Films for Fans of Visionary Directors

Above: Russell Crowe in Noah (2014)

I watch videos for a living. Not that it’s much of a living, but at least it keeps me in debt. In my most delusional moments, I fancy myself along the lines of the late Herman G. Weinberg, a film writer who provided English subtitles for the US releases of most European movies in the middle of the 20th Century. He wrote a column in Film Culture called “Coffee, Brandy and Cigars” (collected in a book called Saint Cinema) in which he rambled over whatever came into his head. I invite you now to pull up a chair and try one of these lady-fingers as we glance over a few titles.

In my idle survey of recent DVDs, I’m struck more than ever by cinema’s thriving traffic in visionaries. You see it in the occasional blockbuster, such as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah with Russell Crowe, arriving on video at the end of July. I haven’t seen this picture yet, though I think I know how it ends. Anyway, I’m leery of movies with lots of water, although not for the same reason W.C. Fields said he avoided water (“Fish fuck in it.”)

Son of Man (2006)

Here is Aronofsky with a big-budget blockbuster on his hands, a current worldwide gross of over $350 million (over $100 million of it in the US) according to Wikipedia. You might think Bible movies tend to make lots of money, despite or because of controversy, but that’s not really so. One of the most jaw-dropping films I’ve watched recently is the South African production, Son of Man (2006), a retelling of Christ in contemporary African terms, and I’m the only one I know who’s seen this beautiful vision.

I wish this could be a world-beater, for it reminds me that filmmaker Mark Dornford-May, aided and abetted by his wife and muse Pauline Malefane, is another visionary among us. They also made the wonderful U-Carmen, a re-imagining of Bizet’s Carmen, that shouldn’t be confused with another wonderful re-imagining called Karmen Gei from Joseph Gai Ramaka. I hope you’re taking notes.

Getting back to Aronofsky’s success. This is the same guy who made the gorgeously black and white Pi on a budget of $60,000. He clearly had a dazzling visual compulsiveness from the get-go, aided by cinematographer Matthew Libatique. I’m partial to his pie-eyed gonzo floperoo The Fountain, but he proved capable of popular Oscar-bait with the more accessible Requiem for a Dream (which struck me as Reefer Madness gone arty), The Wrestler and Black Swan. Now that he’s so successful, it’s probably fashionable to knock him. Lots of people seem to be invested in the idea that personal visionaries go nowhere in film today.

Transcendence (2014)

You can’t tell that from PR, where “visionary” has become a marketing adjective, like “iconic”. I see the Blu-ray/DVD combo of Transcendence describes a bonus feature in the terms “step inside the creative process of visionary director Wally Pfister.” In this context, the word seems to mean “he made a sci-fi movie”. Don’t let the term get you excited. Here’s a movie whose ideas and some of its technical challenges might have justified a commentary track, but all we get are a bunch of “special features” that are two-minute puff pieces, as if the project must still be sold to us.

Shall we call Pfister a visionary? His career as a Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer comes slightly closer to the word, but let’s not get carried away. This directorial debut handles Jack Paglen’s script in a simple and direct way. That’s a wise approach, though I never felt I was seeing what I hadn’t before. What’s most interesting to me about the film is that it’s so glum, elegiac, and low-key for a movie aiming at the popcorn blockbuster-dom its budget needed, and this subtly “low-tech” sense may be underlined by shooting in 35mm instead of digital.

The story opens in a world where electronic communication has gone away, and for some reason that looks like the desuetude of television’s Revolution, if not The Walking Dead. I’m not sure why a virus that shuts down the internet would mean that, five years later, it looks like nobody has cars or air conditioning, but whatever; it’s only one street full of extras.

We learn, as we learned in such chestnuts as Colossus the Forbin Project and WarGames, that artificial intelligence is dangerous — but wait, we actually learn, as in last year’s wondrous Her, that our fears may be groundless and that, although the new consciousness is desirable, we just aren’t ready for it and it might leave us behind. Although the movie indulges in simple, fraught confrontations, it benefits from being slower and more thoughtful than required. Except at the box office.

Some visionaries are quite happy with their defined realms of success. The late James Broughton, a fixture in San Francisco’s cultural life and a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, is the subect of Big Joy, a profile of his life, his witty poetry, and his fun, hedonistic avant-garde films. We hear from friends, colleagues (such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and filmmaker George Kuchar), Broughton’s younger lover/husband (Joel Singer), the wife he dumped (Suzanna Hart), a son (nervous before the camera) who regrets not spending more time with him, and snippets of a taped interview with critic Pauline Kael, with whom he had a daughter. (The two daughters didn’t participate in the interviews.)

