Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

There’s more to cooking on camera than Top Chef, and despite films like Big Night or Julie and Julia that have inspired foodies across the country to run out and prepare elaborate meals, it’s rare that we get a cinematic look at how ordinary folks cook every day. It might not be the first thing that comes up when people talk about Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, but one of the features that make this film so strangely compelling is the attention it pays to the simple routines of cooking. Without moving her camera, Akerman follows her heroine’s every move as she prepares meat loaf, breads cutlets, and peels potatoes. The style may be objective, but the effect is highly personal.

What does it look like when you cook on camera? Now’s your chance to show us! In honor of the release of Jeanne Dielman on DVD, we’re sponsoring the world’s first Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest. Make a video of yourself (or someone else) cooking 1) meat loaf, 2) cutlets, or 3) potatoes, and upload it as a video response to Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest on YouTube. There will be two prizes. The winner of the Audience Award, the most popular entry as voted on by the YouTube community, will receive a $100 gift certificate to the Criterion Collection website. A Grand Prize winner, to be selected by the staff of the Criterion Collection, will receive a new PlayStation 3, Criterion's reference Blu-ray player. Submissions are welcome from anywhere in the world, but only U.S. and Canadian entries will be eligible for prizes. The deadline is September 28, 2009.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman

1975

201 min

Color

1.66:1

Known for creating some of American independent cinema’s chattiest characters, writer-director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan) is apparently feeling rather talkative himself this week. Stillman has popped up all over New York in interviews marking Criterion’s new special edition DVD release of his charmingly caustic romantic roundelay The Last Days of Disco.

First up, there’s a profile and interview by Nick Pinkerton at the Village Voice, where, we learn in the full transcript (online only), Stillman got his first job, when he was still in college.” Then the director dispels some misconceptions about the film with IFC.com’s Stephen Saito (“It’s not so much about disco”), discusses his brief flirtation with Hollywood with Time Out’s Joshua Rothkopf (“I think I made the mistake of trying to make films within the industry and going along. You have to work outside it”), and lets Gothamist in on his favorite spots in New York City (“The Battery, Governor’s Island, and the steps of the Metropolitan when no one’s there, i.e., around 5:00 a.m.”).

Stillman was on the airwaves too, and you can download that WNYC interview with Leonard Lopate here. And the director will be in attendance at local screenings of the film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade, tonight, and Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns Film Center, on September 1.

Metropolitan

Whit Stillman

1990

99 min

Color

1.66:1

The Last Days of Disco

Whit Stillman

1998

113 min

Color

1.78:1

We all go a little mad sometimes, and judging by the new issue of Sight & Sound, that includes magazines. In their cheekily subversive cover story, “The Wild Bunch,” S&S’s editors and contributors single out fifty filmmakers of the “mad, bad, and dangerous” variety, directors who have, as Mark Cousins explains in his introduction (available online), “a psychic energy that is manic to a degree and might well be fueled by sexual rage, or colonial exploitation, or a Marxist hatred of consumerism, or a fear of modernity or the body . . .” The criteria, then, to put it mildly, are wide-ranging, encompassing such artisans of the lurid or the livid as Buñuel, Breillat, Fellini, Imamura, Maddin, Makavejev, Suzuki, and, natch, Lars von Trier. Also included in the special section are sidebars by those surveyors of the sensational Amy Taubin, Kim Newman, and Michael Brooke.

Whit Stillman took a risk to set his third film during (and title it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think, fifteen years after the death of this maligned musical movement, it could have been safely celebrated only with a protective sheen of kitschy detachment. So then how did Stillman pull off something as genuine and persuasively fresh as The Last Days of Disco, and why does it continue to sparkle, more than a decade after its making, with more glittering facets than a mirrored ball? Maybe the answer is Stillman’s unironic affection for the period, for the music, and for his endlessly verbose characters, who live and dance through it.

Yet as in his previous two films—Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994)—Stillman lets his characters speak and behave in their cultural moment without ever marrying them to that moment too literally. For all the deft, bold, voluminous, comic-to-us-but-serious-to-the-characters talk in any Stillman film, the protagonists do not mire themselves verbally or visually in actual, happening-right-now politics or family obligation or any responsibility that might prevent them from walking—or, more importantly, talking and dancing—ever so slightly on air. Never in The Last Days of Disco or Stillman’s earlier films do characters invoke loaded names like Carter or Reagan or Mom or Dad. It’s true that Barcelona has a crucial subplot about anti-American sentiment in late cold-war Spain, but we basically glean these politics, such as they are, from the characters’ cocktail-soaked bull sessions, while for many the most lasting image from that film is the hysterical but moving sight of Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols) reading Scripture while step dancing alone to the song “Pennsylvania 6-5000.”

