filmcomment

JOANNA HOGG’S PAUL SCHRADER’S TECHNOLOGICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AUTEUR

CINEMA OF DISCORD HISTORY OF CINEMA: PART I PHILIPPE GARREL

J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 1 4 | P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E F I L M S O C I E T Y O F L I N C O L N C E N T E R | V O L U M E 5 0 / N U M B E R 4

THE TIME OF
OUR LIVES:
RICHARD
LINKLATER’S
WONDROUS
‘BOYHOOD’
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contents Published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center/July-August Volume 50, Number 4

18 24 32

40 44 6

12 48 48

18 BOYHOOD BY HOLLY WILLIS EDITOR’S LETTER 4

Following the life of a boy from age 6 to 18, Richard Linklater literally OPENING SHOTS 6
takes his time News, Hot Property, Alex Cox’s 10,000 Ways to Die,
Site Specifics, Trivial Top 20®, Restoration Row

24 PHILIPPE GARREL BY JEAN-MARC LALANNE & JEAN-BAPTISTE MORAIN ENCORE 12

Tom Noonan’s The Wife
An interview with the director of Jealousy reveals the roots and
SOUND & VISION 14
personal inspirations of his Cinema Povera methods Tosca’s Kiss and Francesco Vezzoli
A FACE IN THE CROWD 16
32 GAME CHANGERS BY PAUL SCHRADER Paul Kelly
The Birth of Narrative: part one of a history of the key technological
CRITICS’ CHOICE 17
advances that transformed filmmaking Eight critics rate 25 new releases
FESTIVALS 48
40 JOANNA HOGG BY JONATHAN ROMNEY Cannes
An indie filmmaker breaks with the norms of British cinema to examine SCREENINGS 66
the dynamics of problematic relationships, and gives them a modernist Abuse of Weakness, Starred Up, Level Five, and more
spin in Exhibition HOME MOVIES 72
Our guide for the shut-in cinephile, plus British TV
horror makes a comeback
44 CLOSED CURTAIN BY RICHARD COMBS
Banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi embraces his confinement as a READINGS 78
Decades Never Start on Time: A Richard Roud
creative spur and delivers an allegorical psychodrama Anthology, and more
GRAPHIC DETAIL 80
Hans Hillmann

2 filmcomment July-August 2014 Cover: Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood. Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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editor’s letter b y G AV I N S M I T H filmcomment
F or as long as i’ve been attending cannes, the festival has always included
a few retrospective films and restorations. But in 2005, buoyed by an upsurge in
film preservation, the festival launched an official Classics section. In its early years
Editor GAVIN SMITH
Deputy Editor KENT JONES
Managing Editor LAURA KERN
Senior Editor NICOLAS RAPOLD
Cannes Classics was a source of rarities and discoveries for European Editor OLAF MÖLLER
me—Jacques Doillon’s La Drôlesse, Cheng Kang’s The 14 Digital Editor VIOLET LUCCA
Amazons, Mrinal Sen’s The Ruins, and more. But I’ve
noticed a steady drift in the program over the years. Today Consulting Art Director KEVIN FISHER
Production VICKI ROBINSON
Cannes Classics still shows a handful of lost or rediscovered
films but it’s now mainly a launching pad for new digital Contributing Editors
versions of familiar titles from close to home. This year’s NICO BAUMBACH
Cannes Classics included films like A Fistful of Dollars SCOTT FOUNDAS
(which closed the festival), Paris, Texas, and The Last J. HOBERMAN
HARLAN JACOBSON
Metro—films hardly in danger of being lost.
DAVE KEHR
This is a reflection of a fundamental shift away from the restoration and reintro- NATHAN LEE
duction of works that had previously been difficult to see and had therefore fallen out MARK OLSEN
of the conversation in film culture, and toward a focus on the best-known films and JONATHAN ROMNEY
filmmakers, and—thanks to the attention promised by the Classics sections at Cannes, CHUCK STEPHENS
AMY TAUBIN
Venice, and the other big festivals now—a new “celebrity system” in film heritage.
And it’s mostly in alliance with market forces (television, home video, online). Most of Editorial Interns
these so-called restorations are nothing more than digitizations: “newly washed” ABBEY BENDER, BENJAMIN CRAIS, JARED EISENSTAT,
versions of films that aim to make the visuals fit the current HD paradigm. ALLEGRA FRANK, STEVEN MEARS, MAX NELSON,
This is driven by the rights-holders’ unsurprising wish to bring their most famous MORGAN WILCOCK, GRETTA WILSON, ANDRES
ZAMBRANO-BRAVO
library titles to new audiences—meaning digital distribution, of course. Instead of
completely footing the bill for this procedure (as the Hollywood studios mostly do), Publisher LESLI KLAINBERG & EUGENE HERNANDEZ
in Europe they’ve managed to get public funding behind them on cultural grounds. Director of Advertising JERYLL ADLER
For this, they needed to replace the cold terminology of what used to be simply a Business Admin & Logistics VICKI ROBINSON
“transfer” or a “remastering” with language that puts “restoration” at the center—
the recovery of lost or damaged work provides a great motive to bring cultural/ FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
taxpayer money to the table. In France, the state agency CNC has provided massive
financial support for the digitization of “our film heritage.” And while this certainly To Advertise: call 310.792.2633 or
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4 filmcomment July-August 2014

 INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW LLOCATIONS
OCATIONS
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C
CONCENTRATIONS
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Animation;
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ound Design;
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Producing; Production
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Your passion
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oday.
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WWW.UNCSA.EDU
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 OPENING SHOTS

H OT P R O P E R T Y | The Tribe

Out of Hand
the words “homage to the silent movie” might appear in the film’s press
materials, but Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s debut feature couldn’t be further from
The Artist. Set in a cinderblock Kiev boarding school for the deaf, The Tribe con-
cerns a brutal gang of teenagers running rackets that include pimping female
classmates out to truck drivers. But the Ukrainian director takes the common-
MUST-SEE MOVIES place premise of an insular criminal underworld to another level by making sub-
1. Jealousy titling a formal option: none of the characters’ sign language is translated.
2. Boyhood With the crutch of text banished—and with Slaboshpytskiy embracing the
3. Abuse of Weakness festival-film vernacular of long-take, hang-back views—we become pure
4. Dormant Beauty observers of bodies and customs, of obscure exchanges and nasty violence. The
5. Child of God story follows (often literally, by Steadicam) new foot-soldier Sergey as he
ascends the gang’s power structure and falls for Anna, one of the girls in his
charge. The young nonprofessional actors at times look too innocuous to be
FAMILY VIEWING bashing in heads or turning tricks, but the explicit sex scene between Sergey
Hirokazu Kore-eda is following Like Father, and Anna seems to return this couple at least temporarily to a state of youth-
Like Son with another look at the compli- ful vulnerability and innocence.
cated bonds of fam- The Tribe is situated in the type of post-Communist social wasteland in which
ily. The filmmaker is schools seem to have become breeding grounds for crime and corruption (much
directing a live- as in last year’s Kazakh film Harmony Lessons). That much is familiar, but does
action adaptation of Slaboshpytskiy’s treatment of sign language amount to exoticizing it? Perhaps,
the award-winning but nevertheless the film also demonstrates that fiercer human urges need no
manga Kamakura translation.—Nicolas Rapold Sales Agent: alphaviolet.com

SHORT ENDS
David Michôd was in New York for postproduction on something scarier than Australian dystopia: a TV drama
about ballet, Flesh and Bone. Shooting took place in the spring, with Black Swan dancer Sarah Hay in the lead
role ... Sharing a Cannes prize with Godard wasn’t enough for Xavier Dolan, who’s now at work on his first English-
language film, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, about an iconic movie star who takes on a scandalously
underage pen pal. Dolan himself wrote fan mail to Leonardo DiCaprio, at age 8, after seeing Titanic five times ...

6 filmcomment July-August 2014

 Diary. It’s about four sisters, ranging in age
from 13 to 29, who band together after
the unexpected death of their estranged
father. This is the director’s second manga-
inspired feature; 2009’s Air Doll was the
first. The new film is slated for a summer
2015 release in Japan, which could be in
time for the 2015 New York Film Festival.
Not to get ahead of ourselves or anything.
BAD SEED?
Sebastián Silva’s
next film, Nasty
Baby, is gestating in
postproduction.
Silva himself stars
as one half of a gay
Brooklyn couple
(Tunde Adebimpe is the other) who are
trying to have a baby. For a surrogate,
they select their doctor friend (Kristen
Wiig). First there’s trouble conceiving,
then there’s trouble in the neighborhood,
from someone nicknamed “The Bishop.”
Pablo Larraín co-produced, Christine
Vachon executive-produced, and Chilean
DP Sergio Armstrong (No, Silva’s Crystal
Fairy) shot it. No word on what’s so nasty
about the kid, but the film is slated for
premiere later this year.
COP SHOOT COP
Lawlessness is the
name of the game
again for John Hill-
coat: the Aussie
director started
shooting the star-
studded corrupt-
cop thriller Triple Nine in Atlanta last
month. It’s about police officers who plan
to kill a rookie to create a diversion while
they pull off a heist. (“999” is an S.O.S.
code for when an officer is in grave dan-
ger.) The cast alone defies summary:
Casey Affleck, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Woody
Harrelson, Aaron Paul, Anthony Mackie,
and Kate Winslet. Throw in a recent local
Michael Almereyda will tell the story of Stanley Milgram, the psychologist behind the 1960s experiments that demon-
strated people’s unquestioning obedience to authority. Experimenter features Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, and pre-
sumably a lot of shocks, electric and otherwise ... Gianfranco Rosi (Sacro GRA) is making a documentary about the
Italian island of Lampedusa, a destination for waves of African immigrants. Per his usual M.O., he’ll move there in Sep-
tember ... Hot off the Cannes hit Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund has an idea for a movie with “actors playing monkeys” ...
8 filmcomment July-August 2014
A L E X C OX’ S 1 0 , 0 0 0 WAY S TO D I E | Posse
Hat Trick
actors who successfully make the transition to directing are comparatively
few in number. For every Charles Laughton, there are a score of—well, let’s be
kind and not mention all the movie stars who have been gifted a directorial gig
by their studio and totally blown it. One star who did demonstrate directorial tal-
ent and originality was Kirk
Douglas, with a low-budget
1975 Western, Posse.
Douglas also took producer
credit, as he was already one
of Hollywood’s most successful
producer-stars. His executive
producer, Phil Feldman, brought
a certain gravitas from helping
make The Wild Bunch, plus
two of the Peckinpah film’s
cast: Bo Hopkins and Alfonso Arau. Posse was shot in northern Mexico and at
Old Tucson, Arizona. In some ways it is a typical mid-Seventies oater: visually
stylish, with a penchant for medium telephoto shots and the manly visage of Luke
Askew. The shooter was Fred Koenekamp, whose host of mainstream credits
includes Patton and The Towering Inferno.
The script by William Roberts and Christopher Knopf concerns an ambitious
U.S. marshal (Douglas) who hopes a series of high-profile arrests will propel him to
the Senate, and thence to the presidency. When he and his redoubtable super-posse
come up against a band of outlaws led by Bruce Dern, the outcome would in most
directors’ hands be entertainingly predictable. But Douglas manages a rare thing: he
tells a solid story without divulging the script’s surprise ending. The finale—cop ver-
sus criminal, spineless townsfolk versus troubled deputies—is credible and con-
founding, a coherent celebration of corruption.
And Douglas—who famously fought a one-armed man with one arm behind his
back in Lonely Are the Brave—fights Dern with both arms tied behind his back.
www.alexcox.com
THE LAST 10 FILMS I’VE SEEN*
SEBASTIÁN SILVA: CONTENT MEDIA/THE KOBAL COLLECTION/JOSE MIGUEL SILVA; POSSE: PARAMOUNT/KOBAL
ISABELLE HUPPERT ACTRESS (ABUSE OF WEAKNESS )
1. Stranger by the Lake Alain Guiraudie, 2013
2. Gloria Sebastián Lelio, 2013
3. Snowpiercer Bong Joon Ho, 2013
4. The Place Beyond the Pines Derek Cianfrance, 2013
5. Reprise Joachim Trier, 2006
6. Maps to the Stars David Cronenberg, 2014
7. Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2014
8. Bird People Pascale Ferran, 2014
9. Eastern Boys Robin Campillo, 2013
10. La Ritournelle Marc Fitoussi, 2014
 casting call, and your guess about the plot’s
twists is as good as ours: “Looking for any-
one with Kosher butcher experience...”
TIME TRAVELS
Jia Zhang-ke plans
to start shooting his
next film, Mountain
River Old Friend, in
October. The story
begins with a
young couple in 1990s China, then jumps
to the present-day after they’ve separated,
and finally lands in the future with their son,
living in Australia. Jia’s wife and muse, Zhao
Tao, will star, and he’s again tapping interna-
tional producers for support (MK2 in France
and Japan’s Office Kitano). It’ll also be his
first film partly shot outside of China, for
the Down Under portion. Don’t cheer too
loudly: Jia’s previous feature, A Touch of Sin,
has yet to be released in his home country.
A CONVERSATION PIECE
You’ve read the book of interviews, you’ve
seen all the movies—now, finally, comes the
feature documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut,
directed by FC’s own Deputy Editor Kent
Jones, aka Director of the New York Film
Festival. While 26 hours of recordings were
made for Truffaut’s book-length interview,
much of it went unused, and the film will
draw upon this material, with commentary
from a who’s who of contemporary cinema:
Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wes
Anderson, David Fincher, Brian De Palma,
James Gray, Richard Linklater, the Dardennes,
Olivier Assayas, and Arnaud Desplechin.
A spring 2015 release is planned.
Catherine Breillat is also making her first English-language film, Bridge of Floating Dreams, set in Japan about
20 years after Hiroshima and pairing an Australian backpacker and a nightclub hostess ... Don Cheadle hopes to
raise $325,000 for his Miles Davis biopic via crowdfunding. Cheadle will star in and direct Miles Ahead, which will
involve Davis joining forces with a Rolling Stone writer. Ewan McGregor co-stars ... And a belated congratulations
to 2014 Guggenheim Fellows Terence Nance, Joshua Marston, Chris Doyle, and Lynne Sachs (to name but a few!).
10 filmcomment July-August 2014
SITE SPECIFICS | Toronto Film Review
Northern Exposure
while the stark design bespeaks utilitarian concerns rather than voguish minimal-
ism, a great deal of care is put into this particular public scrapbook. Curated by
unabashed Francophile David Davidson, the “found” items on Toronto Film Review
largely consist of Cahiers du cinéma and Positif articles from various eras, some trans-
lated, others summarized, and all lovingly prefaced. Come here to find Stéphane
Delorme’s 2012 appreciation of Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant secret, or Eighties considera-
tions of Steven Spielberg not readily available in English anywhere else. (Davidson’s
translations have been sanctioned by the magazine itself through retweets.) His exami-
nations of past editorial regimes at Cahiers and Positif are also insightful, enriched by
scans of old spreads and covers.
Embedded YouTube clips of rare documentaries are another of the site’s specialties
(one post juxtaposes mid-Eighties docs on Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard to reveal
the similarities between the two), but so is the featured writing by the site’s own edi-
tor. Davidson’s work spans academic papers (the one on French film criticism before
1951 is invaluable), notes on new releases (from Denis Côté’s Bestiaire to Jo Sung-hee’s
A Werewolf Boy), discussions with fellow Toronto-based critics, book reviews, and
thoughts on recent festivals. Unlike many compulsive compilers, he’s actually read and
thought about all the stuff to which he links. While that may seem unremarkable, it’s
increasingly rare in an ecosystem mostly populated by listicles and cultural-studies con-
cepts clumsily grafted onto plot summaries.—Violet Lucca
THE LAST 10 FILMS I’VE SEEN*
PHILIPPE GARREL DIRECTOR (JEALOUSY )
1. The Rules of the Game Jean Renoir, 1939
2. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas F.W. Murnau, 1931
3. Sunrise F.W. Murnau, 1927
4. Ida Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013
5. Adieu au langage Jean-Luc Godard, 2014
6. Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch, 2013
7. Blue Is the Warmest Color Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013
8. Pan pleure pas Gabriel Abrantes, 2014
9. Gravity Alfonso Cuarón, 2013
10. The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson, 2014
ZHAO TAO: PHOTO BY GODLIS

1 2
3 4
FILM COMMENT’S TRIVIAL TOP 20®
BEST SONG SCORES*
1. Mean Streets Martin Scorsese, 1973
2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller Robert Altman, 1971
3. American Graffiti George Lucas, 1973
4. Cold Water Oliver Assayas, 1994
5. Killer of Sheep Charles Burnett, 1979
6. Dazed and Confused Richard Linklater, 1993
7. Trainspotting Danny Boyle, 1996
8. Easy Rider Dennis Hopper, 1969
9. The Royal Tenenbaums Wes Anderson, 2001
10. Super Fly Gordon Parks Jr., 1972
11. Distant Voices, Still Lives Terence Davies, 1988
12. The Big Chill Lawrence Kasdan, 1983
MEAN STREETS: TAPLIN-PERRY-SCORSESE/KOBAL; M C CABE & MRS. MILLER: WARNER BROS./KOBAL; COLD WATER: © ISABELLE WEINGARTEN
13. The Graduate Mike Nichols, 1967
14. Scorpio Rising Kenneth Anger, 1964
15. Bad Timing Nicolas Roeg, 1980
16. Goodfellas Martin Scorsese, 1990
17. Repo Man Alex Cox, 1984
18. Harold and Maude Hal Ashby, 1971
19. Boogie Nights Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997
20. Pulp Fiction Quentin Tarantino, 1994
*tional
Films that rely on popular music instead of a tradi-
score. Based on a poll of FILMC OMMENT
tributors.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
NO IDEAS? NO PROBLEM.
1. Cliffhanger: Scaling new heights of
unoriginality, in Renny Harlin’s footsteps.
2. Stargate: Roland Emmerich decides no
new idea is better than his own, old one.
3. Point Blank: As in, the 2010 French film.
They’re not even remaking the right one!
4. Left Behind: A sound idea: Judgment Day
calls for the unflappable calm of Nic Cage.
5. Purple Rain: Poverty Row, neorealism, and
Rouch all cited as influences. Aim high!
RESTORATION ROW COMING SOON FROM THE FRONT LINES OF FILM PRESERVATION
Featured restorations:
Dragon Inn | King Hu | 1967 | Chinese Taipei Film Archive
King Hu’s breakout film—a full-color wuxia
set nearly a century into the Ming Dynasty—
owes less to the codes of the martial-arts film
than it does to the rhythms of traditional
Beijing opera and the iconography of what
Hu called “ancient Chinese espionage.”
(Half kidding, he billed the film as a response
to the James Bond series.) But in the stark
precision of its movements, the uncanny balance of its construction, and its strict
parceling out of skills among characters, the ancient practice which Dragon Inn most
resembles might be the game of chess.
At stake is custody of the three children of a recently executed general. On one
side, protecting the kids, stand a row of pawns (several dozen faceless soldiers); two
knights, a stocky, short-fused swordsman (Hsieh Han) and his sister (Polly Shang-
kuan); and a master warrior (Shih Chun), a king who functions on the chessboard like
a queen. On the other side stand the assassins who work for the ruthless eunuch gov-
ernors and move in swift, bishop-like diagonals. The action—including stunning fight
scenes—is mostly restricted to a dusty restaurant-inn, which allows Hu to show off
his gifts as a divider, organizer, and manipulator of cinematic space. As each side starts
losing pieces, the playing field expands, culminating in a bloody, dramatic checkmate.
Le Tempestaire | Jean Epstein | 1947 | Cinémathèque française
In 1929, immediately after adapting Poe’s
The Fall of the House of Usher, Jean Epstein
developed a lasting fascination with the
windswept, rocky Brittany coast and its scat-
tered inhabitants. Le Tempestaire, in which a
young woman visits an aging sorcerer to res-
cue her sailor lover from a storm at sea, dates
from this final phase of Epstein’s career. In
this decelerated, stretched-out, inexhaustibly mysterious study of the play of light on
faces and the crashing of waves on land, Epstein limited himself to the simplest, nar-
rowest range of cinematic tools—and produced one of the most haunting of all
attempts to pin down the movies’ strange, ambiguous relationship to nature.
con-
New and forthcoming restorations:
The advertising films of Peter Kubelka | 1958-66 | Vienna Film Museum
La Chienne | Jean Renoir | 1931 | Films du Jeudi/Cinémathèque française
Después del diluvio (After the Deluge) | Jacinto Esteva-Grewe | 1970 | Filmoteca
de Catalunya
The Heirs | Carlos Diegues | 1970 | Cinemateca Brasileira
The Iron Mask | Allan Dwan | 1929 | Museum of Modern Art
Kujira (Whale) | Noburo Ofuji | 1953 | National Film Center Tokyo
Llampo de sangre | Enrique Vico | 1954 | Cineteca Nacional de Chile
Macedonia in Images | Arsenij Jovkov | 1923 | Cinematheque of Macedonia
The Outlaw and His Wife | Victor Sjöström | 1918 | Svenska Filminstitutet
Way Down West | Hou Yao | 1927 | Hong Kong Film Archive
Compiled and written by Max Nelson. Send information on upcoming film preserva-
tions and restorations to editor@filmlinc.com.
July-August 2014 filmcomment 11
encore b y H OWA R D H A M P T O N

The Marital Arts To have, hold, and terrorize in Tom

Noonan’s dinner-guest psychodrama The Wife
T om noonan’s 1995 film The Wife is a finely concentrated, primeval mix of streetwise toughness,
subtle, perturbing, strangely humane, and nearly perfect American deeply ingrained malice, and belittling
comedy. It’s the kind of film I always hoped Woody Allen would eventu- humor. (Her nicknames for him include
“Momo,” “Coco,” and—improvised in a
ally make, shedding the limitations of middlebrow deference and propri-
flash of escalating contempt—“Wormie.”)
ety: the habitual inferiority complex of someone who doesn’t feel he At every turn she outmaneuvers his efforts
really belongs at the grown-ups’ table long after he’s earned a seat there. to leave his revered doctors/parental figures
But The Wife has no such compunctions about the lively vulgarities lurk- in peace, angling for a dinner invitation
ing inside cerebral sanctuaries—no one here is going to use phony and planting herself in their midst like a
WASPy euphemisms when “fuck” is plainly called for. spiny potted cactus.
Young’s performance is head-on ferocious
It opens in the chilly outdoors, by a soli- Writer-director-editor-composer Noonan yet full of delicate recesses and nuances—
tary house well off the beaten track. This takes as his premise the old standby about a fearlessly funny without ever slipping into
might easily be Ingmar Bergman’s private couple who come over to dinner and won’t caricature, terrifying without losing touch
compound at the North Pole: we first see leave. He uses the framework as a magni- with the choking essence of suffering that
married therapists Jack and Rita, played by fying glass to explore the keen farcical possi- produced all this emotional turmoil and
Noonan and Julie Hagerty, walking back bilities in your basic savage, soul-baring seething-cauldron humor. The actress was
to that rustic abode—him tall, swaddled, Strindberg-Bergman-Albee wound-fest, while married to Noonan at the time, and this
and brandishing a staff-like walking stick, laying a believable foundation for the actors part gives her the opportunity to astonish,
her a bundle of frayed nerves scuttling to build fully idiosyncratic characters on. If without it seeming like a mere showcase to
crabbily across the whiteness. They’re frac- dysfunctionality is the alpha and omega of strut her stuff. She’s attentively engaged in
tious variations on a von Sydow/Ullmann modern movie comedy, here it feels utterly the moment and with the actors around
twosome recast as New Agey head- grounded in painful circumstance and the her, even as the character’s going down in
shrinkers. (Chakras are duly invoked—and give-and-take of life’s ordinary madness. a self-immolating pyre of destructiveness.
the finer points thereof debated—along Noonan’s four-piece ensemble is a quar- Hagerty’s Rita, shifting between bone-
with the old Bob Newhart Show mantra of tet of troubled, miserable, manipulative weary withdrawal, prim good-hostess/
“getting in touch with your true feelings.”) individuals. As the self-abnegating patient therapist calm, hysterical pill-head laughter,
Soon a forlorn patient (Wallace Shawn) Cosmo, Shawn gives the definitive reading and barely contained agony, is a study in
pulls up in the long, dark driveway to the of a pathetically ingratiating neurotic panicked desperation and denial. Trying
couple’s cozy little hideaway, interrupting whose schlubby façade masks a hard core to keep the evening, along with her shaky
their tense Sunday evening “we” time. of (im)passive aggression and sexual rage. career/marriage, from capsizing in a
He’s an apologetic, anxious elf who has Young’s domineering former stripper Arlie maelstrom of recriminations and rupture,
his own baggage—one very aggrieved, more than holds her own against her semi- she manifests a blend of bravery, resigna-
embittered wife (Karen Young)—in tow. intellectual “worm” of a husband with a tion, and eruptive, out-of-the-blue cunning.

