Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

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.  

Last fall the Criterion Collection and Janus Films joined forces to acquire a first-run film for theatrical distribution—a rare move for two companies best known for handling the classics of cinema history. Revanche, both an existential thriller and a quiet, character-driven rumination on fate and grief, is the ninth feature from Austrian director Götz Spielmann and the first theatrical release of a new film from Janus in decades. With its Academy Award nomination yesterday for Best Foreign Language Film, Revanche joins a long lineage of Janus first-run releases that have received attention from the Academy (from nominees Dodes’ka-den and The Horse’s Mouth to winners Through a Glass Darkly and The Virgin Spring).

“This all came together very organically,” Peter Becker, Criterion’s president, says. “Key members of the Criterion staff saw the film at Telluride, and they were really bowled over. Götz Spielmann is the real deal. He’s a completely commanding filmmaker with a powerful visual sense and an impeccable sense of timing. He is meticulous, patient, and deeply humane, but he is also full of surprises. He can wring suspense out of the simplest gestures, and the film takes some remarkable turns along the way.”

Though the film has all the ingredients of a classic crime flick, Spielmann’s real interest lies deeper than the caper put in motion by Alex (Johannes Krisch, in a stunning screen debut) and his prostitute girlfriend. “That’s the surface,” Spielmann says. “Deeper down, I hope, the film tells us about a kind of stillness behind things. It’s difficult to express that in words, because it refers to a realization, knowledge, or experience which begins beyond conscious thought and language.”

You’ll be hearing a lot more about Revanche, which Film Comment describes as “a potent, sympathetically observed tragedy” and AFI Fest on website called “the first Buddhist thriller,” when it comes to theaters this spring. Until then, check out the film’s official website, where you can find the trailer as well as more critics’ quotes, comments from the director, and info about prizes it has won at festivals around the world.

It’s a clichéd truism that moviemaking is a collaborative art. Of course it is, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of directors working time and again with the same crew members, trusted writers, cameramen, production designers, editors, even costume designers, to prove it. We all know about the collaborative relationship between Fellini and Nino Rota, between Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. But what interests us the most is the collaboration between a director and a star. The examples are legion: Griffith and Lillian Gish; John Ford and John Wayne; Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune; Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman; Hitchcock and Cary Grant, and also James Stewart; von Sternberg and Dietrich; Antonioni and Monica Vitti; Ingmar Bergman and, it seems, every actor in Sweden (Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Harriet Andersson, among others); Godard and Anna Karina; Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Make up your own list. It’s a good parlor game for movie mavens to play on rainy afternoons at the summer rental. In heyday Hollywood times, a director’s using the same actor or actors over and over again may have had more to do with studio contracts and who was available than with personal taste and affinities. For example, director Henry King made eleven films with Tyrone Power and six films with Gregory Peck. King and both actors were under long-term contract to 20th Century Fox, and there weren’t that many top male stars to choose from. Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn made twelve movies together at Warner Bros. Obviously, they must have enjoyed working together, but it may have been more a marriage of convenience than of affinity.

One of the most important Hollywood director-actor partnerships was between Douglas Sirk (né Detlef Sierck in Hamburg) and Rock Hudson—nine movies at Universal, the smallest and least important of the major studios: Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952), Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), Magnificent Obsession (1954), Captain Lightfoot (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Never Say Goodbye (1956), Written on the Wind (1956), Battle Hymn (1957), and The Tarnished Angels (1958). (Although Sirk is uncredited on Never Say Goodbye and disowned the movie, he did work on it, and there are so many similarities and points of reference in it to other Sirk movies, both thematically and emotionally, I feel it should be counted.) Maybe it was a shotgun marriage—Sirk was one of the studio’s most important directors, if not the most important, and Hudson was one of the very few stars at the company whose name meant anything at the box office. But there’s more to it than that.  

All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk

1955

89 min

1.77:1

Magnificent Obsession

Douglas Sirk

1954

108 min

Color

2.00:1

Written on the Wind

Douglas Sirk

1956

99 min

Color

1.77:1

In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon wrapped in the format of a romance novel and spruced up with a veneer of up-to-the-minute pseudoscientific parlance that made Christianity sound like the latest marvel sprung from the imagination of H. G. Wells. (The New Testament was described as “the actual textbook of a science relating to the expansion and development of the human personality.”) Magnificent Obsession was a mélange of half-baked and drastically underdramatized subplots, but it began and ended memorably. In the first chapter, a feckless young playboy got knocked on the head in a sailing accident and was saved by the use of an inhalator, while unbeknownst to him a great brain surgeon died for want of the same inhalator. In very nearly the last chapter, the same young man, having in the meantime himself become a great brain surgeon in order to atone for the earlier event, employed his skills to save the woman he loved, none other than the young widow of the doctor who died in his place.

