Brian Singer and Dexter Fletcher | Bohemian Rhapsody

November 14, 2018, 3:00 pm

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the champion

by Douglas Messerli

Anthony McCarten (based on a story by Anthony McCarten and Peter Morgan), Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher (directors) Bohemian Rhapsody / 2018

Director Bryan Singer’s and, ultimately, Dexter Fletcher’s biopic of the amazing British musical group Queen, might have been—and accordingly to many, still is—a kind of cinematic disaster. The major figures in the cast kept shifting, from Sacha Baron Cohen to Ben Whishaw, and finally Rami Malek playing Freddie Mercury, with major shifts of screenwriters from 2010 to the final release in 2018, along with numerous changes in the supporting figures in the cast. It’s almost amazing, looking back, that Bohemian Rhapsody, as the film was eventually titled, got made, let alone that it was a financial hit, loved by thousands of its audience members.

      Many of the critics simply hated it, The New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott summarizing, early on in his review:

A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the indiefilm seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer. Those choppers may give you nightmares. And some of you who venture into the theater will surely be inspired to exclaim “Mama mia, let me go!”

The usually reliable Justin Chang, of the Los Angeles Times attacked the film along the lines of numerous other critics, who dismissed its theatrical inaccuracies:

…There is something woefully reductive, even pernicious, about the narrative shorthand used to elide Freddie’s sexual relationships with men: a glimpse of leather here, a truck-stop montage there. There’s also something oddly moralistic, even punitive, about the way Freddie’s increasingly debauched, hard-partying ways drive a wedge between himself and his bandmates; it’s not that Brian, Roger and John aren’t allowed to react with cross-armed disgust, but that the movie too often seems to share their attitude. Even more irritating is a wholly inaccurate later scene in which Freddie tells his bandmates in 1985 that he has AIDS, a fabricated detail that feels like an attempt to tidy up the obligatory reconciliation narrative.

      Howard and I, who grew to adulthood in this period, had not ever known of Queen. Sure we heard of the group, but, as Howard reports, we presumed that they took over the seemingly “gay” moniker to simply mock it, that perhaps they were just a grunge group, rock-a-billy singers (we did know, obviously, the clap along songs “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”; you’d have to have been dead to never have heard these), knowing nothing of Mercury’s history, let alone of the crazy, psychedelic operatic song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with the high counter-tenor reaches of “Galileo.” Had we known, we might have loved it!

     Perhaps our very ignorance, and our lack of knowledge about Mercury’s actual history freed us from all the pre-judgments that the critics could not resist.

      Yes, Bohemian Rhapsody often plays with many of the tropes that musical biopics are based on; the unloved hero finding his own way to reveal his talent and moving toward a love you know that he can’t ever sustain. In this case, obviously, Mercury’s apparent love for a young woman, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) can never be consumated, which she herself quickly perceives knowing he is not only not bisexual but “desperately” gay, and in this case that is the proper word. Freddie may not have even perceived it himself, but he was destined to seek out an underworld of truly transgressive gay life that would end up with his death of AIDS in 1991.

     True, as well, this film spends far too much time with his infatuation with Austin, his determination, despite their inevitable break-up, to keep her in his life, winking with lights off-and-on between the neighboring mansions he was able to purchase after his amazing musical success. But you’d have to be an idiot not to realize that Freddie has long before been slipping in and out of backroom bathrooms to be fucked or to fuck others. If the movie is perhaps a bit too discrete, it doesn’t exactly hide his dark sexuality, and when he finally settles into life with his perverse second manager, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), we are in on the radical sexual orgies in which he must have participated—even if the film doesn’t want to draw our attention to them. Only the blind need claim that this movie doesn’t focus on Mercury’s “darker” world. This is definitely not the Cole Porter of Cary Grant’s sanitized film biography.

       In fact, Malek, with his implanted incisors, gives us a view of a highly, highly sexualized being at fight with the world in which he inhabits, even among his mostly heterosexual band-members, who married, but nonetheless, allowed themselves to collectively portray the kind of faux gay sexuality in their guitar playing, Brian May (played by Gwilym Lee), bass guitar, John Deacon (Joseph Mozzello), and drummer, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) roles. They knew who their lead singer was, and encouraged his open sexuality, despite the times, while keeping their personal distances. This is not simply the story of Freddie Mercury, but of the lives of the strange family named Queen. I kept being reminded of Sister Sledge's "We Are Family." So why should the movie haunt the alleys of Freddie’s sexual indecencies—I’ve been there, and I can tell you it’s kind of boring.

      Of far more interest is their inter-relationships, even if the film also fictionalizes them. So, now we know, the group never actually broke up, that Freddie didn’t reveal, just prior to the remarkable Live Aid concert that he had AIDS. Well that’s dramatic license which actually makes sense. Even if he truthfully told them about his illness much later, and wasn’t suffering deeply during the concert itself, and didn’t meet his new “friend,” Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker) as a one-night waiter, but as a nightly hairdresser, who cares? It’s all good drama, and the tea-party with his estranged Farsi family is right out of a fantasy like that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (his Red Queen-like father demanding the family turn on the television to watch his son’s performance) even if it is something that only the seasoned writer Peter Morgan (who has written about a real queen), who helped write this story, might have imagined.

      What’s more, all critics agreed, Rami Malek did the best imitation of Freddie Mercury that might be possible, singing some of those songs himself, while lip-synching others, while dancing in a way that Mercury surely would have approved of. And the music, the heart of this film, is not to be ignored. I cried, wishing I had encountered Queen in my youth instead of my old age. Today I watched the entire YouTube feature of Freddie Mercury’s Live Aid concert performance, and literally cried again and again. Well, when a movie can make you do that, how bad can it have been?

    When Malek picks up the extended microphone, employing it as did Freddie as a kind of extended cock that spelled out to his audience what a true rooster he was, you can’t help but love him (and Mercury). He was a showman, even in his Presley-like performance, that you simply can’t forget. Bowie, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, John Elton, so many others, are there in his performances that you simply can’t ignore Mercury. He was the champion.  

Los Angeles, November 14, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).   

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Sara Colangelo | The Kindergarten Teacher

November 17, 2018, 9:24 am

≫ Next: Nagisa Oshima | 白昼の通り魔 Hakuchū no tōrima (Violence at Noon)

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discovering a poetic genius

by Douglas Messerli

Sara Colangelo (writer and director) The Kindergarten Teacher / 2018

As a former teacher, I know what a delight it is when you find a student of special talent. That is, after all, what your profession is about, in part, helping to educate the mediocre but to also uplift a being who has a rare intelligence, a series of marvelous perceptions which might never before been realized by the general educational system or simply by the societal conditions in which she or he previously existed. You marvel in their perceptions, their sometimes-easy conceptions, and encourage them to challenge what they have already, within themselves, and even despite themselves attained.

      You must be careful. Sometimes you might even be deluded by a quick-witted challenger, a bright young kid who will use his or her talents for more nefarious gains. But I often, without openly mentoring them (the worse kind of attention these youths might endure), encouraged them through out-of-class connections—often discouraged these days—with a drink at a local bar or a meal at a local restaurant. The goal was never to convince them of their brilliance or of my brilliance. Simply to hear them out, to listen to their perceptions—often learning as much from them as from my own declarations of knowledge—wondering at how their mind worked and encouraging them, most importantly, to ask the questions they were ready to admit with encouragement. That was the most you might be able to give them, the acceptance of their own imaginations.

     I never encouraged or demanded any sexual relationship (and would have never permitted such contact), nor even allowed myself to challenge our consensual friendships. But then, my students were university adults—as much as a young 18-20-year-old student is an adult—and I was careful that they knew I was not controlling the events which we shared so that I might discover their talents. I was also very careful about not showing, at least in the classroom, any favoritism, often calling upon the least talented students before speaking to the more able ones. Teaching, I would argue, is a process of making all feel included, enveloping even the angry kid in the corner into your curriculum, helping him or her to understand that your role as a teacher is to help them, as well, as to enjoy and understand what you are attempting to convey to them. It didn’t always work. But generally, it succeeded. I once had a diffident baseball player get so excited about the book I was teaching that he could hardly contain himself with the joy of the discovery. “Sex was okay,” he almost shouted; “you could even write about it.” (I give Michael Brownstein’s absurdly written Country Cousins all the credit for that—this in a day when you might still be able to teach a book in which the “cousins” fuck themselves to death throughout the entire fiction).

    

    In Sara Colangelo’s deeply-thought movie, however, the teacher is frustrated with her rather ordinary life, whereas I never thought I ever knew what ordinary was. In a relationship with a loving but totally unappealing husband, Grant (Michael Chernus), the would-be creative Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is unhappy with her life as a teacher in Staten Island. Her children have seemingly no imagination, and like most kids their age spend their entire lives on cell-phones talking to their friends, with very few references outside of those computer-generated conversations. These are good kids which you never thought you should have to deal with.

     As Lisa perceives, in the oft-quoted Gertrude Stein comment, “there is no there there,” and she seeks other worlds in which she might discover herself and her own inner talents. Through Gyllenhaal’s lovely performance, we perceive her as a caring and loving teacher, despite her family disappointments, a supportive wife and mother—although even her children recognize her disaffection for them. She takes a creative-writing class with a supposedly perceptive teacher, Simon (Gael García Bernal), who later seduces her while attempting to describe the quality of her poetry.

     Yet, this kindergarten teacher knows that her whole life is a sham. The poetry that most receives acclaim in her class is that of her 5-year-old student, Jimmy Roy (the always-watchable child actor Parker Sevak), whose poems overcome him like sudden visions, which Lisa suddenly feels she must record, he being, in her vision, another kind of Mozart, a talent that can only be worshiped and kindly supported in a society which could care less. The poems are interesting, but not, perhaps what she believes them to be; expressions of a genius-in-the-making:

                             Anna is beautiful

                             Beautiful enough for me

                             The sun hits her yellow house

                             It is almost like a sign from God.

The class analysis of this child’s poem is such a classic case of poetry-in-class imposition of dense meaning of a simple statement that it would be utterly painful if it were not truly (supposedly) the product of a 5-year old. As funny as it is, it is also truly painful if you’ve ever taught a creative-writing course.

       The problem with Lisa is not her dilemma alone, but that of the society in which she lives, a world which, while basically abandoning poetry and art also carefully elevates it to a level outside of everyday experience. If these lines, as well as his second poem, “The Bull,” might be seen by a mother, father, and teacher as quite profound, in this film they become talismans for a society seeking meaning where there is not much there, or, to bring in Stein again, where there “is no there there.”

      Lisa at least is well meaning and ultimately, rather honest, when she basically absconds with the bartender’s Nikhil Roy’s son to allow him to recite the two poems which she has written which basically, has tested out in her creative-writing class. Her Bowery Poetry class members are rightfully confused: is she using her student’s voice as a kind of performative figure for her own work? Or, as she finally admits, has she lied about her own contributions to their community. She admits the lie and is immediately ostracized without their even recognizing the chances she has taken to do that. In a sense, they have themselves been deluded by the child’s siren voice, the simple words he speaks having served for a far deeper expression of poetic thought than they themselves have been capable of.

      

      Yet, of course, Lisa, herself, is highly deluded. The child genius is not Mozart whose hands needed to be messaged after every performance so that he might create another work of genius. The little child, Jimmy, is a natural, who simply spouts, at times quite perceptively, what is on his deeper mind. And it’s always a delight. But his father wants nothing to do with it—his own brother having been an unsuccessful writer—preferring that his son grow up to be a practical man, who has played baseball and who might one day, like him, run a good business. Hasn’t nearly every poet, musician, dancer, artist, performer in the world had just such a father?

      The deluded Lisa, however, imagines herself—given her own personal failures—a kind of spiritual force who might release this would-be poet into the world. It’s a beautiful and stunningly profound imaginative vision, but when the child is taken away—quite rightfully—from her supervision, she determines to steal him away again for a purpose that even she cannot quite comprehend, whisking him away to a northern New England motel before, apparently, planning to shuffle him off to Canada, where, in her imagination, she and he will work on a book of his poetry, implanting his name upon it, as if she might be Boswell to some future Samuel Johnson.

      The delusion is so grand that even a 5-year old sees through it, locking her in the bathroom as she takes a shower and calling to the police to announce that he has been kidnapped.

       The scene is one of the most painful confrontations I’ve ever witnessed on film, he talking to the police about the birches he witnesses outside her window, she from within trying to tell him where he really is so that he might report it to the police. She is not a true abuser, except for herself. And when she finally convinces him to let her back into the room, it is for a modest change of clothing so that the police will arrest her fully dressed, Jimmy again cuddling up to her leg as he had done in his kindergarten class. If this child knows that what she has done is wrong, he still admires her, psychologically speaking, for what she has done. Inwardly, he realizes she is the only audience truly for his poetic verbalizations.

      Lisa has already warned him that in turning her in, he will have lost his ability to speak, to say his poems in the easy way he always has: “I have a poem.” And as we see him in the police car, about to be taken back home, where he announces, once again, “I have a poem,” while those around ignore his comments, we recognize the truth of her predictions.

     Poems, this movie suggests, are never spoken or written with permission from the society; if in the future, Jimmy wants to write a poem, no hands will be messaged, no egos given any rubbing. He will have to do it despite the society into which he was born. Art is not a given, and no one, no one, will truly encourage you to engage in such a meaningless activity.

Los Angeles, November 13, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018)

Nagisa Oshima | 白昼の通り魔 Hakuchū no tōrima (Violence at Noon)

November 17, 2018, 2:01 pm

≫ Next: Yasujirō Ozu | Hogaraka ni ayume (Walk Cheerfully)

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the survivor

by Douglas Messerli

Taijun Takeda (screenplay, based on the novel by Tsutomu Tamura), Nagisa Oshima (director)白昼の通り魔Hakuchū no tōrima (Violence at Noon) / 1966

 

Known for films with highly sexualized content, Nagisa Oshima, in his 1966 film Violence at Noon, focuses more traditionally on attitudes about sex. That is not say that the film does not often contain emotionally repellent attitudes about sex: the central character, Eisuke Oyamada (Kei Sato), after all, is a serial rapist and in the very first sequence of the film becomes a brutal murderer.

     The two central female characters, moreover—Shino Shinozaki (Saeda Kawaguchi) and Matsuko Koura (Akiko Koyama)—hide the identity of the man who now twice raped Shino and killed the woman for whom she works as a maid, and in Matsuko’s case, Eisuke’s schoolteacher- wife whom he has basically abandoned.

     Finally, this film also features an attempted double suicide by lovers Shino and village leader, the young Genji Hyuga (Rokko Toura). Genji succeeds in hanging himself, while Shino is cut down by Eisuke and raped for the first time.

     Yet, in this case Oshima makes no attempt to hide the “violence” signified by the American title. The first many frames of this film (there are a total of over 2,000 cuts in the entire movie) represent a combination of jarring shifts of camera position and the juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal patterns that hint of the rapists’ ultimate ending, eventually with the help of his conflicted lovers, internment in prison and a sentence of death. This violent criminal, we later discover, actually accosted 35 women, killing several of them.

     Even after we leave the urban landscape of the first scenes, the fields, with their rows and rows of plantings create an unforgettable horizontal line that seems to imprison the four friends, having grown up together—the strong peasant Shino, the highly educated and seemingly perceptive Matsuko, and the popular but psychologically distressed Genji—all having suffered dire circumstances as children, when floods and other events destroyed their parent’s livelihoods. Oshima almost seems to suggest that their destructive childhoods have created the passions with which, as adults, they cannot now deal.

       Of their group, Eisuke was always the outsider, the one who stole without guilt, and survived while the others suffered. He is a taker, while the others were givers, often to their own detriment. If they survived by offering their talents to their impoverished community, he steals their produce, their animals, their love. It is the sad story we all know about a kind of inverse survival of the fittest—the fittest, in this case, being the outsider, not at all fit to survive in this tightly enclosed community; but, as such, he is also, strangely, the prodigal son, beloved by all for his very inability to remain within the bounds that they have so carefully, and often painfully, embraced.

      

     Of all the figures, Matsuko is the most controversial. Having just watched a day or two earlier Sara Conlangelo’s film The Kindergarten Teacher, I realized just how similar the two teachers were: both were remarkably calm and loving in the classroom yet were so dissatisfied with their lives that outside their ordered classrooms they were desperately passionate beings who had no ability to choose the right husbands and families. Trapped between their intellects and their passions, they had no way to properly travel through everyday life. In the more recent film, the character sought out the genius of her young student; in Oshima’s film, the teacher chooses the most outré being of her own childhood group, Eisuke, both women destroying the good they have intended and created within their communities.

      Genji, the charmed leader of his community, is too frail to lead it, and determines to destroy himself at the very moment he is elected their leader.

       

     It is only the solid, hard-working peasant Shino who might survive. Late in this violent-laden film, after both women have both helped to turn over the true menace of their lives over to the police, they together realize how they had helped Eisuke—even indirectly—to commit his terrible acts, with a deep sense of guilt—what they describe as a “link” to him—realizing that their lives have also come to an end. The always proud and graceful Mutsuko gathers her students together, and naming them one by one, personally says goodbye, a beautiful scene that combines here personal teaching skills with her graceful recognition of who she and everyone around her is.

      

     On the train ride back to their homes, the stolid Shino is only hungry, eagerly consuming not only her own meal, but, when Matsuko rejects her dinner, the food of her friend. Yet, like Genji, Matsuko convinces the still innocent Shino to commit another “double suicide,” as the two, returning to their home village, and tying their feet together, poison themselves underneath the same trees from which Genji had hung himself.

       It is a both tragic and comic ending to Oshima’s film, as the high-minded, moral “Ma’m” (as Shino keeps calling Matsuko in the English-language version) dies, while, miraculously, once again Shino survives, vomiting out what she has ingested, after which she attempts, unsuccessfully, to save her friend.

      The patient intellect, the political leader, the impulsive lover have all destroyed themselves, while the stolid peasant farmer-girl and maid has survived. In Oshima’s vision, truly the “meek inherit the earth.”

Los Angeles, November 17, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018). 

Yasujirō Ozu | Hogaraka ni ayume (Walk Cheerfully)

November 20, 2018, 9:48 am

≫ Next: Robert J. Flaherty | Man of Aran

≪ Previous: Nagisa Oshima | 白昼の通り魔 Hakuchū no tōrima (Violence at Noon)

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a lost hat, a crushed doll

by Douglas Messerli

Tadao Ikeda (screenplay, based on a story by Hiroshi Shimizu (story), Yasujirō Ozu (director) Hogaraka ni ayume (Walk Cheerfully) / 1930

Yasujirō Ozu’s silent frolic of a film, Walk Cheerfully, comes early in his career, long before his figures mostly retired to more-traditional tatami mat-bound characters; yet in this lovely work he already is very much concerned with changing family values.

      The difference, however, between the more traditionally bred, yet office-working Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki), a beauty which her scotch drinking, game-playing boss would love to get onto his office couch, and the man who falls in love with her, the gangster, Kenji the Knife (the handsome Minoru Takada), is more like the relationship between Polly Peachum and Mackie Messer in G. W. Pabst’s version of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera than any of the more carefully framed confrontations of the sexes in Ozu’s later films.

 

     Even here, nonetheless, Ozu does contextualize his American-styled societal outcasts as far more fun-loving and charming figures than anything out of the tough-guy noirs of the Hollywood screen. Here, working together, Kenji and his sidekick Senko (Hisao Yoshitani) commit a crime—Senko stealing a wallet while Kenji comes to the victim’s rescue only to help Senko pass on the object on to him—it is more like a scene out of the 1940s American musical Guys and Dollsthan anything you might experience in The Public Enemy (1931). In fact, these “gangsters” often tap dance, enjoy themselves at the local bar, and, in their off time, take in boxing at a local club. Of course, Cagney (the “public enemy”) was also a great dancer and could tap up a storm. But he might never have imagined doing that simultaneously in his gangster movies. Ozu distances Kenji from the contagion of his world by making him somewhat of a dandy who charms his victims to death rather than shooting them down in the streets.

     

     The director lets the minor figures, particularly after Kenji determines to go straight in order to win his beauty’s hand, play out any evil that might exist. Kenji tries his best, taking Yasue on a car trip into the country with her young sister at their side, but the results are more out of Harold Lloyd than Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He keeps losing his hat and accidentally squashes the young sister’s doll under the car’s never-ending tires in his macaronic movements into space. In this Ozu film, there is no going back, even if his entire “gang” intend to impede his desired transformations.

