Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Of all the great places I get to go for transfer work, London is probably my favorite. First off, everyone speaks English, and there’s an abundance of great Indian food. But there’s also the excitement that when the workday ends, you end up at the pub. I truly believe that this is how most of the English get through the workday. Another nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to get to London from New York—just a little longer than a flight to L.A. And speaking of the flight, I get to fly on Virgin Atlantic, which has the best film selection, so the flight whizzes by. I finally got to see Control and Waitress, two movies I never got around to seeing in the theater.

The main reason I most recently went to London was for The Thief of Bagdad. This has been a really involved title for a lot of us. The film has been out on DVD before, so Karen, Maria, Heather, and myself spent a long time comparing existing versions to see what we could improve. Thief is in glorious Technicolor and was one of the first films to use multiple special effects, such as blue screen. It’s beloved by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas, just to name a few. As a matter of fact, Karen is working on some great extras for the DVD, including a commentary with Scorsese and Coppola, and a piece on the special effects with Craig Baron (Matte World Digital), Dennis Muren (Industrial Light & Magic), and legendary filmmaker Ray Harryhausen.  

When it comes to world cinema, Jonathan Rosenbaum has tartly observed, many American critics are strict isolationists. At least for national film industries judged too exotic or marginal, a rule of “one director per country” seems to apply. By this shorthand, Andrei Tarkovsky was the only Soviet worth cultivating in the post-Eisenstein era, while Satyajit Ray’s chaste humanism supplied an alibi for blanket ignorance of Bollywood. At present, Pedro Almodóvar conveniently deputizes for Spain, so forget Víctor Erice or Julio Medem. Such lazy tokenism perhaps goes some way toward explaining the eclipse of Alf Sjöberg—lauded as the chief agent and motor force of a revived Swedish cinema in the 1940s and ’50s, yet now barely earning a footnote in movie history. As late as 1970, Peter Cowie declared Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie as inaugurating “a new cinematic language.” If so, it has become a dead tongue. According to the principle that these fjords aren’t big enough for the both of us, the elder genius was overshadowed and finally ousted by a young pretender. His name was Ingmar Bergman.

Born in 1903, Sjöberg caught the tail end of a golden age. From the early teens to the mid-1920s, Swedish film stunned audiences everywhere with the majestic beauty of its landscapes and the delicate realism of its acting. For a brief spell, masterpieces like Victor Sjöström’s The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) and Mauritz Stiller’s Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919) offered a pristine, vital alternative to the already congealed artifice of silent Hollywood. Recognizing the threat, the imperialist enemy snapped up the competition. Sjöström and Stiller (along with his protégée Greta Garbo) were inveigled by fat contracts at MGM, leaving the native studios broken-backed and almost literally directionless. Having trained at that great chrysalis for celluloid talent, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sjöberg caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick (who sustained the piratical tradition by plundering its ingenue star, one Ingrid Bergman).  

Miss Julie

Alf Sjöberg

1951

90 min

Black and White

1.33:1

For some writers, persona threatens to overshadow achievement. Such is the case with August Strindberg (1849–1912), best known outside of his native Sweden for his alleged misogyny and tumultuous family life. Married thrice and divorced from all of his wives at a time in Western culture when such marital fluctuation was rare, Strindberg undoubtedly used his own dramatic life as a sourcebook. In 1886 he claimed that a writer’s task was to be a social reporter and documentary analyst, and argued that the one document a person could use as an authority was his own life. To set an example, he began to write, at age thirty-seven, his multivolume autobiographical story The Son of a Servant (1886–1912). Strindberg was, however, first and foremost a creative writer, and even in his autobiography he often favored dramatic and artistic expediency above the literal rendering of his social and psychological background. That is, he could both reveal himself shamelessly in his works and, when it was artistically opportune to do so, disguise his own reality. Writing was no doubt an intense and probably therapeutic way for him to tackle personal conflicts, but it was also a task that demanded an artist’s commitment and a strict daily routine. Therefore he could state in The Son of a Servant: “Much is arranged . . . but I have tried to be honest.”

