Martin Scorsese concludes his A Personal Journey… Through American Movies (co-directed and co-written by Michael Henry Wilson, 1995) with a brief passage from Elia Kazan’s America America (1963). This epic, physical, elemental, almost monomaniacal film is an important touchstone for Scorsese, a talisman of the passage from and between the old world of Classical Hollywood [...]
Cinémathèque Annotations on Film
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Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) concerns the problems encountered by two teenagers – Wilma Dean (“Deanie”) Loomis (Natalie Wood) and Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) – living in Kansas at the end of the 1920s. Their sexual desire for each other has no outlet because of the rigid morals of the time, and leads [...]
“East of Eden is more personal to me; it is more my own story. One hates one’s father; one rebels against him; finally one cares for him, one recovers oneself, one understands him, one forgives him, and one says to oneself, ‘Yes, he is like that’… one is no longer afraid of him, one has [...]
Discussion of the New Waves of European national cinemas that emerged after World War II has often focused on those movements’ stances towards American cinema. While Italian neo-realism and British social realism tended to be defined as filmmaking practices opposed to those of American cinema, the French nouvelle vague and the New German Cinema of [...]
Michelangelo Antonioni’s name seems to have fallen somewhat into disrepute in US film culture over the last several decades, his main concerns – alienation and the collapse of communication – the subject of a collective yawn. Once seen as the cinema’s most adept observer of alienation as the dominant tone of postwar industrial civilisation, Antonioni [...]
“We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of [...]
“When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door.” – Robert Bresson (1) Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped, 1956) is one of Bresson’s most sublime and understated films, in a career that consists of a series of meditational masterpieces that minutely [...]
“Only the conflicts that take place inside the characters give a film its real movement.” – Robert Bresson (1) “Destiny is tragic but I prefer a fate we choose to one forced upon us.” -Agnès (Elina Labourdette) in Robert Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) For Bresson, as Marvin Zeman puts it, life consists [...]
Released two years before his international breakthrough Salvatore Giuliano (1962), Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (1959) is the story of immigrant Italian workers seeking their fortune in late Adenauer-era West Germany. Unfairly neglected by critics and historians, the film is usually regarded a prelude to the Neapolitan director’s ambitious, labyrinthine chronicles of power and corruption of [...]
The trailer for Salvatore Giuliano (1962) begins with a town crier walking down a Sicilian street, banging a drum. This is followed by a group of men distributed across the town square, one playing a Jew’s harp. The crier is proclaiming a military curfew, but could as easily be announcing a new show in town. [...]
As Gian-Piero Brunetta has noted, Francesco Rosi’s Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973) saw the Neapolitan filmmaker return to the narrative model of his first major success Salvatore Giuliano (1962) (1). Both films employ a non-linear structure in an attempt to outline the complex web of political and economic intrigue [...]
“A shaft of white light used properly can be far more effective than all the color in the world used indiscriminately.” – Josef von Sternberg (1) Of all the delirious exoticisms created by Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg during their white-hot period in the 1930s at Paramount, Shanghai Express (1932) remains my favourite for [...]
In a profile of Josef von Sternberg for the New Yorker in March 1931, the year Americans got to see the English-language version of Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), the author begins where most writers do when discussing the Austrian-born director who conquered Hollywood with his outré style, both on and off the [...]
Les Diaboliques (1955) is a tale of cold-blooded, calculated murder and suspense. Murder and suspense are always billed together in this kind of film, however, in the case of Les Diaboliques, this is equivalent to suggesting that Shakespeare was merely a playwright who was born in 1564 or that Bengal tigers are colourful quadrupeds. In [...]
During the course of a conversation in the crime drama Quai des Orfèvres (1947) between the photographer Dora Monier (Simone Renant) and the investigator Antoine (Louis Jouvet), he discourses upon how the demarcation between the law and the lawless often becomes altogether tenuous. Antoine remarks that during his career he has learned certain practical skills [...]
As Alan Williams notes, “Le Corbeau is an essential work for world film history, if only because its meanings are still being debated” (1). Filmed during the Occupation by the German controlled Continental Films Company, whose head likened himself to an Aryan version of Louis B. Mayer, the unit sought to make quality films rather [...]
The idea of the lost or broken film is central to cinephilia, but its implications are ambiguous. On the one hand, it allows the film lover to construct a neo-Platonic ideal of the perfect film. However, such dreams suggest a certain dissatisfaction with the cinema as it exists (as anyone who has read David Thomson’s [...]
