Tag Archives: Robert Bresson

June 7, 2013

My Top 10 Favorite Notes in Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer

About two-and-a-half years ago I posted a short article on this blog about how I came to receive a personally inscribed copy of the great book Notes on the Cinematographer (Notes sur le cinematographe) by Robert Bresson, my favorite director of all time. For those who haven’t read it, the book is a series of brief notes — some of them only sentence fragments — that Bresson wrote while making films over the course of many decades. These notes, which range from cryptic aphorisms to bits of practical, commonsense advice directed by the author to himself, have been compared by critics to everything from the pensees of Bresson’s hero Blaise Pascal to the messages contained in Chinese fortune cookies. Regardless of how you describe it, one thing’s for certain: the book is so chock-full of wisdom and genuine insight into the creative process that I think it should be considered essential reading for not just filmmakers but artists of any stripe. As I am in the process of writing a new feature-length script that I hope to produce next year (50+ pages down and counting — huzzah!), I find myself returning to Notes on the Cinematographer yet again for inspiration. Among the hundreds of notes contained therein, here are my top 10 favorites:

10. Not to use two violins when one is enough.

9. A whole made of good images can be detestable.

8. Let the cause follow the effect, not accompany it or precede it.

7. A too-expected image (cliche) will never seem right, even if it is.

6. When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.

5. No psychology (of the kind which discovers only what it can explain).

4. Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

3. Empty the pond to get the fish.

2. Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

1. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Notes on the Cinematographer can be purchased from amazon.com here.

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4 comments | tags: Notes on the Cinematographer, Notes sur le cinematographe, Robert Bresson | posted in Uncategorized

October 5, 2012

The Difference Between Robert Bresson in 1934 and 1956

By michaelgloversmith

Having finally caught up with Robert Bresson’s deeply obscure and uncharacteristically slapstick first film Les Affaires Publiques, I decided to throw this together just for fun – two screencaps I made that illustrate the difference between the director in 1934 and 1956.

A sentry box, manned and decorated with polka-dots, in Les Affaires Publiques (1934):

A sentry box, unmanned and unadorned, in A Man Escaped (1956):

3 comments | tags: A Man Escaped, Les affaires publiques, Public Affairs, Robert Bresson, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé | posted in Uncategorized

May 11, 2012

A Classic French Cinema Primer, Pt. 2

By michaelgloversmith

A continuation of the list of essential pre-Nouvelle Vague French sound era movie titles that I began earlier this week. This part of the list encompasses films released from 1946 – 1959.

La Belle et la Bete (Cocteau, 1946)

Jean Cocteau, with an uncredited assist from Rene Clement, directed this beautiful and poetic adaptation of the well-known fairy tale about a young woman, Belle, who sacrifices herself to a grotesque half-man/half-beast creature in order to save her father’s life. But the more she gets to know the beast, the more she realizes his hideous exterior conceals a sensitive soul . . . This was a belated follow-up to Cocteau’s Surrealist classic debut, The Blood of a Poet, and it was worth the wait. A million miles from the Disney-fication of such material, Cocteau’s film begins with the unforgettable title card “…and now, we begin our story with a phrase that is like a time machine for children: Once Upon a Time…” and then proceeds to capture the true essence of fairy tales, with all of the darkness that implies.

Jour de Fete (Tati, 1949)

Jacques Tati’s underrated first feature is a delightful slapstick comedy about Francois (Tati himself as a forerunner to his beloved M. Hulot character), a rural postman who becomes obsessed with delivering mail efficiently after viewing a documentary on the high-tech U.S. Postal Service. Although there is dialogue in the film, it remains secondary to Tati’s incredible sight gags, which rival the best of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in their sheer ingenuity (the runaway bicycle scene is a standout). This was shot in a primitive color process known as Thomson Color though not seen that way until 1995 when Tati’s daughter oversaw the development of a new version that restored the film as closely as possible to her father’s original vision. A revelation.

Le Silence de la Mer (Melville, 1949)

Jean-Pierre Melville was a spiritual godfather to the Nouvelle Vague not only because his work expressed such an obvious love of cinema but also due to the fierce independence evidenced by the low-budget/shot-on-location/documentary-style aesthetic of his early films. This self-financed World War II drama concerns a German soldier (Howard Vernon) who takes up residence with an elderly Frenchman and his niece while convalescing from a wound. Neither of the French characters speak a word as the German regales them with verbose monologues but the niece eventually falls in love with the soldier, a feeling on which she will never be able to act. This austere and intimate chamber drama is played out as a series of carefully orchestrated glances aided by a use of voice-over narration that would clearly influence not just the New Wave but Robert Bresson as well.

Casque d’Or (Becker, 1952)

Jacques Becker’s magnificent recreation of La Belle Epoque is an exquisite romantic melodrama about a gangster’s moll (a terrific Simone Signoret) who also becomes the object of affection of two other men – with predictably tragic results. But Casque d’Or (the film takes its title from the nickname of Signoret’s character) is less about plot than atmosphere. All of the period details feel correct but it is the beautiful cinematography of Robert Lefebvre that elevates this to the front rank of the best French movies ever; the almost overly-bright, poetic, Impressionistic images lend the movie a nostalgic tone even when, or perhaps especially when, the story is at its darkest.

The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Ophuls, 1953)

Austrian-born director Max Ophuls made what are arguably the most elegant movies of the classic French cinema; his much beloved tracking shots find their perfect complement in narrative structures that continually circle back on themselves, like a waltz, before resolving in a typically tragic denouement. Letter from an Unknown Woman, from Ophuls’ brief stint in Hollywood, is my favorite of his films but I think Madame de . . . is the masterpiece of his lengthier French career. The unnamed title character is the wife of a general in the French Army who sells her most expensive pair of earrings to pay off a debt, an act that becomes a catalyst for a chain of events bringing about her ruin. Apart from the aforementioned formal grace, the lead performances (from Daniel Darrieux, Charles Boyer and the very suave and refined-looking Italian director Vittorio de Sica) are sublime.

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Tati, 1953)

Jacques Tati’s classic comedy, the first outing for his legendary M. Hulot character, opens with a sly title card asking the viewer not to expect a plot since the movie is about a holiday and holidays are meant to be fun. From there we follow the bumbling title character as he arrives at a beach-side resort hotel and, in a series of plotless and near wordless scenes, proceeds to comically wreak havoc everywhere he goes. (Especially memorable is Hulot’s riotous visit to the tennis court.) Not only a very funny film but, thanks to Tati’s eye for the geometry of the frame, a very beautiful one as well.

The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece of machismo details the harrowing adventures of four down-on-their-luck European expatriates in Venezuela who agree to the extremely dangerous job of transporting truckloads of nitroglycerine across South American mountain roads in exchange for a large sum of money. This is a gritty, tense, brutal and undeniably exciting adventure movie that also offers, in the character of an anti-union American oil company boss, an intriguing critique of capitalism besides. The Wages of Fear deservedly made Yves Montand an international star and went on to exert a big influence on Sam Peckinpah who tipped his hat to the opening of this film with a similar children-torturing-insects scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch many years later.

French Cancan (Renoir, 1954)

After a 15 year exile, in part due to the Nazi occupation of France, Jean Renoir’s homecoming saw him reunite with actor Jean Gabin to create the most distinctly Gallic film of his famed career. French Cancan tells the story of Henri Danglard (Gabin at his most charismatic), the womanizing impresario who founds the Moulin Rouge and helps to inaugurate the Cancan dance craze while staying just a half-step ahead of his creditors. Françoise Arnoul and Maria Felix play Danglard’s rival romantic interests, both of whom realize that they will have to take a back seat to the scoundrel’s true love: his career. Renoir’s gorgeous visual style takes its cues from the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, most impressively in the Cancan climax, which I’ve described elsewhere on this site as a “near orgiastic riot of form and color.”

Touchez Pas au Grisbi (Becker, 1954)

Jacques Becker segues from the underworld of La Belle Epoque in Casque d’Or to the gangsters of the modern world in Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a massively influential crime/noir film that laid down a template for Jean-Pierre Melville and many others to follow. The plot centers on Max (Gabin again, this time in world-weary mode), an aging gangster whose retirement after a last big score proves short-lived when his former partner is kidnapped and he is asked to put up their loot as ransom. Marvelous black and white cinematography compliments what is essentially a love story between two men, plus Gabin gets to slap a lot of people around. Look sharp for future stars Lino Ventura and Jeanne Moreau in minor roles.

Lola Montes (Ophuls, 1955)

The true story of the infamous slut of the title (Martine Carol) whose sexual appetite was so voracious that she wound up becoming a 19th century circus attraction. As Rafael Nadal once said, “How crazy is the life?” Max Ophuls’ great final film features an ambitiously non-chronological structure, a la Citizen Kane, that alternates between present day scenes where the circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) recounts Lola’s exploits with flashback scenes to her youth, beginning with a tryst with Franz Liszt and continuing through many other men. Ophuls’ trademark bravura visual style is taken to an almost freakish extreme with the addition of Eastmancolor but Carol’s performance is the key here; she and Ophuls conspire to make Lola a figure of intense sympathy and identification throughout. Unfortunately, Lola Montes was a commercial disaster upon release and was soon heavily recut from its original 140 minute version. The recent restoration, which can be seen on Criterion’s magnificent 115 minute blu-ray, is the most complete the film is ever likely to be.

Bob le Flambeur (Melville, 1956)

The film where Melville became Melville. With a tip of his fedora to The Asphalt Jungle, the brilliant French writer/director tells an irresistible shaggy dog heist story about one Bob Montagne, an aging gangster/gambler who dutifully maintains an impeccable sense of personal style even when on a losing streak. Eventually, Bob’s bad luck causes him to hatch a scheme to rob the casino in Deauville, a journey to the end of night that leads to one of the wittiest punch lines in cinema. Melville’s depiction of the Montmartre demimonde is so pungent you can smell it and his mise-en-scene, with its chiaroscuro lighting and emphasis on black and white checkerboard patterns, set a new standard for cinematic cool.

