I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #229 - The Emigrants / The New Land (1971/1972, dir. Jan Troell)

When these two 3-hour Swedish films opened in Denver in the early 1970’s I would have been about 14. I honestly can’t believe my parents thought it was a good idea to take me to six hours of subtitled historical drama, but it is even more surprising that I sat through it, and remembered it fondly. I was thrilled to see that Criterion released them together in one package, and, that after three decades I would be able to revisit this experience. I spent the better part of my day off with Swedish farmer Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and his bride Kristina (Liv Ullman) as they try to succeed in their native Sweden, but failing that, emigrate to mid-1800’s America and help settle Minnesota.

The first movie The Emigrants finds Karl Oskar toiling on his Father’s farm working like a dog, barely making ends meet, and finding it almost impossible to feed his new and growing family. At the same time, his brother Robert and other relatives are finding the Swedish environment of conservativism and religious piety oppressive. They start talking and reading about North America and the promise of freedom and success in the United States. Braving the emotional and financial consequences, a group of them decide to leave their home and make the voyage to America. That’s a neat little synopsis of the first three hours, but it does nothing to convey the overwhelming beauty and power of this great movie. Filmed with loving attention to detail, director Jan Troell puts the dirt under your fingernails, makes you smell the bread baking, and puts the thought in your mind and belly that this will be the last bread of the winter because the harvest is bad. Troell’s movie is in a class by itself. It’s hard to think of another movie that so vividly takes the audience into the lives of simple people so effectively. There is little romanticizing of their plight, everything is shown with a matter-of-fact clarity which conveys both the pain and drudgery of their existence, but also offers a fleeting, bittersweet glimpse at a not so distant past free of technological intrusion and environmental annihilation. The scenes and one’s emotions fly from backbreaking toil to exhilarating natural beauty with the fluency of life itself. The cinematic achievement is profound. Like so few movies (Boyhood is one of the only others that comes to mind), The Emigrants and its sequel The New Land actually capture the huge artistic ambition of showing a life lived.

The lengths of these movies might seem gratuitous, but as they unfold, it becomes clear that this is the only way to portray such overwhelming scale. The sequence showing the boat journey from Sweden to New York is forty minutes of harrowing aquatic nightmare, and when it ends you feel a physical relief as the actors set foot on solid ground. Likewise, the final scenes of The Emigrants show Karl Oskar trekking through unsettled Minnesota looking for the perfect spot to settle. Without any dialogue, it is actually possible to lose yourself in the fantasy of discovering America. It is one of so many beautiful and emotional moments. If you love this country, and believe its inherent greatness is connected to its natural beauty and those who first settled it, this is a rare experience.

 Many social issues are also tackled in these movies. Especially in The New Land, timely themes of immigration, racism, sexuality, class warfare, dirty business and Native American rights are shown, again with the seemingly spontaneous intrusion of true life. Perhaps because everything is from the Swedish perspective, rather than the jingoism we often see in modern Hollywood, it is possible to reflect upon these issues from multiple perspectives. The story climaxes with twin tragedies. First, younger brother Robert heads west to participate in the gold rush. He is exposed to greed, disease, theft, and death, before returning to the disapproval of his own family. It is the Horatio Alger myth in reverse. Then comes the controversial telling of a massacre (part of the Dakota Wars) of many of the settlers by the Native Americans who originally inhabited the land the Swedes were settling. A series of horrifying scenes of violence, retribution and execution bring in to focus one of the more unsettling aspects of the founding of our country and the treatment of its first citizens. Again, it is the non-Hollywood perspective that lends these scenes such veracity and makes them so hard to ignore or forget.

The Emigrants and The New Land are incredibly important films to see at this particular moment in America’s history. The ambitions of these films are as big as America’s endless horizons, yet they focus on the small details of humanity we all share. The endless vistas of this new country tamed by the tiny voice yearning for home.