At first glance, it might seem that a film about Picasso should have been directed by anyone other than Henri-Georges Clouzot, the famous misanthrope of the cinema. But then again, both were hard, violent men, absolutely sure of their vocations, and each approached their work with the same sense of absolute control and complete lack [...]
“Let me tell you the story”, Henri-Georges Clouzot appears to be offering in Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear, 1953), “of four strange men. Four lonely men, and their intertwined fate.” Not friends as much as comrades, not comrades as much as fellow slaves, not slaves as much as desperados, they have [...]
“You don’t know what fear is. But you’ll see. It’s catching. It’s catching like smallpox. And once you get it, it’s for life.” – Dick in Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) The Wages of Fear is a 1953 French film noir-style road movie-cum-thriller, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring rising film star [...]
Lucrecia Martel is one of the most distinctive auteurs to be associated with the “New Argentine Cinema”, an umbrella term used to describe the films of young directors who began to work in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of their country towards the end of the ’90s. In spite of Argentina’s economic difficulties, a [...]
As Lucrecia Martel demonstrates in La Ciénaga (The Swamp), there is more twisted banal horror and caustic humour to be discovered in the forms of personal narrative than found within the boundaries of the horror genre itself. La Ciénaga is a horror film in a way, though it is as inscrutable as the work of [...]
Is there one person in our family who has died sane? – (Tía Lala) María Vaner, The Headless Woman As a “poster girl” for what is wishfully called the New Argentine Cinema, Lucrecia Martel has built a career by lacing her wilfully obscure narratives with symbols that are just too loud and portentous for us [...]
Who was my friend? Who was my enemy? How could they be kind to me and at the same time kill others so horribly? What set us apart? A simple foreskin? – Solly Perel in Europa, Europa Among the many extraordinary stories of survival to come out of World War II, few are as unlikely [...]
It is general knowledge that in communist societies no aspects of human life ever go unnoticed or unscrutinised by the cyclopic, tyrannous intentions of mother state. The aforementioned reality is encountered as a formula, which is adjusted to reflect how much damage an artist can do to the Communist Party and the elite cadre who [...]
A child in a red cap goes to deliver lunch to Grandmother’s house but never returns. Except 6 years later, he does, cut from the belly of the big bad city. There’s no ambiguity in Olivier Olivier as to its relationship with fairytale. But this isn’t Angela Carter or Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves. [...]
An adaptation of socialist writer Andrzej Strug’s 1910 novel The Story of a Bullet (1), Agnieszka Holland’s Goraczka. Dzieje jednego pocisku (Fever) – which shifts emphasis to the “life” or “biography” of a bomb – could just as easily have been retitled The Story of a Bomb in the hands of an uninspired producer. The [...]
It’s great to have an excuse to re-watch a fondly remembered film. Repeated viewings can deepen our appreciation as favourite moments are relived, high points relished, previously overlooked nuances, connections or details revealed. But there’s a danger, too, that it might turn out to be not as great as our memory of it, and that [...]
Memory is also found brilliantly manifested in a large number of madmen. – Dr. Vastel (1) In 1991, documentary film student Alison Millar recorded life in the home of of Fr Michael Cleary, Ireland’s “Singing Priest”. Michael was looked after by his housekeeper Phyllis Hamilton and her son (2). Millar failed to notice that Hamilton [...]
The film starts in virtual silence. There is no music or dialogue, and the only sound we hear is some faint background noise. We see four people standing before some music stands and gesturing at each other in sign language. From the opening moments of Le pays des sourds (In the Land of the Deaf) [...]
Filmed between 1991 and 1994, Nicolas Philibert’s Un animal, des animaux is a gently extraordinary documentary that follows the refurbishment and eventual reopening of the Zoology Gallery of Paris’ Le Muséum National d’Histore Naturelle in 1994 – an important colonial and scientific institution of late 19th century France. As in much of the rest of [...]
The film is as much about ourselves as it is about orang-utans […]. Nénette is a mystery. We don’t know what she thinks or if she thinks at all… She is a receptacle for our fantasies. She is a projection screen… The monkey house where she lives is almost like a confessional. When they talk [...]
When people ask me who my favorite contemporary director is, I answer without hesitation: Manoel de Oliveira. At 102, he is the oldest living filmmaker, and also the filmmaker with the longest career, but he is also one of the most consistently original and challenging filmmakers the medium has ever known. Actually, I came to [...]
The finest deeds of a nation have always emerged from its soul. And however great a writer’s imagination is, he could never force an idea on his people that was not already slumbering in its soul. But beware when the false prophet comes and arouses the wrong forces for these deeds also await the rousing [...]
