Hi, Mike—maybe we start with Deformer, since it feels like an origin point for you as a filmmaker.

It’s one of the first things I ever did, in 1996. I was hanging out a lot at the Alleged Gallery in New York City, run by Aaron Rose, which showed a lot of artists from the skateboarding universe. I was reuniting with skate culture after art school at Cooper Union; it was a freeing time, getting out from under art-school anxieties and theory-driven art practice, and reconnecting with the pleasure of making things and the subversive punk excitement of pre-art-school me. That’s where I met Spike Jonze, Lance Acord—both helped me find a way into filmmaking. And that’s where I met Ed Templeton, a legendary pro skater who was becoming a very interesting artist.

Ed had this very Orange County childhood, and he got inspiration by being a contradiction to the sunny emotional, cultural, political flatness of that world —sort of an Egon Schiele of Huntington Beach. The title Deformer is from his work: the skating culture and community; his relationship with his wife, Deanna; and making art opened a more honest and bigger world where he could acknowledge the pain and traumas of his childhood and be decidedly “deformed” inside the falsely “normal” community where he grew up. I could relate to that, coming from Santa Barbara, and feeling outside of the happiness this beautiful place said it provided.

I wanted to make a portrait of Ed and Huntington Beach, and how they cocreated each other. This sort of cultural/environmental portrait became a central way of making films for me. It has so many moves that I keep coming back to: Objects and places are presented as just as important as people, and it’s happily digressive. I would leave the audio equipment with Ed at night, and he and his friends would record stories, jokes, and passages from his journals—this idea reappears in the way I use other people’s texts in my features. Tonally, it’s kind of funny, enjoying the absurdities of this place, but there’s also a more serious meditation on culture. Finally, the film is composed of portraits—people looking into the camera, like evidence or anthropological fragments. In a lot of ways, the influence of Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces is there, and William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest—the idea of a radical democracy of images, elevating the seemingly unimportant. Walker Evans and Wolfgang Tillmans were big influences too. Like Shore’s and Eggleston’s, their books of photos were open-ended stories. I was also very interested in the short films of Charles and Ray Eames—direct, educational films, very simple. Deformer is the weird combination of those influences.

That sensibility definitely carries over into The Architecture of Reassurance (2000). You’ve said you borrowed the title from a Disneyland exhibition. Why did that phrase feel like the right frame for the film?

It perfectly described the false promise and actual feeling the suburbs gave me. In Santa Barbara, we lived in this old 1915 Spanish-colonial house that my mom constantly fixed up. I would walk to my elementary school by veering into new seventies suburban developments that felt aligned with the world I saw on TV: there was an aesthetic agreement between the homes, and life seemed not as murky as it was at my house, with the secrets of my family and its depression, so I loved them. While I lived in a much more “artistic” and unique home, filled with history and great taste, I yearned for that banal world. Feeling like an impostor, I would walk through those neighborhoods and make up reasons as to why I was there, and from those memories I extrapolated the plot of The Architecture of Reassurance.

I’m also working out an interest in combining documentary and fiction. The couple who are interviewed in The Architecture of Reassurance are the actual owners of the house that we filmed in; I also asked the young actress to come up with lies about why she’s there on the spot, and this helped give her performance energy. I feel more “honest” when I can include things past the edges of my fictional stories. It’s not until I find a way to include some interruption outside of the frame — something alien to the stories and my authorship — that I feel like I have enough of a world to finish the script. Looking back, while I feel very much a writer-director, even then I wasn’t married to the words so much as the feeling I was hoping to capture.

Did you have a desire to be a narrative feature filmmaker?

I didn’t study film in art school. I was basically on my way to being a fine artist. I loved Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and projects like Group Material, but me and some friends wanted out of the rarefied art world — we wanted something more “public.” For me, that began with graphic design: I worked for a bit at M&Co, learning from amazing designers and artists who worked there, like Marlene McCarty. It wasn’t until I was twenty-seven that I had the idea of directing. Watching The Thin Blue Line — a strange mishmash of documentary and dramatization — was the first film experience that made me think, I could do that.

At the time, I didn’t know what a writer-director was, but I wanted to make work that was mine top to bottom. At first, I thought I might be like the Eameses and make innovative educational films, or be a direct documentarian like the Maysles brothers, or D. A. Pennebaker, continuing the social engagement I had gotten from being a student of Hans Haacke. “Hollywood” filmmaking was a different planet, and American indie cinema also felt pretty foreign to me — the whole world of narrative and emotional verisimilitude was not something I connected with. At the same time, a film like 8½, because it was so adventurous and strange, not traditionally narrative, felt easier to understand. It was more like the art world I was from.

The Architecture of Reassurance screened at Sundance — did that open the door to making your first feature, Thumbsucker (2005)?

[Laughs.] Nothing helped me land Thumbsucker! That was a tough six-year journey. I got to show The Architecture of Reassurance at Sundance, which was a big deal, and I got an agent from it, though it didn’t help me much. In my experience of the film world, each time you want to step up, you have to be willing to start over from the beginning. I moved from being a graphic designer/artist to being a director by begging to do videos for anyone I was doing album covers for. After a few years of making music videos — I did about ten, including the ones I did for Air — then the powers that be think you can do music videos, but that doesn’t mean you can do ads. You have to start from zero again. I did spec jobs — any creatively bad job I could. And I would put all my video fees back into projects of my own because I was treating it as a way to build a reel. Then, after years of building up a “reputation” in those worlds, and building confidence from directing a lot of very different situations, shooting all around the world, with the weird dynamics of filming celebrity athletes, big budgets, big ideas that are not easy to direct — it does help you break into the feature world, but then you have to start from zero again. That’s my experience—an American style of learning filmmaking under capitalism. I basically got that model from watching Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry do it ahead of me.

Music videos, and even ads, and the shorts I paid for, these were all my film school. More than steps on the ladder of this weird career, they are where I figured out not just how to direct but how to communicate with people, and because they are shorter, or driven by the magical force of music, they’re inherently more experimental. I’m very grateful I got to learn in that more permissive and expressive space.

Let’s talk about your music videos—we’re including two in this box set. You made several before “All I Need,” but that one feels like a turning point. What opened up for you on this project?

“All I Need” was part of a long, unusual, and productive collaboration with Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, who are the French band Air. From the beginning, the idea was that I would do all the graphics and the videos for their Moon Safari album and its singles, and that was something I had wanted to do for a long time: build a whole world of integrated design and filmmaking. By the time we made “All I Need,” I’d already done two other music videos for them: “Sexy Boy” was a dreamy, puppet-y video, and “Kelly Watch the Stars” a surrealist Ping-Pong experience. At the time, the radical differences in the Fischli and Weiss work were my favorite thing, and I wanted each piece to be very different from the last. Nico and JB supported that. “All I Need” is kind of a sentimental song, even to the band themselves—not schmaltzy, but I remember Nico and JB saying something like, “It’s too pretty, fuck it up.” And that’s a wonderful prompt.

I saw myself as a documentary-based person, and I was coming from a conceptual-art-world habit of appropriating cultural forms for other means, and I had the idea of doing a miniature documentary as a music video. As this was their most romantic, sentimental song, I wanted to engage with that tone by pushing against its dreaminess. I pitched doing a documentary of an actual couple who are in love: I wanted to interview them and have their answers play as VO over the music. The Air guys, being who they are, said, “Great.”

You’ve told me it was where you learned how to be a director, and that you’re not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t made it.

So, what I pitched was a kind of conceptual-art trick, but what I got out of the shoot was something emotional and connective and other than cerebral. I accidentally bumped into the sincerity and emotional availability that those kids had—I didn’t know that was going to happen. But I did grow up in the next town, I was a skater like them, and we hit it off. Perhaps it was the first time I really understood the power of a director who’s emotionally available and connected to his subjects. I am a formerly very shy person—way too self-conscious and afraid to be a good performer—and I feel for anyone who gets in front of the camera for me. Because these kids were very much like me, and not actors, it all came together where the trust between me and them allowed for and created an intimacy that’s in the video.

It had an immediate, not-afraid-to-be-vulnerable, not-interested-in-being-cool energy, communicated very simply. I hadn’t experienced that before, as a director, where people reacted emotionally to something I had made. And it was the beginning of a mysterious practice of creating a space for some kind of emotional realness between me and whoever’s in front of the camera, me and the crew, and, via the camera and editing, a communication/connection between me and the audience.

Godard was another huge influence on me—his shelf at Kim’s Video on Avenue A seemed like the heaviest shelf. So to be emotionally direct and sincere and available was very punk in a weird way—punk to my family of origin, because they were not supposed to be emotional; punk to the toughness of SoCal hardcore punk music, which was my first god; and punk to Godard’s cool, Brechtian suspicion of emotional authenticity. It was a funny coming-of-age individuation story for me [laughs], because it’s saying to Godard, You have some blind spots, you have some rackets that you’re running. Same to you, punk world. This desire to be seen and connect felt subversive. Maybe it’s the beginning of the influence of therapy on my filmmaking too.

Is Eating Sleeping Waiting and Playing (1999) a continuation of that emotional, observational approach?

This was another experience in learning a documentary way of shooting, where you only have half a plan of what you’ll shoot on any given day. You’re hunting for, not completing, a preconceived idea: the film and my direction are reactive and changing all the time. I love how alive that is, and I think that way of being on set has continued to influence everything I do. And maybe more than that, Eating Sleeping Waiting and Playing was one more experiential step in working out a particular voice—a kind of cultural observation, mixed with something like humor, or just absurdism, mixed with an instinct toward and pleasure in connecting with the person in front of the camera. There’s a cinematic mischievousness that wants to be kind of funny and wants to be kind of critical. This project helped me play in that vein and, equally importantly, show that side of myself to an audience, get a response, and develop trust through that.

I want to stay in the documentary world, since you return there often. Between your narrative features Thumbsucker and Beginners, you made a feature-length documentary, Does Your Soul Have a Cold? (2007). It’s not included in this box set, but I’d love to hear what motivated this project.

Thumbsucker wasn’t the experience I was hoping for, and I wanted to go back and engage in a kind of filmmaking which was easier, where you don’t have to write a script, where you’re making decisions on the fly. And I had a real ambition to do stuff that was just more socially engaged, that reflected and carried all the interests and concerns I had in art school. I also wanted to make a documentary that felt like a novel, that had a pattern or focus on a particular situation—in this case, being depressed and taking antidepressants in Japan—but in a ruminating, lyrical, novelistic way. Looking back, the cosmos of inner confusion–pain-depression is an unacknowledged theme in all my work. And that fits, as depression is insidious, and sneaky, convincing you it’s neutral; it hides well.

A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone (2013) has that socially engaged ambition behind it too.

That project was commissioned by SFMOMA. They invited a bunch of artists to come to Los Altos, a town in Silicon Valley, famous for being where Steve Jobs began Apple in his parents’ garage. In researching the history of that town, I became curious about all the famous “futurists” who worked at those companies, and the myths of a much better utopian future that run through that culture. I had the idea of interviewing not the adults who are coming up with these ideas and corporate policies but their children.

This project also reflects a shift in my work that came with becoming a parent, and being exposed to wonderful caretakers and educators who are deeply interested in children’s autonomy. So, while I’ve always been interested in younger people, and in taking them very seriously, as in the Air “All I Need” video, this was a piece that was explicitly about respecting and honoring the worldviews of nonadults. I got to practice a way to be in relation to these young people—how to produce a shoot that makes them feel safe and empowered, not judged or made cute. I loved the result, and the simplicity of it. Later, I took this idea, asking young people what they think the future will be like, and made it a part of my C’mon C’mon script.

Since you mentioned C’mon C’mon—a film scored by the Dessner brothers of the band the National—I want to talk about an earlier collaboration you had with them, I Am Easy to Find (2019). How did that project come about, and how did it change your approach to filmmaking?

The process that led to that was a very layered back-and-forth, beautifully hard to describe! I asked my agent to cold-call the band’s manager to see if they wanted to do a video. I was very lost after doing 20th Century Women, and I was looking for anything to move the atoms around. Matt Berninger, the singer, came back and said, “Can you do a film with our music, like a feature film?” I said that sounds like a lot, but he very generously began a very wide-open project where anything could happen.

They began by sharing their Dropbox with me, filled with fragments of songs, some finished songs, a lot of chord progressions done by Aaron and Bryce Dessner that Matt had yet to write lyrics for. So, I was to make some kind of film to songs that weren’t finished. But I knew all their albums very well and related to the kinds of things Matt writes about—he also writes from life, inserting concrete details into stories. After mulling over a bunch of ideas, the idea of a whole life, from birth to death, came to me. It seemed like that would relate to all of Matt’s unknown future lyrics?! Around the same time, I had met Alicia Vikander—also a fan of the band—and we wanted to do something together.

It was a very unique, lucky, and trusting collaboration. I said to them, “Can I treat your songs like a score?” That meant I had the separate stems and I could mess around with them—stretch things out, only play one or two tracks. I loved soloing tracks, hearing just one or two instruments, or just the vocals and the drums, and in the edit I got more adventurous, combining songs, rearranging the instrumentation, breaking a song down and editing its structure.

At first, I was very scared to show them what I did, but they were super generous and curious and liked what was happening, and I think they just enjoyed having this weird intervention in that stage of their career. They said, “Let’s make the album together; you come coproduce, and we’ll finish these songs and do a bunch of new songs that relate to your film but aren’t in the film.” And it became this crazy cross-feeding thing over a year or so. In my film, I was hearing one idea in a song and would play that out in the scenes you see in the movie, and the band would later see that and write a song about the thing they saw in the film. I wrote the children’s book that the dad is reading to young Alicia, just to avoid legal problems, and then later, unbeknownst to me, those words became lyrics in a song. In another song, the subtitles I wrote as the underlying structure of her life were put into an arrangement by Bryce and sung by the whole Brooklyn Youth Chorus. It was a very magical, fluid, multilayered collaboration. And it was wonderfully free with Alicia. It helped me be more brave with directing: put forward a simple but juicy prompt, open-ended; let the actor run with it and coauthor what happens; and my job is to capture that freedom.

You’ve had a long relationship to Talking Heads’ music, and you recently worked with the band. How did the “Psycho Killer” video come together?

I knew David Byrne a bit, and in 20th Century Women, there’s a Talking Heads subplot that I had to get his permission for, and he was very generous and supportive. Talking Heads: 77 was one of the first albums I owned, and its sound is a foundational mountain of creative excellence and possibility to me.

When the idea for a video for “Psycho Killer” came about, the Rhino–Warner Brothers people contacted my reps, and I knew it was going to be the typical video thing where I’m competing against five directors for the project. To me, “Psycho Killer,” like the whole 77 album, is one of the best pieces of art from the twentieth century. So, how in the hell do you come up with a video for that? I was walking around feeling grumpy and put-upon [laughs], and then the idea just came, in one stroke, mostly formed—a repetition of days, seen in the exact same twenty moments. And coming from my own therapy work, I have been very interested in emotions and how I so often don’t trust mine, or feel like I’m having the wrong emotion. I think it was from that experience that I had the urge for her to go through extreme emotions, the way they often feel on the inside, and to externalize them wildly. I thought it would be interesting if the world around her didn’t react accordingly. So we had seventeen moments done thirteen times. Each day, Saoirse Ronan played with one emotion across the whole day: “What is normal?,” people-pleasing, anxiety, loneliness, fear, sadness, disgust, anger/hate, curiosity, ridicule/rebellion, love, joy/freedom, calm/presence.

What are you carrying forward from that collaboration?

Saoirse was amazing to work with, so it was another experience in coauthoring with an actor, my job being to give them a sense of safety and a good prompt to jump off from. Saoirse showed me how I’m leaning toward something bigger than just naturalism, and how that can carry real emotions. It was very exciting to film and edit, and I like that energy in the final piece.

Kind of like I Am Easy to Find, it has this kind of impossible overarching structure—it says, “I’m going to show you a whole world,” which is impossible, and there’s something exciting about that failure to me. I like breaking things down to their composite parts, applying a rigid, clarifying form to the chaos of life that reveals it can never be clarified. But I think Saoirse’s bravery, her fire, and the not-giving-a-fuck in her performance are a bit unnerving, in a great way. So, I got to have a direct experience with that, tasted it, and I’m like, Oh, I want more of that, in a way that I didn’t know before because it was the first time I physicalized it.