- Paul Epstein

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #205 - Autumn Sonata (1978, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman is one of the all-time greats of world cinema, the Swedish director whose name is for many synonymous with capital-A Art in film for exploring both complex spiritual and psychological themes and unflinchingly observing the difficulties of human relationships. If he hadn’t passed away in 2007 at age 89, he’d be celebrating his centennial year in 2018, and in honor of his legacy the Criterion Collection has released Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, a handsome box set containing 39 of his films. (Don't worry, I'm not reviewing all 39.) Ingrid Bergman, had cancer not claimed her in 1982, would’ve celebrated her centenary in 2015. One of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1940s due to celebrated performances for Alfred Hitchcock, as Joan of Arc, and in a little film called Casablanca, Bergman came from Sweden to the United States, left her family here to go to Italy in a scandalous affair and marriage (and several great films) with director Roberto Rossellini, and later returned triumphantly to the States and Hollywood. Though the Bergmans share a name, they are unrelated, and they worked together exactly once, on 1978's Autumn Sonata, which would prove to be Ingrid’s final feature film and the first time she had made a film in Swedish in over a decade.

Though Autumn Sonata received mixed reviews on its initial release, time has been exceptionally kind to it, and today I think it can be seen as one of the highlights of Ingmar Bergman’s family dramas - more down-to-earth than his period piece Cries and Whispers, less excessive than the 5+ hour televised cuts of other dramas like Scenes From A Marriage and the later Fanny and Alexander - though no less intense than any of them. Film historian Peter Cowie in an essay on Criterion’s website even goes so far as to say “As a tour de force of screen acting, Autumn Sonata stands unchallenged as the finest work of Ingmar Bergman’s last few years as a movie director.”

The story is simple: internationally acclaimed concert pianist Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) is invited by her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), whom she hasn’t seen in years to stay with her in her rural home after the passing of her Charlotte’s longtime companion. They banter a bit upon arrival, Charlotte breezing in, used to being the center of attention, hijacking an accomplishment Eva, looking girlish and mousy despite the almost 40-year old Ullmann’s beauty, tries to relate about a local piano recital she’s given by topping her story with one of sold out shows in L.A. Then Eva reveals the first of several surprises she has in store for her mother: Charlotte’s other daughter Helena (Lena Nyman), who suffers from a degenerative nerve disease and who had been moved to a nursing home, is now living with Eva and her husband. This unexpected news cracks Charlotte’s glittery facade, and there’s a mildly malicious delight as Eva relates to her husband how she expects her mother to handle herself now that she’s seen Helena again. They also talk in the nursery of Eva’s deceased son, who was born and died at age 4 without Charlotte ever having met him. But this is only a prelude as they have a chilly dinner followed by Eva playing a piano piece for her mother who can’t hold back a pedantic tongue - though to be fair Eva asks her for her honest opinion. Once they retire to bed Charlotte awakens from a nightmare and goes downstairs to find Eva already there, awoken by her nighttime cries. The two begin talking and the film settles in for its central movement. An angry Eva starts things off simply and directly enough by asking “Do you like me?” and they’re off, Eva accusing Charlotte of never being there for the family, telling of her deep love and admiration that was never returned by her mother, angry about Charlotte abandoning Helena to her fate, and more. Charlotte, for her part, defends herself, and what at first seems like righteous accusations from Eva grow into anger and memories twisted by their years of buried and repressed resentments into something unfair, bigger even than Charlotte could have done to her if she’d deliberately tried to psychologically damage her.

The delight of the film is in watching these two actors at the height of their powers bringing to life Ingmar Bergman’s deeply incisive dialogue (the film was nominated for Best Screenplay). Each pulls our sympathy and our disdain at points, and each of them undoubtedly dug deeply into their own lives to inhabit these characters. Ullmann had written a year earlier of her own shortcomings as a parent to her daughter Linn (whose father was Ingmar Bergman), while Ingrid Bergman’s earlier public scandal stemmed from having abandoned her husband and daughter to go to Italy to make films with (and marry) Rossellini. And Ingmar, for his part, once boasted to a biographer about not knowing his own children’s ages, but dating his life by his films. Together, these three - plus key acting support from both Lena Nyman as the disabled daughter and Halvar Björk as Eva’s husband, passively observing parts of the tempest and acting as Eva’s pillar (also setting up for viewers Eva's deep insecurities in an address directly to the camera which opens the film), create a chamber drama of withering intensity and seriousness, without even Ingmar Bergman’s occasional experimental tendencies to lighten the drama. And it would be criminal to leave out the name of cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose 19th collaboration with the director this was, and who was always uniquely able to render Bergman’s interior worlds in light and images, here all warm, subtle tones befitting the title and underscoring the brutal emotional storm that passes through the home that night.