     And that is the fun of this comedy. As Kenji removes his dagger-like tattoos and takes on a job as a window-washer that might be almost a foretelling of another musical hero, chronicalling J. Pierpont Finch’s rise to the top in the 1960s Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Kenji becomes almost erased from the film, while his former moll, the evil Chieko (Satoko Date), with hair styled like Clara Bow’s, takes on her sexual competitor, attempting to replace herself as their mutual bosses’ favorite, and working to get Yasue fired. As the critic of the perceptive “Silent London” blog writes:

  

             …the real business of Walk Cheerfully is transacted between Yasue

              and Chieko. Yasue, like it or not, has to change – just as painfully

              as her boyfriend does when he scratches away his ink – and take

              Chieko’s place instead.

It is almost the same lesson that Guys and Dolls’ Sister Sarah Brown needs to learn from Adelaide, you have to “marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow.”

      Although in Ozu’s speed-driven work everyone, it seems, is busy changing themselves, transforming a previously feudal society into a totally westernized world that puzzles and terrifies the elders and often frightens even those determined to undergo that change, their very energy astounds us all.

      As the “Silent London” essayist argues:

              Walk Cheerfully’s jittery tempo is measured by more of these cutaways

              to feet, dancing, pacing and tapping. There’s something suspicious about

              all that perpetual motion: just like Senko when he’s being frisked at the

              quayside, Chieko and her boss jiggle their guilty feet while they scheme in

              the office lift. And the pace of Walk Cheerfully is relentless: these inserts,

              the speeding cars and the travelling camera. The question is: where is all

              this forward momentum taking us?

 

     I wouldn’t exactly describe this forward motion as “suspicious,” but simply as inevitable. This society is in a not-so-slow collapse that must quickly be filled in with the transformations of its youth. Many of these changes, as we know from the history of Japanese cinema and literature, will ultimately be extremely painful, disorienting, and, if nothing else, challenging for both younger and older generations for decades to come. One might even argue that the backlash for this sudden lurch forward came in the Japanese fascism of World War II. If we see it from this perspective, in fact, we can easily parallel it with the radical shifts in German culture of the Weimar Republic during the same period—or even the not so pleasant transformation from Obama’s enlightened politics to the Trumpian “kill-them-all” political chaos of today.

      Ozu, always the conciliator, seems to warn both sides, at least in the English title of Hogaraka ni ayume, suggesting the society “walk” rather than as do his characters, run and dance into the future, and that their elders be “cheerful” rather than begrudging or even grow hateful about those changes. By film’s end, Yasue’s mother remains in place over her teapot, but seems to smile in approval of her daughter’s acceptance of the former gangster. And even with her doll crushed, Yasue’s sister seems ever so pleased with what the future has brought her, a new brother-in-law who appears determined to help move her move out of her sheltered present.

Los Angeles, November 20, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

Robert J. Flaherty | Man of Aran

November 21, 2018, 9:36 am

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the lure of the native

by Douglas Messerli

Robert J. Flaherty (writer and director) Man of Aran / 1934

Often described as a fictional documentary film (an ethnofiction), Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 work Man of Aran might better be described as pure romantic hokum, a work which in its poetic intensity is perhaps closer to someone like Jack London than the post-war neo-realists.

      The major tenets of this film, that the isolated islanders living in harsh conditions off of the western coast of Ireland are a beautiful folk who live in a premodern world, struggling to grow potatoes on stony cliffs by using seaweed as soil, surviving by rock fishing, and keeping their lights on by hunting and harpooning large Basking sharks to render their liver oil into lamplight are almost all fabrications. The seaweed, in fact, was used mostly as a fertilizer; shark hunting had stopped nearly a half-century before the making of this film, and the director needed to bring in Scottish sailors to show the Aran natives how to maneuver their harpoons; and the small crabs and fish that the family’s young son catches would hardly have supported the hunger of a larger family.

      Indeed, even the family Flaherty portrays, the father, Man of Aran (Colman ‘Tiger’ King), the mother (Maggie Dirrane), and son (Michael Dillane) were not related, and were chosen for their photogenic capabilities.

           If the storms and slapping waves against the stony coast, captured by Flaherty’s wide-lens camera (the camera evidently dwarfed by its lens) during his several visits to the island over two years are quite astonishing, the movie’s final scene, in which the shark hunters are nearly lost in a huge storm, was also an utter fiction—and a dangerous one, since, it is rumored, none of the men could swim. Even Flaherty latter admitted: “Looking back I should have been shot for what I asked these superb people to do for the film…for the enormous risks…and all for the sake of a keg of porter and five pound a piece.”

      Yet, that last scene is so very powerful, looking as it does a bit like something like Albert Pinkham Ryder’s 1880s work, The Waste of Waters Is Their Field, that we can only wonder at the scene. Moreover, as we know from movie history, there were plenty of filmmakers from the 1920s and 1930s who put their stars in great danger: Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd—to name only a few.

      Today, there are a great many critics of this work who completely dismiss it for its lack of proper focus—some arguing that instead of man vs nature, the film might have dealt with the Irish treatment of the island’s poverty-stricken population and the tariffs applied to them—while others such as George Stoney, who created a documentary about the making of the film, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, How the Myth Was Made, have continued to attack the movie outright for its fabrications. Others have been kinder to the film, which received great acclaim upon its premier, not only from Irish and British viewers, but from the Nazi government, who saw in Flaherty’s myths of the outsider, issues which resonated with their own visions of themselves. It is apparent that Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was influenced by Flaherty’s film.

 
      But it is equally clear that for Flaherty there was no political intent, but, perhaps just as dangerously, as writer Arthur Calder-Marshall notes, Man of Aranis an “’eclogue’—a pastoral and marine poem”—as I would argue, not a film you can easily make under the guise of a paean to a real place and its people. Ryder’s wild landscapes come to mind again; we know these wonderful works are from a feverous imagination, not from a stolid vision of reality.

      Flaherty loved the exotic, worlds he felt had been left behind by the modern world—and were better off for it, despite the hardships their cultures might have had to face. If only Flaherty had never been classified as a documentarian his films might proffer a different kind of perspective of a man who, in the depths of the Great Depression, who offered lullabies for a people whose land, agriculturally and economically, had betrayed them. Flaherty’s mock-nativists survived because they’d never even entered the 20^th century. And the lure of that world still exists. Is it any wonder that Riefenstahl, in her later years, photographed African tribal natives?

Los Angeles, November 21, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

Derek Jarman | Caravaggio

November 23, 2018, 10:00 am

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pretty images do not a movie make

by Douglas Messerli

Derek Jarman, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, and Nicholas Ward-Jackson, (screenplay, based on a story by Ward-Jackson), Derek Jarman (director) Caravaggio / 1986

Although in the past I have enjoyed a couple of Derek Jarman’s overheated homoerotic films, particularly his Sebastiane of 1976,  his movie of 10 years later, Caravaggio—although containing some fairly lovely images—appears to have no logical point of view except to, apparently, celebrate the Renaissance painter’s life for its open expression of homosexuality and bisexuality, classifying the handsome artist as a kind of wild aesthete in the manner of Shakespeare’s wild nemesis, Christopher Marlowe.

      Yet Marlowe, who like Caravaggio was killed (in the Italian artist’s case, evidently of poisoning), in revenge for his bad behavior, was highly educated, while in Jarman’s version, the Italian artist, although immensely talented, was little more than a street ruffian.

      All the better for Jarman’s purposes, since between friezes of the prostitutes and street figures who Caravaggio used for painted figures, he can let the handsome young Caravaggio (Dexter Fletcher) and chiseled but decaying older Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), tended to by the mute Jerusaleme (Emile Nicolaou/Jonathan Hyde)—who the artist evidently purchased, with pederastic intentions from Jerusaleme’s Grandmother (Zohra Sehgal) early in the film—play out their own somewhat orgiastic adventures without much meaning.

      

       Caravaggio, himself, has also been “purchased,” it is suggested, by Cardinal Del Monte (Michael Gough) who leeringly encourages the artist to produce his art, while evidently keeping the boy/man up many a night with his sexual attentions. Jarman clearly loves a good orgy or two, but mostly in this film he just hints at them instead of exploring their political and social implications as he did in Sebastiane.

     

       This film seems to be simply a kind of endless, narrated often in a voiceover of the younger Caravaggio, recounting his sexual adventures, interspersed with very badly conceived recreations of Caravaggio’s beautiful art.

        Just to remind us how “contemporary” the late-Renaissance bad boy really was, the director interposes numerous anachronisms throughout the film: courtiers madly typing up messages, Caravaggio standing aside a green truck, a motorbike speeding by, and a bar laced with electric lights. Perhaps Jarman thought his campy-like references might save his pointlessly wavering plot, but, I’m afraid, it points up the fact that he has very little to say about the artist and his art itself. He might as well have chosen any other wild-living figure of the past. If Sebastiane, as a sensuously sexual explorative Christian, was presented as being torn between the licentious and the pure, Caravaggio, at least in this depiction, simply jumps into the mud.

      

      Observing a ruddy-faced street-boxer, Ranuccio (Sean Bean), he demands his sexual attentions, which the man, given enough money, is willing to entertain; but with him, fortunately, comes Ranuccio’s girlfriend, Lena (in the amazing Tilda Swinton’s first film role), and in order to get the red-faced streetboy into his bed, it appears that Caravaggio must enter into a meage a` trois. As a threesome they work well together, but when Ranuccio and Lena are observed making love to the artist separately, jealously, as the cliché goes, “rears its ugly head.”

      Much of this film is, in fact, filled with clichés or, at least, with sentences that are destined to become clichés through just such a film. As Washington Post film critic Paul Attanasio wrote in his 1986 review:

            What's most puzzling is Jarman's view of Caravaggio himself. Throughout, the

            artist talks in voice-over, a jumble bizarrely composed of overheated poesy,

            homoerotic dreams and the kind of "insights" that might inspire a sophomore at

            Bennington to scribble in the paperback margin, "|" or even "|||" Thus: "Man's

            character is his fate"; "The gods have become diseases"; "All art is

            against lived experience"; "I am trapped, pure spirit in matter ..."

I have no idea what Attanasio had against Bennington University women, but the script might remind us of thousands of such well-intentioned university-student perceptions throughout the world. I probably wrote some myself.

     Of course, tragedy lies just behind the tapestries. Lena, who is now pregnant does not implicate either of her lovers and now intends to become mistress to the wealthy Scipione Borghese (Robbie Coltrante). Murder seems to be the result of her determination, as Caravaggio and Jerusaleme clean Lena’s nude murdered body in order to capture it in a painting.

     Arrested for Lena’s murder, Ranuccio claims innocence, Caravaggio appearing to believe him and arranging through his Vatican connections to release him.

      But when Ranuccio admits the murder to the artist, Caravaggio slits his throat, while we return to the murderer’s own bed, where he has visions of attempting to deny priests from offering him the last rites.

      

      Okay, this wild young genius lived large and mostly uncontrollably, a kind of Warhol of many centuries past, which is what I supposed attracted Jarman to his subject. Yet, you want to ask, so what? Was murder the poisoning the AIDS of other centuries? Did he deserve what he got? Was he somehow simply misunderstood by a society that was, in fact, far more open to various sexual deviances than our own? It’s hard to know what to make of the film Caravaggio because I don’t believe the writers had a clue about what they were trying to say.

      Pretty images do not a movie make.

  

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving Day, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

Chantal Akerman | Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

November 27, 2018, 11:07 am

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a letter which can wither, a learning which can suffer and an outage which is simultaneous is principal

by Douglas Messerli

Chantal Akerman (writer and director) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles / 1975

If there was ever a film that proves Gertrude Stein’s adage that we are what we repeat, it has to be Chantal Akerman’s 3 ½ hour movie, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles of 1975. Yet I hate even to describe this immersive entry into the beautiful widow’s life, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), living with her teenage son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), and their daily routines. By the time you have carefully observed Akerman’s patterned images, you feel less like you’ve watched the art film (now almost a cult classic) Criterion presents it as, than you have gotten an opportunity to get to know a fascinating woman whose life has become defined by her attempts of daily survival.

 

    She lives, as the title tells us, in a well-kept, if not deluxe, apartment at 23 quai du Commerce in Brussels, Belgium, where her patterns of behavior center around cooking meals for her herself and her son, bringing in small sums of money so that she might survive through prostitution with boring and unattractive businessmen (3 of whom we encounter in this three-act drama). But she is less a “whore” than simply a working woman trying to support herself and allow her studious son enough spending money that he can continue to finish his education—a problem, evidently, since he has been seduced by a close male friend (and yes, there is a fleeting suggestion that their relationship might have been more than mere friendship) to attend a Flemish school; now, in a French gymnasium or college (we can never quite determine is age, since he speaks little), he is having a difficult time in repeating the poems of Baudelaire in proper French. His mother night attempts to correct the locution of her student son.

     We might almost quote from Stein’s Tender Buttons in describing Jeanne’s cooking habits and her relationship with her nearly grown child: the first day she cooks potatoes, creating also a kind of thin vichyssoise and lamb (or mutton).

                                                           mutton

     A letter which can wither, a learning which can suffer and an outrage which is simultaneous is principal.

     Student, students are merciful and recognized they chew something.

     Hate rests that is sold and sparse and all in shape and largely very largely. Interleaved and successive and a sample of smell all this makes certainly a shade.

        Light curls very light curls have no more curliness that soup. This is not a subject

     Change a single stream of denting and change it hurriedly, what it does express, it expresses nausea. Like a very strange likeness and pink, like that and not more like that than the same resemblance and not more like that than no middle space in cutting.

      These, the first lines of this rather long prose poem of “A meal of mutton,” might almost be seen as a model for Jeanne’s life. I don’t want to make to much of this, but I can’t imagine that Akerman, a feminist and lesbian, would not have read it.

       Indeed, one of Jeanne’s most repeated actions is turning off and on lights, as she leaves the screen, returns to finish cooking, and moves on to other rooms, to set the table, place the dishes upon them, and remove them after her son and their quiet dinner together. No one says much; she reports only that she has received a letter from a relative inviting them to Canada. It is certain they will never travel there.

 

     At other times the director simply shows Jeanne in long-camera takes as she bathes, after the loveless sex she has had with her customers. We watch her carefully as she makes up the bed, folds the towel she has used to cover the space between her body and the coverlet. Everything, on the first day, is done with nearly expert control. They only true joy seems to receive is that reading of Baudelaire and a late-night outing into the city’s neon-lights for a few more provisions.

      

     The second day, we again watch Jeanne precisely put potatoes in a pot before exits to do some shopping. Her only pleasure appears to be a cup of latte at a local bar. Her patron of that day pays her and leaves her again to finish the evening meal. But this time things appear to be, just a little, “falling apart.” She must apologize to her son for the potatoes being overdone, but we’ve also observed that the shell of efficiency is slowly beginning to crack: she has dropped a spoon, left a canister uncovered.

       And, on the third day, Jeanne seems not quite to be her self-sufficient being, talking, for the first time with strangers and gossiping, just a little, with her grocer. Her previous imperviousness in which she has lived seems to be slightly cracking at the edges. The lights go on and off, she light’s the burner as she does again and again to prepare for dinner, she combs her hair as usual, and prepares for her afternoon client—even if she is a little late.

       She reminds me, a bit, of Glenda Jackson perfectly preparing her breakfast in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, a scene in which the directly turned his microphone up so that each movement of a knife, a fork, a plate, seemed to demonstrate her absolute efficiency.

      Yet, observing Jeanne in sex with her third client, we recognize that something is different. Subtlety, Akerman helps us to perceive that, for the first time in many years, Jeanne actually achieves an orgasm with this not very loveable man. And soon after the sex ends, she carefully takes out a knife and slits his throat. Her orderly life has clearly been destroyed, her ability to do everything on her own has now shown her the lie of her life.

      Once again, I was reminded by Stein, recalling Jeanne and her son, in their cramped living room (the room in which they also pulled out his bed from a small couch), setting up their evening table:

                                                  a table

     A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. It is like that a change.

     A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary

places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.

     

     Certainly, Jeanne’s table, in every sense of those words, has been shaken. Her routine has been disturbed; emotional interchange has suddenly crept into the looking-glass and made her realize just how empty her life has been. She can no longer sustain her son, Sylvain; he must now make it on his own.

     As you might perceive, this film profoundly affected me. After seeing it, I will now have to rethink all films that speed through their stories with a leery eye. Sometimes getting to know your character is what human interaction is all about. We might almost say that the more we come to know Jeanne Dielman, living at 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, with its dreadful curlicues of wall-paper and the oppressive entry-way mosaics, the more she comes alive; yet as a figure of fiction, she has no choice, perhaps, in that process of the film itself, but to destroy her own being.

      Unlike in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, where the central character leaps off the screen to join, temporarily, the real world, I desired to leap into Ackerman’s screen just to put my hand on Jeanne’s shoulder to reassure her that emotions were just fine, that love was not something she need deny herself, as she clearly had done throughout her life. It’s a silly conceit, of course, a fag trying to reassure a lovely woman who very much knew what she was all about; but when a movie can create such an empathy between audience and character, well, that’s a kind of miracle.

Los Angeles, November 27, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

Alice Rohrwacher | Felice Lozarro (Happy as Lozarro)

December 3, 2018, 11:00 am

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the happy saint

by Douglas Messerli

Alice Rohrwacher (writer and director) Felice Lozarro (Happy as Lozarro) /2018

Without creating a precise allegory or even pushing her film into complete fantasy, Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher has created a significant work in her Felice Lozarro—meaninglessly translated into English as Happy as Lozarro, when it might have been far more felicitous to simply title it “Happy” or “Lucky” Lozarro—that reads like a mix of fable and a metaphoric tale of a young Christ-like being. Lozarro, the Italian medieval name for Lazarus, the believer who Christ restored to life four days after the man’s death, and for whom Jesus wept. In this film he is presented as a beautiful, young, cherubic teenager (stunningly performed by Adriano Tardiolo) as a true “holy fool,” who lives in the small central Italian village of Inviolata, a place that seems, a bit like Brigadoon, a town that has mostly escaped contemporary life.

     

     Unlike the Scottish village, whose citizens joyously are brought back to life for one day in each century, the Inviolataese work hard every day for the bitter Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), the self-described cigarette queen, who also raises other vegetables which help to make her rich, while her citizenry are kept ignorant and in debt. Each month her overweightoverseer (Natalino Balasso) arrives to declare each of them guilty of spending far more than the amount of pay for their labors owed to them, creating an indentured world that might almost match the Jim Crown US South.

     Nonetheless, Inviolata’s workers make the best of it, while cursing, under their breaths, about the ruthless, yet pratriarcal Marchesa, who knows that even if they hate her, they need a system in which they can work in order to survive. And despite their living conditions, wherein, in some small homes there are 18 inhabitats, they seem to make the best of it, celebrating love, enthusiastically sharing the little quantities of wine, cigarettes, and food they have, even as they gripe.

    

      At the very lowest level of this horrible hierarchy is Lozarro, who is never offered anything to eat at these celebratory occasions—and, in fact, consumes no food throughout the film. He is the go-for of their world, the one they order about to fetch up the tobacco leaves they pick from the fields, to lift their crates, to carry off the crippled grandmother who appears to be his only relative. At one point, Lozarro runs off to fix coffee for the field workers only to discover, upon his return, that they have all wandered off.

      Strangely, none of this abuse disturbs the happy Lozarro in the least. He works endlessly and willingly, always with a smile pasted to his face. And he is also one of the few villagers invited into the Marchesa’s house—for she too makes use of his absolute servility—and it is there he meets her most unhappy son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), who has been brought home after, apparently, several debauched years, and is now locked away in the virginal world of Inviolata.

      The frail, young blond Tancredi, who appears to be suffering from consumption, or, perhaps, is just suffering lung cancer from smoking to many of his mother’s cigarettes (as he explains to the innocent Lozarro, “Every time I cough, I need to smoke a cigarette.”) slyly befriends Lozarro and seduces him into helping to pretend that he has been kidnapped in order to get the money to escape her clutches.

      If this is no sexual seduction, it might as well be for the innocent one, who is convinced, when Tancredi tells him the truth—that the Marchessa originally was just another woman from the village with whom his father had sex and that, for all he knows, Tancredi, who has never known his parents, might as well be his half-brother—is reconfirmed in the innocent’s mind when Trancredi, unable to prick his own finger in order to seal his signature in blood, uses Lozarro’s blood. In the mind of this child-like believer Lozarro this truly does make them “blood-brothers.”

      Lozarro takes his new and perhaps only “friend” away to his version of the Wuthering Heights’ Peniston Crag, a high mountain crevice where he has secretly made his own place of escape. Bringing his new friend there is as close to a sexual rendezvous that Lozarro will ever encounter, and in his attempt to feed his new friend, who has now moved into deep ditch (a symbolic burial grounds), after Lozarro has fallen into a “fever”—surely a not just a sudden illness, but a psychological reaction to his new-found friendship)—results in this saint’s fall from a high cliff.