The thorny theme is that if you don’t pursue your joy, you’ll feel damaged, and if you do pursue it, you may leave behind others who feel damaged. Aside from the talking heads, we see clips from such poetic films as The Pleasure Garden, to which Jean Cocteau presented a prize at the Cannes Festival, and the saucy burlesque dream of The Bed. Facets Media released an essential set of The Films of James Broughton several years ago; it has most but not all. This new documentary is a giddy cocktail with a trace of hangover. Extras include delightful poetry readings; his ingenious zen-through-wordplay poems include “This Is It” and the earthy “Nipples and Cocks”.

Speaking of cleansing the palate, won’t you try one of these parfaits?

Another visionary avant-garde filmmaker (this one still alive) is the subject of Jodorowsky’s Dune. In 1975, after making a midnight cult-film splash with El Topo (which basically invented the midnight cult film) and then The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky got the rights to Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic and recruited artists Jean Giraud (Moebius), H.R. Giger and Chris Foss, effects man Dan O’Bannon, rock band Pink Floyd, and actors Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, David Carradine and Salvador Dali (!) before funding fell through. The primary reason seems to be that Jodorowsky refused to make a film of standard length, and they were asking for too much money.

Here’s a clear exhibit to support the notion that visionaries can’t make it in the Hollywood machine, yet apparently the project made a big impact without getting made. This documentary asks us to imagine the unmade epic and traces its influence in later films, comics, and TV. Those influences go beyond David Lynch’s version of Dune. Jodorowsky, an aging, smiling scamp, goes off into amusing and prickly rants of broken English, as when he recounts his pain that Lynch, whom he reckoned the only other filmmaker who could pull it off, was going to make the film, and then his enormous relief at seeing it in a theatre and giggling “It’s a failure!”

The influence on Alien is clear enough, since some of the same artists immediately moved to that project. As the documentary looks at possible influences in movies like Flash Gordon and Raiders of the Lost Ark, not to mention Star Wars, Jodorowsky is even ready to take credit for the development of TV mini-series and multi-part epics, and who can say that the circulation of his mammoth storyboard book for Dune made no contribution to people’s thinking in Hollywood? It’s fun to think about. Jodorowsky’s producer, Michel Seydoux, later worked with Nikita Mikhalkov, Alain Resnais, and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, which I consider one of the most important and visionary films of the last 25 years.

Yet another stubborn, certifiable visionary is Alexander Sokurov. His bizarre transmutation of Goethe’s Faust follows its hero’s wanderings with a sinister moneylender (half goat, half insect) around a 19th Century German town. Sokurov’s preference for drained colors, distorting lenses, and indirect or occluded compositions, plus the busy Altman-esque soundtrack, turn the “story” into a suspended, circling fever dream. I find this an arty, strange, intense alchemy of natural beauty (in the forest) and human ugliness (in the town). I can’t say I “like” it, but I don’t have to.

Then there’s Lars Von Trier, arguably the most audacious and important artist in films today. It’s often impossible to tear one’s eyes away from the screen, so lyrical and appalling can he be. His two-part Nymphomaniac, which I haven’t seen yet, is described as an explicit character study about characters played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgard as they develop a relationship full of flashbacks to her adventures.

Why do I look forward to it? I know that Gainsbourg is either a gift to Von Trier or vice versa, because this actress, who suggests something of the intensity of Charlotte Rampling (with whom she’s shared the screen without being blown away) plus something of the ethereal beauty of dare-I-say Catherine Deneuve, has illuminated Von Trier’s gruelling and hypnotic Antichrist and Melancholia, so I tend to think their tandem can do no wrong. However, even if I should think it’s an utter failure, I’m pretty certain I’ll be glad I saw it. That’s the thing about real visionaries. Even their bad stuff is rich, because it’s so much of themselves.

Ernest & Celestine (2012)

The animated, Oscar-nominated Ernest & Celestine (2012) is about the friendship between a mouse and a bear who live in rival worlds–one on the surface, one below. Both are thieves and outcasts. The mice make their living scavenging bears’ teeth because their own incisors wear down to nubs, while this particular bear is a busker who scavenges and scrounges at will, even breaking into shops.