12 filmcomment July-August 2014

Playing the most outwardly fragile member
of this wreckage crew, she has the most sur-
prising reserves of obstinacy—this is the best
example of Hagerty’s devastating knack for
ringing complex changes on a misleadingly
lightweight voice and skittish appearance.
She’s a well-seasoned time bomb inside a
sugary box of Girl Scout cookies.
And Noonan himself, a looming figure
out of a Charles Addams drawing, bran-
dishes his stick like a sly cross between
Chaplin’s cane and a cult leader’s brow-
beating cudgel. Jack’s modus operandi is
an inscrutable combination of brotherly
concern and Big Brotherly malevolence.
His cruel sarcasm (picking up on Arlie’s
jeers, he joins in her taunting—“Coco’s
been a bad boy”—savoring the words with
mischievous sadism) is tempered by boyish
exuberance just enough to make you won-
der whether he’s a smiling monster or, at
heart, a well-meaning wolf-mensch with his
own unconquerable insecurities. Noonan’s
genius is for making it gradually apparent
that Jack could be both of those things,
and maybe something else in the bargain.
Then and now an actor mostly recognized
for playing fiends and ghouls (Michael
Mann’s 1986 Manhunter; an especially
chilling 1996 episode of The X-Files,
“Paper Hearts”), Noonan here channels the
charisma of nihilism through carefully
placed intimations of vulnerability: possibly
genuine, but certainly a means to tune into
and co-opt the vulnerabilities of others.
The film sprouts like organic tendrils—
or is it cracked pods?—out of this Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? setup. (If the
Body Snatchers came for this group, they’d
run away with their spores between their
legs.) Like his earlier film What Happened
Was… (94), The Wife was workshopped as
a play first, under the title Wifey (as in
Arlie’s caustic howdy-do, “I’m Wifey,”
though someone must have figured the title
was too abrasively down-market for the
film). But it was a big leap forward visually,
as well as in terms of naturalistic, conver-
sational flow. (What Happened Was…
embraced the unbearable awkwardness of a
bad date between two socially inept, deeply
impaired people, but its third act retained
a very stagy presentation.) Joe DeSalvo’s
cinematography is immensely evocative in
the way it integrates direct, intimate view-
points with elegant setups, creating a split-
screen effect by showing one conversation
through the kitchen entrance and another
reflected in a living-room mirror. Or show-
ing an upside-down image of Jack and
Cosmo’s reflection in a pond—he gets a
lot of still-life mileage within a maze-like
home. Blazing firelight is used to comic
expressionist effect, as are faces distorted
in wine bottles: the play of light and dark-
ness is configured into a Munch palette of
sexual unease (cf. Arlie’s striptease demon-
stration). Translucent close-ups put you
right under the characters’ itchy skins.
Noonan has a great way of spreading
out the discomfiture equally, not playing
favorites, and constantly keeping the ex-
pectations off-balance. Just when someone
pulls a stunt of pure awfulness or blurts
something horrendous, there will be a flash
of forlorn defenselessness, a frantic desire to
connect. And no sooner than you’ve regis-
tered that, there’s another kick in the gut:
Jack smirking, “I hope it wasn’t something I
said,” or responding to Rita’s plaintive “Why
Noonan’s four-piece ensemble
is a quartet of troubled, miser-
able, manipulative individuals.
are you doing this?” with a blithely con-
temptuous shrug. “It’s called living, honey.”
I can’t think of another film that has
a better grasp on how the smallest things
can be freighted with all of a marriage’s
stresses. Something as simple as complain-
ing that the music’s too much and getting
up to change it can encapsulate years of
petty slights and dissatisfaction. “This is
really happening,” Jack crows during din-
ner, giddy with anticipation of what fresh
hell might be uncorked; when Arlie,
already good and drunk, asks if there’s any
more wine, he just smiles beneficently. “I
think I can dig something up.” The distress
in The Wife is right in your face, but it has
an encrusted, unfolding quality. Cosmo
and Arlie are handcuffed to each other by
infuriated need: each is the other’s lifeline,
but knowing a partner’s weaknesses, and
living with the realization that they know
yours, has blossomed into mutual loathing.
(Love can work that claustrophobic juju
on you.) The same goes for Jack and Rita,
to a lesser (or more “civilized”) degree. And
Cosmo’s transference onto Jack and Rita is
as understandable, and inevitable, as it is
ridiculous (no wonder Arlie feels like the
Odd Woman Out in their therapeutic “fam-
ily”). Codependence is just the tip of the
iceberg. Goaded on by Jack—the therapist
as eviscerating auteur—each takes their turn
wielding the communal blowtorch and
being on the receiving end.
In What Happened Was…, in which
Karen Sillas’s Jackie has turned her child-
hood sexual abuse into an infantilized,
sing-song form of art therapy, Noonan
makes an interesting connection between the
Hitchcock/De Palma/Shining mode of psy-
chosexual thriller (with all its investment in
fetish and well-regulated fear) and the more
mundane but far more unwieldy horrors of
actual existence. Compared to the chain of
mortifications possible between two—let
alone four—people stuck in a dining room
with each other, fanciful acts of orchestrated
violence are a release and blissful escape
from the dreadful demands of intimacy.
Slashers and serial maniacs are safety valves,
Santa’s helpers to keep our real night terrors
under wraps. The Wife watchfully expounds
on the earlier film’s notion of “the lonely,
damaged, crippled, the people who make
this country what it is.” Noonan replaces the
shopworn conception of Ordinary People
with the truer and, oddly enough, more uni-
versal one of Damaged People. More than
a handy conceit, here it’s a way of being, the
four-alarm siren song of this American life.
“We should all become friends,” Jack
tells his little brood. Jean Renoir isn’t the
name that first springs to mind from a dis-
rupted social context like this, but everyone
here emphatically has their own reasons.
Neither is Chekhov’s, but if there’s a con-
temporaneous movie with which Noonan’s
raucous chamber piece has a kinship, it is
Louis Malle’s considerably more subdued
1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street (also with
Shawn). When I first discovered The Wife
on cable in the late Nineties, I figured that if
Woody Allen had directed it—branded it—
the movie would have reached a decent-
sized audience. But maybe for Allen’s audi-
ence, the whole point is to touch on these
problems without ever getting too close to
the bone. If you can look at The Wife and
say you haven’t been there and been undone
like that, either you’ve led a charmed life or
you’re kidding yourself. In Noonan’s world,
we’ve met the maniacs, and they is us. 
Howard Hampton is a longtime con-
tributor to Film Comment.
July-August 2014 filmcomment 13
Help the Aged Tosca’s
Kiss tours a retirement
home for artistes
iuseppe Verdi considered
G the Casa Verdi to be his
finest achievement. As its founder,
he envisioned his Milanese retire-
ment home for musicians and
singers as a place in which its resi-
dents and their spouses could
dress and furnish their quarters as
they saw fit and roam the hall-
ways as they pleased. The famed
composer even worked closely
with architect Camillo Boito in
order to ensure that the building
had suitable acoustics should its
inhabitants desire to sing.
The Casa welcomed its first
residents in 1902, the year after
Verdi’s death and burial with his
wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, in an
on-site tomb. The financial provi-
sion that he had left in place was
for his “guests”—whose ranks
would grow over time to more
than a thousand in total—to
live off his estate’s royalties. By the
early 1960s, however, the Casa’s
endowment had essentially run
dry, and private donations became
> > i n f o c u s : Tosca’s Kiss will screen August 3 in the Film Society of
Lincoln Center’s annual Sound + Vision series.
14 filmcomment July-August 2014
its main means of financial sup-
port. In the winter of 1984, the
Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid
took a small crew to the Casa to
shoot Tosca’s Kiss, a documentary
that presents the home as cease-
lessly bustling with life.
Schmid filmed intimate
scenes of several of the residents
showing off the wonders of
their house, including Verdi’s
tomb, rooms containing opera
costumes and props, and their
own lodgings, which are filled
with newspaper clippings and
photographs as well as other
cherished memorabilia. These
sequences reveal a comfortable
lifestyle worth maintaining.
Tosca’s Kiss has itself recently
been preserved, thanks to a beau-
tiful Swiss Film Archive 2K digital
restoration, whose color grading
was supervised by Schmid’s great
cinematographer Renato Berta.
The restoration has clarified and
intensified the beauty of the
film’s original 16mm imagery.
sound
by Aaron Cutler
Save for brief opening and
closing street views, Tosca’s Kiss
unfolds entirely within the Casa
Verdi’s cloistered walls. The film
shows the home’s residents
and Schmid’s crew wandering
through rooms flooded with light,
as their conversing voices waft
gently through the air. The elderly
people sometimes fondly recall
nights in large opera houses from
Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro.
At other times, and with great
tenderness, they sing for their
visitors. Over the course of 87
minutes Tosca’s Kiss gives us
30 pieces of music, brought to
shimmering life by the film’s per-
formers, who frequently organize
themselves into clusters of
singers gathered around a con-
ductor and a piano accompanist.
Several of the pieces, of course,
are by Verdi, including selections
from Otelo, Rigoletto, and La Travi-
ata. We are also treated to strains
of Puccini and Rossini, as well
as to live improvisations from
the Casa’s in-house maestro
Giovanni Puligheddu.
At no point does Schmid
(who directed seven operas in
addition to eight fiction features
and two other documentaries)
render these scenes as exhuma-
tions of faded glories. Rather,
each performance is seen as a
fresh creative act, culminating in
the closing credits, during which
five of the film’s leads delightedly
take curtain calls. Their ranks
include the soprano Sara Scuderi,
renowned for her performance as
the knife-wielding Puccini hero-
ine whose name Schmid bor-
rows for his film’s title. In a
touching, tone-setting early
sequence, Scuderi enters a room
and sits down to listen to a
recording of herself as Tosca,
then sings along softly (despite
doctor’s orders), exhaling at the
conclusion of the aria. As in so
many scenes in Schmid’s lovely
film, we have witnessed some-
one striking a perfect note. 
&
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ICARUS FILMS

The Allure of Failure
Francesco Vezzoli’s
cinematic masquerades
t last, postmodernism.
A I don’t know what it is, but
I know it when I see it. This is the
thing, I thought, after visiting
“Cinema Vezzoli” at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
the third part of Francesco Vez-
zoli’s “trinity” of exhibitions (fol-
lowing on from those last year in
Rome and New York) that consti-
tute an early career retrospective.
I had been put off by a state-
ment from Philippe Vergne, the
museum’s director, quoted in a Los
Angeles Times art blog:“His work is
about capturing ambiguity, it’s
about design, sex, oppression, and
the narcissism of Western culture.
It’s also about emancipation. We
are allowed to love Catherine
Deneuve, Yves Saint Laurent, and
Gore Vidal, and still be a radical.”
GREED, THE NEW FRAGRANCE, THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES, PHOTO BY GUY FERRANDIS, COURTESY OF FRANCESCO VEZZOLI
So what’s not to love? At least
Vergne’s last sentence is one of
the few assessments of Vezzoli’s
work out there that isn’t tautologi-
cal. But I needn’t have worried.
Vezzoli’s work is more concrete
than his champions allow.
I have claimed elsewhere
that all art today aspires to the
condition of cinema. Vezzoli’s
work is an exception: it is about
cinema, but it refuses cinema.
All of the short videos projected
in “Cinema Vezzoli” are alibis for
not making real movies.
For example, there’s a pitch-
perfect pastiche of an E! True Hol-
lywood Story episode about a
precocious Italian artist from the
provinces named Francesco Vez-
zoli. He wanted to attend a Donna
Summer concert when he was 4
years old, but at age 35, he ends
up face down in a swimming
> > in f o cu s : “Cinema Vezzoli” runs through August 11 at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
pool, like William Holden in Sunset
Blvd., but a suicide instead of a
murder victim. A fantasy of utter,
complete failure, but Vezzoli him-
self must fail again, fail better.
Also in the exhibition is a 60-
second commercial from 2009 for
an imaginary perfume, GREED
by Francesco Vezzoli, directed by
Roman Polanski, starring Natalie
Portman and Michelle Williams.
There’s an even shorter commer-
cial for “an exhibition that will
never open,” a new La Dolce Vita.
Of course, there’s also his most
notorious work, Trailer for an Imagi-
nary Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula
(05), a good parody of the form
that made me want to see the
original if not the remake. Court-
ney Love gets a minute to herself
at the end and steals the show.
The videos are all well exe-
cuted, and Vezzoli’s ability to
enlist actual movie stars (espe-
cially retired or burnt-out stars) in
the casts is remarkable. With art
museums so starstruck today, that
has counted for enough to make
his reputation. However, the fog of
critical jargon that now surrounds
his work shouldn’t fool us. He
knows better. Perhaps the show’s
use of lo-fi projection from a DVD
is his way of suggesting his own
indifference to his video work.
vision
by Thom Andersen
Vezzoli loves movies, particu-
larly highbrow art films, but this
love is expressed only in the pic-
tures hanging on the wall, notably
in two museum-scale frame en-
largements. In the first room as
you enter, there is La fine di Edipo Re,
a silk-screen print of the word fine
(“end”) from Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex,
with the director’s signature em-
broidered in small script on the
lower right. And in the exhibition’s
last room, there is a woven 2007
tapestry of a title card from As
You Desire Me, in black, white, and
gray. The fabric’s lustrous grays owe
nothing to cinema. The name of the
star, Greta Garbo, and the producer,
George Fitzmaurice, appear. The
name of Luigi Pirandello, whose
play the film adapts, is absent, but
it will be present in the minds of
some viewers. Was it Pirandello that
attracted Vezzoli to this film? Or was
it because Garbo practiced needle-
point, which was Vezzoli’s first
artistic and most lasting medium?
Vezzoli understands what Andy
Warhol once said, according to Vic-
tor Bockris’s Warhol biography: “All
the best art is made by women.”
So the star of this show is Anni
Albers. Denied the opportunity to
study architecture at the Bauhaus
because of her sex, Albers turned
women’s work—weaving—into
a great modern art. She is evoked
in a set of three posters (06-07) for
imagined movies: All About Anni:
Anni vs. Marlene (The Saga Begins),
with Albers and Marlene Dietrich;
Der Bauhaus Engel: Anni vs. Mar-
lene (The Prequel), starring Albers
and her husband Josef and co-
starring Dietrich; and Emmanuelle
(07), starring just Anni Albers.
But like Warhol, Vezzoli is not
a woman. He’s not even Andy
Warhol. What to do then? For an
artist whose ambition is over-
weening but whose temperament
is reclusive? When the possibility
of art as a form of political or cul-
tural opposition is not on his hori-
zon? No more fake movies, please.
Can he turn his art into a self-
portrait? Yes, if he can make him-
self the hero of a postmodern epic,
that is, a figure of passivity in a civi-
lization where it is possible to do
everything, but not possible to do
something. Even Vezzoli’s attempt
to resacralize the gallery space
failed. For the MoMA PS1 part of
his retrospective, he had an old
deconsecrated church in Calabria
dismantled and packed up so that
it could be shipped to New York
and reassembled in the courtyard
of the gallery as “The Church of
Vezzoli.” The Calabrian authorities
however blocked the transfer until
the cultural and historical value of
the church could be determined.
Henceforth, Vezzoli’s failures will
be more important than his suc-
cesses. But in the end, he can
always turn back to needlepoint. 
July-August 2014 filmcomment 15
a face in the crowd by CHUCK STEPHENS

Punch-Drunk Love Paul Kelly’s movie career beat the odds

e made a lot of plans, but they all fell through.” Tigers (42), even when he’s stuck under a

“W Those 11 rather innocuous words—spoken in a voice tinged

with panic and humiliation by veteran screen star and real-life ex-con
Paul Kelly, somewhere late in Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 anti-anti-
Semitism noir masterpiece Crossfire—are the sound of something
enormous and invisible quietly coming apart. It’s the sound of mid-
20th-century America, breaking into pieces.
Kelly’s role, his brief but extraordinary
performance, his life story, and those 11
words haunt and define Crossfire, just as
they haunt and define film noir, postwar
America, and the midcentury male psyche.
They speak of the aftermath of a war we’d
just “won,” and of every war we’ve fought
since; of men, not triumphant but adrift.
“We made a lot of plans but they all fell
through”—plans for victory and peacetime
and harmony and a shining future; plans
that we somehow knew at their conception
would never come true. In Crossfire, so bro-
ken and unfixable is Kelly’s character that
we never even learn who or what he actually
is. Menacing? Pathetic? Gloria Grahame’s
husband, her pimp, or just another psycho
john? He’s only in Crossfire for a few min-
utes, but he makes every second count, his
persona turning a half-dozen times on a
dime. He sees a soldier and his eyes light
up: “You think I could be a soldier?”
he eagerly asks a thoroughly befuddled
George Cooper, only to let his smile wither
immediately back into a disgusted sneer.
“Eh. What would I want to be soldier for?”
Kelly made a lot of plans too, and—
despite the surfeit of shadows that accumu-
lated over the beginnings of his Hollywood
career—most of them came true. Born in
Brooklyn in 1899, he started acting onstage
and in Vitagraph pictures at the age of 8; he
claimed to have made something like 300
silent shorts, and even dabbled in writing one
or two. He won praise and made friends on
Above: Crossfire, Flying Tigers, The File on
Thelma Jordon. Below: Side Street portrait
His most indelible marks were
made in a string of minor film
noirs, where he often played
on the lighter side of dark.
Kelly had long since fallen in love. It was one
of the great Tinseltown scandals of the
Twenties, a sequel to both the Fatty Arbuckle
and William Taylor Desmond affairs that
had begun the decade with a bang. Kelly
served time in the big house, a mere three
years, and married Mackaye as soon as
the terms of his parole allowed. They
Rocky the Flying Squirrel cap and goggles
for most of the film. He had the kind of
made-of-granite face that belonged on tough
guys good and bad, with a nose that stuck
out and canted up just slightly, like a baseball
cap with the bill popped up; more comical
than creepy, really, but never exactly funny,
even when he’s introducing himself with the
Sturges-esque epithet “I.B. McGoogin, Presi-
dent of the American Poultry Protective
Association” in Murder with Pictures (36).
He played cons and ex-cons, and even
turned it all around at the very end, starring
as prison warden (and reformer) Clinton
Duffy in a pair of films—Duffy of San
Quentin and The Steel Cage (both 54)—
that had been conceived as episodes of a
television show, which never aired.
His most indelible marks were made in
a string of minor film noirs, where he often
played on the lighter side of dark: as a
deranged buddy of DeForest Kelley in Fear
in the Night (47), as the cop who narrates
Anthony Mann’s Side Street (49), as a
determined DA in The Secret Fury (50),
and as a stiff-necked police chief in Robert
Siodmak’s The File on Thelma Jordon
(50). But it’s as the quisling of Crossfire,
with no one knowing where he came
from or what he’s capable of, that Kelly
should be remembered for, speaking
those 11 words and ringing down the
curtain on us all. 
PORTRAIT: EVERETT COLLECTION

and off Broadway, among them actress
Dorothy Mackaye and her husband, vaude-
villian Ray Raymond. In 1926, Kelly moved
to Hollywood; Mackaye and Raymond fol-
lowed a few months later. In 1927, Kelly
pummeled Raymond to death during a dis-
pute involving epic quantities of gin and the
affections of the latter’s Mrs., with whom
remained together until her death in
1940, and Kelly continued a successful
and lifelong motion-picture career. Those
shadows had been silver-lined clouds.
Kelly made films of all sorts, as comfort-
able as a suave Follies director across from
Judy Garland in Ziegfeld Girl (41) as he was
riding tail gunner for John Wayne in Flying

16 filmcomment July-August 2014

critics’ choice E I G H T F I L M C R I T I C S R AT E R E C E N T A N D U P C O M I N G R E L E A S E S

Marjorie Manohla Scott Robert Peter Wesley Rex Gavin

The Films Baumgarten Dargis Foundas Horton Keough Morris Reed Smith

BOYHOOD      

RICHARD LINKLATER
CHILD OF GOD     
JAMES FRANCO
THE DANCE OF REALITY   

ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
DORMANT BEAUTY    
MARCO BELLOCCHIO
EDGE OF TOMORROW    
DOUG LIMAN  

EXHIBITION  
JOANNA HOGG
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS 
  
JOSH BOONE
GODZILLA
GARETH EDWARDS      

HELI
AMAT ESCALANTE    

THE IMMIGRANT
JAMES GRAY      

JERSEY BOYS
CLINT EASTWOOD     

LAND HO!   

MARTHA STEPHENS & AARON KATZ
MALEFICENT
ROBERT STROMBERG   

ME AND YOU   
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI
A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST
SETH MACFARLANE     

MOOD INDIGO 
MICHEL GONDRY  

NIGHT MOVES
KELLY REICHARDT       

NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY 

LAV DIAZ   

THE ROVER
DAVID MICHÔD      

THE SACRAMENT  

TI WEST
SNOWPIERCER
BONG JOON HO    

A SUMMER’S TALE 

ERIC ROHMER   

THE TRIP TO ITALY

MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM     

22 JUMP STREET
PHIL LORD & CHRIS MILLER     

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

BRYAN SINGER   

     = EXCELLENT     = VERY GOOD    = GOOD   = OF INTEREST  = MEDIOCRE  = BOMB

participants: Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, Scott Foundas of Variety, Robert
Horton of The Herald (Everett, Wash.), Peter Keough of The Boston Globe, Wesley Morris of Grantland, Rex Reed of The New York
Observer, and Gavin Smith of Film Comment

July-August 2014 filmcomment 17

 IT’S
ABOUT

Richard Linklater’s BOYHOOD spans 12 years,

18 filmcomment July-August 2014
TIME
but it’s always in the moment/BY HOLLY WILLIS
July-August 2014 filmcomment 19
T
he title of richard linklater’s new film is
misleading: Boyhood isn’t really about boyhood
at all. True, it charts the nervous insecurities,
roiling family dramas, and quotidian travails of
a particular boy. And there are connections to be
drawn between this film and the images of
maturing young men crafted by other directors throughout the
history of cinema: François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, for exam-
ple, offers a parallel, while Gus Van Sant’s gritty young hustlers in
My Own Private Idaho and Larry Clark’s wiry boy bodies in films
like Kids and Bully offer counterpoints. But at its core, Linklater’s
attentive portrait of a Texan boy named Mason is less about what
it means to be a young male than it is an evocation of another key
theme in the filmmaker’s body of work, namely time. And not just
time as a philosophical concept, but our time, the present moment,
and what it means to be alive now. Right now.
The film focuses on Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he and his sister
Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter), mother
Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke)
learn, grow, and fight, ignore, and taunt one another, facing life’s
myriad ups and downs over the course of a dozen years. What
makes Boyhood so remarkable, though, is that Linklater actually
shot the film in short annual increments across 12 years, so that we
witness not just the arc of a story but the actual physical and emo-
tional transformations of the
characters—and the actors—as We witness not just
they grow and age. Accordion- the arc of a story but the
like, the film collapses those 12 actual physical and
years into just under three emotional transforma-
hours. The effect is stunning.
tions of the characters—
Mason/Ellar slowly trans-
forms from a boy in first grade and the actors—as they
to a young man who, at age grow and age.
18, is ready for college. His sis-
ter also grows up before our
eyes, from a bratty kid bent on harassing her younger brother to
a pensive young woman pondering what’s next in life. Their
mother endures a series of bad partners while trying to build a
career and take care of her family. And their father drifts in and
out of their lives, a goofy boy in a grown man’s body who refuses
>> i n f o c u s : Boyhood opens July 11.
20 filmcomment July-August 2014
to acquiesce to adulthood and its responsibilities, until he capitu-
lates two-thirds of the way through the story, trading in his prized
GTO for a minivan to appease a new wife and baby.
Mason and Samantha are little kids, then tweens, and then
teens, their soft and round young faces becoming more angular
and specific, their bodies elongating—Mason develops a slow,
lanky insouciance, while Samantha turns into a dark-eyed, petite
twentysomething. For Olivia and Mason Sr., the transformation
is more subtle, but no less striking as time marks its passage
across their faces, creasing their eyes, while the weight of wisdom
settles over their hunched shoulders.
L
inklater’s latest temporal gambit shouldn’t
come as too much of a surprise. Anyone familiar
with the director’s increasingly sophisticated
body of work knows that time is a recurring
theme. In films as radically diverse as Tape (01),
which unfolds in real time, or Waking Life (01),
in which the story’s dreamy meandering creates the sense of a con-
tinuously unfolding present, Linklater has repeatedly explored the
vicissitudes of temporality, and line after line of dialogue in these
movies reflects on the subjective experience of time, or questions its
philosophical significance, or considers its sly complexity. “Time
goes by, and people cry, and everything goes too fast,” sings Céline
(Julie Delpy) at the start of Before Sunset (04), for example.
Indeed, Linklater comes closest to the feat of Boyhood and its
temporal exploration with his Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before
Midnight trilogy, a masterful chronicle of love and marriage simi-
larly shot at intervals, in this case spanning 18 years. The story
begins with Before Sunrise (95), when Céline and Jesse (Ethan
Hawke) meet on a train. Jesse convinces Céline to join him in
Vienna for the evening before he catches a plane home, and the two
spend the next 12 hours together. The film continuously reminds us
of time—we’re aware of the pair’s constraints, and the half-day
shared between them feels very much like real time. And this sense
of real time is enhanced by several particularly long takes, including
a beautiful unbroken six-minute shot on a streetcar as the couple
talks. We can feel the present moment unfolding before our eyes.
The story picks up nine years later with Before Sunset, a film
that bumps the temporal experimentation up a notch by making
the two-hour movie cover a two-hour span. Once again, we expe-
rience a sense of urgency due to Jesse’s impending departure and
the literal reality of the min-
Linklater has repeatedly
utes passing. Simultaneously,
we also feel the pull of the
explored the vicissi-
past, the sense of longing and tudes of temporality,
loss for a relationship that and line after line of
never had time to blossom. dialogue in his movies
These two temporalities merge reflects on the subjec-
overtly in the opening shots, as
tive experience of time,
Linklater introduces a series of
flashbacks, intercutting imagery
or questions its philo-
of the characters in 1995 and in sophical significance.
the present; on a metaphorical
level, the images from Before
Sunrise imbue Before Sunset with an aura of memory—recol-
lections of a woozy past rich with ardor underscore the urge
to rekindle old yearnings.
With the newest film, we lurch forward another nine years,
into a marriage and a sense of intimacy fraught with tension, bit-
terness, and the weight of time spent together. Before Midnight
(13) is set in Greece as Jesse and Céline, along with their twin
daughters, try in vain to enjoy a vacation together. If the previ-
ous two films delight in their ability to conjure the delicious
pleasures of early romance and erotic possibility, Before Mid-
night burns with its unerring portrait of lovers who feel like they
have exhausted all the possibilities and are thus stuck not with
the unknown but the known. They comprehend all too well each
another’s irritating foibles, disappointing flaws, and pettiness.
Céline’s self-righteousness is grating, and Jesse’s immaturity—
after all these years—is infuriating. Bickering has replaced flirta-
tion; disdain has replaced desire; and the way forward requires
a new reckoning with intimacy. The temporal experimentation
in this film is less overt than in the previous two films in the tril-
ogy—the film is structured as a series of vignettes. Each segment,
however, boasts a vivid sense of the present tense thanks in part
to the use of long takes once again.
Overall, the brilliance of the trilogy lies in its beautiful demon-
stration of how time unfurls, not necessarily forward in an easy
and smooth progression, but in fits and starts, in moments of
searing intensity surrounded by years of relentless longing and
frustration. Time opens up into a languorous sprawl, which
might concentrate in one moment, then clip along in a blur of
months and even years.
The trilogy achieves something else quite remarkable: it charts
Linklater’s two-decade maturation, and that of a generation that
grew up alongside him. And it’s this sense of maturation that
infuses Boyhood, catapulting it beyond a typical indie-film narra-
tive to something far more ambitious in scope.
B
oyhood begins in black with just the sound
of a guitar strumming. It’s the opening riff of
Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Then we see a blue sky
dotted with puffy clouds, and as the lyrics
begin—“Look at the stars, see how they shine
for you”—the film reveals a close-up of a boy’s
face (one that recalls Linklater’s own boyish looks). It’s Mason,
and he’s lying on the grass, his pensive eyes gazing upward, and
in both his dreamy countenance and his sense of wonder, we’re
invited to consider the passage of time through his perspective,
and therefore with interest, curiosity, even serenity. The film’s
point of view will embody these qualities throughout. A minute
later we meet Mason’s mother, Olivia, and a few minutes after
that, the boy is riding a bike, then spray-painting graffiti, watch-
ing TV, bowling with his dad. There’s a violent stepdad, baseball
games, camping trips, visits with grandparents, the prom, and
high-school graduation. There are quiet conversations, brooding
accusations, and surprising revelations. We move from age 7 to
8 to 9, and then suddenly at some point—oh my God!—Mason
is a sulky teenager with long stringy hair and pouty lips. One
event rolls into another, time unfolds, and, as in so many of Lin-
klater’s films, there’s no traditional narrative structure to force
conflict, no three acts to dictate development. Instead, a series of
non-hierarchical situations take place, or perhaps more accu-
rately in this case, they take time.
Hawke has described Boyhood as an example of “human
time-lapse photography,” and in so doing, he identifies the film’s
essential feat: it returns cinema to its original mandate, to reflect
reality as it occurs in time in a sequence of images. This is an
important point. The displacement of celluloid images by digital
images has been a consistent source of cultural anxiety for more
than a decade now, as has the concomitant loss of trust in the
veracity of images. Distrust of the digital is wrapped up in our
larger ambivalence about technological progress, and our con-
viction that the modern condition of living in a state of distrac-
tion is directly tied to the dizzying array of new devices.
July-August 2014 filmcomment 21
 Linklater, however, renews our expectation of cinema as a
realm of wonder—but not by advancing its techniques or reveling
in its increasing capacity to reshape reality in its portrayals. Just as
the goal of time-lapse photography is to present normally imper-
ceptible phenomena for scrutiny—flowers blossoming, clouds tum-
bling across the sky, and so on—he finds a way to give us the lives
and bodies of his characters, who grow and change against the
backdrop of the world and its events.
Boyhood allows us to move back and forth between the figure
and ground of story and history, between fictional characters and
our own world, and in the process we witness the passage of time
for a sustained and unparalleled duration.
W
e live in an era that celebrates the
self-regarding glimpse (selfies), that has
found some strange pleasure in the repeti-
tion of seven-second video loops (Vines),
and that has even engineered something
as ineffably ephemeral as the Snapchat
image that vanishes after 10 seconds. Time as it’s represented in con-
temporary image culture is instantaneous, fleeting, and quickly for-
gotten. Looking at our culture more broadly, we constantly fret
about the accelerating pace of contemporary life and about the
future, which used to sprawl in front of us across a vast horizon and
now looms all too close. Even glaciers are moving faster, and events
that were previously calculated to take place in 500 years are now
supposed to happen in 50. Time is no longer thought of in terms of
progress or a contemplative unfurling of placid duration. Against
this backdrop, Linklater proposes a different vector: he invites us to
be present—to look at the stars and see how they shine for us.
A year or two before Linklater began shooting Boyhood,
author, economist, and “technology thinker” W. Brian Arthur
argued that we need to adopt a new kind of knowing to align with
a technology-based economy. In a world characterized by rapid
change and technological development, it is no longer enough to
rely on previous experience or old frameworks for understanding
and knowledge. While previous eras emphasized order, determi-
nacy, and stasis, our current era emphasizes, in Arthur’s words, con-
tingency, indeterminacy, sense-making, and openness to change. In
the 2005 book Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in
People, Organizations, and Society, Arthur described a new way of
knowing in this context, explaining: “You need to ‘feel out’ what to
22 filmcomment July-August 2014
Time is no longer thought do. You hang back, you observe.
You’re more like a surfer or a
of in terms of progress really good race-car driver. You
or a contemplative unfurl- don’t act out of deduction, you
ing of placid duration. act out of an inner feel, making
Against this backdrop, sense as you go. You’re not
Linklater proposes a even thinking. You’re at one
different vector: he with the situation.”
In a sense, this way of
invites us to be present. knowing is what Linklater
represents in Boyhood. We’re
invited to hang back and
observe rather than rely on conventional story frameworks.
We’re asked to feel and empathize with Mason and the other
characters rather than enjoy the usual roller-coaster ride of dra-
matic conflict. We’re asked to be open to indeterminacy and
change. Can we accept the film’s invitation to be at one with the
events on screen?
A new era requires a new sense of time, and dozens of artists,
especially media artists, have been engaging with time as a topic—
from Douglas Gordon’s iconic 1993 video installation 24 Hour
Psycho, which slows Alfred Hitchcock’s 104-minute film down to
last 1,440 minutes, to Christian Marclay’s 2010 The Clock, which
excerpts and arranges snippets pegged to certain times culled from
the history of cinema to create a 24-hour chronicle. An army of
media artists, including Sharon Lockhart, Tacita Dean, Bill Viola,
Mark Lewis, and Candice Breitz, to name just a few, participate in
similar temporal investigations with films, videos, and installations.
Taken together, this work disrupts the easy forward flow of the PHOTOS BY MATT LANKES AND DEANA NEWCOMB, COURTESY OF IFC FILMS
past rolling into the present toward an oncoming future, in order
to explore new configurations. Time is suspended and questioned;
it is reconfigured, recombined, reoriented.
Linklater bridges the gap between these more art-oriented
projects and contemporary narrative cinema. He offers us a new
sense of knowing time by inviting us to be present as it unfurls.
His perspective is deftly formulated by Mason, who says with
wonder toward the end of Boyhood: “It’s as if all of time unfolded
so that we could be here.” It has, asserts Linklater. It has. 
Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice division
within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of South-
ern California.
 T HERE ARE STORIES THAT DESERVE TO BE CAPTURED FOREVER.

For close to a decade, Jaeger-LeCoultre has been associated with the best artistic
film festivals around the world and in turn pays tribute to the creative ingenuity
of filmmakers by annually awarding the Glory to the Filmmaker Award and by
supporting preservation of film. Further establishing its support of the film
community; Jaeger-LeCoultre has partnered with the Film Society of Lincoln
Center on ‘The Filmmaker in Residence’ Program. YO U D E S E RV E A R E A L WATC H.