This 45th feature he directed was Ingmar Bergman’s final film made expressly for theaters; it would be Ingrid Bergman’s final theatrical film as well (one for which she received her 7th Academy Award nomination) - both would do work for television after this, but it is the culmination of two stellar careers in cinema. Three, actually, because it’s also one of Liv Ullmann’s great performances. Put Nykvist in there as well, and let’s call it four. It's a great one. Back in 1978, the critics just got it wrong.

-          Patrick Brown

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #189 - Elevator to the Gallows (1958, dir. Louis Malle)

"Anything's good for an alibi. Wives, girlfriends, bartenders, childhood friends, deceived husbands - but not an elevator. That's ridiculous. It's totally harebrained."
 - Commissaire de police

The most succinct way to express how I feel about Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle's feature length directorial debut, is to say that it exudes the essence of cool. It can often be difficult for a director, especially a new director, to innovate within a strict genre such as that of Film Noir. Often such directors will simply rest on the easy and clichéd conventions inherent to the "noir." However, Malle seems to have effortlessly skirted the traps of the genre and created one of the most brilliant and beautiful noir films of all time (I know, I know, a very bold statement, however it's true...).

Within the first 15 minutes of the film a few very specific events occur and choices are made that trigger all of the dark events to follow. Thrown into the middle of our story, the film opens on Florence Carala (stunningly portrayed by Jeanne Moreau) as she professes her love for Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet). Through reading the clues left for us we discover that the two are lovers, and they have concocted a plot to kill her husband (Simon Carala, played by Jean Wall), who also happens to be an arms dealer and Tavernier's boss. After they get off the phone Tavernier leaps into action, stealthily making his way to his boss’ office under the guise of giving him a report. He then pulls a gun (Carala's own gun) and kills him, staging the scene to look like a suicide and sneaks back into his office just in time to leave with the only other two people left in the office. In the moment that he is about to be home free and drive to meet up with his love, he notices that he's left the hook and rope that he used to scale the wall to get into his boss’ office, thus negating the carefully left suicide scene. He rushes back into the building, leaving his car running, to try and grab the evidence, only to be trapped in the elevator as the attendant shuts down the power. Just as he is being trapped, a small time thief, Louis (Georges Poujouly), and his girlfriend Veronique (played by Yori Bertin, who has a bit of a crush on Julien/Mr. Tavernier) hop in his car and take off, running away to their own absurd sequence of events, but not before Florence sees Julien's car driving away with a young girl in the passenger seat.

In that brief few minutes three separate yet surreally tied narratives commence; Julien Tavernier stuck in the elevator frantically working against time as it seems to stand still, Louis/Veronique as they descend madly into their criminal downward spiral, and Florence as she walks sullenly through her desolate thoughts and fears. The future of all of them is uncertain, the only certainty is the inevitable passage of time. I won't spoil the suspense for you, you'll simply have to watch to see what comes of these three intertwined stories.

Other than this fantastic and brilliantly peculiar story and Malle's masterful development of the tale, there are many other reasons that this film has made its way firmly into my personal top ten. However, in the interest of brevity I will only elaborate on a few of those things. First and most prominently, the film was shot by the French cinematographer Henri Decaë, who crafted a gritty and yet luminous aesthetic, playing with the conventions of noir while metaphorically utilizing a novel lens. Secondly Jeanne Moreau's portrayal of a reflective woman scorned, which has become one of the most lauded performances of this era of French cinema. Thirdly, though the use of music is somewhat sparing, it is certainly impactful when utilized, since it happened to be improvised by none other than Miles Davis and a few other musicians in the heat of a single night in Paris. If you look further into the story behind the soundtrack it only solidifies that this film exudes "cool." Fourth, and finally, I love the fact that I always find myself at the edge of my seat the entire time as the characters are hurled blindly through the insane narrative, the suspense in this film is killer and you can practically cut the tension with a knife!

In the end, this is a film that screams to be seen. I can't fully provide a sufficient description of why you must see Elevator to the Gallows so I will simply wrap up this edition of I'd Love To Turn You On-At The Movies. I implore you to take the time to watch this important film!