On the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Cinedigm, you can see the French-made film in its original language (with Lambert Wilson as the bear) or dubbed with American stars Forest Whitaker (bear), Mackenzie Foy (mouse), Paul Giamatti, Stephen H. Macy, and, to our amazement, Lauren Bacall as an unpleasant old mouse. The directors are Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner. Aubier and Patar created a charming and delightful whimsy known as A Town Called Panic, a stop-motion film with toys, so I was looking forward to this acclaimed item whose awards include the L.A. Film Critics Association, France’s César, and Belgium’s Magritte.

Here’s where I’m swimming upstream. To me, the tone’s more gloomy than enchanting, although the watercolor approach makes lovely, delicate images. It’s inspired by a beloved series of books by Belgium’s Gabrielle Vincent, which look very light and anecdotal, while the filmmakers construct a plot-heavy tale full of danger and oppression (what a dreary vision of society, for bears and mice) in order to make a big point about the unlikeliness and specialness of the central friendship of vagabonds. Whimsy is crushed as though stepped on by a bear.

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013)

There’s more literally crushing whimsy in Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013), an even darker fairy tale from Canada’s Denis Côté. It follows a rocky affair between two female ex-convicts (played excellently by Romane Bohringer and Pierrette Robitaille) living in woodsy seclusion. We never learn their crimes, but oblique hints and sinister details imply that something from the past is catching up with them.

This occupies a border between the real, the pretty, and the disturbing. Because this isn’t trying to be ingratiating, I found its uneasy, foreboding nature got under my skin in a good way. This is the first film I’ve seen by the busy, award-winning Côté, and what I’ve read about him suggests a budding visionary. If I had to stretch to a comparison based on one film, I might suggest Francois Ozon for the confidence and willingness to be sour.

I imagine most Canadian directors work somewhat under the shadow of David Cronenberg, a genuine visionary who casts a very odd shadow, indeed. He applies a classical, restrained, almost hermetic style upon great gonzo unleashings and outbursts–sometimes bursting out quite literally, as in Scanners. We have arrived at a cultural landmark when the definitive low-budget exploding-head movie gets lavish treatment from Criterion, but here we are. (Criterion already released a lavish edition of his even scarier Videodrome.) As a bonus, it throws in his black and white student film, Stereo, an antiseptic and avant-garde parody of science documentaries that already explores institutional exploitation of psychic powers and the sex drive.

Even a Visionary’s Bad Stuff Is Rich

If you had cable TV in the ’80s, you must have seen Scanners (1981), and if you weren’t around yet, you’re in for a ghastly treat. The faceless corporate paranoia has hardly dated, even if some of the superficial styles have, and psycho-kinetic stuff still blows up real good just as you start to feel the throbbing in your own temples. In 1981, some found it derivative of Brian DePalma’s The Fury, a senseless movie that looked terrible on TV but still had astonishing setpieces, like the death of Carrie Snodgress’ character. (DePalma knows nothing if not how to kill women.)

Scanners (1981)

Today, we see Cronenberg’s movie properly within the context of his own transition from gory “body horror” (which he practically invented, and I won’t be surprised if Criterion next latches onto his agonized divorce drama The Brood) to the more intellectual path he’s followed for the last 20 years. This path seems to disappoint some fans who miss the blood and guts, like the Woody Allen fans who yearn for his “early, funny movies”, but I find Cronenberg as strong and willful as ever. A Dangerous Method is as beautiful, brainy, seductive, and roiling as anybody could want, unless it’s just me.

Mmm, this martini is a bit on the tart and bitter side, don’t you think?

The Lunchbox (2013)

After a diet of the unnerving, I enjoyed Ritesh Batra’s modest and affirmative The Lunchbox. It builds from a culturally specific situation, Mumbai’s lunchbox delivery system, and arrives at universal truths about friendship and choices. Thanks to a mix-up, an isolated and prickly desk-worker (Irrfan Khan) on the verge of retirement begins trading lunchtime notes with an equally lonely and frustrated young housewife (Nimrat Kaur).

As their epistolary confessions become more personal, we eavesdropping viewers become increasingly interested to know where this is going. Batra conveys this simple idea in the modern manner of handheld docu-realism, acted naturalistically without a music score (although recordings and street performers are elements in the story), and with many long-held middle-distance compositions focused on the man’s careful, nuanced behavior. Batra doesn’t reveal himself as a visionary, merely a humanist working an honorable field with tools he understands.