      With both boys having now gone missing a maid calls the police, who discover a village that in its horrific conditions stands against all Italian modern codes of living, clear out the town, arresting, presumably the Marchessa who has created these insufferable conditions.

      Most of the critics writing about this film, who I read, suggest that there is now an incredibly sudden shift in the film, concerning which, as A.O. Scott, for example, writes:

Midway through, just as we’ve accepted the semi-fantastical parameters of Lazzaro’s world — his half-secret friendship with the Marchesa’s son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani); his chaste infatuation with a young woman named Antonia (Agnese Graziani) — our perspective changes. We suddenly see the landscape from above and hear an ancient folk tale in a woman’s voice, and the film takes a double swerve, into harsher realism and more explicit magic.

But, in truth, Rohrwacher takes us quite gently into to this new world by suggesting that the police have ousted most of the previous Inviolata tenants simply in order to save them, to allow them entry into the modern world. Only Lozarro—who like Lazarus and a bit like Rip Van Winkle, wakes up again into life, after having been sniffed out and rejected by a wolf (a major metaphoric figure in this film) who refuses to eat him, declaring that he has sniffed out a totally “honest man”—returns to the village to find thieves removing whatever they might find of value in the Marchesa’s abandoned house. If he frightens them, he still innocently leads them to her drawer of “cutleries,” and even begs them for a ride into the urban future. When they reject him, he walks into a world he might never have imagined. And it is a wonderment to behold, as he discovers, still dressed in his light sweater and loosely knit pants, huge power-lines and gigantic towers of communication.

      The world he discovers in Milan and other northern cities is made up of the same people of his small village, now, given their newly established hierarchical roles, forced to steal and sell their gains in the underground. Only there is now a very big difference: they have all aged terribly, almost forgetting their past, while the happy Lozarro has remained ever young. Not only do they, at first, not recognize him, they reject him—until Antonia, the woman who was serenaded in the very first scenes of this film (now played by Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister) recognizes him, and forces the others to allow him into their own current metallic hovel.

       Here, Lozarro, despite the same conditions, essentially, he has suffered in the past, is still in love with life, eagerly willing to help out with everything. But his sad re-encounter with Tancredi, where we now perceive the young blond now as an old, stringy-haired barfly, says everything. The wolves have won, and the old world he knew is now about to die.

       Throughout the film, Lozarro is seen as going into a kind of trance during lonely removals from the world in which he exists during which he seems, despite everyone else’s perception of his intelligence, to be considering things, to be evaluating a world in deep concentration.

        Near the end of the film, when his fellow travelers suddenly hear a heavenly music that has left the local cathedral simply to follow them, the innocent turns away again in deep thought. They joke about returning to Inviolata to reclaim what is left to them as squatters. But we know these now somewhat aged street-folk will never be able to reclaim their virgin state. And, so too, must Lozarro know that the past cannot be reclaimed.

        Yet he attempts just that, awkwardly trying to enter a bank, setting off their alarms as he approaches through the wrong door. Behaving, as he does always, rather oddly, the customers suddenly determine that he is armed, and in terror, move away from him. When he perceives their own odd behavior, he moves toward them, trying to explain to himself why they are so fearful; all he wants, as he explains to the tellers, is that everything left behind be returned the Tancredi—not, evidently, even a customer of that particular bank.

      When the terrified customers perceive the intruder’s innocence, and that the gun they thought he was carrying is simply a slingshot, a gift by Tancredi, they attack him, and one by one, beat him to the ground. The wolf reappears, evidently now ready for his feast. By the time the police arrive, the “holy innocent” is bleeding and appears to have died.

       The movie leaves us with the notion that, if he is to survive and come to life again, it can be only in our belief, in our imagination. Like Christ, I wept. Happiness is such a rare thing.

Los Angeles, December 3, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

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Wong Kar-wai | 東邪西毒 (Ashes of Time Redux) / first filmed in 1994, revised in 2008

December 7, 2018, 10:09 am

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loves that never truly existed

by Douglas Messerli

Wong Kar-wai (writer, based on a story by Louis Cha, and director) 東邪西毒(Ashes of Time Redux) / first filmed in 1994, revised in 2008

It’s difficult to imagine Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s spectacularly beautiful Ashes of Time—which we in the US have only in his “redux” version, since the original filming as apparently so stressful, that the director could not properly cut it when it first appeared in 1994, only attending to it again in 2008—represents the popular wuxia epic (historical sword-play romances). Yes, the director does present us with images of swords, at one point The Blind Swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) defending a village against dozens of bandits, and yes, as one critic argued, a great deal of crimson blood gets spilled; but in this film these images are presented as aesthetic art-like, slowed-down, and somewhat pixelated scenes that refuse to get into the truly bloody details of vengeance and death.

 
     There’s plenty of talk about vengeance and death, surely, as a virtual series of hurt and angry lovers gather, over a period of seasons, at Ouyang Feng’s (Leslie Cheung) desert camp, hoping he will find the proper warriors in order to kill those who have wronged them, including the male in-drag princess Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin) (who, a bit like Fassbinder’s Erwin in In a Year of 13 Moons, becomes a transgender figure in order to find his/her wished-for lover), his/her sister, Murong Yin, the Blind Swordsman, a young bounty hunter (Jackie Cheung), and the notably handsome Eastern Heretic (Huang Yaoshi), who, loved by both Yang and Yin (who may also be the same person) only wants to forget, drinking a bottle of wine he has brought as a gift to Feng that promises to erase all memories of the past.

       As a man who jilted both Yang and Yin, he, more that any other individual, needs that elixir, and gradually over his evening with Feng his memories disappear, with only a glimpse of past love glimmering in the morning light when he encounters the Girl with a Mule (Charlie Yeung).

      The real issues here, as they are in nearly all of Wong’s films, don’t concern a literal battleground, but an emotional one wherein the mind struggles with love, memory, and time; he is the 21^st centuries’ Proust, and struggles to untie the gordian knot these three represent in most of his films. And much of this seemingly action-packed genre film languishes on the central figures’ regrets for not having been able to “hold on” to things of value. Love is so fleeting in a Wong film that a single glance, a touch of skin, even a gentle stroke while one is sleeping can alter one’s entire life. Real and intense sexual love hardly occurs.

      Like the passive murderer-to-hire Feng, neither love-making or death itself truly matter (killing is easy, he suggests, then immediately denies it). What is most essential is how the mind retains those images, and how, over time, they decay or over time become distorted, images that now compel these figures to want to destroy the very individuals with whom they were once so fixated.

      In Wong’s films, love as a sexual act is never quite achieved; like wandering Tristans and Isoldes, love is a state of the mind that, as the mind itself decays, is ultimately lost even at the highest moment of passion.

      A man losing his eyesight, another losing his mind, a woman losing her sexual identity, another unable to enact any of the abilities he claims, are the heroes, beings who suffer from a love never achieved. Feng himself is obsessed with his sister-in-law (Maggie Cheung). For Wong love becomes obsession simply because it is not resolved, never enacted, the figures unable to achieve orgasm. The story of how they came to encounter one another, accordingly, hardly matters.

     Yet, strangely, in his remarkable images, in this case realized by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and in the music, in Ashes of Time composed by Frankie Chan, Wong creates an intense paean to loves that never truly existed.

Los Angeles, December 7, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Alfonso Cuarón | Roma

December 9, 2018, 4:38 pm

≫ Next: Ofir Raul Grazier | האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker)

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mothers without a voice

by Douglas Messerli

Written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón Roma / 2018

Based loosely on the director’s upbringing in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City—hence the film’s title Roma, which also hints of an attachment to “Rome,” and a relationship to the “Roma” population the “Romansh,” who throughout the world are generally described simply as “gypsies.”

      It is a strange title given the fact that the central family upon which this film focuses are upper-middle-class citizens, who not only live in a house with 3-4 servants, but who also have a constantly defecating dog, Borros, as well as several birds and 4 children, this family supported by a doctor father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), and his rather passive, biochemist professor wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), along with her mother Teresa (Verónica García). In fact this large family is mostly being cared for by their house-keeper (Yalitza Aparicio), who lives in this menagerie mostly as a kind of beloved slave. Throughout the opening credits of the film she washes-down of the home’s entry-way, the dog’s and bird’s abode, which is followed by her desperate attempt to gather up all the dirty laundry before the time arrives for her to pick up the children from their various schools, re-deliver them home, help, with her servant friend Adela (Nancy Garcia) to serve-up dinner, and then, in the very next scene, wash out their clothing on a roof-top eyrie, from where we glimpse others like her performing the very same tasks.

    Without saying anything, director Alfonso Cuarón makes it quite clear that she is on-call for nearly 24-hours each day, rushing to the garage / entry-way each time the master returns in his huge galaxy automobile to hold back the dog, and later in the evening, cuddling up with her young charges as, with their inattentive families, as they watch silly early 1970s television games shows and other fare.

      
     The director does not, at first, even hint of the abuse she receives, since, in part, Cleo is so pliable and loving that you can’t immediately recognize her condition. She appears more as a trusted and caring nanny that anything else, until Cuarón very gradually helps us to perceive her working conditions, particularly when, at one moment, her youngest charge talks about an imaginary past life as an aged man before he was born, when he claims he was a air-pilot who died in a crash, laying down on a cement protrusion where Cleo is busy cleaning the family laundry, pretending to be dead.  

     
     One of the wonders of Cuarón’s film is that you never know what the next frame of the film might reveal. Suddenly, upon her youngest charge’s insistence that he has died in a previous life, the wonderful Cleo lays down on the same cement abutment, lying head to head to with the boy, insisting that she too is now dead. We immediately realize, however, that her notion of “dead” is something different from the boy’s imaginative rumination, that she is quite literally feeling so tired that she might as well be dead; and when she proclaims that it feels good, we comprehend that she has simply not ever had enough rest.

     The late-night arrival home of the master, the doctor Antonio, is like a surreal intrusion into their otherwise peaceful lives, as he slowly attempts to maneuver his large Galaxy car into the narrow confines of the courtyard parking space, the giant beast of a machine rolling over the dogshit left by Borros, even after Cleo has cleaned it up. We suddenly perceive that this man is a kind of monster, who demands that everything and everyone attend to him, and it is not surprising that in a scene soon after he pretends to escape to a business conference in Quebec from which he never returns, leaving his wife to have to deal with his exit by pretending to her loving children that he is simply on a longer retreat that he (or she) had expected.

      Distraught, she expresses her hurt in various ways, at one point crying out to her elderly mother, which the eldest of her children overhears, despite Cleo’s attempts to draw him away from his mother’s door. Cleo, herself, is blamed for the child’s sufferings, which he is now forced to keep secret from his brothers and sisters. We are nearing the territory of a Cocteau film.

     Is it any wonder that on their nights out, Cleo and Adela seek the delights of young men? Adela has a steady boyfriend in Pepe (Marco Graf), but Cleo is left with his more handsome, but unreliable cousin,Fermín(Jorge Antonio Guerrero), who draws her away from the movie to a rented room where he first, completely nakedly, reveals his impressive martial arts talents before joining her in bed.

     The result is disastrous, when Cleo soon after discovers that she has missed her period and is probably pregnant. We truly realize her boyfriend’s treachery when, soom after, he excuses himself to go to the bathroom and never returns, leaving her to deal with the problems she now is facing, just like her mistress, all alone.

     Fortunately, both Sofia and her mother Teresa, despite their abuse of her, are sympathetic, taking the servant—quite disastrously, given Sofia’s driving skills—to the hospital, where the female doctor confirms Cleo’s pregnancy; and later, with Teresa in control, seeking out a crib into which their working “mother” might deposit her own new progeny.

 
      Yet here, again, Cuarón reveals that their timing is terribly bad, for that very afternoon the tragic Corpus Christi massacres of young protesting students occurs in the same neighborhood in which they happen to be shopping. In those shootings nearly 120 young people were shot down by paramilitary troops, including, in this case the young now-fascistic Fermín, who enters with others, the very shop where Cleo is attempting to buy her crib, to shoot down a couple of students who have attempted to escape the violence.

     In the stress, Cleo’s water breaks, and with Teresa and their driver, they attempt to escape to hospital safety, but trapped in traffic, are too late to save he maid’s unborn daughter. The director forces us to see the entire scene where Cleo loses the child, demanding we recognize what it truly means to lose a child in a stillborn birth, perhaps one of the most painful scenarios of film I have ever witnessed. It leaves Cleo, as even her charges proclaim, nearly mute.

     Yet the demands of family life are foremost, as Madame Sofia, who has now bought a new, smaller car, insists her children, with Cleo in attendance, drive down in one final Galaxy trip to a Veracruz beach—where she later admits to her children, she has been forced to travel in order to let her former husband ransack their home for whatever possessions he believes are his. The sad table-side admission of what has happened to their father devastates the eldest son while confusing his youngest siblings. Cleo can only look on, realizing her own losses, while hoping to help these children, whom she has basically raised, to gain some equilibrium.

     Their love of swimming in the ocean is their only relief; yet Cleo cannot swim and has never actually been in the ocean. She watches over her charges, taking the youngest of them away to the beach while looking back at the others, disobeying their mother’s orders, and floating out to sea impossible large waves. This brave woman has no other choice but to enter the water herself in an attempt to retrieve them before they drown.

     Amazingly she succeeds, bringing them all ashore just as their mother returns after checking the tires of the "beast" which will return them to their neighborhood Roma. Recognizing the miracle that has occurred, all of them gather on the beach like worn-out survivors—which they surely are—to gather in the love which feel for one another, Cleo finally admitting that she did not truly want her unborn child, with the children soon demanding that, as a family, they can now travel, a bit like the Roma gypsies, everywhere. They are no longer forced to remain in their topsy-turvy household.

     Yet the director simply takes them home, where, now that their father has left, has opened up other rooms, allowing them all to re-inhabit their own space, perhaps even to discover a kind of travel from room to room in their own household—a Disneyland beyond their dreams. Surely, Cleo, the savior of their lives, is no longer simply a servant, even as she climbs, in the last frame, to the roof to wash out the clothing they have worn on their most recent voyage.

     If there is little question that Cuarón’s lovely black-and-white cinematography is a bit too coy—as Howard pointed out to me, in one single tracking scene the director used hundreds of actors to  inhabit his restaurants and shops, and at other times everything was just too beautiful to be believed—I would argue that it is the director’s simple attempt to recreate a semi-autobiographical world in which he, as a child, was so immersed that determined his precise re-creation. In a true sense, this is not simply a “memory,” but a tribute to his own “Cleo” and to all the others who exist throughout Mexican and South American history who played the same roles. These women, mostly without children of their own, raised up entire richer families with deep love and caring. I remember eating a dinner with the Brazilian poet Horácio Costa whose childhood “nanny” had been brought to Sao Paulo to cook a delicious meal for us which he had loved as a child. I’m so sorry that I never got a chance to meet her. Here, at least, we do see the woman, however mutable (and mute) she is as a woman who raised this family, a kind of silent beauty who belongs in such a lovely silvery saga.

Los Angeles, December 9, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

     

Ofir Raul Grazier | האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker)

December 12, 2018, 10:25 am

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undiscovered territory

by Douglas Messerli

Ofir Raul Grazier (writer and director) האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker) / 2017, USA 2018

undiscovered territory

by Douglas Messerli

Ofir Raul Grazier (writer and director) האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker) / 2017, USA 2018

Israeli director Ofir Raul Grazier’s first feature film is a gentle realist work, with little experimentation involved, but which is nonetheless complex and watchable. The Cakemaker, might almost be characterized as one of the numerous food-based films (think Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, Julie & Julia, and Chocolat)—except that this work explores, along with baking in this case, the issues of religion, sex, cultural separation that are also the subtexts of two of the above films, Babette’s Feast and Chocolat, in an even more challenging manner.

 

     Not only are the major protagonists, at least in the early part of the film, an Israeli and a German, a married man and a single baker, but together they have a gay relationship in Berlin. They quickly fall in love with one another in Thomas (Tim Kalkof) small café, which the Israeli-based Oren (Roy Miller)has apparently visited previously, since he not only orders up the baker’s German Black Forest (Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte) Cake, which the thin man chows down with relish, but orders a container of Thomas’ cinnamon cookies, which his Israeli wife, Anat (Sarah Adler), he reports, loves. After finishing his sweets, the stranger asks if the baker might suggest what Oren might buy as a birthday gift for his young son. After inquiring what the father does for a living—Oren works for an Israeli-German train corporation—he suggests a nearby toy shop where model trains are made and painted by hand. And we suddenly realize, when he asks if Thomas might accompany him to the shop, that something is a bit odd here. By next scene we see are the couple about to kiss.

 

      The next scenario already establishes that the men have become regular lovers, Oren living with Thomas every time he visits Berlin. Yet, Grazier creates an even more subtle relationship between the two as Thomas queries the obviously bisexual Oren about his sex-life with Anat, suggesting that he, too, might share an interest in women. In short, before we have gone far into this film the director has already established at attitude of sexualities that accords with his equal presentation of massive cultural differences, a young German male living with an Israeli Jewish man.

      When Oren leaves to return to Jerusalem this time, he forgets both his keys and the cinnamon cookies, leading Thomas to call him on his cellphone. There is no answer, again and again, until finally he attempts to contact his lover at his office, where he told that Oren has died in a car accident. And it is at this point where Grazier’s would-be tale of an odd gay couple becomes something even stranger, as Thomas determines to travel to Jerusalem to discover, so we might imagine, what happened to his former companion.

      My clause, “so we might imagine,” is important since the director never tells us what his characters are truly thinking, but represents it only in their silent actions, made even more silent in Thomas’ case when he arrives in the Hebrew-speaking world of Israel, where people can communicate with him only in English. Things are not made easier by the fact that, as Grazier clearly shows us, his world does easily embrace outsiders—particularly Germanoutsiders.

      Moreover, the audience is itself put on edge as we recognize that this particular outsider is almost literally stalking Oren’s wife and child Itai, going so far, with the use of Oren’s left-behind keys, as to open up a locker at a local swimming club and slip in to the dead man’s swimming trunks.

      Ultimately, he even finds employment as a dishwasher/shopper in the café that Anat owns, gradually inserting himself into her and Itai’s life. Given the stresses on Oren’s widow and son, not only the sudden loss of their major provider and clearly a loving husband and father, but along with the constant religious reminders impressed upon her by her brother Moti (Zohar Strauss), it is not terribly difficult for Thomas to enter their lives. When her son suddenly goes missing as a runaway from school, the baker is asked to take over the kitchen, pitting peppers so that that they might be stuffed. We know what she does not, that he is an expert chef, and that he now will be unable to resist the empty oven. Yet the very fact that he opens the oven to bake his delicious cookies is perceived by some as a grave indiscretion.

      When Itai arrives at the café, Thomas skillfully handles the situation by serving him up a hot chocolate and, when Itai finally comes into the kitchen by his own will, allowing him to help decorate the cookies. It is a lovely scene wherein we realize that Thomas might also be a loving father to a child, one which the returning Anat witnesses from a nearby window.

       Yet her brother is furious when he discovers that Thomas has dared to open the stove, which might mean that his sister would lose her Kosher status. And just like the endless microphonic calls to Sabbat, his are shouts of exclusion rather than embracement. However, the not so religious Anat continues to sell Thomas’ cookies to great success. Although Moti may be wary, he helps to find Thomas a nice apartment and invites him to Sabbath dinner. When he later shows up, invited, to Itai’s birthday party with a delicious cake in hand and somewhat drenched from a rainstorm that has impeded his visit, Anat tells him to change into her husband’s clothes, and the tale spins round to an artful conclusion.

      Finally made curious about her husband’s remaining documents, she opens the box to discover his numerous receipts from Thomas’ Berlin bakery and begins to perceive the truth—which in this lovely film is never openly spoken. Eventually the two, Thomas and Amat, have sex, soon after which her brother hands him a ticket back to Berlin.

       Amat, the seemingly accepting one, however, follows him to Berlin. We don’t know whether she plans to confront him or to begin a new life with her husband’s former lover in another world. As throughout so much of this lovely film, the intentions of the characters, even their intimate feelings, remain secret and are kept in silence. Individuals behave in ways that cannot always be known, only witnessed in their actions or what we believe are their actions. Love and sexuality are always an undiscovered territory that cannot be easily explained.  

Los Angeles, December 12, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Ingmar Bergman | Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light)

December 15, 2018, 10:01 am

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the betrayals of christ

by Douglas Messerli

Ingmar Bergman (writer and director) Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light) / 1963

Generally linked with Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly of 1961, and The Silence, released later in 1963, Bergman’s Winter Light is at the center of a trilogy about mid-to-late-life angst and loss of faith, themes which interlink these works with many of this director’s films.