However rudimentary Douglas’s narrative technique, his book became and remained a best seller. (It has rarely, if ever, been out of print.) His condemnation of Jazz Age frivolity arrived in perfect time for the onset of the Great Depression, and his modernized version of the message of the Gospels managed to impart the key to spiritual power—it was a matter of performing service for others while making sure that the service remained a closely held secret—and still wrap up with a satisfying fade-out kiss.

Little wonder that Universal snapped up the movie rights. When John M. Stahl’s film was released in 1935, however, Douglas was none too happy with the results. Although the team of screenwriters had retained the beginning and ending, little of what came between had made it to the screen. The writers had done an excellent job of extracting the usable plot points, while jettisoning most of the homilies. The great brain surgeon’s philosophy of acquiring spiritual power by doing good for others in secret was still there, to be sure, but it had been essentially reduced to a single expository scene, in which young Bobby Merrick (Robert Taylor) was initiated by an avuncular artist, played rather charmingly by Ralph Morgan. To fill the rest of the running time, the writers had fabricated an emotionally wrenching series of narrative twists and turns.  

Magnificent Obsession

Douglas Sirk

1954

108 min

Color

2.00:1

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

The Berlin International Film Festival this week announced the competition lineup for its upcoming fifty-ninth edition, and the list includes an intriguing array of world premieres from Criterion-family directors. Costa-Gavras, whose Missing we released last October, returns with Eden Is West, about illegal immigrants living in Europe, and the tireless Andrzej Wajda (Danton coming in March!) follows up last year’s historical Katyn with the drama Sweet Rush. Two other Criterion directors have assembled surprising casts for their latest: Stephen Frears’s Colette adaptation Cheri (The Hit will hit shelves in April) stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates, and the compellingly titled New Orleans detective story In the Electric Mist, from Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de torchon), features the even more compelling roster of Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, and Peter Sarsgaard. The Berlin Film Festival runs from February 5 to 15.

In the 1980s, with the wounds of the Vietnam War still fresh in the collective American memory, Hollywood took up the themes of empire, democracy, and war. A series of films transported Americans to distant countries and exotic locales where small and bloody conflicts of the cold war were being fought. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The focus of U.S. foreign policy had turned to a handful of Latin American countries where right-wing dictators waged war against leftist rebels. In response, filmmakers raided studio wardrobe closets for the uniforms of foreign armies and their gold-braided epaulets; and they lined up Latino actors to play banana republic strongmen and right-wing hit men.

For Salvador (1986), dozens of actors were hired to portray the tortured corpses of El Salvador’s recent history, and Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman paired up to tell a story about the revolution against Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in Under Fire (1983). These films borrowed heavily from the narrative formula mastered decades earlier by British writer Graham Greene. In novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and The Comedians, Greene tossed idealistic and cynical Westerners into the absurd theater of third world political conflict and imperial intrigue. Salvador and Under Fire offered up American journalists as protagonists, as did other political thrillers of the era, such as The Year of Living Dangerously and Missing (both 1982).

The authoritarian regimes of the era provided an ample supply of dread, and each film re-created mass arrests, massacres, and forced “disappearances” in chilling detail. The filmmakers’ indignation sprang forth from each screenplay in soliloquies of moral outrage: U.S. politicians and diplomats were taking the side of venal, tin-pot regimes in the name of cold-war victory and tainting the good name of American democracy. “I believed in America. I believed we stood for something,” declares James Woods as Richard Boyle, the antihero of Salvador, written and directed by a Vietnam veteran named Oliver Stone. “I don’t want another Vietnam.”

In 1983, filmmaker Gregory Nava, with his writing partner and producer, Anna Thomas, also brought the story of a cold-war battleground to the screen. They shared the moral outrage that marked the works of their brethren working in Hollywood, but their film was made under very different circumstances, and with a very different narrative, if not political, point of view: the independently produced El Norte explicitly rejected the Graham Greene formula and told a story in which politics was secondary to a universal (and ongoing) human drama. Moreover, Nava and Thomas made a courageous decision: they told the story entirely from the point of view of the colonized “natives,” eschewing an English-speaking protagonist.  