A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956)

Robert Bresson’s minimalist drama, based on the memoir of a real life French Lieutenant’s escape from a Gestapo prison, unforgettably conveys one man’s relentless desire to regain his freedom. Eschewing the easy thrills so common to the Hollywood treatment of this type of subject matter, Bresson instead zeroes in on the specific process of how Lieutenant Fontaine acquires, creates and utilizes the tools that enable his escape plan to work. The stringent use of close-ups of hands at work, accompanied by a use of heightened sound effects and an extensive employment of first person voice-over narration, draws the viewer into Fontaine’s world to an almost unbearably intense degree. This is on my short list of near-perfect movies.

Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959)

Robert Bresson’s loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment transposes Dostoevsky’s novel to contemporary Paris, replacing Raskolnikov’s senseless murder of an old woman with the story of a young man who drifts into a life of crime for which he was not made. What remains the same are the hero’s confused Nietzschean beliefs, the cat-and-mouse game he plays with the local police inspector and the hint of spiritual rehabilitation that is triggered by the love of a young woman. The actual pickpocketing sequences are virtuoso pieces of camera choreography but, as in all of Bresson’s movies, the sum is greater than its individual parts, resulting in a deeply moving, spiritually exultant work of art.

5 comments | tags: A Man Escaped, Beauty and the Beast, Bob le Flambeur, Bob the Gambler, Casque d'Or, French Cancan, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jour de Fete, La Belle et la Bete, Le salaire de la peur, Le Silence de la mer, Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Lola Montes, Madame de . . ., Max Ophuls, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Pickpocket, Robert Bresson, The Earrings of Madame de . . ., The Silence of the Sea, The Wages of Fear, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

May 7, 2012

A Classic French Cinema Primer, pt. 1: Beyond the “Tradition of Quality”

By michaelgloversmith

The pre-Nouvelle Vague French cinema remains unjustly neglected in a lot of critical and cinephile quarters today, in part due to the contempt shown for it by the Nouvelle Vague directors when they were still critics for Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s. Francois Truffaut’s famous dismissal of the French cinema’s “tradition of quality,” which he contrasted with the more ostensibly personal and cinematic films coming out of Hollywood during the same period, has given an unfortunate and lasting impression that French cinema in the early sound era was a barren field. I would argue that, since the birth of the movies, France has consistently been one of the three greatest film producing nations – along with the United States and Japan. This list, which encompasses the early sound era through the birth of the New Wave (a separate silent French cinema primer will be posted in the future) is meant to spotlight just a few of the most essential and exciting French movies made during this period.

The list will be broken into two parts. Today’s post encompasses the years 1930 – 1945. Part two, to be published later this week, encompasses 1946 – 1959. As a self-imposed, arbitrary rule, each half of the list will contain no more than two films by the same director.

L’age d’Or (Bunuel, 1930)

Luis Bunuel’s first feature-length film is this hilarious Surrealist portrait of a man and a woman who repeatedly attempt to get together and have sex but are continually prevented from doing so by members of respectable bourgeois society. This is full of famously bizarre images, which still retain their awesome, funny, unsettling power today: a woman shoos a full grown cow off of the bed in her upper-class home, a groundskeeper arbitrarily shoots his son, a woman lasciviously sucks on the toe of a statue, a man throws various objects, including a burning tree, a bishop and a giraffe, out of a second story window. Like a lot of great works of Surrealist art, this was deliberately meant to counter the rising tide of fascism that was sweeping across Europe at the time.

Marius (Korda, 1931)

The first and best installment of Marcel Pagnol’s “Fanny Trilogy” (followed by Cesar and Fanny) is a sweet comedy/melodrama about the goings on in a Marseilles port-side bar. Marius is a young man who manages the bar owned by his father Cesar. He has an affair with local girl Fanny who, holding out hope for a marriage proposal, turns down the hand of the older, wealthier Monsieur Panisse. But, alas, like the song says, Marius’ life, love and lady is the sea. Hungarian born director Alexander Korda does a wonderful job of “opening up” Pagnol’s play, making a deft use of real Marseilles locations. Charges that the movie is “filmed theater” are misguided; Pagnol and Korda’s very subject is the theatricality inherent in human nature.

A Nous la Liberte (Clair, 1931)

Mostly known today as the inspiration for Chaplin’s Modern Times, Rene Clair’s classic comedy follows the exploits of two escaped cons, one of whom becomes a factory owner and one of whom becomes a worker in the same factory. Is there any real difference, Clair asks, between a prisoner and a lowly factory worker? The equation between capitalism and criminality is a bit heavy handed but this is never less than a total visual delight, from the slapstick humor to Lazare Meerson’s stunning Expressionist-influenced art direction (which, atypical for a “foreign film” of the time, received an Oscar nomination).

Zero de Conduite (Vigo, 1933)

Jean Vigo’s penultimate film, an unforgettable tribute to the anarchic spirt of youth, documents the rebellion of four pre-adolescent boarding school students and is based on the director’s own childhood memories. Vigo was way ahead of his time in blending experimental filmmaking techniques with narrative storytelling (check out the poetic use of slow motion during the pillow fight scene) and the end result is beautiful, strange, beguiling and unmissable.

L’atalante (Vigo, 1934)

L’atalante tells the story of a newly married couple, a barge captain and his provincial wife, and their tumultuous honeymoon-cum-cargo delivery trip along the Seine river. The simple boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-finds-girl plot is merely an excuse for director Jean Vigo and ace cinematographer Boris Kaufman to serve up an array of rapturously photographed images, all of which correspond to the emotions of his protagonists. In a legendary supporting role, Michel Simon’s portrayal of a tattooed, cat-loving first mate is as endearing as it is hilarious. Vigo’s final film is one of the cinema’s transcendental glories – endlessly rewatchable, always uplifting.

Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1937)

Grand Illusion is a comedy and a drama, a war movie and a prison break film and, finally, thanks to an 11th hour appearance by the lovely Dita Parlo, a very touching love story. There is also a healthy dose of social criticism in the story of an aristocratic German Captain (memorably played by Erich von Stroheim) who shows favoritism to an upper class French captive, indicating that the bonds of class can sometimes be tighter than those of nationality. But this is just one of many examples of Renoir explicating the “arbitrary borders” made by man in one of the few films that deserves to be called a true anti-war movie.

The Pearls of the Crown (Guitry)

In this witty, innovative, trilingual take on the history film, three narrators – an Italian, an Englishman and a Frenchman – each tell the story of how four pear-shaped pearls ended up in the British crown. Writer/director Sacha Guitry manages, in a head-spinning hour and forty one minutes, to trace the pearls from one owner to the next over five hundred years of European history, allowing hilarious cameos by famous figures like Pope Clement VII, Catherine de Medici, Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, Napolean and Queen Victoria. But in a movie whose real subjects are language and storytelling the pearls themselves are nothing more than a MacGuffin. Guitry himself plays the French narrator as well as three other characters in the flashback sequences; as he wryly notes, “We always lend our faces to the heroes of the story.”

Pepe le Moko (Duvivier, 1937)

One reason why French film critics were so quick to identify and appreciate American film noir in the 1940s is because it distinctly resembled, tonally and visually, many of the great French crime films of the late 1930s. One such film is Julien Duvivier’s fatalistic Pepe le Moko, the story of a charismatic Parisian gangster (wonderfully played by Jean Gabin) hiding out in the Algiers’ Casbah, and the police inspector who attempts to reel him in. Algiers, an equally interesting Hollywood remake with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr, followed just one year later.

Le Jour se Leve (Carne, 1939)

One of the high water marks of the movement known as Poetic Realism (under which many of the titles immediately preceding and following it on this list also fall), Le Jour se Leve has it all: working class characters – with Jean Gabin as the doomed hero and Arletty as his love interest, atmospheric locations, a tragic crime plot, poetic dialogue by Jacques Prevert, and taut direction by Marcel Carne. Also like a ton of great French films of the era, this was soon banned by the Vichy government on the grounds that it was “demoralizing.” Maybe so but sometimes hopelessness can be romantic too.

The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)

This is Jean Renoir’s masterpiece and the grandaddy of all films about an assortment of friends and couples getting together for a weekend-long party in the country. The “rules of the game” are the rules one must abide by in order to get along in society, which involves a considerable amount of dishonesty. Fittingly, the one character who is incapable of lying, the earnest, heart-on-his-sleeve aviator Andre, is also the character who dies “like an animal in the hunt.” Like the best works of Shakespeare or Chekhov, this humanist tragicomedy captures timeless truths about the inner workings of the human heart.

Le Corbeau (Clouzot, 1943)

A series of anonymously written poison-pen letters are sent to various prominent citizens of a small French village. Chief among the targets of “The Raven,” the mysterious author’s pseudonym, is a doctor who is accused of adultery and performing illegal abortions. Both rumors and hidden secrets are brought to light by the letters, which threaten to tear the fabric of the community apart. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot made this for a German production company during the Nazi occupation of France. Sensing that the movie in some way allegorized them, the Nazis promptly fired Clouzot and banned the film. When the occupation ended, Clouzot was prohibited from making movies for an additional two years by the French government because he had collaborated with the Nazis! The director would go on to achieve much greater fame for The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques in the 1950s but this refreshingly dark and bitter thriller, a film far nastier than its Hollywood counterparts of the time, remains my personal favorite.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson, 1945)

Robert Bresson’s second film features star performances (most notably a ferocious turn by Maria Cesares), an original diegetic musical score and relatively ornate dialogue written by none other than Jean Cocteau – all elements the director would soon eschew in the major movies for which he became best known. But Les Dames du Bois de Bolougne is still a terrific and very Bressonian film about a woman who hatches a revenge plot against her ex-lover that involves arranging a marriage between him and a prostitute. The timeless, dream-like atmosphere is alluring (the story takes place in the present but feels as if it could be taking place in the 19th century) and the ambiguously redemptive ending packs a wallop precisely because of Bresson’s de-dramatized treatment.