     Indeed, in some respects, the pastor at the heart of this drama, Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand), is related to the cruel bishop, Edvard Vergérus who Emelie Ekdahl marries after her husband Oscar’s death. And like the Bishop, Tomas, who has also lost his wife, is partially responsible for a death, in this case a parishioner in crisis, Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow), who terrified by the cultural, political, and financial rise of the Chinese—an oddly contemporary concern—brings him to lose the belief that the world will survive, a theme that further resonates with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Swedish-made film, The Sacrifice, particularly when the fisherman Jonas commits suicide after meeting with the pastor to discuss his fears.

      
     On top of this, Tomas, who has been having a secret affair since the death of his wife with the local school teacher, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), chooses this day to declare how much he despises her, while still taking her along to Jonas’ house to tell that man’s pregnant wife, Karin (Gunnel Lindblom) of her husband’s death.

    Beyond that, Tomas is suffering from the symptoms of a very bad cold, and even more importantly is rapidly losing his entire congregation. By day’s end no one shows up for his evening service, despite that fact that he orders the bells rung and moves forward to a homily delivered to only his staff.

   Even if this might be represented as a kind of survival tale, a story of a man who, despite all evidence to the contrary, is still able to declare that “God is holy and that all the earth is full of His glory,” we recognize there is no glory any longer in Tomas’ small-town world. He is now been emptied of everything that might have represented as a glorious world, he unable to deal with his own disbelief, without love, and without even a purpose in his life—with no one there to whom he can preach what he himself perceives as lies.

   Bergman fills in his barebones plot with intense conversations which involve his various discussions with others, with Märta and through her schoolmarm pronunciations argues that Tomas needs her simply because cannot to continue to exist without love; his failed communications with Jonas; and even the arguments of his loyal sexton, Algot Frövik (Allan Edwall) who poses some of the deepest questions of this film: Why is so much time of the story of Christ’s life spent on his crucifixion and death, when Christ had to live his life with the betrayal of his beloved communicants and God himself. It is both God and man who work together to destroy the faith that some posit into the world, and the issue is at the heart of this film's believers, including the non-believing Karin and the abused Märta, the latter of whom finally in the last scenes begins to pray.

    
     | I suppose for many who no longer believe in religion, Bergman’s film, in this case, might seem almost an artifact from a culture plagued by fears of insignificance and doubt, stirred up by the long, dark winters in a country just too close to the arctic tundra.

     As a non-believer, I too feel that if only these tortured individuals might free themselves from their deeply religious reflections, they might move out into the world again with love, faith in the future, and some realization of why they are on earth.

     Yet, even if you were to remove the religious constraints on these individuals, I fear that what lies behind their fears—strong senses of doubt about their own abilities, hatred of themselves and others, and just fear of the future—might not be erased. Within the “winter light” through they see through the “glass darkly,” their visions, religious or not, are distorted. In order to be made to feel worthy of the light, Bergman seems to suggest, they need to find some feelings within themselves that could help them redeem their lives. Perhaps prayer, Märta’s solution, is all they can hope for. Or, as in the final sequence of this trio of dark films, turning inward to a kind of silence that in simply listening to others and the self they might find a way to truth. Perhaps it was not Christ who has betrayed us in our doubts, so the director suggests, but we who have again betrayed Christ. Accordingly, this film becomes a strangely reconfirming work to be seen near Christmas.

Los Angeles, December 15, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen | The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

December 20, 2018, 10:10 am

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masters of mayhem and death

by Douglas Messerli

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (writers and directors) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / 2018

Those bad-boy brothers of American cinema are at it again in their new anthology of 6 short films, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, serving up along with Thanksgiving dinner, mayhem and death. I used to describe Joel and Ethan Coen as being cynical, but over the years I guess I become inured to their so very well-made films, now preferring to perceive most of their works as American versions of the Grand Guignol theater, a popular French-born format mostly featuring rape and death, with larceny, robbery, and other dark-doings dropped in for free.

 

     In many ways their film-making is a sort of arthouse version of the films of Tod Browning with a large dash of James Whale thrown into the brew of spices of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whipped up with a postmodern syrup that gives us a stew that despite its sour aftertastes is utterly delicious. Yes, I mix my metaphors, but so too do they.

     

      Throughout their work the brothers have treated the most serious topics not simply the way the Grand Guignol masters did, as subjects of absolute fascination and utter significance, but as only Americans might, with a sense of innocence and good humor. If you’re going to kidnap a baby, you might as well leave him on the roof of your car (Raising Arizona, the very first Coen brother’s movie I saw with Dennis Phillips in Sacramento), if you intend to create a Frankenstein, you can’t do better than Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men). And it is no accident that these always winking kids choose Western shoot-‘em-up myths as the background for some of their films, in particular True Grit and now the 6 films that make up The Ballad.

       It doesn’t hurt that the Coens’ work with some of the very best cinematographers (in this case Bruno Delbonnel), composers (central to the film replete with singing cowboys are the musical compositions in this work by Carter Burwell). And it very much does matter that over the years they have employed some of the best of Hollywood (and non-Hollywood) actors as their performers. In this instance, the Coen’s have gathered young and older actors such as Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Jefferson Mays, Tyne Daly, and numerous others—all quite excellent.

 

      Such a large concept, its immense cast, and various locations—the most difficult of which was “The Gal Who Got Rattled” which required 14 wagons shipped to Nebraska where they filmed and many sets of stubborn oxen and other desert locations for the first, title film and the second, “Near Algodones,” wherein the brothers satirically recreate a “literal” pan-shot when the bank teller who has been robbed comes after the robber draped with pans for protection from any bullets that might be sent his way.

      There are lots of such witty cinematic allusions, including the hilarious rise of the singing cowboy as an angel, lyre in hands, after his death or the wonderful theatrical mish-mash of Shelley, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Lincoln in one of the very best of these films, “Meal Ticket,” in which the lovely armless and legless actor is replaced with a chicken who seems, like the horse Clever Hans, to know how to add and subtract.

       Although I am well known as the spoiler of all times for those who hate to not know ahead of time what the story is—I have myself never cared about knowing the “plot” before seeing a film, focusing instead of how that story is told—I will spoil no further plots this time ‘round. I think I’ve already suggested that all of them ends in single or multiple deaths. The stories are all fascinating in the manner of Bret Harte and O. Henry, with multiple ironic twists and turns. And the Coen’s use of the Western American landscape is stunning and complex.

     

        This time, moreover, the cleaver brothers have chosen not to release this through a major studio—studios who might surely have all turned the proposition down after 25 years, purportedly, of their work on the project—in order to get their work produced, in this case by the ambitious on-line streaming service Netflix, who released the film to theaters only for a short period, thus delimiting theater revenues. Somewhat like the great European directors, among them Godard and Fassbinder, the Coens have now perceived how to go around the system in order to create something that Hollywood producers simply cannot perceive as safe investments. But oh what a lovely contribution this is. In the hands of Joel and Ethan Coen death is a lovely thing to behold, frightening and as brutal as it may be. I don’t quite comprehend how Netflix evaluate their successes, except for their overall subscribers; and this work has generally been ignored in all the award season selections (which it certainly shouldn’t have been), but kudos for them for having funded such a controversial masterwork.

Los Angeles, December 20, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Jean-Luc Godard | Les Carabiniers

December 22, 2018, 9:21 am

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seeing the world

by Douglas Messerli

Roberto Rossellini, Jean Gruault, and Jean-Luc Godard (screenplay), Jean-Luc Godard (director) Les Carabiniers / 1963, USA 1967

Way back in 1963, the great French director Jean-Luc Godard showed us where many of today’s “yellow vest” protesters come from, the country outposts of the French landscape, some, like the Stan and Laurel-like brothers, Ulysses (Marino Masé) and Michel-Ange (Patrice Moullet)—about as far away as you can get from the great voyager and the talented artist—living, as these two do, in a ramshackle hut with their equally ill-named wives, Venus and Cleopatra (Genevieve Gaela and Catherine Ribero), hometown beauties who are left behind. These poor idiots haven’t even been to Paris.

      Suddenly they are visited my two military carabiniers (riflemen) who deliver them a letter signed by the King inviting them to join the war. What war, you might ask? In Godard’s dark anti-militarist satire, it hardly matters as—after being assured that, as Roger Ebert summarized, “they will be allowed to loot, plunder, deface, see the sights and in general have a smashing time. ‘Will we be able to slaughter the innocent?’ asks Ulysses. "Of course," the carabinier snaps, ‘this is war.’" They are even promised swimming pools, Maseratis and Ferraris. With pure anticipation, the brothers enlist.

 
     The war or, I should say, wars that follow represent a trek through Europe, the mid-east, the far-east and even the US that might suggest any imaginable battle that existed in the 20^thcentury. And their adventures, other than their occasional participation in precisely those activities they were promised—plundering, raping, torturing, and creating general mayhem—is structured around postcards which they send home featuring the sites (among them the pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa) along with their impressions of their adventures. Indeed, these wide-eyed innocents might almost be perceived to have become true adventurers and artists in their discovery and evident enjoyment of the world they finally get an opportunity to encounter.

      Surely, the scenes of violence and death Godard shows us are not pleasant, but even the would-be heroes of this piece are made by Godard to be slightly ridiculous as they spout political slogans while standing before firing squads or race unnecessarily into harm’s way, whereupon the idiot brothers and others simply shoot them down.

      Along the way there are also delightful scenes, as when one of the brothers visits his first movie theater, attempting to join the naked star in her onscreen bathtub. And, even occasionally, a war scene itself, as when Godard, working in black-and-white, suddenly lights up the screen with a burst of fireworks that signifies to the villagers and to the two dumb brothers that the war is now over, represents a startingly beautiful series of images.

      Pauline Kael inexplicably found the first hour of this 1 hour and 20-minute film “pure hell”—as I have made it apparent through the My Year volumes, I do not share the adoration that some of her readers have awarded her over the years—yet I do agree with her that the best scenes of Godard’s black comedy are its last, where we discover that the riches the brothers have returned home with consist of a suitcase of postcards, catalogued into various topics, which tell the story of their numerous adventures. Like tourist connoisseurs, the two lay out for their wives, again and again, the signifiers of their many years of travels, lovingly displaying them with perhaps a far greater joy than their actual experiences. Like my mother, who always enjoyed travel more in hindsight that, in reality, these brothers almost come to worship their past peregrinations.

      Alas, as Godard makes in this black comedy clear, all good things must come to an end. As soldiers for the losing King, Ulysses and Michel-Ange are now traitors, and new carabiniers suddenly appear upon the landscape, this time stand them up against the wall to shoot them as participants on the wrong side of the previous wars. As the director makes clear, there are never any winners in warfare, socially nor as survivors in real-life. Through the voice of his narrator Godard reiterates who these innocent fools they have been all along: “Henceforth the two brothers slept for an eternity, believing the brain, in decay, functioned beyond death, and its dreams are what constitute Paradise.”

        If this represents high sarcasm against the ignorant faith of the masses, it is also—given the scenes of simple joy they express in reviewing the images of their life adventures—an almost Pasolini-like praise for the common man. Sometimes delusions are simply better than reality. And, after all, unlike so many of their peers, they did see the world.

Los Angeles, December 22, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Francis Lee | God's Own Country

December 28, 2018, 9:04 am

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learning how to love

by Douglas Messerli

Francis Lee (writer and director) God’s Own Country / 2017

Why is it, I have to explore, why I felt Francis Lee’s 2017 film about a young, gay Yorkshire sheep farmer (Josh O’Connor) and a Romanian migrant temporary worker (Alec Secăreanu) to be totally believable and touching, whereas I found Ang Lee’s 2005 gay romance, Brokeback Mountain, about a gay relationship between two sheep-herders utterly unconvincing?

     It wasn’t that I was surprised by the sudden sexual passion between the two rugged Wyoming-based shepherds who get the hots for one another; as I wrote in my review of that year:

The first part of the film, a long laconic testimony to the lonely life of the sheep-herding cowboys and an evocation of the beauty of the landscape in which they work, was perfectly reasonable. And I think it is not at all illogical or even out of the ordinary that these two lonely men, both of whom had come from dysfunctional families, would develop a kind of unspoken bond, even be attracted to one another, and, upon that lonely mountain, find themselves having sex. I don’t care how loud the Christian coalitions yell, men—even straight men which both of these cowboys proclaim themselves to be—sometimes have sex in situations where they exist for long periods of time without women. So, their rather violent sexual outing—although we later suspect that it is not the first time for the Jake Gyllenhall character, Jack Twist—is quite believable.

     
















 The central character of Francis Lee’s movie, Johnny, in this more nuanced work, begins also loving 

with rough and quick sex, the young farmer grabbing up anyone he might encounter in his rural isolation for a quick fuck in the back of his van in which he carries his cows to market. His sexuality is clearly a thing of frustration and anger.

     The young lad with whom we first encounter him having sex tries to encourage a deeper connection through an invite for a drink at a local pub, which Johnny brusquely refuses. He is bitter, forced as he is to run his father, Martin Saxby’s, farm since the elder has suffered a stroke and can now barely walk.

      His grandmother, Deidre (Gemma Jones), with her gorgon-like personality doesn’t help. Johnny is clearly locked up in a world not to his liking and which he has no chance to escape. His only outs are his drunken evenings at a nearby pub, after which he is apparently delivered up by a local taxi, whose drive is forced to literally deposit him, like a piece of rubbish, in the driveway of the farm, a scene which the temporary Romanian worker, Gheorghe, painfully observes from the small trailer near the house in which they have ensconced him.

 

      Johnny’s first encounter with Gheorghe, given the Yorkshireman’s unhappiness with his life, is not a pleasant one, although we immediately sense that the handsome Gheorghe, given his deferential attitude to life and his gentle responses to the brutal comments of his new employer and the conditions in which he must now live (including an dialect so peculiar that subtitles are needed), might be perfect to calm the angry young man. And that is, precisely, what makes this film so wonderful.

      Gheorghe, a bit like a saint of Pasolini’s Theorama, appears out of the blue in order to gradually tame the beast in Johnny, showing him, without saying a word, how beautiful his Yorkshire landscape truly is, that even a newborn baby sheep “runt,” might be nursed back to health—in one of the most 

painful but enlightening moments of this film, he takes up a knife to skin a stillborn sheep, placing the pelt around the runt, which when the dead sheep’s mother smells, encourages her to nurse it—and helps Johnny to learn that another male body is not just an ass to be intruded, but a being to caress and even kiss. Sheep are not simply something to be sheared, but produce, if you are knowledgeable, a beautiful cheese that is not only delicious but possibly financially beneficial.

      For the bitter Johnny, these lessons, particularly when he realizes that he cannot possibly bring his new lover into his house, are learned slowly. And when drunkenly and casually he chooses to fuck another young gay man in the local pub in the presence of his new “teacher,” Gheorghe determines, as the agreement has always been, to move on. The angel has flown off to Scotland.

      When Johnny’s father has another stroke, however, the son realizes that he must now take charge, and despite the dismissive stares of the gorgon grandmother, determines to find his Romanian lover and bring him home and, presumably, into his own bed.

       

     These events, large and small, are what make the love between these two unlikely gay lovers so very different from the other Lee’s simple-minded, lust-induced cowboys. We believe in this relationship because we can comprehend it; we understand what they do and don’t have in common and perceive how together they have worked to create something different, a world unthinkable in the Yorkshire wilds. In order to have a true relationship, you can’t just drop in from time to time on a married man to restore that “oh such special feeling”; you need to wake up, recognize yourself and your love and act on that.

      Francis Lee, unlike Ang Lee, using his own experience as the basis of his filmmaking truly comprehended what love (any love, not just gay) is all about. And in a world in which gays are not yet accepted, you need to simply take a stand, bring the boy into the house and let him work with you to make a better life together. Even the gorgons will surely back off; besides Gheorghe is a much better cook! And that goat cheese he has left behind looks so very delicious.

Los Angeles, December 28, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

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Yasujirō Ozu (早春 Sōshun) Early Spring

December 30, 2018, 9:35 am

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going hungry

by Douglas Messerli

Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) (早春Sōshun) Early Spring / 1956

Yasujirō Ozu’s longest film to survive, Early Spring, might almost be described as a melodrama, a bit in the manner of the works of American directors Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk—except while the American films were generally about women who were unfaithful and doubting. In Ozu’s great film it is the husband, Shoji Sugiyama (Ryō Ikebe) who cheats on his wife,Masako (Chikage Awashima). 

     

      Working in an office that is just as impersonal, although far more crowded, as Billy Wilder’s terrifying vistas in The Apartment, Sugiyama is unhappy in his daily routine, which Ozu indicates from the very first scene of his film with the sound of his alarm clock and his character’s trudge, along with hundreds of other workers, to central Tokyo, where they are locked into small rooms for accounting, typing, and fact-checking, with an occasional invite out by the higher-ups. The best such a common worker can hope for is to gradually move up in the corporate structure over many years, but like his fellow worker who dies during the movie, Sugiyama has little hope for advancement. For reasons unknown, his and Masako’s only son has himself died—one suspects of lack of nutrition, since the family sometimes cannot even afford their daily intake of rice. Masako is sometimes forced to take advantage of her tart-speaking mother, who runs a local restaurant-bar, in order to simply bring enough food to their table.

      Throughout this film, in fact, Sugiyama often goes hungry, his lunch being interrupted by officials, his dinners replaced by drunken nights with his friends with whom he plays mahjong. He is a man who hungers; so is it any wonder when, invited by an wide-eyed office typist, Chiyo Kaneko (Keiko Kishi), nicknamed because of her large eyes, “Goldfish,” that he is quite literally seduced into joining the office hikers (a thematic in several Japanese films), and even further implicated into her life after she suggests they take the slackers way by catching a hitch on the back of a local truck passing by. Indeed, their fellow would-be hikers are envious of their decision, begging that they too might join them.

      Ozu subtly makes this simple act into a kind of transgression, as the two rides past their fellow workers in complete enjoyment of their “rest,” while the rest must slowly slog on. You can almost hear the gossip that follows roiling up among their fellow employees. And soon after even Masako suspects that something is going on with her husband, while his friends determine to celebrate a rice party wherein, since Sugiyama never shows up, they castigate Kaneko for beginning an affair with their married friend.

      The bleakness of Sugiyama’s life gets even darker when Masako leaves their home to return to her mother, admitting that she has discovered a lip-stick stained handkerchief in his husband’s pocket, while the confused worker is asked to relocate to a provincial city where the company has interests—a move which might be seen either as a demotion or a possibility of new potential—which, obviously, will also take him away from his only current pleasure.

      Ozu, himself, argued that he was attempting "to portray what you might call the pathos of the white-collar life,” while still making it quite clear that Masako, nonetheless, is a good and quite faithful wife. What makes the Japanese director’s work so very different from any Hollywood melodrama us that these humans, who have made grave mistakes, can return to one another and forgive, that their love is somehow deeper than their own desperations.

      We can never know whether Sugiyama and his wife’s lives will improve—Ozu never allows simple summaries of his explorations of deep family life—but we can hope that this unhappy couple may somehow again find their way through life. Ozu’s vision, with regard to the vicissitudes of post-World War II Japanese family life, still believes in the unions into which they originally committed themselves. If they fail, it is also a product of the culture at large, not simply their personal inabilities. One might even argue that for Ozu, family life is the only way to survive such tragic circumstances. Alone, one can find no true solution for survival.

Los Angeles, December 30, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

André Téchiné | Impardonnables (Unforgiveable)

January 12, 2019, 8:24 am

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life in venice

by Douglas Messerli

André Téchiné and Mehdi Ben Attia (writers), André Téchiné (director) Impardonnables (Unforgiveable) / 2011

Although André Téchiné’s 2011 film, Unforgiveable, was fairly well-received by critics, it still was not seen to be as likeable or coherent as his early films such as Wild Reeds or The Witnesses or even a later film like Being 17; as The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, for example, observed: "Unforgivable isn't one of Mr. Téchiné's greatest achievements, but it's engrossing even when its increasingly populated story falters, tripped up by unpersuasive actions, connections and details."

      The wide range of characters who weave in and out of novelist Francis’ (André Dussollier) life—his sudden wife, the real estate agent Judith (Carole Bouquet), his daughter Alice (Mélanie Thierry), who just as suddenly abandons her own daughter, Vicky (Zoé Duthion), the female, heavy drinking detective, Anna Maria (Adriana Asti), who previously had a lesbian relationship with Judith, the wealthy spoiled small-time drug dealer, Alvise (Andrea Pergolesi), with whom Alice is deeply in love, and Jérémie(Mauro Conte), Anna Maria’s violent, possibly repressed homosexual son, who Francis hires for follow Judith after he suspects her of extramarital affairs—almost all seem to be dropped into this stewpot of a story without any explanation of how they have come together or what their feelings are for one other. You only need to read the almost incomprehensible plot summary on Wikipedia to perceive the utter zaniness of the story, in which the characters shift back and forth in the French and Italian languages, the tale inexplicably taking place on a distant island,Sant' Erasmo, near Venice.