Since then, I have come to understand that you don’t need Mike introducing the film for it to make you cry. He is always there in his films, which share a clear voice, a distinctive gaze, a personal approach to the filmmaking process. There is a sleight of hand to Mike’s work. Like magic, it’s not clear how it works or how it’s so deeply moving, nor is it easily explained. And as for the Hollywood part—well, Mike doesn’t play by those rules anyway. 

Mike Mills’s films are inhabited by human beings whose inner worlds engage us in ways that go beyond the plot or the exterior conflict. It is as if the voice of his cinema itself aligns us with the humans we are watching on-screen, and always in an unusually caring way. In his fiction features since Thumbsucker—Beginners (2010), 20th Century Women (2016), and C’mon C’mon (2021)—the characters are often flawed in their ability to function within a conventional family structure, and the tensions in their relationships are never portrayed stereotypically, in the vein of a partner or parent being an antagonistic force that needs to be overcome. The psychodynamics are rich and paradoxical in these films, just like in life.

Several of his male characters have left behind old ideas of masculinity—of meritocratic men who grapple with their missions or battles — and instead long for connection and intimacy in a world where those things are complicated, even in the closest of relationships. The films are defined by inactivity as a narrative force, telling silences, and looks that we the audience see, but no one else — stolen moments of lonely contemplation shared in a cinema, united with strangers.

The sophistication of Mike Mills’s design shows a deeper way for us to see the hidden interconnections of our unconscious motivations and movements. The real drama of life doesn’t happen when people yell at each other or make grand gestures, but rather in the tender, quiet moments of everyday despair or joy.

Like in Beginners: A man approaching midlife (Ewan McGregor) looks at his father (Christopher Plummer), who, having recently come out of the closet, is in love maybe for the first time, while dying from cancer. Could this observation of his father reshape the man’s ability to connect romantically? Slicing through many layers of human life in pursuit of love alongside loss, the film asks questions about how family dynamics affect us in our yearning to get close to one another. How does memory fail us, but also, in its glitches, give us the possibility to grow?

Or like in 20th Century Women: The film, set in 1979, portrays three women of different ages and their individual roles in guiding a teenage boy through a time of big societal changes. The mother (Annette Bening) was born in 1924 and had lived through the Great Depression, while her skater son (Lucas Jade Zumann) yearns for individuality in an increasingly fragmented world. As a multigenerational slice of American life in the late seventies and beyond, the film asks all the big questions: How do we live as children and parents? Why is communication with and connection to others so complicated? And why can’t fans of Black Flag be friends with people who like Talking Heads? 

And finally, like in C’mon C’mon: A radio documentarian (Joaquin Phoenix) has to bring along his estranged nephew (Woody Norman) as he travels across America asking children how they feel about the future. Genuinely listening, and searching for meaning through openness and curiosity, he grapples with how to negotiate the difficult truths of life with a nine-year-old, a process that in turn enriches his other relationships and helps him make sense of the constant flow of time and memory in his recordings.

Despite their intimacy as character studies, these films have an impressive scope. They are always reminding us of the specific historical and cultural context of who and what we are watching, and seeing the United States through the prism of individual human experience. This is the epic quality of Mike Mills’s body of work — the questioning of human scale in the endeavor of modernity that is the American experiment.

His montage sequences—composed of successions of moving-image scenes or still photographs and a narrator’s voice that situates the surrounding narrative within a broader cultural context— are a recurring formal trope in his work. They reveal the paradox of how culture shapes us while simultaneously being sold back to us as a veneer of change, even as the universe remains the same—how the personal tragedies of lived experience can never be reduced to social analysis.

In existential terms, the films question the meaning of the material world—our objects, our presidents, our genders, our beliefs — as seen through the everyday lives of ordinary people. Similarly, in the nephew and uncle’s grappling with the passage of time and constant change, there is an awareness that things will be forgotten, yet there is also a choice to remember. By recording their thoughts, they attempt, at the very least, to “see each other” along the way — through sound, images, and words.

Though they look clearly at human experience, these films are not made in the improvised, gritty manner of tough social realism. Mike’s formal originality and sense of exploration show us a way to bring the big machine of filmmaking to a much subtler place. A place I want to return to time and time again.

In the late nineties, my younger brother and I discovered Mike Mills’s music video for the band Air’s “All I Need,” and we couldn’t stop watching it. We had both skated, and watching skate kids in LA was of course cool, but more than that, watching this young couple in love felt like a radical act of quiet tenderness. The video felt like a documentary and a beautifully aestheticized photo-essay at the same time. It felt like no one with this particular gaze, this mix of hipness and craft, had ever bothered to look at teenagers in love like this before. Lyrical and specific at the same time. Anthropological yet kind and open.

I later learned that Mike is an excellent graphic designer who has also played in a couple of bands (while being a skater himself). So, the fact that his film work is so beautifully designed and musical in its structuring makes complete sense. 

Mike inspires the rest of us to be brave about our personal material, showing us how relevant even the tiniest domestic detail can be in a bigger existential perspective. 

Because I have had the fortune of working with some of the same collaborators as Mike—the editor Olivier Bugge Coutté, the cinematographer Kasper Tuxen, and the incredibly talented Elle Fanning—Mike and I have become friends, and it’s always such a pleasure to spend time with a guy who is so knowledgeable about art, cinema, and music. But what impresses me most is how well-read and smart Mike is about psychology, and the dynamics inside and between us all. He is truly a great observer of life.

I will sometimes meet people who haven’t seen a Mike Mills film, and I will try to explain what they are like. It will be impossible.

For me, this is Stanton’s greatest performance, specifically because it fuses together the two modes that predominate in his career, but are rarely explored, as they are here, as two faces of the same character. One is the frisky, misanthropic provocateur, the other the soulful dead-eyes survivor-witness, the man who’s seen too much. (You could call this the Repo Man vs. Paris, Texas perplex.) Because his unusual physiognomy ropes these two modes together in one body—Stanton appears to have jumped from limber, goofy teen to crushed senior citizen without bothering to visit middle age on the way—we can underestimate his range. But not here.

Our introduction to Jerry is one of the great scenes in the film. Hoffman’s Dembo rolls across the bed he has just shared with Theresa Russell—since Max has vengefully wrecked his parole, this has been a night of nonverbal reflection, a calm before some kind of storm—and dials a telephone number, asking for Jerry, a name we haven’t heard. The film then cuts ahead, to Jerry’s suburban backyard. The scene is suffocatingly vapid: kidney-shaped pool, floral shade umbrella, aluminum folding chairs, a thin margin of walkway, bounded by a high, seamless wooden fence, and Jerry’s new wife, trailing them from the grill to a table covered with pickles, chips, mustard, ketchup. Stanton relates his apparent good fortune in a sleepwalker’s drone: “Goin’ alright. After you fell, I pulled a few jobs and met Carol. She straightened me out. So I set myself up in the paint contracting business . . . Put that pool in last year, the only thing I need’s a new car . . .” When Carol (played by Rita Taggart) joins them at the table, she reveals that she, too, has a tropism for the criminal life: she seems to collect ex-cons for romantic partners. She asks Hoffman’s Max whether while on the inside he ran into her first husband, Lumpy. Max: “Yeah, I know Lumpy.” This tests Jerry’s patience: “What are we going to do, go down the whole damn list?” In retrospect, we may see this as a tiny first flare of Jerry’s awakening. Max, playing peacemaker, asks Jerry where he and Carol met, and Jerry replies, “Met her at Thirty-One Flavors, of all places.” Carol says, “He was thirty-two,” Jerry almost blushes, saying “Ain’t she a peach.” He knows the script to marital life. But for him it is only a script.

This is confirmed when Carol exits to the kitchen, to bring the men some beers. Jerry then makes it unmistakable that he’s been putting on an act for her, and possibly for himself. Between wolfish bites of burger that prefigure his impatience with every kind of delay, he lowers his vocal register and says to Max, “Get me out of here. They’re killing me. I can’t make this scene anymore. Get me out of here.” The lines are the film’s hinge; as Jerry’s mask falls instantly away, Max seems only halfway surprised. Jerry goes on swallowing barely chewed chunks of burger and adds, “You got somethin’, I know you got somethin’.” What Jerry means is a gig, a heist, a target for robbery, anything that will make him feel less dead inside.

Max: “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

Jerry: “I don’t give a damn what it is, let’s just do it.”

When Carol returns, it is with two beers but also with Jerry’s acoustic guitar, which she places in his hands. Possibly she sees his music as a sufficient container for his discontent. At first Jerry balks, embarrassed, but Max beckons to him: “What’s that walkin’ stick thing you used to play?”

“Walking stick? You mean ‘Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane?’”

Max: “Yeah, play that. C’mon, we got cause to celebrate.” An allusion lost on Carol. What Max and Jerry are now celebrating is a fresh partnership, one that will embolden an escalating series of robberies and eventually lead to Jerry’s death and Max shooting a policeman, murdering another accomplice, and being locked up again, presumably for good.

With smiles at first sheepish, then increasingly candid, Jerry sings: “Hand me down, my walking cane / Hand me down my walkin’ cane / Hand me down my walkin’ cane / I’m gonna leave this ball and chain.” The last line sounds good enough to him that his face splits in a real grin. Carol, the ball-and-chain in question, bobs her head encouragingly, not hearing the meaning of the song. Grosbard’s camera rises up, in the kind of crane shot traditionally used to end a film; in fact, this marks the end of the first half of Straight Time. Only as the frame widens do we see how closely this backyard is bounded by the high fence on all sides. Jerry has found his own captivity in the opposite sense that Max soon will, not by failing to achieve “straight time” but by achieving it too well; for him, the suburban monogamy, the pool and grilled burgers, all is as much a prison as anything he experienced on the inside.

Their very first job, the robbery of a high-stakes poker game, goes so wrong that the ostensible victims never even learn that their game has been cased. Max’s other confederate, who is meant to supply the weaponry, is a jelly-legged amateur, who not only arrives late but without the promised firepower. (In a film of brilliantly overlapping motifs and set pieces, this foreshadows Gary Busey’s cataclysmic failure as the getaway driver.) Jerry’s disappointment as the plan sours is a knife in the gut: he dropped out of suburbia, out of poolside burgers and beers, for this? Jerry expends his bitterness in a seething rant. “Man, this is very unprofessional . . . Goddamn it, I told you, I’m not taking that game without a shotgun. You can’t cover a fucking poker game without a shotgun, all right? The plan was to meet your friend with the shotgun we go in and do the job and we leave. We been sittin’ here all fucking night waiting for the guy with the shotgun and you want to take it with your cap pistol and I’m telling you it’s very unfuckingprofessional, all right?” Stanton’s exasperated emphasis on fucking and shotgun gives the speech an incantatory and prophetic power. At this moment he feels he might be the only competent criminal on the planet. The younger men are all predestined to fail the standard of his teachings.

It’s not wrong to say that Jerry plays Max’s father figure, very much like Willie Nelson is to James Caan in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981). (Mann had an uncredited hand in Straight Time’s script, and the research he conducted, interviewing lifelong criminals, appears to have strongly influenced his own work as a director.) Nevertheless, Stanton also vividly defines the childlike jubilation that still explodes from inside the jaded criminal veteran. It’s the adrenaline of an armed robbery, as much as the money, that is his intoxicant. As we understood when he mock-humbly accepted the proffered guitar, Jerry is a performer, one who loves to play-act the “bad robber” to Max’s “good robber.” When they rob a bank, he terrifies the tellers and customers with feral glee: “You in love with me? Answer me, you in love with me? Then stop looking at me motherfucker, or I’ll blow your goddamn face off!” Max then has to console the tellers enough to get them back up to open their cash drawers.

Seishun (youth) links Cruel Story to a pop-culture phenomenon of its era: the wave of taiyozoku-eiga (sun tribe films), launched by the 1956 screen adaptations of Shintaro Ishihara’s novels Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit. These works, which glamorized the disaffection of Japanese adolescents, became the target of public accusations of immorality and were a focus of cultural commentary claiming a generational breakdown in Japanese society. Cruel Story of Youth contains some typical features of the sun tribe films and other contemporary Japanese movies about young people, including themes of prostitution and abortion; the iconography of motorbikes, motorboats, and Hawaiian shirts; and a male protagonist given to fits of violent rage.

Monogatari (story), a word that frequently appears at the end of Japanese literary titles, could be read as an indication that Oshima, though very much a modernist in his style and choice of subject matter, was offering a film situated within the traditions of classical narrative cinema. Indeed, his title for the first draft of the script, Awakening of Love and Humanity, seemed to promise a work that would share the humanist idealism of one of Shochiku’s star directors, Keisuke Kinoshita.

The word that lays Oshima’s true intentions bare is zankoku (cruelty). Shochiku had disapproved of the ending of Oshima’s first film, A Town of Love and Hope (1959), finding it too “cruel.” In preparing his follow-up, Oshima took his employer’s objections to heart and, instead of softening his attitude, resolved to go further in his portrayal of “cruelty” as “the essence of the present.” Awakening of Love and Humanity became Cruel Story of Youth, a film that sees the situation of young people in an increasingly affluent and conservative Japan in terms of two kinds of cruelty—that which attacks them from the outside, and that which they summon from within in a doomed attempt to defend and assert themselves. The word cruelty also defines the director’s approach. Determined to “destroy the old naturalist methods” of Japanese cinema, Oshima wages a battle against them on all fronts: narrative, representation, image, sound.

Oshima builds Cruel Story of Youth in bold, elliptical strokes. The film follows two lovers: university student Kiyoshi (Yusuke Kawazu) and third-year high-school student Makoto (Miyuki Kuwano). Their revolt against society takes the degraded form of a serial con they run on middle-aged businessmen. Makoto serves as bait, enabling Kiyoshi to catch the men as they try to bring her into love hotels and giving him the chance to extort money from them. The political context of the couple’s delinquency is broadly but forcefully defined. Early in the film, Kiyoshi and Makoto watch a street demonstration against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security (Anpo) Treaty. The pair stand on the sidelines without participating, as if unable to see how organized action could transform their lives. The film goes on to suggest that political apathy is a historical consequence of the failure of the early postwar period’s left-wing struggles, in which Oshima himself took part as a student at Kyoto University in the early 1950s. It is likely that he saw something of himself in one of the film’s secondary characters, the clinician Akimoto (Fumio Watanabe, who would go on to be one of Oshima’s favored actors), an idealist who has lost his belief in the possibility of revolutionary change.

The society for which Kiyoshi and Makoto feel instinctive hatred hardly bothers to constrain them. Makoto’s father (Jun Hamamura) explains his refusal to exert authority over her by saying that, in light of Japan’s social decline, it’s no longer reasonable to expect individuals to behave morally. Makoto’s school seems to be run with a similar laissez-faire approach, as can be discerned from the laid-back body language of her cigarette-smoking homeroom teacher (Toshiko Kobayashi). With nothing keeping her on the straight and narrow, Makoto gets drawn into Kiyoshi’s world, whose two bases are a bar frequented by sleazy underworld types and the small apartment he and his roommate (Shinji Tanaka) take turns using for trysts with girlfriends.

Within this atmosphere of indifference, violence, and discontent, the love between Kiyoshi and Makoto develops like a mutation. In one of Cruel Story’s most memorable sequences—which, thirty-five years later, Oshima included in his British Film Institute–commissioned documentary 100 Years of Japanese Cinema—Kiyoshi and Makoto go to a log pier at Tokyo Bay. Long shots emphasize the stillness and depopulation of the site. Riichiro Manabe’s eerie modernist score suggests that the world is in a trance. As Kiyoshi fondles the barely conscious Makoto, Oshima cuts to the image of a dull sun. It casts a listless mood, which the assault that follows seems to maintain rather than rupture. If the sun, as Oshima later explained in an interview, is an evocation of the Anpo protests (a link reinforced by the dubbed-in sound of a passing airplane), then Kiyoshi’s rape of Makoto can be understood both as a revelation of the discreet violence of Japan’s rightward shift and as a misdirected protest against it. The camera tilts down to the logs, along which the camera tracks calmly toward Makoto, who is lying face up, Kiyoshi’s shirt spread over her body, as Kiyoshi dives naked into the water. Throughout this lengthy sequence, music, camera movement, and elliptical cutting create psychological distance and point toward inexorable, if invisible, external forces.