Les Enfants du Paradis (Carne, 1945)

The pinnacle of the Marcel Carne/Jacques Prevert collaborations is this epic tale of doomed love set in the world of 19th century Parisian theater. Baptiste is a mime who falls in love with aspiring actress Garance. His shyness prevents their affair from being consummated and they go their separate ways until, years later, fate brings them back together for one last shot at romance. Both the behind the scenes look at theater and the depiction of 19th century France are lovingly detailed and passionately executed. This is sometimes referred to as a French Gone with the Wind but it’s actually much better than even that would suggest. One of the all-time great French movies.

16 comments | tags: A Nous la Liberte, Alexander Korda, Children of Paradise, Grand Illusion, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Julien Duvivier, L'age D'or, L'atalante, La Grande Illusion, La règle du jeu, Le Corbeau, Le Jour se Leve, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Les Enfants du Paradis, Les perles de la couronne, Luis Bunuel, Marcel Carne, Marcel Pagnol, Marius, Pepe le Moko, Rene Clair, Robert Bresson, Sacha Guitry, The Pearls of the Crown, The Raven, The Rules of the Game, Zero de Conduite | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

April 23, 2012

My Top 200 Films of All Time

By michaelgloversmith

In the past week, this blog has reached the milestone of having been viewed 100,000 times. To celebrate, I am posting a list of my favorite films of all time, one that I have been working on for what feels like forever. A wise man once said that favorite movies were always the hardest to write about and, after compiling the list, I heartily concur. I worked mighty hard to write the capsule reviews of my ten favorite movies that you’ll find below, attempting to nail down exactly what qualities they possess that has made them so impactful to me from points of view both personal (as an “ordinary” movie lover) and professional (as a film studies instructor and blogger). Below the list of my ten favorites you will also find a list of 200 runners-up that has been divided into eight groups of 25 in descending order of preference.

This highly personal list, which is actually a list of my 110 favorite movies, has literally been a lifetime in the making. I hope you enjoy it.

The Top Ten:

10. City Girl (Murnau, USA, 1930)

In F.W. Murnau’s lyrical, late-silent masterpiece, a farm boy from Minnesota travels to Chicago to sell his family’s wheat crop. He unexpectedly returns home with a new bride, an event that threatens to fracture his relationship with his skeptical parents who regard his big city wife as a shameless gold digger. This begins as an unforgettable portrait of urban loneliness (Mary Duncan’s title character keeps a fake bird in a cage as a pet) before moving to the wheat fields of Minnesota for some of the most gorgeous pastoral imagery ever captured on celluloid. Murnau knew how to put emotion into camera movement, something that is very difficult to do, and that skill is more evident in City Girl than any of his other considerably estimable films.

9. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, Russia, 1966)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, epic biopic of the famed 15th century icon painter is for my money the greatest movie ever made about the life of an artist. Told in vignette fashion, Tarkovsky depicts Rublev’s story against the turbulent backdrop of medieval Russia during the Tatar invasions. The highlight is the climactic sequence where Rublev, who has sworn a vow of silence in protest of the horrors he has seen, witnesses a mere boy overseeing the arduous process of the casting of a giant bell. The boy saves himself from government execution by successfully casting the bell in spite of the fact that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. At the conclusion of this awe-inspiring 30 minute scene, the depiction of a miracle that feels like a miracle of filmmaking, Rublev is inspired not only to speak again but to continue painting and to create his greatest works.

8. Out 1 (Rivette/Schiffman, France, 1971)

Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman’s legendary 12-and-a-half-hour serial is Feuillade made modern, where the directors use an expansive running time to tell various mystery stories, most of them unresolved, which also serves as a psychic x-ray of the 1960s French counterculture and the apotheosis of the entire Nouvelle Vague. Rivette and Schiffman intercut between four different plots: two seemingly unrelated theater troupes rehearse different Aeschylus plays while two seemingly unrelated con artists (Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto) ply their trades in the cafes and streets of Paris. The con artists each receive information about “the 13,” a secret society with its origin in Balzac that may or may not currently exist. Their investigations lead them to interact with various members of the theater troupes as Rivette and Schiffman slowly bring their narrative threads together and reminds us why paranoid conspiracy theories not only exist but are paradoxically comforting: they make us feel that disparate, unconnected events may be related and therefore part of a meaningful design. An intellectually vigorous, terrifying, funny, challenging and life-altering work.

7. Journey to Italy (Rossellini, Italy, 1954)

The Joyces (the incredible duo of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) are a married couple from England who travel to Naples to settle the estate of a recently deceased uncle. With the precision of a surgeon, director Roberto Rossellini shows how the romance has gone out of their marriage due to petty jealousies, mutual misunderstandings and a breakdown in communication. As the characters wander alone through Naples and nearby Pompeii, the viewer comes to realize that they do still love one another but are merely incapable of expressing it. Can a miracle save their relationship? This is the best movie ever made about marriage, a subtle, elegant, deeply spiritual film that uses the Italian landscape, both urban and rural, and the inexorable pull of ancient history to comment on the possibility of love in the modern world.

6. Tokyo Story (Ozu, Japan, 1953)

Yasujiro Ozu’s supreme masterpiece tells the story of an elderly Japanese couple who travel from their rural hometown to visit their grown children in the title city, only to find that their children don’t have much time to spend with them and even treat them as a nuisance. Rather than condemn any of his characters the way you would expect a Hollywood melodrama to do, Ozu’s patient, observant, non-judgemental eye sees the disintegration of the family as the sad but natural order of the universe. The heart of the film is the performance of Ozu’s favorite actress Setsuko Hara as Noriko, the elderly couple’s daughter-in-law, whose smiling countenance seems to radiate an almost overwhelming warmth and humanity. When one embittered character tells her that life is disappointing, Noriko’s resigned, smiling response is “Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Sublime.

5. L’argent (Bresson, France, 1983)

Robert Bresson’s swan song, as tight and compressed as a Ramones song, is a masterful update of Tolstoy’s short story The Forged Note. Bresson’s ingenious narrative follows a counterfeit bill, initially passed off in a shop as a schoolboy prank, which sets off a chain of events (an “avalanche of evil” in the director’s own indelible words) that ends with a young man murdering an entire family with an axe. This vital, rigorous movie, made when the director was 81 but seeming like the work of a much younger man, is the ultimate artistic statement about the potentially destructive power of money.

4. Gertrud (Dreyer, Denmark, 1964)

Carl Dreyer’s final film is an adaptation of Hjalmar Soderberg’s 1906 play of the same title and its deceptively theatrical character is also reminiscent of Ibsen (a protoypical feminist heroine) and Strindberg (the eternal conflict between men and women). But there are few films as truly and wonderfully cinematic as Gertrud, whose unique combination of stillness, slowness and whiteness is perfectly suited to capturing the title character’s near-religious view of romantic love as an uncompromising ideal. A lot of men seem to love Gertrud but none love her as much as she requires and so she chooses to live alone – without regrets. Unforgettable for its use of long takes (one of which clocks in at 10 minutes) and Nina Pens Rode’s luminous lead performance.

3. The Searchers (Ford, USA, 1956)

The greatest western ever made is also the greatest American movie ever made. Before filming began, John Ford described The Searchers as “a kind of psychological epic” and indeed this complex take on the settling of the West, with its head-on examination of racism, finds an appropriately tragic hero in the character of the mysterious Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in his best and most nuanced performance). Spurred on by an unrequited love for his deceased sister-in-law, the maniacal, Indian-hating Edwards will stop at nothing to recapture his nieces who have been kidnapped by Comanche Indians. “We’ll find ‘em,” Ethan says in a line of dialogue worthy of Melville, “just as sure as the turning of the earth.” The dialectic between civilization and barbarism posited by Ford, with Ethan standing in a metaphorical doorway between them, would have an incalculable effect on subsequent generations of filmmakers.

2. Tih Minh (Feuillade, France, 1918)

Louis Feuillade’s ridiculously entertaining 7-hour mystery serial features kidnappings, daring escapes, slapstick fistfights, secret messages coded in an ancient Hindu dialect, “forgetfulness potions,” various forms of mind control, a mountaintop cliffhanging climax, and many, many badass disguises. It also uses an international espionage plot to reflect on World War I and allegorize contemporary French fears about the insidious nature of Bolshevism; the hero is a French explorer and his chief rival is an evil German doctor named Marx. The hero’s maid turns out to be a villainess who is secretly in Marx’s employ and one of the key title cards is another character’s incredulous exclamation that “Marx is here!” The entire espionage genre, including Fritz Lang’s Mabuse cycle and the James Bond films, have their origins here but Feuillade’s masterpiece remains the best movie of its kind.

1. A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, Taiwan, 1991)

Edward Yang’s four hour epic about juvenile delinquents in 1950s Taipei marries the ambitious societal portraits of the 19th century Russian novel (one gang leader even references War and Peace, memorably calling its characters “swordsmen”) with the romanticism, iconography and intense identification with outsiders characteristic of a Nicholas Ray picture. In other words, the personal story (involving a troubled fourteen year old kid played by future adult star Chang Chen) can be seen as an allegory for the identity crisis of an entire nation struggling to define itself in the aftermath of World War II. I saw a 35 millimeter print of this over a decade ago and I emerged from the theater unable to speak. No moviegoing experience has shaken me more profoundly to the core than that one.