      I won’t even try, in this case, to reiterate why the characters are doing what they are and how they arrived into their complex relationships. The movie doesn’t seem to know and certainly does not attempt to explain it. But I think that is the point. These figures might as well be out of the novel Francis is frustratedly trying to write. They are somewhat melodramatic, and, except for Francis, are beautiful imaginations of figures trapped in a world nothing is truly knowable.

      A bit like the characters in Gilbert Sorrentino’s epic fiction Mulligan Stewthese creations speed up and down the Venice cannels without any real purpose except to attempt to get closer to each other. They are figures of the imagination: the authors’ (the story was based on a fiction by Philippe Djian), our own, and their own—all out of control. All are totally unfit for their assigned professions, perhaps even Francis who seems to be orchestrating their interrelationships.

 

     Even if Judith might be an excellent real-estate agent, she is simply, in her beauty and youth, not appropriate as Francis’ island-bride, temporarily bedding down with the boy is following her; Alice is neither a good daughter nor a capable mother; Alvise is incompetent as a member of the Venice aristocracy, as a petty drug agent, and as a lover; the self-hating beautyJérémie is as clumsy in his detective duties as Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau; the vodka swigging Anna Maria might be better sitting at a bar and swilling down drinks on a couch.

      And yet, somehow Téchiné, along with his impressive cast, turns this nonsense into a fascinating human farce in which you actually care for all of their outcomes. In the end, all the film’s characters have some kind of reconciliation. Francis finishes writing. Anna Maria returns from France after having successfully found Alice. Upon Alvise’s imprisonment, Alice returns to Francis. And Francis finally serves as a kind of father to Jérémie, not only saving him from a suicide attempt but forcibly disciplining him for his inability to love his mother and for his violence for people whose ideas he finds threatening. By film’s end, Francis invites the lovely Judith back into his own Paris world.

     Perhaps art is greater life; or, perhaps life triumphs over art. In this beautiful work, we can never certain. Are these all figures of Francis’ imagination or has he, through his writer’s block, been able to finally integrate his life with the ghosts of his present and past?

Los Angeles, January 12, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

     

Joey Kuhn | Those People

January 13, 2019, 9:39 am

≫ Next: Chantal Ackerman | Les Rendez-vous d’Anna

≪ Previous: André Téchiné | Impardonnables (Unforgiveable)

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a world somewhere else

by Douglas Messerli

Joey Kuhn and Grainne O'Hara Belluomo (writers), Joey Kuhn (director) Those People / 2015

Joey Kuhn’s 2015 film Those People is hardly a profound film, preferring to study desire rather than intense romance. But this is also its gift, given that for one of the few times ever that sex is not at the center of a LGBT film.

      Unfortunately, what Kuhn replaces the sexual element with a focus on wealth. The young Charlie (Jonathan Gordon), a not-very-convincing artist, who mostly paints portraits, pines for his fellow boarding-school rich-boy friend Sebastian (Jason Ralph), a character who quickly comes to be perceived as a kind of stand-in for the scandalous Bernie Madoff, whose son, Mark,  committed suicide 2 years after his father’s arrest for defrauding thousands of Americans.

      Mark, in real life, was apparently straight, having two wives and children to boot. But in this film his fictional personae is a hard-to-get but needy young beauty who seeks out a lot of people, men and women, in order to fulfill his own sense of worth. Unfortunately, Charlie, openly gay, has fallen for him, and finds his demands impossible to reject, including Sebastian’s demand that he move in with him. A bit like Gatsby, Sebastian (a character that shares some of the sadomasochistic appeal of the Tennessee Williams-scripted film’s character Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer) is a man so compelling that the confused Charlie simply cannot resist his charms. And, in a sense, the film, symbolically speaking, is about the young artist’s attempt to digest and spit out the bones of his own attraction to the man who has been taking advantage of him.

     Fortunately, or unfortunately—depending on how one ultimately interprets this movie—Charlie also encounters, on his desultory travels through New York’s bars with Sebastian, an older piano player, Tim (Haaz Sleiman), a Lebanese man, who might at first appear simply as a part-time player, but whom we later discover is also a concert pianist of some note. The two hit it off immediately, the younger painter quickly bonding with the elder. When the two finally do couple, if only for a short while, we know immediately that Tim is the right man to lead Charlie into the new life he deserves.

     But, of course, youth never can quite comprehend what they need to do, and as Kuhn demonstrates, there are always endless twists and turns as this younger man attempts to sort out his feelings for Sebastian in relationship for the far more sophisticated and culturally separated Tim.

     I do wish Kuhn’s film had more fully explored these vast distances between the obviously privileged Charlie, his friend Sebastian, and the far more talented pianist, but the director seems locked into his pattern of outsider desire. For Charlie, even if he has found his way into the world of wealth, is still an outsider; and so too is Sebastian, now detested by everyone around him for his father’s sins. Strangely, the true outsider, Tim, seems more at home in his chosen world, having obviously made his way from a bar-room pianist to a concert-one. The privileged are, at least in Kuhn’s terms, the truly disadvantaged, without truly realizing it.

 

      Even if Charlie is somehow, rather unconvincingly able to talk this version of Madoff’s son out of committing suicide, we finally realize if the young man is to survive, he must leave his desires for wealth, beauty, and grandiose comforts for something else, something foreign even to his life. He does toast goodbye to Sebastian, but we can’t yet be sure, at film’s end, whether he can reconnoiter with Tim, who has now moved on to a position as the pianist for the San Francisco Symphony.

     Only the film’s title suggests that he might be able to now join the human race against “those people.” Yet we can never know certainly who those people are, the ones on the outside or the ones within, for Tim has now also entered the world of privilege, and if Charlie rejoins his friend he will also enter that world. It appears that in Kuhn’s vision the people of whom he speaks are always somewhere else from where he or we are.

Los Angeles, January 13, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

Chantal Ackerman | Les Rendez-vous d’Anna

January 18, 2019, 10:05 am

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a way out

by Douglas Messerli

Chantal Ackerman Les Rendez-vous d’Anna / 1978

I might now finally, after all of these years, confess that every time I see a new movie, play, or performance, I become somewhat nervous: I long for each writer, actor, and filmmaker to be just perfect, that I might find in the art a sort of personal transformation and, at the very least, allow me a life-long admiration of the work. I am nervous, not for my own possible disdain and even disliking of the work, but in the way if I might myself be the actor, the writer, the filmmaker. Will the audience 

see what I am trying to do, or what the movie or the play is attempting to express. I guess you might describe me as an over-empathetic viewer, which may be why I often find meaning where others simply point to the flaws.

      There are a number of exceptions to this rule, however, in film Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, Yasujirō Ozu —although I have written a few negative reviews of each of these masters—and now Chantal Akerman, all of whom make me immediately feel comfortable in their art, so much so that I can simply sit back and enjoy without any of my self-created discomfort.

      Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Akerman’s 1978 film, despites its somewhat dour themes, accordingly, was a film which immediately engaged me and allowed me just to sit back in my office-desk chair and enjoy its pleasures.

      That seems like a strange thing to say about a somewhat autobiographical film which, in parts, explain the Belgian director’s own suicide in 2015. The central character, traveling throughout Europe in this work, Anna Silver (Aurore Clément) meets en route from Essen to Brussels, is like Ackerman a film director, a beautiful woman in great demand. Yet she chooses inexpensive hotels, trains filled with German immigrants, and far-too-brief encounters with people she had relationships with along the way, including the mother of a man she has turned down for marriage twice (Ackerman, herself, was lesbian), and her own mother—brilliantly performed by Lea Massari, the gone-missing young woman of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura—the perfect choice, perhaps, since Anna is herself a missing woman, clearly unable to interact with any of the figures with whom she has her “rendez-vous.”

      As J. Hoberman notes: “Anna is a portrait of a woman, actually a self-portrait…a 28-year-old filmmaker who is the Belgian-born child of Holocaust survivors, [who] is a stand-in for Akerman, traveling from one European city to another to introduce screenings of her movie.”

 

     Perhaps no other director has been so willing to cinematically proclaim her own failures, recreating slightly autobiographical portraits in I you she he and the wonderful News from Home, in which her mother’s impassioned correspondence plays a major role.

      If Anna seems cold and dispassionate, we can well relate to her disorientation in the post-World War II Germany and Belgium. No one she meets seems to any longer be at home or even comprehend what “home” might mean. They all speak an amalgam of languages, having learned their new tongues just skillfully enough to be complimented on their fluidity. German, French, Turkish, and numerous other tongues (we should recall that Ackerman’s own country is a bilingual world of French and Dutch). There is no possibility, one might argue, of being perfectly at home with ones own native tongue.

      The Germany this film portrays, from Essen through Cologne and elsewhere, is presented as an urban nightmare of signs and passages, sending its citizens in the directions of their presumed destinations. Anna’s arrival in Essen seemed, even to me who has never been there, so familiar of the German landscape that I once might have visited the city. The giant cathedral of Cologne is glimpsed only in the far distance. This world might almost be the same (although obviously different) from a US journey up the east coast on Amtrak.

      The past and present in this film is glimpsed only in quick images, a tie some male guest has left in the room where Anna has ensconced herself; in a train full of “outsiders,” which might almost resemble one of Donald Trump’s racist nightmares; a German who complains that his wife has “run off” with a man from Turkey, as if the director were signaling Fassbinder’s film of 4 years earlier, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

      This is, after all, a world of fear, a woman whose family died in the Holocaust, freely traveling through the very territory which sent them to their deaths, not only Germany, but Belgium itself. Anna’s world is not only one of repressed memories, but of missed telephone calls, where the only possible communication is through missed messages on answering machines—a world in which even the most beloved figures are always out to lunch. It is a bleak world not for the tourists, a post-war landscape where only those who have been born into it cannot ever quite reconfirm their existences. And, despite her beauty and talent, Anna cannot quite find her place in it.

      As I mentioned above, it helps to explain why this so very gifted director, whose films seem so natural that I never fear upon entering them, finally sought a way out.

Los Angeles, January 18, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

Films discussed (listed alphabetically)

January 20, 2019, 7:14 am

≫ Next: Jacques Rivette | La Religieuse (The Nun)

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Films discussed (ltised alphabetically by director)

A new table of contents which I will be gradually developing. Meanwhile the old one is below.

George Abbott and Stanley Donen Damn Yankees/ 1958

George Abbott and Stanley Donen Damn Yankees / 1958 [short discussion on dance]

George Abbott and Stanley Donen The Pajama Game / 1957

George Abbott and Stanley Donen The Pajama Game/ 1957 [short discussion on dance]

Naji Abu Nowar ذيب‎‎,(Theeb) / 2014, USA 2015

Maren Ade Toni Erdmann / 2016

Andrew Ahn Spa Night / 2016

Chantal Akerman La chambre / 1972

Chantal Akerman La Folie Almayer (Almayer’s Folly) / 2011
Chantal Akerman Je tu il elle (I you he she) / 1974

Chantal Akerman Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles/ 1975

ChantalAkerman News from Home / 1976

Chantal Akerman Les Rendez-vous d’Anna / 1978

Percy Aldon Bagdad Cafe / 1987

Robert Aldrich Kiss Me Deadly / 1955

Marc Allégret Fanny / 1932

Irwin Allen Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / 1961

Lewis Allen The Uninvited / 1944

Will Allen Holy Hell / 2016

Woody Allen Annie Hall / 1977

Woody Allen Blue Jasmine / 2013

Woody Allen Café Society / 2016

Woody Allen Crimes and Misdemeanors / 1989

Woody Allen Manhattan / 1979

Woody Allen Midnight in Paris / 2011

Woody Allen Zelig / 1983

Pedro Almodóvar ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) /  1990

Pedro Almodóvar Le ley del deseo (Law of Desire) / 1987

Pedro Almodóvar Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) / 2009

Pedro Almodóvar Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited) / 2013

Pedro Almodóvar Julieta / 2016

Pedro Almodóvar Matador / 1986

Pedro Almodóvar La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) / 2011

Pedro Almodóvar Todo sobre mi Madre (All About My Mother) / 1999

Pedro Almodóvar Volver / 2007

Canner Alper (see Mehmet Binay)

Robert Altman The Company / 2003

Robert Altman Gosford Park / 2001

Robert Altman The Long Goodbye / 1973

Robert Altman Nashville / 1975

Robert Altman The Player / 1992

Robert Altman Popeye / 1980

Robert Altman A Prairie Home Companion / 2006

Robert Altman A Wedding / 1978

Michael Anderson The Quiller Memorandum / 1966

Paul Thomas Anderson Boogie Nights / 1997

Paul Thomas Anderson Inherent Vice / 2014

Paul Thomas Anderson The Master / 2012

Paul Thomas Anderson Phantom Thread / 2017

Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel / 2014

Wes Anderson The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou / 2004

Wes Anderson Moonrise Kingdom / 2012

Eleanor Antin The Man without a World / 1991

Michelangelo Antonioni L'Avventura / 1960

Michelangelo Antonioni Blow-Up / 1966

Michelangelo Antonioni Il deserto rosso / The Red Desert / 1964

Michelangelo Antonioni L’Eclisse (Eclipse) / 1962

Michelangelo Antonioni I Vinti (The Vanquished) / 1953

Denys Arcand Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) / 2003

Nikolaj Arcel En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair) / 2012

Miguel Arteta Chuck & Buck / 2000

Miguel Arteta Chuck & Buck / 2000 (brief discussion)

Hal Ashby Being There / 1979

Don Askarian Musicians / 2000

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard Pygmalion / 1938

Richard Ayoade The Double / 2013, USA 2014

Lloyd Bacon Footlight Parade / 1933

Lloyd Bacon 42nd Street / 1933

Lloyd Bacon A Slight Case of Murder / 1938

Sean Baker The Florida Project / 2017

Sean Baker Tangerine / 2015

Ramin Bahrani Chop Shop / 2007

Ramin Bahrani Man Push Cart / 2005

Ramin Bahrani 99 Homes / 2015

Paul Bartel Eating Raoul / 1982

Paul Bartel Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills / 1989

Paul Bartel The Secret Cinema / 1966, released 1968

Ritesh Batra Dabba (The Lunchbox) / 2013, USA 2014

Yevgeni Bauer Posle smerti (After Death) / 1915

Yevgeni Bauer Sulmerki zenskoi Dushi (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul) / 1913

Yevgeni Bauer Umirayuschii lebed (The Dying Swan) / 1916

Noah Baumbach The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) / 2017

Jacques Becker Casque d’or / 1952

Jacques Becker Le Trou (The Hole) / 1960

Marco Bellocchio I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)/ 1965, USA 1968

Shyam Benegal Bhumika / 1977

Bruce Beresford Tender Mercies / 1983

Ingmar Bergman Ansiktet (The Magician) / 1958

Ingmar Bergman Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) / 1982, USA 1983

Ingmar Bergman Gycklarnas aft Autumn Sonata) / 1978

Ingmar Bergman Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light) / 1963

Ingmar Bergman En Passion (The Passion of Anna) / 1969, USA 1970

Ingmar Bergman Persona / 1966

Ingmar Bergman Såmson i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly) / 1961

Ingmar Bergman Skammen (Shame) / 1968

Ingmar Bergman Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) / 1957

Ingmar Bergman Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) / 1955

Ingmar Bergman Törst (Thirst) / 1949

Ingmar Bergman Tystnaden (The Silence) / 1963, USA 1964

Ingmar Bergman Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) / 1968

Busby Berkeley (musical director) Footlight Parade / 1933

Busby Berkeley (musical director) 42nd Street / 1933

Busby Berkeley The Gang’s All Here / 1943

Greg Berlanti Love, Simon / 2018

Bernardo Bertolucci La commare secca (The Grim Reaper) / 1962

Bernardo Bertolucci Il conformista (The Conformist) / 1970

Bernardo Bertolucci The Sheltering Sky / 1990

Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker / 2008, USA 2009

Mehmet Binayand Canner Alper Zenne Dancer / 2012

Mike Binder Black or White / 2014

Pierre Bismuth Where Is Rocky II? / 2016, USA 2017

Noel Black Pretty Poison / 1968

Shane Black Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang / 2005

Linda Bloodworth-Thomason Bridegroom: A Love Story, Unequaled / 2013

Budd Boetticher Comanche Station / 1960

Budd Boetticher Decision at Sundown / 1957

Budd Boetticher Ride Lonesome / 1959

Budd Boetticher The Tall T / 1957

Bertrand Bonello Saint Laurent / 2014

Frank Borzage Liliom / 1930

Frank Borzage Seventh Heaven / 1927

John Boulting Brighton Rock / 1947

Stan Brakhage Desistfilm / 1954

Stan Brakhage Dog Star Man / 1961-1964

   Prelude / 1962

   Dog Star Man, Part I / 1962

   Dog Star Man, Part II / 1963

   Dog Star Man, Part III / 1964

   Dog Star Man, Part IV / 1964

Stan Brakhage The Extraordinary Child / 1954

Stan Brakhage Interim / 1953

Stan Brakhage Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection / 1953

Stan Brakhage The Way to Shadow Garden / 1954

Stan Brakhage Wedlock House: An Intercourse / 1959

Paddy Breathnach Viva / 2015

Catherine Breillat Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) / 2009

Catherine Breillat Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress) / 2007

Robert Bresson L’Argent / 1983, USA limited release 1984

Robert Bresson Au Hasard, Balthazar / 1966, USA 1970

Robert Bresson Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent soufflé où il veut (A Man   

     Escaped or: The Wind Blows Where It Likes) / 1956, USA 1957

Robert Bresson Les Dames de Bois Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois Boulogne) / 1945

Robert Bresson Le diable problement (The Devil, Probably) / 1977

Robert Bresson Le Journal d’un cure / 1951, USA 1954

Robert Bresson Mouchette / 1967, USA 1970

Robert Bresson Pickpocket / 1959, USA 1963

Robert Bresson Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc) / 1962, USA 1965

Martin Brest Beverly Hills Cop / 1984

Richard Brooks Cat on a Hot Tin Roof / 1958

Richard Brooks Elmer Gantry / 1960

Richard Brooks In Cold Blood / 1967

Richard Brooks Sweet Bird of Youth / 1962

James Broughton Adventures of Jimmy / 1950

Clarence Brown Flesh and the Devil / 1926

Clarence Brown The Human Comedy / 1943

Clarence Brown Intruder in the Dust / 1949

Luis Buñuel ElÁngel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) / 1962

Luis Buñuel Belle de Jour / 1967

Luis Buñuel Un chien Andalou / 1929

Luis Buñuel En el viejo Tampico (Gran Casino) / 1947

Luis Buñuel Le journal d'une femme de chambre(Diary of a Chambermaid) / 1964

Luis Buñuel La joven (The Young One) / 1960

Luis Buñuel Cet obscur objet du désir (Ese oscuro objeto del deseo) (That Obscure Object of

     Desire) / 1977

Luis Buñuel Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) 1950

Luis Buñuel Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe / The Adventures of Robinson

      Crusoe)/ 1954 (US), 1955 (Mexico)

Luis Buñuel Símon del desierto (Simon of the Desert) / 1965

Luis Buñuel Tristana / 1970

Luis Buñuel Virdiana / 1961

John Butler Handsome Devil / 2016

Charles Burnett Killer of Sheep / 1977

Tim Burton Big Eyes / 2014

Tim Burton Ed Wood / 1994

Tim Burton Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street / 2007

Michael Cacoyannis The Cherry Orchard / 1999

Michael Cacoyannis Otan ta psaria vgikan sti steria (The Day the Fish Came Out) / 1967

Michael Cacoyannis Αλέξης Ζορμπάς (Zorba the Greek) / 1964

J. C. Calacino Is It Just Me? / 2010

Donald Cammell (see Nicolas Roeg)

Juan José Campanella The Secret in Their Eyes/ 2009, USA 2010

Steven Cantor Dancer / 2016

Frank Capra It Happened One Night / 1934

Frank Capra Lady for a Day / 1933

Frank Capra Meet John Doe / 1941

Frank Capra Pocketful of Miracles / 1961

Henning Carlsen Sult (Hunger) / 1966

Marcel Carné Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) / 1945

Marcel Carné Jour se lève (Daybreak) / 1939

Marcel Carné Hôtel du Nord / 1938, US 1940

Marcel Carné Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows) / 1938

Marcel Carné Thérèse Raquin / 1953

John Carney Sing Street / 2016

Rick Castro “3. Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate” from Three Faces of Women / 1994