The push-pull effect of Oshima’s style here is characteristic of a film that, from beginning to end, declares the independence of its author. Putting human figures at the edge of the GrandScope frame and filming them in uncomfortable close-ups that often seem about to fracture, Oshima highlights the instability of his characters’ relationships with one another and with their surroundings. By omitting transitional shots and explanations, Oshima sets the characters adrift in space and time, forcing viewers to drift with them. The visual flatness created by cinematographer Takashi Kawamata’s telephoto lens adds to the unmoored and abrupt quality of the narrative. In exterior long takes, the warmth of very-early-morning light defamiliarizes the garishness of hyper-commercial Tokyo, while the director makes known his opposition to institutional preference by using a handheld camera (as Oshima later noted, “at Shochiku at that time . . . the thing they hated the most was images shaking”).

Oshima’s use of color in Cruel Story of Youth manages to be at once lurid and austere. The early sections of the film are emphatically red: you see the color in everything from the main titles to a pair of parked cars featured in the opening shot to the flags that fill the screen during the protest scene. Eventually, red becomes the color most closely associated with the central couple. After Kiyoshi has raped Makoto a second time (taking out on her his shame over the financial victimization he has just suffered at the hands of a group of pimps), Makoto thinks she sees in Kiyoshi’s face that he loves her. Oshima shoots this moment of recognition against a dislocated blackness in which two blurry red lights gleam as if signaling distress.

After Makoto tells Kiyoshi that she is pregnant, he arranges for her to have an abortion at Akimoto’s clinic. Visiting her after the procedure, Kiyoshi takes two apples from a paper bag—one red, one green. Kiyoshi greedily devours the green one (“as if chewing on the pain of youth,” Oshima wrote in the shooting script), but not without first placing the red one under the sleeping Makoto’s chin as a sign of love. Oshima, who later said of this scene that it caused his heart to leap, captures all this in the movie’s longest take, putting Kawazu’s strength of concentration to the test and forcing viewers to respond to Kiyoshi’s hopeless passion for freedom.

Oshima’s vigorous and astringent style won the approval of critics, who were quick to compare Cruel Story of Youth to the French New Wave films that had premiered in Japan during the months before its release. Nine other Shochiku productions made by young directors acquired the label nuberu bagu when they appeared later in 1960: in addition to Oshima’s next two films, The Sun’s Burial and Night and Fog in Japan, there were Yoshishige Yoshida’s Good-for-Nothing and Blood Is Dry, Masahiro Shinoda’s One-Way Ticket to Love and Dry Lake, Tsutomu Tamura’s Volunteering for Villainy (a.k.a. The Samurai Vagabonds), Osamu Takahashi’s Only She Knows, and Eitaro Morikawa’s The Tragedy of Bushido. Though Oshima objected to the “new wave” tag as a code phrase advertising sex and violence, he also acknowledged that before starting production on Cruel Story of Youth he had seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), which he admired for the director’s “active involvement” and for the way the film reveals “the continuity of discontinuity.” In Cruel Story of Youth, Oshima chooses the milieu, the situations, and, broadly speaking, the form of a crime film for the same reason Godard does in Breathless: to highlight the incoherence of the main characters’ relationship to their society while showing how this incoherence contaminates their relationship to each other.

The two directors are similar in their awareness that a film is, as Oshima put it, “a document of its actors.” As much as Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, Kawazu represents a kind of international masculinity that was in vogue in the year 1960. Though his veneer of swaggering derision is thinner than Belmondo’s—and though he seems amused by other people, while Belmondo’s humor arises from his amusement at himself—Kawazu is no less convincing than Belmondo in embodying the restless, predatory nature of youthful male rebellion. His affectless performance, eschewing conventional signifiers of anguish and emotional release, frustrates the viewer’s efforts to sympathize with Kiyoshi but bears the stamp of reality.

Meanwhile, Kuwano’s performance (like that of Jean Seberg in Breathless) creates a continuity of feeling and purpose that conveys an intense indifference to the traps the screenplay sets for her character. As one of the pimps spins her around brutally in the bar, Makoto withdraws into an alcoholic haze, whose space and rhythm the actor delineates with the same automatic cool that later marks the character’s growing mastery of the gestures of cigarette smoking. More than twenty years after its release, Oshima watched a TV broadcast of Cruel Story of Youth and was surprised to find that “even in the contemporary era, when women have changed completely, Miyuki Kuwano’s role was drawn so carefully that it still held up. Clearly, by the final scenes, the woman is the stronger one. She asserts herself properly. That was really a self-discovery for me, revisiting it.”

In the end, Kiyoshi gives his life to protect Makoto from being prostituted by a gangster (Kei Sato) and his hoods. Paradoxically, this act of self-sacrifice happens right after Kiyoshi breaks up with her, saying he sees no way for them to avoid ending up as mere things to be sold and consumed. Here lies the crucial contradiction of the film. Unable to avoid this fate, the couple perversely embrace it. Makoto, who has hated turning herself into a thing for sale to carry out their scheme, now proposes that they put it into action one more time. This decision leads to a bloody finale, shot and cut with relentless brilliance, in which Oshima anticipates the intertwining of love and violent death in his later masterpieces such as The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983).

Looking back on the months of artistic concentration and political upheaval that saw the creation of Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun’s Burial, and Night and Fog in Japan, Oshima remarked that “the year 1960 determined my entire cinematic life.” Each of the great films he made that year points toward key aspects of his later achievements, but it is the first of the three that, through its rawness, ferocity, and glimmers of tenderness, captures the richest sense of freedom and discovery.

This month on the Criterion Channel, crank up the volume on our playlist of (actually good) rock biopics that go beyond cliché to explore the elusive place where inspiration sparks and musical legends are born. Our Southern Gothic collection serves up a thick gumbo of hothouse drama, while Desert Trips brings together four psychedelic journeys through the sun-scorched Southwest. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the classic high school shocker Carrie, a pair of rousing dispatches from the front lines of labor struggle by Barbara Kopple, a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, exclusive premieres of an acclaimed American indie and a tender Indian love story, and a revelatory, newly restored portrait of James Baldwin.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

When rock stars get the Hollywood treatment, the result is often a lackluster re-creation of their career’s most famous highs and lows. But the best musical biopics do more than just cover their subjects’ greatest hits, adopting unconventional modes of storytelling that go deeper than mere mimicry. These films find visionary directors putting their imprints on the brilliant, often tumultuous lives of boundary-breaking musical icons: Ken Russell elevating one of the original celebrities of the classical world to the heights of glam-rock outrageousness in Lisztomania; Susanna Nicchiarelli reckoning with the pain and regret that fame leaves in its wake in Nico, 1988; and Todd Haynes teasing out the enigmatic multiplicity of Bob Dylan by enlisting six different actors to portray him in I’m Not There. In thrall to the ecstatic power of music, these portraits explode rise-and-fall conventions to reveal deeper truths about identity, artistry, and the myths we create around both.

Coprogrammed by Yasi Salek, writer and host of the podcast Bandsplain

FEATURING: Lisztomania (1975), The Buddy Holly Story (1978), Amadeus (1984), The Hours and Times (1992), Velvet Goldmine (1998), 24 Hour Party People (2002), Control (2007), I’m Not There (2007), Nowhere Boy (2009),* The Runaways (2010),* Love & Mercy (2015), Nico, 1988 (2017)*

COMING SEPTEMBER: The Doors (1991)

Set against the decaying grandeur of the American South, these sweltering sagas of family secrets, repressed desires, and twisted love are steeped in the region’s vibrant folklore and haunted history. Featuring adaptations of definitive southern writers like Tennessee Williams (Baby Doll) and Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood), lurid chronicles of families in decline (Written on the Wind, Eve’s Bayou), terrifying thrillers built around crazed villains (Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear, as well as Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s remake of the latter) and hothouse tales of simmering lust (The Beguiled, The Paperboy), this selection of southern-gothic greats abounds in the eccentric characters and eerie atmosphere that define the genre.

FEATURING: The Night of the Hunter (1955), Baby Doll (1956), Written on the Wind (1956),* The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Cape Fear (1962),* The Beguiled (1971),* Wise Blood (1979), Down by Law (1986), Wild at Heart (1990),* Cape Fear (1991),* Eve’s Bayou (1997), The Paperboy (2012),* Wildcat (2023) 

COMING SEPTEMBER 1: The Beguiled (2017)

The vast, arid landscapes of the American Southwest become hallucinatory expanses of existential reckoning in these sun-blasted journeys into a harsh, unforgiving no-man’s land. From the counterculture disillusionment of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point to the aching desolation of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas to the feverish romanticism of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, these films turn scorched highways and otherworldly terrain into unforgettable projections of their characters’ inner worlds.

FEATURING: Zabriskie Point (1970), Paris, Texas (1984), Wild at Heart (1990), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Beloved for their work in both music and comedy, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen have left an indelible imprint on pop culture with their cult-favorite sketch show Portlandia. In this special edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, the pair join Criterion president Peter Becker at Portland’s PAM CUT Cinema for a hilarious conversation about the films they’ve loved, obsessed over, and want to share with each other and the world. Touching on everything from what they watch on tour and their all-time favorite movies about bands (that aren’t Spinal Tap) to their reverence for stars ranging from Greta Garbo to Divine, the pair blend quick-witted banter with wide-ranging cinephilic knowledge for a celebration of auteurist favorites and pop pleasures alike.

Towering literary lion, fierce social critic, and inimitable cultural icon James Baldwin opened up a new space for the frank discussion of race, sexuality, and identity in American society. He also left behind a dynamic cinematic legacy, as seen in these portraits that capture his electrifying presence and passionate eloquence. Across his screen appearances, Baldwin delivered a far-reaching commentary on everything from art to religion to love to liberation to his experiences as a queer Black man who lived much of his life abroad but who never stopped examining his own complex relationship to the United States.

FEATURES: I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989)

SHORTS: Baldwin’s Nigger (1968), Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970), James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973)

STREAMING PREMIERES

Featuring a new introduction by director Sophy Romvari, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

A singular coming-of-age story, this revelatory feature debut by Sophy Romvari heralds the arrival of a major new cinematic voice. In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her Hungarian Canadian family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island, but their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behavior from her eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes). At wit’s end, their parents are presented with a shattering choice. Audaciously layering the past and the present until they converge in a moment of devastating emotional clarity, Blue Heron evokes the languid haze of a childhood summer and the hidden tensions rippling beneath it.

In a tight-knit Dominican American community in the Bronx, Rico (Juan Collado) is hustling his way through the summer, selling bootleg “nutcracker” cocktails out of a beach cooler while chasing girls. But when his girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), begins crashing at his family’s place, their small apartment becomes a stage for their messy, complicated relationship—and soon they must reckon with the sobering reality of growing up too fast in a city that waits for no one. Channeling the electrifying naturalism of John Cassavetes, writer-director Joel Alfonso Vargas turns his hometown into the heartbeat of his crackling debut feature, teaming up with street-cast acting talent to deliver a deeply authentic look at the tapestry of urban life and the ups and downs of young love. 

The exquisitely tender feature debut from Rohan Kanawade is a watershed event in Indian cinema: a compassionate vision of queer romance fighting to blossom amid the forces of tradition, class prejudice, and deep-seated cultural repression. Following the death of his father, thirtysomething Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is compelled to return from Mumbai for a ten-day mourning period in his hometown in the rugged countryside of western India. There, he reconnects with Balya (Suraaj Suman), a farmer and childhood friend with whom he once shared an unspoken connection. As a budding love story plays out in moments of beautifully observed intimacy, Anand must decide the fate of a relationship born under duress. 

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Fifteen years after the end of Jim Crow, writer, activist, and cultural critic James Baldwin returns to the American South for a thought-provoking journey that brings the region’s past and present into revealing dialogue. As he revisits the major sites of the civil rights struggle—from Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia—Baldwin explores both what has changed in the intervening years and what, tellingly, has not. Featuring illuminating conversations with prominent activists and cultural figures like Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Oretha Castle Haley, and Chinua Achebe as well as everyday people, I Heard It Through the Grapevine offers an essential perspective on the changing face of the South, the legacy of the civil rights movement, and all that remains to be done.

With this landmark debut feature, director Ebrahim Golestan delivered a jolt of modernism to prerevolution Iranian cinema, laying the groundwork for the country’s first, still often overlooked new wave. When a mysterious woman (feminist literary icon Forugh Farrokhzad) abandons a baby in the backseat of his cab one night, Tehran taxi driver Hashem (Zakaria Hashemi) is launched on a journey through the city’s unfeeling bureaucracy as he attempts to find a home for the infant—a situation that soon puts him in conflict with his nurturing girlfriend Taji (Taji Ahmadi). Melding the influences of Persian poetry, 1960s European art cinema, and Wellesian expressionism, Brick and Mirror offers a portrait of a crumbling relationship that also functions as a devastating dissection of a society poisoned by fear, distrust, and patriarchal arrogance. 

In 1948, Gainsborough Pictures—best known for its enormously popular gothic melodramas—embarked on a rare prestige project: an anthology-film adaptation of four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham titled Quartet, soon followed by two similarly structured follow-ups, Trio and Encore. Featuring British acting legends like Dirk Bogarde, Jean Simmons, and Glynis Johns, these exquisitely crafted miniatures represent literary adaptation at its most elegant, drawing on Maugham’s famously keen insights into human nature to tell stories of misguided passions, creative obsession, social ambition, and unexpected reversals of fortune.

FEATURING: Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), Encore (1951)

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Med Hondo’s one-of-a-kind musical spectacular explores the effects of French colonialism across centuries of oppression and injustice, resistance and revolution.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Hondo, African-cinema scholar Aboubakar Sanogo, and cinematographer François Catonné.

Teenage lovers turn to a life of crime on the margins of postwar Tokyo in Nagisa Oshima’s scorching tale of toxic love in a toxic world.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A Town of Love and Hope (1959), Oshima’s first feature film; Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a short film by Oshima; and an interview with film scholar Tony Rayns.

Luis Buñuel’s final film brings full circle the director’s preoccupation with the darker side of desire through the story of an urbane widower tortured by lust for an elusive woman.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An interview with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, a documentary featuring actors Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, a 2012 documentary on Buñuel featuring members of the crew, and more.

A sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum is evil incarnate in Charles Laughton’s sole directorial effort, a horror movie with the quality of a Grimm fairy tale.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary on the making of the film, interviews with Laughton biographer Simon Callow and cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a clip from The Ed Sullivan Show in which cast members perform a scene deleted from the film, and more.

“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” In 1960s Louisiana, a young girl sees her well-to-do family unravel in the wake of her father’s infidelities.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Kasi Lemmons, cinematographer Amy Vincent, producer Caldecot Chubb, and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire; interviews with Lemmons and composer Terence Blanchard; and more.

Alcoholism, nymphomania, impotence, and deadly jealousy are just a few of the toxins coursing through a massively wealthy, degenerate Texan oil family in Douglas Sirk’s operatic melodrama.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: The 2008 documentary Acting for Douglas Sirk and an interview with film scholar Patricia White.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Urgent, eye-opening dispatches from the front lines of American class struggle, these galvanizing documentaries by Barbara Kopple—both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary—are among the most essential films ever made about organized labor. Filmed over several years, Harlan County USA is a powerful immersion into a small Kentucky town struggling to stay afloat amid a thirteen-month coal miners’ strike as Appalachian grit goes up against the entrenched forces of capitalism. In American Dream, Kopple travels to Austin, Minnesota, to document a Reagan-era meatpackers’ strike against Hormel Foods, capturing the heated backroom negotiations, competing media wars, and devastating human cost of a battle that leaves no part of the community untouched. 