So if Stillman’s characters aren’t driven primarily by politics or familial duty, what are they driven by? What at heart do they do, and what at heart do they talk about? Well, in The Last Days of Disco, they go to the Club, and more often than not, they talk about the Club. It’s “the very early eighties,” and the Club is the social mecca of Manhattan. Stillman perhaps means to emulate the fabled Studio 54, but if so he knows enough about fable to cast his Club as a universal. From the way it’s filmed, with a shadowy back entrance in an alley and a front door perennially mobbed by anonymous wanna-get-ins, the Club could as easily be in Chelsea’s edgier Meatpacking District as in the more mainstream Midtown. Inside the Club, we find other universals that would resonate in any era: one is white, powdered, and snortable, another is a ubiquitous, scantily clad dancing slut named Tiger Lady, and of course there are the lupine, sneering bouncers and gatekeepers.  

The Last Days of Disco

Whit Stillman

1998

113 min

Color

1.78:1

I AM WAITING: PORT OF CALL

The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain.

Hiroshi Shimizu’s ever-prowling camera had followed Japanese girls along these harborsides a quarter of a century earlier, watching them walking, watching them talking, years before movies had sound, before Japan had lost the war. As the 1960s began, one of Nagisa Oshima’s ideological slumdogs would deflower his date somewhere nearby, in the blistering sunlight, on a flotilla of rough logs waiting to be milled, her tears, his sneers, in crimson Technicolor so lurid as to defile the nation’s cinema forevermore. But tonight, the pier is quiet, the harbor peaceful, the screen saturated only with squid-ink blacks and pallid, paper-lantern whites. Steamers and tugs wolf whistle in the distance, then slowly the determined footfalls of a bandy-legged, bucktoothed boy-man begin to slice through the mist and chill. From out of the shadows comes Yujiro Ishihara, the handsome, if still baby-faced, king of the taiyozoku (Japanese cinema’s “sun tribe” of dissolute postwar youth)—and now, suddenly, the venerable and recently revitalized Nikkatsu studio’s radiant new matinee supernova—and with him a mission: he’s got a letter to mail.

Not so noir a midnight sortie, perhaps you’re thinking; a bit far afield from the Los Angeles basin or South Street Lower Manhattan, locus classicus of Hollywood film noir, that setting: dockside postwar Japan. But wait: no sooner has Ishihara clanked the letter slot shut than a moonlit minx, a fog-dappled mermaid, a siren from the Yokohama mist, appears before him. She is Mie Kitahara—her long, wavy hair haloed in frizz by the rain; her bangs cut as adorably short as her eyes are filled with hopelessness and pain—and she is loitering, forlornly, perhaps suicidally, at the brackish waterside, a “canary who’s forgotten how to sing.” And before you can stop yourself from envisioning, say, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo—or, for that matter, Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung in Days of Being Wild—Ishihara is beside her, walking with her through black and slickened streets, taking her “home” to his dockside dive, Restaurant Reef, where soon their darkest secrets shall be revealed, and their deepest fears realized. Add those smoldering gazes from beneath silenced songbird Kitahara’s bangs to the defensively hunched shoulders of Ishihara’s bruised pugilist, and I Am Waiting—an atmosphere-steeped mood masterwork from the early heyday of what would soon become Nikkatsu’s house brand of mukokuseki (“borderless,” i.e., internationalized) action flicks—casts a spell as shadow thatched as any Hollywood noir.  

I Am Waiting

Koreyoshi Kurahara

1957

91 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Rusty Knife

Toshio Masuda

1958

90 min

Black and White

2.35:1

Take Aim at the Police Van

Seijun Suzuki

1960

84 min

Black and White

2.45:1

Cruel Gun Story

Takumi Furukawa

1964

91 min

Black and White

2.45:1

A Colt Is My Passport

Takashi Nomura

1967

84 min

Black and White

2.35:1

As proven by our monthly newsletters and right here on our website, everyone has their favorite Criterion titles. Now Film.com has released a list of its own, and rather than ten–the number our friends and contributors whittle their selections down to—writer Amanda Mae Meyncke has included twenty titles. With choices ranging from Dreyer to Tarkovsky to Guy Maddin, it’s a fun, eclectic list and nicely representative of the breadth of films in the collection. So if everyone has their favorites, what are yours?