-          Edward Hill

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #184 - Ghost World (2001, dir. Terry Zwigoff, Written by Daniel Clowes & Terry Zwigoff)

Rebecca: This is so bad it’s almost good.

Enid: This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.

In the nineties Daniel Clowes had a run of his comic Eightball entitled “Ghost World” that, among others, featured the odd stories of recent high school grads Enid and Rebecca. Clowes’ series was a cult classic in the comic world and as the “Ghost World” narrative gained popularity, Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes turned the story into the crazily rad film that I have the pleasure to attempt to turn you onto for this post! I’ve always been a bit of a comic nerd with a penchant for the underground and alternative stories, so I fell in love with Clowes’ Eightball (at the same time as I found the Hernandez Brothers Love & Rockets series). With that in mind, I was extremely pleased when the film, in an abnormal turn of events, happened to live up to the insane awesomeness of the comic.

The story follows Enid (Thora Birch) as she and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), having just graduated high school, embark on the beginning of the rest of their lives. All seems well as they follow Satanists from their favorite haunt to the “like, Taj Mahal of fake 50’s diner’s,” mess with their ‘friend’ Josh at his convenience store job, and Enid dryly fumbles through her remedial art class, however life becomes much more complex as the both of them deal with the ennui of the real world in different ways.

While reading through the personal ads in the paper, they come across a “missed connection” (pre-Craig and his list) of a man who believed he had a connection with a woman who he had randomly helped. The two decide that it would be fun to mess with the guy, make a date with him and watch as he is “stood up.” Fast-forward; as Enid watches the man sit and sip his vanilla milk shake an interest is piqued within her. Having followed the man home they began stalking him, eventually discovering that the man, Seymour (Steve Buscemi), runs a makeshift record store out of his garage on Saturdays. Enid picks up a 33RPM compilation of old Blues 78’s and her interest begins to become an obsession (thanks to Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”). While Enid further falls down the rabbit hole of Seymour’s anti-glamorous life and escapes further into defensive sarcasm, Rebecca begins to embrace the real world working at a coffee shop and looking for an apartment. And from there, well, the story evolves.

Seymour: I can't relate to 99% of humanity.

One of the things that hits me most about Ghost World is the fact that every time I watch this film (or read the comics or graphic novel compilation) I see it from a different perspective. The root of the film is transition. Enid and the rest of the characters are all going through major changes and transitions in their lives and the ways that they deal with them are extremely relatable and human. All of the characters offer a different perspective on change and evolution of self, which make the film/comic endlessly fascinating.  The story/comic is gorgeously imbued with this relatability, and the film under less capable direction and with less committed performers could have easily fallen flat. Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi prove to be such perfect live action representations of their much-beloved characters that it almost seems as if Clowes had written/drawn the characters for those particular people.

While I have certainly focused more upon what makes this a remarkable and important film, I can’t express enough how enjoyable and hilarious the movie truly is! The trials and tribulations of Enid’s life in transition, while at time heartwarming/breaking, are often hysterical and the sardonic sense of humor of the main character permeates the entirety of the film. Being a new addition to the Criterion Collection I can’t say enough about Ghost World and knowing that words won’t fully be able to describe the appeal of this eccentric gem, I will end this edition of “I’d Love To Turn You On,” so you can go and experience it for yourself!

-         Edward Hill

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #175 - Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964, dir. Byron Haskin)

I’ve been home sick for a few days and it has given me a great opportunity to get caught up on a bunch of movies, new and old. Yesterday I watched modern master Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant which was ultra-modern, hyper-scary, mega-suspenseful. It was masterful science fiction/horror of the highest order, bringing together all the technological and storytelling finesse that can make these genres so appealing when done well. The achievements were clearly of this time: in other words, there is no way this movie - with its hellish visions literally made flesh -could have been made in a different era. It got me thinking about those different eras and the shifting sands of audience expectation and context that makes our appreciation of such movies possible.