FEATURING: Harlan County USA (1976), American Dream (1990)

Featuring an introduction by Grady Hendrix, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Raw, gritty, intensely angry visions of individuals pushed to the brink by a corrupt society, the films of Hong Kong action renegade Ringo Lam scorch the screen with an anarchic fury. His action classic City on Fire offered Chow Yun-fat one of his meatiest roles and inspired QuentinTarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. With his further entries in the “On Fire” series and later triumphs like the propulsive handover-era thriller Full Alert, Lam doubled down on social criticism without stinting on the action, offering a searing portrait of systemic moral breakdown.

FEATURING: City on Fire (1987), Prison on Fire (1987), School on Fire (1988), Wild Search (1989), Prison on Fire II (1991), Full Alert (1997), Victim (1999)

Julien Duvivier was among the definitive craftsmen of classical French cinema, bringing expressive camera work, atmospheric mise-en-scène, and a darkly lyrical sensibility to often-overlooked jewels across an extraordinary array of genres. His deeply shadowed, fatalistic early sound films David Golder and La tête d’un homme anticipate the poetic-realist style that would come to define 1930s Gallic cinema, and which would find one of its fullest expressions in the intoxicatingly doom-laden, Algiers-set underworld drama Pépé le Moko. From the elegant, wistful romance of Un carnet de bal to the startlingly bleak noir pessimism of Panique to the charmingly imaginative meta-comedy of La fête à Henriette, Duvivier maintained a master’s touch that won him the admiration of titans like Orson Welles and Jean Renoir, who declared, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance.”

FEATURING: David Golder (1930), Poil de carotte (1932), La tête d’un homme (1933), They Were Five (1936), Un carnet de bal (1937), Pépé le moko (1937), The End of the Day (1939), Lydia (1941), Panique (1946), Anna Karenina (1948), La fête à Henriette (1952)

SHORT FILMS

Like his acclaimed feature Happyend, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, these short films by Neo Sora display both his keen eye for vivid cinematic details and ability to connect intimate human stories with broader social and political questions. While The Chicken and A Very Straight Neck are striking adaptations of short works by the Japanese writers Naoya Shiga and Momoe Narazaki, respectively, Sugar Glass Bottle draws from Sora’s own childhood experiences and is very much a thematic precursor to Happyend. 

FEATURING: The Chicken (2020), Sugar Glass Bottle (2022), A Very Straight Neck (2025)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Out-of-print Criterion LaserDisc Edition featuring audio commentary by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen and author Laurent Bouzereau

A bullied teenager (Sissy Spacek) unleashes her powers of telekinesis in Brian De Palma’s classic, still-shocking adaptation of the novel by Stephen King.

Posing as a police officer, a sociopathic ex-con (Alec Baldwin) embarks on a wild crime spree with a detective in hot pursuit in this marvelously offbeat, black-comic caper.

Robert Altman updates Raymond Chandler for the liberated, hedonistic 1970s as private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is drawn into a labyrinth of murder and deception. 

An intricate game of erotic entrapment unfolds as an architect (James Spader) begins to suspect the dark secrets his too-good-to-be-true wife (Mädchen Amick) may be hiding.

MUSIC FILMS

Discover the glorious, chaotic story of beloved Minneapolis rock band the Replacements through the testimonies of the fans who revere them.

Oppressed musicians set out to get even with the mafia-like figures who exploit them in one of the definitive reggae films, an effortlessly cool immersion into Jamaica’s 1970s music scene.

DOCUMENTARIES

An intimate cinema-verité documentary explores the myriad forms of “women’s work” through a portrait of three mothers whose lives intersect at a twenty-four-hour daycare center.

This irreverent blend of documentary, drama, musical, political satire, and intellectual sparring match sets out to answer a provocative question: Does America have a ruling class?

Hud belongs to a series of films Ritt made during the sixties that tackled major cinematic genres, often shaping their traditional motifs to suit his evolving cultural vision. In fashioning this film, Ritt displays a sharp and penetrating take on the American landscape. Unlike two revisionist westerns released the year before, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, which evoke nostalgia over the passing of the Old West, Hud betrays no feelings of regret in deconstructing the western hero, instead exposing his macho persona as empty and amoral, his mythology as bankrupt.

Ritt got his start in theater and then live television during its formative period. He entered both worlds as an actor, working first for the Federal Theatre Project—an outgrowth of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration—whose head, Hallie Flanagan, felt that art was integral to the fabric of communities. Her vision of theater as a social force profoundly shaped the Group Theatre, which became the definitive influence on Ritt’s career and his artistic philosophy from the time he joined in 1937. The communal spirit of the Group stayed with Ritt, who regarded filmmaking as a collective experience, rejecting the cult of the director. This was not only a working method; the creation of community also became a thematic thread running through his films. Ritt liked to surround himself with people he trusted and valued, so he would collaborate repeatedly with Howe, editor Sidney Levin, cinematographer John A. Alonzo, and production designers Tambi Larsen and Walter Scott Herndon. This attitude extended to writers as well. Ritt loved working with husband-and-wife team Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who together wrote the screenplays for eight of his films, including Hud, and with Walter Bernstein, who wrote two of Ritt’s most personal films, The Molly Maguires (1970) and The Front (1976).

Another profound influence on Ritt was Elia Kazan, who introduced him to the Group, first recommending him to teach Luther Adler to box for his starring role in Clifford Odets’s 1937 play Golden Boy. Ritt was also given a small part in the production. Kazan, of course, would go on to become America’s most important midcentury theater director as well as an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. The two would remain close until 1952, when Kazan named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This committee’s hearings, and the subsequent blacklisting of alleged communists by Hollywood studios, played a central role in Ritt’s life and affected his career in significant ways, including his directing and producing The Front, the first Hollywood film about the blacklist.

After World War II, Ritt had gravitated to the new medium of television and, between 1950 and 1952, found success acting in, directing, or producing more than one hundred dramas, primarily for the anthology series Danger and Somerset Maugham TV Theatre. His greatest triumph during this era, however, was his performance in the Danger episode “The Paper Box Kid,” written by Bernstein. One critic wrote that Ritt “may be the best actor on television.”

This period ended abruptly in 1952, when Ritt reported to work at CBS one day, only to find that he had been fired. He had been named in the newsletter Counterattack, published by three former FBI agents; it alleged that he had helped Communist Party locals of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. Ritt would use that incident in The Front.

Unlike many of his friends, however, Ritt was not named or subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. His blacklisting from the television industry was based on unproven accusations and guilt by association. Years later, Ritt stated that he was never a member of the Communist Party: “I was always a very left-wing liberal, and I agreed with the Communists a lot of the time, but I didn’t agree with them some of the time, and that was bitter and angry.” Most often, he described himself as a “humanist.”

After a period during which he supported himself by teaching acting, Ritt arrived in Hollywood to direct No Down Payment (1957) for producer Jerry Wald, after making his debut as a film director earlier the same year with Edge of the City, shot in New York. Ritt and Wald went on to collaborate on three films starring Paul Newman—The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962)—and the director and actor formed a close friendship. Hud came about when Ravetch, who had cowritten The Long, Hot Summer, came across Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By, and presented the project to Ritt and Newman, who had developed a partnership called Salem Productions in 1962. 

The novel is a coming-of-age story filtered through the consciousness of teenager Lonnie Bannon, who has lost both his parents and is living with his grandfather Homer. Homer’s stepson, Hud, is a minor character—a mean, consummately selfish, and disreputable man who is also a drunk and a womanizer. By centering their screenplay around this hedonist, Ravetch and Frank felt they had found a powerful theme: “the greed and materialism that was beginning to take over America.” Though many had advised him against taking the role, Newman enthusiastically embraced the idea of playing a thoroughly detestable man. He had already portrayed an impressive list of antiheroes in From the Terrace (1960), The Hustler (1961), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), but none of these characters compared with Hud, whom the film’s publicity described as “the man with the barbed wire soul,” and whom Newman compared to Richard III.

Ravetch and Frank made other modifications, some to tighten the relationships and sharpen the thematic focus. Hud becomes the son of Homer (Melvyn Douglas) rather than his stepson, meaning that he is also the uncle of Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde). This strengthens the connection between the three generations of Bannons. The family’s cook, in the novel, is a Black woman named Halmea; she is called Alma in the film and played by the white actress Patricia Neal. Ritt did not feel that Hud’s pursuit of a Black woman would be accepted by audiences at the time.

Hud works best if thought of as a modern western. It deliberately plays off George Stevens’s classic western Shane (1953), which, like Hud, frames the titular figure through the eyes of a younger character—here a boy, Joey Starrett. America’s reverence for childhood is central to the thematic structure of Shane, a portal through which Stevens allowed audiences to escape into a mythic past and to rediscover a purer world than the one contaminated by the war and its aftermath.

Joey is played by Brandon de Wilde, whose casting as the teenage Lonnie Bannon in Hud becomes a direct link between the two films. Both deal with a youngster’s education as he observes the deeds of the protagonist. Shane is first seen by Joey as an idealized figure in buckskin, astride a horse. Stevens’s mise-en-scène even suggests that Joey’s view may be a boy’s romantic vision: Shane and his horse seem to glide across the stream as he approaches the Starrett ranch. Shane presents its hero, lightning-fast with his pearl-handled guns, as a messianic savior who descends from the mountains to defend an emerging town and its homesteaders from lawlessness. Although he had hoped to abandon his life of violence by settling down with the Starretts, Shane is eventually forced to kill to protect the settlers.

Hud is introduced when his nephew goes to town looking for him. Lonnie’s first clue comes from a bar owner who is sweeping up broken glass at his place, the result of a fight started by Hud. Lonnie then finds his uncle’s pink Cadillac parked in front of the house of a married woman. Hud emerges, buttoning his shirt, boots in hand—this is clearly not Shane.

Like most westerns, Hud opens with the landscape: vast, lonely, and almost desertlike. There are few signs of civilization. Howe explained that he wanted the cinematography to emphasize “the harsh skies and flat glare”; he even decided to filter out the clouds. This first shot is beautifully rendered in black and white, accented by a ray of sunlight. The emptiness is soon undercut by the sight of a truck pulling a horse trailer. Ritt is calling attention to the disjunction between horse and rider, no longer a graceful unit but instead separated in two vehicles. Standing in contrast to this mechanical world and to Hud, whose Cadillac embodies it, is Homer, who represents the Old West. The generational conflict between father and son forms the basis of Lonnie’s education.

The name Homer suggests his epic status. The owner of the cattle ranch where Hud and Lonnie live and work, he is in love with the land and feels a strong connection to nature and the wild. If Hud is linked to his car, Homer is associated with his two Texas longhorns, symbols of the pioneer lifestyle. They also evoke another classic western, Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), in which Thomas Dunson (John Wayne), starting with only two longhorns, founds a cattle empire and ultimately clashes with his surrogate son over its management. Hud, meanwhile, doesn’t do much of anything to contribute to the well-being of his father’s ranch.

To the shock and even chagrin of Ritt and Newman, upon the film’s release, viewers mostly gravitated toward Hud. Ritt underestimated his star’s magnetism, which triumphed over his character’s flaws. Hud also embodied what audiences have always admired about western heroes: their individualistic bravado, exemplified by Hud’s dislike for the government and the law. Newman’s performance also tempers the unpleasantness of his selfish persona: the twinkle in his eye, his offhand sweetness and sudden frankness, remain attractive despite the character’s unheroic behavior. Unlike the more inarticulate rebels of the fifties, Newman’s alienated misfits are typically garrulous, ironic, and witty. Ritt’s film often accentuates this unexpected charm, and even attempts to capitalize on Newman’s air of emotional vulnerability by suggesting that Hud’s harshness may have resulted from the death of his older brother—Lonnie’s father—for which Hud was in part responsible.

Another factor mitigating Hud’s iniquity is the overwhelming aura of death that permeates the film. Early in the story, Homer calls Hud home to examine a dead heifer on the property. When they drive out to look, Ritt cuts to a shot of buzzards in a tree, which fills the side of the frame. These vultures hold dominion over the scene, just as their image hovers over the rest of the film.

Against Hud’s advice, Homer brings in a government veterinarian, who concludes that the heifer died of foot-and-mouth disease and that all of the Bannon’s cattle must therefore be destroyed. This brutal, horrifying slaughter is the film’s most graphic sequence. The passive beasts are rounded up and herded into a large pit, where they are surrounded by ranch hands who shoot until all are dead. The sounds of the frightened, dying cattle and the rifle fire are all that we hear as the scene plays out.

When Hud inherits a share of the ranch at the film’s end, it seems probable that he will simply turn it over for lucrative oil drilling, which his father has steadfastly refused to do. His actions have hastened his father’s death; indeed, in the novel he actually shoots the dying Homer. Easily accommodating himself to the loss of the patriarch he has at least symbolically killed, Hud turns his attention to the looming oil deals that will consolidate his new position of power. Whereas in classic westerns the acquisition of land is seen as an opportunity to grow and build, in Hud Ritt demonstrates the heartless exploitation that lies in western expansionism.

At the conclusion of McMurtry’s novel, Lonnie, having rejected Hud, simply takes off for the open road in true American fashion. Catching a ride with a truck driver who remembers Homer, Lonnie seems to be returning in spirit to his grandfather. An early version of the screenplay closed the same way, but Ritt ultimately chose to end the film more brutally, by keeping the focus on Hud. After Lonnie says goodbye and walks away, Hud returns to the house alone, and the screen door slams behind him. Here, Ritt quotes John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which the departing figure of Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is framed in a doorway and then disappears as the door swings shut. Ethan understands that, as Shane says, “there is no living with a killing,” and that there is no room for him in his united family. Hud, the amoral modern westerner, has instead taken over the ranch. Rejected by his nephew, whose ethical sense has been shaped by his grandfather, Hud is left alone inside the house and in possession of the future.

In Martin Scorsese’s 1974 comedy-romance Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Ellen Burstyn plays Alice, a freshly minted widow and single mother, thirty-five years old and tentatively ready for a new life. She goes shopping for herself, ending up with a pair of sensible bone-colored pumps and a simple green wrap dress accented with a jaunty black-and-white polka-dot scarf. It’s the kind of outfit worn by countless working women of the era, though the job Alice is seeking isn’t the secretarial sort; she’s hoping, after a yearslong detour, to finally fulfill her ambition of becoming a singer. Alice has been to the beauty parlor too: her hair, previously a housewife’s practical, sideswept blond bob, is now a tousle of flirty curls, alive to the future and electrical with anticipation. In this moment, Burstyn shows us an Alice who’s suddenly aglow with possibilities—yet she doesn’t look exactly modern. The seventies are almost half over, and Alice is just catching up. Jane Fonda’s groovy-subversive shag in Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 Klute may have been a shout of rebellion heard by women round the world, but not by Alice. Busy with her household chores, a wisecracking kid, and an impossible-to-please husband, she simply hadn’t had time to notice.

Yet in its time, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was the opposite of retrograde, especially for an American film released by a major American studio, in this case Warner Bros. The studios had been gradually picking up on the general static of women’s discontent: movies like Klute, featuring a woman—an escort—who makes her living off male desire without allowing her personal life to be ruled by it, and Frank Perry’s 1970 Diary of a Mad Housewife, in which Carrie Snodgress plays a homemaker who seeks release from her loveless marriage by launching an affair of her own, were mainstream pictures that echoed the greater social discord around them. But even within that framework, Alice was and is special. Like those two films, it had been directed by a man. But it’s so focused on everyday life—on one woman’s yearning to achieve her dreams even as she’s struggling simply to get by—that it becomes a feminist film merely by being human first. Burstyn’s Alice is conventional in many ways: she hasn’t picked up and left her husband—his death is the thing that forces her to make a new start. She’s an accidental heroine, and anyone who has ever felt their life springing out of control can feel kinship with her.

That’s the movie’s secret power. Alice wasn’t only for women who had already been energized by the feminist movement; it spoke to average, as well as perhaps slightly older, women who were reconsidering the hand they’d been dealt, who suddenly found themselves balking at the standards they’d been conditioned to meet in order to be considered good wives and mothers. Alice, in her baby-girl curls and tasteful and not particularly racy new knee-length dress, is taking her first step toward something that feels like freedom. She doesn’t know it yet, but in her new uniform, she’s ready for a revolution that will be waged not through ideology but through a drastic and sometimes painful reshaping of her own life. Scorsese and Burstyn—the star as well as the engine behind the project—had pulled off a sly miracle: their movie was nonthreatening and explosive at once. It had meaning precisely because it came with no agenda attached.