Claude Chabrol Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) / 1958

Claude Chabrol Les Biches (Bad Girls/The Does) / 1968

Claude Chabrol Le boucher (The Butcher) / 1970

Claude Chabrol Les Cousins / 1959

Claude Chabrol La Demoiselle d'honneur (The Bridesmaid) / 2004, USA 2006

Claude Chabrol À double tour (Leda) / 1959

Claude Chabrol Merci pour let chocolat / 2000

Youssef Chahine العصفور (Al-Asour) (The Sparrow) /1972

Youssef Chahine باب الحديد‎‎ (Bāb al-Ḥadīd) (Cairo Station) / 1958

Youssef Chahineإسكندرية ليه‎‎, (Iskanderija... lih?) (Alexandria…Why?)/ 1979

Charles Chaplin The Cure / 1917

Charles Chaplin Easy Street / 1917

Charles Chaplin The Gold Rush / 1925

Charles Chaplin The Immigrant / 1917

Charles Chaplin Modern Times / 1936

J. C. Chandor Margin Call / 2011

J. C. Chandor A Most Violent Year / 2014

Ronald Chase Bruges-la-Morte / 1978

Ronald Chase Lulu / 1978

Damien Chazelle La La Land / 2016

Chen Kaige  邊走邊唱 Life on a String / 1991

Chen Kaige Farewell, My Concubine / 1993

Abigail Child On the Downlow / 2007

Lisa Cholodenko The Kids Are All Right / 2010

Grigori Chukhrai Баллада о солдате (Ballada o soldate) (Ballad of a Soldier) / 1959, USA

      1960

Věra Chytilová O něčem jiném (Something Different) / 1963

Věra ChytilováSedmikrásky (Daisies) / 1966, USA 1967

Michael Cimino The Deer Hunter / 1978

René Clair I Married a Witch / 1942

René Clair Le Million / 1931

René Clair À Nous la Liberté / 1931

Shirley Clarke The Connection / 1961

Jack Clayton The Innocents / 1961

René Clement Paris brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?) / 1966

René Clement Jeux inerdits (Forbidden Games) / 1952

René Clément Plein soleil (Purple Noon, aka UK, Blazing Sun) 1960, USA 1961

George Clooney Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

Henri-Georges Clouzot Les Diaboliques (Diabolique) / 1955

Jean Cocteau La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) / 1946

Jean Cocteau Orphée (Orpheus) / 1950

Jean Cocteau Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of the Poet) / 1930

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Barton Fink / 1991

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / 2018

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Hail, Caesar! / 2016

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Inside Llewelyn Davis / 2013

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen The Ladykillers / 2004

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen No Country for Old Men/ 2007

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen O Brother, Where Art Thou? / 2000

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen A Serious Man / 2009

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen True Grit / 2010

Sara Colangelo The Kindergarten Teacher /2018

Bill Condon Kinsey / 2004

Stephen Cone Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party / 2015, general release 2016

Stephen Cone Princess Cyd / 2017

Stephen Cone The Wise Kids / 2011

Sara Colangelo The Kindergarten Teacher / 2018

Francis Ford Coppola The Conversation / 1974

Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather / 1972

Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather II / 1974

Francis Ford Coppola One from the Heart / 1982

Anton Corbijn A Most Wanted Man / 2014

Charles Crichton The Lavender Hill Mob / 1951

John Cromwell Caged / 1950

John Cromwell Dead Reckoning / 1947

John Cromwell The Goddess / 1958

John Cromwell The Racket / 1951

Alfonso Cuarón Roma / 2018

Alfonso Cuarón Y Tu Mamá También / 2001

George Cukor A Star Is Born / 1954

George Cukor The Wizard of Oz / 1939

George Cukor The Women / 1939

Michael Curtiz Casablanca / 1942

Michael Curtiz White Christmas / 1954

Michael Curtiz Yankee Doddle Dandy / 1942

Morton DaCosta The Music Man / 1962

Lee Daniels The Butler (Lee Daniels’ The Butler) / 2013

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night) / 2014

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne Le Gamin au veto (The Kid with a Bike) / 2011, USA

     2012

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne L'Infant / 2005

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne La Promesse/ 1996

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne Rosetta / 1999

Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne Le silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence) / 2008, USA

     2009

Jules Dassin The Naked City / 1948

Jules Dassin Night and the City / 1950

Jules Dassin Du rififi chez les homes (Rififi) / 1955

Byambasuen Davaa and Luigi Falorni Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel (The

     Story of the Weeping Camel) / 2003

Terence Davies The Long Day Closes / 1994

Terence Davies The Deep Blue Sea / 2011, USA 2012

Basil Dean 21 Days / 194

Steve De Jarnatt Miracle Mile / 1988

Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern Aaltra / 2004

Jacques Demy La baie des anges (Bay of Angels) / 1963

Jacques Demy Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) / 1967

Jacques Demy L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (A   

      Slightly Pregnant Man) / 1973

Jacques Demy Lola / 1961

Jacques Demy Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) / 1964

Jacques Demy Peau d'Âne (Donkey Skin) / 1970

Jacques Demy Model Shop / 1969

Roy Del Ruth Broadway Melody of 1936 / 1935

Vittorio De Sica Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini(The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) / 1970, USA

     1971

Vittorio De Sica Ladri di Biciciette (The Bicycle Thief / Bicycle Thieves) / 1948, USA 1949

Vittorio De Sica Umberto D. / 1952, USA 1955

Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe The Red Drum Getaway/ 2015

William Dieterle Dark City / 1950

William Dieterle (see Max Reinhardt)

Disney Studios Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (see David Hand)

Edward Dmytryk Christ in Concrete (a.k.a. Give Us This Day) / 1949

Stanley Donen Charade / 1963

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly It’s Always Fair Weather / 1955

Stanley Donen The Royal Wedding / 1951

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly Singing in the Rain/ 1952

Stanley Donen (see also George Abbott)

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Des Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) / 2006

Robert Dornhelm Echo Park / 1985

Alexsandr Dovzhenko Арсенал(Arsenal) / 1928

Alexsandr Dovzhenko Zemlya (Earth) / 1930

Arthur Dreifuss The Quare Fellow / 1962

Carl Theodor Dreyer Du skal ære din hustru(Master of the House) / 1925

Carl Theodor Dreyer Gertrud / 1964, USA 1966

Carl Theodor Dreyer Mikaël (Michael) / 1924

Carl Theodor Dreyer Ordet (The Word) / 1955

Carl Theodor Dreyer La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc(The Passion of Joan of Arc) / 1928

Carl Theodor Dreyer Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath) / 1943

Robert Duvall The Apostle / 1997

Julien Duvivier (with Victor Fleming and Josef von Sternberg) The Great Waltz / 1938

Julien Duvivier Lydia / 1941

Allan Dwan Robin Hood / 1922

Clint Eastwood Flags of our Fathers / 2006

Clint Eastwood J. Edgar / 2011

Clint Eastwood Jersey Boys / 2014

Clint Eastwood Letters from Iwo Jima / 2006

Atom Egoyan Krapp's Last Tape / 2000

Sergei Eisenstein Bronosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin) / 1925

Sergei Eisenstein Oktyabr': Desyat' dney kotorye potryasli (October: Ten Days That Shook the  

     World) / 1927, USA 1928

Stephan Elliot The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert / 1994

Roland Emmerich Independence Day / 1996

George Englund The Ugly American / 1963

Ildikó Enyedi Testről és lélekről (On Body and Soul) / 2017

Victor Erice El sepíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) / 1973

Metin Erksan Susuz Yaz (Dry Summer) / 1964, USA 1967

Pierre Étaix Le Grand Amour (The Great Love) / 1969

Pierre Étaix Heureux Anniversare (Happy Anniversary) / 1962, USA 1963

Pierre Étaix Yo Yo / 1965, USA 1967

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady One of Us / 2017

John Farrow Five Came Back / 1939

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier)/ 1970

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Angst essen Seel auf(Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) / 1974

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Angst vor der Agnst (Fear of Fear) / 1975, USA 1976

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Berlin Alexanderplatz / 1980, USA 1983

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Bolwieser (The Stationmaster’s Wife) / 1977, USA film version

     1982

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter

     Tears of Petra van Kant) / 1972, USA 1973

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation)/ 1979

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Die Ehe der Maria Braun(The Marriage of Maria Braun) / 1978,

      USA 1979

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Effi Briest / 1974, USA 1977

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Faustrecht der Freiheit(Fox and His Friends) / 1975, USA 1976

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Götter der Pest (Gods of the Plague) / 1970, USA 1977

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of Four Seasons) /

     1971

Rainer Werner Fassbinder In einen Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons) / 1978

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Katzelmacher / 1969

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Liebe ist kälter als de Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death) / 1969

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Lola / 1981

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Martha / 1974, USA 1994

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven)

      / 1975, USA 1977

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Pioneers in Ingolstadt) / 1971

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Eine Reise ins Licht (Despair) / 1978

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rio das Mortes / 1971

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss) / 1982

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore) / 1971

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Warum läuft Herr R. amok (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?) / 1970

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) / 1973

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Whity / 1971

Federico Fellini Amarcord / 1973, USA 1974

Federico Fellini Il bidone (The Swindlers) / 1955, USA 1964

Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita / 1960, USA 1961

Federico Fellini Fellini Satyricon / 1969, USA 1970

Federico Fellini 8 1/2 / 1963

Federico Fellini Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits) / 1965

Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuado Luci del varietà(Variety Lights) / 1950, USA 1965

Federico Fellini Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

Federico Fellini La Strada (The Road) / 1954, USA 1956

Louis Feuillade Le Récit du colonel(The Colonel’s Account) / 1907

Louis Feuillade Une Dame vraiment bien (A Very Fine Lady) / 1908

Louis Feuillade Le Printemps(Spring) / 1909

Louis Feuillade Possession de L’Enfant(Custody of the Child) / 1909

Louis Feuillade La Feé des grèves(The Fairy in the Surf) 1909

Louis Feuillade L’Orgie romaine(The Roman Orgy) 1911

Louis Feuillade La Tare(The Defect) / 1911

Louis Feuillade Le Trust, ou les batailles de l’argent (The Trust, or the Battles for the Money) /  

      1911

Louis Feuillade Le Coeur et L’Argent(The Heart and the Money) 1912

Louis Feuillade La Hantise(The Obsession) / 1912

Louis Feuillade Erreur tragique(Tragic Error) / 1912

Louis Feuillade L’Agonie de Byzance(The Agony of Byzance) / 1913

Louis Feuillade Bout de Zan vole un éléphant(Bout de Zan Steals an Elephant) / 1913

Jacques Feyder La Kermesse héroïque (Carnival in Flanders) / 1935

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa I Love You Phillip Morris / 2009, USA 2010

Kleber Mendonça Filho Aquarius / 2016

Kleber Mendonça Filho O soma o redor (Neighboring Sounds) / 2012

David Fincher The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / 2008

David Fincher The Social Network / 2010

Robert J. Flaherty Man of Aran / 1934

Richard Fleischer Compulsion / 1959

Victor Fleming (with Julien Duvivier and Josef von Sternberg) The Great Waltz / 1938

Victor Fleming The Wizard of Oz / 1939

Anne Fontaine Les Innocentes (The Innocents) / 2016

John Ford Four Sons / 1928

John Ford The Grapes o Wrath / 1940

John Ford The Long Voyage Home / 1940

John Ford My Darling Clementine / 1946 [pre-release version]

John Ford The Searchers / 1956

John Ford The Whole Town’s Talking / 1935

Tom Ford A Single Man / 2009

Miloš Forman Hoří, má panenko(The Fireman’s Ball) / 1967

Marc Forster Monster's Ball / 2001

Bill Forsyth Local Hero / 1983

Michelangelo Frammartino Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) / 2010, USA 2011

Georges Franju Judex / 1963, USA 1966

Georges Franju Les yeux xans verge (Eyes without a Face) / 1960, USA 1962

John Frankenheimer The Manchurian Candidate/ 1962

John Frankenheimer Seconds / 1966

John Frankenheimer Seven Days in May / 1964

Irwyn Franklin Harlem Is Heaven / 1932

Stephen Frears Florence Foster Jenkins / 2016

Stephen Frears My Beautiful Launderette / 1985

Stephen Frears Philomena / 2013

Stephen Frears The Queen / 2006

Thornton Freeland Flying Down to Rio / 1933

William Friedkin The Birthday Party / 1968

William Friedkin The Boys in the Band / 1970

Dan Futterman Capote / 2005

Abel Gance La Fin du monde (End of the World) / 1931

Abel Gance La Roue (The Wheel) / 1923

Liz Garbus What Happened, Miss Simone? / 2015

Matteo Garrone Gomorrah / 2008, USA 2009

Matteo Garrone Reality / 2012

Luca Guadagino Call Me by Your Name / 2017

Roberto Gavaldón Macario / 1960

Julie Gavras La Faute à fidel! (Blame It on Fidel!) / 2006

Greta Gerwig Lady Bird / 2017

Alex Gibney Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief / 2015

Don Gilroy Nightcrawler / 2014

Francois Girard Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould / 1993

Jean-Luc Godard Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange     

      Adventure of Lemmy Caution) / 1965

Jean-Luc Godard Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders / The Outsiders) / 1964

Jean-Luc Godard À bout Soufflè (Breathless) / 1960

Jean-Luc Godard Les Carabiniers / 1963

Jean-Luc Godard Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About   

      Her) / 1967, USA 1968

Jean-Luc Godard Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) / 1964

Jean-Luc Godard Le mélpris (Contempt) / 1963

Jean-Luc Godard Pierrot le Fou / 1965, USA 1969

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin Tout va bien(All's Well) / 1972

Jean-Luc Godard Masculin Feminin (Masculine Feminine) / 1966

Jean-Luc Godard Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (All the Boys Are Named Patrick) / 1957

Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard Tout va bien (All's Well) / 1972

Jean-Luc Godard Vivre sa Vie / 1962, USA 1963

Peter Godfrey Christmas in Connecticut / 1945

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon Me and Earl and the Dying Girl / 2015

Gosho Heinosuke Osorezan no onna (An Innocent Witch / Woman of Osore Mountain) / 1965

Alejandro González Iñárritu Birdman / 2014

Michael Gordon Pillow Talk / 1959

Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard Tout va bien (All's Well) / 1972

Edmund Goulding Dark Victory / 1939

Edmund Goulding Grand Hotel / 1932

Edmund Goulding The Great Lie / 1941

Edmund Goulding Nightmare Alley / 1947

Edmund Goulding The Old Maid / 1939

Rachel Grady (see Heidi Ewing)

Ofir Raul Grazier האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker)/ 2017, USA 2018

Alfred E. Green Baby Face / 1933

Paul Greengrass 22 July / 2018

Jean Grémillon Le ciel est à vous / 1944

Jean Grémillon Lumiere d’Été (Summer Light) / 1943

Jean Grémillon Remorques (Stormy Waters) / 1941

Peter Greenaway Eisenstein in Guanajuato / 2015, USA general 2016

Jan Gruyaert De vlaschaard (The Flaxfield) / 1983, USA 1985

Robert Guédigiguian La Ville est tranquille(The Town Is Quiet) / 2000

Ciro Guerra El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent) / 2015

Andrew Haigh 45 Years / 2015

Andrew Haigh Weekend / 2011

Alexander Hall Here Comes Mr. Jordan / 1941

Alexander Hall Little Miss Marker / 1934

Lasse Hallström Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog) / 1985

David Hand (and others) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / 1937

Michael Haneke Amour / 2012

Michael Haneke Caché (Hidden) / 2005

Michael Haneke Code inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (Code Unknown:

     Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys) / 2000

Michael Haneke La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) / 2001, USA 2002

Michael Haneke Das Schloß (The Castle) / 1997, USA 1998

Michael Haneke Das weisse Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White

     Ribbon) / 2009

Susumu Hani Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen (Nanami: The Inferno of First Love), 1968, USA 1969

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun Bye Bye Africa/ 1999

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun Grigris/ 2013

Wojciech Has Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Saragossa Manuscript) / 1965, restored                   version, 2001

Byron Haskin War of the Worlds / 1953

Henry Hathaway Peter Ibbestson / 1935

Stefan Haupt Der Kreis (The Circle) / 2014, USA 2015

Howard Hawks Bringing Up Baby / 1938

Howard Hawks El Dorado / 1966

Howard Hawks Red River / 1948

Howard Hawks Rio Bravo / 1959

Howard Hawks Rio Lobo / 1970

Howard Hawks To Have and Have Not / 1944

Howard Hawks Twentieth Century / 1934

Todd Haynes Carol / 2015

Todd Haynes Far From Heaven / 2002

Michael Hazanavicius The Artist / 2011

Victor Heermann Animal Crackers / 1930

Werner Herzog Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God) / 1972, US 1977

Werner Herzog Auch Zwerge haen lein angefangen (Even Dwarfs Started Small) / 1970, USA    

     1971

Werner Herzog Fitzcarraldo / 1982

Werner Herzog Grizzly Man / 2005

Werner Herzog Jeder für Sich und Gott gegen alle(The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) / 1974,   

      USA 1975

Werner Herzog Stroszek / 1977

Werner Herzog Woyzeck / 1976

Jared Hess Nacho Libre / 2006

George Roy Hill The World of Henry Orient / 1964

Arthur Hiller Plaza Suite / 1971

Henry Hills Bali Mécanique / 1994

Henry Hills Electricity / 2007

Henry Hills Failed States / 2008

Henry Hills Goa Lawah / 1992

Henry Hills Kino Da! / 1980

Henry Hills Little Lieutenant / 1994

Henry Hills Money / 1985

Henry Hills Porter Springs 3 / 1977

Henry Hills Porter Springs 4 / 1999

Henry Hills SSS / 1988

Alfred Hitchcock Blackmail / 1929

Alfred Hitchcock Dial M for Murder / 1954

Alfred Hitchcock Downhill / 1927

Alfred Hitchcock Foreign Correspondent / 1940

Alfred Hitchcock I Confess! / 1953

Alfred Hitchcock Jamaica Inn / 1939

Alfred Hitchcock Juno and the Paycock / 1930

Alfred Hitchcock The Lady Vanishes / 1938

Alfred Hitchcock The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog / 1927

Alfred Hitchcock Mr. & Mrs. Smith / 1941

Alfred Hitchcock North by Northwest / 1959

Alfred Hitchcock Notorious / 1946

Alfred Hitchcock Psycho / 1960

Alfred Hitchcock Rear Window / 1954

Alfred Hitchcock Rebecca / 1940

Alfred Hitchcock Rope / 1948

Alfred Hitchcock Sabotage / 1936

Alfred Hitchcock Shadow of a Doubt / 1943

Alfred Hitchcock Spellbound / 1945

Alfred Hitchcock Stage Fright / 1950

Alfred Hitchcock Strangers on a Train / 1951

Alfred Hitchcock The 39 Steps / 1935

Alfred Hitchcock To Catch a Thief / 1955

Alfred Hitchcock Torn Curtain / 1966

Alfred Hitchcock The Trouble with Harry / 1955

Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo / 1958

Alfred Hitchcock The Wrong Man / 1956

P. J. Hogan Muriel's Wedding / 1994, USA 1995

Tom Hooper The King's Speech / 2010

Tom Hopper Les Misérables / 2012

Hsiao-hsien Hou Le Voyage du Ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon) / 2007d

Paul Humfress (see Derek Jarman)

John Huston Key Largo / 1948

John Huston The Night of the Iguana / 1964

John Huston Under the Volcano / 1984

John Huston Wise Blood / 1979

Armando Iannucci The Death of Stalin / 2018

Kon Ichikawa The Burmese Harp / 1956, USA 1967

Kon Ichikawa 炎上Enjō(Conflagration) / 1958

Kon Ichikawa Kagi (“The Key,” titled inthe West as Odd Obession) / 1959

Kon Ichikawa Nobi (Fires on the Plain) / 1959

Kon Ichikawa Otōto (Her Brother) / 1960

Kon Ichikawa Sasme-yuki (The Makioka Sisters) / 1983

Kon Ichikawa Yukinojo henge (An Actor's Revenge) / 1963

Shōhei Imamura Erogotoshi-tachi yori: Jinrulgaku nyūmori (The Pornographers) / 1966

Shōhei Imamura Guta to gunkan (Pigs and Battleships) / 1961, USA 1963

Otar Iosseliani Ap'rili (April) /1961, released 1972

Otar Iosseliani Giorgobistve (Falling Leaves) / 1966

Isidore Isou Treaty of Drooling and Eternity ( Treatise on Venom and Eternity ) / 1952