Robinson Crusoe On Mars was made in 1964, a full year before the first images from Mariner 4 started to show the world what the Red Planet actually looked like. Thus any verisimilitude or failure can be placed on the makers of the film and not on contemporary scientific understanding. Even under this difficult stricture, this movie holds up well. The film is based faithfully on Daniel Defoe’s 18th century adventure classic which tells the tale of a man shipwrecked on an island and forced, with the help of a native companion named Friday, to find food, water, shelter and ultimately meaning in a lonely and confusing life. The “On Mars” version obviously updates the story to put the wayward traveler (square-jawed Paul Mantee) out in space and stranded on Mars instead of an island in the South Pacific. The movie opens as Mantee, his co-pilot (a young and completely un-smarmy Adam West) and a woolly monkey named Mona are passing Mars on an observation mission when an errant meteor forces them off course and into Mars’ gravitational pull. Crash landing, Mantee, named Captain Kit Draper, quickly realizes his only human companionship has perished and he is now stuck on a faraway planet with nothing but a space-suit wearing Monkey for companionship. Much like Defoe’s Crusoe, Draper must begin the slow, lonely process of finding, shelter, food, water, and in this alien environment, oxygen. Through a series of alternately plausible and laughable eventualities he does manage to secure all these needs for himself. It’s worth reminding at this point that within the parameters of our contemporary understanding of the facts, his discoveries all seemed pretty plausible. In fact, in general this movie does a remarkable job of creating possibilities out of scant information. With hindsight, more than a few of the solutions Draper comes up with are remarkably prescient.

A little more than halfway through the movie we are introduced to Friday, who in this version is an alien slave forced to mine on Mars by another, dominant alien culture. Director Byron Haskin had previously directed The War Of The Worlds in 1953 and the dominant species’ vessels are remarkably similar to those in his other film, but this fact does not distract from the eeriness of their ominous presence. Friday has escaped from his slave labor but can still be tracked through wristbands he is forced to wear, thus outrunning the hostile spaceships and their deadly laser blasts becomes Draper, Friday and Mona’s reason to start traveling across Mars to the polar ice caps. They make it, they free Friday and they eventually get rescued. For its time it is as realistic as Matt Damon’s The Martian and twice as fun.

The real reason I mentioned being home sick is that the first time I saw this movie (as a TV rerun in the early 1970’s) I was in the exact same situation. I was in elementary school, home with a fever and given the luxury of our black and white Zenith being wheeled into my bedroom so I could recuperate under the healing powers of the boob tube (as my father angrily called it). I recall drifting in and out of this magical movie, with clear memories of the Martian environment, the scary alien ships, the sense of loneliness and fear, and that monkey! Yes, for me, Mona The Monkey (actually an animal named Barney with fur covered underwear to stop gender confusion) stands out in memory in the most adorable little monkey-sized space suit. I never forgot it, and when I returned to the movie as an adult, it was even more memorable than I thought. The monkey in the space suit remains my favorite detail of the movie, but with fresh eyes I was blown away by the beauty and forward-thinking vision of the sets, the colorfully tinted and ever changing skies (couldn’t see any of that on the old Zenith), the fascinating views into old technology trying to look modern - dig the early computers and especially the amazing primitive video camera, which ultimately provides one of the most magical sequences in the movie. There are plot holes and anachronisms that might make you guffaw, but if you tend toward this type of entertainment and can appreciate historical perspective as the inevitability that it is, Robinson Crusoe On Mars is an entirely satisfying and sweetly nostalgic trip to another place and time.

-          Paul Epstein

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #173 - Still Walking (2008, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda)

Sometimes family issues don’t get resolved. Instead they get buried, simmering under the surface, peaking out at inopportune moments, and then submerging again until the next time the simmer works up to a boil. So goes the plot of Hirokazu Koreeda’s masterpiece Still Walking, which traces a day (and a little) at an annual family memorial.