Strindberg had a fiery temperament that made him write at great speed—a play took him an average of six weeks to finish. Such productivity enabled him to leave behind some seventy volumes of plays, novels, short stories, poetry, essays, scientific speculations, and letters. But for most people, especially outside of Sweden, Strindberg’s writing for the stage takes precedence in his total oeuvre, both in size and literary impact, for he published a number of remarkable plays in every conceivable genre: tragedies, comedies, lyrical dramas, history and pilgrimage works, and his late “chamber plays.” Among these, two major categories of dramatic writing stand out: his naturalistic plays from the 1880s and his dream plays or symbolist dramas from around 1900 and on. Foremost among his naturalistic plays are The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1888). At their conception, Strindberg lived abroad in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Always impressionable to new literary trends and ideas, he had explored the tenets outlined in Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and the focus is confined to three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancée, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the proletarian upstart Jean will live on, but Julie, the last member of a degenerate aristocratic family, will succumb.  

Miss Julie

Alf Sjöberg

1951

90 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Midway through David Storey’s novel This Sporting Life, published in 1960, the widow Mrs. Hammond tells the hero that her relationship with him is making her feel “dirty.” “I couldn’t think why she should say all this,” he muses, “and the shortest way of stopping it I found was to hit her.”

Lindsay Anderson’s film of the novel replicates that moment and typifies its tone and theme. This Sporting Life (1963) is a clenched fist of a movie. Its hero, Frank Machin (Richard Harris), is a professional Rugby League player who instinctively channels feeling through physical aggression. Early in the film, when he is still working as a coal miner, he provokes a fight in a dance hall simply, it seems, out of envy. In his trial game for the club, he deliberately injures a player on his own side when he feels that teammate is affecting his performance. His first love scene with Mrs. Hammond (Rachel Roberts) is more like rape than romance, presaging a relationship that develops into a tormented struggle, she still in mourning over the death of her husband, he brutally—and in the end, fatally—trying to pull her out of her shell of coldness and withdrawal.  

This Sporting Life

Lindsay Anderson

1963

134 min

Black and White

1.66:1

In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s claim that she had seen virtually no other films before making it (after racking her brain, she could come up with only Citizen Kane). Whether Varda’s assertion was true or the whim of an artist who does not wish to acknowledge any influence, La Pointe Courte is a stunningly beautiful and accomplished first film. It has also, deservedly, achieved a cult status in film history as, in the words of historian Georges Sadoul, “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”

Thanks to historians of that movement, and especially to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’s study of Varda in her book To Desire Differently, Varda’s role as a pioneer—if not the “mother” or “grandmother”—of the new wave is now better known, and not just for the fact that she was the only woman director in it. The production of La Pointe Courte by Varda’s own tiny company, Ciné-Tamaris, completely outside the film industry and on a budget a tenth the size of that of the average French film (the money came mostly from a family inheritance and loans from friends; she had no professional training and would not get an official French film industry membership card until much later), Varda’s authorial control over both scriptwriting and directing, the exclusive use of location shooting, the mixing of professional and nonprofessional actors—all of this was groundbreaking in early 1950s France. For these reasons and others, La Pointe Courte was a precursor of the films that Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard would start making five years later, and of those of Alain Resnais, who worked as editor on Varda’s film and whose generosity in that capacity and as a mentor she has gratefully acknowledged. Seeing La Pointe Courte again in 2007, after Varda’s extraordinary documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), also confirms how prophetic this first feature was, heralding—beyond the new wave—some of the most exciting developments in French postwar cinema, as well as in Varda’s own career. She would go on to make numerous documentaries and feature films, including the groundbreaking Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1961 and Vagabond in 1985.  

La Pointe Courte

Agnès Varda

1956

80 min

Black and White

1.33:1

There have been many films, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) to Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), devoted to the challenge of capturing or reconstituting the experience of “real time.” Agnès Varda’s 1961 Cléo from 5 to 7—an account of an hour and a half in the life of a normally carefree young woman who is gravely awaiting a medical diagnosis—is one of them, but it dispenses with the single-camera-take concept that Hitchcock cleverly faked (and that Sokurov would heroically maintain); it is as jazzily photographed and busily edited as any more conventional narrative film. Rather, Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction. Unlike traditional story films, which skip everywhere in both time and space, Varda gives us a gauntlet: every second piling up, every step traced out. And she picked the best possible site for this gauntlet walk: the Left Bank of Paris is preserved for us in all its early sixties vibrancy and diversity. Indeed, Varda once described the film as “the portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris.”