James Ivory Howards End / 1992

James Ivory The Remains of the Day / 1993

Mick Jackson L.A. Story / 1991

Derek Jarman  Caravaggio / 1986

Derek Jarman Edward II / 1991

Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress Sebastiane / 1976

Barry Jenkins Moonlight / 2016

Norman Jewison Send Me No Flowers / 1964

Craig Johnson Alex Strangelove / 2018

Chuck Jones Duck Amok / 1953

Chuck Jones One Froggy Evening / 1955

Chuck Jones Rabbit of Seville / 1950

Chuck Jones Rabbit Seasoning / 1952

Chuck Jones Wearing of the Grin / 1951

Harmon Jones Bloodhounds of Broadway / 1952

Tommy Lee Jones The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada / 2005

Jonesy Fiend / 1994

Neil Jordan The Crying Game / 1992

Neil Jordan Mona Lisa / 1986

Neil Jordan Not I / 2000

Michele Josue Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine/ 2014, USA general release 2015

Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos Obchod na korze(The Shop on Main Street, previously titled The Shop on High Street) / 1965

Marek Kanievsky Another Country / 1984

Garson Kanin My Favorite Wife / 1940

Chiani Karasawa Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me / 2014

Mikhail Kalatozov fly Juravel ( Letyat zhuravli ) ( The Cranes Are Flying ) / 1957, USA 

     1960

Jerzy Kawalerowicz Pharaon ( Pharaoh ) / 1966, USA 1977

Elia Kazan Baby Doll / 1956

Elia Kazan A Face in the Crowd / 1957

Elia Kazan Gentleman’s Agreement / 1947

Elia Kazan On the Waterfront / 1954

Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman The General/ 1927

Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline One Week / 1920

Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone Our Hospitality / 1923

Buster Keaton Sherlock, Jr. / 1924

Buster Keaton and Charles Reisner Steamboat Bill, Jr. / 1928

Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick The Cameraman/ 1928

William Keighley The Man Who Came to Dinner / 1942

Sarah Kernochan (see Smith)

Gustave de Kervern and Benoît DelépineAaltra / 2004

Abbas Kiarostami Copie Conforme (Certified Copy) / 2010

Abbas Kiairostami کلوزآپ ، نمای نزدیک‎‎ (Klūzāp, nemā-ye nazdīk) (Close-Up) / 1990

Abbas Kiarostami ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブRaiku Samuwan in Rabu(Like Someone

    in Love) / 2012, USA (general release) 2013

Abbas Kiarostami Shirin / 2008

Abbas Kiarostamiطعم گيلاس...‎‎ (Taste of Cherry) / 1997

Abbas Kiarostami خانه دوست کجاست‎‎ (Khane-ye doust kodjast) Where Is the Friend’s Home? /

      1987

Krzysztof Kieślowski Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) / 1993

Krzysztof Kieślowski Trois couleurs: Blanc (Three Colors: White) / 1994

Krzysztof Kieślowski Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colors: Red) / 1994

Kim Ki-young 하녀(The Housemaid) / 1960

Henry King Tol’able David / 1921

Keisuke Kinoshita 死闘の伝説 (Shitô no densetsu)(A Legend or Was It?) / 1963

Teinosuke Kinugasa Jigokumon (Gate of Hell) / 1953, USA 1954

Dimitri Kirsanoff Arrière-saison (Backward Season) / 1950

Dimitri Kirsanoff Mérilmontant / 1926

Randal Kleiser Grease / 1978

Elmar Klos (see Ján Kadár)

Alexander Kluge Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday’s Girl) / 1966

Alexander Korda The Ideal Husband / 1947, USA 1948

Alexander Korda Marius / 1931

Alexander Korda The Wedding Rehearsal / 1932

Hirokazu Kore-eda Shoshite chichi ni naru(Like Father, Like Son) / 2013, USA 2014

Hirokazu Kore-eda 海街diary (Our Little Sister) / 2015, USA 2016

Henry Koster The Bishop's Wife / 1947

Stanley Kramer Inherit the Wind / 1960

Wayne Kramer The Cooler / 2002

Suri Krishnamma A Man of No Importance / 1994

Stanley Kubrick Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb /  

     1964

Stanley Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1968

Joey Kuhn Those People / 2015

Aki Kurismäki Ariel / 1988, USA 1990

Aki Kurismäki Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds) / 1996

Aki Kurismäki Le Havre / 2011

AkiKurismäki Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past) / 2002

Aki Kurismäki La Vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life) / 1992

Akira Kurosawa 赤ひげAkahige (Red Beard) / 1965, USA 1966

Akira Kurosawa どん底 (Donzoko) (The Lower Depths) / 195
Akira Kurosawa  生きものの記録 (Ikimono no kiroku) (I Live in Fear) / 1955

Akira Kurosawa 生きるIkiru (To Live) / 1952

Akira Kurosawa  隠し砦の三悪人 (Kakushi toride no san akunin) (The Hidden  

     Fortress) / 1958

Akira Kurosawa 野良犬Nora inu (Stray Dog) / 1949, USA 1963

Akira Kurosawa 羅生門,Rashōmon(Rashoman)/ 1950, USA 1951

Akira Kurosawa 七人の侍,Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai) / 1954

Akira Kurosawa 天国と地獄Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low) / 1963

Akira Kurosawa 酔いどれ天使,Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel) / 1948, USA 1959

Akira Kurosawa 用心棒Yōjinbō(Yojimbo) / 1961

Kiyoshi KurosawaトウキョウソナタTokyo Sonata / 2008, USA 2009

Emir Kusturica Otac na službenom putu (When Father Was Away on Business) / 1985

Emir Kusturica Sjećaš li se Doli Bel?(Do You Remember Dolly Bell?) / 1981, USA 1986

Gregory La Cava My Man Godfrey / 1936

Gregory La Cava Stage Door / 1950

David LaChapelle Take Me to the Church / 2013

Albert Lamorisse Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon) / 1956

John Landis Into the Night / 1985

Fritz Lang The Big Heat / 1953

Fritz Lang House by the River / 1950

Fritz Lang M / 1931, USA 1933

Fritz Lang Metropolis / 1927

Fritz Lang Spione (Spies) / 1927, USA 1928

Fritz Lang While the City Sleeps / 1956

Walter Lang The Desk Set / 1957

Walter Lang The King and I / 1956

Giogos Lanthinos Dogtooth / 2009, USA 2010

Giogos Lanthinos The Killing of a Sacred Dear/ 2017

Giogos Lanthinos The Lobster / 2015, USA 2016

Claude Lanzmann Le dernier des injustes (The Last of the Unjust) / 2013

Claude Lanzmann Shoah / 1985

Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini Luci del varietà(Variety Lights) / 1950, USA 1965

Alberto Lattuada Il Capotto (The Overcoat), 1952, USA 1953

Charles Laughton The Night of the Hunter / 1955

Philip Leacock Escapade / 1955, USA 1957

David Lean Blithe Spirit / 1945

David Lean Brief Encounter / 1945, USA 1946

David Lean Great Expectations / 1946

David Lean Hobson’s Choice / 1954

David Lean Oliver Twist / 1948, USA 1951

Ang Lee Brokeback Mountain / 2005

Francis Lee God’s Own Country / 2017

Rowland V. Lee Son of Frankenstein / 1939

Mike Leigh Another Year / 2010

Mike Leigh Mr. Turner / 2014

Mike Leigh Topsy-Turvy / 1999

Mitchell Leisen No Man of Her Own / 1950

Claude Lelouch Un Homme et une Femme (A Man and a Woman) / 1966

Jean-Baptiste Léonetti Carré blanc / 2011

Mervyn LeRoy Gypsy / 1962

Mervyn LeRoy The Wizard of Oz / 1939

Jailil Lespart Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

Don Levy Herostratus /1967

Marcel L'Herbier L'Argent / 1928, released 1929

Richard Linklater Before Midnight / 2013

Richard Linklater Before Sunrise / 1995

Richard Linklater Before Sunset / 2004

Richard Linklater Bernie / 2011, US general distribution, 2012

Richard Linklater Boyhood / 2014

Richard Linklater School of Rock / 2003

Anatole Litvak All This, and Heaven Too / 1940

Antaole Litvak Mayerling / 1936

Anatole Litvak Sorry, Wrong Number / 1948

Jennie Livingston Paris Is Burning / festival premier 1990, general release 1991

Frank Lloyd Oliver Twist / 1922

Phyllida Lloyd Mamma Mia! / 2008

Joshua Logan South Pacific / 1958

Kenneth Lonergan Manchester by the Sea / 2016

Joseph Losey Accident / 1967

Joseph Losey The Damned (These Are the Damned) / 1963, USA 1965

Joseph Losey The Servant / 1963

Joseph Losey Time without Pity / 1957

Ernst Lubitsch Angel / 1937

Ernst Lubitsch Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) / 1919

Ernst Lubitsch Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife / 1938

Ernst Lubitsch Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) / 1918

Ernst Lubitsch The Love Parade / 1929

Ernst Lubitsch The Marriage Circle / 1924

Ernst Lubitsch Ninotchka / 1939

Ernst Lubitsch Die Puppe (The Doll) / 1919

Ernst Lubitsch The Shop Around the Corner / 1940

Ernst Lubitsch The Smiling Lieutenant / 1931

Ernst Lubitsch Trouble in Paradise / 1932

Sidney Lumet Dog Day Afternoon / 1975

Sidney Lumet Fail-Safe / 1964

Sidney Lumet Long Day’s Journey into Night / 1962

Sidney Lumet 12 Angry Men / 1957

Sidney Lumet A View from the Bridge / 1962

Rod Lurie The Contender / 2000

Alexander Mackendrick A High Wind in Jamaica / 1965

Alexander Mackendrick Sweet Smell of Success / 1957

John Madden The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel/ 2011, USA 2012

John Madden Shakespeare in Love / 1998

Guy Maddin Brand on the Brain! / 2006

Guy Maddin The Forbidden Room / 2015

Guy Maddin Keyhole / 2011, USA general 2012

Guy Maddin My Winnipeg / 2007

Guy Maddin The Saddest Music in the World/ 2003, USA 2004

Albert Magnoli Purple Rain / 1984

Dušan Makavejev Nevinost bez zaštite (Innocence Unprotected) / 1968

Terence Malick The Tree of Life / 2011

Louis Malle Au revoir les enfants / 1987

Louis Malle Les Amants (The Lovers) / 1958

Louis Malle Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) / 1958

Louis Malle L’Inde Fantôme (Phantom India) / 1969

Louis Malle Lacombe, Lucien / 1974

Louis Malle My Dinner with Andre / 1981

Louis Malle Le souffle au cœur (Murmur of the Heart) / 1971

Louis Malle Zazie dans de métro (Zazie in the Metro) / 1960

Joseph L. Mankiewicz The Ghost and Mrs. Muir/ 1947

Joseph L. Mankiewicz Guys and Dolls / 1955

Joseph L. Mankiewicz The Quiet American / 1958

Joseph L. Mankiewicz Suddenly, Last Summer / 1959

Michael Mann Public Enemies / 2009

Chris Marker L’ambassade (The Embassy)/ 1973

Chris Marker LaJetée (The Jetty) / 1962

Chris Marker Sans Soleil (Sunless) / 1983

Gregory J. Markopoulos Bliss / 1967

Gregory J. Markopoulos Christmas, USA / 1949

Gregory J. Markopoulos Gammelion / 1968

George Marshall Destry Rides Again / 1939

Rob Marshall Into the Woods / 2014

Charles Martin My Dear Secretary / 1948

Tina Mascara and Guido Santi Chris & Don. A Love Story / 2007

Peter Masterson The Trip to Bountiful / 198

Toshio Matsumoto Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses) / 1969, USA 1970

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin Salesman / 1969

Paul Mazursky Enemies, a Love Story / 1989

Paul Mazursky Yippee / 2006

Leo McCarey Duck Soup / 1933

Thomas McCarthy Spotlight / 2015

Thomas McCarthy Win Win / 2011

Martin McDonagh In Bruges / 2008

Martin McDonagh Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri / 2018

Scott McGehee and David Siegel The Deep End / 2001

Scott McGehee and David Siegel What Maisie Knew / 2012

Douglas McGrath Infamous / 2006

Adam McKay The Big Short / 2015

John McTiernan Die Hard / 1988

Jean-Pierre Melville L’armée des ombres (Army of Shadows) / 1969, USA 2006

Jean-Pierre Melville Bob le Flambeur / 1956, USA 1959

Jean-Pierre Melville Le Cercle rouge (The Red Circle) / 1970, USA 1993

Jean-Pierre Melville Deux hommes dans Manhattan (Two Men in Manhattan) / 1959

Jean-Pierre Melville Le Deuxième Souffle / 1966

Jean-Pierre Melville Les Enfants terribles / 1950

Jean-Pierre Melville Un flic / 1972

Jean-Pierre Melville Léon Morin, Prêtre (Léon Morin, Priest) / 1961

Jean-Pierre Melville Le Samouraï (The Samurai) / 1967

Sam Mendes Skyfall / 2012

Jiři Menzel Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále(I Served the King of England) / 2006, USA

      2008

Jiři Menzel Ostre Sledované Viaky (Closely Watched Trains) / 1966

Douglas Messerli Reading Films

Douglas Messerli Reading Sexually Coded Films: A Defense

Piero Messina L’attesa (The Wait) / 2015, US 2016

Lewis Milestone The North Star / 1943

Lewis Milestone The Strange Love of Martha Ivers / 1946

Bennett Miller Capote / 2005

Bennett Miller Foxcatcher / 2014

Vincente Minnelli Brigadoon / 1954

Vincente Minnelli Cabin in the Sky / 1943

Vincente Minnelli Gigi / 1958

Vincente Minnelli The Long, Long Trailer / 1954

Vincente Minnelli Meet Me in St. Louis / 1944

Vincente Minnelli Two Weeks in Another Town / 1962

Kenji Mizoguchi 西鶴一代女Saikaku Ichidai Onna (The Life of Oharu) / 1952

Kenji Mizoguchi 浪華悲歌,Naniwa erejii (Osaka Elegy)/ 1936

Kenji Mizoguchi 山椒大夫Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) / 1954

Kenji Mizoguchi 祇園の姉妹 Gion no Shimai(Sisters of the Gion) / 1936

Kenji Mizoguchi 赤線地帯Akasen Chitai (Street of Shame) / 1956

Kenji Mizoguchi 残菊物語 Zangiku monogatari? (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum) /  

     1939, USA 1979

Kenji Mizoguchi 雨月物語^? Ugetsu Monogatari (Ugetsu) / 1953

Kenji Mizoguchi 夜の女たち Yoru no onnatachi (Women of the Night) / 1948

Mario Monicelli I compagni (The Organizer) / 1963, USA 1964

David Moreton Edge of Seventeen / 1998

David Moreton Testosterone / 2004

Crystal Moselle The Wolfpack / 2015

Robert Mulligan To Kill a Mockingbird / 1962

Cristian Mungiu După dealuri (Beyond the Hills) / 2012

Cristian Mungiu 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days/ 2007

Andrzej Munk Eroica (Heroism) / 1958

F. W. Murnau Faust / 1926

F. W. Murnau Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) / 1924

F. W. Murnau Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) /   

    1922, USA 1929

F. W. Murnau Sunrise / 1927

F. W. Murnau Tabu: A Story of the South Seas/ 1931

Andrew Nackman Fourth Man Out / 2016

Nobuo Nakagawa 地獄Jigoku(The Sinners of Hell) / 1960

Bharat Nalluri Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day/ 2008

Mikio Naruse 銀座化粧Ginza Keshō (Ginza Cosmetics) / 1951

Mikio Naruse 君と別れてKimi to wakarete (Apart from You) / 1933

Mikio Naruse Midaregumo (Scatterd Clouds, aka Two in the Shadow) 1967, USA 1968

Mikio Naruse 乱れるMidareru (Yearning) / 1964

Mikio Naruse 女が階段を上る時Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki(When a Woman Ascends the  

   Stairs) / 1960, USA  1963

Mikio Naruse 妻 (Tsuma) (Wife) / 1953

Mikio Naruse 山の音 Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain) / 1954

Mikio Naruse 夜ごとの夢Yogoto no yume (Every-Night Dreams) / 1933

Jan Němec O slavnosti a hostech(A Report on the Party and the Guests) / 1966

László NemesSaul fia (Son of Saul) / 2015

Fred C. Newmayer and Sam Taylor Safety Last! / 1923

Mike Nichols Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/ 1966

Yoshitaro Nomura ゼロの焦点(Zero no shōten) (Zero Focus) / 1961

Phillip Noyce The Quiet American / 2002

Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry Nanette /2018

Manoel de Oliveira Belle Toujours / 2006

Manoel de Oliveira O Estranho Caso de Angélica (Strange Case of Angelica)/ 2010

Ermanno Olmi Il Posto (The Job) / 1961

Max Ophüls Letter from an Unknown Woman / 1948

Max Ophüls Lola Montés / 1955, USA 1959

Max Ophüls Madame de... (The Earrings of Madame de...) / 1953

Max Ophüls Le plaisir (House of Pleasure)/ 1952

Max Ophüls The Reckless Moment / 1949

Nagisa Oshima 愛のコリーダ (Ai no Korīda)(In the Realm of the Senses) / 1976

Nagisa Oshima 悦楽 (Etsuraku) (Pleasures of the Flesh) / 1965

Nagisa Oshima白昼の通り魔Hakuchū no tōrima (Violence at Noon) / 1966

Nagisa Oshima 帰って来たヨッパライ(,Kaettekita Yopparai)(Three Resurrected Drunkards) /

      1968

Nagisa Oshima  絞死刑 (Kōshikei) (Death by Hanging) / 1968

Nagisa Oshima 少年Shōnen (Boy) / 1969

Nagisa Oshima日本春歌考 (Nihon shunka-kō) (Sing a Song of Sex / A Treatise on Japanese

     Bawdy Songs) / 1967

Nagisa Oshima 新宿泥棒日記 (Shinjuku dorobō nikki) (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) / 1969

Nagisa Oshima 戦場のメリークリスマス (Senjō no Merī Kurisumasu)(Merry Christmas, Mr.