First 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

1. L’avventura (Antonioni, Italy, 1960)
2. A Man Escaped (Bresson, France, 1956)
3. Viridiana (Bunuel, Spain, 1961)
4. A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, USA, 1974)
5. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, Italy, 1948)
6. Coeur Fidele (Epstein, France, 1923)
7. How Green Was My Valley (Ford, USA, 1941)
8. Contempt (Godard, France/Italy, 1963)
9. Vertigo (Hitchcock, USA, 1958)
10. Three Times (Hou, Taiwan, 2005)
11. A Touch of Zen (Hu, Taiwan, 1971)
12. Our Hospitality (Keaton, USA, 1923)
13. The Decalogue (Kieslowski, Poland, 1988)
14. M (Lang, Germany, 1931)
15. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, Italy, 1966)
16. Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, Japan, 1953)
17. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau, USA, 1927)
18. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, USA, 1948)
19. The Rules of the Game (Renoir, France, 1939)
20. Play Time (Tati, France, 1967)
21. Man with the Movie Camera (Vertov, Russia, 1929)
22. L’atalante (Vigo, France, 1934)
23. The Leopard (Visconti, Italy, 1963)
24. Greed (Von Stroheim, USA, 1924)
25. Chimes at Midnight (Welles, Spain/Italy, 1965)

Second 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

26. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bunuel, France, 1972)
27. City Lights (Chaplin, USA, 1931)
28. Casablanca (Curtiz, USA, 1942)
29. Earth (Dovzhenko, Ukraine, 1930)
30. The Mother and the Whore (Eustache, France, 1974)
31. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, Germany, 1980)
32. 8 1/2 (Fellini, Italy, 1963)
33. Les Vampires (Feuillade, France, 1915-1916)
34. Zodiac (Fincher, USA, 2007)
35. The Ballad of Narayama (Imamura, Japan, 1983)
36. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, Japan, 1954)
37. The Band Wagon (Minnelli, USA, 1953)
38. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi, Japan, 1939)
39. Pandora’s Box (Pabst, Germany, 1929)
40. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, Italy, 1964)
41. Chinatown (Polanski, USA, 1974)
42. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger, UK, 1948)
43. Bigger Than Life (N. Ray, USA, 1956)
44. Charulata (S. Ray, India, 1964)
45. The Phantom Carriage (Sjostrom, Sweden, 1921)
46. The Arch (Tang, Hong Kong, 1969)
47. The Crowd (Vidor, USA, 1928)
48. Citizen Kane (Welles, USA, 1941)
49. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, USA, 1959)
50. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka, Japan, 1937)

Third 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

51. Lucky Star (Borzage, USA, 1929)
52. Singin’ in the Rain (Donen/Kelly, USA, 1952)
53. Day of Wrath (Dreyer, Denmark, 1943)
54. Variety (Dupont, Germany, 1925)
55. Unforgiven (Eastwood, USA, 1992)
56. Spring in a Small Town (Fei, China, 1948)
57. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, USA, 1962)
58. Park Row (Fuller, USA, 1952)
59. Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman, USA, 1971)
60. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, Italy/France, 2010)
61. Come and See (Klimov, Russia, 1985)
62. The Awful Truth (McCarey, USA, 1937)
63. Army of Shadows (Melville, France, 1969)
64. Floating Clouds (Naruse, Japan, 1954)
65. Boy (Oshima, Japan, 1969)
66. Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, USA, 1959)
67. Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, France/Italy, 1961)
68. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Rossellini, France/Italy, 1966)
69. All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, USA, 1956)
70. Stalker (Tarkovsky, Russia, 1979)
71. Satantango (Tarr, Hungary, 1994)
72. A Fugitive from the Past (Uchida, Japan, 1965)
73. The Docks of New York (Von Sternberg, USA, 1928)
74. The Roaring Twenties (Walsh, USA, 1939)
75. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, USA, 1946)

Fourth 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

76. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, Belgium, 1975)
77. The Long Goodbye (Altman, USA, 1973)
78. Le Boucher (Chabrol, France, 1970)
79. Brightness (Cisse, Mali, 1987)
80. The Strange Case of Angelica (De Oliveira, Portugal, 2010)
81. Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (Eisenstein, Russia, 1944-1958)
82. The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, Spain, 1973)
83. Lonesome (Fejos, USA, 1928)
84. Nouvelle Vague (Godard, France, 1990)
85. Isn’t Life Wonderful? (Griffith, USA/Germany, 1924)
86. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, USA, 1953)
87. Goodbye South Goodbye (Hou, Taiwan, 1996)
88. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, USA, 1968)
89. Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (Lang, Germany, 1922)
90. Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, USA, 1932)
91. Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, USA, 2001)
92. A Moment of Innocence (Makhmalbaf, Iran, 1996)
93. The Naked Spur (Mann, USA, 1953)
94. The Road Warrior (Miller, Australia, 1981)
95. Raging Bull (Scorsese, USA 1980)
96. Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Straub/Huillet, Germany, 1968)
97. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Sturges, USA, 1944)
98. Detour (Ulmer, USA, 1945)
99. Vagabond (Varda, France, 1985)
100. In the Mood for Love (Wong, Hong Kong, 2000)

Fifth 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

101. The Passenger (Antonioni, Italy, 1975)
102. Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, France, 1966)
103. The Unknown (Browning, USA, 1927)
104. Los Olvidados (Bunuel, Mexico, 1950)
105. Love Streams (Cassavetes, USA, 1984)
106. Ordet (Dreyer, Denmark, 1955)
107. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, Germany, 1974)
108. Pierrot le Fou (Godard, France, 1965)
109. Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (Hawks, USA, 1932)
110. Psycho (Hitchcock, USA, 1960)
111. A City of Sadness (Hou, Taiwan, 1989)
112. Vengeance is Mine (Imamura, Japan, 1979)
113. The Housemaid (Kim, S. Korea, 1960)
114. Naked (Leigh, UK, 1993)
115. Safety Last! (Newmeyer/Taylor, USA, 1923)
116. The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Ophuls, France, 1953)
117. Late Spring (Ozu, Japan, 1949)
118. The Third Man (Reed, UK, 1949)
119. Mon Oncle d’Amerique (Resnais, France, 1980)
120. L’amour Fou (Rivette, France, 1969)
121. Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, Germany/Italy, 1948)
122. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, USA, 1976)
123. The Ascent (Shepitko, Russia, 1977)
124. Senso (Visconti, Italy, 1954)
125. Touch of Evil (Welles, USA, 1958)

Sixth 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

126. Red Desert (Antonioni, Italy, 1964)
127. Pickpocket (Bresson, France, 1959)
128. L’age d’Or (Bunuel, France, 1930)
129. Anxiety (de Oliveira, Portugal, 1998)
130. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, France/Denmark, 1928)
131. The Quiet Man (Ford, USA/Ireland, 1952)
132. Weekend (Godard, France, 1967)
133. Rio Bravo (Hawks, USA, 1958)
134. Rear Window (Hitchcock, USA, 1954)
135. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (Ingram, USA, 1921)
136. Brief Encounter (Lean, UK, 1945)
137. Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, USA, 1984)
138. Heaven Can Wait (Lubitsch, USA, 1943)
139. Touki Bouki (Mambety, Senegal, 1973)
140. The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi, Japan, 1952)
141. Floating Weeds (Ozu, Japan, 1959)
142. A Nos Amours (Pialat, France, 1983)
143. The Music Room (S. Ray, India, 1958)
144. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, France, 1959)
145. Blade Runner (Scott, USA, 1982)
146. Black Girl (Sembene, Senegal, 1966)
147. Out of the Past (Tourneur, USA, 1947)
148. Turkish Delight (Verhoeven, Holland, 1973)
149. Chungking Express (Wong, Hong Kong, 1994)
150. The Goddess (Wu, China, 1934)

Seventh 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

151. Beau Travail (Denis, France/Djibouti, 1999)
152. Vampyr (Dreyer, Germany/Denmark, 1932)
153. The Sun Shines Bright (Ford, USA, 1953)
154. The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak, India, 1960)
155. Passion (Godard, France, 1982)
156. North By Northwest (Hitchcock, USA, 1959)
157. The Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, Iran, 1997)
158. Peppermint Candy (Lee, S. Korea, 1999)
159. Blue Velvet (Lynch, USA, 1986)
160. Some Came Running (Minnelli, USA, 1958)
161. Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, Japan, 1954)
162. Early Summer (Ozu, Japan, 1951)
163. Laura (Preminger, USA, 1944)
164. In a Lonely Place (N. Ray, USA, 1950)
165. Stromboli (Rossellini, Italy, 1950)
166. Goodfellas (Scorsese, USA, 1990)
167. Mr. Thank You (Shimizu, Japan, 1936)
168. M. Houlot’s Holiday (Tati, France, 1953)
169. Life Without Principle (To, Hong Kong, 2011)
170. The Emigrants (Troell, Sweden, 1971)
171. The 400 Blows (Truffaut, France, 1959)
172. The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg, Germany, 1930)
173. Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda, Poland, 1958)
174. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, Germany, 1920)
175. Yi Yi (Yang, Taiwan, 2000)

Eighth 25 Runners-Up (Listed Alphabetically By Director’s Family Name):

176. Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East? (Bae, S. Korea, 1989)
177. Killer of Sheep (Burnett, USA, 1977)
178. The Piano (Campion, Australia/New Zealand, 1993)
179. Holy Motors (Carax, France, 2012)
180. Children of Paradise (Carne, France, 1945)
181. The Magic Blade (Chor, Hong Kong, 1976)
182. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, UK, 1988)
183. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, France, 1964)
184. 3 Bad Men (Ford, USA, 1926)
185. Notorious (Hitchcock, USA, 1946)
186. A Page of Madness (Kinugasa, Japan, 1926)
187. Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, USA/UK, 1999)
188. Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica, Yugoslavia, 1988)
189. Daisies (Chytilova, Czechoslovakia, 1966)
190. Centre Stage (Kwan, Hong Kong, 1992)
191. Before Midnight (Linklater, USA/Greece, 2013)
192. Days of Heaven (Malick, USA, 1978)
193. Sans Soleil (Marker, France, 1983)
194. The Headless Woman (Martel, Argentina, 2008)
195. The Asthenic Syndrome (Muratova, Russia, 1989)
196. Groundhog Day (Ramis, USA, 1993)
197. Johnny Guitar (N. Ray, USA, 1952)
198. Antonio das Mortes (Rocha, Brazil, 1969)
199. Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (Shimazu, Japan, 1934)
200. People on Sunday (Siodmak/Ulmer, Germany, 1930)

28 comments | tags: A Brighter Summer Day, Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer, City Girl, Edward Yang, F.W. Murnau, Gertrud, Jacques Rivette, John Ford, Journey to Italy, L'argent, Louis Feuillade, Out 1, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, Suzanne Schiffman, The Searchers, Tih Minh, Tokyo Story, Viaggio in Italia, Voyage in Italy, Yasujiro Ozu | posted in All Best of Lists, Best Films - All Time

January 25, 2012

The Top Fifty Directors of All Time

By michaelgloversmith

As a companion piece to my list of the fifty best living film directors, which I published last year around this time, today’s post concerns my highly subjective list of the top fifty directors of all time. Below you will find a countdown of my top ten (with commentary on each and a citation of three essential works) as well as a list of forty runners-up (for whom I cite two essential works). As any reader of this blog knows, I love making lists and generating debates concerning all things cinematic. So who doesn’t deserve to be here and who did I egregiously omit? Feel free to comment below!

