It was a pleasure to sit down (virtually) with Extract Editions, who reached out to us to have a short conversation about the movies, and in particular, about criticism and cinephilia. The interview inspired a welcome walk down memory lane, and a fond look back at my informal film school, that is, the time I spent haunting the “legendary St. Marks Cinema on the Lower East Side during my first year of grad school.” It was at the St. Marks (or just down the block, at the Theater 80), where I saw second-hand prints of the classic films that would change my relationship with the movies forever.
The interview was initiated by an interest in my contributions to Cineaste Magazine. For a number of years now, I have graced the pages of Cineaste fairly regularly, appearing in almost every quarterly issue (occasionally twice!) For the most part I have written essays about great movies, but I have also dabbled in book reviews, and, twice and most thrillingly, landed a major feature—most recently on the cinema of Agnes Varda. Given that even the most dedicated followers of Mid Century Cinema might not be aware of these efforts, this seemed like an opportune moment to review the most recent two years of these contributions to Cineaste, along with a few brief comments about each.
I am especially pleased with my Varda appreciation, “Agnes Varda: An Artist in Her Own Right” (summer 2021), which was occasioned by the Criterion Collection’s release of their spectacular box set, The Complete Films of Agnes Varda. (Dispensing with false modesty, we will add that it very well received, and the subject of a lovely letter to the editor in a subsequent issue.) “One of the singular voices of postwar French cinema, Varda was a participant in the Nouvelle Vague, and one of the central tenets of the New Wave was to challenge the distinction between “documentary” and “fiction” films . . . In the 1980s and 1990s, Varda would extend this experiment, commonly making pairs of overlapping films, one a feature and the other nominally a documentary. And obviously that Varda trademark—a personally inflected, biographically oriented essay film in which she participates as a subject—is a blend of all of these attributes.”
As for individual movies, the (currently) steady release of new Blu Rays and DVDs of older films (physical media matters, people—do your part to support it!) continues to present the opportunity to revisit in long form some of our favorite films, including, most recently, this half dozen:
The Clockmaker (winter 2021): The debut effort of MCC favorite Bertrand Tavernier, featuring Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort, is one of the great films of the 1970s—which is pretty, pretty, high praise, coming from us. “Tavernier describes The Clockmaker as “an emotional journey of a father” to find his son. But it is in addition a deeply personal film for its director—shot lovingly in his beloved Lyon and revisiting the locations of his youth (including a scene set in his childhood home), the movie is also haunted by the disappointments of 1968, and, more subtly, by the lingering humiliation of France’s wartime collaboration with its Nazi conquerors.”
Le Corbeau (winter 2022): An astonishing film, made in France under Nazi occupation. Any movie condemned by the collaborationist Vichy Government and the Catholic church and the communists and the resistance movement must be something special, which this is. “With the passage of eighty years since its production, perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Le Corbeau is that, despite the considerable freight of its distinct historical context, it remains a film of timeless relevance and enduring quality.”
Double Indemnity (fall 2022): Directed by Billy Wilder, and co-written with Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity is not just one of the greatest films noir ever made, it stands as one of the towering achievements of Hollywood’s classic studio era. “With a savvy mix of location work and studio shooting, Wilder and Seitz practically write noir’s visual playbook, emphasizing shadows (Neff, in particular, is often diminished by his own exaggerated shadow, forecasting his looming fate), images cut to ribbons by venetian blinds, and asymmetric, low-key lighting.”
Masculin Feminin (fall 2021): Possibly our favorite film by Jean Luc Godard, released near the conclusion of his astonishing fifteen feature film run from 1960 to 1967. “It’s hard to argue with a movie that won rave reviews from both Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael (then at The New Republic). A film of many strengths, one of them derives from the fact that by 1966 Godard, although still reliably terrible, was no longer an enfant—and he knew it.”
The Parallax View (summer 2021): This New Hollywood landmark was the middle entry of Producer-Director Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid trilogy, all of which were shot by the great seventies cinematographer, Gordon “the prince of darkness” Willis. Boasting a very strong cast led by Warren Beatty (and script doctored by Robert Towne), Parallax is a singular film and a must-see. The plot holds together well and the dialogue is serviceable—but ultimately The Parallax View is a clinic in visual storytelling. Its strongest passages largely withhold dialogue, as seen famously in the “Parallax Test” montage (a four-minute scene that took four months to compose) but even more impressively in a twelve minute virtuoso sequence in which Frady must at great peril find his way on and off an airplane. Hitchcock could not have done it better; in fact, one suspects that Hitch might have overplayed a scene that Pakula navigates with restraint.
The Party and the Guests (summer 2022): Also known as “A Report on the Party and the Guests,” this was one of the great achievements of the Czech New Wave. Banned not once, but twice (the second time “forever”) Party is not our favorite film from this movement (that honor falls to The Ear, a masterpiece best described as Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets 1984). Nevertheless, Party and the Guests remains an impeccably crafted film, inventively shot, well played, and with much to say. “The most pointed political message of The Party and the Guests is delivered via its serial illustration of how authoritarianism is dependent on the acquiescence and obsequiousness of those over whom it lords.”
Finally, and fittingly given our ode to revival houses that began this discussion, in the summer 2022 issue we reviewed the memoir of Dan Talbot, In Love with the Movies: From New Yorker Films to Lincoln Center Cinemas. Talbot was the founder/proprietor of the New Yorker Theater, the legendary Art House on the Upper West Side—you know, the one where in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Alvy took Annie to the movies and pulled Marshall McLuhan out from behind a poster to settle an argument. The New Yorker Theater “was the sort of place where Peter Bogdanovich would, for some years, program a two-week Forgotten Films series . . . It was the sort of place where the evening’s program notes might be written by the likes of Jack Kerouac, Andrew Sarris, Terry Southern, or Jules Feiffer.” “Among the theater’s devoted denizens were a breathtaking who’s who of prominent cinephiles and legendary or soon-to-be legendary critics.”
We weren’t there. But those were the days.