It is a stunningly scrupulous, exact film, in space as well as in time—so much so that a viewer can draw a precise map of Cléo’s path and consider touristically re-creating her journey, down to the last second, in the Left Bank as it exists today. (Varda’s only cheat, in fact, is to have titled it Cléo from 5 to 7, rather than from 5:00 to 6:30.) But if the film were only a virtuosic formal exercise, or a cleverly choreographed stroll through a city, it would probably not have endured as the remarkable, affecting testament that it is. At least since her short L’opéra Mouffe (1958), Varda has devoted a large part of her art to conveying not just what the physical world looks and sounds like but how it feels, how we process it internally in our mind, body, and heart. That internal feeling then informs her presentation of the material world, subtly shaping it into something more than real––a very modern style of expressionism. And since L’opéra Mouffe is a mosaic of Parisian impressions filtered through the perception of a pregnant woman, Varda is declaring, early in her career, that gender matters in art and cinema, that men and women are likely to see and feel the same things very differently—a theme that follows through to her later films Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000), as well as to her installation Some Widows of Noirmoutier (2006).  

Cléo from 5 to 7

Agnès Varda

1962

89 min

1.66:1

Few films have inspired as many wildly differing interpretations in the decades since their release as Agnès Varda’s 1964 Le bonheur (Happiness). Is it a pastoral? A social satire? A slap-down of de Gaulle–style family values? A lyrical evocation of open marriage? Is the central character a good husband who knows how to enjoy life, a psychopath, a cad, or an unreal cardboard construction? Are the implications of the film’s title ironic or sincere? And, indeed, what is happiness?

Set in a tiny suburb near but oh so far from Paris, Le bonheur depicts the events leading up to the collapse of a seemingly perfect marriage and the aftermath of this collapse. François, his wife, Thérèse, and their two toddlers enjoy a blissful life. Tall, dark, and handsome François works in his uncle’s carpentry shop. Pretty, buxom, blonde Thérèse is a homemaker who supplements the family’s income by doing a bit of dressmaking. They obviously adore their children, who never whine, almost never cry, and have the peculiar gift of falling instantly asleep anytime their parents want to make love—which is often. Varda cast the members of an actual family—French TV star Jean-Claude Drouot, his wife, Claire Drouot, and their children, Sandrine and Olivier—in these roles, and one wonders what they made of the totally conflict-free daily lives of their screen characters.  

Le bonheur

Agnès Varda

1965

80 min

Color

1.66:1

Funny how certain films come back to haunt you. I was a student in late 1980s London when I first saw Sans toit ni loi, and I remember liking everything about it. The terse English title Vagabond. The poster image of Sandrine Bonnaire with windswept witch’s hair and the horizon in her eyes. The film’s cold glaucous light, the colors of icy skies and frozen earth. The evocative sense of inhabiting places I wasn’t used to seeing in films: a run-down château, a Tunisian laborer’s kitchen, and the out-of-season Languedoc landscape. I liked the challenge of a film whose central character we first encounter frozen to death in a ditch and who is brought back to life only to be returned irrevocably to extinction. But mostly I liked the way the film does to its spectators what Mona the vagabond does to those she encounters on her lonely road, leaving us troubled, intrigued, and repulsed in equal measure. Seeing the film made me want to write about it, in order to try to understand how it had worked on me. Instead, I turned in a term paper that was overly influenced by the theoretical orthodoxies of the time and the mangled locutions that accompanied them. But even that didn’t put me off the film. All these years later, I still admire the way Varda leaves things out. The way her camera tarries beside Mona as she trudges along but then abandons her in a tracking shot that will come to rest on a piece of agricultural machinery or a skeletal tree. The way Varda recruits the face-on testimonies of those who have encountered Mona. And the way Mona remains as much a mystery to them as she does to us.

Vagabond was a turning point in a difficult phase of Varda’s career, her first feature-length fiction film in almost ten years, since One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Between 1979 and 1981, Varda had tried unsuccessfully to set up a picture in Los Angeles and had made seven documentary and essay films of various lengths (two in the United States, the rest in France), before embarking on Vagabond. The film proved to be one of her most successful works, winning the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival and a best actress César for Bonnaire; it went on to be distributed in fifteen countries. One of the films Varda made while in Los Angeles was Documenteur (1981), the title a pun on the French words for “documentary” (documentaire) and “liar” (menteur) and expressing her long-standing suspicion toward the supposed objectivity of the documentary form. In this respect, Varda shares the belief characteristic of the nouvelle vague that the distinctions made between fiction and documentary are mere generic niceties and that, cinematically speaking, things get more interesting when the boundaries are blurred and the subjective gaze of the filmmaker is asserted. Since her debut with La Pointe Courte in 1954, Varda has made only thirteen feature-length fiction films and more than twice that number of documentaries, essay films, and shorts, so it is hardly surprising that her features should be so consistently marked by a combination of documentary and fiction, Vagabond being a case in point.  