If you want a visionary who’s affirmative yet stringent, extravangantly colorful yet off-putting in a good way, look no farther than Jacques Demy, a highly personal artist in a tangential relation to the French New Wave. Criterion’s The Essential Jacques Demy gathers six films and garnishes with generous helpings of bonus shorts (four by the man himself), documentaries (two by his wife, Agnès Varda), and interviews with all and sundry, as is their wont.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Here you’ll find his most famous and beloved film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) with Catherine Deneuve, a candy-colored confection in which all dialogue is sung and scored by Michel Legrand. It burst out as an apotheosis of his worldview of criss-crossed lovers and yearning souls, as expressed in the earlier black and white Lola with Anouk Aimée and Bay of Angels with Jeanne Moreau. All these have previously been on DVD from Koch-Lorber, but these new digital restorations supercede those.

The Young Girls of Rochefort, sometimes incorrectly labeled a sequel to Cherbourg, is the only film to co-star Deneuve with her sister Françoise Dorléac, who died shortly after. It’s another gorgeously colored musical, with appearances by Gene Kelly and George Chakiris. I saw this film in Paris (how I love saying that) and was underwhelmed, so I understand Jonathan Rosenbaum’s remarks in the booklet that the film is loved in France “but tends to be an acquired taste elsewhere.”

8 Women (2002)

Now that I’m more mature (ahem), I better appreciate its expression of Demy’s personal vision, and of course now I’ve seen such loving homages as Ozon’s 8 Women (2002). I agree with Rosenbaum’s insight that this movie manages to be disconcertingly more realistic and more artificial than we expect our musicals to be. I still think Kelly sticks out a bit, but this whole movie sticks out a bit.

Donkey Skin (1970)

Meanwhile, the fairy tale Donkey Skin (1970) is sheer glittering perfection. It stars Deneuve again, appropriately cast as a princess; Jean Marais (of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, to which the film delicately winks) as her father the king, who decides to marry her (this ain’t Disney!); and goddess Delphine Seyrig, also appropriately cast as her hip fairy godmother. This is another release that renders the previous Koch-Lorber disc superfluous.

What a strange treat is the sixth feature, the one I hadn’t seen before, the almost wilfully concealed Une Chambre en Ville. Set in 1955 Nantes, Demy’s home town in Brittany, during bitter clashes between striking dockworkers and police, this is another all-singing, pseudo-operatic vision in gorgeous colors, with everyone’s pastel outfits matching the wallpaper. It follows 24 hours in the life of more ecstatically mismatched lovers, a world in which nobody can get or keep what they want. In an extra interview, Demy refutes the observation made by some that “it’s like Umbrellas of Cherbourg“, because it sure isn’t. This is an essentially political, class-based tale and a tragic one.

One thing I’ve always admired about Cherbourg is that it acknowledges all the melodramatic feelings of love without capitulating to them, because it’s wise enough to know that they pass and leave one rueful. In this sense, it’s a Gallic equivalent to Splendor in the Grass. If that’s the rueful ending and Rochefort contrives the ironically happy ending, this 1982 film contrives the tragic ending whose very absurdity and unnecessary-ness is the point, and an appropriate one.

Although Demy’s complete output is available in a French boxed set, I understand (regretfully) Criterion’s hesitation to clear all rights issues of the minor titles, especially since the remarkable Hollywood production Model Shop (or “Lola Goes to Zabriskie Point”) is already available, as is the British co-production The Pied Piper, albeit in notably unrestored prints. But I’ve still never had the chance to see A Very Pregnant Man with Marcello Mastroianni, the musical Parking with Jean Marais, the cross-dressing adventure Lady Oscar, and few others.

Jacquot de Nantes (1991)

Like a Demy character, I yearn restlessly for what I may never have: a follow-up set, perhaps called “The Inconsequential Jacques Demy”. And I urge you to seek out Varda’s loving and beautiful Jacquot de Nantes (1991), which is perhaps the only biopic about a film director’s life (and certainly the only one made with its subject’s participation), and a masterpiece.

Judex (1963)

Have a few more truffles. I can’t stop talking until I’ve mentioned another film by a wilfully independent French filmmaker, another title I’d heard about for years and never got to see until Criterion just brought it out: Georges Franju’s Judex (1963), the hypnotic tribute from visionary auteur to another. As the extras explain, it’s his remake of one of Louis Feuillade’s silent films — not the one he really wanted to remake, though, because he’d have preferred one that concentrates on the villain instead of the good guy. But then, as he also explains in an interview, this Judex is really a bastard anyway!

