Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a manicurist who bites her own nails, played by Catherine Deneuve, as insufficiently focused. “Have you fallen asleep?” chides the cosseted client. Giving us no insight into her daydream, Polanski establishes our relationship with this impenetrable girl, whom we will barely get to know even though she’ll be the film’s main focus. Already the opening title sequence has concluded with a close-up of one of Deneuve’s eyes—with the words “Directed by Roman Polanski” ominously slicing straight across like a razor—yet, as we learn, our proximity to her hardly brings a greater understanding of who she is, or why she’ll do the terrible things she ultimately does.

At first, Carol, a francophone Belgian living in London with her older sister, Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), seems a mere blank slate. She simply appears distracted from work, visibly withdrawn, and with a pleasant-enough man in her life, Colin (John Fraser), of whom she’s clearly less enamored than he is of her. It’s not until Helen’s no-nonsense married lover, Michael (Ian Hendry), delivers a verdict on Carol’s manner (“She’s a bit strung up, isn’t she? . . . She should see a doctor”) that we as viewers are encouraged to regard her conspicuously odd affect as shrouding more deeply disturbed depths. (Those seeing the film on its original 1965 theatrical release, however, might already have had a strong disposition as to what was in store, based on the poster art alone, a disturbing graphic of Deneuve’s head multiplied by seven and arrayed on the business edge of an open straight razor, beneath the text, “The nightmare world of a Virgin’s dreams becomes the screen’s shocking reality!!”)

In Repulsion, as throughout his career, Polanski preys on the viewer’s acceptance of “face value,” only to cannily undermine it, with his characters treading into hostile territory they, and we, haven’t seen coming. All we see is what Carol appears to be, and progressively we see what she sees. Disavowing the workings of sympathy, Repulsion instead is a painful character study (there is no plot to speak of), and offers only the tiniest gestural attempt at “explaining” Carol. Though her symptoms—excessive attachment to her sister, revulsion toward men and the concomitant rejection of “mature” sexuality, hesitancies about food—can all be found in any given textbook on psychopathological disorders, Polanski refuses to argue her condition in a Freudian key. Averse to embracing psychiatric dictates to explain human behavior, Polanski is more an observer than an analyst, and his face slap to the claims of the therapeutic could not be more blunt.  

Repulsion

Roman Polanski

1965

105 min

Black and White

1.85:1

A traveling exhibition of installation works by Chantal Akerman, currently at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (its final stop in the United States, ending August 2), has given writer Hesse Caplinger the opportunity to discuss this brilliant Belgian filmmaker in an excellent piece in the St. Louis Fine Arts Examiner this week. If you’ve never seen anything by Akerman, whose galvanizing masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is coming out on Criterion DVD next month, Caplinger provides a swift, intelligent introduction to the “ferocious delicacy” of her approach to filmmaking. And if you’re already an Akermanian, he’ll give you detailed insight into the three video pieces on display, each of which incorporates footage from many of Akerman’s movies. Writes Caplinger: “Taken together, the work in this exhibition serves as an elaboration and extension to Akerman’s filmic sources.”

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman

1975

201 min

Color

1.66:1

The New York Press’s Armond White on Made in U.S.A and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her—by way of Michael Bay (we knew it would happen someday!):

“Both these widescreen spectacles can help remind moviegoers how important it is to appreciate movies as a visual art form that represents the world and the imagination with creativity and integrity. That’s what is missing from the Harry Potter junk, where imagery is corrupted into tired, overfamiliar, nonvisceral special effects. Made in U.S.A and 2 or 3 Things have more in common with the visual wit of Michael Bay’s Transformers 2. It is Godard’s bold example that taught Bay to love sound and image. All these films share a visual language and a way of seeing the world that is rooted in an artistic use of technology. What a triple bill.”

Made in U.S.A

Jean-Luc Godard

1966

85 min

Color

2.35:1

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Jean-Luc Godard

1967

87 min

Color

2.35:1

Armageddon

Michael Bay

1998

153 min

Color

2.35:1

The Rock

Michael Bay

1996

136 min

Color

2.35:1

Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature, Made in U.S.A, is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s great Breathless to Weekend period (1960–67). For those of us in the United States, however, it is also the least familiar.

Due to producer Georges de Beauregard’s insolvency following the government censorship of his previous production, Jacques Rivette’s The Nun, and complications regarding the literary rights for Godard’s project (it is vaguely adapted from American mystery writer Donald E. Westlake’s pseudonymous novel The Jugger), Made in U.S.A did not get a U.S. distributor, or even a limited theatrical run, until four decades after its American premiere, a single screening at the legendary 1967 New York Film Festival, which opened with The Battle of Algiers and closed with Far from Vietnam.

Writing a more sympathetic notice than his colleague Howard Thompson gave Godard’s Les carabiniers (1963), which was shown on the same evening, New York Times reviewer Richard Shepard found Made in U.S.A “an often bewildering potpourri of film narration, imagery, and message . . . better seen twice, if at all.” Albeit noting Made in U.S.A’s “pop art bloodstains,” Shepard left it for others to connect the season’s cinematic scandal, Hollywood’s own New Wave gangster flick, Bonnie and Clyde, and what would be the last of Godard’s reconfigured genre films.

Dedicated to Nick (Ray) and Samuel (Fuller), “who raised me to respect image and sound,” Made in U.S.A is, at least nominally, a political noir in the tradition of Godard’s second film, Le petit soldat (1960). At the same time, it resembles Band of Outsiders (1964) in being a thriller about people who are acting as if they’re living in a movie. “You can fool the audience, but not me,” the star, Anna Karina, tells someone. Made in U.S.A is self-reflexive as well as self-conscious: when characters speak, it’s often to speculate on the nature of language or note the time passing.  