Vagabond

Agnès Varda

1985

105 min

Color

1.66:1

Certainly one of the wildest, most original, and most instinctive movie stars turned auteurs in the Hollywood annals, Cornel Wilde made procedurals of uncivilized survival, in a visual syntax that ranges from comic-strip splat to outright gut punch. Watching the films, you may certainly get the feeling, as David Thomson memorably suggested, of “watching the first films ever made,” and indeed there may be no clearer sense of pulp—from folktales to Wilde’s best films and beyond—than as an expression of how deep in our reptile brains the fears, hatreds, and needs of being alive still lurk, unappeased by the narcotics of technology, ritual, comfort, and entertainment.

Wilde remains an unexhumed artist, a scattershot brother to delirious genre god Samuel Fuller, whose three best, though generally forgotten, films, The Naked Prey (1966), the World War II combat daydream Beach Red (1967), and the eco-sci-fi apocalypse No Blade of Grass (1970), make up an ersatz triptych of human self-hate at three evolutionary stages: primal, “civilized,” and postcivilized (it may very well have been Wilde’s point that there’s precious little difference between them). In fact, had Fuller been a little less postmod hard-boiled and a little more dog-eat-dog athletic, he might have arrived at something as pulse-panicky, as pure and cruel and infernal, as The Naked Prey. Insofar as the movie is remembered at all, it remains the best known in Wilde’s lost filmography. It also has the least English or subtitled dialogue of any Hollywood movie since Modern Times and yet was nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar. The film’s plot is as primitive as a hieroglyph: Wilde (identified only as “Man” in the credits), on a colonial-era ivory safari, gets captured by a tribe of bushmen after his fat-cat financier disgraces their expedition; when the tribesmen decide to give Wilde’s character “the Chance of the Lion” and hunt him for sport, he kills their point man and keeps on running. It may be the first entry in the “man in the wilderness” subgenre, as well as the first stripped-down American action film (prior to 1966, westerns and swashbucklers were ordinarily 80 percent talk, 20 percent combat at best). Indeed the thrust of the film is Darwinian in its brutality, from the tribal executions (including covering a safari hand in mud and then cooking him ceramic hard over a fire) to the parade of veld atrocities—it was surely the first film in which we saw a tribesman casually step out of the carcass of a butchered elephant with an armful of innards and hang them over the campfire to dry. Here is the dry-eyed corrective to the darkest-Africa safari romance, the spear-fight-and-starvation bones beneath the chest-pounding adventure saga.  

The Naked Prey

Cornel Wilde

1966

96 min

Color

2.35:1

As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker. And this was hardly a coincidence: though he had made a name for himself as a promising popular craftsman at Toho Studios during the war, Kurosawa later said he didn’t feel he could express himself as an artist until the censorship restrictions of that era had been lifted and he could take the new Japan as his subject. Devastated by the human and material losses of the war and facing widespread homelessness and economic collapse, the now Allied-occupied Japan became the canvas on which this trained painter would make his mark as a filmmaker.

For Kurosawa, social commitment and visual artistry would always go hand in hand, although this particular phase of his career, from right after the war until the mid-fifties, would see him tackling more directly the pressing issues of contemporary Japanese life than ever again. In between 1946’s No Regrets for Our Youth and 1955’s I Live in Fear, Kurosawa would become an international sensation, all the while creating a body of work that dealt, either straight-forwardly or through metaphor, with the struggles of his fellow citizens.  

I Live in Fear

Akira Kurosawa

1955

103 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa

1951

166 min

Black and White

1.33:1

No Regrets for Our Youth

Akira Kurosawa

1946

110 min

Black and White

1.33:1

One Wonderful Sunday

Akira Kurosawa

1947

109 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Scandal

Akira Kurosawa

1950

105 min

Black and White

1.33:1