As the film begins the Yokoyama family is gathering at the home of the parents (father Kyohei and mother Toshiko) in a seaside town south of Tokyo. Their son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) and daughter Chinami (You) bring their families for the annual event, whose purpose slowly becomes clear – the family meets once a year to honor their eldest son Junpei, who drowned trying to save a child. In the early scenes, everything is lightness and camaraderie as the family makes food together, chats, and catches up, though there’s a notably curt “Oh, you’re here” from the father as Ryota and his wife and stepson arrive. Slowly, as the meaning of the event is known, the family relationships begin to become clear – Chinami and her husband hope to move into the family home, but this means the clearing out Junpei’s belongings, and the parents aren’t quite ready for that. Kyohei (played with stern demeanor 
by Yoshio Harada) hoped to leave his medical practice in the care of Junpei, and when Ryota chose to leave the pursuit to become an art restorer, Kyohei’s dreams of passing on his legacy died with them. Meanwhile the slightly comical Toshiko (played beautifully by Koreeda regular Kirin Kiki), lets out her vulnerable and wounded sides as the film progresses, letting the buried pains of several events of her past to the surface through her normally cheerful outlook.

As the early conversations keep turning to the absent Junpei, the film digs in deeper. Rather than becoming a mournful or melodramatic tract about a dead son taken too soon, it works into broader territories that all families face – jealousies and resentments, disappointments long held, strains between siblings and between the younger and older generations, and so forth. After setting up an ensemble cast, Koreeda continually pairs and groups off his characters to have conversations that deepen our understanding of their relationships. And rather than resolving everything in a dramatic wrap-up, the film does the out of the ordinary and leaves issues unresolved – Kyohei’s disappointment with Ryota’s life choices may be slightly mitigated and changed by their final scene together, but they’re not settled, moved past, or put aside.

Koreeda, as is usual for him, has exceptional insight in his writing, with the characters all so realistic, so well inhabited by the actors, that we could believe we’re watching a documentary about a family rather than a narrative film. He’s also got a brilliant touch with young actors, and though they’re not put front and center here as they are in his films like I Wish or Nobody Knows, the roles given to children here (particularly Shohei Tanaka as Ryota’s stepson Atsushi, who is given an especially poignant scene) are superb. And his camera technique and editing style are unobtrusive – allowing the actors and dialogue to unfold in a natural rhythm in front of the camera without drawing attention to themselves despite his gift for composition. He’s a humanist

filmmaker of the highest level, on par with Ozu (to whom he’s frequently compared for his films of families in generational conflict), though he’s got an additional measure of adding familial trauma and its aftermath into the mix. He’s directed eleven narrative films (and a number of documentaries as well); of the nine that I’ve seen, I’d call six of them great or better, and the rest good to very good. You can’t go wrong with Koreeda, but Still Walking might be the easiest starting point to see his powers on full display.

-          Patrick Brown

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #110 - Jules and Jim (1962, dir. François Truffaut)

François Truffaut pulls out all the cinematic stops in his 1962 masterpiece, Jules and Jim: voice over, dolly shots, aerials, pans, wipes, masking, freeze frames, photographic stills, newsreel footage. It’s like an overflowing portfolio of the possibilities of film. And it’s a great story: two good friends, Jules and Jim, a German and Frenchman, live the bohemian life in Paris before World War I, drinking wine in cafes, talking about art, looking for love. A friend gives them a slide show of ancient statues and they’re both taken by a marble portrait of a woman with a mysterious smile. A few days later, they meet a woman named Catherine who looks just like the sculpture, and so begins a 25-year saga in which both men are in love and obsessed with her, and their triangular relationship shifts dramatically over the years. It’s storytelling at its most sophisticated, with an almost musical quality, more like a symphony than a movie. At times, years go by in a breathless whir, as the narrator spins the yarn of the increasing complexity of the trio’s love. Other times the pace suddenly slows, often to a complete stop, with a freeze frame of the lovely Catherine, her blond hair backlit by the sun. Or it’ll linger on a seemingly mundane scene, maybe Catherine and Jim packing a suitcase, or the three of them drinking wine in a meadow, or riding their bikes on a tree-lined lane. It’s all so beautiful, and all of it together—the fast parts, the slow parts, the panacea of motion picture technique—gives the film a fullness that’s rare in movies.

The film won the Grand Prix (predecessor to the Palme d’Or) at Cannes, and is often included on lists of the best movies of all times. It’s inspired generations of filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, who specifically hailed it as a precursor of the riveting pace of Goodfellas. In a gushing review, Roger Ebert wrote, “Jules and Jim was perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of (the French New Wave’s) first astonishing films that broke with the past. There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time.” Indeed, it still feels like cutting-edge art, despite being more than 50 years old and in black and white. And not just stylistically. Even though the story is set in the early 20^th Century, and the film came out a few years before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, the tragic romance feels contemporary, and infidelity abounds. Catherine is as liberated and self-assured as any character who might grace the screen today, in many ways even more so. And that’s what makes this film a true classic, its timelessness. In another fifty years, Jules and Jim will no doubt be as poignant as it was when it came out, and as it is now.