Set in a Franco-era Spain that has made only the barest of concessions to modernism (there are telephones and cars), but remains fully locked down under Catholicism at its most patriarchal and reactionary, Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana is satire at its most profound and tragic. The title character (Silvia Pinal) is about to take her vows [...]
“In my day, there were too many symbols.” – Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) in Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) Madrid in 1951 was a drab place. The capital of Europe’s last surviving fascist dictatorship, it presided over an impoverished and socially backward nation. Ever since the end of the Civil War [...]
It is rare today to find a film as highly stylised as Shinju: Ten no amijima (Double Suicide) – especially one in which the stylisation is so exquisitely sustained across every level of set design, performance, sound and dramaturgy. Based on a bunraku theatre script written by the most famous premodern Japanese dramatist, Monzaemon Chikamatsu, [...]
Alongside Kihachi Okamoto’s Dai-bosatsu toge (The Sword of Doom, 1966) and Hideo Gosha’s Kedamono no ken (Sword of the Beast, 1965), Masahiro Shinoda’s Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke (Samurai Spy) presents a new type of samurai protagonist: refined from the prototypes of Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi, pitiless, obsessive, even more alienated. But Shinoda’s films are distinguished [...]
“I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can examine it from different angles.” – Masahiro Shinoda (1) In the long history of Japan, few moments were as volatile and violent as the Meiji Restoration in 1868. 250 years of peace under the [...]
The disappointments of adulthood permeate Nicholas Ray’s gangland fable Party Girl, the story of a criminal defense attorney (Robert Taylor) and a nightclub dancer (Cyd Charisse) who struggle to break free of their ties to a Chicago mobster. Although well-known for his films about youth (They Live By Night [1949] and Rebel Without a Cause [...]
The cinema of Nicholas Ray, even in early efforts like They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), and The Lusty Men (1952), ranges across conventional Hollywood genres but almost always reveals recurrent, guiding concerns. Among these are the relations between individuals and cruel, unforgiving environments or authority – in [...]
Does it come at all as a surprise that the first image in the often-hallucinatory Johnny Guitar features an explosion, and one whose cause is not immediately apparent? Or that the next sequence draws attention to a seemingly unpremeditated stagecoach robbery? Or again that when the subsequent shot situates us in something at least affiliated [...]
“Knock on Any Door looks like a throwback to the socially conscious gangster movie of the 1930s… the resurrection of a dying genre.” – Bernard Eisenschitz (1) “In some respects, Knock on Any Door conforms to a standard social-conscience drama format: Romano is the poor, misunderstood and impressionable teenager from the wrong side of the [...]
N. B. Those who wish to avoid prior knowledge of the story, particularly its climax, should put off reading these notes till after seeing the film. Hopefully, then, they will want to see the film again! When shooting started on They Live by Night, Nick Ray told his cameraman George Diskant: “Every mistake in this [...]
It is not impossible to believe that before Nicolas Ray there was never an American director who better understood the unbearable fragility of being human. From his debut film, 1949’s film noir They Live by Night, Ray approached the most masculine of genres and infused it with an intense embrace for his protagonists who were [...]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder epitomises the figure of the true auteur. Mythologised as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, the legend surrounding Fassbinder – his inhuman prolificness, his tempestuous personal relationships, his often authoritarian approach to directing and his self-destructive behaviour – is so ubiquitous that even now, almost 30 years after his death, [...]
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first film, Der stadtstreicher (The City Tramp, 1966), the director enters a public pissort and sneers at his derelict anti-hero (Christoph Roser). Public toilets also provide an over-riding metaphor in Fassbinder’s later Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation). Obscene graffiti from Berlin jakes provide epigraphs to the film’s six chapters, not [...]
Although with regard to career chronology Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss) marks the culmination of Fassbinder’s so-called “BRD (Budesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy”, its narrative in fact positions it as the second work in this celebrated series and its pointed interrogation of wartime and postwar Germany. It is set in 1955, specifically between Die ehe [...]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films create an intriguing dialogue between subject and spectator where opposing fabrics of the social and personal are profoundly interwoven. It is not enough to presume that an exchange between characters is relevant to a specific situation alone, but rather, is representative of broader oppressive cultural and sexual politics brought into focus [...]
In a scene from Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul, Emmy, an aging, widowed German national, and Ali, a much younger Moroccan immigrant, sit together at an outdoor café. They are encircled by an arrangement of yellow chairs; stark horizontal and vertical slats seem to entrap them. The waiters refuse to serve. Fortified in this fortress [...]