10. Jean Renoir (France)

Today Jean Renoir is thought of as the quintessential director of “classical” French cinema even though the films he made in the 1930s, the lofty high point of his career, are far wilder than this reputation would suggest. In the twin peaks of Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, Renoir showed, allegorically but with great generosity of spirit, a Europe that was tragically and inexorably heading towards World War II. His use of long shots and long takes, abetted by an elegantly gliding camera, allow viewers to observe his characters from a critical distance even while the folly of their behavior makes them intensely relatable on a human scale. He left France during the German occupation and became a U.S. citizen long enough to make at least one masterpiece in Hollywood (The Southerner) and another in India (the striking one-off The River). When Renoir returned to France in the 1950s, he embarked on a sublime trilogy of films centered on the relationship between life and performance that, fittingly, gave a trio of international movie stars some of their very best roles: The Golden Coach (with Anna Magnani), French Cancan (with Jean Gabin) and Elena and Her Men (with Ingrid Bergman).

Essential work: Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion) (1937), The Rules of the Game (La Regle de Jeu) (1939), French Cancan (1954)

9. Orson Welles (USA)

Orson Welles was the great synthesizer; in Citizen Kane he self-consciously appropriated techniques from most of the major historical film movements that came before him and wedded them to a revolutionary use of deep focus cinematography. More importantly, he pressed these techniques to the service of an epic story about the life of “one of the biggest” Americans that speaks volumes about the changes undergone by American society from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the second World War. This monumental achievement, coupled with the fact that it was the only time Welles had complete creative control over a movie, virtually guaranteed that his subsequent films would be seen as not living up to the “early promise” of Kane. Fortunately, Welles’ critical stock has risen considerably since his death in 1985 and masterpieces like The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight (my personal favorite) and F for Fake, not to mention various unfinished projects, are now more easily seen as part of a highly personal continuum stretching from the early-1940s to the mid-1980s, inside and outside of the Hollywood studio system, and from America to Europe and back again. With each passing year, his body of work looks more estimable for what he did achieve instead of deficient for what he didn’t.

Essential work: Citizen Kane (1941), Touch of Evil (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1965)

8. Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan)

Of all the great Japanese directors, Kenji Mizoguchi is the most expressive visual stylist. His hallmarks – elaborate tracking shots (in some films the camera is moving more often than not), chiaroscuro lighting and the subject of the oppression of Japanese women – were already evident as early as the mid-1930s when he made such gems as Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion. His first major masterpiece, 1939′s heartbreaking The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, about a wealthy young actor’s illicit affair with his family’s wet nurse, was enough to ensure his immortality. But the best was yet to come; after a handful of relatively safe films made during and immediately after the war, Mizoguchi’s career peaked in the 1950s with an extraordinary series of movies, including The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff and the incredibly atmospheric and unusually poetic ghost story Ugetsu. Each of these films is a period drama, in which an earlier era in Japanese history is painstakingly and authentically recreated, that tackles human suffering with a clear-eyed honesty and compassion that is simply unparalleled in cinema.

Essential work: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953)

7. Roberto Rossellini (Italy)

In the 1940s Roberto Rossellini helped to spearhead the revolutionary Italian Neorealist movement with his socially conscious, documentary-style War Trilogy (consisting of Rome, Open City, Paisan and Germany Year Zero). Then, he shifted gears in the 1950s to make six remarkable melodramas starring his then-wife Ingrid Bergman including Stromboli and Voyage in Italy. These films arguably marked the birth of “cinematic modernism” by eschewing plot in favor of a series of scenes of Bergman wandering a primordial landscape meant to evoke the interior journey of her characters (which would pave the way for both Antonioni’s L’avventura and Godard’s Le Mepris). Finally, in the 1960s and 1970s Rossellini turned to television for a series of de-dramatized, educational films about “great men” throughout history that arguably took the Neorealist aesthetic to its logical extreme. Very few filmmakers have gone through multiple phases as dramatically different as Rossellini. Fewer still have managed to create such groundbreaking work with each distinct chapter in their careers.

Essential work: Stromboli (1950), Voygage in Italy (Viaggio in Italia) (1954), The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV) (1966)

6. Carl Dreyer (Denmark)

Carl Dreyer was nothing if not exacting. The great Dane proclaimed cinema to be his “only” passion and proved it by making only the kind of films that he really wanted to make. His rigorous/perfectionist style is reflected in the fact that his final five features, as astonishing a run of movies as can be found in any filmography, were released in five separate decades: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943) Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964). The evolution of his style over the course of these films is fascinating: from close-ups to long shots, from quick-cutting to long takes, from acting to non-acting, from music to no music. Genre trappings (the melodrama of Joan, the horror of Vampyr) also fade away as Dreyer moves relentlessly inward in pursuit of the capture of various “states of soul.” Equally fascinating is his naturalistic approach to ambiguously supernatural subject matter: a woman who communes with God, vampirism, witchcraft, the resurrection of the flesh and . . . romantic love.

Essential work: Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) (1943), Ordet (1955), Gertrud (1964)

5. F.W. Murnau (Germany/USA)

F.W. Murnau is often referred to as the best director to have only worked in the silent era and for good reason; he was the chief figure of German Expressionism, creating three major masterpieces with Nosferatu (the first and best vampire film), The Last Laugh (a movie with no intertitles but a lot of fluid camerawork) and Faust (a technically virtuosic take on the German folk tale that nearly bankrupted UFA, the studio that produced it), before answering the call of Hollywood where he made three more: Sunrise (a love story about the dichotomy between city and country life featuring highly innovative cinematography), Four Devils (a lost film) and City Girl (an exquisite melodrama that intentionally reverses the iconography of Sunrise). Unhappy with working conditions in both Germany and the U.S., Murnau went to Tahiti for his independently produced final film Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. If Fritz Lang was the Tolstoy of German cinema (going “wide” with his ambitious, third-person societal portraits), then Murnau was its Dostoevsky (going “deep” with his take on the highly subjective psychological impressions of the individual).

Essential work: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), City Girl (1930), Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

4. Alfred Hitchcock (USA/UK)

Alfred Hitchcock is a rare example of a director who was able to combine a high degree of creative control with a long and prolific career. Beginning in the silent era in England, Hitch successfully adapted to sound, the Hollywood studio system, color, widescreen cinematography and even 3-D. He looked at potential projects as logistical problems that he could utilize the latest technology to solve, frequently breaking new ground along the way. Furthermore, his ostensible “genre pieces” were highly personal in nature, more often than not studies of obsession with an emphasis on the duality of man. The fact that he could make such personal films on such a massive scale, using major stars and the resources of Hollywood, is impressive in the extreme. And his craftsmanship has never been bettered (Andrew Sarris has aptly referred to him as the “supreme technician of the American cinema”); the best of Hitchcock’s suspense sequences (the climactic confrontation between photographer and killer in Rear Window, the crop dusting scene in North By Northwest, the shower murder in Psycho, the final attack in The Birds) are so well planned and executed that they retain their power to thrill, entertain and strike fear in the heart even after many viewings.

Essential work: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960)

3. Luis Bunuel (France/Mexico)

Like Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel was one of the most Catholic of all directors. But the theme of guilt that was present in so much of the Englishman’s work was not allowed to so thoroughly infuse the movies of his Spanish counterpart. Instead, Bunuel violently reacted against his upbringing (and against the rising tide of fascism of late 20s/early 30s Europe) with the wildest and most transgressive films of the French Surrealist movement (Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’Or). Following a lengthy stint of not being able to direct, Bunuel resurfaced in the late 1940s as a master of the subversive Mexican melodrama, dropping bombs like Los Olvidados, El and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. After a brief sojourn in his native Spain in the early Sixties, where he made the scandalous, blasphemous masterpiece Viridiana, Bunuel returned to France for what is arguably the greatest last chapter of any director’s career; it was there that he married his distinctive Surrealist sensibility to more polished cinematography and glamorous movie stars, resulting in a series of droll comedies, full of hilarious non-sequiturs and bizarre, dreamlike imagery, that constitute his very best work: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire.

Essential work: Los Olvidados (1950), Viridiana (1961), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie) (1972)

2. Robert Bresson (France)

The relationship between spirit and flesh has never been dramatized on screen as effectively as it has in the work of Robert Bresson because no other filmmaker has used sound and image so precisely to focus on material reality (and therefore, perhaps paradoxically, on the spiritual conditions underlying it). The great French director hit his stride early on with a “prison cycle” of films consisting of The Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped (the best prison break movie ever), Pickpocket and The Trial of Joan of Arc (a film so austere it makes Dreyer’s Joan look like a soap opera). Then came Au Hasard, Balthazar, a soul-enchanting masterpiece about the life of a donkey, in which the title character is seen as a barometer for the sins of mankind. In the late 1960s Bresson began working with color, expanding his palette while refining his overall style to an increasingly “essentialist” extreme. Some observers find his late work pessimistic (virtually all of his last movies end in suicide and/or murder). Bresson himself rejected this view, opting for the word “lucid” instead. The redemption is still there if you’re willing to look for it; it’s just buried a little deeper beneath the surface. Robert Bresson more consistently made near-perfect films than any other director with whose work I am familiar.

