Cult Movies
Though many drive-ins have been shut down, and the practice of screening midnight movies in theaters has waned considerably from its heyday in the early 1970s, the thrill of sharing boundary-testing films in the dark can now be enjoyed just as well while curled up on the couch—no accompanying cult required. From the whiff of exploitation emanating from Roger Vadim’s sensational And God Created Woman to the touch of snuff in Michael Powell’s voyeuristic Peeping Tom, these films delicately ride the line between pulp and art, always landing firmly in the latter camp. Who better to challenge cinematic standards than Samuel Fuller, with his unforgettable B melodramas Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, or Brian De Palma, whose wonderfully nasty Sisters ushered in a new era of thrilling post-Hitchcock stylish excess? These films stubbornly refuse to be marginalized, lower budgets and lack of Hollywood gloss be damned.
French New Wave
“Tidal wave” would have been a more appropriate name for this explosion of vibrant, innovative, and highly self-conscious films by young French directors in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The informal movement was spearheaded by a handful of critics from Cahiers du cinéma—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette—whose incisive writings were matched by their films: bold, modern takes on classical masters that reworked genres like noir and the musical, and experimented with techniques antiquated and discovered. While Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows remain the twin groundbreaking events of the movement, films such as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 were watersheds as well, finding excited audiences hungry for a new, energetic, political cinema opposed to the stuffy “cinema of quality,” as Truffaut put it, of the old guard. Though the movement quickly dissipated, filmmakers like Godard, Rivette, Varda, and Rohmer continue to pioneer today.
Italian Neorealism
The neorealist movement began in Italy at the end of World War II as an urgent response to the political turmoil and desperate economic conditions afflicting the country. Directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti took up cameras to focus on lower-class characters and their concerns, using nonprofessional actors, outdoor shooting, (necessarily) very small budgets, and a realist aesthetic. The best-known examples remain De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a critical and popular phenomenon that opened the world’s eyes to this movement, and such key earlier works as Rossellini’s Open City, the first major neorealist production. Other classics of neorealism include De Sica’s Umberto D. and Visconti’s La terra trema, but the tendrils of the movement reach back to De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us and forward to Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis, as well as to some filmmakers who did their apprenticeships in this school, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini—and far beyond.
Technicolor
Candy-colored, boisterous, lush, lurid—all words that have been used to describe the various effects, moods, and sensations of Technicolor. For the first half of cinema’s first century, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation had a monopoly on color filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. Requiring three separate negatives, the Technicolor method involved filtering light through a double-prism beam splitter to produce magenta and green, which, when combined with blue and red light, accurately reproduced the full color spectrum, with often dazzlingly rich and sumptuous results. In later years, when Eastman Color developed a single-strip technique that could be used in any 35 mm camera, Technicolor lost its grip on the industry. Though three-strip Technicolor is still used today, it is an anomaly—often a sign of stylish distinction. Technicolor’s full spectrum is famously difficult to reproduce, but at Criterion we aim to get those eye-popping colors as close to their original vibrancy as possible.
New German Cinema
Written and signed by two dozen German filmmakers pledging themselves to “the new German feature film,” the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto boldly announced the arrival of New German Cinema, with young, innovative, and politically radical directors taking up arms against the propriety of West German society and its failing film industry. In the late sixties and early seventies, filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg set out to create smaller, more independent and artistically challenging films to investigate the state of contemporary Germany (Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katherine Blum), as well as to grapple with the ghosts of the past, from the Weimar era (Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz) and the Nazis (Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum) to their aftermath (Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy”). Like other countries’ new waves, New German Cinema, which ended in the mid-eighties, embraced politically akin but artistically disparate directors with diverse interests, working methods, and spheres of influence, from the avant-garde (Kluge’s Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed) to major international productions (Fassbinder’s Querelle).
Poetic Realism
Poetic realism was a cinematic style that emerged in France during the 1930s, the peak of that nation’s classic period of filmmaking. With its roots in realist literature, this movement combined working-class milieus and downbeat story lines with moody, proto-noir art direction and lighting to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, with the iconic Jean Gabin as the titular antihero, is generally regarded as the start of this melancholic, often fatalistic brand of cinema, which in part reflected the ominous atmosphere of prewar France but also lent itself to the individual sensibilities of a wide range of brilliant directors, such as Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, La bête humaine) and Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève), and set designers like Alexandre Trauner. Poetic realism is thought to have greatly influenced such later film movements as Italian neorealism, which was equally sympathetic to the proletariat, and the French new wave, which looked to these great masters who had retained their artistic freedom while working in the French film industry.
Noir and Neonoir
Some call it a genre, others a movement, or even a fashion statement, but however one defines noir, with its signature femmes fatales, wisecracking tough guys, and dramatic, high-contrast cinematography, its appeal never seems to wane. Though its origins are in German expressionism and French crime films of the thirties, film noir has always been a distinctly American film movement, influenced and shaped as it was by American pulp fiction, wartime gender politics, and postwar nuclear anxieties. And since its forties and fifties heyday, the legacy of noir has spread everywhere—from Kurosawa (High and Low) to the French new wave (Alphaville) to the proliferation of “neonoirs” in the eighties (Coup de torchon) and nineties (Insomnia). Color may have seeped into noir’s rich gray palette over the years, but some things never change: anxiety, disillusionment, panic.
Documentaries
“Life caught unawares,” that’s how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the mere recording of reality. From its anthropological origins in the works of Robert Flaherty, the documentary has come to encompass Soviet and Fascist German propaganda of the thirties; the Direct Cinema and vérité methods of the sixties, as in the films of the Maysles brothers; and the populist social-reform tradition of today. What all the great documentaries have had in common is their ability to capture a place and time so vividly as to equal the imagery and storytelling of even the best fiction.
Samurai Cinema
Samurai cinema, which includes both chanbara (action-oriented sword-fight films) and the historical jidai-geki film, focuses on the nationally mythologized samurai warriors of the twelfth to sixteenth century. Like the American western, the samurai film lends itself to tales of loyalty, revenge, romance, fighting prowess, and the decline of a traditional way of life. Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films have arguably been the most influential both in Japan and around the world; certainly the range of his approaches—from Seven Samurai’s epic scope to Yojimbo’s acidic black humor to Ran’s poetic despair—established the genre’s creative possibilities, influencing generations of filmmakers, including George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Key works of the genre, in its more traditional form, also include Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion, Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto, the first part of his epic “Samurai Trilogy.”
Oscar Winners
The Criterion Collection is bursting with films that have earned Hollywood’s prestigious little golden guy—though, perhaps unsurprisingly, many of them were made pretty far from Hollywood. On our shelves you’ll find eighteen best foreign-language film winners, which make up a fairly comprehensive history of art-house cinema in the U.S., from Kurosawa, Bergman, and Fellini to Tati, Costa-Gavras, and Buñuel. A handful of these trophy-winning foreign films (like Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, and Forbidden Games) even hail from the period before the competitive foreign-language film category was established—they had such cultural impact that the Academy gave them special honorary awards. Furthermore, two of the best picture winners in the collection have the very rare distinction of also being foreign films: Hamlet, which was the first movie from a country other than the U.S. to garner the prize, and The Last Emperor, which, with its nine Oscars, remains one of the most Academy-honored films of all time. Of course, Criterion also offers a selection of Oscar-embraced American films, which have won in such categories as best documentary feature (Hearts and Minds), cinematography (Days of Heaven), screenplay (Missing), visual effects (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), editing (The Naked City), and even best documentary short (Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist). Explore all the Academy-awarded Criterion films below.