The plot of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—with its script by the great Robert Getchell, who would go on to write Bound for Glory (1976) and Mommie Dearest (1981)—is fairly straightforward, though its structure feels loose and free. In an early scene, we meet Burstyn’s Alice Hyatt; her uncommunicative and perpetually angry husband, Donald (Billy Green Bush); and her precocious twelve-year-old son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter), who, when we first see him, is frying his eardrums with Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way from Memphis” jacked up on the family stereo. Donald bellows at Alice. It’s her job to communicate with Tommy; this bright, beautifully strange kid is an alien to him. Yet we can see from their first exchange that Alice and Tommy speak the same language—we know she secretly thinks it’s funny when he swaps the usual contents of the sugar bowl for salt, spoiling his father’s iced coffee and instigating a tirade. Their connection is the crackling lifeline stretching through the movie.

Yet even before we can settle into this somewhat unsettling family groove, Donald is gone: a Coca-Cola delivery guy, he’s killed in a highway accident. (Scorsese shows us only the aftermath, in a tableau that’s both awful and gruesomely funny.) Alice is suitably shocked by her husband’s death—until she realizes that this is her chance to reclaim the dream she gave up when she married the domineering cad. She sells off most of the family’s belongings in a yard sale, bids a teary goodbye to her closest friend (played, beautifully, by Burstyn’s real-life bestie Lelia Goldoni), and, with Tommy in tow, leaves the crap town of Socorro, New Mexico, and heads out on the road, with Monterey, California—their Oz—in her sights. She’d grown up there, and done some singing there too. It was the last time she can remember feeling happy and free.

There are shades of the classic Hollywood woman’s movie to the story, pictures—like Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas—in which mothers want the best for their children, often at the expense of their own happiness. But in those movies, men were mostly impediments to joy—better not to have one around at all. Alice presented a new model, one offering the hope of romantic fulfillment and reassurance that women’s lives can be multidimensional rather than constrictive.

Burstyn at the time was just off the making of The Exorcist, one of the most highly anticipated films of its era, and was already a bankable star. Warner Bros. wanted to do another movie with her, though she disliked most of the scripts she read; they were, she has said, “full of stereotypes—the woman as victim, the woman as helper.” Her agent started rooting around for something more suitable, and he came across Getchell’s script, which piqued Burstyn’s interest, though she felt it needed some tweaking. As she said in Mary Pat Kelly’s 1991 book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, “Most scripts need to be polished, but this one needed to be ‘roughed up.’ It was good, but it seemed as if it were written for Doris Day and Rock Hudson.”

She also needed the right director, and she called Francis Ford Coppola for advice. He told her to take a look at a film called Mean Streets, which hadn’t yet been released. Burstyn responded to the movie’s brash inventiveness, and to the raffish energy of its star Harvey Keitel. But Mean Streets vibrates with testosterone; she needed to know whether Scorsese could direct a film about a woman’s experience. The two met, and she asked, “What do you know about women?” He said, “Nothing. But I’d like to learn.” Burstyn liked that answer. Together, they worked on the script, and eventually they’d incorporate some on-set improvisation as well. Burstyn loved the way Scorsese trusted his actors.

Although Alice would be Scorsese’s first movie for a major studio, it was his fourth overall, and the hardscrabble origins of his earlier films—including his woolly debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), and Boxcar Bertha (1972), produced by Roger Corman—meant that he understood the necessity of preparation. He’d gotten in the habit of working out all his shots and angles in advance. “When I made films at New York University, you had to wait on line for the equipment,” he has said. “You couldn’t have a camera because so-and-so was using it that weekend. When you got the equipment was when you shot—there was no schedule.”

But Scorsese’s efficiency didn’t mean he was predictable. He opened Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with a dream sequence masquerading as a flashback scene, a reverie drawn from the language of classic Hollywood camera work like that of Duel in the Sun, Gone with the Wind, East of Eden—and The Wizard of Oz. We see the young girl who will grow up to be Alice striding across a landscape of Old Hollywood sunset red as Alice Faye’s version of “You’ll Never Know” unfurls like a dandelion wish on the soundtrack. Little Alice clutches a doll in her arms as she outlines, in rather foulmouthed terms, her dreams of becoming a singer: “I can sing better than Alice Faye, I swear to Christ I can!” It’s a disorienting but great opening, a salvo indicating that no matter what we’re expecting, we’re not in Kansas anymore. The set for that opening scene alone cost eighty-five thousand midseventies dollars, and Warner Bros. wanted to cut it, but Scorsese prevailed. Its out-of-left-field weirdness now seems essential to the film. The sense of dislocation it teases out is the pleasing kind; you wonder, Where the heck is this thing going?

Alice and Tommy don’t quite know either. Though they’ve started their road trip with the utmost optimism, Monterey, as both a physical destination and a dream, is elusive. They stop off and settle for a while in Phoenix, where Alice does manage to land a peanuts-paying job as a lounge singer. She also attracts the attention of a local charmer in a scorpion bolo tie, Harvey Keitel’s Ben, who seems sweet until he’s not. When his violent streak emerges, Alice and Tommy pack up and flee to Tucson, where Alice takes a waitressing job. Workaday stuff rankles her—she doesn’t get along with one of her new coworkers, Diane Ladd’s delightfully potty-mouthed Flo, though the two bond once they realize that, as women on their own, they have more in common than they thought. And the café brings Alice a new love interest, an easygoing divorcé named David (played by Kris Kristofferson, whose honeyed drawl is as reassuring as his crinkle-eyed smile). David may be a dream come true—or he may simply be the charming bulldozer that nudges another dream out of the picture.

Though Alice’s world is miles away from the scruffy universe of Mean Streets, Scorsese’s fingerprints are all over the film, in the casually unvarnished texture of its dialogue, in the way he navigates a sudden tone shift by training a handheld camera on Ben as he flies into a potentially murderous rage. Even so, he’s always attuned to Burstyn’s sturdy radiance. Her performance has a complex, gentle authority, keyed to one central truth: you’ve got to have a sense of humor to get through life. Alice’s husband certainly didn’t. Flo definitely does. And for Alice and Tommy, cracking wise is simply a way of being. As new characters flow around them and into their story, the tapestry of their life together gently shifts in tone and color. Jodie Foster shows up as a smart, sassy tomboy who encourages Tommy to shoplift; Vic Tayback is Mel, the café’s owner, who runs a tight ship even as he delights in his employees’ idiosyncrasies, including those of the space-case waitress Vera, played by Valerie Curtin. All of these people represent, for Alice and Tommy, a life that’s nothing like their old one—a better, freer mode of being.

Audiences, and plenty of critics, loved the film. Both Ladd and Getchell were nominated for Academy Awards, and Burstyn won for Best Actress. It seemed viewers didn’t want to leave these characters behind: the movie inspired the long-running CBS sitcom Alice, with Linda Lavin in the starring role (Burstyn at the time wasn’t interested in doing television) and Tayback reprising his role as Mel. All of that sprang from the world Scorsese created for the character of Alice, and from Burstyn’s portrayal of her. It’s easy to claim that male filmmakers can’t really key into women’s experiences. But Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore shows what can happen when a director and a star listen to one another and build upon each other’s ideas. This is one of the unshowiest of Scorsese’s films; it’s also one of his most tender pictures, freewheeling in its easy warmth.

Some viewers and critics, Pauline Kael among the latter, enjoyed the film but were disappointed by what the ending suggests: that finding a man is central to Alice’s happiness. But Alice has never had a good man, which Kristofferson’s David seems to be. Until the seventies, many women had been trained to seek a provider rather than a simpatico life partner. In 1974, David represented something many women didn’t even know they wanted. Shouldn’t Alice be allowed to take a chance on what could be a great relationship?

To look at Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore through a rigid feminist lens also fails to reckon with the scope of Burstyn’s performance. She’s lit from within but also guarded, like cautious sunlight. And the wary hopefulness on Alice’s face, on Burstyn’s face, as she stands in the doorway of that first motel room, wearing that okay-but-not-great dress, tells you everything about what it takes to bounce back from a fall. Women don’t always restart their lives with radical makeovers. Sometimes it all starts with a polka-dot scarf.

The final scene, in which Alice and Tommy walk along a street in Tucson toward a mildly shabby roadside sign that happens to spell out, in big letters, Monterey—a sign that, according to Scorsese, just popped up, unplanned, in the shot—is perfect. Alice puts her arm around Tommy and squeezes a little too hard; he protests—this was an improvisation, too, from Lutter. More important than ideology is to trust what actors, in this case Burstyn and Lutter, are telling you. Alice and Tommy are walking toward a future of their own making, a Monterey by any other name. It’s their path to chart, and their dream to follow.

Miramax’s marketing campaign leaned heavily into the idea that the film contained a taboo twist having to do with sexuality and gender. That tactic proved to be massively successful with the moviegoing public, and the film went on to earn $71 million. The trailer featured cautionary and clichéd warnings of the kind endemic to any thriller of the era, and the glamorous Black trans woman Dil (Jaye Davidson) made her first appearance there alongside the phrase “Where nothing is what it seems to be.”

Even so, there’s not a moment from the marketing, or from the public discourse around it, that can be isolated as the one that immortalized The Crying Game as the film epitomizing the reveal trope; it was a constellation of voices and events that did that. Critic Roger Ebert lavished praise on the film in his December 1992 review but compared it with 1960’s Psycho, a horror movie that makes the disclosure of its serial killer’s gender ambiguity a key component of its terrifying climax, writing that The Crying Game presented itself as one thing but really was “about something else altogether.” At the sixty-fifth Oscars the following March, The Crying Game was nominated for six awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Davidson, and the cultural hysteria surrounding the reveal supplied a centerpiece of host Billy Crystal’s opening monologue. The number he performed was a supposedly comedic twist on the trans-panic reaction. Called “(Surprise) It’s The Crying Game,” the song was written by gay comedian Bruce Vilanch and set to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “(Love Is) The Tender Trap.” In the audience, Davidson reacted with a stone-faced expression to Crystal’s trivialization of the film. In subsequent years, the reveal was spoofed in several other movies, but none more notorious than Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), when the antagonist, Lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), is shown, with a crass close-up of her tucked groin area, to be disgraced Miami Dolphins placekicker Ray Finkle, against a needle drop from The Crying Game’s soundtrack and alongside a montage of police officers gagging.

It is hardly the fault of The Crying Game that the American public didn’t know how to respond to the difficult questions about the fluidity of sexuality and gender that the film was raising. American audiences at the time were prone to disorientation whenever the possibility of transness was introduced. They’d also struggled with the ambiguity of serial killer Jame Gumb’s nature in the Academy Award–winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991), whose infamous tucking scene—which was also endlessly spoofed—is likely the most notorious trans film image of the twentieth century. It would be difficult to blame any trans person who considers either of these films an impassable obstacle owing to the cultural residue of its contemporary reception and its reputation. However, when looking at The Crying Game with some distance from the monocultural freak-out, it is clear that we did not have the language to explain its virtues in the 1990s.

The white IRA volunteer Fergus (Stephen Rea) and the captured Black British soldier Jody (Forest Whitaker), whom he is supposed to be guarding, have an intimate chemistry that neither explicitly acknowledges. Their flirtation extends to their bond over the types of women they find beautiful. Jody alludes to the fact that he’s attracted to trans women when he says that the IRA member Jude (Miranda Richardson) isn’t his type. Fergus is enamored by the picture of Jody’s girlfriend, Dil, that he keeps in his wallet, and tells him that Dil would be anyone’s type. Over the course of an evening, they tell childhood stories and make promises of deep friendship if they can survive the moment. With the hour of Jody’s planned assassination nearing, Fergus agrees to his request that he seek out Dil and tell her what happened.

We catch up with Fergus—now going by Jimmy—in his new life in London, where he is finding Dil just as intoxicating as he found Jody. His sexuality is as mystifying as her gender identity; binary thinking does us no favors when it comes to characters as elastic as these. The romantic tension of The Crying Game arises not only from the question of whether Fergus can love a trans woman but also from his own reconciliation with the interracial queer relationships he finds himself drawn toward.

Also on October 30, 1992, The Crying Game, the new movie from Irish screenwriter, director, and author Neil Jordan, opened in UK theaters. It was a malign concurrence, if not exactly an unlikely one given how active the IRA was that month, that attacks occurred alongside the release of a film exploring the emotional complexities of an IRA member, portrayed with sympathetic sensitivity by Irish actor Stephen Rea. While the movie would be an immediate sensation when Miramax put it out in America a month later, its reception in the UK was more muted.

“I can understand why, when it was released in Britain, it didn’t take off like a rocket,” Jordan said at a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening. “It was still a very disturbing fact, you know, the fact of political violence. The memories of Bloody Birmingham and IRA bombs and all that were still very raw. And the idea of accepting a character like the character [Rea] played, seeing a human being there, was offensive—not only to English people, to a lot of Irish people as well.”

The humanization of an IRA soldier had also alarmed financial backers, whose reluctance nearly torpedoed the independent production. Jordan eventually started shooting without having the money to finish, and wound up “begging” for funding to complete the movie. (He got it from Britain’s Channel 4, on the condition he shoot a contrived, conventional happily-ever-after ending. He did, but he hated it, and ultimately lobbied successfully for his original finale.) Potential producers objected to The Crying Game’s political elements, its central interracial relationship, and its provocative take on sexuality, gender fluidity, and queerness. They were particularly uncomfortable with the midfilm twist, which took the movie out of the familiar arena of heterosexual, status-quo-confirming movie romances.

Inevitably, though, those were the exact same elements that critics and viewers couldn’t stop discussing, particularly after Miramax cleverly marketed the movie around the idea of a big secret no one should spoil. Miramax directly contacted individual critics ahead of the film’s premiere at the 1992 Venice Film Festival, asking them not to spoil the big twist—and all but guaranteeing that reviews would focus enticingly on The Crying Game as a movie with an important, daring reveal that audiences had to experience for themselves.

That startling moment of revelation, the scene where all the foreshadowing falls into focus, also made for irresistible word of mouth once the film hit theaters. But The Crying Game’s longevity runs much deeper than the twist. Every relationship in this film is adrift in confusion, emotion, and denial, from the connections the characters share to their individual relationships with institutions, nations, gender, race, class, and even their own identities. That’s what really makes Jordan’s movie so endlessly discussable.

Rea stars as Fergus, an IRA volunteer who helps kidnap a British soldier, Jody (American actor Forest Whitaker), as a potential bargaining chip for a hostage exchange. Over the course of three days in a rural Northern Ireland hideout, Fergus guards Jody for the IRA, and the two men build up a rough camaraderie. Whether out of authentic longing, spite, or some combination of motives, Jody boasts about his girlfriend, Dil, and urges Fergus to visit her in London and comfort her if Jody dies. When the British Army comes to rescue Jody and, ironically, accidentally kills him, Fergus flees and lands in London under an assumed identity. He does seek out Dil, a glamorous, flirtatious hairdresser. (Fashion model and first-time film actor Jaye Davidson has claimed he took the part out of a belief that the film would be a direct-to-video flop, leaving him relatively anonymous. Instead, it was an international hit, and Davidson went on to a major role in 1994’s Stargate before largely retiring from acting.)

Fergus rapidly falls for Dil, not realizing she’s a trans woman. When he first sees her naked, he’s shocked and revolted—but he can’t stay away from her, especially when his old IRA cadre, particularly his venomous former lover Jude (Miranda Richardson), finds him and threatens Dil’s life if Fergus doesn’t agree to a suicidal attack on a British judge.

Jordan’s intent was not to valorize the IRA or destigmatize its attacks. That may not have been clear to 1992 audiences reading about the movie’s portrayal of Fergus. (“An Irish Terrorist in Human Terms,” proclaimed the headline on Vincent Canby’s New York Times review.) But it’s clear enough to anyone who watches the film and sees how brutish, impulsive, indifferent, or cruel Fergus’s compatriots are, and how he fully finds himself only after he leaves them behind and takes up with Dil. Fergus and Dil’s relationship is messy—mutually confusing and mutually painful. But it’s part of a necessary reconstruction and reclamation process for both of them, a way to redefine themselves in more positive terms.