Essential work: A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut) (1956), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), L’argent (1983)

1. John Ford (USA)

Simply put, John Ford is the American cinema. A few indelible moments: Shirley Temple singing “Auld Lang Syne” to Victor McLaglen as he lies on his deathbed in Wee Willie Winkie (while an exquisite camera movement slowly eliminates him from the frame). Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, awkwardly dancing with and serenading his Ma to the tune of “Red River Valley” in The Grapes of Wrath. Walter Pidgeon in How Green Was My Valley, looking on from a cemetery in long shot while the love of his life, Maureen O’Hara, exits the church after marrying another man. Fonda again as Marshall Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, leaning back in his chair on a hotel veranda, balancing himself on a post with his boots. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, standing in the doorway between civilization and wilderness, unsure of whether to enter, in The Searchers. Anne Bancroft’s resignation while committing the ultimate self-sacrifice at the end of 7 Women: “So long, ya bastard.” And, as Johnny Cash once said, lots of other things.

Essential work: How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Runners-Up (listed alphabetically by family name):

11. Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy)
Essential work: L’avventura (1960), Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) (1964)

12. John Cassavetes (USA)
Essential work: A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Love Streams (1984)

13. Charlie Chaplin (USA)
Essential work: City Lights (1931), A King in New York (1958)

14. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal)
Essential work: Anxiety (Inquietude) (1998), The Strange Case of Angelica (O Estranho Caso de Angélica) (2010)

15. Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Ukraine)
Essential work: Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930)

16. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany)
Essential work: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

17. Federico Fellini (Italy)
Essential work: La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963)

18. Louis Feuillade (France)
Essential work: Les Vampires (1915), Tih Minh (1919)

19. Sam Fuller (USA)
Essential work: Park Row (1952), Shock Corridor (1963)

20. Jean-Luc Godard (France/Switzerland)
Essential work: Contempt (Le Mepris) (1963), Histoire(s) du Cinema (1989-1988)

21. D.W. Griffith (USA)
Essential work: Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916), Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924)

22. Howard Hawks (USA)
Essential work: Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932), Rio Bravo (1959)

23. Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Taiwan)
Essential work: Goodbye South Goodbye (1996), Three Times (2005)

24. King Hu (Hong Kong/Taiwan)
Essential work: Dragon Inn (1967), A Touch of Zen (1971)

25. Shohei Imamura (Japan)
Essential work: Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), The Ballad of Narayama (1983)

26. Buster Keaton (USA)
Essential work: Our Hospitality (1923), The General (1926)

27. Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)
Essential work: The Taste of Cherry (1997), Certified Copy (Copie conforme) (2010)

28. Stanley Kubrick (USA)
Essential work: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

29. Akira Kurosawa (Japan)
Essential work: Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954)

30. Fritz Lang (Germany/USA)
Essential work: M (1931), The Big Heat (1953)

31. Sergio Leone (Italy/USA)
Essential work: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

32. Ernst Lubitsch (Germany/USA)
Essential work: Trouble in Paradise (1932), Heaven Can Wait (1943)

33. Vincente Minnelli (USA)
Essential work: The Band Wagon (1953), Some Came Running (1958)

34. Mikio Naruse (Japan)
Essential work: Floating Clouds (1955), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

35. Max Ophuls (France/USA)
Essential work: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953)

36. Yasujiro Ozu (Japan)
Essential work: Late Spring (1949), Tokyo Story (1953)

37. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger (UK)
Essential work: Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948)

38. Nicholas Ray (USA)
Essential work: In a Lonely Place (1950), Bigger Than Life (1956)

39. Satyajit Ray (India)
Essential work: Pather Panchali (1955), Charulata (1964)

40. Alain Resnais (France)
Essential work: Last Year at Marienbad (L’annee dernier a Marienbad) (1961), Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980)

41. Ousmane Sembene (Senegal)
Essential work: Black Girl (La noire de…) (1966), Moolaade (2004)

42. Douglas Sirk (USA)
Essential work: All That Heaven Allows (1956), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

43. Preston Sturges (USA)
Essential work: The Lady Eve (1941), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)

44. Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia)
Essential work: Andrei Rublev (1966), Stalker (1979)

45. Jacques Tati (France)
Essential work: Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Play Time (1967)

46. Dziga Vertov (Russia)
Essential work: Kino-Eye (1924), Man with the Movie Camera (1929)

47. Jean Vigo (France)
Essential work: Zero de Conduite (1933), L’atalante 1934)

48. Luchino Visconti (Italy)
Essential work: Senso (1954), The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) (1963)

49. Josef von Sternberg (USA)
Essential work: The Docks of New York (1928), Shanghai Express (1932)

50. Erich von Stroheim (USA)
Essential work: Foolish Wives (1922), Greed (1924)

24 comments | tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Carl Dreyer, F.W. Murnau, Jean Renoir, John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini | posted in All Best of Lists, Best Directors - All Time

January 6, 2012

Filmmaker Interview: Jonathan Hourigan, pt. 2

By michaelgloversmith

This is the second part of my interview with filmmaker and teacher Jonathan Hourigan who worked as an assistant on Robert Bresson’s L’argent. Part one was published earlier this week.

MGS: How has Bresson impacted you specifically as a writer/director? What lessons did you learn from watching him work that you were able to apply to your own filmmaking endeavors?

JH: These are difficult questions. By the time I arrived in Paris in the summer of 1982 I had seen all of the films and had read Notes on the Cinematographer several times. I was aware that Bresson was unlike other filmmakers but as I said earlier, being involved in L’argent was my first experience of the film industry, so I had no context in which to assess the experience. In addition to which, on arrival in Paris I spoke virtually no French. The crew, French and Italians (in a year when the Italians won the football World Cup), were generally very kind to me. And Bresson, in particular, spoke to me often, invariably in fluent English and he was always courteous and solicitous about my well-being, even as he worked to the limit on his film. He also had a very keen sense of humour. And as my French improved, I was increasingly given little jobs to do on set. I would also often travel in Bresson’s car to watch rushes in the evening.

So, to address your second question first, I did have the privilege of watching Bresson and his crew work at very close quarters. It’s hard to say what specific lessons I learned. Or rather, what specific lessons I was aware of having learned at that time. I was certainly immersed in the experience but I think I’m both a late starter and a slow learner – not a great combination – and I’m not sure that I derived specific lessons that I could have articulated at that time. My own first film, Jade, made a few years later, was indebted – too much so, in truth – to the surface of Bresson’s style but entirely missed any deeper correlations. I sent it to Bresson and when we next met I think he described it, with affection, as a “sweet comedy.” Suffice it to say, that had not been my intention!

Now, almost 30 years on, the impact and lessons are perhaps a little clearer.

At one level, that making films is complex and challenging and remains so today, even as technological advances have made the technical processes simpler, more accessible and cheaper. That one has to be committed, precise and demanding, principally, of oneself, although without being precious or lacking humour. That one needs to discover one’s authentic territory and to dig deep; an argument for depth rather than breadth, perhaps. Also, Bresson constantly reminds us, through his work and in Notes on the Cinematographer, of the huge possibilities that still remain largely dormant in this extraordinary medium that he had so thoroughly mastered.

Another lesson one might take from Bresson is to learn from other arts and artists; Notes on the Cinematographer is full of references and allusions to painting, music and literature, as well as to philosophy and history. It’s also worth pointing out that Bresson was by no means dismissive of theatre, simply of its spurious dominance of Cinema which, as filmed theatre, had lost both the defining immediacy and expressiveness of theatre and any aesthetic autonomy.

At another level, to attend to the entirety of an image, not in order to make it ‘painterly’ or self-consciously beautiful but to ensure that it is appropriate to one’s purposes. And similarly, to attend to the relationship between sound and image, about which Bresson was always so attentive and skillful. Indeed, from Bresson one might learn the necessity for attentiveness and commitment throughout the process. There is, after all, such a high risk of dissipation when making a film because of both the involvement of other interests and individuals and the extended and complex nature of film production. And alongside this sharp, disciplined creative focus, one might also learn humility and the necessity to live life well.

MGS: You told me that you continue to work on preserving Bresson’s legacy? What exactly does this entail?

JH: In the years since Bresson’s death in 1999 there has, I think, been an encouraging and gratifying upsurge of interest in Bresson’s films. This has coincided with the emergence of both the internet and digital technologies, ensuring the greater availability of material and information. I have simply assisted Madame Bresson in responding to interest and enquiries and in keeping an eye on what is placed in the public domain in relation to her late husband and his oeuvre, especially in the English language.

There have also been various retrospectives and for example, I was very pleased to be invited to speak about L’argent during the BFI’s most recent Bresson retrospective. It’s also been a great pleasure to meet – either electronically or in person – so many people interested in Bresson’s films, yourself included, of course, Michael.

MGS: I will be offering extra credit to my students if they attend any of the films in the upcoming Bresson retrospective here in Chicago. Is there a single movie you would recommend for young people to see to introduce them to Robert Bresson? Is there any advice you would give in terms of what to look out for or what to take away from the experience?

JH: Can I hedge my bets? I’m not, by inclination, prescriptive.

So, first, I think it would be hard for your students to go wrong if they followed my own path and saw Au Hasard Balthazar as an introduction. It’s lyrical, beautiful and also demanding. The film sits at the centre of Bresson’s oeuvre and also close to the fulcrum of the debate – involving Schrader and others – as to the pinnacle and trajectory of Bresson’s career.