PROUD PARTNER OF
24 filmcomment July-August 2014
 Small Triumphs
Former “art militant” Philippe Garrel shares
words of wisdom after 50 years on the front line
BY JEAN-MARC LALANNE &
JEAN-BAPTISTE MORAIN
Translated by Max Nelson
Reprinted from the December 4, 2013
issue of Les Inrockuptibles

W
ill a comprehensive garrel dvd box set ever exist, like the
ones dedicated to Rohmer, Marker, and Varda? We deeply, even impa-
tiently, hope so, because Garrel’s body of work is rare, difficult to gather
together, and contains a handful of films that are now nearly invisible,
like Un ange passe (75), Voyage au jardin des morts (78), and Le Bleu des origines (79).
These all belong to the first part of Garrel’s career, which spans the Sixties and Seventies.
Those were decades of lost revolutionary dreams and countercultural experiments, and they
gave rise to a cinema of great poetic brilliance, of which Le Révélateur (68), The Inner Scar
(72), and Les Hautes solitudes (74) now stand as the most beautiful examples. With the
advent of the Eighties and the release of his transitional film L’Enfant secret, Garrel turned
to prose, investing more in narrative and character, while maintaining his sense for the
pure and uncluttered, his taste for a kind of structural austerity in which life could appear
in all its nakedness. In this cinema of pure affect, Jealousy is the dazzling new chapter.

>> i n f o c u s : Jealousy opens August 15.

July-August 2014 filmcomment 25

 In Jealousy, the director films his son
Louis, re-establishes Anna Mouglalis as a
major actress, and brings his father Mau-
rice back from the dead. If Garrel fills his
movies with details about his life and inti-
mates, he is always equally captivated by
the work of others: Truffaut, Warhol,
Kechiche. What follows is an extensive
conversation with a true man of cinema.
Jealousy concerns your parents’ separation
when you were a child. Is this a subject that
you’ve carried with you for a long time?
No. The idea came after my father’s death.
I think of his death every day. Or at least,
I think about him all the time since his
death. So it seemed natural to me to talk
about him in a film. When he was 20,
Maurice landed on the beaches with the
Allied forces. I wanted to make a film that
would show him leaving Africa, but I
couldn’t afford it. Caroline Deruas, my
screenwriter, was at that point corre-
sponding with a woman who had been my
father’s partner when I was little, and she
suggested I make a film of their story.
Arlette Langmann wrote many of the
scenes, and then Marc Cholodenko signed
on to fill us in on the world of the theater,
the working-class crowd of actors, their
lives, their anxieties, the world that my
father frequented when he was young. I
had already titled the film J’ai gardé des
anges [“I Kept Angels”]. But finally, on my
producer’s advice, I chose Jealousy. I
thought of Moravia, who chose very gen-
eral words for the titles of his novels—
ideas that would interest everyone.
This title is simpler than the poetic titles of
many of your films. It’s mysterious. You won-
der who is jealous of whom, and the link
between the title and the story isn’t clear.
The title is not illustrative. It isn’t a film
about jealousy. There are places in the
story where jealousy has already passed.
That said, when I was young, I didn’t
exactly understand who had contempt for
whom in Contempt, but that didn’t bother
me much more than this does. [Laughs]
Would you say that your films speak about
your life?
Let’s say that they are autobiographical
and that, these days, they’re dedicated to
26 filmcomment July-August 2014
“It isn’t a film about jealousy.
I didn’t exactly understand
who had contempt for
whom in Contempt, but that
didn’t bother me much
more than this does.”
my life. My previous film, A Burning Hot
Summer, was dedicated to my best friend,
the painter Frédéric Pardo. This one is
dedicated to my father. There are autobi-
ographical spots. But the most autobio-
graphical components of my most recent
films come from dreams that I’ve jotted
down and mixed with fiction. I set things
up so that you can’t pick out the “real”
scenes. But I won’t tell you what in the
film came from a dream. I won’t give
away my tricks! [Laughs]
Would you say that cinema has complicated
your life?
At times, cinema has created my life. At
others, it’s partly destroyed it. Carax says
that “cinema destroys life.” That’s true, but
not exclusively. It’s a dialectic, a movement.
It creates an erosion; it eats away at life a
little. But in other places, it shores it up.
How does it destroy?
It’s a way to enter a house full of strangers.
These strangers are the characters, and
they make everyone mildly psychotic.
In the four years between L’Enfant secret,
which was shot in 1979 but didn’t come out
until 1982, and Liberté, la nuit [83], you didn’t
make a film. It’s the moment when your cin-
ema took a more narrative turn. Could you
tell us about that turn?
Liberté, la nuit was the first film I made
with a producer, Claude Guisard.
It was also the moment when your son Louis
was born.
It all goes together. You have a child, you
stop working for free. And to work for
pay, you have to find a producer, which
means having a screenplay ready to show.
But L’Enfant secret was a kind of transi-
tional film between these two periods. It’s
an underground film, but it’s also a narra-
tive film. A bit like the Bill Douglas trilogy
re-released in theaters last summer: narra-
tive underground cinema. Those three
films—My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My
Way Home—are magnificent, by the way.
They were made outside the system on
16mm, but are closer to the grand classical
tradition than anything the system could
have produced. They’re beautiful in the
same way that Joseph Losey’s films are
beautiful. On that note, I saw Bresson’s
Une femme douce again. It’s fantastic!
Did you feel the same way when it came out
in 1969?
I thought it was fine, but nothing more.
Bresson needed his films to be very aesthet-
ically beautiful for them to hold up: Four
Nights of a Dreamer, for instance, disap-
pointed me because his cinema seemed
badly adapted to the texture of 16mm.
Today, Une femme douce strikes me as
a masterpiece. There are two directors
who’ve grown in my estimation over time:
Pasolini and Bresson. I like Antonioni, too,
but that’s another story.
In Jealousy, we thought we found your first
Truffaut reference. Louis says: “It’s been a long
time that I’ve known who I am. It’s a bless-
ing and a pain,” which recalls the Truffaut-
esque sentiment “it’s both a joy and a
pain”—a line that turns up both in Missis-
sippi Mermaid and The Last Metro.
Truffaut has meant a lot to me, it’s true.
But Godard, too. The women in Truffaut’s
films are magnificent, but they’re object-
women, objects of desire. They’re wor-
shiped, and they’re a little phosphorescent,
like goddesses. Whereas Godard would
film his actresses straight in the eye, as
intellectual equals. I find that that makes
the world much more beautiful and inter-
esting—that equality between men and
women. At the start of the Sixties, very few
men thought that. My idea today, which
I’ve tried to examine in my recent films, is
that the masculine libido and the feminine
libido have exactly the same power.
So why do you love Truffaut?
I see that it’s classical cinema—Renoir-
esque, maybe—but I think all the solutions
he found are deeply original in the artistic
moves they make. People showered con-
tempt on Mississippi Mermaid at the time
 PHOTOS COURTESY OF DISTRIB FILMS

July-August 2014 filmcomment 27

of its release. Today, they consider it one of
his best. I love it, like all Truffaut.
On its release in 1969, post–May ’68, wouldn’t
the film have seemed to you a little bourgeois
in its mode of production?
Ah, but I was completely disengaged by ’69,
starting with Le Révélateur, my film shot in
the immediate aftermath of May. I didn’t
consider myself a militant for anything but
art. I made a very bohemian life for myself,
coming down from the clouds to a much
lower standard of life. It was interesting.
The period when I was poor wasn’t the
worst of my life. It’s for that reason that I
try not to get hooked on money today. I
know that money and happiness don’t coin-
cide. That said, the fact that I’d already shot
films with very little money meant that it
didn’t pose a problem to me when the
recent economic crisis hit, production bud-
gets plummeted, and you had to pick up the
pace and shoot twice as fast. I knew. There
was a time when I shot two films per year.
Then, I made one every year and a half. At
any rate, I was always ready to grab my
camera: I did it in ’68, and if World War III
had broken out a year later, I would’ve
looked for my camera right away. [Laughs]
Is it true you never shoot more than a single
take?
Yes, most of the time. For me to shoot a sec-
ond take, something really has to go wrong.
Often, when I do decide we have to do a
second take, I don’t stop the camera. I ask
the actors to start over without a break or a
cut. That means that it’s still the first take.
You haven’t stopped or rewound; none of
that stuff has happened that gives you the
sense of retracing your steps. You’re still
moving forward through the dark, looking
for a path with a flashlight without know-
ing where you’re going. And it’s that
fragility, that uncertainty, that it’s important
for me to reproduce on screen.
Shooting little footage—which started as
an obligation and eventually evolved into
an artistic position—makes it possible for
you to work with little money.
Yes, that method becomes a part of the
whole, in the end. For Jealousy, there
were only five hours of rushes, and the
film is 76 minutes. I’m far from the 600
28 filmcomment July-August 2014
“You get hurt a lot in film-
making. When I leave home
in the morning, I think two
things: (1) no accidents, and
(2) if I get that far, a good
mise en scène.”
hours of rushes Kechiche shot for Blue
Is the Warmest Color. His film is better
than mine, but is it a hundred times bet-
ter? [Laughs] It’s all right with me that
French cinema should be saved by Blue Is
the Warmest Color.
Saved? Is it in danger?
Yes, there’s nothing anymore. I haven’t
seen Stranger by the Lake, mind you, and
I’m sure it’s good, because Guiraudie has
a personal style and That Old Dream That
Moves was a marvel. I loved Camille
Rewinds by Noémie Lvovsky. And Holy
Motors by Leos Carax. I find his narrative
ideas brilliant. The story of this guy whose
job is to play different people and profes-
sions, I find that extraordinary. It makes me
think of Situationism: everyone is an actor.
Everything happens as the staging of a spec-
tacle. It’s a level of collective alienation that
humanity’s arrived at. And the musical
scenes in the church and La Samaritaine are
magnificent. And I thought Bruno Dumont’s
Camille Claudel 1915 was terrific. The idea
of a famous actress, Juliette Binoche, sur-
rounded by actual mental patients fits a cer-
tain reality. Because—and this is an idea I
really believe—in nearly every asylum there’s
a locked-up intellectual. He’s not mad; he
just has a persecution complex or some kind
of fragility. I think that’s always relevant,
and that if we could see today’s society
clearly, we’d cry all day, like certain mental
patients. The film gives you that idea.
How did you choose Anna Mouglalis to star
in Jealousy?
I met her in Rome. My son and her stepson
happened to be friends. For all my recent
films, I’ve looked for actresses who could be
Louis’s partners. So I did some research. I
had shot a test with Anna, I wasn’t con-
vinced, and when I looked back over the
images to soothe my conscience, I realized
that there was fantastic chemistry between
Anna and Louis. I always take one actor as
a jumping-off point and look for actors who
go well with him. I branch out, like a tree.
This is the first of the four films you’ve made
with your son in which his character attempts
to commit suicide and fails. Why?
These suicide stories are unconscious things.
Maybe because I’m not totally sadistic
toward my son? It’s funny: Valeria [Bruni
Tedeschi] made fun of me in her film A Cas-
tle in Italy, in which Louis’s character has
a father who is a director who makes him
shoot himself in the head in a scene.
[Laughs] That film seemed bizarre to me; it
felt like dreaming standing up. Bertolucci’s
The Dreamers had the same effect on me.
Any thoughts on the recent debates over
the employment status of French film pro-
fessionals?
I think that everyone’s right. As for me, I
always pay people at the union rate. If I
can’t, then I don’t make the film. But little
films still need to get made, too, even dur-
ing the current economic crisis. Inevitably,
then, employees will work fewer hours.
For me, the risk of accident goes up when
the pace of production goes up. It’s like
building an apartment building in six
months instead of a year. I’ve always been
obsessed by work-related accidents on film
sets. You get hurt a lot in filmmaking.
When I leave home in the morning, I think
two things: (1) no accidents, and (2) if I get
that far, a good mise en scène.
What is your relationship to realism?
I don’t like it much. I adore neorealism.
But a certain conception of realism, based
on conventions of looking true to life,
where everything seems as if it’s been
filmed by an observational camera and the
actors are forced into these realist stereo-
types—that really annoys me. Obviously,
I have to eat my words. Because Kechiche
doesn’t aim at anything but realism. But to
reach that level of realism, he has to use
the art of a great stylist. His cinema feels at
once composed and caught on the fly.
Did Rohmer matter for you?
Certain films of his. My favorite is My
Night at Maud’s. That’s a film that has
meant a lot in my life. Much later, The
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Lady and the Duke stunned me with its use
of digital and the power of its representa-
tion of history. Those, for me, are his two
best films. After those, I love Full Moon in
Paris and Claire’s Knee. But all the same, I
have to say that Rohmer isn’t as important
to me as Godard and Truffaut. It’s like Riv-
ette. I adore certain films of his, like The
Duchess of Langeais and Jeanne la Pucelle,
but I still love him a little less than those
two. Or even than Demy, whose Bay of
Angels is one of my favorite films. Maybe
Rivette and Rohmer are too classical for
me to have taken them as mentors.
But you could just as easily say that Rohmer
and Rivette represented—each in their own
way—two very strong images of what mod-
ernist cinema could be. Have you seen
Rivette’s Out 1?
No, never. It’s terrible, in a single life you
don’t have the time to see everything. I
love the idea Henri Langlois came up with:
when he was the director of the Cinéma-
thèque, he picked out 300 films that he
considered the greatest and played them in
a continuous loop, as if to make us all feel
obligated to see them.
In his essay on your films, Philippe Azoury
said that in the Seventies, Langlois would
show your new film each year on Christmas.
Where did that ritual come from?
Yes, on Christmas Eve. I was the one who
asked him, because I was a young man so
broke that I couldn’t celebrate Christmas. I
thought of people like me, who were feeling
down about not knowing what to do that
night—when you can feel so alone—and
who could say, “All right, at 8 p.m., at least
this film’s playing.” For a few of my films,
those screenings were some of the only
opportunities for audiences to see them,
because they weren’t really distributed.
You were really very poor?
Ah, yes, I lived in a very low economic stra-
tum. At one point I lived in an apartment
without heat and electricity. For a certain
number of years, I ate very little. When I
had a little cash, I’d choose to buy film
instead of a sandwich. And I borrowed a
camera. Eventually I got out of poverty,
but I still didn’t feel safe. My family didn’t
have money. For more than 15 years, I
30 filmcomment July-August 2014
“For a certain number of years,
I ate very little. When I had a
little cash, I’d choose to buy
film instead of a sandwich.”
was making films outside the professional
circuit, without a producer or a salary, so I
had to just keep shooting to earn enough to
get by. But that suited me.
Were you worried about whether or not
you’d be able to keep making films?
Sometimes a little. To keep filming, I
couldn’t be alone. Other French auteur
films had to be successful. I’m always happy
when a film like Kechiche’s wins the Palme
d’Or and gets seen by millions of viewers,
or when a director like Carax makes it into
the pantheon. I just read in Cahiers that
Oliveira couldn’t finance his most recent
film. He’s been keeping up a string of films
for so long, and then all of a sudden it stalls.
Do Bertrand Bonello’s films interest you?
Yes. House of Pleasures made me think of
India Song. It’s not a very expensive film, but
it looks grand and luxurious. That’s a practi-
cal intelligence at work. India Song cost noth-
ing. Someone rents Marguerite Duras an
oriental villa near Paris, Seyrig and Lonsdale
come for a few days, she slaps on Carlos
d’Alessio’s music, and all of a sudden India is
there, the past is there. It becomes as grand
and beautiful as a classic Hollywood film.
Something about this power to evoke some-
thing with very little except the power of
cinema carries over into House of Pleasures.
How do you feel about the films that Cop-
pola has made outside Hollywood?
I haven’t seen Twixt yet, but I really liked
Tetro. Sometimes I ask myself whether,
what with the economic crisis and the
general sense of asphyxiation it’s created
among people, there’ll be much time left
for us to work on small-scale films, films
made by hand. Maybe India Song had such
a strong presence because at the time, peo-
ple were still breathing a little more nor-
mally and could go out of their way to
discover Duras’s films. Today, when peo-
ple live so tightly, always agonizing over
the conditions that let them provide for
themselves, maybe they only want to see
things that blow everything away, films made
on a huge scale, like Gravity. That means
that when Bertolucci makes something inti-
mate like Me and You—a very beautiful
film—it really doesn’t interest anyone.
Did you know Lou Reed?
Very little. I spent a half-hour with him, his
wife, and their baby in the apartment
where I lived for a while with Nico. The
building was owned by Paul Morrissey. I
remember being stunned by the American
TV we watched there. One night we saw a
broadcast made by the Puerto Rican Che
Guevara followers, the Young Lords. It
was then that I realized how effective the
U.S. was at neutralizing any attempts at
revolution. It was enough to give a live feed
to the angriest splinter groups. That way
of integrating dissent into the huge appara-
tus of spectacle-making knocks me out.
When you lived with Nico, did the two of you
go to New York often?
Sometimes. I met Warhol regularly; he
interested me a great deal. I would stop by
to see him at the Factory. I showed him Le
Lit de la vierge, and he showed me one of
his films, Imitation of Christ, the story of a
Factory artist who loses himself in para-
noia, cuts himself off from others, and goes
insane. There were strong resemblances
between the two films, which confirmed
my theory that, without planning it, multi-
ple directors often make the same film. It
suddenly popped up in humanity’s collec-
tive unconscious, and several filmmakers
knew to grab hold of it. But my favorite
film of Warhol’s is Chelsea Girls. Without
any story, with only that brilliant split-
screen idea, it can hold your attention for
hours on shots of girls staring into the cam-
era one after another. Warhol wasn’t just a
conceptual artist; he also had a very strong
grip on filmmaking. Even just his way of
being in the world was unique and fasci-
nating. In a world where people around
him were always getting stoned and letting
themselves go, he was silent and still.
Totally paranoid, always on the alert. 
Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste
Morain edit and write for the film section
of the Paris weekly Les Inrockuptibles.
Always Enjoy Responsibly.
©2013 Anheuser-Busch InBev S.A., Stella Artois® Beer,
Imported by Import Brands Alliance, St. Louis, MO

How technological innovation has shaped film history
In December of 2010, a film
I’d written and was to direct
(The Jesuit, subsequently
made by other hands) fell
apart and I felt about to do
the same. I knew that
Andrew Sarris had given up
his class at Columbia Univer-
sity for health reasons, so I
called Annette Insdorf, Direc-
tor of Undergraduate Studies,
and asked if I could take
Andy’s slot. I figured that the
task of a five-hour class each
week would prevent any pre-
cipitous slide into depression.
Annette said Andy’s class
had already been taken but
that she would carve out a slot
for me. “What shall I teach?”
“Whatever you want.”
I’d been interested in how
film history interacts with film
technology, so I thought I’d try
that. This was the initial topic
of the course: “Films That
Changed Filmmaking.”
Columbia grad student Robert
Brink helped organize the
classes and this series of arti-
cles. (After nine weeks I shifted
gears, doing some classes on
“Films That Changed Me,”
which, perhaps, will be cov-
ered at a later time.)
32 filmcomment July-August 2014
G A M E C H A N G E R S
THE BIRTH OF
NARRATIVE
BY PAUL SCHRADER
Editorial collaborator: Robert Brink
INTRODUCTION
I
here are many perspectives from which to
view film history—sociological, psychological, eco-
nomic, political. Most often it’s viewed through the
prism of art movements and a mixture of all of
those modes, and often framed as a progression of
artists. But the artist doesn’t invent the technology,
and it’s important to remember that.
PART
Motion pictures and photography are the first art forms that
are solely the product of mechanical and chemical technology. All
the other art forms existed in some pre-technological fashion—
drawing, dance, oration—but there were no movies before there
were machines. So it’s interesting to view the history of movies as
the history of movie technology. You can track this history by
tracking its technological advances—in short, a history of toys.
A lot of technology begins as toys—that is, something inher-
ently not very useful. Entertainment technologies often appear first
as tricks, diversions, baubles. A camera obscura. A zoetrope. Even
Edison and the Lumières didn’t see the artistic ramifications of
their inventions. But then the toys evolve and become something
more. They become aesthetic tools. When viewing the history of
film as a history of technology, the important thing is not so much
the first moment that a film technology appears—though that’s
critical—but the defining moment when that toy becomes a cre-
ative tool. When the divertissement becomes a vision. It’s interest-
ing, for example, to know the name of the French chemist who
first isolated yellow chromate pigments (Louis Nicolas Vauquelin),
but it’s more exciting to see how J.M.W. Turner used those yellow
pigments in his painting.
Looking at film history from the usual perspectives can feel
like, well, history. It feels old. So my hope in taking this techno-
logical point of view is to try to get you to see things from the This is the first in a series of
filmmaker’s perspective. articles by Paul Schrader exam-
I myself can vividly remember when certain new technologies ining the influence of technol-
© MAX S. GERBER
like the Steadicam and the Zeiss lenses came in, the excitement ogy on film throughout the
you felt when you could do what you couldn’t do before. The history of cinema.
The Birth of a Nation

July-August 2014 filmcomment 33

 GAME CHANGERS: THE BIRTH OF NARRATIVE
way you felt when you saw Avatar—and hopefully you saw it
in IMAX—and went: “Wow, that’s another ball game.” Or
Kinect—you can play games without a remote, waving your
hands in front of a Kinect module and seeing a game world
respond. A whole new arena of AV communication! That’s the
kind of buzz filmmakers felt when they went to see Sunrise.
It was that magical.
I recently watched a demonstration by the guys from Rock-
star Games who did the Western video game Red Dead
Redemption. They said that all new technology is essentially run
by techies. And then at some point, somebody comes in from
another field and makes it universal. And they were hoping that
we were getting to that point with video games. We’re not there
yet. It’s still in the realm of the techies.
Think about digital technology in
relation to theatrical film. It’s been
around since the late Eighties, and the
first film projected digitally was in
1998—The Last Broadcast. And then
Michael Mann was the first director to
show what that tool could do. Which
is: it could see into the dark. In Collat-
eral you see the night sky, the clouds.
Digital electronics can penetrate the
darkness in ways film chemistry can-
not. Digital technology creates a new
Queen Elizabeth
way to see the night.
I’ve selected specific technologies
to look at in terms of how they In Queen Elizabeth, Quo Vadis?,
evolved and which films adopted and The Musketeers of Pig Alley
those technologies in a way that you can see the excitement of story-
changed the game. There are other telling being revolutionized. These
technologies I’d like to talk about, but
I won’t. Some subjects won’t be dis-
film teams were working very fast.
cussed because I don’t feel I’m well Griffith made 400 or so films for
enough informed. Lights get smaller Biograph over a  10-year  period.
and lenses get faster—we all know
that—and when that happens, artistic
opportunities expand: the opportunities to work on location, in
smaller spaces, with available light and so forth. I’ll touch on
that a bit, but I’m not going to talk color temperature. I just
don’t know enough. I’m not going to do digital film capture or
digital film effects because the field is in a state of constant evo-
lution. Avatar is clearly a breakthrough, but how are we going
to feel about digital beings five years from now? I’m not sure.
Nor will I do 3-D and IMAX. There’s a future there, but what
is it? We’re finding out.
I’m not going to talk about music either, though I’d like to.
The Birth of a Nation is one of the first films for which a free-
standing score was written, largely by D.W. Griffith, although
to be honest it’s a composite of other scores, “The Ride of the
Valkyries,” and so on. King Kong is the first film to have a
wholly original synchronous score, and Sorcerer is the first
34 filmcomment July-August 2014
non-science-fiction use of an all-synth score that I know
of. Shortly thereafter Vangelis won an Oscar for Chariots of
Fire. Gradually computer music took over the scoring world.
There’s relatively little purely orchestral scoring anymore. Film
scoring merits a whole course of its own.
L
ooking across the continuum of innovation,
you see that the first use of a film technology can
have a major economic impact but not neces-
sarily an artistic one. The case in point is The
Jazz Singer. In 1927, that movie made a for-
tune; it just blew the box office wide open. The
industry had been very reluctant to adopt sound, but all of
a sudden, the battle was over. The
silent film was a dead man walk-
ing. But just because The Jazz Singer
was first doesn’t mean it addressed
the aesthetic possibilities of sound.
The Jazz Singer wasn’t a particularly
intelligent use of sound. It was only
partially sync sound and it was only
used when Al Jolson was singing. It
was still a trick—it wasn’t a tool yet.
Sound really didn’t come into its own
until a little later with films like
Hitchcock’s Blackmail.
Sometimes a film will get an unde-
serving reputation for a certain kind of
technical innovation. A good case in
point is Citizen Kane. Gregg Toland
was using the new coated lenses, which
allowed him to let about 10 percent
more light into the lens. And therefore
the focal length was a little deeper.
In the mythology of Hollywood the
mantra has become that Gregg Toland
and Orson Welles created deep-focus
photography. Well, yeah, sort of. The
fact is, Toland had used deep-focus photography before, and
some of the most stunning “deep-focus” scenes in Kane aren’t
even deep-focus—they were done with a split diopter and two
different planes of focus.
But the importance of Kane doesn’t lie in its technological
innovations, legitimate or not. The importance of Citizen Kane
is that it redefined toys as tools and in so doing changed the
grammar of filmmaking and film aesthetics.
HISTRIONIC FILM/THE KOBAL COLLECTION
So it comes down to boys and their toys—in movies it’s usu-
ally boys. In the beginning they were directors like Walsh
and Murnau. Today it’s Fincher and Zemeckis and Cameron.
These are boys obsessed with toys who are also artists.
Most of the changes in filmmaking have been incremental.
The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane are among the rare
examples of instant milestones that changed everything.
 GAME CHANGERS: THE BIRTH OF NARRATIVE
***
B
efore discussing individual film technologies,
I want to start with film narrative. In the U.S., Edi- is one of the reasons he was so commercially successful: he
son and Griffith tower over the birth of motion
pictures. Edison was the king of toys and Griffith
was the master of the toolbox. Edison may not
have invented every entertainment toy, but he
took credit for all of them. Griffith may not have turned every toy
into a tool, but he came close.
The defining moment in film history occurred when the fea-
ture film emerged from the rudiments of film narrative. When
Griffith started, films were for the most part an assortment of
curiosities: tableaux vivants, visual
oddities, slices of daily life, comic
pratfalls. Griffith assembled these
building blocks and built the feature
narrative. It’s really hard to overesti-
mate his importance. (Except of course
if you’re Griffith himself—he had a high
estimation of his own contributions.) In
Griffith’s day, there was tension between
hardware and software development—
just as there is now. Griffith, of course,
was making software. Biograph, Grif-
fith’s primary employer, was making
Quo Vadis?
hardware. And through Biograph, Edi-
son was using the software to sell
the hardware, just as Apple uses iTunes When Griffith started, films were
to sell iPods and iPhones. Films were for the most part an assortment
growing in length, from one-reelers (10 of curiosities: tableaux  vivants,
minutes) to two-reelers to films between visual oddities, slices of daily
40 and 60 minutes long. And this is
where Griffith wanted to take Biograph.
life, and comic pratfalls.
Biograph, however, thought they could
make more money sticking with the
short form. They didn’t need a software revolution.
By 1912, the French film Queen Elizabeth, a Sarah Bernhardt
vehicle, ran to four reels. Griffith was envious of Enrico Guaz-
zoni’s 1913 Italian film, Quo Vadis?, which was two hours long.
But in 1912, Griffith was only doing one- or two-reelers, like The
Musketeers of Pig Alley. Griffith’s ambition spurred him to com-
pete with these larger attractions like Judith of Bethulia and The
Avenging Conscience (both released in 1914). In 1913, he took
out a full-page ad in a publication called The Dramatic Mirror:
“D.W. Griffith, producer of all great Biograph successes, revolu-
tionizing the Motion Picture drama and founding the modern
technique of the art. Included in his innovations are close-up fig-
ures, distant views as represented by Ramona, the switch-back
[meaning the intercut], sustained suspense, the fade-out, and the
CINES CO, ROMA/KOBAL
restraint in expression, raising motion picture acting to the
higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.”
This is him talking about himself!
True, in general, but not in the specifics. Virtually every-
thing he took credit for existed before he did it. He began as
an actor and playwright, touring small-town America, which
understood popular taste and the mass audience. (There is a
Biograph film in which Griffith, the actor, is seen in close-up.
This was before he invented it, of course.) But Griffith man-
aged to collect everything that was going on and package it.
He was the father of real film narrative.
We call motion pictures before Griffith “The Cinema of
Attractions.” A stroll down the midway: you’d look left, you’d
look right, you’d see a nickelodeon show. Maybe it was a half-
hour long, cost a nickel, and it re-created a famous event in his-
tory. Or maybe a travelogue through
the Taj Mahal, or a freak show—
actual physiological curiosities. To
imagine the mindset, the perspective of
the audience before The Birth of a
Nation hit the screen in 1915, consider
those three 1912 films—Queen Eliza-
beth, Quo Vadis?, and Griffith’s The
Musketeers of Pig Alley.
Queen Elizabeth runs 40 minutes,
but it is nonetheless a “cinema of
attractions.” It is one of the only
filmed performances of Sarah Bern-
hardt. If you lived outside a big city,
this was your chance to see this inter-
nationally famous French stage
actress. And at the same time, you saw
Elizabeth and Essex in a historical re-
creation. When Griffith stated his con-
tributions, he included “restraint in
expression,” i.e., understated acting—
what we now call film acting. It was
a reaction to theater acting. Witness
Sarah Bernhardt’s sweeping hand gestures. When we watch
Griffith’s Broken Blossoms or The Birth of a Nation today, we
don’t see the understated acting he describes. It isn’t restrained
by our standards. But it certainly was in 1912 terms. Stage
actors don’t have amplification or powerful lights, and so they
have to project the world out to the audience. So in Queen Eliz-
abeth, the camera sits there: the performers project themselves
toward us, and the setting frames the show like a proscenium.
As a consequence, after Essex is executed, Elizabeth notices that
Essex’s ring is missing. And they have to put that on an intertitle.
Whereas, obviously, the natural thing you do is cut to a close-up of
the hand. But they didn’t. It wasn’t in the theater vocabulary.
By 1912, Griffith was already cutting to the hand, as we’ll see
when we look at close-ups as a topic in their own right. But his
very first close-ups were an attempt to show you something that
you couldn’t otherwise see. They weren’t an attempt to create
an emotion. They were simply expository.
July-August 2014 filmcomment 35
 GAME CHANGERS: THE BIRTH OF NARRATIVE

Quo Vadis? came out two years essentially a Victorian storyteller.