Any analysis of Jordan’s work is likely to eventually become an analysis of identity. At some point, his stories almost invariably consider who his characters are versus who (or what) they’re pretending to be. Supernatural predators disguise themselves as ordinary humans in The Company of Wolves (1984), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and Byzantium (2012). Con artists masquerade as ghosts in High Spirits (1988), convicts masquerade as priests in We’re No Angels (1989), and a drug mule identifies as a selkie in Ondine (2009). Michael Collins finds his political identity in Michael Collins (1996), and Kitty grows into her trans identity in Breakfast on Pluto (2005), while Francie Brady loses his identity to fantasy, trauma, and madness in The Butcher Boy (1997). The characters in 1986’s Mona Lisa adopt false names, wear disguises, and steal one another’s identities. The eponymous villain of 2018’s Greta is a matryoshka of assumed personae, stacked one inside another.

In The Crying Game, Dil projects confidence and control. In the Metro, the run-down but cozy corner pub where Jody told Fergus he would find Dil, she holds herself like temporarily embarrassed royalty, graciously accepting fealty from her court, particularly the ever-watchful, gently supportive bartender Col (Jim Broadbent). But her loneliness and hunger for acceptance, love, and kindness leave her vulnerable, first to an abusive hanger-on, Dave (Ralph Brown), who manhandles and hits her whenever she refuses his advances, then to Fergus himself. She sees Fergus as a chance to reshape her life, to see herself anew through the eyes of a shy, admiring, gallant stranger. When Fergus assaults Dave, Dil clearly relishes the power to finally chase off her abuser and have it stick. But she also enjoys being protected by someone who cares enough about her to feel possessive and jealous.

Fergus’s own identity games are more complicated. Jordan has said that, for him, the hook in The Crying Game was the chance to dissect his protagonist, to separate him from his self-image and see what happened next. Fergus starts out as an IRA loyalist, but his sympathy for the charismatic, sly, subversively funny Jody shakes his ability to demonize British soldiers. Jody, a Black British man of Caribbean descent, confronts Fergus with accounts of the shocking racism he has experienced in Ireland, making Fergus uncomfortable with his own ethnic identity. For her part, Dil rattles Fergus’s sense of his sexuality, while Jude shatters his sense of agency and independence.

“By the end of the movie, he’s called every facet of what he thought he was into question,” Jordan told the British Film Institute in 2017. “I don’t think people fully understand themselves, and I like to make movies about characters who realize they don’t fully understand themselves.”

Fergus responds to his initial losses of identity by remaking himself in London: he cuts off his shaggy hair, takes the name Jimmy, allows Dil to believe he’s Scottish, and conceals his history with Jody from her for most of the film. He has the nerve to accuse Dil of adopting a false identity (“You’re not a girl,” he tells her, with a patronizing air), even as he’s lying to her about who he is, where he’s from, and why he sought her out. But there’s an open question hanging over The Crying Game: Who was Fergus, really, before he met Jody? We learn nothing about his family, his history, or what brought him to the IRA. His entire defense of the organization’s terrorist acts amounts to one limp sentence delivered to Jody: “You guys shouldn’t be here.”

The only hints we have about his life come from the bits and bobs Jody elicits over three days of dialogue: Fergus is a fan of hurling, he enjoys “having a pint at the Rock,” and he knows a little about the Bible. The real keys to him are that he’s instinctively kind to Jody, and that when Jody shames him for having no words of comfort about Jody’s impending execution, Fergus meekly responds, “No, I’m not good for much.”

When Jordan was developing the movie, one seminal text he drew on was 1931’s “Guests of the Nation,” the most traveled short story by celebrated Irish author and cultural writer Frank O’Connor. The first-person narrative concerns an IRA soldier, nicknamed Bonaparte, whose cadre has been holding two English soldiers hostage for so long, and so informally, that captives and captors alike have lost their innate sense of enmity. They aren’t friends, exactly, but they’re as familiar with each other as small-town neighbors, and their arguments about society, capitalism, and God are contentious but not vituperative.

Then Bonaparte’s group is ordered to execute their captives, in retaliation for IRA members killed by the British Army. None of the men entirely know how to proceed, and the murders that follow are marked more by social awkwardness than nationalistic fervor. After helping to bury the two English soldiers, Bonaparte describes the terrible distance he feels from everyone and everything around him. “I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow,” he says. “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” That’s where the first act of The Crying Game leaves Fergus—guilt-stricken, vulnerable, bereft, and primed for reconstruction. But he lacks the will or impetus to reshape himself past the most basic surface elements (a haircut, a name, a day-laborer job) until he meets Dil.

For all Dil’s aching need for love and validation, she’s more certain in her identity than Fergus is in his. She has carved out a precise life for herself in places where she’s welcomed and accepted—a salon where she’s just one of the girls, a quiet neighborhood queer bar where she sits shoulder to shoulder with people playing with masculinity or femininity in rule-breaking, constructed ways. “Dil” as a persona is something of a public performance—she periodically speaks about herself in the third person, just as Jody did about himself in the movie’s opening. (The commonality raises the question of whether one of them picked this habit up from the other, or whether perhaps it was a shared game.) She uses that affectation to distance herself from some of the flirty or furious emotions she communicates to Fergus, pointedly passing her messages through Col at the Metro, even when she and Fergus are sitting together.

Other parts of her identity she expresses through a song. Her smoky, sultry cover of Dave Berry’s lyrically banal but effectively melancholy pop song “The Crying Game,” performed on the Metro’s stage for an appreciative audience, communicates how love has let her down in the past, and how she’s still getting by. (In a wink at the movie’s central toying with gender constructs, pioneering gender-fluid singer Boy George covers the song over the closing credits.)

But while Dil’s various performances—of the song, of imperious amusement at Fergus, of chic glamour and absolute confidence—hide the hungers that drive her, she ultimately proves so desperate for Fergus’s approval that she tearfully permits him to strip away her identity toward the climax of the movie. When he cuts off her hair and dresses her in Jody’s clothes, he claims he’s trying to protect her from his IRA pursuers by disguising her. Instead, he winds up symbolically recreating Jody to replace the one he watched die. Ultimately, this facsimile of Jody avenges the original Jody, successfully fighting back against Jude (who has also reinvented herself, with new hair, clothes, and bitter hardness) and Fergus in ways the first Jody couldn’t.

Even Fergus winds up mirroring Jody: In the film’s opening act, Jody tells him the old fable about the scorpion who wants a frog to carry him across a body of water but can’t stop himself from stinging the frog midtrip, dooming them both. “I can’t help it,” the scorpion says. “It’s in my nature.” In the film’s final moments, Fergus, in prison after taking the blame for killing Jude, tells the same story to Dil, by way of explaining why he had to give up his freedom for hers: with all his other pretensions and disguises stripped away, he implies, doing the right thing is in his nature.

None of this shows the IRA in a positive light, and none of it digs into the generational complexities of Irish politics in a way that aims to justify or excuse the bombs that were going off as The Crying Game opened in theaters. British audiences resisted the film without necessarily seeing how it interrogates the IRA, its methods, and its members while symbolically rescuing at least one of them, putting him back on the road toward empathy and human connection. It’s much more a personal movie than a political one, a continuation of Jordan’s still-ongoing explorations of how his sectarian, contentious, frequently violent homeland constructs some people’s identities, and shatters others’. In The Crying Game, he ultimately asks which parts of identity are important enough to kill for or die for, and which we can let go, for love or friendship or basic humanity. Whatever’s hidden under all the things we imagine to be our true identities, he implies, is in our natures. We can only hope the kindness in those natures outweighs the cruelty.

One of the most mischievous figures in world cinema, Věra Chytilová is still best known for Daisies, the daring 1966 film whose gonzo vision of female rebellion and empowerment launched her into the public eye. This Czechoslovak New Wave landmark—which follows the hedonistic exploits of two young women, both named Marie—was banned in the director’s home country for its many shots of wasted food, at a time when rations were strictly enforced by the communist government. Beyond the popularity of this signature work, though, there’s much left to discover in Chytilová’s oeuvre—including the underappreciated Wolf’s Hole, made two decades later. This grim but kooky take on the teen-horror genre widens the scope of Chytilová’s political critique; instead of taking exclusive aim at the patriarchy, here she examines the power dynamics within a group of adolescents from different backgrounds who have been invited to a mysterious skiing retreat that turns out to be a dangerous game. Though the movie lightly touches on gender politics, its main subject is the absurdity of authoritarianism and groupthink.

In contrast to Chytilová’s other films, which tend to be formally subversive and experimental, Wolf’s Hole has a relatively straightforward narrative premise: once the ragtag group of eleven youths arrive at their cabin at the top of an icy mountain, they begin to discover that their three adult leaders aren’t who they claim to be. At first, the warning signs are subtle, but the kids soon learn that they are being held captive by aliens. The leader, who calls himself “Daddy,” explains to the hostages that there should be only ten of them at the retreat, and refuses to let them leave until they have chosen one of their own to be killed. Daddy’s intention is to reveal the mercenary nature of the human species, and the ensuing power struggle forms the central drama. Will the group decide on an ethnic outsider, a Romani girl named Gitka, who has brought along a pesky dog and attends a different school than the others? Or will they single out the defiant Petr, who has a criminal past?

Wolf’s Hole takes time integrating its various dystopian genre elements. The warbling synths on the eerie, blippy soundtrack call to mind the film scores of John Carpenter (just as the plot may remind viewers of Carpenter’s similarly icebound and extraterrestrial-themed The Thing). Equally hypnotic are Chytilová’s images, which include long shots of crackling snow, indigo nights, and blizzard-struck slopes. Unlike its American counterparts in the teen-horror genre, Wolf’s Hole contains no blood or sex; the most rebellious thing about the kids, initially, is their smoking habit, which is thwarted when their matches are confiscated. Considering its dreary, remote setting and the physical constraints that the characters are trying to escape, it’s remarkable how many tonal registers the film contains: Chytilová’s satirical humor turns on a dime, from understated to fiery. She gives us a hodgepodge of moods, ideas, and vibes, with a visual sensibility that never lets us get our bearings.

It wasn’t until 2012 that I met Love in real life. I was cohosting a live-stream radio show during Fashion Week, put on by Garage magazine. My cohost and best friend, Sara Nataf, and I were not told who the guest was going to be until we arrived to get set up. That morning, I happened to have put on my favorite Hole T-shirt (the one with the pink and green splatter logo), and I guess you could say I had done so unknowingly, though I believe some part of me knew what was about to happen. Love was the star we were talking to that day, and we had a wonderful interview. To the shock and awe of that unibrowed twelve-year-old still inside me, we struck up a friendship.

I think the reasons that I (and others like me, including many women and gay men) feel that Love opened the world up to us are the same qualities that make her a great actress. She has a rare combination of electric charisma, razor-sharp intelligence, and profound vulnerability that blasts off the screen. But she’s also uncompromising, honest, and extraordinarily self-aware, characteristics that do not thrive in Hollywood.

Love has appeared in less than a dozen films, both before and after she rose to fame (and infamy) with her high-profile marriage to Kurt Cobain and her music. Most would agree that the high point of her acting career is Miloš Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. In his review, Roger Ebert called her “a true actress,” which she always was.

In a just world, we would have gotten the opportunity to see her play a range of complicated, interesting characters (including romantic-comedy leads! See: her performance in 200 Cigarettes). We don’t live in that world, but we can be grateful for everything she has shared with us so far: her music (of which there is more on the way), wisdom, unforgettable looks, endlessly quotable sound bites, and the six films of hers now playing on the Criterion Channel, all of which are worth watching.

You had a small acting career prior to your success in music. Many people might not be aware that, in the mid-’80s, you collaborated with the experimental director George Kuchar, and even appeared in one of his short films, Club Vatican (1984). And you also took some classes taught by Whoopi Goldberg! What came first—the desire to play music or the desire to act?

Yeah, I had a really small acting career. I went to San Francisco Art Institute very, very briefly, and it was pass/fail. I only went for a minute. Maybe a semester? People were really pursuing fine art, and I couldn’t relate to it at all. I met George Kuchar; he was just a great San Francisco eccentric, you know, a Wavy Gravy type. And he was like, “I make films.” It was very much out of this scene in San Francisco, [centered around the nightclub] the Mabuhay Gardens, also known as the Fab Mab, and all these very performance-y, ’70s punk and prepunk bands like the Mutants. [The bands] were all sort of in his films, and they were wacky. I had always wanted to be in films. So . . . I’m in a few George Kuchar films, being insane. I didn’t really study film, but I was in his films.

 

My friend Kay Moore was going out to Oakland. She was a comedian and taking comedy lessons from this woman, Whoopi. And so we went a few times. You just sort of sat there, and she was so brilliant and clearly was going to do great things in her life.

You were cast in a small role in your first feature film, playing Gretchen in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, in 1985, and then in a leading role, as Velma in his 1987 film Straight to Hell. What did you learn from being directed by him?

So there was an ad in this punk zine called Flipside. I was like a little San Francisco street rat, and my drug dealer pointed out that there was an ad in there for an open call for Sid and Nancy, down at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, for the role of Nancy Spungen, who I’ve come to be very protective of. [My drug dealer] paid for my midnight flight—twenty-five dollars, San Francisco to LA, one-way. I stayed with my friend Jennifer Finch.

 

There were a lot of girls there. Abbe Wool had written a script with Alex Cox. I memorized so much more of that than you were supposed to, because I didn’t know the process. There were a lot of girls with Harrods bags because there’s a scene with one in it. I’d gone to England, and I’d even lived in Liverpool and a bit in London, and I knew what Harrods was, but I didn’t have a Harrods bag. And I was really intimidated by that. There were a lot of LA rich girls who could afford wigs and Harrods bags. Now everybody that acts is a rich girl! Acting was more of a working-class game back then.

 

So I read for it, and I was impressive to Alex Cox, and to the room. Gary Oldman tried out, and so did Daniel Day-Lewis, and neither had done a film before. Daniel Day-Lewis got My Beautiful Laundrette like five minutes after this; they were both gonna explode. I remember hearing that Abbe Wool and Alex were really stumping for me. But I was eighteen, and these guys were twenty-seven. So, you know, it was pretty clear that I’m not gonna play this titular Nancy role, and I’m very, very happy that I didn’t.

 

First of all, it was Roger Deakins’s first film. They let me do a lot of stuff! They let me cast extras, help the art department with shit. I remember going up to Roger and being like, hey, can I help you with camera work? [Laughs.] I looked through a big Panavision, and I saw black and was like, that wasn’t for me.

 

I remember complaining to [producer] Eric Fellner and Alex Cox: “You know, Gretchen was a real person. She was Johnny Thunders’s girlfriend, and she doesn’t say enough. What about Gretchen? Justice for Gretchen!”

 

I’d never been to New York; I’d never been paid $365 a day. A while passed, and Alex Cox called me, and he was like, we wrote you a role [as Velma in Straight to Hell]. I was back in San Francisco, I was dancing, and I was super excited.

How was Joe Strummer as a costar?

Here’s the thing about Joe Strummer: I didn’t have a sense of how really, truly important the Clash was. I didn’t have the sense that they had really affected politics in Britain or anything like that. My friend Julie was like, I made out with Joe Strummer once. How could you not think he was sexy? I thought he was like my uncle, okay? I was a kid. They were so nice to me. I was playing a pregnant woman in Almeria, Spain, at MiniHollywood [a Wild West–style theme park]. It was really fucking hot, and it was really fucking cheap, and I was wearing this belly, and I would pick the Styrofoam out of the belly so I would look thinner.

 

I was playing a really bad guitar with nylon strings. I was just trying to form chords with my fingers, no pick. Remember, I wasn’t intimidated by Joe. I didn’t know to be. So he got in the back of the car and he was like, you’re a really bad guitar player. Don’t quit your day job. And I was like, fuck you. And we really made friends. I ended up living in his basement at some point for quite some time. It was great. For a couple of years, we were really tight.