     Lawrence) / 1983

Sergio Oksman Uma História para os Modlin(The Story of the Modlins) / 2012

John Olb Nanette (with Nanette Parry) / 2018

                                                                                                                                

Franz Osten A Throw of Dice / 1929

Ruben Östlund The Square / 2017

Ruben Östlund Turist (Force Majeure) / 2014

Richard Oswald Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) / 1919

François Ozon Frantz / 2016

Ferzan Özpetek Le fate ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies) 2001, USA 2002

Ferzan Özpetek Haman: Il bagno turco (Steam: The Turkish Bath) 1997, USA 1998

Yasujirō Ozu 秋日和(Akibiyori) (Late Autumn) / 1960, USA 1973

Yasujirō Ozu 父ありき(Chichi ariki) (There Was a Father) / 1942

Yasurirō Ozu 早春Sōshun (Early Spring) / 1956, USA 1974

Yasujirō Ozu 出来ごころ(,Dekigokoro)(Passing Fancy) / 1933, USA 2013
Yasujirō Ozu Hogaraka ni ayume (Walk Cheerfully) / 1930

Yasujirō Ozu 彼岸花 (Higanbana) Equinox Flower / 1958

Yasujirō Ozu 一人息子,(Hitori musuko)(The Only Son) / 1936, USA 1987

Yasurjrō Ozu 風の中の牝鶏, (Kaze no naka no mendori) (A Hen in the Wind) / 1948, USA 2013

Yasuijrō Ozu 小早川家の秋(Kohayagawa-ke no aki) (The End of Summer) / 1961

Yasujirō Ozu 東京物語, (Monogatari Tokyo) (Tokyo Story) / 1953

Yasujirō Ozu お早ようOhayō (Good Morning) / 1959, USA 1962

Yasuijrō Ozu 秋刀魚の味 (Sanma no aji)(The Taste of Pike; An Autumn Afternoon) / 1962,

     USA 1964

Yasujirō Ozu 東京暮色 (Tōkyō boshoku)(Tokyo Twilight) / 1957, USA 1972

Yasujirō Ozu 東京の合唱(Tōkyō no gassho)(Tokyo Chorus) / 1931, USA 1982

Yasujirō Ozu 浮草物語 (Ukigusa monogatari) (A Story of Floating Weeds) / 1934

Yasujirō Ozu 浮草 (,Ukigusa) (Floating Weeds) / 1959

G. W. Pabst Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) / 1929

G. W. Pabst Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) / 1931

Marcel Pagnol César/ 1936

Alan J. Pakula All the President’s Men / 1976

Jafar Panahi تاکسی‎‎(Jafar Panahi’s Taxi; Taxi Terehan) / 2015

Jafar Panahi این فیلم نیست‎‎ (This Is Not a Film) / 2011, USA 2012

Sergei Paradjanov and Dodo Abashidze Ashug-Karibi(Ashik Kerib) / 1988

Sergei Paradjanov and Dodo Abashidze სურამისციხისა (The Legend of Suram Fortress) /  

     1984

Sergei Paradjanov Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) / 1968

Sergei Paradjanov Тінізабутих предків/ Tini zabutykh predkiv (Shadows of Our Forgotten  

     Ancestors) / 1964

Madeline Parry (see Jon Olb) 

Pier Paolo Pasolini Accatone (The Scrounger) / 1961

Pier Paolo Pasolini Edipo re(Oedipus Rex) / 1967, USA 1984

Pier Paolo Pasolini Mamma Roma / 1962

Pier Paolo Pasolini Porcile (Pigsty) / 1969

Pier Paolo Pasolini Teorema (Theorem) / 1968

Pier Paolo Pasolini Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows) / 1966, USA 1967

Geeta Patel and Ravi Patel Meet the Patels / 2015

Frank Pavich Jodorowsky’s Dune / 2013

Paweł Pawlikowski Ida / 2014

Arthur Penn Bonnie and Clyde / 1967

Arthur Penn Night Moves / 1975

Donald Petrie A Raisin in the Sun / 1961

Aleksandar Petrović The Master and Margaret / 1972

Christian Petzold Barbara / 2012

Christian Petzold Phoenix / 2014, USA 2015

Harold Pinter Butley / 1974

Suzan Pitt Asparagus / 1979

Laura Poitras Citizenfour / 2014

Roman Polanski Chinatown / 1974

Roman Polanski The Ghost Writer / 2010

Roman Polanski Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) / 1962

Roman Polanski Oliver Twist / 2005

Roman Polanski Repulsion / 1965

Roman Polanski Rosemary’s Baby / 1968

Roman Polanski La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur) / 2013, USA 2014

Abraham Polansky Force of Evil / 1948

Sydney Pollack Three Days of the Condor / 1975

Gillo Pontecorvo La battaglia di Algeri (معركة الجزائر) (The Battle of Algiers) / 1966, USA

     1967

Corneliu Porumboiu Politsit, adj. (Police, adjective) / 2009

H. C. Potter Three for the Show / 1955

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Black Narcissus / 1947

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger I Know Where I’m Going! / 1945

Michael Powell Peeping Tom / 1960

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger The Red Shoes / 1948

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger The Tales of Hoffman / 1951

Otto Preminger Laura / 1944

Emeric Pressburger (see Michael Powell)

Harold Prince Something for Everyone / 1970

Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky Shakhmatnay a goryachka (Chess Fever) / 1925

Richard Quine Bell, Book and Candle / 1958

Richard Quine My Sister Eileen / 1955

Nicholas Ray Johnny Guitar / 1954

Nicholas Ray The Lusty Men / 1952

Nicholas Ray (with Josef von Sternberg) Macao / 1952

Nicholas Ray Rebel without a Cause / 1955

Satyajit Ray আগন্তুক Agontuk (The Stranger) / 1991, USA 1992

Satyajit Ray অপরাজিত Aparjito (The Unvanquished) / 1957

Satyajit Ray Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) / 1959

Satyajit Ray দেবী(Devi) (The Goddess) / 1960, USA 1962

Satyajit Ray Ghare Baire(The Home and the World) / 1984

Satyajit Ray গণশত্রুGônoshotru (An Enemy of the People) / 1989

Satyajit Ray জলসাঘরJalsaghar (The Music Room) / 1958

Satyajit Ray মহানগর, Mahānagar (The Big City) / 1963, USA 1968

Satyajit Ray Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) /1955

Carol Reed The Fallen Idol / 1948, USA 1949

Carol Reed A Kid for Two Farthings / 1955, USA 1956

Carol Reed Night Train to Munich / 1940

Carol Reed Oliver! / 1968 [discussion of dancing]

Carol Reed Oliver! / 1968 [discussion of film]

Carol Reed Our Man in Havana / 1959, USA 1960

Carol Reed The Third Man / 1949

Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle A Midsummer Night’s Dream / 1935

Irving Reis The Big Street / 1942

Jill Reiter Birthday Party / 1994

Jason Reitman Up in the Air / 2009

Jean Renoir Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Save from Drowning) / 1932

Jean Renoir Le Carosse d'Or (The Golden Coach) / 1952, USA 1954

Jean Renoir La Chienne / 1931, USA 1976

Jean Renoir Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange) / 1936

Jean Renoir The Diary of a Chambermaid / 1946

Jean Renoir Elena et les hommes / 1956, USA 1957

Jean Renoir Le Fleuvre (The River) / 1951

Jean Renoir French Cancan / 1954

Jean Renoir La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion) / 1937, USA 1938

Jean Renoir Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country) / 1936, released in France 1946

      (redited), USA 1950

Jean Renoir La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) / 1939

Jean Renoir Toni / 1935

Alain Resnais L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) / 1961

Alain Resnais Hiroshima mon amour 二十四時間の情事Nijūyojikan'nojōji/ 1959

Alain Resnais Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle) / 1980

Alain Resnais Muriel ou le temps d'un retour/ 1963

Alain Resnais Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips) / 2003

Daniel Ribeiro Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho (The Way He Looks) / 2014

Tony Richardson A Delicate Balance / 1973

Tony Richardson Tom Jones / 1963

Wolf Rilla Village of the Damned / 1960

Arturo Ripstein El Colonel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel) / 1999

Arturo Ripstein El imperio de la fortuna (The Realm of Fortune) / 1986

Arturo Ripstein El lugar sin limites (Hell without Limits) / 1978

Arturo Ripstein Profundo Carmesí (Deep Crimson) / 1996

Martin Ritt Norma Rae / 1979

Joan Rivers: (Still A) Live at the London Palladium / 2005

See also Ricki Stern

Jacques Rivette Le coup du berger / 1956

Jacques Rivette Histoire de Marie et Julien (Story of Marie and Julien) / 2003, no US

     distribution

Jacques Rivette Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights) / 1985

Jacques Rivette Ne touchez pas la hache (The Duchess of Langeais) / 2007, USA 2008

Jacques Rivette Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) / 1958, 1961 premiere

Jacques Rivette Le Pont du Nord / 1981
Jacques Rivette La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967

Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise West Side Story/ 1961

Bruce Robinson Witnail & I / 1987

Mark Robson The Inn of the Sixth Happiness / 1958

João Pedro Rodrigues O Fantasma / 2000, USA 2001

João Pedro Rodrigues Odete (Two Drifters) / 2005

João Pedro Rodrigues O Ornitólogo (The Ornithologist) / 2017

Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell Performance / 1970

Nicolas Roeg The Man Who Fell to Earth / 1976

Éric Rohmer L'Amour l'après-midi (Love in the Afternoon, also called Chloé in the Afternoon) /

      1972

Ḗric Rohmer La Collectionneuse (The Collector) / 1967

Ḗric Rohm er Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s) / 1969

Alice Rohrwacher Felice Lozarro (Happy as Lozarro) 2018

Herbert Ross Nijinsky / 1980

Roberto Rossellini Europa ’51 / 1952, USA 1954

Roberto Rossellini Francesco, giullare di Dio(God’s Jester) / (The Flowers of St. Francis) /   

    1950, USA 1952

Roberto Rossellini Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero) / 1948

Roberto Rossellini Paisa’ (Paisan) 1946

Roberto Rossellini Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) / 1945, USA 1946

Roberto Rossellini Stromboli, terra di dio (Stromboli) / 1950

Roberto Rossellini Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy) / 1953

Robert Rossen All the King's Men / 1949

Alan Rudolph Choose Me / 1984

Wesley Ruggles No Man of Her Own / 1932

Wesley Ruggles Too Many Husbands / 1940

Raúl Ruiz Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon) / 2010, USA 2011

Raúl Ruiz Le temps retrouvë (Time Regained) / 1999, USA 2000

Raúl Ruiz Les Trois Couronnes du Matelet (Three Crowns of the Sailor) / 1983, USA 1984

Björn Runge The Wife / 2017, USA 2018

David O. Russell American Hustle / 2013

David O. Russell Flirting with Disaster / 1996

David O. Russell Silver Linings Playbook / 2012

Walter Ruttman Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis) / 1927,

    USA 1928

Ira Sachs Keep the Lights On / 2012

Ira Sachs Little Men / 2016

Ira Sachs Love Is Strange / 2014

Mark Sandrich Top Hat / 1935

Sudhanshu Saria Loev / 2015, USA 2017

Volker Schlöndorff Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) / 1979, USA 1980

Volker Schlöndorff Diplomatie (Diplomacy) / 2014, general USA 2015

Volker Schlöndorff Die junge Törless (Young Törless) / 1966

Volker Schlöndorff Un amour de Swann (Eine Liebe von Swann) (Swann in Love) / 1984

Volker Schlöndorff Der Fangschuß (Coup de Grâce) / 1976

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder:  

  Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann(The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or:

  How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead) / 1975

Barbet Schroeder Reversal of Fortune / 1990

Werner Schroeter Deux / 2002

Lacey Schwartz Little White Lie / 2014

Jeffrey Schwarz Tab Hunter Confidential / 2015

Martin Scorcese After Hours / 1985

Martin Scorcese Hugo / 2011

Martin Scorcese The Wolf of Wall Street / 2013

George Seaton Miracle on 34th Street / 1947

Parvez Sharma A Jihad for Love (In the Name of Allah) / 2007, USA 2008

Richard Shepard The Matador / 2005

Larisa Shepitko Krylya (Wings) / 1966, USA 1996

Larisa Sheptiko Voskhozhdenie (The Ascent) / 1976

Hiroshi Shimizu 有りがたうさんArigatō-san(Mr. Thank You) / 1936
Hiroshi Shimizu 按摩と女Anma to onna (Two Masseurs and a Woman) / 1938

Masahiro Shinoda はなれ瞽女おりん (Hanare Goze Orin) (Ballad of Orin) / 1977

Simon Shore Get Real / 1998

Michael Showalter The Big Sick / 2017

George Sidney Kiss Me, Kate / 1953

David Siegel (see Scott McGehee)

Don Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers / 1956

Don Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers/ 1956 [short discussion]

Bryan Singer (with Dexter Fletcher) Bohemian Rhapsody / 2018

Douglas Sirk Imitation of Life / 1959

Alf Sjöberg Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) / 1951

Alf Sjöberg Hets (Tormet) / 1944

Victor Sjöström Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage) / 1921, USA 1922

Victor Sjöstrom The Scarlet Letter / 1926

Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan Marjoe / 1972

Jack Smith Flaming Creatures / 1963

Kevin Smith Chasing Amy / 1997

Greta Snider Hard-Core Home Movie / 1989

Greta Snider Our Gay Brothers / 1993

Steven Soderbergh Erin Brockovich / 2000

Paolo Sorrentino La grande belleza (The Great Beauty) / 2013

Paolo Sorrentino Youth / 2015

Steven Spielberg Lincoln / 2012

Steven Spielberg The Post / 2017

Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work /2010

Josef von Sternberg The Blue Angel / 1930

Josef von Sternberg (with Julien Duvivier and Victor Fleming) The Great Waltz / 1938

Josef von Sternberg The Last Command / 1928

Josef von Sternberg (with Nicolas Ray) Macao / 1952

Josef von Sternberg Morocco / 1930

Josef von Sternberg The Salvation Hunters / 1925

Josef von Sternberg The Scarlet Empress / 1934

Josef von Sternberg Underworld / 1927

George Stevens The More the Merrier / 1943

George Stevens Shane / 1953

Robert Stevenson Jane Eyre / 1944

Jon Stewart Rosewater / 2014

Susan Stroman The Producers / 2005

Andrew L. Stone Stormy Weather / 1943

Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead / 1990

Erich von Stroheim Queen Kelly / 1929

John Sturges Bad Day at Black Rock / 1954

Preston Sturges Hail the Conquering Hero / 1944

Preston Sturges The Lady Eve / 1941

Preston Sturges The Palm Beach Story / 1942

Anne Sundberg (see Ricki Stern)

Suzuki Seijun すべてが狂ってるSubete ga kurutteru (Everything Goes Wrong) / 1960

Jan Švankmajer Něco z Alenky (Alice) / 1988

Jan Švankmajer Spiel mit Steinen (A Game with Stones) / 1965

Jan Švankmajer Rakvičkárna (Punch and Judy) / 1966

Jan Švankmajer Et Cetera / 1966

Jan Švankmajer Picknick mit Weissmann (Picnic with Weissmann) / 1968

Jan Švankmajer Tichý týden v domé (A Quiet Week in the House) / 1969

Damían Szifron Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales) / 2014. USA general release 2015

Kidlat Tahimik Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) / 1977

Abdellah Taïa L’armée du salut (Salvation Army) 2013, USA 2015

Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Rublev / 1966

Andrei Tarkovsky Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan's Childhood) / 1962

Andrei Tarkovsky Offret (The Sacrifice) / 1986

Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker / 1979

Andrei Tarkovsky Зеркало (Zerkalo) (Mirror) / 1975

Béla Tarr Kárhozat (Damnation) / 1988

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky A Londoni férfi(The Man from London) / 2007, USA 2008,

    2009

Béla Tarr Sátántangó / 1994

Béla Tarr A Torionói Ló (The Turin Horse) / 2011

Béla Tarr Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) / 2000

Jacques Tati Trafic(Traffic) / 1971

Norman Taurog| Broadway Melody of 1940 / 1940

André Téchiné Impardonnables (Unforgiveable) / 2011

André Téchiné Quand on a 17 ans (Being 17) / 2016

André Téchiné Les roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds) / 1994

André Téchiné Les Sœurs Brontë(The Brontë Sisters) / 1979

André Téchiné Les Témoins (The Witnesses) / 2007, USA 2008

Hiroshi Teshigahara Tanin no kao (The Face of Another) / 1966, USA 1967

Hiroshi Teshigahara Suna no onna (Woman of the Dunes) / 1964

Hiroshi Teshigahara Rikyū / 1989

Mark Thiedeman Last Summer / 2013

Guillermo del Toro El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) / 2006

Guillermo del Toro The Shape of Water / 2017

Ceyda Torun Kedi (Cat) / 2016, USA 2017

Jacques Tourneur Out of the Past / 1947

Scott Treleaven The Salivation Army / 2001

François Truffaut L’Amour en fuite(Love on the Run) / 1979

François Truffaut Antoine et Colette (Antoine and Colette) / 1962

François Truffaut Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) / 1968, USA 1969

François Truffaut Domicile Conjugal (Bed and Board) / 1970, USA 1971

François Truffaut L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) / 1970

François Truffaut Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) / 1962

François Truffaut La Nuit américaine (Day for Night) / 1973

François Truffaut Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) / 1959

François Truffaut Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player) 1960, USA 1964

Ming-liang Tsai 青少年哪吒 (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) (Rebels of a Neon God) / 1992, USA

     2015

Edgar G. Ullmer Detour / 1945

Zaza Urushadze მანდარინები (Mandariinid) Tangerines / 2013, USA 2015

Peter Ustinov Billy Budd / 1962

Roger Vadim …And God Created Woman / 1956, USA 1957

Jean-Luc Vallée Dallas Buyers Club / 2013

Jaco van Dormael Mr. Nobody / 2009, USA 2011

Jaco van Dormael Toto le Heros (Toto the Hero) / 1991, USA 1992

Jaco van Dormael Le tout nouveau testament (The Brand New Testament) / 2015, USA 2016

W. S. Van Dyke The Thin Man / 1934

Gus Van Sant Mala Noche / 1986

Gus Van Sant Milk / 2008

Agnès Varda Les plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) / 2008

Agnès Varda Le Bonheur (Happiness)/ 1965

Agnès Varda Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7) / 1962

Agnès Varda Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) / 2000

Malcolm Venville 44 Inch Chest / 2009, USA 2010

Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera / 1929

Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Silova Tri geroinia(Three Heroines) / 1938

King Vidor The Crowd / 1928

King Vidor Cynara / 1932

King Vidor Show People / 1928

Lorenzo Vigas Desde allá (From Afar) / 2015, USA general release 2016

Jean Vigo L’Atalante (Le Chaland qui passe) / 1934

Jean Vigo À Propos de Nice / 1930

Jean Vigo Zéro de conduit (Zero for Conduct) / 1933

Luchino Visconti La caduta degli dei (Die Verdammten) (The Damned) / 1969

Luchino Visconti Il gattopardo (The Leopard) / 1963

Luchino Visconti Le Notti Bianche (White Nights) / 1957

Luchino Visconti Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Friends) / 1960

Luchino Visconti Senso / 1954, USA 1968

Luchino Visconti La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) / 1948, USA 1957

Andrzej Wajda Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) / 1977

Andrzej Wajda Kanał / 1956, USA 1961

Andrzej Wajda Niewinni czarodzieje (Innocent Sorcerers) / 1960

Andrzej Wajda Panny z Wilka (The Girls of Wilko) / 1979

Andrzej Wajda Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) / 1958

Andrzej Wajda | Sibirska Ledi Magbe (Siberian Lady Macbeth) / 1962

Raoul Walsh High Sierra / 1941

Raoul Walsh They Died with Their Boots On / 1941

Charles Walters Easter Parade / 1948

Charles Walters Lili / 1953

Tim Wardle Three Identical Strangers / 2018

Charles Sibley Watson and Melville Webber The Fall of the House of Usher / 1928

Apichatpong Weerethakul Rak Ti Khon Kaen(Cemetery of Splendor) / 2015, USA limited 2016

Apichatpong Weerethakul Sud anaeha (Blissfully Yours) / 2002

Apichatpong Weerethakul Tropical Malady / 2004

Apichatpong Weerethakul Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / 2010

Paul Wegener and Carl Boese Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kom (The Golem: How He Came  

      into the World) / 1920

Peter Weir The Plumber / 1979

Peter Weir The Truman Show / 1998

Peter Weir Witness / 1985

Orson Welles, François Reichenbach (uncredited), Gary Graver (uncredited) and Oja Kodar

     (uncredited) F for Fake/ 1975

Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai / 1947

Orson Welles the Magnificent Ambersons / 1942

Orson Welles Touch of Evil / 1958

Orson Welles The Trial (Le Procés)/ 1962

William Wellman Nothing Sacred / 1937
William Wellman So Big! / 1932

Wim Wenders Der amerikanische Freud (The American Friend) / 1977

Wim Wenders Paris, Texas / 1984

Paul Wendkos Gidget / 1959

Lina Wertmuller Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) / 1975, USA 1976

Mark S. Wexler Tell Them Who You Are / 2004

James Whale Bride of Frankenstein / 1935

James Whale Frankenstein / 1931

James Whale Show Boat / 1936

Mike White Year of the Dog / 2007

Robert Wiene Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) / 1920

Billy Wilder The Apartment / 1960

Billy Wilder Love in the Afternoon / 1957

Billy Wilder Sabrina / 1954

Billy Wilder Some Like It Hot / 1959

Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard / 1950

Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard / 1950 [short discussion]

Spencer Williams The Blood of Jesus / 1941

Irvin Winkler De-Lovely / 2004

RobertWise The Andromeda Strain / 1971

Robert Wise The Day the Earth Stood Still /1951

Konrad Wolf Ich war neuzehn  (I Was Nineteen) / 1968

Konrad Wolf Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers) / 1958, released 1972

Wong Kar-wai 東邪西毒 (Ashes of Time Redux) / 2008 (revision of 1994 film)

Wong Kar-wai 墮落天使 (Duòluò tiānshǐ) (Fallen Angels) / 1995

Wong Kar-wai 春光乍洩(Happy Together)/ 1997

Wong Kar-wai 花樣年華(In the Mood for Love)/ 2000, USA 2001

Wong Kar-wai 2046 / 2004

Wong Kar-wai 旺角卡門 (Wàngjiǎo Kǎmén) (As Tears Go By) / 1988, USA 2008

Edgar Wright Baby Driver / 2017

Randall Wright Hockney / 2016

Marcin Wrona Demon / 2015, USA 2016

Wu Tianming 变脸Bian Lian (The King of Masks) / 1996, USA 1999

William Wyler The Best Years of Our Lives / 1946

William Wyler Dodsworth / 1936

William Wyler Funny Girl / 1968

William Wyler How to Steal a Million / 1966

William Wyler Jezebel / 1938

William Wyler The Letter / 1940

William Wyler The Little Foxes / 1941

Peter Yates The Hot Rock / 1972

Marina Zenovich Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired / 2008

Zhang Yimou Raise the Red Lantern ( dà Hóng Dēnglong Gāogāo guà ) ( the Raise at The Red Lanterns ) /

      1991

Fred Zinnemann Behold a Pale Horse / 1964

Fred Zinnemann Oklahoma! / 1955

Fred Zinnemann Oklahoma! / 1955 [short discussion]

Andrey Zvyagintsev Левиафан (Leviathan) / 2014

Andrey Zvyagintsev Dislike ( Loveless ) / 2017