Hearts of
before The Birth of a Nation. It is an the World There are camera moves Griffith
Italian film—one of the exciting things didn’t do. Common-sense narrative
about the early days of filmmaking was moves that others were starting to do,
that it really was a time of worldwide cin- but that he didn’t incorporate. He didn’t
ema. It doesn’t take much work to swap do absolutely everything in silent cin-
out the titles, and translate the film for a ema, although you sometimes have the
whole new market. Quo Vadis? made impression that he did. He didn’t do
Griffith want to make longer films. point-of-view shots, at least not in the
What Griffith saw when he watched way we think of them today, although
Quo Vadis? was the production values. in Broken Blossoms there are a couple.
Those scenes full of extras—it went He seized on the close-up, but he didn’t
beyond the scope of theater, into a scale seize on the POV. That was left to some-
that only film can register. And like The Griffith’s very first close-ups one else. When you watch early films
Birth of a Nation, Quo Vadis? is based were an attempt to show you in this way, you are seeing film history
on a novel. But in terms of camera something that you couldn’t see happen right before your eyes: happy
placement and screen composition, it’s otherwise. They weren’t an attempt accidents seized, mistakes discarded—a
still very stage-bound. language being born.
That same year Griffith’s two-reeler
to create an emotion. They were In theater, you project an image out
The Musketeers of Pig Alley comes out— simply expository.  to the audience. In movies, the audi-
the first gangster film. You can actually ence comes in and enters the image
see motion pictures maturing, moving itself, starts walking around inside
from tableau-driven reenactments and stage dramas to drama seen it. Which means that you get into characters’ eyelines, you get
from multiple manipulated angles. Toward the end of Musketeers, into over-the-shoulder shots and singles—you violate the actors’
at the 13-minute mark, comes a famous shot in which one of the space. Griffith didn’t really violate the space. He began the
characters advances closer and closer to the camera until his face is process, but he held back. In a sense, he was still looking at the
in close-up, with an extraordinary partial image of that face being story from “out there.”

slowly revealed and then leaving the frame! It’s electrifying.
I wonder if Griffith understood the ramifications of this effect.
So much of what we call innovation is actually a happy acci-
dent. In Elizabeth, Quo Vadis?, and Musketeers you can see the
excitement of storytelling being revolutionized. These film teams
were working very fast. Griffith made 400 or so films for Bio-
graph over a 10-year period. Guazzoni made six costume epics
the same year as Quo Vadis?.
It was like shooting for YouTube today—two, three, or more
a week. And that’s one of the reasons why a lot of directors today
like to shoot commercials—apart from the paycheck, it allows
them to keep working a lot, and when you work a lot, you try a
lot of things. So there in Musketeers, you see that amazing shot in
which, because of where Griffith places the camera in relation to
the brick wall, the characters get right in front of the lens, and all the feature film. And you can only get through the door watch-
of a sudden they’re heavy in the foreground. And because they
were shooting in sunlight, the shot was still in focus—and it’s the
only time that happens in that film. But Griffith was using that
technique again in Home Sweet Home (1914) and The Birth of a
Nation. Someone says, “Oh, that’s really cool”—and boom, now
it becomes part of the process.
B
ut the griffith film that changed filmmaking
forever was The Birth of a Nation. It’s pretty hard
to stomach these days. When it was first shown
in 1915, it was still called The Clansman, after the
Thomas Dixon novel. You remember it as being
kind of racist and inflammatory, and then you
watch it again, and it’s like wow: there is an hour-and-a-half of
wall-to-wall racist ideology. While some say that the film can be
excused because at the time this ideology was acceptable, on the
contrary, it wasn’t even acceptable then in much of the country.
There were riots around the U.S.
It’s hard to watch. But you cannot not watch it, if you’re inter-
ested in the history of this art. It stands there at the threshold of
ing that film. But the other reason it changed movie history is
that it cost $100,000 and made $10 million. If you crunch the
numbers, Birth is still probably the most profitable film ever
made, with a ratio of a hundred to one. Today, if a film returns
its investment by tenfold, that’s extraordinary.
To appreciate the innovation that The Birth of a Nation repre-
PARAMOUNT PICTURES/PHOTOFEST

Griffith lifted the medium up to its full powers of storytelling. sents, think about its premiere: February 8, 1915 at the Clune’s
He put it all together. Eisenstein writes about how Griffith used the Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. They projected the film in
parallel story technique that Charles Dickens employed, something an auditorium, because they hadn’t built the big movie palaces yet.
that Griffith himself acknowledged. It’s important to remember that That was another by-product of The Birth of a Nation. It enabled
Griffith, for all of his revolutionary activity and self-promotion, was the creation of the film exhibition industry. In every metropolis,

36 filmcomment July-August 2014

 GAME CHANGERS: THE BIRTH OF NARRATIVE

The Birth of
a Nation

huge movie palaces were built, once The Birth of a Nation enabled the viewer into the spectacle.
Griffith proved you could fill them. the creation of the film exhibition What must it have been like in that
The film went far beyond the scale auditorium? Nobody could quite believe
and grandeur of an attraction or
industry. In every metropolis, huge what was going on. President Wilson
curiosity. The entire Los Angeles Phil- movie palaces were built, once supposedly said The Birth of a Nation
harmonic was there: they started up, Griffith proved you could fill them. was like watching history written with
they played the overture, and the cur- lightning. One of the great questions
tain rose. The film was 190 minutes about Griffith is: was he first a racist
with an intermission. It was a full evening. Unlike a one-reel film ideologue and secondly a showman, or vice versa? He did want
curiosity, it involved the spectator. Even the stuff that we object to, to create trouble with The Birth of a Nation, he did want to have
like the ride of the Klan, is transporting. And the battle sequence is something incendiary that would get everybody talking. There’s
thrilling. Griffith was transforming those nickelodeon conventions an anecdote that suggests that he didn’t do this naïvely or inno-
like historical reenactment—you see Grant, Lee, and Lincoln in the cently, though he later said he did: at one point, somebody said,
film—with the narrative sweep of a historical novel. “You show this in Atlanta, there’s going to be a race riot.” He
Griffith was a master of the chase, and in film after film he replied: “That would be great for box office!”
really could get people up and excited. He claimed to be the first Without excusing the racist ideology of The Birth of a Nation, it’s
one to do that—and he is very close to being the first, not in this fair to say that the dominant part of Griffith was the showman. And,
film, but about eight years earlier, when he started doing inter- in this case, his racism helped his showmanship. But later, when he
EPOCH/KOBAL

cutting. The chase, more than any other type of film scene, made Intolerance (16) and then Broken Blossoms (19), it was in his
distinguishes movies from earlier forms of narrative. It pulls best interests to appear anti-racist. So then he was anti-racist.

July-August 2014 filmcomment 37

 GAME CHANGERS: THE BIRTH OF NARRATIVE

Broken
Blossoms

G
riffith was really not any different from
our current entertainment industry moralists.
He was a showman first, and his morality was
adjusted to the circumstances. Take his 1918 film
Hearts of the World. Griffith was brought to Eng-
land with great fanfare, just as the U.S. was entering
into World War I, by Lord Beaverbrook, who was sort of the Rupert
Murdoch of his time. The man who made The Birth of a Nation was
going to make a film about the war as it was actually happening. And
he actually went on record saying that the war was “disappointing” as
drama, but that it provided him with the most expensive “settings”
that have ever been used in a movie. In other words, the war itself was
his own, lavish set—his biggest and most expensive toy ever.
When Griffith was trying to raise the money to make The Birth
of a Nation, for the then-outrageous amount of $40,000, they
asked him what he had in mind. And he
said that what he had in mind was a
full evening of entertainment. It would
In Broken Blossoms, Griffith hit
be like a night at the opera. Before The upon the idea of extreme close-ups
Birth of a Nation, films were all differ- in which the focus was soft. At a
ent lengths. A film didn’t necessarily distance of six feet from the filmed
have to be an hour and a half or two object, the camera is at the limit of
pictures left short attractions behind and developed the two-
hour formula. It was a formula that made sense economically. It
was the most efficient way to charge higher ticket prices to larger
groups simultaneously. And when those economics change, so
does the definition of film length and exhibition.
Right after The Birth of a Nation, Griffith made Intolerance,
a response to being called out for his racism. And then, in 1919,
he made another film, Broken Blossoms. He told a story in which
the villain is the white father of a young woman, and her protec-
tor is a Chinese man. Griffith’s effort to recuperate his public
image drove further innovation in Broken Blossoms. In The Birth
of a Nation, he had raised the specter of miscegenation in order
to make the case for the Southern White: a black character (iron-
ically a white man in blackface) wants to do nothing more than
violate white maidenhood. So Griffith decided to do a story
that would be the opposite of anti-
miscegenation propaganda, a story in
which the person who’s the kindest to
the white girl (Lillian Gish) is the Chi-
nese man (Richard Barthelmess). Bro-
ken Blossoms was a hard sell—it ran
against the grain of the prejudices of
UNITED ARTISTS/PHOTOFEST

hours. Today we’re coming to the end its focal length. Griffith turned this the time. And because it was such a
of that definition. We’re starting to see hard sell, Griffith had to slow his story-
all kinds of different lengths again.
limitation into a storytelling asset. telling down and take his time develop-
After The Birth of a Nation, motion ing the interracial relationship.

38 filmcomment July-August 2014

 GAME CHANGERS: THE BIRTH OF NARRATIVE
Griffith hit upon the idea of extreme close-ups in which the
focus was soft. They only had 30mm and 50mm lenses at that time;
they didn’t have a telephoto lens. To get an extreme close-up, they
had to push in very close—violating what at the time was called
“the six-foot rule,” which stipulated that the camera was supposed
to be no less than six feet away from the subject. At a distance of
six feet from the filmed object, the camera is at the limit of its focal
length. Griffith turned this limitation into a storytelling asset. He
could make Lillian Gish’s expression soft and give Donald Crisp’s
eyes that huge bulge. And at the crucial moments, he does go inside
the eyeline. You actually see her point of view of her father.
And so Griffith ends up doing a character piece. Most of the films
of that time, Griffith’s included, tended to have a Dickensian gallery
of characters, but in Broken Blossoms there are only a small handful,
and he spends a lot of time with Gish and Barthelmess. As a result,
you get a greater complexity in the relationship between the man and
the woman. There’s a plot, but really it’s a character study—and
all of a sudden, storytelling is going to another place, a kind of
isolated drama of individuals rather than whole social groups.
Looking at Griffith at the dawn of feature-film narrative, it’s pos-
sible to see how a single film can change filmmaking—and how it
often creates change by happenstance. Griffith decided he wanted to
tell this kind of story, and that entailed giving much more screen time
to the two main characters. And so all of a sudden Lillian Gish is
Fearless
Fosse
A BOB FOSSE FILM
T
Two
wo new
new deluxe
deluxe editions from
from the Criterion
Criterion Collection
giving a far more nuanced performance than you’d typically see at
that time. All the characters die at the end, and it’s a rather somber
ending. Jesse Lasky, who financed Broken Blossoms and later created
what would become Paramount, was furious at this and didn’t want
to release it, leaving Griffith to figure out how to release it himself.
Then the filmmaker came up with the strategy of promoting
the film as “edifying”—as an artwork that is ennobling. And it
worked! He conned everyone into thinking that they had to see
this film because it was good for them. Broken Blossoms actu-
ally did very well. And we still sell films that way today.
But Broken Blossoms also contains the seeds of Griffith’s
demise. The film takes place in 1919, and World War I has just
ended. The Great War is referred to in the film—one character says:
“Only 40,000 killed this week.” And once those soldiers started
coming home, modernism and a new kind of commercialism
and a new kind of liberty and female empowerment took hold in
America—and Griffith’s Victorian sentiment began to look really
old-fashioned. He was not suited for the Jazz Age. The guys who
were working with Griffith—Erich von Stroheim was an assistant
on The Birth of a Nation, Karl Brown was an assistant cameraman,
Raoul Walsh played John Wilkes Booth—were of the contempo-
rary sensibility and by 1923-24 they were making films of that
sensibility, whereas the old man was still doing Victorian sentimen-
tal cards. And as quickly as that, he was left behind. 
Courageous
Cassavetes
Collection www.criterion.com
www.criterion.com
July-August 2014 filmcomment 39
 coming
D I R E C TO R J O A N N A H O G G R E V I S I T S T H E I N D I S C R E E T M I S E R Y O F

40 filmcomment July-August 2014

 apart
T H E E N G L I S H B O U R G E O I S I E I N E X H I B I T I O N / BY J O N AT H A N R O M N E Y

July-August 2014 filmcomment 41

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” and the apparent awkwardness as intrinsic to the film’s language
to quote Pink Floyd’s appropriation of Thoreau’s phrase. This idea and to the characters’ way of relating to the world.
has been so thoroughly chewed over in British film, drama, novels, Anna (Kathryn Worth) is a middle-aged woman who arrives
and song that it seems hardly worth commenting on again. Yet it to stay with a friend in an idyllic villa in Tuscany. Like any loner
finds a vivid new application in the outsider cinema of Joanna Hogg. thrown into a seemingly happy family, Anna is bound to feel
Did I say “outsider cinema”? Yes—even though the characters uncomfortable, especially because she is going through a trau-
in Hogg’s three features would seem, socially speaking, anything matic patch in her relationship. She spends much of the holiday
but. They are privileged representatives of the English upper middle having stilted phone conversations with her absent partner,
class: people who speak in well-polished Home Counties accents, while her crushing need to think of herself as youthful makes
who holiday in Tuscan villas or in island cottages with live-in cooks; her align herself with the group’s contingent of young adults,
or who, in Hogg’s latest film, Exhibition, live in gorgeously austere to their parents’ annoyance. She also deludes herself that she
Modernist houses where their economic security allows them to
mooch around pondering their next move as conceptual artists.
Hardly outsiders in the normal sense, nevertheless they seem
foreign to contemporary everyday Britain: they are an endangered
hybrid class closing ranks, holding a threatening world at bay,
while individually they crumble from the psychic pressure of
maintaining social poise. They are also outsiders to one another,
unable to communicate their emotions, which consequently erupt
in rage or break down; hence the title of Archipelago (10), refer-
ring both to the island cluster where the story is set and to its
ensemble cluster of isolated souls.

hat really makes these films “outsider cinema”

w is that Hogg is depicting these people at all, in a film

culture that has little interest in this social stratum.
While portrayals of working-class life have long held
the moral high ground in British cinema, and images of archaic
privilege continue to do a roaring trade as television luxury goods,
the upper middle class is generally considered too bland or too
embarrassing to be given screen space. Where French cinema main-
tains a thriving tradition of bourgeois narrative, the British equiva-
lent (which attained perfection in Joseph Losey’s films of the Sixties)
is today considered fundamentally alien to cinema, identified too
closely with a history of TV melodrama and comedy.
In documenting this milieu, Hogg has gone out on a limb as a
British filmmaker. That’s all the more true because of the kind of
films she makes: laconic, gentle, yet delicately excruciating dramas
of social unease. Her contemplative, slow-burn approach—at least
in her first two features—marks her stylistically and temperamen-
tally closer to Rohmer and to certain contemporary German film-
makers (Maren Ade, Pia Marais) than to Mike Leigh, say.
Hogg has made no secret about belonging to the world she
depicts, sometimes recruiting her friends as nonprofessional actors.
Before turning to features in her late forties, she put in several years
as a jobbing director on bread-and-butter TV series such as Casu-
alty. Even so, her low-budget debut Unrelated seemed to come
out of nowhere, and made its presence felt slowly, following a
low-profile premiere at the 2007 London Film Festival and a dis-
missive review from Derek Elley in Variety. By the time it was
Joanna Hogg
The characters in Hogg’s three features are out-
siders to one another, unable to communicate
their emotions, which consequently erupt in
rage or break down.
stands a chance with the family’s suavely confident golden boy
Oakley (Tom Hiddleston, in an auspicious big-screen debut).
Worth is a deeply discomfiting revelation; you empathize with
her Anna, but you can’t help cringing, at her as much as for her.
Anna is so gauche, so eager to please, that she’s agonizing to
spend time with; the film’s brilliance lies in how it feels so relaxed
in its detachment, even while turning the screws. You wince as
Anna buys the lingerie that she hopes will hook Oakley, and then
flatters him by agreeing with his callow sexual philosophizing.
Discomfort turns to horror in a quietly brutal scene as Oakley and
two boys line up opposite Anna in a swimming pool, knowing
she’ll have to climb out naked. The horror of English emotional
© BAFTA/ELLIS PARRINDER

released in the U.K. a year later, the static visuals that Elley
objected to could be seen as rigorously controlled mise en scène,
>> in focus: Exhibition, Archipelago, and Unrelated had their U.S.
theatrical premiere runs at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in June.
ineptitude emerges mesmerizingly as Oakley and his father (David
Rintoul) have a furious screaming match off screen, while every-
one else sits pretending that nothing is happening.
The execution is clean and spare—long takes, the seemingly
casual layering of voices and natural sound, the elision of key

42 filmcomment July-August 2014

episodes. All this makes Unrelated a lot tougher and more
prickly than the sour little bourgeois drama it might be mistaken
for. It’s one of the most rigorously made British films in recent
years, and one of the U.K.’s most forceful feminist dramas.
The follow-up, Archipelago (10), is about another family holi-
day, this time in the Scilly Isles, where a middle-aged woman (Kate
Fahy) and her two adult children wait for her husband to join
them. (He never arrives, but like Anna’s partner in Unrelated, he
looms as an implied unsympathetic presence on the phone.) The
family have hired a young cook, Rose (Amy Lloyd, whom Hogg Unrelated
actually found by advertising for a cook); she forms an awkward,
tentative bond with Edward (Hiddleston), a doubt-filled young
man who’s leaving for a year’s volunteer work in Africa and is sub-
jecting himself to this oppressive family jaunt before he leaves.
Christopher Baker, a painter in real life, is on hand to play guru,
embarrassed onlooker, and theorist of chaos and order in art.
In many ways the film reworks Unrelated, with the cards shuf-
fled and the humor decisively muted. Hiddleston now plays a well-
meaning, put-upon Prince Myshkin figure, and the outbursts of
rage are female rather than male: Lydia Leonard is quite brilliant
as Edward’s sister Cynthia, whose bottomless reservoirs of pained Archipelago
fury remain teasingly unexplained. The interiors, claustrophobic
and shrouded in gray and beige penumbra, are lit by DP Ed
Rutherford with echoes of the quintessentially melancholic Danish
painter Vilhelm Hammershøi.

ogg’s latest film, Exhibition (13), is something

h else again—an unapologetic leap into hard modernism.

If Exhibition resembles anyone, it’s Antonioni—and its
London seems to still be the cold, clean-edged ghost city
of Blow-Up. Exhibition is essentially a marital two-hander.
D (Viv Albertine, once a guitarist for punk pioneers the Slits) is a
diffident, introspective artist who spends much of her time in her
office desultorily trying out poses half-naked or wrapped in fluo-
rescent tape. Her partner, H, also an artist, is played by Liam
Gillick, another newcomer to acting and himself a Turner Prize
nominee; H taps away on his laptop at ideas involving “space” in
some vague way. Exhibition is partly a wry answer to the ques-
tion: what do artists actually do all day?
Much of the time, the couple communicate tersely by intercom;
sex is often abortive, and D seems to find most satisfaction mas-
turbating while H sleeps, or confessing her desires to a recorder
(pleasure, or research and development?). Albertine’s fearless per-
formance as the almost abjectly cautious D makes Exhibition
another acutely thorny film—again, like Unrelated, about a middle-
aged woman uncomfortable with her libido, but here just as ill at
ease with the demands of her intellect.
The action mostly takes place in the couple’s home, a real West
London house built by the late architect James Melvin, a con-
struction of large glass windows and sliding partitions. Walls and
sliding doors, some in intense red, defy all attempts to fix the build-
ing’s shape in our mind; often, we can’t tell whether we’re looking
in or out, looking through a window or seeing the reflections on it.
The house is the stage for the couple’s drama, and the vitrine in
which they are exhibited to us. But despite their constant exposure,
Exhibition
the pair remain mysterious. What is the previous incident that has
D on edge when H proposes taking a walk at night? And why is
she in the habit of lying down along windows and folding herself
around corners as if trying to disappear into the architecture?
Unlike Hogg’s two other films, Exhibition is staccato in feel, shot
by Rutherford in often extremely short takes, examining the house
from different angles, fragmenting space, narrative, and time alike.
Shortly before the end, the couple serve their friends a cake modeled
on the house; the building itself similarly comes apart before our
eyes, its surfaces constantly rearranged in modular fashion, just as
editor Helle le Fevre has arranged the film’s fragmentary scenes.
Despite sporadic moments of fantasy, Exhibition is ostensibly
as realistic a drama as Hogg’s other films, an evocation of how a
certain posh-bohemian social group lives in contemporary Lon-
don. Yet it is the strangest and boldest British film of the
moment—an exhibition in its own right, an installation, in its mys-
tery something like a freestanding object. With this new work,
Hogg may have willfully sabotaged her marketability as the
approachable face of British art cinema, but the fundamental
apartness of her work emerges to stunning effect. You can imagine
the gallery label: Exhibition, Joanna Hogg, 2013. Mixed media:
light, space, sound, desperation, quietness. 

July-August 2014 filmcomment 43

 WITHIN THESE WALLS
IN A HOUSE BY THE SEA, JAFAR PANAHI RETURNS
TO ZERO AND SETS FORTH AGAIN
BY RICHARD COMBS

44 filmcomment July-August 2014

July-August 2014 filmcomment 45
P
artway through This Is Not a Film, his 2011 act
of defiance after being banned by the Iranian authorities
from making films for 20 years, Jafar Panahi changed
tack. After recording himself on his cell phone in his
Tehran apartment, talking to his lawyer about the prospects of a
reduction in the ban (and the six-year jail sentence that went with
it), Panahi invited another filmmaker, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, to
come over with his camcorder. Mirtahmasb then filmed Panahi
going through a screenplay he had previously been prevented
from filming about a young girl locked in her apartment by her
parents to prevent her registering for university.
Panahi didn’t just read from the unproduced screenplay, he
blocked it out. Down on his hands and knees on his living-room car-
pet, he measured out the spaces of the girl’s apartment, and pictured
the six-minute take that would open the film, shot through her bed-
room window. Thus Panahi hoped to “create an image” of his lost
film (on the DVD commentary track, Jamsheed Akrami muses that
the filmmaker is “acting like a human storyboard”). In the end,
Panahi says: “Perhaps the viewer will see the film that wasn’t made.”
With his latest film, Closed Curtain, the subject remains con-
finement, and the cost that has been exacted in Panahi’s personal
and professional life by that court judgment. But if This Is Not a
Film was a record of the process by which he had been confined,
and his response to it, Closed Curtain broadens the picture
through both allegory and psychodrama. There’s no one film
behind the film that we’re supposed to see here, but what could be
behind it, in a sense, is Panahi’s entire filmography, his creative
enterprise, his relationship to his own subject matter (which, in one
way or another, has been figured for a while now as confinement).
The irony is that if the curtain has been closed by the authorities
on Panahi’s creative life, that locked-in situation is anyway the one
that most identifies him, that has most nourished him.
P
anahi’s recourse to these situations—after his early
films were so vigorously out-and-about in the city—had
both a political and an aesthetic dimension. All the
gates and grilles, the police and hospital hatches, which
framed the progress of the women in The Circle (00)—and the
police pen that fenced in the girls outside the football arena in
46 filmcomment July-August 2014
With his latest Offside (06)—supplied the imagery of
film, Closed Cur- social oppression and a satisfying cin-
tain, the subject ematic form. But those images of con-
remains confine- finement also seemed to lead Panahi to
ment, and the greater containment, to self-restriction
cost that has as both a dramatic and a production
been exacted in tactic. There was a strong practical
Panahi’s personal motivation to this: as Panahi explains in
and professional This Is Not a Film, using a single, con-
life by that court tained location would hopefully enable
judgment. him to avoid too much official oversight.
Apart from the script he acted out,
based on a Chekhov story, Panahi has
scripted an adaptation of Death and the Maiden that would have
taken place “in a holiday home by the sea” (is there an echo of
that in Closed Curtain?) and would have been shot in one con-
tinuous take. Panahi was shooting another film in his own apart-
ment when he was arrested in 2010. In the long opening shot of
Closed Curtain, the camera sits behind a locked grille across the
glass doors of a house by the sea. A taxi draws up and a man
takes his luggage inside, where he draws flimsy curtains and then
releases the dog he has brought with him in a bag. The man, it
turns out, is a scriptwriter, played by Kambuzia Partovi, who is
also credited as the film’s co-writer and co-director.
The writer eventually seals up his makeshift cell by covering
all the windows with blackout curtains and shaving his head. A
TV news program suggests a reason for his paranoia, a political
threat not against himself but his dog: “Because dogs are impure
in our Islamic society, they will now be banned in public.” Events
quickly overtake the writer’s closeted project. A young man and
CLOSED CURTAIN PHOTOS COURTESY OF VARIANCE FILMS
woman, claiming to be brother and sister, get into the house,
apparently having fled the police. The man announces: “They’ve
arrested everyone” (their crime seems to be some illicit partying
on the beach). He goes for help and leaves the writer to look after
the woman, Melika (Maryam Moghadam), warning him that she
has “a knack for suicide” (she has arrived dripping wet, and
drowning, both as threat and invitation, figures later in the story).
>> i n f o c u s : Closed Curtain opens July 9.
 And if Melika has this knack, it could be transferred to the
writer—and through him, to Panahi, who in becoming the mae-
stro of cloistered cinema might have created a specialty that, with
a little help from the Iranian authorities, has now trapped him.
When the writer later blocks Melika from what he thinks is
another drowning attempt, her first mocking response—“If I
wanted to die, there are many ways”—then shifts, as if all the
foregoing were a sham and there’s another reality to confront.
Abruptly she tells him: “I wrote tons of reports on guys like
you,” and then, “Suicide is your only way out.” (The Chekhov
project included a character, a boy who seemed to be a suitor for
the girl, but who turned out to be a police agent.)
Later, when the writer complains about her interrupting his
work, she dismisses this too. “Is your writing so important? A man,
a dog, a villa… You write it and he shoots it. Then what?” If the
“he” in this sentence is Panahi, the writer and Melika have a more
troublesome, slipsliding reality. They are like dueling spirits, erup-
tions from Panahi’s consciousness. But Kambuzia Partovi is a
writer, working on a script for Panahi, and his troubles in this film
reflect Panahi’s own. “I don’t want any trouble,” the writer says
when first confronted by the young couple—a declaration repeated
by Panahi himself when he enters the film in the second half.
M
elika could be any one of the female characters
from Panahi’s films—going back to the youngest in
his first two—a representative of the subject matter
he can no longer deal with, or dare approach too
closely (leaving him with “a man, a dog, a villa…”). Despite all
the early talk of suicide, its shadow really enters when Panahi
walks into the film, stepping over the broken glass of the doors
we saw in the opening shot. There has been a break-in—bur-
glars, perhaps (the writer hides out when he hears them ransack-
ing the place), but these might just be the ghosts of another
reality, the one that burst into Panahi’s apartment in 2010.
Melika represents a temptation to give in to the despair that the
arrest and sentencing have caused him: “He’ll let the melancholy
of dusk take him away,” she pronounces.
Closed Curtain at this stage moves into a quotidian reality, a
familiar enough mode for Panahi and Iranian cinema. Friends and
Panahi likes to neighbors drop by; one tries to reassure
pivot on a him (“You’ll be able to work again”),
moment when a and concludes: “There’s more to life
film will turn back than work.” Panahi’s reply—“Yes, but
on itself, take a those things are foreign to me”—pairs
different dramatic him again with the frustrated writer.
or narrative route In Panahi’s limbo world, somewhere
out of the prob- between total shutdown and a strange
lem it has set up. samizdat freedom, smuggling out his
last two missives to international film
festivals, it’s not surprising if even the
quotidian seems totally self-referential, self-reflexive.
But the self-reflexive in Panahi is really part of a different kind
of double-track cinema, and in this respect Closed Curtain still sits
within an earlier aesthetic. Panahi likes to pivot on a moment
when a film will turn back on itself, take a different dramatic or
narrative route out of the problem it has set up. This was first
apparent in his second film, The Mirror (97), when the child actor
apparently decides she’s had enough of acting and hops off the nar-
rative bus. But the break, the return to zero and setting forth again,
also occurs in This Is Not a Film when Panahi tires of his initial
diary format (“It’s turning out to be a lie”) and reframes the sec-
ond part with Mirtahmasb.
Closed Curtain follows the same double routing, with the ini-
tial dueling of phantoms overtaken by a more pragmatic, every-
day explication of Panahi’s situation (not until the very end do the
two levels come together). What has begun to happen, in this sec-
ond chapter in Panahi’s post-ban cinema, is that the aesthetic itself
is in danger of breakdown, attempting a refinement and restate-
ment that must eventually overcomplicate it to the point of oblit-
eration. Is there a way out? That’s not in Panahi’s hands,
obviously, though at least the “melancholy of dusk” is overcome.
“What is he thinking?” “About renovating the house” goes one
of the final exchanges between the writer and Melika, before
Panahi packs up and, in another long sequence shot, closes the
grille over the glass doors and starts to drive off. At the last
moment, he backs up to pick up the writer and his dog. 
RICHARD COMBS is a regular contributor to FILM COMMENT.
July-August 2014 filmcomment 47
festivals C A N N E S b y A M Y TAU B I N
Adieu au langage