Was Dick Rude as hot in person as I found him to be when I watched this film as a teenager?

Dick Rude was really hot. That movie was ridiculous. It was so funny and ridiculous. Alex Cox was so good to me. He was like a dress rehearsal for Miloš [Forman]. I don’t want to say [it was] paternal, because it’s something past paternal. When a director really loves you for you, you can do no fucking wrong. He’ll tease it out of you, and you just look up to him hugely.

 

We used to sleep under the stars on the roof instead of going to the hotel. Me and Joe and Dick Rude and Alex.

In Basquiat, you play a character known only as Big Pink, speculated to be based on Madonna and/or Debbie Harry. Were you aware of that potential connection when you were playing the role, and if so, did you use any aspects of either of those women in your performance? Did you have a relationship to Basquiat’s work prior to being cast in the film?

No, I didn’t have any sense of him. I’m uncultured, remember that. I come from the streets of San Francisco. However, it was a cool set, and I like Jeffrey [Wright], and we had this little scene. I found out later that I was representing Madonna, and I was mad about it. I’m not mad anymore at all, but I’ve never seen that movie.

Your performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt was undeniably exceptional and largely critically celebrated. However, some people tried to criticize it by claiming you were only playing yourself. Miloš Forman told Rolling Stone that actually perhaps the Courtney Love of the early ’90s in media was less you than people thought—“Courtney explained to me that she’s always very much under the pressure of the music people to play, to act, this character who is on the edge, because that’s what sells records and that’s what brings the kids into her concerts.” What was it like working with him, and how aware were you of his work?

Obviously I knew who Miloš was. I’m not that dumb. You know why? Lots of reasons, but in San Francisco at the Strand, me and my friend Marie Barr would go and see Amadeus every day. When I liked a movie, I used to go see it at the theater every day. But the first time I went to see Miloš, there were a lot of actresses going in and out. I remember seeing Ashley Judd there, and a lot of the ladies of the day. And he was watching a Lakers game and smoking his cigar. He was kind of a dick. I was like, okay, whatever, I’m not getting this role. He liked that I was kind of a dick back to his dick, and I got called back again, and then I read with Woody [Harrelson], and I got called back again.

 

After I did this audition, I was taken to the old Palm Restaurant, with Woody; Miloš; Oliver Stone, who was a producer on it; and some studio executives like Mark Canton, who, I found out later, had said, over my dead body are you casting this girl. I blurted out, to this table full of mostly producers, “Do you know, when I was a kid, and I was a ward of the state… I was on the same compound you shot One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in.”

 

Miloš took me aside, and in his deep Czech accent, he goes, listen, these people, they only like the upper-middle class. Do you have anything upper-middle-class? And I said, boarding school. And he went, yes, boarding school. And then he goes, did you ever ride a pony? And I said, yeah, I took riding lessons. So he goes, don’t say anything. I don’t care if you were a crack whore on the street. Don’t say it. I adjusted accordingly. We had an incredible working relationship. Woody was nothing but great to me. We had one epic fight that was crazy.

 

Edward Norton had been cast. He’d just come off Primal Fear, and he’d done a Woody Allen movie. We started hanging out, and we would rehearse. One day I came to set and Miloš was so furious. He’s like, I don’t ever want to see you act. If I see you acting, you can’t hang out with Edward anymore.

What drew you to the part of Joan Volmer, William Burroughs’s wife, in Beat? I’ve always been fascinated by her and how history has flattened her into a biographical point in his artistic development arc when she was clearly a brilliant and fascinating person. Did you feel the same way about her before you took the part?

[After The People vs. Larry Flynt] I did Man on the Moon, and then I just started getting offered everything. Everything. I hate when people do their pass list; it’s such a simpy thing to do. So I won’t even bore you.

 

I’d been in Hollywood for years. And you would think I knew how to play that game. I just didn’t. I liked being a film star, it was super fun. I just was under a lot of pressure.

 

I kept passing on things that ended up getting Academy Awards or making a billion dollars or whatever. I will say one thing, because no one's ever made it. Sherry Lansing brought me in when she was the head of Paramount. She said, how about you do Janis Joplin? She did this whole pitch. Sherry Lansing was an incredibly formidable beauty queen, you know, velvet glove with the iron fist. And I said, I don't want to do it. I want to do [James Gray’s] The Yards. And Sherry Lansing blew up. She was offering me fifteen million. Like, this was the era where actors were getting twenty. I was friends with Drew Barrymore, and she’s like, do it for the quote. I would never do anything for the quote at that point. I’d just come from punk, and like, you don't do things for money. Anyway, I told her I didn’t want to do Janis and I wanted to do The Yards. And she was like, you want to fucking do The Yards with Harvey [Weinstein]? It was very funny.

 

Anyway, I didn’t want to do Joplin. I wanted do this little movie, Beat, because I had a real connection to these Beat guys. Also, Joan Vollmer Burroughs was murdered. And that to me was a better story. I just felt like, okay, that’s something I can get into. It was a really hard shoot in Mexico. Kiefer Sutherland was William Burroughs. My friend Norman Reedus was Lucien [Carr]. I really enjoyed it. It was kind of a film on my own terms, where I got to sort of do what I wanted. Lots of things didn’t work in it, but it’s a really reflective, interesting piece that didn’t get any attention. So I’m glad Criterion is showing it, because of everybody’s performances—they’re all great.

You’re so good, and incredibly charming and funny, in 200 Cigarettes, in what is essentially a romantic-comedy role. Did you ever want to do more comedic roles?

200 Cigarettes was [directed by] Risa Bramon Garcia. If you know anything, you know that she and her partner were, other than Bonnie Zimmerman, the biggest casting agents in Hollywood. The thing I liked about it, weirdly, was she’d never cast me. I owed her nothing. A lot of people on that film owed her something. Her [producing] partner, Betsy [Beers], was a really great comedic woman. It was so light and so sweet. I was like, I wanna do this movie because it’s comedy.

 

I remember the producer wanted somebody else to play the person across me. I had just seen Clueless, and there’s a scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone [as Cher] says, “Well, I know my Mel Gibson,” about Hamlet, and [Paul Rudd] just gives her a look. I told Risa and Betsy, I wanna do this with Paul Rudd. I had casting approval, which is a weird thing. I remember being accosted at a party by Billy Zane, yelling at me because I had casting approval. Anyway, I didn't care, I just wanted Paul Rudd. So I had to send him flowers. I did a whole campaign, and he said yes in the end. We had a really good time.

 

Comedy is really fucking hard. I had done Man on the Moon. I’d been around Jim Carrey, and we had talked about it a lot, physical comedy, and he did some comic stuff in that movie. The milk and cookies in the Carnegie Hall scene was fucking epic. The process of comedy was really hard. Honestly, if you have a good leading partner, everything is butter. And that cast was great: Kate Hudson coming off her first indie; Christina Ricci; Elvis Costello, my scene partner in life. Who else? A lot of people in that fucking movie. Casey Affleck! It was crazy. Janeane Garofalo and Ben Affleck. It was a great set. It was really fun; great camaraderie. And Risa was a really good director. Betsy was the producer. They were a great team.

 

I wish I had done more comedies.

Trapped was one of the last feature films you did. Did you seek out a role in a crime thriller, something you hadn’t really done before? Is it a genre you like in general? Did you enjoy stretching yourself for that?

Trapped was sort of like me knowing, okay, I need to get my shit together and do a real movie. Charlize [Theron] was on the come up. Also, Kevin Bacon was in it. I could now play the Kevin Bacon game and actually be not even one degree from Kevin Bacon.

 

I know why I did that movie—[the director] Luis Mandoki. I asked Jennifer Lopez; I asked Andy Garcia. I asked people that had been in Luis Mandoki movies because I didn’t want to make the same mistake and not have a really good connection with my director ever again. Luis was fantastic, and he got the best reports from other actors. I do think Jennifer Lopez is such a good actress. I love her. Hustlers should have gotten an Oscar nomination if not an Oscar. I talked briefly to Meg Ryan, and everybody said he was great, and he was. I just wanna say, Vancouver is hard if you’re an actor, it just is. It grates on the soul.

What are some of your unrealized artistic ambitions when it comes to acting and filmmaking? Do you think you’ll act again?

I had a really brief run. I did things wrong. I just didn’t know how to do things. As far as my film life, I don't really care. I peaced out and that was the end of me in that world. My friend Courtney Hoffman, who’s a director, was like, you need to go to AFI women’s program to direct. This was ten years ago. I told Aaron Sorkin about this. I told Cameron Crowe, because you have to get someone to recommend you. It was like literally the whole town going, oh, we know what to do with Courtney now. She should direct. And I thought the same thing. I went into AFI, and these women were great. There’s only so many places a year, and it’s an eighteen-month program. Have you ever gone on a date and it was high stakes, but you both knew it was not for you? I don’t want to direct. I don’t want to write. The Courtney-can-direct thing? No, not gonna happen. Courtney can write a really good album. That’s what Courtney’s doing right now. I’m super flattered, with my brief run, that Criterion is doing anything. What the fuck? It’s amazing. I’m so grateful.

A socially engaged film with a political topic, It Was Just an Accident (2025) is Panahi’s eleventh feature, and his sixth made clandestinely in Iran. It’s based on his two experiences as a prisoner of conscience in Iran, in 2010 and 2022–23, which included solitary confinement, hunger strikes, and interrogation sessions. The film was shot in just twenty-five days, following the end of a twenty-year sentence that banned the director from filmmaking, writing, giving interviews, and traveling abroad. Still, Panahi adamantly identifies as a socially engaged filmmaker, not a political one. In authoritarian states, which benefit from blurring the boundaries between the social and the political as a form of control over plurality and dissent, artists tend to emphasize the distinction between the two, seeking to lay claim to their civil rights without being accused of political radicalism. Both this civilian tendency to detach the social from the political and the state’s attempts to conflate them are symptomatic of the power imbalances found in corrupt justice systems and collapsing legal and social orders. In a sense, this film is taking part in a tradition of cinema—from Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman—that depicts individual efforts to correct such power imbalances as vigilantism. Unlike most revenge thrillers, however, including Panahi’s own Crimson Gold (2003), It Was Just an Accident is also about the vigilante’s search for a way to settle with their doubt.

What does a group of torture victims do when they think they may have encountered their torturer outside prison? This central question of It Was Just an Accident is reminiscent of ones asked by other artists with lived experiences of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and repression—the Turkish playwright Tuncer Cücenoğlu, for example, in his 1980 Dead End, or the Argentina-born Chilean American playwright Ariel Dorfman in his 1990 Death and the Maiden. What sets Panahi’s film apart is that its dilemma extends beyond individual choices to encompass the communal decisions that must be made by conflicting voices—voices that often share a goal but not modalities. Some discover that their goal changes as they evaluate the means of reaching it.

“I dig for the truth, but while I do, something happens to it,” says the Writer in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. “He took everything: my dignity, my wife, my job. I lost everything. I even dug a hole to bury him alive. But he made me doubt,” says It Was Just an Accident’s former prisoner of conscience Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) of his interrogator and torturer Eqbal (Ebrahim Azizi). Vahid’s mentor, Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), responds: “There’s no need to dig their graves. They’ve done it themselves. It’s your ideals you’d be burying.” Vahid must process not only what to do with his torturer but also what his ideals are and how to act on them with the freedom of a new beginning.

In the incident that sets the film’s plot in motion, Vahid, an Azeri-speaking mechanic, believes he has encountered Eqbal in the garage where he works, based on the distinctive squeaking of the man’s prosthetic leg (Vahid was always blindfolded during interrogations). He kidnaps Eqbal, intending to exact his revenge, but after some interaction is uncertain whether he has the right person and seeks to confirm the identification by consulting with several fellow victims—introducing the unpredictable variety of their opinions and styles. With each of the six characters who ultimately join Vahid in his van over the course of the film, a different layer of absurdist comedy is added to its social satire. Without overt genre stylization, a philosophical examination of political ethics transforms into a comedy of manners before a final tonal shift into a psychological thriller, with an ending that keeps us oscillating between hope and despair, life and death. Some of the film’s sarcasm and humor is lost in cultural and linguistic translation, such as the riotous language of the hot-tempered Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), as well as aspects of Elyasmehr’s phenomenal performance. Yet the experience of seeing the film in a movie theater is a communal one of confronting fear and uncertainty and processing collective trauma through laughter. In an emotionally charged sequence, Vahid begins burying the blindfolded Eqbal alive while Eqbal implores him to stop and swears he is not the torturer. In a moment of doubt, after seeing the fresh wounds on the man’s amputated leg, Vahid stops and lights a cigarette. Traveling with Panahi, I learned by experience that, in North America, the cut from Vahid in the grave to Vahid smoking while sitting ambivalently in the doorway of his van guarantees a laugh. Every time, Panahi turned to me and asked in bewilderment, “What are they laughing about?!” “The shift from absolute certainty to doubt, perhaps,” I’d reply.

To engage with doubt is to experience one’s humanity. That idea is central to It Was Just an Accident, and keeps us wondering throughout about ambiguities in the characters. First, there is the question of Eqbal’s identity. We may also be concerned that the group will not have the necessary “political creativity,” as Hannah Arendt called it, to come up with a solution, and that Eqbal will take revenge if his kidnappers permit him to go free. Some of the group are more determined, others less so. Only some of them develop the doubt that drives the narrative, but they all orbit the van, the hub of the action and, in itself, an active personage. In Panahi’s guerrilla filmmaking, the van also served the practical function of hiding the cast, crew, and equipment of an underground film being shot in broad daylight by a former prisoner of conscience.

This is “a film made for after the fall of the current regime,” in the words of its creator. Whether or not Iranian society is entering its post–Islamic Republic era, the film’s prophetic timing aligned its Oscar campaign with a most historic moment in Iran’s fate. During the January 2026 protests, the state almost completely lost its legitimacy with yet another mass killing in a telecommunications blackout, with death-toll estimates ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. By early March, the assassinations of Iran’s top political and military leaders in an unprovoked war by Israel and the U.S., along with the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, energy reserves, and defense systems, seemed to have brought the Islamic Republic to some of its weakest days since its formation in 1979.

In addition to the immediate Iranian context, Panahi recognizes that audiences around the world can relate to the film because they either have experiences of authoritarianism in their collective memory, are currently undergoing it, or fear its imminent rise. The film’s dilemmas resonate with today’s most pressing questions for the international community: When and where is a cycle of violence going to end, if at all? What should be done with the agents of a brutal system during and after its collapse, whether they were just following orders or loyally promoting its ideology? And after the fall of an authoritarian regime, what is a society’s capacity for a new beginning, i.e., its “natality,” as termed by Arendt? The first two questions are philosophically embedded in the plot of It Was Just an Accident. The question of natality, however, emerges and reemerges, even after the film ends, in the various interpretations of the final sequence’s sound, the source of which remains unclear.

The characters themselves portray the complexities of plurality as Arendt described them. Although in a revolutionary setting the vision for a new beginning may seem to be unified, in practice revolutionaries often find themselves competing to shape the winning narrative. The question is how to reconcile the disparate voices, if they even agree on the need for reconciliation. While each character in the group is emblematic of a type within the dissident milieu, Vahid himself closely resembles the real-life activist Mehdi Mahmoudian. Panahi met Mahmoudian in prison and later invited him to collaborate on dialogue for It Was Just an Accident. Mahmoudian, whose kidneys, like Vahid’s, were damaged while he was being tortured in prison, identified one of his torturers by his amputated arm when the man and his family entered Mahmoudian’s workplace, just as Eqbal does Vahid’s. True to his nonviolent principles, Mahmoudian amicably served his torturer, but, in a moment apart from the man’s family, reminded him of their former relationship. The former interrogator fled in fear, only to return the next day to apologize, explaining that he had just been following orders. In the film, Vahid, too, helps his torturer’s family. Unlike Mahmoudian’s torturer, Eqbal announces his ideological loyalty to the regime in the same breath with which he confesses his guilty conscience and his complexes from being bullied as a child. It is eventually Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photojournalist in the group, who manages to bring Eqbal to his knees.