El Norte

Gregory Nava

1983

140 min

Color

1.78:1

In movie criticism, there’s praise, and then there’s praise. In his New York Times review of Criterion’s double-barreled Roberto Rossellini history film release slate this week—the special edition The Taking of Power by Louis XIV and Eclipse Series 14, including The Age of the Medici, Cartesius, and Blaise Pascal—Dave Kehr makes a grand claim indeed. Reminding readers of the legendary Italian director’s statement that “one makes films in order to become a better human being,” Kehr concludes his piece with this call to self-improvement: “Just watching Rossellini’s magnificent work may help a bit in that department as well.”

The Rossellini love continues, albeit slightly tempered, over at Film Comment, where Patrick Friel, reviewing Louis XIV, makes his own declaration: “Rossellini was always a visionary, but with a series of unlikely made-for-television historical films in the last decade of his life, he became a radical.” In the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney agrees, writing, “No filmmaker has addressed as extensively—or successfully—the cinematic challenge of plausibly recovering the past as Roberto Rossellini did.” He calls Louis XIV “arresting, utterly distinctive filmmaking.”

And in a Los Angeles Times review, Dennis Lim hopes the Criterion releases will help spread the word about these unique films: “Rossellini’s late work is long overdue for a wider audience. His history project was a retreat from the big screen but a massive undertaking nonetheless, perverse in its grandiosity and yet perfectly logical for an artist who, despite his claims, evidently still believed in cinema as a means of understanding the world.”

Update (21JAN09): John Powers discusses The Taking of Power by Louis XIV on NPR’s Fresh Air, calling it “one of the greatest of all historical movies” and even drawing parallels to more recent political history: “Like Louis, President Obama must find a way of bringing rivals under his sway. Think how he handled Joe Leiberman and Hilary Clinton.”

Update (2FEB09): In the New Yorker, Richard Brody also brings Rossellini into the present: “He made the internecine struggles and intellectual debates of centuries past seem as vibrant and vital as contemporary politics and intimate affairs.”

Update (18FEB09): “Slip in one of the DVDs from the Criterion set Rossellini's History Films, and watch the tube radiate intelligence,” promises J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. “Rossellini's amazingly lucid movies have an intimacy well-suited to the small screen and an immediacy rare in historical reconstruction.”

The Age of the Medici

Roberto Rossellini

1973

255 min

Color

1.33:1

Blaise Pascal

Roberto Rossellini

1972

129 min

Color

1.33:1

Cartesius

Roberto Rossellini

1974

162 min

Color

1.33:1

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV

Roberto Rossellini

1966

100 min

Color

1.33:1

This week marks the long-anticipated release of Roberto Rossellini’s beloved The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, the crowning achievement of the filmmaker’s remarkable end-of-career endeavor to capture the history of human knowledge in a series of provocatively minimalist television films (also including Blaise Pascal, Cartesius, and The Age of the Medici, released in conjunction as Eclipse Series 14). For Louis XIV, Rossellini scholar Tag Gallagher created a multimedia essay in which he elucidates the meanings behind the style of this modernist-humanist “horror film,” and Rossellini’s other history works. Watch a clip from that new video here.

The Age of the Medici

Roberto Rossellini

1973

255 min

Color

1.33:1

Blaise Pascal

Roberto Rossellini

1972

129 min

Color

1.33:1

Cartesius

Roberto Rossellini

1974

162 min

Color

1.33:1

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV

Roberto Rossellini

1966

100 min

Color

1.33:1

What happened when Bernardo Bertolucci went to see Stop Making Sense in Florence? Well, as he confessed to director Jonathan Demme, he not only loved the film but was also stunned by (and even a little envious of) the response it got from the audience, who were dancing in the theater and even applauding between numbers. He also met the concert movie’s star, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, with whom he began discussions on what would become the unique blended score for his epic The Last Emperor. Byrne recounts these origins, and the collaborative process with the director and his fellow composers Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su, in this excerpt from an interview included with the four-disc special edition and Blu-ray release of the film (the latter just out), in which you can hear part of the magical musical results, which garnered an Oscar for best original score.

The Last Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci

1987

160 min

Color

2.00:1