Dog Days One masterpiece and a brace of superior

offerings relieved the misery that is Cannes
or me, at cannes 2014, there was jean-luc godard’s Adieu au
F langage and then there was everything else. Godard didn’t attend,
instead sending a video letter to festival toppers Gilles Jacob (who has
wanting to add to the insufferable noise,
I limited myself to a contemptuously
curled lip or half-stifled ironic laugh.
Which is hardly the way to communicate
officially stepped down) and Thierry Frémaux, who now runs the
with the few cinephile peers one has left,
whole shebang. Godard explained that he was in a “different place,” a
many of whom have already written
phrase that should be read, like every minute of Adieu au langage, both cogently and even passionately about the
literally and metaphorically. In a more revealing interview recorded in films of Cannes 2014.
Paris shortly before the festival (and viewable on YouTube) he Still, I think Godard would have been
explained that in the early Sixties, Cannes had been the place to be pleased, not only by the cheer of “Godard
with his second family—directors and cinephiles—although that had forever” that rose from the packed
quickly proven to be no happier than the first. Lumière Theater as the lights dimmed for
the premiere of his first 3-D feature, but
There was still a strong strain of unless one possesses one of the higher- also by the spontaneous applause that
cinephilia when I began attending the fes- priority passes, for anywhere between 30 erupted mid-movie, after a mindboggling,
tival nearly 20 years ago. But this year, it minutes to an hour and a half, in some eyeball-dislocating, narratively profound
was all but obliterated by what I can only cases, depending on the popularity of the sequence that involves the superimposition
describe as mass movie bulimia, the goal movie and the size of the theater in which of two 3-D images that begin as one, go
being to scarf down as many films as pos- it’s screening. Being hotheaded and opin- their separate ways, and reunite at the end.
sible and vomit up undigested opinions in ionated, I have occasionally gone on the Or at least after one viewing, that’s what I
tweets and blog posts, even before the attack within earshot of dozens, usually think happens. Having upended the rules
lights have come up in the theater, or in defense of a movie I believe is being of film language in Breathless, Godard
spew them onto captive audiences in the stupidly decimated or one that I think is does it anew here, 3-D having more inter-
pass-holder queues, where one stands, ridiculously overvalued. This year, not esting possibilities for depicting the “I” of

48 filmcomment July-August 2014

the self in relation to the “I” of the other
(or the “I” of “I think” which is not the
same as the “I” of “I am,” to paraphrase
Godard quoting philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas) than the two-shot or the shot/
countershot does. So it’s goodbye to all
that and hello to the transformation of the
relationships between on- and off-screen
space, image and sound, and, of course,
flatness and depth. No surprise, Godard
isn’t interested in making us think we can
touch the fingers that seem to reach out
from the surface of the screen. There are
many things in Adieu au langage that are
familiarly Godardian: it’s divided into two
parts, the second repeating the first but
with variation, and both parts are subdi-
vided into “Nature” and “Metaphor”—
although these sections are not con-
secutive but intermingled. There is the
expected adulterous heterosexual couple,
lounging around naked in front of a TV
that sometimes shows black-and-white
movies with passionate but decorously
dressed lovers and sometimes the atroci-
ties that humanity has committed and
that film has captured.
White God
A Girl at My Door
TOP 10 CANNES
1. Adieu au langage Jean-Luc Godard,
France/Switzerland
2. Whiplash Damien Chazelle, U.S.
3. White God Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary
4. Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako, France
5. Mr. Turner Mike Leigh, U.K.
6. Maps to the Stars David Cronenberg,
Canada
7. Misunderstood Asia Argento, Italy
8. Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, France
9. The Blue Room Mathieu Amalric, France
10. A Girl at My Door July Jung, South Korea
Godard’s 3-D cameras are jury-rigged
and/or low-tech but they yield images of
great variety and beauty. Indeed this late
(but not final) film might be his most beau-
tiful, Mozartian in its lightness, and unre-
strained in communicating feelings about
love. There is a third term in the relation-
ship of the couple: he is named Roxy and
is played by Roxy Miéville, suggesting that
the actor is a member of the family of
Godard’s partner, Anne-Marie Miéville.
Roxy is a dog, an exceptionally free spirit
Misunderstood
Timbuktu
with serious brown eyes and a dark brown
coat with gold and white markings that
can look like a blur of autumn leaves when
he runs. We know that dogs are scene-
stealers, but Godard’s pleasure in immor-
talizing the enchanting way that Roxy
turns his head and the mystery of his eyes
is more naked than it ever was with any
of the actresses he transformed into stars.
Adieu au langage, which ends with a
dog’s bark and a child’s cries, is a master-
piece, a film attuned to a future that likely
will not come to pass.
T he only other film i saw that
displayed anything approaching this
exhilaration with the possibilities of cin-
ema as a living language was Damien
Chazelle’s jazz opera Whiplash, which I
wrote about here after it premiered at
Sundance. On the other hand, there were
many movies, some of them very fine
indeed, in which animals play prominent
roles. The dogs in Kornél Mundruczó’s
White God are both “nature” and
“metaphor.” The film is a rare instance in
which animals stand—and take a stand—for
July-August 2014 filmcomment 49
themselves while also representing human
disenfranchisement. In Hungary and
other “civilized” former Eastern bloc
nations, stray dogs are being rounded up
and euthanized or shot on sight in great
numbers, and the “White God” has
scarcely more compassion for the non-
Aryan refugees flooding across European
borders. Mundruczó employed 200 dogs
(animatronics would have destroyed the
intensity and indeed the meaning of the
movie) to depict a Spartacus-like uprising,
led by Hagen, the beloved dog of 13-year-
old Lili (Zsofia Psotta). Hagen is dumped
onto the street by Lili’s father, who refuses
to pay the licensing fee for a “non-pure-
bred-Hungarian dog.” The film intercuts
two odysseys: Lili’s search for Hagen and
Hagen’s passage from one abusive master
to another until his latent fighting skills are
unleashed by an exploitative trainer; thus
equipped, he leads a mass uprising of
dogs, out of the pound and into the
streets. Since this is not a children’s
movie, we have no doubt about the
slaughter that will follow the visionary
tableau with which White God ends.
In the Name of My Daughter
50 filmcomment July-August 2014
Mundruczó dedicates the film to camera-
movement virtuoso Miklós Jancsó, who
would have approved of the improvised
handheld work of cinematographer Mar-
cell Rev as he races after the dogs.
Psotta is fragile but implacable as a
tweener betrayed by her estranged par-
ents. So too is Giulia Salerno, who plays a
similar role in a tonally very different film,
Asia Argento’s irrepressible, colorful in
every sense but never cartoonish Misun-
derstood. All but ignored by her showbiz
parents and tormented by her more con-
ventional and manipulative siblings, Aria,
Argento’s heroine and, one imagines, alter
ego, shuttles between the well-appointed
digs of her actor father and her singer
mother with her only companion, a large
cat who is more affectionate and comfort-
able in his own skin than any of the
humans in her life. A gifted writer, Aria
elaborates her frequent cat-accompanied
walks into the imaginative, sometimes
life-threatening adventures that mix with
mundane actualities on the screen. As a
projection of pre-adolescent female sub-
jectivity, Misunderstood is ingenious,
Welcome to New York
The Blue Room Maps to the Stars
direct, and utterly real. A more difficult
depiction of growing up female, July
Jung’s A Girl at My Door centers on an
alcoholic policewoman, exiled to a small
provincial town because of a lesbian
affair, who attempts to protect a pre-teen
girl who has been abused by everyone in
her family for so long that she is probably
twisted beyond repair. Jung’s indictment
of Korean machismo is as unsparing as
her depiction of the confusion of identi-
fication, desire, and guilt in the police-
woman’s rescue fantasy.
The first image in Abderrahmane Sis-
sako’s wrenching Timbuktu is of a gazelle,
racing so swiftly across the sand that it
looks transparent as a ghost. The gazelle is
trying to outdistance a group of soldiers in
a jeep who are taking potshots at it. The
film concludes with a young girl desper-
ately fleeing across the same terrain with
the same men in pursuit. We already know
that the gazelle did not escape and neither
will she. This fragile, horrifying film is set
in a small village in northern Mali, close to
Timbuktu, where Jihadists have invaded
and imposed their absurd, murderous
version of Islamic law, stoning people to
death for singing, dancing, and loving.
Timbuktu is film as nightmare, made out
of a furious need to show the world with
what wanton ease joy and beauty have
been destroyed. Less sophisticated as film-
making, Run by the young Ivory Coast
director Philippe Lacôte depicts, through
the inadvertent adventures of a young man
who becomes a player in a conflict he
barely understands, the political power
grabs that tore apart one of Africa’s most
stable republics. The film starts slowly but
gains momentum through the perfor-
mances of Abdoul Karim Konate as the tit-
ular Run and Isaach De Bankolé as the
seasoned revolutionary who both helps
him and uses him to further the struggle.
I ndeed much of the pleasure in the
films at Cannes had to do with their
actors. There was first and foremost Tim-
othy Spall as the 19th-century painter
J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner,
a densely appointed biopic in which no
detail is unnecessary or merely pic-
turesque. Spall’s performance fearlessly
renders Turner as a man devoid of charm
and social skills but absolutely dedicated
to his uncompromising vision of paint-
ing, evolving from representation to the
abstraction of nearly pure color and light.
(Spall won the Best Actor award.) Olivier
Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria is similarly
reflexive in that it is about the creative
process. Elegant, witty, and often unnerv-
ing in its depiction of the refusal of the
psyche to acknowledge the aging of the
body, it is, except for a brief, star-touched
turn by Chloë Grace Moretz, virtually
a two-hander for Kristen Stewart—finally
fulfilling the promise she showed early
in her career—and Juliette Binoche, as
a middle-aged actress and something of
an alter ego for the director. Based on
an actual murder case, André Téchiné’s
absorbing In the Name of My Daughter
allows an unknown actress, Adèle Haenel,
to create the most complex female
character of recent memory, a young
woman whose desire for and belief in
her own independence is betrayed by
her sexual obsession for a manipulative
man who destroys both her and her
mother (Catherine Deneuve). For his
spare, darkly erotic The Blue Room,
adapted from a Simenon murder mystery,
Mathieu Amalric cast himself in a role
that only the actor with the most speak- “SMART, WICKEDLY FUNNY,
ing eyes in cinema could play. The sur- AND SURPRISINGLY TOUCHING.”
Chris Nashawaty, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
prise twist at the end of the film is
conveyed simply through a series of
glances that reveal, well, I won’t spoil the
NY OBSERVER
moment. It proved too subtle for most of
the sleep-deprived audience to grasp. But
it is a great reveal, and I hope that Amal-
ric will not be persuaded, in the interest
of commerciality, to change a frame.
Anyone expecting the return of Gérard
Depardieu to his former greatness in Abel
Ferrara’s Welcome to New York, aka “the
DSK movie,” will be disappointed.
Although lawsuits are threatened, the
movie is haphazard and unrevealing,
except for one voiceover interior mono-
logue by the star, which suggests the
movie that perhaps could have been.
(Ferrara’s film, which was not invited to
the festival but showed as an unofficial
screening in the market, opened in France
on VOD to great success.)
The award for Best Actress went to
Julianne Moore for her gonzo perfor-
mance in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the
Stars. I preferred Mia Wasikowska and
Evan Bird, as the film’s incestuous sib-
lings. Located on the borderline between
narcissism and psychosis, i.e., Holly-
wood, Maps to the Stars suffers from a
too-little-too-late script by Bruce Wagner,
but Cronenberg somewhat redeems it
with an astonishing directorial choice.
The vast majority of shots isolate one
person in the frame, thus suggesting nar-
cissistic self-enclosure and causing the
moments when a connection between
two characters is made—usually involv-
ing sex or violence—to pack a double
whammy, even when the physical contact
occurs just outside the frame.
The low point of the festival was the
decision by the Jane Campion–led jury to
award the Jury Prize—sounds great but it’s
actually the third prize—to both the oldest
and the youngest directors in the Competi- AVAILABLE ON
tion, Godard and Xavier Dolan. Godard’s BLU-RAY AND DVD
film, indeed his entire career, is so far above JULY 8, 2014
anything in the festival that even to have
given him the Palme would not have been
enough. Dolan’s one-gimmick, pandering-
to-the-youth-vote Mommy is not worth a
kick in the butt. Godard was right to stay www.musicboxfilms.com
away; I was never so glad to be on the
Nice-to-JFK flight in my life. 
July-August 2014 filmcomment 51
festivals CANNES by KENT JONES

Adieu au langage

something else again. We have cinema

Empire of Light Three highlights aligned with the spirit of poetry tending
toward pure plasticity and/or musicality
from Cannes move in poetic and (Brakhage), we have narrative cinema with
interludes set at a poetic pitch (Tarkovsky),
painterly directions we have poets who have adapted themselves
to narrative cinema (Cocteau, Pasolini) and
narrative artists with poetic sensibilities
ow to describe jean-luc godard’s Adieu au langage. is it a
H valedictory work? It certainly feels that way, but then so does
almost everything Godard has ever made. It’s difficult to recall a
(Powell), and we have a few great individual
film poems (Shoah, The Tree of Life). But
I’ve come to believe that Godard is the only
moment from his body of work that doesn’t speak of last things (and actual film poet, which is to say that he is the
first things, in the same breath). Adieu au langage is no exception. Let only filmmaker to address the audience in
it be noted that Godard is now at work on a new film. the sense described by Wallace Stevens in his
essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Let’s look at the film from another poetry—temperamentally, practically, and Words”: the poet’s measure of himself as a
angle, that of Godard’s appointed role as spiritually, Godard is much closer to Emily poet, “in spite of all the passions of all the
diagnostician-superhero with the ability to Dickinson or William Carlos Williams lovers of the truth, is the measure of his
see through the veil of appearances. True than he is to Lang or Ophuls. power to abstract himself, and to with-
enough, but that role is often described in The words poetry and poetic have been draw with him into his abstraction the real-
purely political terms, and this has had the employed liberally in film criticism, most ity on which the lovers of truth insist. He
paradoxical effect of reducing Godard by often to describe visually or sensorially ele- must be able to abstract himself and also to
misdescribing him as a noble agitator, the vated passages that float above narrative abstract reality, which he does by placing it
Noam Chomsky of cinema. But the revela- concerns; the use of such language acquires in his imagination.” The “pressure of real-
tory moments in his work always arrive an entirely different meaning in relation to ity,” as Stevens calls it—the oppressively
suddenly, unexpectedly—you might even a Stan Brakhage, who knew Robert Dun- dull bottom line on which we must all
say that his core aesthetic practice is laying can and filmed Robert Creeley and supposedly agree in order to keep the
the groundwork for such moments. It’s Michael McClure, or Hollis Frampton, machinery of society in good working
difficult and perhaps impossible to find who was one of Ezra Pound’s regular visi- order—is nullified by the poet, who takes
analogues in cinema, but far easier in tors at St. Elizabeth’s. Godard’s case is responsibility for his or her own freedom

52 filmcomment July-August 2014

and in so doing offers a model to the
reader. Or, in this case, the viewer.
cannot give you an accurate
I assessment of the “content” of Adieu au
langage. One might say that previous
Godard films begin with what pass for sub-
jects—for instance, the protection of art
from business concerns and the American
co-opting of memory (In Praise of Love), or
the bridge between love and work (Pas-
sion)—only to see them complicated and
finally abstracted within Godard’s imagina-
tion. In his 43rd feature, made very far
from anything even remotely resembling
commercial considerations and pretty much
in his own backyard, Godard’s subject, like
Dickinson’s, becomes as vast as it is inti-
mate. If pressed, you might call this subject
the difficulty of being, which Cocteau long
ago identified as a central concern of poetry.
It could be said that Adieu au langage has
some kind of narrative, an extremely com-
pressed representation of Godard’s relation-
ship with Anne-Marie Miéville. It also has a
governing and unifying set of oppositions
and contrasts—the clarifications and com-
plications of language; being as opposed to
the idea of being (Stevens again: “Not ideas
about the thing but the thing itself”),
embodied within the film by Godard and
Miéville’s dog Roxy; rhetoric that addresses
the I, the we, and the other, and thus charges
the film’s 3-D images with a rich metaphor-
ical energy. Godard was ostensibly attracted
Mr. Turner
TOP 10 CANNES
Adieu au langage Jean-Luc Godard,
France/Switzerland
Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, France
Jauja Lisandro Alonso, Argentina
Mr. Turner Mike Leigh, U.K.
National Gallery Frederick Wiseman, U.S.
Of Men and War Laurent Bécue-Renard,
France
Silvered Water Wiam Simar Bedirxan &
Oussama Mohammed, Syria
Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako, France
Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc
Dardenne, Belgium
Whiplash Damien Chazelle, U.S.
to 3-D because it remains unencumbered by
any rules to speak of, but he eventually
breaks its one implicit rule by drawing
attention to the separation between the
right-eye and left-eye images, most spectac-
ularly in a mind-bending shot that I have
yet to fully comprehend on a technical level
(believe me: you’ll know it when you see it)
and that actually drew a round of applause
mid-screening in Cannes.
In Pierrot le fou Ferdinand quotes Elie
Faure on Velazquez’s tendency to focus on
the spaces between objects rather than the
objects themselves. Faure’s observation can
be just as aptly applied to Godard. Identi-
fying the aesthetic strategies in Adieu au
langage and enumerating the film’s visual ele-
ments runs the risk of reducing it to a neat
succession of choices and preoccupations.
But this is a Jean-Luc Godard movie, an
unfolding of revelatory instants—the
screen suddenly aflame with the vibrant
reds and yellows of autumn, the two points
of the 3-D perspective magically diverging
and converging, a close image of Roxy
looking us in the eye—that at once upend
the ground beneath our feet and slice
cleanly through the curtain of reality.
Adieu au langage is a film that brings us
face to face with doubt, despair, and every-
day existential confusion, made in a state
of pure liberty. It was the most exhilarating
and ennobling film in Cannes.
ike leigh’s Mr. Turner also looks
M at the difficulty of being… with oth-
ers. “Humans…” muses Timothy Spall’s
J.M.W. Turner, in conversation with an old
gentleman (Karl Johnson) who is haunted
by the horrors of his years piloting a slave
ship. Like Maurice Pialat with Van Gogh,
Leigh has assumed an extremely sophisti-
cated approach to the task of recounting
the life of a true giant of painting, who
worked in the divinely inhuman realm of
light. Dick Pope’s images stress the presence
of light, while Leigh’s dramatic focus is on
that which might one day be dissolved in
light’s transcendence—indifference, callous-
ness, cruelty, exploitation. Spall’s grunting
Turner is all work, impulse, and devotion to
the craft of painting and the rendering of
light, always more refined, always more
abstract, as his work goes in and then
July-August 2014 filmcomment 53
severely out of fashion. In the meantime,
we come to understand that Turner’s sin-
gle-mindedness is only possible thanks to
others—the ex-wife (Ruth Sheen) and
daughters that he has denied; the beloved,
aging father (Paul Jesson) on whom he has
come to depend; the dutiful and unimagi-
native Constable (James Fleet), in contrast
to whom Turner’s genius is that much
more dramatically alive; and Turner’s mis-
erable and mousily compliant housekeeper
Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), unappreci-
ated helpmate and abandoned lover. What
is truly remarkable in Leigh’s film is his
hero’s non-verbal recognition of his own
failings as a human being, borne out in
stray gestures and behaviors, in dramatic
contrast to his all-too-human fear of own-
ing up to them. By virtue of its subject and
its obligation to cover a certain measure of
biographical ground, Mr. Turner is a little
more conventionally structured than pre-
vious Leigh films, but that’s not a com-
plaint. Leigh and his cast achieve
something rare—a work that dramatizes
Jauja
54 filmcomment July-August 2014
both everyday human cruelty and the
unspoken longing to rise above it.
isandro alonso also finds a new
L direction with Jauja. The better part of
Alonso’s cinema has been wordless, allow-
ing the physical journeys of his heroes and
the terrain through which they travel to
hypnotically evolve in lengthy stretches.
Alonso ventures into places that few of his
fellow filmmakers would consider visiting
let alone filming, and he also has an
uncanny way of finding landscapes with
their own drama. Los Muertos, for
instance, isn’t just “set” along the Paraná
River: its hero’s every action is tied to this
particular bend or that section of the
bank under that tree or thicket. Similarly,
in Jauja, the section of seashore and the
series of pathways further and further
inland and up the mountain taken by mil-
itary engineer Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo
Mortensen, who speaks only Danish and
heavily accented Spanish), in search of his
runaway daughter, are as integral to the
texture and force of the film as the metic-
ulously selected objects and constumes in
Visconti’s work were. What is new here is
the historical setting, laid out in the open-
ing declamatory dialogues—the Conquest
of the Desert in the 1870s, during which
the Argentinean army attempted to drive
all indigenous peoples out of Patagonia.
The film gradually shifts emphasis, as
Mortensen’s character advances up the
mountain, from the historical to the
mythical to the oneiric. Jauja, shot by Aki
Kaurismäki’s usual DP Timo Salminen on
35mm in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, is a
stunning visual achievement: almost
every image is an adventure in color and
light, and there are many passages that
manage to divine the color values of
Manet without any apparent trickery or
manipulation. Jauja is, like all of Alonso’s
films, both a feat and a small-scale won-
der, but the more intricate narrative
framework actually adds a whole new
dimension. It’s a film that continues to
grow in the mind. 
Make ever y cof fee moment special with the smooth,
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festivals C A N N E S b y G AV I N S M I T H
Clouds of Sils Maria

the best actors of her generation.

Aiming True Importance rules, but Returning to Cannes for the eighth time,
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne proved that
the real thing shines through their aesthetic system is sturdy enough to
withstand even the presence of a star of
f the 115 titles in the 2014 cannes lineup, i managed to see 53,
O 25 of which I considered to be somewhere between good and great
(and I missed three reported highlights). That seems like a decent ratio,
Marion Cotillard’s magnitude without los-
ing balance. In Two Days, One Night, Cotil-
lard plays Sandra, employee of a small
and so while the general feeling was that this was a middling edition solar-panel manufacturer who’s faced with
overall, once I’d put together my Cannes 10-Best list, this year’s festi- redundancy unless she can persuade the
val started to look pretty good. (And most of the 28 disappointments majority of her co-workers to vote to
and disasters had their virtues—I’ll go out on a limb here and say that forego their bonuses, which will allow her
to stay on. It’s no overstatement to describe
the universally derided festival opener Grace of Monaco was never bor-
what follows as an emotional roller-
ing, and I rather liked Tim Roth’s suave performance as Prince Rainier.) coaster—with only 48 hours to make her
Shut out of the awards, Olivier Assayas’s play the older woman, while a Lindsay
Clouds of Sils Maria was certainly one of the Lohan–esque American (Chloë Grace TOP 10 CANNES
festival’s standouts, and the director’s best Moretz) will essay Maria’s original part.
1. Adieu au langage Jean-Luc
since Summer Hours. Invoking the spirit of The ambiguous, shifting dynamics that play Godard, France/Switzerland
Ingmar Bergman (Persona in particular), it out as Maria discusses the role and runs 2. Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas,
rematches Assayas with Juliette Binoche in lines with Valentine suggestively mirror France
a low-key, finely modulated psychodrama and echo—and sometimes reverse—what’s 3. Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc
ostensibly about the relationship between going on in the play. And then a truly stun- Dardenne, Belgium
successful actress Maria (Binoche) and her ning coup on a hilltop that culminates in a 4. Saint Laurent Bertrand Bonello, France
capable personal assistant, Valentine (Kris- close encounter with the Sublime invites 5. Queen and Country John Boorman, U.K.
ten Stewart). Reckoning with middle age, the viewer to completely rethink the rela- 6. The Wonders Alice Rohrwacher, Italy
Maria agrees to revisit the stage play in tionship between actress and factotum. 7. Mr. Turner Mike Leigh, U.K.
which she made her name at age 18, in the Under Assayas’s tight direction, Binoche 8. It Follows David Robert Mitchell, U.S.
role of a scheming assistant whose actions delivers one of her greatest, least self- 9. The Blue Room Mathieu Amalric, France
lead to the undoing of her businesswoman indulgent performances, while Stewart 10. Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako,
boss. In the proposed revival Maria will continues to demonstrate why she’s one of France/Mauritania

56 filmcomment July-August 2014

case, Sandra visits the homes of 16 men and
women accompanied by her husband (Fab-
rizio Rongione), the outcome of each
encounter far from certain.
The Dardenne Brothers are nothing if
not consistent—if suspense is their habitual
secret ingredient, it’s always embedded in a
compelling and lucid moral framework
(Ken Loach could learn a thing or two from
them). But while their previous films have
been largely defined by their protagonists’
struggles to accept responsibility for or
embrace commitment to another person,
this is their first narrative predicated on
ideas of solidarity and sacrifice. And it’s the
renewal of this (at times seemingly near-
extinct) ideal within the hard realities of
modern life that gives the Dardennes the
solution to the tricky narrative challenge
they set themselves by building up to the
workers’ ballot: how to resolve things in a
way that evades the obvious dramatic pit-
falls of either triumph or defeat? Where
other filmmakers might resort to grand-
standing, the Dardennes simply remain
steadfastly true to life, which, along with
Cotillard’s restrained performance, is what
makes Two Days, One Night finally so
beautiful and deeply moving.
had already won the runner-up Grand Prix
not once but twice (deservedly for Once
Upon a Time in Anatolia in 2011, less so for
Distant in 2002), not to mention Best Direc-
tor (for his worst film, Three Monkeys, in
2008). So it fell to a secret ballot by Jane
Campion and her jury to finally put the poor
guy out of his misery and lift him up where
he justly belongs, in the pantheon alongside
Bille August and Roland Joffé. Set in a
mountain village and improbable tourist
trap, Winter Sleep is a talky, just-about-
watchable three-and-a-half-hour drama
centered on a self-satisfied, overbearing
middle-aged former actor turned hotelier/
landlord/newspaper columnist (Haluk Bil-
giner). Ceylan’s protagonist has been
putting off writing a not-very-interesting-
sounding book on the history of Turkish
theater, happy to divert his energies into a
series of inconsequential moral debates and
musings with whoever’s in earshot.
He’s flanked by two discontented
women—his much younger wife (Melisa
Sözen), whose misery owes as much to her
endurance of her husband’s impervious
sense of superiority as to the fact that she’s
stuck in this backwater; and his recently
divorced sister (Demet Akbag), who launches
into an epic tirade against her brother (I’m
still not sure quite why) that devolves into
yet another moral disquisition. These woe-
fully overextended dialogue scenes reduce
the film to a series of theatrical vignettes that
are as exhausting as they are inconclusive.
To be sure, through these and a handful of
secondary characters, Ceylan’s grappling
with an Important Theme—the ethics of
charity, or put another way, the idea that
Charity Begins at Home—but while it’s not
entirely simplistic, this philosophical exposi-
tion isn’t terribly compelling or revealing.

o competition in cannes is com-

N plete without at least a couple of des-
ignated Important Films—films that aim for
grandeur and too often settle for bombast.
In an effort to make an Important State-
ment, Michel Hazanavicius’s Chechen War
drama The Search (a remake of Fred Zinne-
mann’s 1948 film) certainly fell well short of
Two Days, One Night
success. Although it seemed okay to me on
the terms it sets for itself, its over-familiar
story—weary EU aid worker (Bérénice Bejo)
takes in an ostensibly orphaned boy and
attempts in vain to tell the world about the
genocide that’s in full swing—was widely
despised. Although the film seems to be
about communication breakdown, the
takeaway for most was: how dare the man
behind The Artist have the temerity to lay a
banal War Is Bad message on us. Appar-
ently we’re all experts on the horrors of war
now, so we can safely consign an entire
genre to the dustbin of history.
Anyhow, with the lumbering momentum
of a true White Elephant, this year’s Palme
d’Or went to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter
Sleep—to the surprise of few and the delight
Winter Sleep
of many. Talk about predestination: Ceylan