Feuillade’s films were celebrated by the Surrealists for their straightforwardly staged presentation of complicated twists and reversals and masquerades so fantastic and absurd, they enter a dreamlike realm of mysterious figures populating pretty landscapes. Franju’s version rushes slowly, as it were, from one oxymoronic histrionically-restrained setpiece to another, unraveling a never-ending series of kidnappings and false deaths whose narrative path can just about be inferred by indirection. The most celebrated sequence involves a masked ball in which Judex wears a giant bird-head, as if in reference to famous etchings by Max Ernst, although the interview with co-writer Jacques Champreux (Feuillade’s grandson) identifies another source: cartoonist J.J. Grandville.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

The plot cannot be sensibly described, but there’s a lot of it. American magician Channing Pollock plays the title role. The wispy and large-eyed Edith Scob (Franju’s Eyes Without a Face ) is the fainting heroine, while Francine Bergé dominates all as the relentlessly evil and ingenious villainess. She got the part after Franju saw her in a scandalous success from the Cannes Film Festival, Les Abysses, which Wikipedia describes thusly: “A violent and surrealistic mixture of farce and social commentary, its story was inspired by the real-life case of the Papin sisters.” Goodness, now that’s another I have to see somehow. Hello, Criterion? It would have too much to ask for that one as an extra.

Also present on the disc are two shorts by Franju. One is about disfigured survivors of war and a museum of war, and the other is a gentle docudrama recreation of the life of another landmark magician of cinema, Georges Méliès (played by his own son). I like an artist who doesn’t forbear to honor his forebears. Now let me publicly express the hope that Criterion (or somebody) will continue to mine Region 1’s undisc-ified Franju, especially Head Against the Wall, Therese Desqueyroux, Thomas the Impostor and Shadowman.

Looking back over our little tête-à-tête, you must think I fall into raptures over everything I see, especially if it has “Criterion” on the label. I assure you it isn’t so, and not every acclaimed filmmaker seems to me to have vision, much less be a visionary. I’ve never “gotten” writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, who either pillages old genres in uninteresting ways (Body Heat, Silverado ) or presents us with “serious” films about characters in crisis, as in Grand Canyon and The Big Chill (1983). The latter is now on Criterion, signifying its acceptance as the landmark it was hailed as by my college generation in 1981 amid Oscar nominations and soundtrack sales.

The Big Chill (1983)

I was among the few left cold by it, and I was surprised by its projective nostalgic appeal to people in their 20s. They weren’t children of the ’60s (except literally), but it was as though they were already looking forward to their Big Chill reunion moments, perhaps because this movie promised they’d be pretty, witty, and well-employed. Well, you’ve had it now, folks, and how was it? At my reunion, all the women looked fabulous and the men had gone to pot.

But you know, I often consider Pauline Kael’s point that we can’t hang on to our old opinions. We find that films we recall fondly haven’t retained their shine, but it’s harder to find examples where we reverse a negative opinion, simply because we don’t go out of our way to revisit what we didn’t like in the first place. How are we ever going to discover the gold to which we’d previously been blind? So this new edition, carefully curated with interviews and reunions, provides the perfect excuse to revisit my old prejudices after 30 years.

The story’s about a group of college chums, out of touch in more ways than one, who spend a weekend burying their youthful dreams along with their suicided Golden Boy, and discover (or at least the viewer does) that none of them has interesting problems or lives, a point they paper over with enough witty one-liners to choke Neil Simon and enough classic music to pass for emotion.

It all comes back to me: Meg Tilly’s young outsider felt like the only real and surprising character at the time, and she still does. Glenn Close plays the index who lets us know how sad each scene is by the tracks of her tears. William Hurt plays the lump who can’t get through a conversation without mentioning that a Vietnam injury left him unable to have sex, of which he seems to have a limited definition. I find that this slice of modest soul-searching among the well-groomed doesn’t make me grate my teeth anymore at the thought that it’s supposed to represent anybody’s generational snapshot (no fear), but it’s still an easy, forgettable foray.

I kept wishing Eric Rohmer had made it. John Sayles did, as Return of the Secaucus Seven, which I prefer without loving. Now it occurs to me that Louis Malle made it much later, as May Fools, and that was tiresome, too. It looks like the times, they’re not so much a-changing after all, or at least my impression of films on that subject. They could all take a cue from Kasdan and borrow profundity from a ’60s song: “What a drag it is getting old”.

Snap out of it. I keep telling you, the movies can still be as personal and visionary as ever. And isn’t this a lovely little Bordeaux? Try the manchego cheese with quince, you won’t be sorry.