On the other hand, L’argent, his final film, seems to me to be Bresson’s late, great masterpiece and perhaps the summation of his oeuvre. But equally, one cannot overlook Pickpocket, in many ways the quintessential Bresson film. Meanwhile, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, whilst giving away its outcome in the title, is perhaps Bresson’s most conventionally exciting and accessible film – which is not to damn it with faint praise because it more than holds its own amongst Bresson’s films. I’ve already expressed my own deep and abiding affection for Une Femme Douce, Bresson’s first film in colour and to some extent a ‘lost film’ as it’s still not available on DVD, whilst both Lancelot du Lac and Les anges du péché, the latter being his feature film debut, might also offer wonderful introductions to the oeuvre.

I will, finally, briefly make a case for Le Diable Probablement, Bresson’s prescient penultimate film, sometimes overlooked and certainly grueling and demanding though it is. It occurs to me that, with young people today ever more sensitive to ecological issues, this might be a great film for your students to rediscover and as such, an interesting place to start.

Now that I’ve mentioned so many of the films, from what is anyway a fairly slender oeuvre, it might seem as though I’m rather damning the remaining films. That’s certainly not my intention. What can I say? It would certainly be great if, between them, your students collectively managed to see all of the films.

OK, gun to my head – just one film? L’argent.

And to look out for, or to take away?

Well, this may be a little pedagogically unsound but I wouldn’t ‘look out’ for anything first time around. Simply experience. And to ‘take away’? Whatever immediate feelings one has from experiencing these films. Nothing intellectual. Simply experiential and emotional. Bresson is so sui generis that it’s almost impossible for an attentive viewer not to struck by some unique aspect of the films.

A more structured engagement with the films might commence with subsequent viewings and the great thing about Bresson’s films is that they certainly repay multiple viewings. And then one might begin to think about, amongst many other issues, Bresson’s extraordinary use of sound, the ubiquity of doors, the nature of Bresson’s ‘models’, the preponderance of narratives drawn from existing sources as opposed to original material, or the ways in which such powerful and authentic emotion is provoked within and by these apparently austere films.

Bresson and the films are sometimes characterised as austere, or studied. By contrast, I would argue that they – Bresson, his working methods and the films – are passionate, emotional, truthful at some deep level and full of spontaneity and inspiration. And in any study of Bresson’s films – and as I’ve already mentioned above – I would also strongly recommend a careful reading of Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer. It is a little difficult to get hold of now but it is a brilliant summation of Bresson’s hopes, intentions and working methods. It illuminates, I think, why Bresson is considered to be one of the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century – perhaps the single greatest – and why he has been such an influence on and inspiration to so many other major filmmakers.

For those of you about to encounter Bresson and his films for the first time, I am more than just a little jealous. I am certain that it will be memorable. I hope it will also be an inspiring and transformative experience.

20 comments | tags: Jonathan Hourigan, L'argent, Notes on the Cinematographer, Robert Bresson | posted in Interviews

January 2, 2012

Filmmaker Interview: Jonathan Hourigan, pt. 1

By michaelgloversmith

From January 21st through February 29th the Gene Siskel Film Center will hold a complete retrospective of the films of my favorite director of all time, the French master Robert Bresson. In anticipation of this happy event, I am pleased to present an interview with London-based filmmaker and teacher Jonathan Hourigan, who worked on the crew of L’argent, Bresson’s great final film.

Jonathan is a graduate of Oxford University and the National Film and Television School. His own short and feature-length films have played to acclaim at festivals around the world. In addition to his work as a filmmaker and teacher, he continues to be involved in preserving Bresson’s legacy. Jonathan and I became acquainted when he contacted me after reading a post on this blog about Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer.

I conducted this interview via e-mail and tried to avoid asking him about his work on L’argent (since he has already spoken about it at length in this great interview: Offscreen Interview)

MGS: You were responsible for organizing a Bresson retrospective in London in 1981 before you ever met and worked with the man. How did you first discover his films and do you remember what your first impressions were?

JH: At 18 or 19, during the year between school and university, my interest in photography began to be superceded by an interest in cinema. I was living in Worthing at the time, a seaside town on the south coast of England and that year I saw Altman’s A Wedding and both The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now in the cinema. I also saw Victor Erice’s magnificent Spirit of the Beehive in 16mm, projected onto a white sheet at the West Sussex College of Art and Design, where my uncle was teaching. It was Erice’s film which kindled in me the initial desire to make films but there were, at that time, very few opportunities to see other films of this kind.

So I began reading books about the cinema and that’s how I came across Bresson, first through articles by Andre Bazin, Roy Armes and Gavin Lambert. Something about his formal concerns attracted me I think. And then, in my first term at university, I saw Au hasard Balthazar at the University Film Society. I was transfixed and still think it’s one of Bresson’s most seductive films, despite its very tough narrative. Soon afterwards I discovered that Une femme douce was being screened in London and so I went to London to see that film. It’s been a source of long-term regret that Une femme douce is not more widely available and better known, as I think it one of Bresson’s most expressive films and a particular favourite of mine. It was a big influence on my own first film. And with these two films, Au hasard Balthazar and Une femme douce, my love for Bresson’s films was secured.

I was drawn consciously, I think, to Bresson’s impeccable, austere aesthetic. But I can also see, in retrospect, that the Catholic and redemptive themes and inflection of his narratives must at least sub-consciously have attracted me, having been brought up Catholic, even if lapsed by that time. I organised the retrospective primarily so that I could see the remaining films. Actually, I did meet Bresson whilst preparing the retrospective. I visited him in Paris in, I think, the Spring of 1981 and I wrote both about the films (some of them, I now confess, unseen by me at the time!) and the meeting with Bresson in Paris in an early edition of Stills magazine.

MGS: Unlike Paul Schrader, I actually think Bresson’s movies got better over time, or at least the end results seemed to correspond more closely to what he was trying to achieve. (I’m thinking particularly of the way they became increasingly minimalist, with the last few movies featuring only diegetic music.) Of course, neither Bresson nor you could have been aware that L’argent would be his final movie but I think it does feel, appropriately, like a last testament. Were you aware while working on it that it would be a special film even within his extraordinary body of work?

JH: First of all, the later films certainly seem more austere, more closely corresponding to some of the rigours explored in Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, among them the exclusive use of diegetic sound but also including, for example, the use of a single standard lens, non-professional ‘models’ and the creation of flattened images.

But secondly, these elements, on their own, aren’t the summation of what Bresson was ‘trying to achieve’. Bresson contrasted his notion of Cinematography with conventional Cinema, with the latter indebted to theatrical traditions and methods. What, I think, Bresson pursued, in short, was what one might call a documentary of emotions, with the mechanical means of apprehension – camera and tape recorder – capable of capturing models’ authentic, unconscious states of soul. Hence, to some extent, the non-professional models and the numerous takes for which Bresson was renowned. And these fragments, captured in flattened and uninflected images, are then given structure and meaning – for Bresson, are transformed – through a rhythmic editing strategy and of course, with the creation of a resonant soundtrack – Bresson’s approach to sound, as you’ll know, is unique and noted by many commentators. This is all complex, subtle and far from self-evident stuff – and I’m only scratching the surface here – but one does not have to accept all of it in order to find Bresson’s films uniquely expressive. However, much of this territory is explored and clarified in Bresson’s short, aphoristic Notes on the Cinematographer which is, along with the films, a crucial source for those interested in Bresson’s films and his approach to filmmaking.

As to the improving quality of Bresson’s oeuvre, well, that strikes me as a third issue. There are certainly fierce debates around this issue, with Schrader and others suggesting a mid-career pinnacle, with the later films perhaps losing the redemptive or transcendental aspect of the earlier films. The shift to darker territory – Bresson might have said more “lucid” territory – does not alienate me, or, in and of itself, suggest a tailing off in the quality of the films. Leaving aside L’argent, which I will come to, Une Femme Douce and Lancelot du Lac, in particular, amongst the ‘later films’, seem to me to be masterpieces.

As for L’argent, for me it was my first experience of being involved in a film’s production and so quite hard to assess. But I was aware that it was a difficult film to make, with tight production parameters. Equally, viewing rushes and edited sequences suggested something very special, to my eyes and ears at least, from very early on and soon after the completion of Principal Photography, a first cut was screened which was already powerful and compelling. And the film only became tighter and sharper as post production continued.

I suspect that making a relatively small number of films in a long career ensures that each and every one of them feels ‘special’, at least at the time. On the other hand, at the time Bresson was hoping – even expecting – to make his long-cherished film Genesis in the near future and so there was no sense, in 82/83, of L’argent being his “last testament”. In addition to which, the film’s reception at Cannes in 1983 was less than fulsome.

Looking at L’Argent now, however, the film inevitably takes on the aspect of “last testament” and it’s certainly a remarkable and profound film, worthy of assuming that role. It is passionate, prescient, humane and quite simply, a truly great film. And after all, it’s not for nothing that it was the “Top Film of the 1980′s” in one of your own recent lists. There are any number of wonderful moments and sequences in the film but I’ve always been particularly fascinated by the film’s remarkable and ambiguous final shot, the crowd still looking into the cafe, although Yvon, flanked by police officers, has passed through the crowd and been taken away. It’s such a resonant image, so perfectly drawing together the thematic threads of this extraordinary film and perhaps, even, of Bresson’s entire oeuvre.

MGS: One aspect of L’argent that really sets it apart from Bresson’s previous work is the presence of Christian Patey as Yvon. When I think of Bresson’s male “models,” I think of them as typically being physically graceful, slightly feminine and possessed of a soulful, almost ethereal, beauty. Patey really bucks this trend and brings a masculine energy to the part, coming across almost like a monster at times. Why do you think Bresson chose to cast him?

JH: Christian Patey is certainly striking in L’argent and he has a powerful physical presence. His weight – physical and moral – is palpable throughout the film. But I wonder if he is really so different from Bresson’s other male models. Or, rather, I wonder if they are quite so homogenous as you suggest.

