while you’re there, you can catch some Fellini at the Cinémathèque française—another complete retrospective. You’re in good company!

I have no idea how such things work, but it sure feels like an immense honor to be feted in this fashion. As I’ve grizzled I’ve learned not to look too closely at honors. Hairline cracks in any tribute can rupture into gaping fissures in a hurry. I remember being on a jury at a major film festival where my colleagues and I voted a prize to a film that was no one’s favorite, no one’s second favorite, nor third favorite. The movie also happened to be no one’s least, second, or third least favorite, so the title just sort of sailed through the middle without anyone noticing, and mediocrity won it all. Apparently, this is a common occurrence. Since that bizarre experience, I’ve vowed not to second-guess anything good or bad that’s been flung my way.  

Brand upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin

2006

99 min

Black and White

1.85:1

This week marks the publication of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, Chronic City, another captivating journey through mysterious New York with a host of peculiar characters (and a sci-fi twist), including a certain cinephile who finds his way into the offices of the Criterion Collection. Lethem, of course, is a film lover himself, and has worked with us in a number of capacities: as liner-note writer, interviewee, and Top 10 contributor. On the occasion of his new book—which GQ calls “stellar”—we wanted to ask him about his choice of settings, and some other things.—Liz Helfgott

We couldn’t help noticing that Chronic City opens in our old offices. How did that come about?

Well, of course it originates in my one and only real-life visit there. I’d just become acquainted with Sean Howe, the writer and editor, who at that time worked there. Sean had enlisted me to write a liner note for the 1946 The Killers—the Robert Siodmak/Burt Lancaster version—in a box set with the 1964 Don Siegel/Lee Marvin version, for which Geoffrey O’Brien wrote the notes. This completely thrilling assignment became an excuse for me to visit what I imagined as a great sanctum—remember, for longtime freelancers like me, Manhattan offices are mysterious places. And Criterion didn’t disappoint. I was ushered through and introduced to a great number of people whose names didn’t stick at the time but who have become friends subsequently, like Johanna and Issa and Peter, and got a glimpse of all sorts of fascinating piles of prospective material—a VHS tape of The T.A.M.I. Show!—and briefly watched someone digitally cleaning up I Am Curious—Yellow, laboriously erasing blots and glitches from the bodies of naked Swedish hippies, frame by frame.  

Agnès Varda’s 1962 New Wave masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 has gotten a dramatic reinterpretation from Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, stage directors and founders of New York’s Big Dance Theater. Comme Toujours Here I Stand—which premiered in April in Lyon and opens tonight at New York’s Kitchen theater—takes Varda’s own experiment, a real-time story of a young model-singer who wanders Paris while waiting for the results of a biopsy, and turns it into a multimedia confrontation with the cinema, combining drama, dance, video, and rapidly moving walls and sets to reproduce the unique properties of film. Parson and Lazar often work with translation from other media—Japanese novels, Kaspar Hauser’s diaries, Nixon’s Oval Office tapes. Here, they gave themselves the added challenge of starting with the screenplay and not watching the film before they set out to mount the production (with Varda’s blessing), so that they would have to grapple with how to convey purely cinematic devices like close-ups and jump cuts. As she was getting ready for the opening night, Parson (also Big Dance Theater’s choreographer) spoke with us about the project. —Michael Koresky

So how did you come to choose Cléo from 5 to 7, a film you hadn’t seen?

We had commissions from two French institutions, just by some weird chance [New York’s French Institute/Alliance Française and Les Subsistances in Lyon], and so we thought, Let’s do something French. We considered using French music or adapting a French novella (we had done that once with Flaubert), but for us probably the most exciting thing about French culture was French film, and especially the French New Wave. So I read a lot of screenplays from that period. I was like Zero Mostel in The Producers; I just read script after script. All those I kept reading had the same subject matter and I just wasn’t interested: I thought, No, no, I can’t do a piece about a young woman coming of age sexually! And then I read Cléo. I loved the intimacy of it. The way she uses real time and breaks things up into timed segments really spoke to the choreographer in me. I decided not to see the movie because I knew from the French New Wave films I had seen how incredibly powerful the visual element is, and I thought I would be vacuumed up by it, and there would be no room for me or my imagination.  

Cléo from 5 to 7

Agnès Varda

1962

89 min

1.66:1