July-August 2014 filmcomment 57

 Leviathan

Have I made you hot to see this one yet? bitter dispute between hotheaded mechanic
There’s more! An existential motorcyclist Kolia (Alexei Serebriakov)—who lives in a
passing through, a well-meaning imam, house overlooking the coastal town with
and an angry unemployed ex-con who’s his young wife, Lilya (Elena Liadova), and
behind on his rent (and so naturally, in a teenage son by a previous marriage—and
gesture stright out of Dostoevsky, throws the corrupt local mayor who has obtained
a wad of euros into a burning fireplace to legal authorization to appropriate Kolia’s
show he’s too proud to accept charity land and demolish his home to make way for
from his landlord’s wife). And guess a vaguely described “communications cen-
what? (Spoiler alert.) When all is finally ter” for the town. Kolia’s close friend Dmitri
“resolved” in surrender/defeat/acceptance/ (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), a sharp Moscow
whatever, Ceylan’s protagonist finally lawyer, quickly puts the mayor on the back
makes a start on that book of his. Despite foot, but he’s also having an affair with the
passages of real cinema—particularly in the unhappy Lilya, so things clearly aren’t going
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SOCIETY OF LINC
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OLN CENTER promising opening scenes—this moral to end well. (Have you ever stopped to won-
treatise feels like a dauntingly attenuated der why the wives in these Important Films
FASSBINDER
FASSBINDER and mildly enervating literary exercise, are always so unhappy?) And as this involv-
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OGY unprofitably harking back to Bergman’s ing but predictable drama of family conflict,
ON SALE
SALE NO
NOW!
W! dramas of estrangement (Scenes of a Mar- betrayal, and heavy-handed gangster tactics
riage, Winter Light) and Chekhov’s studies unfolds, the ambiguous figure of a local
in bourgeois complacency. priest comes into the picture—and the Russ-
The Best Screenplay award went to ian Orthodox Church and its interests
another post-millennium certified auteur, become part of the equation. Though
Andrei Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg visually never less than striking, acted
Negin for Leviathan. Like Ceylan, Zvyag- with rough-edged vigorousness by the
intsev is prone to self-seriousness, but he three leads, and laced with a couple of
seems to be coming out of it a bit. Once you nicely unresolved ambiguities, Zvyagint-
get past the title and the ponderous opening sev’s bid for political relevance is hobbled
scene with its straining-for-importance by the film’s melodrama and ultimately
score, the fourth film by Russian art cin- it’s all very obvious—but it makes its
F
Featuring
eaturing 35 yyears
ears ooff exclusive Film
exclusive Film ema’s Great White Hope proves to be his point, and it leaves Winter Sleep all the
Comment
Commentt coverage—including
coverage—including a 19751975
interview prolific
interview with the pr filmmaker,
olific filmmak err, articles
articles most enjoyable and least oppressive to date. more anemic by comparison.
by
by Manny
Manny Farber,
Farberr, Roger
Roger Greenspun,
Greenspun, and The mise en scène is as muscular as ever but The awards ceremony, by the way, was
Brooks Riley,
Brooks R profiles
iley, profiles of
of his most
most frfrequent
equent less in your face, and a welcome sense of a hoot. Award presenter Monica Bellucci
collaborators,
collaborators, and mormore.e.
humor helps to keep Zvyagintsev’s predilec- seemed stoned. Best Actor Tim Spall com-

JUS
JUST
T 99
99¢!
¢!!
tion for overwrought portentousness in check. pletely lost the plot. Bennett Miller con-
Clearly invoking Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan cluded his acceptance speech for the Best
is a fairly clear-eyed look at the State of Director prize with a resounding “this is
B
BUY
UY NO
NOW
WAAT
T FILMLINC.
FILMLINC.COM/ANTHOLOGY
COM//ANTHOL
A OGY
Things in today’s Russia, encapsulated in a quite affirming.” And Campion couldn’t

58 filmcomment July-August 2014

Queen and Country
even pronounce Zvyagintsev’s name prop-
erly when she announced his award—
somehow she didn’t have a minute to write
it out phonetically on a scrap of paper (it’s
zvee-ah-gint-sev, Jane)—but because she
also, amazingly, seemed incapable of cor-
rectly pronouncing the names of half her
jury members, including Willem Dafoe’s,
that’s all right then.
he received wisdom is that the
T Directors’ Fortnight came into being
because Cannes’ lineups were seen as too
safe and behind the times, its selections lim-
ited to work drawn from the world-cinema
establishment. The Quinzaine aimed to
introduce the work of young Turks not
on Le Festival de Cannes’s radar—hence
Bertolucci, Oshima, and Garrel in 1969, its
first year. It’s intermittently scooped the main
festival in the years since, breaking new tal-
ents that went on to become cinema giants—
Herzog, Fassbinder, Ruiz, Angelopoulos,
Brocka, Scorsese, and more recently, such
competition favorites as Oliveira, Jar-
musch, Kaurismäki, Hou, and Haneke.
Meanwhile, the Quinzaine’s other pur-
pose—to make room for work that was
more radical or counter-cinema in charac-
ter—has largely faded away.
But the first edition of the Directors’
Fortnight also presented the work of an old
master that the main festival hadn’t seen fit
to select for competition—Robert Bresson’s
Une femme douce (Four Nights of a
Dreamer and The Devil, Probably were
later shown as well). The Directors’ Fort-
night still does this occasionally, as they
did this year, with the coup of Queen and
Country by octogenarian five-time Cannes
veteran John Boorman (who debuted there
in 1970 with Leo the Last). A hugely plea-
surable follow-up to the director’s autobio-
graphical 1987 Hope and Glory, Queen
and Country is set in the early Fifties and
details the bittersweet rites of passage of the
now-grown-up Bill (Callum Turner) as he
does his National Service stint in the British
Army. Boorman’s stand-in avoids being
shipped off to Korea and lands a desk job as
a typing instructor, a cushy post but for a
military-regulation-fixated Sergeant Major
(David Thewlis in top form) who makes life
miserable for Bill and his two office mates in
an escalating grudge match. The counter-
point to this seemingly light service comedy
is Bill’s romantic pursuit of an alluring but
unhappy Oxford student (Tamsin Egerton)
who’s clearly out of his league. The action
of both narrative strands eventually con-
verges in a sense, as the psychological prob-
lems afflicting Thewlis and Egerton’s deeply
troubled characters come to the surface,
with the implication that both are, in differ-
ent ways, casualties of Britain’s all-but-obso-
lete class system. I found the film deeply
moving, perhaps because in the loving re-
creation of postwar England and intima-
tions of a country on the cusp of a new era
Boorman’s nostalgia and gentle sense of loss
are so unabashed and sincere, and his film-
making still so vital. The director has let it
be known that while there’s potentially a
third autobiographical film to be made,
filmmaking now seems a daunting
prospect to him at his age. Come off it,
John: if Jean-Luc Godard and Manoel de
Oliveira can pull it off, so can you. 
July-August 2014 filmcomment 59
Collect them all!

Digital and print

back issues of
Film Comment
now available at

www.filmsociety.
myshopify.com
critics’ choice E I G H T F I L M C R I T I C S R AT E C A N N E S 2014
Joumane Manohla Anton Charlotte Alexander Jonathan Gavin Manuel
The Films Chahine Dargis Dolin Garson Horwath Romney Smith Yáñez-Murillo

ADIEU AU LANGAGE 

    
JEAN-LUC GODARD

AMOUR FOU
JESSICA HAUSNER
    

BIRD PEOPLE     

PASCALE FERRAN
THE BLUE ROOM     
  
MATHIEU AMALRIC
THE CAPTIVE
ATOM EGOYAN    

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

OLIVIER ASSAYAS        

FORCE MAJEURE
RUBEN ÖSTLUND     

FOXCATCHER      


BENNETT MILLER
THE HOMESMAN    
  
TOMMY LEE JONES
JAUJA       
LISANDRO ALONSO
LEVIATHAN       
ANDREI ZVYAGINTSEV 

LOST RIVER     
RYAN GOSLING
MAPS TO THE STARS        
DAVID CRONENBERG
MISUNDERSTOOD     
ASIA ARGENTO
MOMMY
XAVIER DOLAN
     

MR. TURNER       

MIKE LEIGH
PARTY GIRL MARIE AMACHOUKELI, CLAIRE       
BURGER & SAMUEL THEIS
SAINT LAURENT       
BERTRAND BONELLO 

THE SEARCH      
MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS
TIMBUKTU       
ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO
TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT
JEAN-PIERRE & LUC DARDENNE        

WHITE GOD
KORNÉL MUNDRUCZÓ      

WILD TALES
DAMIÁN SZIFRON       

WINTER SLEEP
NURI BILGE CEYLAN       

THE WONDERS
ALICE ROHRWACHER       
XX

     = EXCELLENT     = VERY GOOD    = GOOD   = OF INTEREST  = MEDIOCRE  = BOMB

participants: Joumane Chahine of the Beirut International Film Festival; Manohla Dargis of The New York Times; Anton Dolin of
Moskovskie Novosti, Moscow; Charlotte Garson of Etudes, Paris; Alexander Horwath of Die Presse, Vienna; Jonathan Romney of Screen
International, London; Gavin Smith of Film Comment; and Manuel Yáñez-Murillo of Fotogramas, Barcelona

July-August 2014 filmcomment 61

festivals CANNES by DENNIS LIM

The Wonders arduous work of honey harvesting, with an

evocative atmosphere of mystery. Family
dynamics and backstory (are they dooms-
day cultists? political radicals?) surface
only in partial glimpses, and as in Corpo
Celeste, Rohrwacher conjures a richly con-
crete world that is nonetheless subject to
the magical thinking of adolescence. The
Wonders never announces its themes,
which is probably one reason so many dis-
missed it, but it’s a film with plenty on its
mind, not least the ways in which old tra-
ditions survive in the modern world, as acts
of resistance or repackaged as commodi-
ties. (Bonus points for being shot, by vet-
eran French DP Hélène Louvart, in the
all-but-extinct 16mm film format.)

Films not so fragiles Three up-and- R ohrwacher won the runner-up

Grand Prix, confirming the oft-

comers trump the usual suspects repeated, rather patronizing assumption

that at least one of the two women in Com-
petition (the other being—who else—
Naomi Kawase) would be rewarded by
he general rule at cannes is to tune out the chattering
T white noise that, even more than the thudding Eurodisco that
floods the Croisette nightly, constitutes the festival’s most grating
jury president Jane Campion. As frustrat-
ing as it was to see a film this accomplished
reduced to the gender of its director, an
soundtrack. But sometimes the received wisdom and idle blather that equally chronic problem apparent in the
surround a given film can be revealing. Such was the case with Alice conversation around The Wonders is the
Rohrwacher’s second feature, The Wonders, one of the more striking films festival’s increasingly pronounced bias
in this year’s Competition and yet persistently described, even by many against the new. A film like this might not
of its admirers, as “slight,” “minor,” and “small.” have seemed so out of place in the Compe-
tition if the gatekeepers were more wel-
Like Rohrwacher’s debut, Corpo and her sister, Alba, plays the mother. coming to emerging voices. Instead Cannes
Celeste, a Directors’ Fortnight selection in Whether or not the film is autobiographi- clings stubbornly to an annual regimen of
2011, The Wonders is a coming-of-age cal in its details, it suggests a collection of old masters and usual suspects. The osten-
story. The focus is on a family in rural cen- sense memories, combining a documentary sible reason, some say, is to protect the
tral Italy—German-speaking father, Italian attention to daily ritual, including the more challenging and delicate work—les
mother, four girls, a young woman who films fragiles, as the French call them—
may be their aunt—that keeps bees and TOP 10 CANNES from the unforgiving main spotlight.
produces honey. Two unexpected arrivals Whatever the intention, the impression left
1. Jauja Lisandro Alonso, Argentina
prove disruptive, especially for the pensive behind is of a festival that puts little stock
2. Adieu au langage Jean-Luc
oldest daughter, Gelsomina: the father Godard, France/Switzerland in discovery. This year, Cannes had the
takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of 3. Saint Laurent Bertrand Bonello, France opportunity to anoint two rising talents in
a child welfare program and a television 4. L’il Quinquin Bruno Dumont, France addition to Rohrwacher: Israel’s Nadav
crew shows up to enlist the local farmers 5. The Kindergarten Teacher Nadav Lapid and Sweden’s Ruben Östlund, who
in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culi- Lapid, Israel both had new films that confirm their
nary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Mon- 6. Maidan Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine wholly distinctive voices. But Cannes
ica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). 7. Force Majeure Ruben Östlund, Sweden deemed neither ready for its pantheon.
Unlike countless movies of its ilk, The 8. Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, Östlund landed in Un Certain Regard
Wonders is neither precious nor pre- France while Lapid had to make do with an out-
dictable in describing teenage yearning and 9. The Wonders Alice Rohrwacher, Italy of-Competition slot in Critics’ Week.
confusion. Rohrwacher grew up in a mul- 10. Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako, Östlund’s previous film, Play, considers
tilingual family with beekeeping parents France race and class tensions beneath the veneer

62 filmcomment July-August 2014

of Scandinavian liberal democracy by
observing the interactions of two groups
of children on the streets of Gothenburg.
In his new Force Majeure, the focus nar-
rows to that beleaguered social unit: the
nuclear family. On a ski vacation in the
French Alps, a young Swedish couple and
their two children have a close call with an
avalanche that sends the father, Tomas,
scurrying for his life, iPhone in hand, leav-
ing behind his panicked kids and equally
terrorized wife, Ebba. No one is harmed,
but the foundational beliefs and expecta-
tions holding up the edifice of marriage
and family have been shattered. As he digs
into the aftermath of Tomas’s split-second
transgression, there are some easy, queasy
laughs at the expense of the emasculated
patriarch, but the film is both sharp and
serious in examining the conflict between
The Kindergarten Teacher
social role and survival instinct. Among
other things, Force Majeure functions as a
viral thought experiment, which Östlund
dramatizes by compelling Ebba and
Tomas to replay the traumatic moment
and examine its implications in front of
one couple, and then another. The film
ends with not one but two reversals—a
faux-redemptive moment and another
brush with fear—that suggest the impossi-
bility of undoing what came before.
Like Östlund, Lapid is an analytical
filmmaker who has earned comparisons to
Michael Haneke. (Is it the dearth of rigor-
ous, cerebral cinema or a lack of imagina-
tion among critics that causes any director
with sociological interests and diagnostic
ambitions to be automatically likened to
Haneke?) Even more than his bifurcated
2011 debut feature, Policeman, which sets
an elite anti-terrorism squad on a collision
course with a band of young Israeli revolu- Devil’s Advocates Series
tionaries, Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher FROM
is a shape-shifting provocation and, un-
AUTEUR PUBLISHING
apologetically, a film of ideas. The central
relationship is between the fortysomething
title character, Nira (Sarit Larry), a married
mother of two, and Yoav, a 5-year-old
charge of hers with a curious gift: every
now and again, without warning, he paces
back and forth and begins declaiming per-
fectly formed verses on love and loss that
would seem far beyond the scope of his
emotional life. (Lapid used poems that he
himself dictated to his nanny between the
ages of 4 and 7.) Where do Yoav’s words
come from and what place do they have in
this world? Nira’s prize pupil apparently
Carrie
awakens in her a protective impulse, but as NEIL MITCHELL
her actions grow more extreme, the ques- $15.00 · PAPER
The Silence of the Lambs
BARRY FORSHAW
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tion of what exactly she’s protecting
remains very much open.
This impassive prodigy, unwilling or
unable to give up his secrets, becomes, for
this ever more determined woman, a bul-
wark and a weapon in her fundamentalist
rejection of a world that has no use for
poetry. Trading the precise mise en scène
of Policeman for reflexive, rupturing for-
mal strategies, with a borderline-invasive
camera that gives the film itself (and not The Thing
just its characters) a searching and rapa- JEZ CONOLLY
cious quality, Lapid sustains a multiplicity
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of possible meanings in this mordant,
coolly ambiguous work. The Kindergarten
Teacher may share the despair of its hero- For more titles from
ine, but there is something perversely Auteur Publishing,
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the power to drive us mad. 
July-August 2014 filmcomment 63
festivals CANNES by NICOLAS RAPOLD

and yet rich, Gett features a gallery of

Major Films in the Minor Leagues surprising and often funny characters taking
their turns on the stage, and a stringent
The Directors’ Fortnight finds room scheme of point-of-view camerawork that,
while sometimes awkward, aptly underlines
for new blood and old masters alike the subjectivity of the courtroom.

he best quinzaine film not about a

T here are those who believe that the directors’ fortnight
has seen better days, whether the benchmark is several years or sev-
T Jewish divorce court proceeding shared
a little common ground with Mike Leigh’s
eral decades old. (See p. 59 for a potted history of Cannes’ parallel Mr. Turner though not, to the enduring sur-
showcase.) Certainly the sleep-deprived correspondents to whom I men- prise of any listmaker of the world’s fore-
tioned my assignment—to take the measure of one year’s Quinzaine most auteurs, a place in the Competition.
selection, from soup to nuts—seemed more inclined to murmur words Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery finds
of encouragement than envy. That wariness might partly arise from the the filmmaker’s camera taking up residence
unknown-quantity debuts on display and the varying mileage of its this time in the preeminent London art
museum, home to Mr. Turner as well as
genre entries, both of which make up a significant portion of the lineup.
Messrs. Cézanne, Holbein, Giotto, van
For my money (which is a figure of while the couple’s connection (or lack Eyck, Velazquez, and many other canonical
speech that can be taken literally due to thereof) is increasingly suggested by what artists. Wiseman’s 41st feature makes a
the high cost of attending Cannes), the 2014 isn’t explained rather than what is. ready counterpart to No. 40, last year’s At
titles that were new to me did have a clear While others testify that he’s a totally Berkeley in its heavy use of quotation—
standout in an Israeli film whose action devoted husband, Elisha comes across as a here, speeches by eloquent tour guides that
largely unfolded within a single room. In real pill; never fully fleshed out by compara- send us back in time, painting by painting,
Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the sibling ble testimony, Viviane understandably and and demonstrate the fine art of ecphra-
filmmaking team of Ronit and Schlomi Elk- bravely objects to being held up for scrutiny. sis—and in its self-reflexivity as it ponders
abetz, completing a trilogy that they began Part of the appeal of this twistily written the problems of representation. (The
with To Take a Wife (04) and 7 Days (08), film—which effortlessly shifts from court- movie was shot in HD, which at times, at
again set themselves certain formal limita- room drama to feminist commentary to the screening I attended at least, made the
tions to unearth profound drama and mys- intense melodrama to black farce to some texture of some paintings seem a tad flat,
tery from the dry-sounding scenario of a combination of existential conundrum and but the very challenge of lighting and
protracted divorce trial before a rabbinical folk tale—lies in the way it maintains the framing is itself addressed in a sequence
court. According to accepted archaic law, impossibility of truly characterizing a rela- about mounting an exhibition.)
Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) can only legally tionship to outsiders. It’s more than a matter The film’s edifying first half lingers in
finalize her divorce with the complete con- of he-said-she-said, since this isn’t some the halls of art, appreciating the aesthetic
sent of her husband, Elisha (Simon Abkar- tabloid story of competing accusation; qualities and historical specificity of a series
ian). Supported by her lawyer (Menashe instead, from our limited vantage point, we of works, with cutaways giving offhand
Noy), she returns again and again to court, are ultimately left to imagine for ourselves portraits of museumgoers. Wiseman’s
with friends and family called as witnesses, both the lived reality and essence of their usual curiosity about institutional adminis-
but the man to whom she is unluckily marriage, while the often capricious rabbis tration feels curtailed somewhat here but
bound holds firm, for increasingly opaque continue to insist upon notions of the para- glimpses of decision-making bear witness
reasons in which anger, love, and pure male mount importance of home and family, especially to the insidious effects and
prerogative are merged together. As the however irrelevant they quite evidently rhetoric of marketing. But as the film pro-
months go by, time itself seems suspended, remain to Viviane in her situation. Spare gresses, Wiseman problematizes his subject

Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem National Gallery A Hard Day

64 filmcomment July-August 2014

matter: through scenes about restoration
and about art depicting other artworks, the
materiality of the museum and its contents
comes to seem unstable, their meaning
contingent upon framing in every sense.
The stripping of rooms for a new exhibi-
tion (producing the film’s most abstract
images), a poetry recitation, the recording
of a pretentious art-history TV show, and a
site-specific dance event underline the sta-
tus of the museum as a perpetual perfor-
mance space, where art comes alive, and
stays strange, with each physical encounter.
n addition to these two very disparate
I entries, and to its credit, the Quinzaine
also hosted Kim Seong-hung’s rollicking
thriller A Hard Day. Carefully orchestrated,
beat for beat, the movie unfolds as a
macabre comedy of errors and paranoia, as
a cop in a casually corrupt department finds
himself unable to wash his hands clean of a
hit-and-run that refuses to stay covered up.
Lee Sun-kyun, an honest-looking Hong
Sang-soo regular, gets put through the
wringer in action and fight sequences that
take on a Rube Goldberg quality as the
mishaps and accidents pile up, especially
when a third party (effectively sinister and
unpredictable Choi Jin-woong) intervenes.
Highlights include a mano a mano apart-
ment brawl and an extended gag involving a
coffin; amusingly, the director cited Almod-
óvar’s Volver, or rather his speculation about
the possible real-life aftermath of a key event
in Volver, as an inspiration. Coming eight
years after Kim’s first feature, A Hard Day
marks a second debut of sorts, and one that
portends well if he can maintain the same
standards of pacing and freshness. (The
same couldn’t be said of, say, Catch Me
Daddy and the shouty Eat Your Bones,
which vividly portray their respective crim-
inal subcultures but break down as they go
along. And the less said the better of These
Final Hours, in which a gym bunny and a lit-
tle girl face the apocalypse in, where else,
Refugiado
TOP 10 CANNES
1. The Kindergarten Teacher Nadav
Lapid, Israel
2. Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, France
3. Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem Ronit
& Schlomi Elkabetz, Israel
4. Adieu au langage Jean-Luc Godard,
France/Switzerland
5. L’il Quinquin Bruno Dumont, France
6. Mr. Turner Mike Leigh, U.K.
7. The Wonders Alice Rohrwacher, Italy
8. National Gallery Frederick Wiseman,U.S.
9. A Hard Day Kim Seong-hung, Korea
10. Maps to the Stars David Cronenberg,
Canada
Australia—I’ll take The Rover any day.)
On a rather different note, menace was
deployed to nerve-fraying but meaningful ends
in Diego Lerman’s Refugiado (“Refugee,”
as in someone looking for safe haven),
about a woman on the run from her vio-
lently abusive partner. Lerman’s hovering
camera creates a sense of ambient unease
as it tracks Laura (Julieta Diaz) and her 8-
year-old son scurrying from women’s
shelter to motel to backwoods hideaway.
While some might complain that the
Argentine filmmaker skirts the unseemly in
squeezing so much around-the-corner
suspense out of the husband’s pursuit—
we know the potential consequences
from an opening scene of Laura bloodied
and dazed—the paranoia is true enough to
the stalker behavior of many abusive hus-
bands and the exhausting trauma of abuse,
which lingers in the mind long after escape.
The merits of all the above notwith-
standing, only one feature was apparently
deserving of any recognition: Love at First
Fight (Les Combattants), which swept the
Quinzaine awards as well as FIPRESCI’s
sidebar prize. It’s a diverting, crowd-
pleasing debut from French filmmaker
Thomas Cailley, pairing two idle teens, a
kid (Kevin Azais) working for his family’s
construction company and a tough tomboy
Tu dors Nicole
(Adèle Haenel) whose nerd-rage and mer-
cenary self-interest are entertaining until
they start to pose problems. The comedy,
despite straining for effect with a cleans-
ing forest-fire climax, owes some of its feel
to American indie influences, though along
those lines, Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole
(“You’re Sleeping, Nicole”) also had lazy-
summer charms worth noting. In this
sedately black-and-white film, a thrift-store
clerk hangs out with her best friend in the
family house; the parents are on vacation,
and her brother and his band have moved in
for relentlessly noisy practice sessions and
attendant adolescent distractions. I slightly
preferred the Quebecois filmmaker’s dead-
pan heroine, Nicole (Julianne Côté), to
those of Love at First Fight, even though
the film’s tone and weakness for gimmicks
(e.g. the device of Nicole’s pubescent suitor
being deeply voiced by an adult is funny
but overused) verged on quirkiness.
The selection also featured a pair of Sun-
dance star graduates (Whiplash and Cold
in July), more by pastmasters (John Boor-
man’s Queen and Country, and Studio Ghi-
bli co-founder Isao Takahata’s The Tale of
the Princess Kaguya), and a special screening
of Bruno Dumont’s miniseries-turned-fea-
ture L’il Quinquin, easily another of my
favorites. But to end with the beginning: as
silly as it can be to search for themes in a
festival lineup, the Quinzaine opener Girl-
hood does suggest a recurring motif—
women called upon, or unpleasantly forced
into, justifying and asserting their own per-
sonal narratives. For the French-African
teenagers of Céline Sciamma’s latest (and
overly mannered) feature, the solidarity
and brio of a girl gang partly shields its
members from the paternalistic hierarchy
around them. But the Quinzaine doesn’t
need the justification of some hold-all
generalization or the delivery of the sort of
éclat associated with the main festival, for
the strength of its individual efforts to
make themselves felt. 
Girlhood
July-August 2014 filmcomment 65