I suspect that the ‘typical’ Bressonian male ‘model’ might be Claude Laydu as the Curé d’Ambricourt in Journal d’un curé de campagne, or Martin LaSalle as the eponymous Pickpocket, perhaps even Francois Leterrier as Fontaine in Un condamné à mort s’est échappé. But even these three are somewhat different from one another. Graceful, yes. Soulful, yes, although in some cases only belatedly. Slightly feminine? Well, perhaps Laydu. LaSalle, by contrast, is almost feral – or perhaps feline and thus feminine? – for much of Pickpocket, whilst Leterrier has masculine – even martial – honour and conviction throughout.

Antoine Monnier as Charles in Le diable probablement and Guillaume de Forets as Jacques in Quatre nuits d’un rêveur both have a certain feminine beauty but at the very least, it seems to me that there’s no single dominant type for Bresson’s male ‘models’. I can certainly see some of Christian Patey’s sturdy masculinity in Luc Simon as the eponymous Lancelot du Lac and not simply because of Lancelot’s encasement in armour. There is physical and moral weight – flawed and burdensome – in Simon’s Lancelot, just as there is in Patey’s Yvon.

Why did Bresson choose Christain Patey? I don’t know. Intuition I suspect. Certainly it was inspired casting, as was Vincent Risterucci as Lucien, the thorn in Yvon’s side. And also Caroline Lang as Yvon’s wife Elise, Marc Ernest Fourneau as Norbert and Bruno Lapeyre as Martial, the young, bourgeois Parisian students, as well as Sylvie Van den Elsen and Michel Briguet as the woman and her father in the country. It is, almost throughout, a brilliantly ‘cast’ film, with the vibrant and differentiated presences of Bresson’s ‘models’ so luminous. It’s one of the things that really stands out about L’argent.

MGS: Funny, I was thinking of Leterrier specifically when I used the word “feminine” because of his slight physical stature and manual dexterity. I also think it’s significant that he describes making ropes based on memories of watching his mother braid his sister’s hair.

To be continued . . .

3 comments | tags: A Man Escaped, Au hasard Balthazar, Jonathan Hourigan, L'argent, Lancelot du Lac, Notes on the Cinematographer, Pickpocket, Robert Bresson, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, Une femme douce | posted in Interviews

January 10, 2011

Bresson/Eastwood: A Strange Symmetry

By michaelgloversmith

The following newly written essay is based on notes for a lecture I gave at my friend Sara Vaux’s Religion and Film class at Northwestern University last year.

“The filmed sequence shows a prisoner’s unsuccessful escape from a prison van, from the first attempt to the last consequence. The sequence consists of about forty setups, each one clear and simple, with no regard for superficial beauty. Each setup makes sense only in connection with the preceding one and the one that succeeds it.

The necessary prerogatives for the escape – the fugitive, his hand, the door handle inside the car, a vehicle and a streetcar which force, or almost force, the prison van to stop – are clearly shown in their interrelationships. In relatively quick succession, we see first the fugitive, who stares ahead; then the road, where in a moment a vehicle may force the prison van to stop; then the fugitive’s hand, reaching for the door handle.”

- from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1966 application to the German Film and Television Academy, Berlin. Fassbinder was shown the opening scene of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, without being told the title, and asked to analyze it. Fassbinder’s application to the school was rejected.

To many film critics and historians, it would seem perverse to suggest that Robert Bresson and Clint Eastwood might have anything in common. Bresson’s movies come across as self-consciously crafted works of “high art,” the seriousness of which is signaled by their esteemed source material (e.g., 19th century Russian literature), religious overtones in the images and dialogue and, in the earlier films, the use of canonical classical music (Mozart, Schubert, Lully) on the soundtrack. These signposts are in part what has precipitated endless critical discussion of the “transcendental” qualities of Bresson’s cinema. Eastwood’s movies, by contrast, are often relegated to a less elevated sphere of discussion. (A refreshing exception is the staff of Cahiers du Cinema who, forty three years after naming A Man Escaped the best film of 1956, daringly named The Bridges of Madison County the best film of the 1990s in a decade-ending critic’s poll.) Eastwood’s movie star persona still tends to be the focus of the reviews of even the movies he directs but doesn’t star in, as opposed to whatever ideas he might have as a filmmaker. And because of his long associations with the detective thriller and western genres, Eastwood is still thought of primarily as a genre director. Some schools of critical thought unfortunately believe that true artists do not work with generic conventions. Indeed, Bresson never made a movie that could be classified as a genre piece.

Nevertheless, to look at the actual nuts and bolts filmmaking practices of each director is to notice a strange symmetry between them in regards to form. And this ultimately translates to a symmetry in regards to ethics as well. Fassbinder’s analysis of the opening scene of A Man Escaped, a brilliant close reading of Bresson’s style, could also apply to many, many scenes directed by Clint Eastwood but not, I believe, the films of most other contemporary directors. For example, Fassbinder notes how Bresson clearly shows us all of the elements of a scene in their “interrelationships.” Eastwood, the director, has a comparable clarity of form to Bresson regarding how images relate to each other – Eastwood allows viewers to see, in a simple and direct way, exactly what he wants them to see, no more and no less, through similar chains of interrelated images.

The scene in all of Eastwood’s movies that most obviously resembles the opening of A Man Escaped is the climactic scene of The Bridges of Madison County, a terrific film that transcends the trashy romance novel on which it is based. In that heart-stopping sequence, Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) is in the passenger seat of her husband’s truck as the two are stopped in traffic in the rain. Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), the man with whom she has just had an affair, is in the truck in front of them, unbeknownst to the husband. Francesca looks at the passenger side door handle and contemplates whether to open the door and “escape” from her husband’s truck in much the same way that Lieutenant Fontaine in A Man Escaped has to decide whether to try escaping from the prison van. If she doesn’t flee from her husband and leave with Robert at that precise moment, she knows he will drive away, out of town and out of her life forever.

What these scenes have in common is ultimately something more than the superficial similarity of a narrative situation where a character is attempting to determine whether to jump out of a stalled vehicle. The deeper affinity lies in the fact that in each instance suspense is being generated by the director through purely visual storytelling; in Eastwood’s case he makes us feel the power of Francesca’s dilemma through cinematography and editing, clearly showing us the interrelationships between Francesca, her husband, the door handle, the traffic light, and Robert’s reflection in the rearview mirror of the truck in front of her. This is a perfect illustration of Fassbinder’s formulation that “each shot makes sense only in relation to the one that precedes it and the one that succeeds it.” Sometimes a door handle is just a door handle. In Eastwood’s film, because of the context in which it is carefully placed, it’s a door handle that can make you cry.

Another aspect of Fassbinder’s analysis that I think can be applied to Eastwood as well as Bresson is the “disregard for superficial beauty.” It is often difficult for filmmakers to resist the temptation to show beautiful images but this is precisely what Bresson and Eastwood do. They both believe in showing what is necessary at the expense of showing something beautiful. This is particularly striking in Eastwood’s case given how closely he is identified with the western, a genre known for its pictorial beauty. But from High Plains Drifter to Unforgiven, Eastwood doesn’t typically linger on shots of sunsets, landscapes or other types of picture-postcard scenery commonly associated with the genre.

Finally, both Bresson and Eastwood might be said to have a minimalist or “essentialist” style, ruthlessly paring down the image to only what they deem is its most essential elements, but they achieve this in different ways. The most prominent way Eastwood pares down his images is through the use of low-key lighting. Eastwood has consistently made the darkest movies (literally, if not figuratively) in Hollywood over the past several decades. Working with talented cinematographers like Jack Green and Tom Stern, Eastwood submerges his images in darkness as a means of directing viewers’ eyes to exactly what he wants them to see. Bresson achieves similar ends by favoring a shallower focus image and by fragmenting the human body into close-ups of its various parts.

What does this have to do with ethics? The essentialist style of both men is ultimately pressed to the service of the same theme: redemption. Eastwood is interested in redemption in terms of social justice, Bresson is interested in redemption as a kind of spiritual transformation that occurs inside of an individual. For Eastwood’s purposes, it’s important that he paints the broadest possible portrait of society so that he can more effectively juxtapose his individual protagonists against it – hence his sometimes misunderstood melodramatic style. Society in Eastwood is frequently portrayed as corrupt and incapable of providing true justice; therefore it is usually up to one individual to restore justice and a sense of social order. This is most obvious in the westerns (think of the depictions of community in the towns of Lago in High Plains Drifter and Big Whiskey in Unforgiven) but it’s also true of the contemporary films as well. Eastwood’s uncluttered visual style is especially important here because “unnecessary” images will only get in the way of his ambitious societal portraits. Surely Clint Eastwood, a master of shorthand communication and a melodramatist par excellence, is the only man who could have made as ambitious a film as Invictus clock in at a relatively lean 134 minutes!

Robert Bresson approaches the theme of redemption differently. Because Bresson is interested in the redemption of individual souls, he prioritizes interiority and subjectivity. Bresson constantly looks for ways to draw us into the inner lives of his characters: fragmentation, voice-over narration, neutral acting, etc. Interestingly, in comparison to the melodramas of Eastwood, society is depicted as something abstract and almost unreal in Bresson because his movies are so relentlessly focused on the individual. (Many critics have pointed out that, for this reason, some of Bresson’s contemporary movies like Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and Une Femme Douce seem to be taking place in a distant, dreamy past.) This means that whatever measure of redemption Bresson’s characters manage to achieve is pointedly not felt by the larger society within the film, unlike in Eastwood’s films where that impact is often felt with a vengeance. The community in Diary of a Country Priest, for instance, does not know or care whether the priest has received God’s grace before dying. The important thing is that the character feels it and, if we are seeing and hearing the movie properly, hopefully we feel it too.

2 comments | tags: A Man Escaped, Clint Eastwood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Bresson, The Bridges of Madison County, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

December 25, 2010

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Tag Archives: Robert Bresson

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