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to experience the materiality of cinema, its literal duration, and gives concrete meaning to a woman’s work. We watch, for three hours and twenty-one minutes, as Jeanne cooks, takes a bath, has dinner with her adolescent son, shops for groceries, and looks for a missing button. Each gesture and sound becomes imprinted in our mind, and as we are lulled by familiar rhythms and expected behavior, we become complicit with Jeanne’s desire for order. The perfect parity between Jeanne’s predictable schedule and Akerman’s minimalist precision deflects our attention from the fleeting signs of Jeanne’s afternoon prostitution. They nevertheless loom at the edge of our mind, gradually building unease. Jeanne Dielman constitutes a radical experiment with being undramatic, and paradoxically with the absolute necessity of drama.

Made in 1975, when the artist was only twenty-five years old, the film upped the ante on neorealism’s mandate of “social attention.” Akerman’s real-time, matter-of-fact presentation of a woman’s everyday seemed to mock the timidity of the neorealist demand for “a ninety-minute film showing the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” In postwar film and video, banal kitchen scenes (in Umberto D., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Semiotics of the Kitchen) are signs of an inclusive realism, a new politicized energy. Akerman’s “images between images,” those scenes neglected in conventional representation, gave this impulse a strong feminist accent. But more than a corrective to traditional cinema, Jeanne Dielman is a lesson in structural economy: the full visibility given to daily tasks exacts, as its cost, the more sensational scenes of Jeanne’s prostitution. These encounters last the time it takes to cook dinner.

Akerman told an interviewer that one night, after having worked on her script for some time, she “saw” the entire film in its “final” form. She then decided to eliminate subplots and subsidiary characters, focusing intensely on Jeanne in her apartment. Aunt Fernande, Jeanne’s sister, living in Canada, only appears in the form of a letter, read in litanylike monotone by Jeanne to her son; the neighbor, heard by the door (and played by Akerman herself), describes how, shopping for her husband’s dinner, and still undecided, she ended up getting the same expensive cut of meat as the person in front of her on line. Never casual, each of the film’s uniquely strange and long-winded monologues expresses some form of gendered pressure: they refer to Jeanne’s marriage, the son’s Oedipal thoughts, each breathing a sexual anxiety, each a drawn-out, wordy attempt to mitigate the “other scene” we never see, the elided afternoon trysts.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman

1975

201 min

Color

1.66:1

It may not be a multiplex, but Santa Monica’s Aero repertory theater still offers two too many confounding options for ten gallon–hatted Josh Brolin in the Coen brothers’ delightful short World Cinema. Part of the 2007 omnibus Chacun son cinema (To Each His Own Cinema), made for the Cannes Film Festival’s sixtieth anniversary (and also featuring shorts by Jane Campion, Gus Van Sant, Zhang Yimou, and David Lynch), this three-minute-and-eighteen-second film—in which Brolin's rancher wanders into the theater and then needs help deciding between Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s recent Climates (eliciting earnest explanations from the cinephilic cashier)—is now available on YouTube after being left off of Chacun’s recent DVD release. We particularly enjoyed seeing the posters featured in the lobby!

The Rules of the Game

Jean Renoir

1939

106 min

Black and White

1.33:1

“Repulsion is finally out on DVD!” exclaims Paper’s Dennis Dermody about the long-awaited release of Roman Polanski’s “terror masterpiece”—in both standard-definition and Blu-ray editions—which he goes on to dub “one of the finest of psychological shockers.”

Chris Nashawaty, at Entertainment Weekly, writes, “Polanski’s first English-language film is still a creepy little horror masterpiece. And thanks to the Criterion Collection’s new digital face-lift, it’s never looked better or more crisp.” And Dave Kehr, in the New York Times, says, “Repulsion remains a commanding film, its festering detail enhanced by an excellent new transfer.”

More comes courtesy of IFC.com’s Michael Atkinson (“Quintessentially cinematic . . . an impeccable Petit Guignol spectacle in deep black and white”) and Sam Adams, at the Los Angeles Times (“Consistently engrossing . . . Repulsion quivers with liberated energy and forces both cathartic and annihilating”). And the “claustrophobic shocker” is the critics’ pick over at Salon.com.

Repulsion

Roman Polanski

1965

105 min

Black and White

1.85:1

Jonathan Rosenbaum has been posting a lot of his past work on his (relatively) new blog, a real boon for cinephiles, as the former Chicago Reader critic’s archives are four bounteous decades deep. The latest to appear is a recent essay he wrote for the Australian DVD label Madman on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in which he appraises the German filmmaker’s “ambiguous and conflicted” remake of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows more than thirty years after its release. Most interesting is Rosenbaum’s claim that the film doesn’t particularly like its tragic main characters, who cannot change despite their social victimization, especially its heroine (“One often feels that Fassbinder is appalled by her intellectually even while he weeps for her suffering”).

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1974

93 min

Color

1.33:1

All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk

1955

89 min

1.77:1