Abuse of
Weakness
REVIEW BY KRISTIN M. JONES
Director: Catherine Breillat
Country/Year: France, 2013
Opening: August 15
Where: New York
wo extraordinary scenes bookend
T Catherine Breillat’s latest film, inspired
by her experience of a stroke in 2004 and
subsequent entanglement with con man
Christophe Rocancourt. First, in a striking
overhead shot, film director Maud Shoen-
berg (Isabelle Huppert) awakens in bed
and with growing panic tries to feel the left
side of her body. She attempts to stand but
falls to the floor, facing away from the
camera as if her very identity has col-
lapsed. Then at the story’s conclusion,
with muffled unease, she struggles to
explain to her family why she wrote
numerous checks for large sums of money
to notorious con man Vilko (rapper Kool
Shen). “I knew I had to stop, but didn’t
care… It was me, but it wasn’t me.”
What happens between these events—a
devastating stroke and the recognition that
66 filmcomment July-August 2014
screenings
some version of herself has given away
everything she possessed—is a thriller
about the journey of a grown woman and
fully fledged artist from innocence to expe-
rience. It begins with a period of numb
determination in which Maud relearns
how to walk and even laugh in pristine
hospital and physiotherapy rooms over
several months, though in a voiceover she
recalls that it took her a year to under-
stand that she had suffered a brain hemor-
rhage. “I’ve sunk like the Titanic. But if I
ever resurface, I’ll be an atomic bomb,”
Maud says at one point, her strong will
intact. But how exactly will she know
when she has resurfaced?
Rest is clearly a big part of Maud’s
recovery, and she is dozing at home when
Vilko enters her life as an apparition on a
television screen. Waking to the sight of
him being interviewed, she decides to cast
him in a film, fascinated by what she calls
his “icy, hangdog look” and “bitter
pride.” Vilko materializes like a damaged,
attention-hungry prince waking Sleeping
It’s hard to imagine an
actress other than Huppert
so artfully layering frailty
and toughness, self-delusion
and self-awareness.
Beauty, and he repeats the rude awaken-
ings throughout their relationship, phon-
ing while she is trying to rest, even
eventually invading her home, where he
crashes in a child’s bed.
When Maud isn’t sleeping, she is falling
or struggling not to fall. The opening scene
includes a shot of her body prostrate
beneath a toppled gilded chair, hair flow-
ing, an image so arresting it could be a
period painting, or a still from Breillat’s
The Last Mistress (07). Throughout Abuse
of Weakness, some of the most potent
scenes and images involve frightening tum-
bles. More than once she implores Vilko
not to let go of her, though in doing so she
is also succumbing to a voluptuous vertigo.
If sex is largely absent in Abuse of Weak-
ness, power is not. Vilko plays on her pride
as well as her vulnerability, reminding her of
their similarities and grousing that she
enjoys dominating men, a charge that elicits
peals of childlike laughter. When he first vis-
its her home, he jumps up on her bookcase
while she watches in delight, as if her imag-
ined film is already coming to life, though it
is a book bearing her own image that he
plucks from a shelf. Later, at the delirious
height of their involvement, he notices a
monograph of an artist’s sadomasochistic
photographs, and she remarks on their
beauty, oblivious to any implication it may
hold in terms of her own situation.
It’s hard to imagine an actress other
than Huppert so artfully layering frailty
and toughness, self-delusion and self-
awareness, and her complex portrayal is an
irresistible foil to Kool Shen’s blank expres-
sions and wounded swagger. Maud herself
often seems to relish the absurd aspects of
the story as it unfolds, such as Vilko’s hulk-
ing driver and ditzy, good-hearted wife—
sometimes half-smiling as if, in fact, she
were directing her own life.
Starred Up
REVIEW BY GRAHAM FULLER
Director: David Mackenzie
Country/Year: U.K., 2013
Opening: August 29
Where: Limited
n the british prison system, an
I inmate under 21 who proves too dan-
gerous to be held in a youth offender insti-
tution will be moved—or “starred up”—to
an adult facility. So it is with Eric Love
(Jack O’Connell), a 19-year-old working-
class Londoner in Scottish director David
Mackenzie’s punishing realist drama, writ-
ten by Jonathan Asser, who drew upon his
own experiences working as a counselor in
HM Prison Wandsworth.
Initially held in solitary, Eric is unfazed
by having to keep company with all
the Choppers and Bronsons when he’s
assigned a cell in a communal wing. He
batters the faces of two prisoners, trounces
a handful of guards in riot gear who try to
subdue him, and clamps his teeth around
another guard’s testicles, then slashes the
face of another prisoner with a weapon
he’s made from a razor and a toothbrush.
Eric is so violent that the ineffectual
Deputy Governor Hayes (Sam Spruell)
feels he has no option but to have him
hanged, and the killing passed off as a sui-
cide. By the time Hayes reaches this deci-
sion, however, disclosures about the kid’s
history and his attempts to manage his
anger via the group therapy sessions run by
Oliver Baumer (Rupert Friend), an unpaid
upper-class voluntary worker, have made
him a character with whom it is possible to
empathize, if not identify.
One sign of this is the drawing Eric
made, as a child of 5, showing himself, his
mother, and his father holding hands, above
the words, “I Love you daddy.” It turns out
to be stuck to the wall of his father’s cell—
which happen to be in the same wing as
Eric’s: Neville Love (Ben Mendelsohn) is an
intimidating long-term con whose sentence
has been increased because he killed
another prisoner. With his father in prison
and his mother dead, Eric was taken into
care as a boy and abused by a pedophile on
whose face he poured boiling water and
As it portrays the battle of
wills between two men for
one savable youth’s soul,
Starred Up unostentatiously
depicts other integral
aspects of prison life.
sugar when he was 10. He’s serving his cur-
rent sentence for “offing” a man who killed
or hurt (it’s not clear) a woman dismissed
by his father as a “junkie Slut.” Because of
Starred Up’s murky sound and criminal
argot, U.S. viewers may miss some of these
details, though Mackenzie’s tense, fluent
storytelling—more indebted to Robert
Bresson’s A Man Escaped than Alan
Clarke’s Scum, the obvious antecedent—
is emphatically visual.
Neville encourages his son to attend
Oliver’s meetings—from which the savvy
Eric quickly benefits—but twice disrupts
them. He is jealous that another man is
usurping his long-forsaken paternal role.
Intrigued by therapy’s potential to help him
curb his own ferocious rages, he is too
proud or too conflicted to sit in. He also
resents Eric’s “fraternizing” with other
men who value the sessions, not least
because they are black. As it portrays the
battle of wills between two men for one
savable youth’s soul, Starred Up unostenta-
tiously depicts other integral aspects of
prison life—administrative corruption and
homosexuality, as well as racism.
Whereas Scum, adapted by Roy Minton
from his stage play, excoriated the inability
of the British borstal system to rehabilitate
young offenders, Starred Up is more opti-
mistic, given Eric’s growing control of his
temper. The reconciliation between Eric and
Neville after the film’s histrionic final battle
redeems the latter, yet the last words he
speaks to his son—“I’m proud to be your
dad”—are bitterly ironic. His removal from
the scene doesn’t come a moment too soon.
July-August 2014 filmcomment 67
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68 filmcomment July-August 2014
Level Five
REVIEW BY HOWARD HAMPTON
Director: Chris Marker
Country/Year: France, 1996
Opening: August 15
Where: New York
I
f Level Five, originally released in
1996, could be reduced to essentials, the
pungent, bracing ingredients of its perfect
Crème de la Chris Marker recipe would
include: virtual realities and the immaterial
figurations of the Internet, the fateful Battle
of Okinawa in 1945 (as concrete history, as
disremembering, and as a potential video
game), mass suicide and cultural dictation
(vis-à-vis the shifting meanings of “sacri-
fice”), a fable-like tale behind David Raksin’s
composition of the theme from Laura,
a terrifying bullfight (two bulls roped
together head to head, goaded on by grunt-
ing trainers), tourists guided through the
bunkers of Okinawa like chattering lem-
mings, Yves Klein blue horizons, computer-
generated voices reminiscent of Alphaville
and Stephen Hawking, prophetic net-
works of knowledge and (dis)information,
masks/avatars draping counterfeit skin over
old ceremonies, grainy footage of women
jumping off cliffs like people leaping from
the Twin Towers...
Wait, stop—that hadn’t taken place yet,
9/11 was still years away. All the same, as
a filmmaker Marker loved to frame the
present retrospectively, looking back into
the heart of this teeming techno-ecosphere
from the vantage of an imminent—and
surely immanent—future. Much of Level
Five is narrated by the wonderfully rue-
ful and rumpled Catherine Belkhodja, as
“Laura,” in the manner of a recurring
Skype conversation with, or message for,
a phantom Marker. (Skype didn’t exist
yet either, but Level Five proceeds with
this serene sense of higher technology’s
inevitable mundane pervasiveness.) Laura’s
is a ghost-to-ghost call, which Marker peri-
odically addresses or parries. Then after
finally, wearily, pronouncing a eulogy that
could be for him or might be her own,
Laura dematerializes abruptly and it is
Marker who remains anchored to this
island Earth to wrap up this virtual obitu-
ary. The futuristic ethnologist/phantom of
the Internet manages to cheat death even as
he ponders its bottomless ramifications.
Marker loved to frame
the present retrospectively,
looking back into the heart
of this teeming techno-
ecosphere from the vantage
of an imminent—and surely
immanent—future.
The most extraordinarily
contemporary thing about
Marker’s intricate matrix
is how beautifully it lines
up with and enlarges the
contexts of recent films.

This ethnologist also functions as an

ON MY WAY
ethicist. Citing Rabbi Huna’s Talmudic for- NOMINATED FOR TWO 2014 CÉSAR AWARDS
mulation, Laura explains: “God always
sides with the persecuted” even when “a
“A celebration of
just man persecutes a bad man.” C.M. is in
Ms. Deneuve as the
pursuit of the spiritual dimensions hidden
eternal & quintessential
within a grossly materialist age—the per-
French beauty.”
sistence of poetry, the unappeasable hunger
—Los Angeles Times
for justice, the resolute intuition that there
are deeper and higher levels of being and “Deneuve is as
meaning right on the tip of our inadequate, luminous as ever!”
antiquated imaginations. Marker fashions —Entertainment Weekly
an incredibly prescient sensorium here.
Level Five encompasses the passage of
time, wherein the latest machinery of the
AVAILABLE ON
late 20th century feels right on the cusp BLU-RAY™ & DVD
of seeming as antediluvian as the hand- JULY 29
cranked cameras of The Great Train Rob-

AND
bery, and a set of displacing circumstances
that foretell the shocks of our own acceler-
ating social-cyberspace odysseys.
Intimacy is Marker’s paramount weap-
THE WIND WILL CARRY US
on: Belkhodja looking straight at the audi- 15TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
ence, sounding as casually quizzical as DIGITALLY REMASTERED AND NOW AVAILABLE
one’s dearest, oldest friend; Marker him- FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN THE U.S.
self not so much speaking to us as making
it seem like we’re listening to the playback
of our own subconscious. (Why can’t we WINNER
GRAND SPECIAL JURY PRIZE
be so articulate and droll and substantial FIPRESCI PRIZE
in our waking lives?) VENICE FILM FESTIVAL
The most extraordinarily contem-
porary thing about Marker’s intricate
“A celebration of the human
matrix (in a William Gibson rather than a
spirit nothing short of sublime.”
Wachowskis sense of the concept) is how –Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
beautifully it lines up with and enlarges the
contexts of recent films. Of course Pussy “A full-fledged masterpiece.”
Riot: A Punk Prayer owes an obvious and –David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

acknowledged debt to the great director

(there, it is history itself unfolding before our AVAILABLE ON
eyes that seems to be paying homage to BLU-RAY™ & DVD
Marker). But We Steal Secrets, Computer
Chess, and especially Her are all affectingly
JULY 22
previewed in Level Five. When we incontro-
Available at
vertibly arrive in the bright, flashing World
of Tomorrow, I’m positive that scrawled on COHENMEDIA.NET
the walls of the New City (like the World
War II “Kilroy” drawings or the graffiti that
popped up all over Paris: “RIP Chris Marker,
1921-2012”) will be: “C.M. was here.”

July-August 2014 filmcomment 69

 short takes
B E G I N AG A I N
Director: John Carney
Country/Year: U.S., 2013
Opened: June 27
Where: New York and Los Angeles
late in john carney’s musical sightsee-
ing tour Begin Again, Keira Knightley’s
songwriter rebukes her rock-star ex for
wrenching her delicate composition into
an overblown earworm. There’s a paral-
lel to be found with Carney’s repurposing
of the “lovelorn city-dwellers bond while
recording an album” premise from his
weightlessly beguiling 2006 debut Once
into a star-powered redemption yarn that
lives for its next montage.
Mark Ruffalo strains for Nicholson-
esque impudence as a flask-swilling music
producer with nothing left but his principles
who hears Knightley in a bar and persuades
her to record her songs, guerrilla-style, on
the rooftops and subway platforms of New
York City. The notion that the city’s ambi-
ent sounds lend her demo authenticity is
hard to swallow, but worse still, what we
hear is studio-pristine—the film wants to
have its cred and mix it too.
Part of the problem is the change of
location; what seemed enchanting in
Dublin feels twee in New York. Another
part is that the Once blueprint is adhered to
with staggering fidelity, except where it
matters most—the central relationship,
here a non-starter because Carney replaces
his characters’ inner lives with interludes.
The best sequence finds Ruffalo roused
from despair by imagining what Knightley’s
acoustic solo would sound like fully orches-
trated, with each instrument joining her
onstage, playing itself. For a few moments
the healing power of song washes over us.
Then the music stops.—Steven Mears
70 filmcomment July-August 2014
THE GREEN PRINCE
Director: Nadav Schirman
Country/Year: Germany/Israel/U.K., 2014
Opening: August 8
Where: New York
inspired by mosab hassan youssef’s mem-
oir Son of Hamas, Nadav Schirman’s gruel-
ing documentary burrows into the mindset of
a Palestinian who was recruited to spy on his
own family. Like a fusion of Omar and The
Gatekeepers, its central interviews with
Youssef and his Shin Bet contact Gonen Ben
Yitzhak yield insights on intelligence meth-
ods and the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire,
but also show how individually distinct
and twisty all such relationships must be.
What’s extraordinary here is the pedigree:
Mosab’s father, Sheikh Hassan Youssef, was
a founder and leader of Hamas with a fanat-
ical following. Mosab was arrested as a
teenager, and Schirman elicits from him the
volatile mix of coercion, muddled principles,
and painful emotional history that paved the
road to betrayal. Dramatically shot head-on,
his eyes lit up and vulnerable, Mosab cuts
a riveting but unsettled presence, less pol-
ished than the practiced Ben Yitzhak.
Perhaps like almost any account of the
region’s conflict, The Green Prince’s expla-
nations are doomed to feel insufficient and
its political stance unsatisfying. (Schirman’s
2013 feature, In the Dark Room, examined
another open wound with its portrait of
self-absorbed former terrorist Magdalena
Kopp.) But despite some ill-advised reenact-
ment sequences, the 99-minute film (named
after Mosab’s codename) goes a long way
towards depicting the dance of loyalties
that accompanies generational shifts in
political position, and strikes an emotional
chord well beyond the world of covert
operations.—Nicolas Rapold
L I F E I TS E L F
Director: Steve James
Country/Year: U.S., 2014
Opening: July 4
Where: New York
late in this documentary about film
critic Roger Ebert, the subject himself
e-mails director Steve James from the hos-
pital to insist that a difficult conversation
with his wife Chaz be captured for the
movie. After all, he writes, “This is not
only your film.”
The correspondence underscores how
this filmic profile is also a kind of a self-
portrait by Ebert. It shares a title with the
critic’s 2011 memoir, passages of which are
lifted to narrate his rise from precocious
tabloid reviewer to unlikely celebrity to
national treasure. And while it’s too candid
about Ebert’s ego, petulance, and late-
career critical softening to be called hagiog-
raphy, that very frankness does harmonize
with the critic’s own eleventh-hour turn
toward full and fearless disclosure. He
came out as alcoholic in 2009, used his blog
to inform readers of his health issues (which
rendered him unable to speak in 2006), and
here thrills to James’s documenting of his
most painful medical ordeals.
Such candor helps close the gap between
author and audience, though it also often
leaves the great director of Hoop Dreams
(94) with little more to do than collate
archival photos and deploy functional—if
often entertaining and emotional—talking-
head interviews with colleagues, critics,
filmmakers, and family members. In
attempting to encapsulate a life, the film
ultimately becomes a bracing snapshot of
death, with the subject working together
with the filmmaker to see and be seen dur-
ing whatever time remains.—Eric Hynes
LO V E I S S T R A N G E
Director: Ira Sachs
Country/Year: U.S., 2014
Opening: August 22
Where: Limited
working again with a dp borrowed
from the Greek new wave and favoring
an elliptical, lower-case strategy that
evokes the likes of Claire Denis and
Olivier Assayas, Memphis-born Ira Sachs
has become one of our most European
filmmakers. But he also understands the
purpose and power of old-fashioned Hol-
lywood high concept, of delicately detail-
ing within well-worn grooves.
Love Is Strange invokes McCarey’s
Make Way for Tomorrow to craft a con-
temporary fable of separation: aging
West Villagers Ben (John Lithgow) and
George (Alfred Molina) marry after sev-
eral decades of cohabitation, only to find
themselves without a home when the
Catholic school at which George works
as a music teacher fires him for making
his homosexuality public. Since none of
their friends have spare bedrooms, they
have to separate whilst searching for a
new apartment, with George crashing on
a neighbor’s couch and Ben sharing a
bedroom with his niece’s teenaged son.
Sachs doesn’t subvert his tearjerker
enterprise so much as soften and parcel
out emotion, empathizing no more with
the distraught couple than with their
hosts, whose lives are no less inconve-
nienced, or interesting. And though the
conceit would seem to invite overplaying
by its headlining hams, Sachs instead elic-
its their finest work in years, with Lithgow
mining deepening fragility, and Molina
displaying the somber comportment of a
man unrepentantly in love.—Eric Hynes
M AG I C I N T H E M O O N L I G H T
Director: Woody Allen
Country/Year: U.S., 2014
Opening: July 25
Where: New York and Los Angeles
with his 44th feature, woody allen
returns with a characteristically formida-
ble crew and top-drawer cast to a France
of the imagination, previously the setting
of his highest-grossing film to date,
2011’s Midnight in Paris. If last year’s
Blue Jasmine was rooted in the frauds
and self-delusions of a fallen, Madoff-
afflicted world, Magic in the Moonlight
harks back to another era and tradition
of deceptions practiced by clairvoyants
and stage entertainers.
Sometime in the sumptuously cos-
tumed Twenties, Colin Firth enjoys him-
self as a haughty Orientalist magician who’s
summoned by a friend to expose a gold-
digging psychic, Sophie (Emma Stone). With
a setup out of Murder, She Wrote and a title
evoking a charity ball, the story settles in at
an estate in the south of France where
Sophie, overseen by her mother (Marcia
Gay Harden), holds a rich gullible matriarch
(Jacki Weaver) in her thrall. Diverting but
inconsequential, the toothless takes-one-
to-know-one story coasts on Firth’s prac-
ticed wryness and Stone’s insouciant
charm that acquires a glint of antagonism
once her livelihood is threatened.
But talk about off-screen space... I did
not by any means enter this lighthearted
romp looking for any such resonance,
nor need it signify anything, but over the
course of watching the story unfold, it
did occur to me that the film’s suspense
derives primarily from the spectacle of an
older entertainer trying to prove that a
young woman is lying.—Nicolas Rapold
MOOD INDIGO
Director: Michel Gondry
Country/Year: France/Belgium, 2013
Opening: July 18
Where: New York and Los Angeles
boris vian holds the distinction of being
the only author who was so outraged by a
film adaptation of his work that he died
during its screening. Before keeling over
from a heart attack while watching Michel
Gast’s 1959 take on I Spit on Your Grave,
Vian stood up and shouted: “Those guys
are supposed to be American? My ass!”
Although I don’t pretend to be a Vian
scholar, Michel Gondry’s adaptation of
Vian’s 1949 novel L’Écume des jours (here
given the English-language title Mood
Indigo) is truer to the original than those
attempted by Charles Belmont (in 1968)
and Go Riju (under the title Chloe in 2001),
in terms of visuals, spirit, and critical eye.
Wealthy Colin (Roman Duris), inventor
of the “pinocktail” (a piano which makes
cocktails based on what tune is played and
how one plays it), meets Chloé (Audrey
Tautou) at a party and is immediately smit-
ten. Their romance develops in tandem
with that of Chick (Gad Elmaleh) and Alise
(Aïssa Maïga), and at one point the couples
literally race each other to the altar in small
cars. Chloé suffers from a surreal medical
condition—a lily on the lung—and during
her long convalescence, the happiness she
shares with Colin is slowly undermined.
Chick meanwhile squanders the money
Colin gave him to marry Alise buying up
the works of philosopher Jean-Sol Partre.
Gondry’s trademark contraptions and lo-fi
special effects are a perfect fit for this mate-
rial, and so, against the odds, he creates an
experience that’s at once emotionally potent
and visually delightful.—Violet Lucca
July-August 2014 filmcomment 71
 TO P 1 0
8 1. Love Streams Cassavetes, 84; Criterion $29.95
2. We Won’t Grow Old Together Pialat, Fr./It., 72;
Kino Classics $29.95
3. Only Lovers Left Alive Jarmusch, U.K./Ger., 13;
Sony $30.99
4. Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer, U.K., 13;
Lionsgate $19.98
5. Love in the City Antonioni, Fellini, Lattuada, Lizzani,
Maselli, Risi & Zavattini, It., 53; Raro Video USA $27.98
6. Jimmy P. Desplechin, U.S./Fr., 13; IFC $24.98
7. The Grand Budapest Hotel Anderson, 14; Fox
$29.98
8. Oculus Mike Flanagan, 13; Fox $29.98
9. Favorites of the Moon Iosseliani, Fr./It./USSR, 84;
Cohen Media $29.98
10. Blue Ruin Jeremy Saulnier, U.S./Fr., 13; Anchor
Bay $24.98
R ECO M M E N D E D
Costa-Gavras x 2: Amen., Fr./Ger./Rom., 02;
Capital, Fr., 12; Cohen Media $24.98 each
Clark Gable x 4: Hell Divers, George W. Hill, 31;
After Office Hours, Robert Z. Leonard, 35; Parnell,
John M. Stahl, 37; Test Pilot, Victor Fleming, 38;
Warner Archive $18.95 each
John Garfield x 6: Blackwell’s Island, William C.
McGann, 39; Dust Be My Destiny, Lewis Seiler, 39;
East of the River, Alfred E. Green, 40; Flowing Gold,
Green, 40; Saturday’s Children, Vincent Sherman,
40; Dangerously They Live, Robert Florey, 41; Warner
Archive $18.95 each
Afflicted Derek Lee & Clif Prowse, Can., 13; Sony $26.99
Bethlehem Yuval Adler, Isr./Ger./Belg., 13; Adopt
Films $29.95
Careful, He Might Hear You Carl Schultz, Aus-
tral., 83; Kino Lorber $19.95
Curtains Jonathan Stryker, Can., 83; Synapse $19.95
It Felt Like Love Eliza Hittman, 13; Lorber Films
$29.95
Joe David Gordon Green, 13; Lionsgate $19.98
Like Father, Like Son Kore-eda, Jap., 13; IFC $24.98
Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid Irving Pichel, 48;
Olive Films $24.95
Le Weekend Roger Michell, U.K./Fr., 13; Music Box
$29.95
ON DEMAND
Jan Troell x 2: The Emigrants, Swe., 71; The New
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The Battle of the Villa Fiorita Delmer Daves, 65;
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The Naked and the Dead Raoul Walsh, 58;
Warner Archive Instant, free w/membership
72 filmcomment July-August 2014
HOME MOVIES
OUR GUIDE FOR THE SHUT-IN CINEPHILE
B L U - R AY P I C K | Scanners | Criterion, $39.95
E very special effect is an idea, and Scanners packs some gnarly hypotheses.
The notorious exploding head sequence, originally planned as the opening
scene and an object of consternation for the MPAA, is both an outrageous demon-
stration of telepathic power run amok and the crystallization of a rigorous the-
matic. A tale of telepaths at war with each other and the corporate machine that
engineered them, Scanners consolidates the ruling problematic of the Cronenberg
project from the sex slugs of Shivers to the financial abstractions of Cosmopolis:
what are the effects of signals on an organism? How do we process information?
What are the consequences and by-products of synthesis, and what are the forms
of a successful—or disastrous—output of alien energy?
Rushed into production to take advantage of tax shelter financing and shot
during a grim Montreal winter, Scanners feels at once scrappy and minimalist. “It
was meant to be very deadly,” Cronenberg remembers, “a cold, harsh, nasty film.”
A significant portion of that chill is localized in the weirdly neutral central perfor-
mance by Stephen Lack as the telepathic initiate Cameron Vale. Videodrome (83)
would establish Cronenberg’s ability to evoke superbly textured performances, but
Lack’s blank affect is characteristic of an entire subclass of productively awkward
acting throughout his oeuvre. Character actor Robert A. Silverman, a minor
axiom of the Cronenbergian here playing a paranoid sculptor, is an early exemplar
of the style, which is more or less totalized in the ensemble of Crash (96) and
received one of its wittiest variations by Sarah Gadon in Cosmopolis (12). Lack
may well be a “bad” actor, though we’ll never know; following Scanners he
returned to the avant-garde art circles he frequented and struck out for the nascent
East Village scene. But it scarcely matters in a film with next to no investment in
producing audience surrogates or sympathetic identifications; the most notable
point-of-view shot in Scanners assumes the perspective of the scanning process
itself as it merges with the “nervous system” of a mainframe computer—a proto-
cyberpunk conceit predating Neuromancer by three years.
Scanners is something of an odd choice for the deluxe Criterion treatment given
the number of Cronenberg masterworks languishing on subpar DVDs. Until, that
is, you account for its packaging as a telepathic double feature with the early
experimental feature Stereo (69), a wonderful bit of sardonic Burroughsian
pseudo-science so comprehensively prophetic of the Cronenbergian that it reads
like a Rosetta Stone of the New Flesh.—Nathan Lee
8 = See review
AT L A S T ! P I C K | Love Streams | Criterion, $29.95 Nothing Personal Urszula Antoniak, Ire./Neth., 09;
Vyer Films, free w/membership

D uring production on 1984’s Love Streams John Cassavetes learned he had six
months to live, and it’s hard not to regard the film’s air of desperation and its char-
acters’ mad scramble to connect as reflecting the urgency of an artist’s final testament.
Ziba Bani Khoshnoudi, Iran/Fr., 12; Vyer Films, free
w/membership

The film traces the reeling mid-life trajectories of an affluent womanizing writer (Cas-
savetes) and his manic, aggressively cheerful sister (Gena Rowlands), both divorced,
both with children they can’t hang onto. People hurtle in and out of each other’s orbits,
bringing piles of baggage (both literal and figurative) with them. Any exposition is
purely accidental, continuity errors abound, accruing a strange internal logic, and nar-
rative coherence is drawn entirely from character development. The results are oddly
shaped, energized, hilarious, and overwhelmingly moving. Criterion’s package is loaded
with superlative supplements—among them
Michael Ventura’s 1984 documentary I’m
Almost Not Crazy—while the transfer retains the
film’s warm greens, yellows, and oranges, and
countless gradations of shadow. The actors are
frequently in the dark, but their performances are
luminous.—José Teodoro
C L A S S I C P I C K | Red River | Criterion, $49.95
TO P 2 0 B LU - R AY
1. Pickpocket Bresson, Fr., 59; Criterion $39.95
2. Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery 29 eps., 90-91
+ Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, 92; CBS/Paramount
$109.99
3. Demy x 6: Lola, It./Fr., 61; Bay of Angels, Fr., 63; The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Fr./W. Ger., 64; The Young Girls
of Rochefort, Fr., 67; Donkey Skin, Fr., 70; Une chambre
en ville, It./Fr., 82; Criterion $124.95 box set
4. Herzog x 16: Even Dwarfs Started Small, 70; Fata
Morgana, 71; Land of Silence and Darkness, 71; Aguirre,
the Wrath of God, 72; The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 74;
Heart of Glass, 76; Stroszek, 77; Woyzeck, 79; Nosferatu
the Vampyre, 79; Fitzcarraldo, 82; Ballad of the Little Sol-
dier, 84; Where the Green Ants Dream, 84; Cobra Verde,
87; Lessons of Darkness, 92; Little Dieter Needs to Fly, 97;
My Best Fiend, 99; Shout! Factory $159.99

O ne of the best american films? maybe. One of the great American films?
Absolutely. To appreciate the distinction, gaze upon Criterion’s four-disc dual-
5. Wilder x 2: Witness for the Prosecution, 57; The Private
Life of Sherlock Holmes, 70; Kino Lorber $29.95 each
format release and feel the epic reach of Howard Hawks’s 1948 classic. A complicated 8 6. Scanners Cronenberg, Can., 81; Criterion $39.95
view of nation-building and the generational divide between John Wayne and Mont- 7. Caught Ophuls, 49; Olive Films $29.95
gomery Clift (the characters they play and the actors they are) provides the sweep, but 8. All That Jazz Fosse, 79; Criterion $39.95
the film also thrives in detail—every exchange is constructed around Hawksian behav- 9. Southern Comfort Hill, 81; Shout! Factory $29.93
ioral beats that define how to exist. The allegedly weak ending is actually a radical ges- 10. The Wind Will Carry Us Kiarostami, Iran/Fr.,
ture, a rejection of easy tragedy or melodrama. The 2K restoration of both theatrical and 99; Cohen Media $39.98
“pre-release” versions is stunning (to my eye the image looks slightly bright, but I might 11. Vengeance Is Mine Shohei Imamura, Jap., 79;
be clinging to old memories of dusky 16mm Criterion $39.95
prints). The four discs include new conversations 12. On the Beach Kramer, 59; Kino Lorber $29.95
with Peter Bogdanovich and Molly Haskell, and 13. The Wind and the Lion Milius, 75; Warner
great audio of Bogdanovich interviewing Hawks Archive $18.95
in the Seventies. Plus you get Borden Chase’s 14. Phantom of the Paradise De Palma, 74;
source novel, as lively as its title: Blazing Guns on Shout! Factory $29.93
the Chisholm Trail.—Robert Horton 15. The Baby Ted Post, 73; Severin $24.98
16. What’s New Pussycat? Clive Donner &
D O C U M E N TA R Y P I C K | Altman | EPIX, August 6 Richard Talmage, Fr./U.S., 65; Kino Lorber $29.95
17. The Legend of Hell House John Hough, U.K.,

W hat does altman-esque mean? The question is a motif throughout Ron Mann’s
absorbing look at the life and work of this great director. Familiar faces from Robert
Altman’s films respond in pleasantly phrased platitudes; there are only so many ways you
can say “iconoclastic.” One of the documentary’s most amusing anecdotes involves Jack
Warner firing Altman from an early film because “That fool has people talking at the same
time.” Altman-esque, indeed. In an audio clip, Pauline Kael praises Altman for “dump-
ing square conventions that don’t work anymore.” He wasn’t the only director doing this
in the Sixties and Seventies—the lack of contextu-
alization of Altman’s films within the New Holly-
wood movement is a glaring omission here. Even
so, his work speaks for itself, and Altman is sure to
inspire viewers to delve into his fascinating filmog-
raphy—the breadth of which can only be suggested
in a 95-minute documentary.—Abbey Bender
73; Shout! Factory $29.93
18. The Big Chill Kasdan, 83; Criterion $39.95
19. The Party Edwards, 68; Kino Lorber $29.95
20. The Children’s Hour Wyler, 61; Kino Lorber
$29.95
C U LT CO R N E R
Death Spa Michael Fischa, 89; Gorgon Video $34.98
Grizzly William Girdler, 76; Kino Lorber $19.95
Iguana Monte Hellman, It./Sp./Switz./U.S., 88; Raro
Video USA $29.95
Screamers Sergio Martino, It., 79; ADA Corp $29.95
Without Warning Greydon Clark, 80; Shout! Fac-
tory $26.99