- Joe Miller

Two films by Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel was a Spanish-born director who made less than five films in his native country, creating the bulk of his work in France and Mexico, which is where he filmed the latest two offerings from the Criterion Collection, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert. As a member of the Parisian surrealist group in the 1920’s, Buñuel liked to deal in imagery at once confusing and sometimes shocking – at least two of his films were banned in several countries for their scandalous content.

One of the key goals of the surrealists was not just to shock (though it was a favorite tactic) but to liberate thinking from what they perceived as the shackles that bound people to conventional thought. Buñuel was fond of attacking those institutions – social, governmental, and especially religious – that he felt were particularly responsible for providing and reinforcing those barriers to a freer mode of thinking and expression, of living. So it’s no surprise that many of his films circle around themes of frustration, wherein the protagonists find themselves unable for whatever reasons to satisfy even the simplest desires.

Take for example his 1963 masterpiece The Exterminating Angel. In it, a group of upper class citizens return from the opera to their host’s home for dinner. After dinner, they retire to the drawing room for some entertainment before going home. But no one leaves. Nothing physical prevents them from exiting the drawing room; they find that they simply can’t leave. At first it’s an annoying state of affairs, but as it continues for hours, days, weeks (perhaps months? It’s never made clear exactly how long it goes on) and things become more desperate all their well-bred social graces slowly fall away. They argue and fight, they covet neighbors’ wives, they panic, they commit suicide and attack one another – anything they can think of to survive in the room in which they’re trapped. Buñuel of course never clarifies or explains matters – this is simply a situation that exists and how these people respond in the resulting pressure cooker is what’s interesting, milked for black comedy as much as possible and laced throughout with satiric barbs. It’s possibly the finest realization of satirical wit married to more obscure surrealist free expression out of all of his 36 films.


A close second might be his short film Simon of the Desert that, in only 45 minutes, takes an equally humorous and scathing approach in its satire on religious piety, echoing The Exterminating Angel’s attack on bourgeois morals and manner. When Buñuel’s producer ran out of money halfway through production, the film was done. But the structure of his films, in which a central idea runs through like an endless railroad track on which any number of scenes can appear – getting off at an earlier station than originally intended still leaves us with the satisfaction of the journey we wanted. Here, a saint (Simon, played to pious perfection by Claudio Brook) sits atop a pillar in the desert to bring himself closer to God but true to Buñuel’s satiric form, this sort of strict adherence to dogma has no place in the real world. He performs miracles rated by onlookers as so-so, restores a thief’s severed hands only to have the thief’s first act with his new hands turn out to be the slapping of a boisterous child. While these scenes smack of the sort of disrespect bordering on blasphemy that gave his earlier works Viridiana and L'Age D'or such notoriety, it’s Buñuel’s clinical and intellectual (and secular) interest in the subject that also allows him to dryly and humorously explore the theological end of things. Simon is not merely there as an object to poke fun at for his inability to transform earthly matters, he’s also repeatedly tempted by Satan (in the form of actress Silvia Pinal), who appears and reappears in various guises, bringing us back to Buñuel’s interest in desire and frustration (in this case, self-inflicted). The point of all this is that Simon has bound himself to something that – like the class-bound diners of Angel – prevents him from experiencing his own life, from feeling the full range of his being by cutting himself off with his ascetic existence. When the devil finally takes him in the abrupt finale to a rock and roll club Simon doesn’t seem to be in hell, he merely seems disappointed in how mundane the real world can be, removed from the saintly struggles that gave him a sense of purpose.

Both of these films are high water marks for Buñuel and surrealist cinema in general. Both are being released by the Criterion Collection on Tuesday February 10th and are loaded with extras, including interviews on both DVDs with actress Silvia Pinal, interviews with Luis Buñuel from the 1970’s, critical essays, and more.