Made in U.S.A

Jean-Luc Godard

1966

85 min

Color

2.35:1

In honor of the Museum of the Moving Image and the Museum of Arts and Design’s joint retrospective French New Wave Essentials, now ongoing in New York, New Yorker film editor and blogger extraordinaire Richard Brody has posted a short and diverting video of clips from Roger Vadim’s 1956 melodrama And God Created Woman, featuring his own voice-over commentary. In it he celebrates the “exuberant vulgarity” of this sun-dappled Brigitte Bardot vehicle, one of the series’ highlights, which he argues was a “significant inspiration for the French New Wave.”

And God Created Woman

Roger Vadim

1956

92 min

Color

2.35:1

We’ve previously written about the new digitally restored 35 mm print of Powell and Pressburger’s ballet masterpiece The Red Shoes, which premiered at Cannes in May. (We can’t wait to see it stateside.) But how much do we really understand about what it means—and what it takes—for a classic film to go through the restoration process? Thankfully, the always engaging and informative Ian Christie has a piece in the August issue of Sight & Sound in which he not only previews the new Red Shoes but also takes us through the process of twenty-first-century movie refurbishment (from the high-res scanning of the negative to the digital removal of blemishes), which he compares to the restoration of paintings and frescos. It’s a fascinating (and accessible) look at the value of art restoration—something that’s been debated for ages—and another mouthwatering preview of the Technicolor beauty we’ll hopefully be seeing soon.

The Red Shoes

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

1948

133 min

1.33:1

The greatest film by the greatest post-1950s filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her presents the critic, humbled by the beauty of its surfaces, the density of its ideas, and the uncanny coherence of its fragmented structure, with a writing dilemma. If any film deserves a book-length exegesis, it is this one. Alternately, one pithy paragraph might do the trick. Since the situation in which I write precludes both of these options, I’ll take up the irresistible strategy Godard suggests and offer just two or three things about 2 or 3 Things.

“I wanted to include everything: sports, politics, even groceries. Everything should be put in a film,” wrote Godard about 2 or 3 Things. It could have been Andy Warhol speaking. And given that Godard and Warhol had the same genius for purloining the words and images of others to create visions of the world like no others, I hesitate to venture which of them was first to express the desire to encompass “everything” in a movie. It was Warhol, however, who in 1962 brought “groceries,” or more specifically brand-name grocery packaging, into the institutions of high art, creating a media sensation. So one can safely say that Warhol was very much on Godard’s mind when, in 1966, he plucked from the magazine Le nouvel observateur a letter in response to an article enticingly titled “The ‘Shooting Stars,’” about women living in the newly built housing developments on the edge of Paris who worked as part-time prostitutes in order to pay for the basics of a middle-class life (what Godard ironically dubs “a normal life”), not the least of which was their groceries.  

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Jean-Luc Godard

1967

87 min

Color

2.35:1

Today’s the day, the fortieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing, and as Brian Sholis writes in Artforum, it’s the perfect opportunity to revisit the Apollo program and think about the future of space exploration (Aldrin has his eyes set on Mars!). “Criterion has contributed to the effort,” says Sholis, “by releasing on DVD and Blu-Ray Al Reinert’s magnificent 1989 documentary For All Mankind.” In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim calls the film “a remarkable feat of assemblage,” and writes that “in striving for a kind of cosmic poetry, in privileging sensory experience above all else, For All Mankind remains a one-of-a-kind artifact.” Michael Wilmington, reviewing the film for Movie City News, grandly exclaims that it “plays like one of the great science fiction epics . . . Reinert gives us something comparable in its extraterrestrial lyricism, strangeness, and galactic rapture to Kubrick’s 2001.” And in their glowing evaluation of the Blu-ray edition, the folks at Home Theater Forum call For All Mankind nothing less than “one of the most engrossing documentaries of human endeavor and achievement ever committed to film.”

Also of interest: the New York Times’s special section on the historic moon landing.

Update (21 JUL 09): In the Huffington Post, Michael Glitz calls For All Mankind an “engaging, gorgeous, and thrilling documentary”; and PBS’s Online NewsHour has a downloadable audio interview with Al Reinert, who himself says the new Criterion edition is "the best those pictures have ever looked.”

For All Mankind

Al Reinert

1989

79 min

1.33:1

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ acclaimed, meticulously restored 35 mm print of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which Janus Films is currently touring across the country, opens today at Baltimore’s historic Senator Theatre, and in a feature for the Baltimore Sun, Michael Sragow has given it praise that, unlike the event at the film’s center, is indisputable. “The test of a great, innovative movie is whether its power survives decades of imitation,” writes Sragow. “Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece . . . dwarfs its legions of successors.” The critic goes on to extol the Japanese director’s “brilliant and instinctive narrative art, which unites an audience in awe and wonder.” And he saves room to effuse over the new print, which he says makes the film look “better than anyone remembers it,” adding: “Movie presentation this luxurious doesn’t just blow your mind, but frees it.” So, if you’re in the Baltimore area this week, go blow, and open, your mind! Stay tuned here for future dates.

Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa

1950

88 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The venerable critic Andrew Sarris, now eighty-one years old, gets his due in a lovely profile in the New York Times by Michael Powell (no, not that one). This die-hard auteurist, who has contributed writing and been featured in on-screen interviews for Criterion releases, and recently left the New York Observer (his home since 1989, following decades as a groundbreaking critic at the Village Voice), is, in Powell’s words, “one of the last refugees of the heroic age of film criticism.” The article also provides a light but thorough crash course on that hallowed era of movie watching and writing, invoking Sarris’s battles royal with Pauline Kael and John Simon, and reminding us of the days when lines snaked around the block at the local art houses.