July-August 2014 filmcomment 73

 ST R A I G H T TO DV D
Favor Paul Osborne, 13; Horizon Movies $26.95
Infliction Jack Thomas Smith,13; Virgil Films $24.99
Swelter (w/Jean-Claude Van Damme & Alfred
Molina) Keith Parmer, 14; Well Go USA $14.98
H OT D O C S
1. Modern Life Depardon, Fr., 08; First Run $24.95
2. The Unknown Known Morris, 13; Anchor Bay
$24.98
3. Jodorowsky’s Dune Frank Pavich, U.S./Fr., 13;
Sony $40.99
4. Watermark Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky,
13; eOne $24.98
5. Anita Freida Mock, First Run $24.95
Boredom Albert Nerenberg, Can., 12; eOne $19.98
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me Chiemi Karasawa, 13;
IFC $24.98
Finding Vivian Meier John Maloof & Charlie
Siskel, 13; IFC $24.98
First Cousin Once Removed Alan Berliner, 12;
HBO $17.95
More Than a Rainbow Dan Wechsler, 12; First
Run $24.95
Music from the Big House Bruce McDonald,
Can./U.S., 10; Kino Lorber $24.95
Seduced and Abandoned James Toback, 13;
HBO $19.98
Six by Sondheim James Lapine, 13; HBO $17.95
Truth in Numbers Scott Glosserman & Nic Hill,
10; Alive Mind $24.95
12 O’Clock Boys Lotfy Nathan, 13; Oscilloscope
$34.99
The Unbelievers Gus Holwerda, 13; FilmRise $24.95
Weekend of a Champion Frank Simon, U.K., 72;
MPI $24.98
Who Killed Walter Benjamin... David Mauas,
Sp./Neth., 05; SISU $24.95
FO R E I G N R E L E A S E S
The Chris Marker Collection: Sunday in Peking,
56; Letter to Siberia, 58; Description of a Struggle, 60;
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, 68; The Embassy, 73;
Theory of Sets, 91; Three Video Haikus, 94; Blue Hel-
met, 96; E-CLIP-SE, 99; The Case of the Grinning Cat,
04; Soda Pictures Blu-ray £24.99
Rapture John Guillermin, Fr./U.S., 55; Eureka! £17.99
O F I N T E R E ST
Greer Garson x 4: Desire Me, Mervyn LeRoy, 47; The
Law and the Lady, Edwin H. Knopf, 51; Scandal at
Scourie, Jean Negulesco, 53; Strange Lady in Town,
LeRoy, 55; Warner Archive $18.95 each
Lewis Milestone x 2: Armored Attack! aka The North
Star, 43; Arch of Triumph, 48; Olive Films $24.95 each
74 filmcomment July-Augist 2014
B OX S E T P I C K | Jean Epstein | Potemkine Films/La Cinémathèque
française/agnès b. DVD, €99.90
J ean epstein’s reputation in the u.s. has largely rested on The Three-Sided
Mirror (27) and The Fall of the House of Usher (28) and they remain his best-
known films. Both are great, but hardly tell the full story of this important artist.
A more complete picture of Epstein can now be seen thanks to a beautiful box set
of 14 features and shorts, most transferred from restored 35mm prints held at the
Cinémathèque française. Mirror and Usher are Epstein’s most overtly avant-garde
films and conveniently fit within the broad narrative of French experimental cin-
ema: they mark him, more so than his other films, as an adherent of French
Impressionism, a loose grouping of intellectual filmmakers in 1920s France
(including Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, and Marcel L’Herbier) who privileged
specific plastic and formal elements of filmmaking in their works.
Epstein did not arrive at this modernist avant-gardism fully formed, though, as
is evidenced by his earlier narrative features. Here we see him exploring various
Impressionist tactics (multiple exposures, slow and fast motion, oblique camera
angles, out-of-focus or otherwise diffuse shots), but using them to punctuate solid
but fairly conventionally structured films—they are not yet fully integrated as they
are in Mirror and Usher. What is more striking in these films—Le Lion des
Mogols (24), Le Double amour (25), Mauprat (26), and Six et demi, onze (28)—
is Epstein’s use of space, particularly his framing of characters in long shot, swal-
lowed up by large, cavernous interiors or expansive outdoor locations.
The relationship of character to surroundings is very different in the Breton films
he began in 1929 and with which he would continue to the end of his career. Shot in
Brittany and its outlaying islands, these are immensely personal works, and it shows.
As good as most of his early features are and as great as Mirror and Usher are, here
Epstein reached another level. The formal elements of the Brittany films are entwined
with theme and story in a way that is absolute—there is no possibility of teasing them
apart. Epstein again places characters within large vistas, but here they merge with
the landscape, becoming an indivisible part of the world around them, their lives
bound up with their environments. Epstein’s style in these films—especially in two
astonishing masterpieces from this chapter in his filmmaking, Finis Terrae (29) and
Le Tempestaire (47)—is more subtle. It quietly destabilizes what we see, throwing
things slightly off-kilter, in a way that reflects the always-present unpredictability of
nature. It is this simplicity of form, combined with the pared-down narratives and a
focus on elemental themes, that gives these films such power.
All of the titles in the box set come with English subtitles; and aside from a
2011 feature documentary about Epstein by James June Schneider, the many
bonus features (interviews, audio commentary) do not. The 158-page book that
accompanies the discs is also French-only—but it is so lavishly illustrated that it
matters little. An important, glorious, long-overdue release.—Patrick Friel
8 = See review
A R T H O U S E P I C K | Judex | Criterion, $39.95
G iven its sprightly mélange of deadpan humor and fairy-tale mysticism, it’s
easy to dismiss Georges Franju’s 1963 feature as a middling remake of Louis
Feuillade’s 1916 serial of the same name. Yet it takes only one sequence a quarter of
the way through—a magisterially shot masquerade ball—to realize that in the French
master’s hands, Feuillade’s serial retains the same shadowy, expressionistic fullness
characteristic of the director’s masterpiece Eyes Without a Face (60). Among the guests
at the dinner party is the titular Judex (American magician Channing Pollock), who
abducts a corrupt banker (Michel Vitold) in order to force him to return the money
he’s swindled. The film’s façade of playfulness
doesn’t conceal its darker tones, in which
Judex’s underworld of shadows—whose full-
bodied textures are wonderfully rendered in an
impeccable transfer from Criterion Collection—
is far more present than the film’s other charac-
ters initially grasp.—Andres Zambrano-Bravo
A N I M AT I O N P I C K | Frozen | Disney, $29.99
B ased upon hans christian andersen’s The Snow Queen, Disney’s Frozen was
an inescapable cultural phenomenon during its theatrical run. The highest-grossing
animated film ever, it received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and
generated the Oscar-winning song “Let It Go” (which wore out its welcome almost
as quickly as it became a standard). The movie even drew praise from many quar-
ters for its depiction of two strong female leads and who put sisterly love ahead of
the attentions of any of their princely suitors. The animators broke new ground in
realizing the reflective ice and snow-covered landscapes needed for the story’s setting.
One of the few films that truly benefited from the 3-D experience in a theater, it
remains a visual stunner on Blu-ray. The extras,
however, are a disappointment. “The Making of
Frozen” depicts nothing of the sort and is
instead a rather cynical song-and-dance number
featuring the voice actors essentially singing
about the fact that you’re not learning anything
about the film’s creation.—David Filipi
S I L E N T C O M E DY P I C K | The Max Linder Collection | Kino Classics, $29.95
“
I ’ve always been an incurable romantic,” Max Linder said. The French
actor-director’s feelings are fully on display in these four films, all presented in
excellent, freshly restored versions from the Lobster Films archives with newly com-
posed scores. Linder—whom Chaplin called “the Professor”—adopted the persona
of a short bourgeois fellow seeking happiness. In Max Wants a Divorce (17), he and
his wife prove willing to abandon an inheritance scam in order to stay together. The
long-lost feature-length version of Be My Wife (21) shows him assuming disguises
so that he can woo his beloved despite her stern aunt’s disapproval. He similarly dis-
sembles in Seven Years Bad Luck (21) to hold onto his superstitious fiancée after
accidentally breaking a mirror. His young
nobleman “Knockout Dart-in-Again” strives to
impress a trio of swashbuckling heroes in the
action comedy The Three Must-Get-Theres
(22). Linder’s characters try to pass for better
versions of themselves before learning that who
they are is good enough.—Aaron Cutler
Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
Arnaud des Pallières, Ger./Fr., 13; Music Box $29.95
Bad Words Jason Bateman, 13; Universal $29.98
Bankers of God: The Calvi Affair Giuseppe
Ferrara, It., 02; Raro Video USA $24.94
Bicycling with Molière Philippe Le Guay, Fr., 13;
Strand $27.99
Cell 213 Stephen Kay, Can., 10; eOne $19.98
Cesar Chavez Diego Luna, U.S./Mex., 14; Lionsgate
$19.98
The Double Richard Ayoade, U.K., 13; Magnolia $26.98
Forever Female Irving Rapper, 53; Olive Films $24.95
Good Sam Leo McCarey, 48; Olive Films $24.95
Grigris Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chad/Fr.,13; Film
Movement $24.95
The Lunchbox Ritesh Batra, Ind./Fr./Ger./U.S., 13;
Sony $40.99
Nymphomaniac: Volume I von Trier, Den./Ger./
Fr./Belg./U.K., 13; Magnolia $26.98
Nymphomaniac: Volume II von Trier, Den./Ger./
Fr./Belg./U.K., 13; Magnolia $26.98
On My Way Emmanuelle Bercot, Fr., 13; Cohen
Media $24.98
Operation Petticoat Edwards, 59; Olive Films $24.95
The Other Love De Toth, 47; Olive Films $24.95
Paris Blues Martin Ritt, 61; Kino Lorber $24.95
The Raid 2 Gareth Evans, Indon./U.S., 14; Sony $30.99
Rigor Mortis Juno Mak, H.K., 13; Well Go USA $24.98
Sabotage David Ayer, 14; Universal $29.98
The Sacrament Ti West, 13; Magnolia $26.98
Some Velvet Morning LaBute, 13; Cinedigm $26.95
So This Is New York Fleischer, 48; Olive Films $24.95
A Summer Story Piers Haggard, U.K., 88; Kino Lor-
ber $24.95
The Suspect Won Shin-yeon, S. Kor., 13; Well Go
USA $24.98
Two Lives Georg Maas, Ger./Nor., 12; IFC $24.98
Vic + Flo Saw a Bear Denis Côté, Can., 13; KimStim
$29.99
Violent Road Howard W. Koch, 58; Warner Archive
$18.95
When I Saw You Annemarie Jacir, Pal./Jor./Gr./UAE,
12; Kino Lorber $29.95
R E S I S S U E S & S P EC I A L E D I T I O N S
The Black Book aka Reign of Terror, Anthony
Mann, 49; Film Chest $13.98
P R I M E-T I M E
Attica Marvin J. Chomsky, 80; Echo Bridge $6.99
Boardwalk Empire season 4, 12 eps., 13; HBO $59.99
Friendly Fire David Greene, 79; Kino Lorber $24.95
The Normal Heart Ryan Murphy, 14; HBO $19.97
The Originals season 1, 22 eps., 13-14; Warners $59.98
Wahlburgers season 1, 9 eps., 14; Lionsgate $19.98
July-August 2014 filmcomment 75
 Schalcken the Painter
SMALL SCREEN | Ghost Stories for Christmas (BFI, £36.15)
Old Haunts Revisited
Surveying the landscape of vintage British
TV ghost stories/By David Thompson
O ver the 2013 christmas season, the bbc revived a
tradition that had once been an oddly comforting British
television fixture of the Seventies—the annual ghost story. Mark
Gatiss, the actor/writer who had made his name through the
almost deranged comedy series The League of Gentlemen and
scripting duties on the reboot of Doctor Who, directed his own
adaptation of a classic M.R. James short story, “The Tractate
Middoth.” He also presented a lucid documentary on the author,
whose first collection of supernatural tales was published in 1904.
This quintessentially Victorian tradition of storytelling during the
cold winter nights was perfectly suited to the shorter formats and
domestic intimacy of television. But now that tighter budgets and
executive timidity have become the norm in the multi-channel
era, this genre has been mostly squeezed out of the picture, leav-
ing it to the enterprising British Film Institute to reissue the BBC’s
past triumphs in the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night business.
Although M.R. James (1862-1936) has long been regarded
as the greatest of British ghost story writers, his works were not
immediately felt to be suited to the moving image. James, a seri-
ous academic at Cambridge and Eton, was a Christian archae-
ologist, a lover of ancient manuscripts and ecclesiastical history.
He was also, as one surviving colleague described him in
Gatiss’s documentary, most likely a “non-practicing homosex-
ual.” While he delighted in telling ghost stories at all-male after-
dinner gatherings, James maintained that he did not believe in
the supernatural. Revealingly, his tales often feature sexually
repressed, solitary bachelors investigating the forgotten
ephemera of the Christian and pre-Christian era, discovering
secrets related to satanic or pagan practices, and through their
meddling bringing about death or destruction.
This holds true of the first significant television rendering of
one of James’s stories, Whistle and I’ll Come to You (68), made
for the arts series Omnibus by the brilliant intellectual and
76 filmcomment July-August 2014
Robin Redbreast
sometime comedian Jonathan Miller. A hard-line atheist and
scientific rationalist by temperament, Miller was fascinated by
James’s principal character, a university professor (Michael
Hordern). While staying in a bleak seaside village, this lonely
academic discovers a strange whistle on the beach, and comes
to believe he has summoned up some kind of demon, which
Miller and his team visualize through a simple flapping sheet
and a highly imaginative piece of sound design.
Miller’s film made such an impact that the BBC commissioned
further adaptations from former documentary filmmaker
Lawrence Gordon Clark, who made five in all. The Stalls of
Barchester (71) and especially A Warning to the Curious (72) set
the style, with fluid camerawork (on color 16mm), restrained per-
formances, and a resistance to explicit horror conventions. As
well as adapting James, Clark also made a memorable 1976 film
of Charles Dickens’s The Signalman, in which Denholm Elliott
plays a railway employee deeply haunted by a terrible train wreck
that occurred on his watch. The tale, born out of Dickens’s own
terrifying experience of a rail crash and Victorian fears of the
mechanical mayhem brought on by the industrial revolution, was
effectively updated to the 20th century and made potent through
atmosphere and filmic legerdemain. (All of these titles are avail-
able in the BFI’s six-disc Ghost Stories for Christmas collection).
I f the above qualities make clark’s work seem timeless,
then it is their absence that dog similar television ventures of
this era. The 1977 series Supernatural (BFI, £24.99) aimed, in
the words of producer Robert Muller, “to illustrate the myths
and fears like vampires, werewolves, doppelgangers and ghosts,”
and the episodes were structured around central characters
(revealed to be either victims or perpetrators) attempting to win
membership in the gentleman’s Club of the Damned by recount-
ing their personal stories. But Muller’s series was hamstrung by
its obvious studio sets, and crude lighting and video camerawork,
and in this environment even well-known actors seemed to
believe they had to project to an audience seated just beyond the
technical crew. One of the better episodes, “Dorabella,” much
influenced by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, strongly benefits
from its restrained performances and extensive location filming.
Sheridan Le Fanu was also the source for a far more memorable
BBC one-off, Leslie Megahey’s exquisitely disturbing Schalcken
Dead of Night, “The Exorcism” Dead of Night, “A Woman Sobbing”

the Painter (79; BFI, £19.99), shot entirely on film and drawing scientific enquiry into the stone circles of Avebury, where the
from 17th-century Dutch painting for its visual language. local villagers appear to have formed a cult under the trou-
Of the three surviving episodes of Dead of Night (72; BFI, bling influence of the strange monoliths.
£19.99), the standout is “The Exorcism,” written and directed
by Don Taylor. The action takes place almost entirely in one stu-
dio set—a country cottage—and while it has a theatrical quality
(it went on to become a stage play, with some success), the
A rguably the greatest progenitor of such imaginary
conflicts between the rational modern and the threatening
ancient world was fantasy writer Nigel Kneale, who had made
nuanced acting and the theme of urban sophisticates confronted his mark at the BBC in the Fifties with the Quatermass series
with a guilty inheritance make for tense viewing. By Taylor’s and The Stone Tape (73; 101 Films, £19.99). His one-off ITV
own admission, the subject was really more political than super- drama Murrain (75) was the compelling tale of an old woman
natural, with the exploitation and murder of previous occupants victimized as a witch by a rural community, and once again an
revealed as the cause of such shocking moments as a wine tast- urban outsider attempting to calm the locals proves unable to
ing of blood and one of the company (Anna Cropper) becoming resolve the conflict or explain the ambiguity of the situation.
possessed by a spirit. Cropper also features in John Bowen’s out- This drama led to the series Beasts (76; Network, £19.99,
standing BBC play Robin Redbreast (70; BFI, £19.99) as a tele- includes Murrain), which works at its best when the threats are
vision employee who moves to a country village and finds herself unseen or only vaguely glimpsed, as in “Baby” (a strange mum-
singled out for impregnation as part of an old pagan ritual. In mified creature found in the wall of a country home appears to
fact, the conceit of “folk horror,” in which repressed rural myths come to life) or “During Barty’s Party,” in which poison-
would surface with unreasonable force, became a regular fixture resistant rats terrorize a couple living in rural isolation.
in television’s excursions into the supernatural, particularly in the And what now of that tradition’s greatest exponent? Clark
work of Bowen (who also scripted a Dead of Night episode, “A gave up on his series of James adaptations because (he says) the
Woman Sobbing,” as well as two ghost stories directed by Clark) BBC considered his plans for a film of Count Magnus too
and David Rudkin, who adapted James’s The Ash Tree (75) just expensive, but he did make a version of Casting the Runes
after writing the BBC’s powerful Penda’s Fen (74), directed by (Network, £6.00) for ITV in 1979. It’s a fair stab at a contem-
Alan Clarke and as yet unavailable on DVD. porary rendering of the story, whose villain is clearly based on
Exploring a mysterious Britain of the past that remains pre- the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. But it lacks the poetry
sent through indelible monuments or recurring rituals also of Clark’s BBC films (the awkward melange of video and
yielded material for creative work on the big screen, most 16mm doesn’t help) and is nowhere near as chilling as the clas-
notably The Wicker Man (72), in which director Robin sic big-screen adaptation of James’s story, Jacques Tourneur’s
Hardy and scriptwriter Anthony Schaffer invent a beguiling 1957 Night of the Demon. The BBC did eventually return to
modern-day pagan community on a Scottish making films based on James with two reason-
The quintessentially
island. But while television could never be as ably effective adaptations of A View from the
Victorian tradition
explicit or violent, similar manifestations of Hill (05) and Number 13 (06), but veered well
of storytelling dur-
“folk horror” could even be found in series off the path with another stab at Whistle and
ing the cold winter
aimed at children. Two of the most outstand- I’ll Come to You (10). This time the makers
nights was perfectly
ing were The Owl Service (69; Network, committed the unforgiveable sin of turning
suited to the shorter
£9.18) and Children of the Stones (77; Net- James’s story into a psychological drama, with
formats and domes-
work, £8.40). The former, unusually well- the hero visited by a ghost who is none other
tic intimacy of the
shot on color film on location, tells of local than his demented wife newly resident in a care
television format.
legends invading the lives of teenagers on home. Now where’s the essential ambiguity or
vacation in Wales. The latter focuses on a atavistic terror in that? 

July-August 2014 filmcomment 77

readings by J. HOBERMAN
Founding Father
A man with a mission
Decades Never Start on Time: A Richard Roud Anthology
Edited by Karen Smolens & Michael Temple BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, $38
“L et us now praise famous men, and our fathers that
begat us.” The film journalist Richard Roud was one. As
the New York Film Festival’s program director (and then simply
director) from 1963 until his still-controversial ouster in 1987, this date.”) In the Seventies, Roud began updating British readers on
catalytic figure was for many, myself included, a tastemaker, advo-
cate, and impresario supreme. Amos Vogel was his only real precur-
sor in New York; only the singular Jonas Mekas wore more hats.
When I remember Richard Roud, I think first of his facility as
a translator—sitting at the end of a table in Alice Tully Hall or the gave Last Tango in Paris a spectacular premiere.
old Palais at Cannes, chain-smoking Gitanes, head cradled in one
palm, suavely editing windy questions and
briskly interpreting a French-speaking film-
maker’s expansive reply. Reading this first
collection of Roud’s writings, Decades
Never Start on Time, it occurred to me that
translating was his gift and his mission.
A Boston-born expat, Roud circulated
between London (where he helped found the
London Film Festival in 1957), Paris, New
York, and sundry European film festivals.
Writing mainly for Sight & Sound and The
Guardian, he reported on the U.S. to the
U.K. as well as vice versa, and on France to
both. Programming the NYFF, Roud trans-
ported the treasures of Cannes, Venice, and
Berlin to New York. That he began his career
just as the New Wave broke, the Sixties
dawned, and cinema approached its peak as
an international art form, made his mission
all the more vital—and, some may say, easier. Roud was a tastemaster, advo-
Roud is often thought of as Jean-Luc cate, and impresario supreme.
Godard’s American advance-man and he
was that. (Beginning with A Woman Is a
Woman and Band of Outsiders in 1964, the NYFF premiered an
additional 10 Godard films over the next six festivals while Roud
himself published an elegant and invaluable monograph on the
man in 1968.) Godard, however, was something like an imper-
sonal, inevitable historical force, the embodiment of the Sixties.
Roud writes more warmly about Bresson, reserving for himself
the Bresson entry in his 1980 Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, and
with greater passion on Demy, Losey, and the group he dubbed
the “Left Bank” directors—Resnais, Varda, and Marker, whose
Le Joli mai he was particularly proud to have included, along
with Muriel, in the inaugural NYFF. Subsequent enthusiasms
were Bertolucci, the Straubs, and, prodded by his alter ego Susan
78 filmcomment July-August 2014
Sontag, Fassbinder. You can credit Roud with translating these
filmmakers (and many more) into American, often in alliance
with distributor Dan Talbot.
The long reviews of Red Desert, Alphaville, Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach, and Le Gai savoir (edgy Euro art films all) pub-
lished in Sight & Sound are all impeccably crafted and illuminat-
ing pieces, but the heart of this anthology may be found in the
shorter reports Roud filed for The Guardian. Topical in the best
sense, these bulletins from the front are the first draft of film his-
tory. (The news from Paris: “Muriel is the most important film in
recent years,” Masculine Feminine is “Godard’s best film to
developments in America’s suddenly interesting movies (The God-
father phenomena, Mean Streets, Badlands, E.T.). A whole subset
of Guardian pieces report on various festivals—including his
own, which, thanks in part to Pauline Kael’s orgasmic response,
In a way, these festival reports are Roud’s most personal
pieces, written from the perspective of an
attendee as well as an organizer. In addi-
tion to reportage on the politically upended
1968 Cannes and Pesaro fetes, Decades
contains a long feature on film festival cul-
ture, “The International Gravy Train,”
published in The Guardian in late 1971.
Given the fog of doubletalk that typi-
cally surrounds the film festival process,
civilians may also appreciate the refresh-
ingly frank 1981 Sight & Sound piece com-
paring the London and New York festivals.
Roud doesn’t exactly tell tales out of
school but, among other things, he
includes the tidbit, doubtless as exotic to
his British readers as it was delicious for
him, that certain critics—namely Kael,
whom Roud several times attempted to
coax onto the NYFF selection committee,
and the New York Times lead reviewer Vin-
cent Canby—so detested each other that
they required separate screenings.
Roud’s final decade was a reflective one.
He published a biography of his forefather Henri Langlois as well
as a number of highly personal memorial essays on Fassbinder,
Losey, and the pioneering German film historian (and journalist)
Lotte Eisner. In his introduction, co-anthologist Michael Temple
describes the “film memoir” that Roud wanted to write “recount-
ing his life in film criticism and reflecting on how the history of
cinema had conversely ‘written’ his life.” This proposal, which
had the working title “Decades Never Start on Time,” was
rejected by the Viking Press in 1984, five years before the author’s
death. The published Decades Never Start on Time is not the
book that Richard Roud would have written but, given its dialec-
tical mix of theory and practice, in a sense, it is. 
in brief
Brainquake
By Samuel Fuller Hard Case Crime, $12.95
A damaged man (good heart, childlike disposition,
seizure-prone brain), a cunning woman (ruthless by
necessity), a baby (mini-MacGuffin, never called any-
thing but “it”), a couple of hard-boiled authority fig-
ures (both female, one a black detective, the other a
maternal crime underboss), a hit man dubbed
“Father Flanagan” whose signature technique is cru-
cifixion, and any number of zesty minor characters
who thicken the plot like mustard greens tossed
into a stew. Add in a haze of backstories, side stories,
triple-crosses, double-somersault reversals, flashbacks, dream sequences,
and hallucinations in shocking pink and four-alarm red. When the big wrap-
up seems at hand, there’s always one more romp down memory lane or
proscenium-framed monologue to complicate the complications.
One guess as to which notable deceased writer-director-philosopher-
raconteur combined these ingredients into the delightfully dizzying, invig-
orating novel Brainquake, a beach book that storms the reader’s defenses
like the Normandy invasion (which gets a shout-out here). No, this ain’t
James Ivory, pal: it’s Sam Fuller at full blast, relentlessly advancing a multi-
pronged narrative while throwing restraint to the wind and leaving a
Proust-load of movie-madeleines strewn in his wake. (Picture a pastry
truck in a 10-car pileup after a French Connection–like chase.)
Written in the early Nineties, this book is packed with Fuller’s characteristic
verve and emotional audacity: without the constraints of producers and run-
ning times, he basks in the kind of strikingly panoramic but non-essential
scenes, information, and flourishes that wouldn’t fit into a two-hour cut. Read-
ing Brainquake, I kept seeing it as a movie no one but Fuller could direct, but
once it gets to a barge on the Seine and a phantasmagorical crime-scene-
cum-shoot-out, I realized that even from beyond the grave, Fuller was several
steps ahead of me. I heard a gruff voice in the fog.“Leos Carax,” it chuckled,
and then vanished into the taillights’ glare.—Howard Hampton
Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity:
Avant-Garde – Advertising – Modernity
By Michael Cowan Amsterdam University Press, $124
When prewar advertising laws in the Weimar
Republic were relaxed in the Twenties, print ads
infiltrated every available surface, even the roofs of
tramways. Advertising psychologists pondered the
meaning of the electric signage and neon streaks
reflected in their pebble glasses. Magazine layouts
became more arresting. But the medium that best
captured the “fleeting glances” of an increasingly
distracted public was cinema. It was in this climate
that Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941), the subject of
this book-length study (the first one in English), transformed himself from
the paragon of the avant-garde “absolute film” movement in Germany into
an asset for corporate and state-sponsored employers.
Working on an animation table that he customized and later patented,
Ruttmann created loads of commissioned films packed with statistical
charts and animated pictograms, synthesizing complex data for the
masses. Meanwhile, his personal films celebrated factory production and
the scope of city life. In the book’s most fascinating chapter, author
Michael Cowan considers the “cross-sectional film”—urban panoramas
like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera—and contends that Ruttmann’s
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (27) towers above all.
Critics argued that Ruttmann’s aesthetics could be co-opted to propagan-
distic ends. And indeed, it’s impossible to witness the camera coursing
through Berlin by train without contemplating the track Ruttmann and his
homeland (and its victims) were barreling down. The same artist who consid-
ered his early animations “visual music”—and even accompanied screenings
himself on cello—would later accept commissions from Nazi ministries.
Though he never joined the party, Ruttmann was stigmatized as “the
one who stayed.” Soon he was a resource for Riefenstahl, co-writing
Triumph of the Will and editing Olympia. Despite being somewhat lean
on biographical insights, Cowan’s analysis of Weimar visual culture and
its consequences is as well oiled as the factory machinery about which
Ruttmann rhapsodized.—James Hughes
Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar
By James Harvey Faber & Faber, $27
Watching Them Be asks us to look closely at what
goes into close-ups—at star presence, which has
less to do with performance than with revelation,
whereby the magnitude of the screen makes a
symphony from the subtlest gesture. Author
James Harvey trifurcates his study into Icons, Real-
ists, and Transcenders—categories less sequential
than spiritual—beginning with Garbo, to whose
mystery and power he claims all stardom aspires.
A shrewd choice, as his Icons somehow all exist in her orbit, even as their
images form right angles to hers. When a Garbo heroine is sent to a firing
squad, she goes with eyes raised to heaven; Dietrich, facing the same fate,
straightens the seam in her stocking.
Harvey builds an irrefutable case for the actor-auteur, lingering on stars’
sovereignty over their material (Garbo’s vehicles, directors, and leading men
were often substandard). He tends to synopsize the films at too great a
length, but makes up for it with lucid, earthy prose—this never reads like a
textbook, and for that reason deserves to be one. His emphases can be
bizarre; the most analyzed Ingrid Bergman film from her Hollywood years is
neither Casablanca nor Notorious but the near-forgotten oddity Saratoga
Trunk (and when you finish the chapter you’ll be aching to see it).
What could’ve been merely a chronicle of unpacked traits—indeed Harvey
doesn’t skimp on John Wayne’s walk or De Niro’s smile—startles us with per-
sonal recollections (seeing the elderly Dietrich sing protest songs in her one-
woman cabaret), amusingly idiosyncratic opinions, gossip, and candid coverage
of stars’ limitations (Charles Laughton’s ineptness at comedy). He saves his
greatest surprise for last, a chapter on the donkey from Au hasard Balthazar.
That Bresson, who sought to purge all affect from performance, distilled his
greatest truth from the reactions of an unwitting beast suddenly makes
sense. We aren’t watching him act; we’re watching him be.—Steven Mears
July-August 2014 filmcomment 79
graphic detail
1 3
Hans Hillmann
1. Storm Over Asia
Vsevolod Pudovkin, USSR,
1928;1961 poster: perma-
nent collection of The
International Design
Museum, Munich
2. The Fire Within
Louis Malle, France, 1963;
1966 poster courtesy of
Posteritati
3. Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1954;
1962 poster courtesy of
Heritage Auctions
80 filmcomment July-August 2014
b y A D R I A N C U R RY
H ans hillmann, who passed away in may at the age of 88, was one of the giants of 20th-century
film poster design, an artist who stripped away the clutter and noise of postwar German movie poster
illustration and practiced a rakish minimalism that came in many forms. Hillmann was studying design at
the University of Kassel in 1952 when distributor Walter Kirchner, seeing the need for a new kind of
graphic language to promote a more challenging wave of international art cinema, approached Professor
Hans Leistikow to design posters for his new company. Leistikow turned the assignment into a contest for
his students, which Hillmann won. The winning design became the logo for the Neue Filmkunst, and over the
next 20 years Hillmann was the distributor’s chief designer, producing some 150 posters for films by almost
every major auteur of the Fifties and Sixties. Working with small budgets, he was eternally resourceful. Some
of his best posters are stark black and white—though he was also a bold colorist—and many employ the most
homemade techniques: strewing leaves over a photograph for The Fire Within, or punching holes in the paper
and photographing his own hand strangling a pencil outline of a lady for The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la
Cruz. Some of his most striking posters are for Godard films, and the director paid homage to Hillmann by fea-
turing three of his posters (for films by Resnais, Buñuel, and Buster Keaton) in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.
Adrian Curry writes about movie posters for mubi.com and is the design director for Zeitgeist Films.
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