Shiva’s friend Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), another torture victim, enters the van in her white wedding gown, along with her politically neutral fiancé, Ali (Majid Panahi). Shiva and Golrokh, as well as Eqbal’s candid little daughter (Delnaz Najafi), who signifies hope in future generations, embody the iconoclastic agency of the Iranian women who broke away from tradition and breached the Islamic Republic’s most unassailable redline, on mandatory hijab, in the Women, Life, Freedom movement, born in 2022. The women of It Was Just an Accident represent a characteristic Panahi tribute to the significance of grassroots, bottom-up social and political change. Shiva’s abilities to doubt and to make Eqbal face himself both emerge from her desire for truth. This testifies to Panahi’s self-identification as a social, not a political, filmmaker: it is not the most polemical member of the group but the one with the strongest social roots who breaks the uncanny, cuts the shadow open, and actualizes the impossible.

Eqbal’s confession to Shiva unfolds in a twelve-and-a-half-minute medium shot of the torturer in the dark desert, illuminated only by the van’s red brake lights. Shiva and Vahid step in and out of the open frame as they force him to face his reality. The offscreen space in which the torture victims operate as whole individuals with autonomy and Arendtian natality is a neorealist window onto the intervention of social forces in the dark undercurrents of political extremism. Panahi’s principle of “visual justice,” which strives to give all characters a fair share of the camera, provides Eqbal a chance to respond and the audience ample breathing room in which to assess his self-defense. After discarding several takes, Panahi invited Mahmoudian to the set to guide the scene based on his extensive experience with interrogator-torturers. Mahmoudian’s advising and Azizi’s extraordinary performance, according to Panahi, saved the film. Blindfolded, with his hands tied behind him and his torso tightly roped to a tree, Azizi combines microexpressions of every possible facial muscle with minute vocal nuances that, again, highlight the significance of sound in this film.

Panahi embeds the question of a society’s potential to start anew in the film’s ending, which unfolds ambiguously; our interpretation of it relies on the way we hear it. The aura of secrecy surrounding all aspects of authoritarian rule keeps citizens in the dark, blindfolded metaphorically if not literally. In the absence of visual confirmation of political realities, soundscapes can guide the public’s perception of them. In the Islamic Republic, those included revolutionary songs and slogans from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when the state realized that reminding citizens of the revolution’s unrealized glorious promises was counterproductive. Since 1979, schools, radio, and television have been used for broadcasting sonic propaganda (on television, over still images or videos). Additionally, over the past two decades, residents near nuclear and military sites have reported hearing unexplained loud, unusual sounds. In auditory authoritarianism, domination of the sonic environment without freedom of information is a power mechanism that blurs facts, invites speculation, and obstructs access to knowledge. Together with data concealment, auditory authoritarianism facilitates information manipulation and thought control.

Like other prisoners of conscience, Panahi himself was blindfolded while having to respond to his interrogator, whose footsteps he heard incessantly behind him. During those sessions, his curiosity about his interrogator sharpened his hearing and shaped his sonic experience of incarceration. The narrative fulcrum of It Was Just an Accident is the haunting political soundscape of a militant religious dictatorship. This is encapsulated in the sound of the prosthetic leg belonging to Eqbal, for whom the loss of his leg while fighting for the Islamic Republic in Syria is a badge of honor. Part father figure, part ISIS fighter, part Captain Ahab, Eqbal is politically demonic and socially human. His squeaking footsteps, heard only in the opening and closing sequences of the film, together with Hamid’s loud outbursts for revenge, are sonic reminders of the social calamities of political certainty, juxtaposed against the humanity of doubt in Vahid, Shiva, and Golrokh.

Panahi has said he was uncertain about the last twenty seconds of the film until he was in the editing room. In some of the discarded shots, there was dialogue; in others, Vahid turned to face Eqbal. In the end, nothing could have better captured the psychological warfare waged by auditory authoritarianism than the scene as we have it: Vahid in close-up from behind, his upper back and neck fused with the uncertainty of whether he is hearing Eqbal’s squeaking footsteps. As we wonder if the sound is real or imagined, we are vicariously assessing the group’s natality and capacity for pluralism. Whether the peaceful family man in Eqbal overcomes the evil torturer depends, for one thing, on whether we register the sound of his footsteps as only approaching Vahid or as first getting close to him and then, after a harrowing pause, receding. Regardless of what Vahid intended to do to the torturer, his doubt, and his recognition of his own freedom to start anew, inadvertently saves three lives. In Panahi’s own words: “Are we, as people, going to continue a multigenerational cycle of violence, or are we going to say ‘cut,’ at some point, and end it?”

Desperate Living (1977)—whose opening credits feature a woman daintily eating a rat with a fork and knife—is an anomaly in Waters’ early oeuvre: it doesn’t feature Divine, who starred in most of the director’s films through the 1980s. But there are plenty of other vicious divas, wackos, and practitioners of the bizarre to admire here. Like many of Waters’ movies, it starts in the Baltimore suburbs. Picture-perfect white picket fences and piles of fall leaves. Quickly, however, we discover that Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) has just returned home from the sanatorium. Her stressed-out husband (George Stover) is surprisingly sanguine: “The road to mental health is just around the corner.” But when Mr. Gravel starts to get on his wife’s nerves, she recruits her maid, Grizelda (Jean Hill), to kill him. Peggy and Grizelda go on the lam, only to end up sexually harassed by a police officer who loves women’s underwear. “I love the feel of cold nylon on my big butt,” the cop says. Waters always calls into question the sanity of normies. “Baltimore is a city where everyone thinks they’re normal, but they’re all completely crazy,” he quipped of his hometown in a 2009 interview.

Peggy and Grizelda are exiled to Mortville, a vile little settlement of nudists and queers subject to the tyrannical Queen Carlotta (electrically played by Edith Massey, often carried around on a palanquin by a cadre of bondage-clad studs). The fugitives soon seek shelter with Mole (a dapper Susan Lowe, besieged by craggy moles) and his gorgeous lover, Muffy (the legendary stripper and actress Liz Renay). Begrudgingly, the couple allow Peggy and Grizelda safe harbor. Meanwhile, Queen Carlotta’s daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce), cavorts around with a common peasant. This act of class treason, for which the princess is eventually banished by the queen, catapults the film into overdrive. When Coo-Coo hides out with Peggy and Grizelda, the royal guards quickly find her and pounce, killing Grizelda and destroying poor Mole’s house in the process.

Peggy doesn’t submit so easily. But, reinventing herself after her maid’s death, she soon joins Carlotta’s cause. She even infects the disgraced Coo-Coo with rabies at her majesty’s demand. Mole becomes the protagonist of the film, helping orchestrate a coup that ousts Carlotta and brings Peggy to her knees. The film ends with a joyful, if macabre, banquet. Carlotta herself is served as the main roast. The townsfolk gleefully dig in, mirroring the opening-credits sequence. Who’s the real pig? Waters leaves it up to us.

The camaraderie of Mortville echoes that of Waters’ own Dreamlanders, a troupe that included Desperate Living cast members Stole, Hill, Massey, Lowe, Pearce, Stover, and Cookie Mueller (who plays a Mortville resident), in addition to Divine and others. Waters, like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini before him, regularly employed the same actors over and over. Friendship was a powerful force for these outcasts, who transmuted their pain into stardom, just as it is for Grizelda and Peggy, who become “sisters in crime,” if only for a while. Years after making films like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble (1974), and Polyester (1981), Waters reflected on the grief he felt over the sheer number of his collaborators who had passed away prematurely: “I miss everybody. You go through the movies, and you see them. God, we were so young. Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.”

In recent years, Waters has found acceptance in the mainstream, a development that he maintains a benign attitude about. It’s not as if his many accolades—from a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to multiple Grammy nominations to numerous retrospectives around the world—have made it any easier for him to make films. (David Lynch, too, had difficulty getting funding in his later years.) “The only difference is that now people are celebrating these kinds of films. When I started out, the first festival I entered, they stopped my movie halfway through,” Waters has joked with deadpan seriousness. Deviants and degenerates sell, sure, but not enough to outweigh the cultural conservatism of our current moment.

“You’re a weirdo pervert!” Muffy screams at Mole when she discovers he got phalloplasty in order to better serve her needs, about two-thirds of the way through Desperate Living. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Mole cuts off his new dick and Muffy throws it outside, where a dog promptly eats the appendage. In an essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Caden Mark Gardner crowns Mole a “gender outlaw” in the anarchic style of the legendary Kate Bornstein, someone who lives outside the traditional trans-at-birth narrative and moves through the world more ambiguously. It’s not exactly that Mole is ambivalent about his masculinity—“I’m a man!” he screeches—but that he seems to have an awareness of the times, understanding that he’s being read as a butch lesbian. Despite this gender trouble, when Muffy pukes after trying to take his dick out on its maiden voyage, he swiftly severs his phallus. “So much for science, Muffy,” he moans.

The link between John Waters and trans medicine is more than satirical coincidence. Baltimore is home to what was one of the first hubs of gender-affirming surgical care: Johns Hopkins University. Desperate Living features a sequence where Mole holds the staff there at gunpoint in order to speedrun getting phallo. Only two years after the film came out, however, the clinic shut down because of conservative backlash. Perhaps this sounds familiar, given the recent closures of numerous pediatric trans clinics, and threats to trans medicine more broadly. Déjà vu. “America has finally come to resemble one of Waters’ movies,” Alex Halberstadt recently wrote in the New York Times.

Especially in his early features—made during, and in the shadow of, Richard Nixon’s presidency—Waters took ruthless aim at censorship, bourgeois norms, and other repressive regimes. For the provocative Pink Flamingos, he filmed a decked-out Divine walking down the street in real time, capturing the actual looks of disgust and bewilderment from passersby. (Fashion is always a key component in Waters’ films; he adores a sequin dress.) The fear of suburban housewives, something my fellow trannies are all too familiar with, is a motif he would return to again and again.

As for phalloplasty, it remains a rare and controversial surgery. In 2022, the New York Times published an in-depth feature by Jamie Lauren Keiles titled “How Ben Got His Penis.” As he outlines the long road of medical transition—and the many frightful aspects of such a difficult surgery—Keiles delivers a nice summation of the process: “Phalloplasty, or surgery to construct a penis, is one of medicine’s most complex procedures. Though it technically refers to one step in a long process—the construction of a phallus from a flap of one’s own skin—the term is used more generally to describe a suite of modular surgeries, each attending to a different penile function.”

Mole’s cock is not quite this advanced. It looks not unlike a floppy hot dog sewn on by the film’s costume department. Displeasure at the surgery, like Muffy’s, is not uncommon; I know many people who joke about “Frankendick,” worried about the possible complications of the procedure. One study that collated data from 2009 to 2019 found that only 766 patients had undergone phalloplasty in the state of California during that time. Part of the reason is that, unlike vaginoplasty, phalloplasty is not a one-and-done procedure—it requires multiple visits to the doctor, often over the course of several years. It’s a Herculean commitment to gender that Desperate Living transforms into a utopian drive-by event.

The debates over trans surgery can easily lend themselves to melodrama. Thank God that Waters didn’t bow down to sentimental portrayals of trans plight. Early trans pioneer and frequent Waters collaborator Elizabeth Coffey—who briefly appears in Desperate Living as a bartender in the middle of a bar brawl—also shows up in Pink Flamingos, where she flashes her dick. Apparently, she filmed the cameo just days before getting vaginoplasty—at Johns Hopkins, no less. According to Waters, “She said, ‘I did that scene because I knew that I could own that joke forever. And nobody could ever make fun of me.’ And no one ever did.” It’s a strategy Coffey may have learned from Waters: his ability to turn filth into gold by owning it. Desperate Living takes a similar approach to gender, refusing respectability in favor of jesters and pure abjection. Mole isn’t some trans-boy paragon of virtue—in his quest to topple Queen Carlotta, he’s just as despicable as any of Waters’ cissies.

Not everyone in Desperate Living is so liberation-minded about being an outsider. “I have never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing,” Peggy chirps. She praises Carlotta’s despotism and hails her neat and orderly grip on Mortville: “A single gunshot can never destroy the beauty of fascism.” She hates the Supreme Court but only because of its occasional liberal decisions, not because it’s the head of a branch of the U.S. government. Her hysteria in the suburbs is a symptom not of the surrounding area’s placid banality but of the fact that this milieu isn’t fascist enough. (When she has sex with Grizelda, perhaps under duress, she ekes out, “This is so unnatural!” before seemingly succumbing to the pleasure.) The satire is complete when Peggy becomes a witch and cooks up a rabies potion to serve the princess for her crimes. Waters’ script is full of these verbal and visual zingers—he’s one of the best modern screenwriters. His literary slapstick provides some of the finest screwball comedy this side of Bringing Up Baby (1938) or What’s Up, Doc? (which came out the same year as Pink Flamingos). It’s a gift that Waters’ screenplays have been published as books, helping the superfan to memorize his wisecracking ripostes.

There are many acolytes of John Waters in the modern-day filmmaking world—Jamie Babbit, Vera Drew, Louise Weard, and Julia Ducournau—auteurs pushing the bounds of cinematic respectability. Instead of turning the transgressive into mere sadistic punishment, these filmmakers offer gleeful, sensual, cackling subversion. Hedonism should be fun! What a radical concept. Waters knows this instinctively. Desperate Living is a brilliant portrait of delicious rebellion, of a world where the outcasts set aside their differences and band together, and where fascists are not merely overthrown but devoured.

And then the majestically reprobate filmmaker behind Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) made Hairspray, his most ostensibly wholesome, nondeviant movie. “All you need is one really good idea. And, boy, a fat white girl fighting for racial integration was it!” he writes in his 2019 book, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. It took twenty-one years to break even, he reports, but the first Waters movie with a seven-figure budget ($2.7 million, to be precise), the first to be period-set (it takes place in 1962), and the first (and still only) to earn a straight-up PG rating has become by far his most widely seen title. Then this “gift that keeps on giving,” as he calls it, spawned a hugely successful, Tony-winning musical that is to this day a staple of high-school drama production rosters the nation over and that itself was made into a 2007 film version (with Waters in a seal-of-approval cameo). And so it also became the project most responsible for the latter-day spit polish of Waters’ formerly proudly cruddy reputation. “Somehow I became respectable,” he writes ruefully at the start of Mr. Know-It-All. “What the hell has happened?” What happened was Hairspray.

The tale of Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), a big girl with a big heart, big dreams, and even bigger hair, Hairspray sees Waters proffering a friendship ring to Middle America, who slipped it coyly onto a plump finger, where it remains. Inspired by Waters’ fond memories of The Buddy Deane Show—a kind of Baltimorean American Bandstand that made defiantly local celebrities of its twinkle-toed teenage participants—Hairspray can be read as thinly, or rather fatly, veiled autobiographical wish fulfillment. The movie’s version, The Corny Collins Show, in the best tradition of the show-within-the-film trope, functions as both a microcosm of the movie at large and a scaled-down model of a divided Baltimore (and therefore a divided America). This is particularly poignant given how hard Tracy works from both within and without the Corny Collins system to end the program’s racial segregation. In real life, The Buddy Deane Show never integrated, and look where real life has gotten us.

It was a breakout role for Lake, who has often stated that the public’s conflation of herself with her adorable, approachable character was a major factor in the success of her subsequent long-running daytime talk show. But finding the perfectly agreeable and perfectly ample embodiment of Tracy Turnblad (a Pynchonesque surname that rings with all the poetry of an obscure medieval term for cystitis) is only one of Hairspray’s casting coups. The presence of R&B pioneer Ruth Brown as “Motormouth” Maybelle, the matriarch of Baltimore’s boogying Black community, and the scene in which Toussaint McCall performs his biggest contemporary hit (a little anachronistically; “Nothing Takes the Place of You” came out in 1967) lend credibility to the portrayal of an era when even the most white-bread of American youths were embracing Black music. “Leave me alone, Mother,” says Tracy’s archnemesis, Amber Von Tussle (Colleen Fitzpatrick, later the pop star Vitamin C), defending her favorite record, by the Black soul group the Five Du-Tones. “‘Shake a Tail Feather’ is a wild song.” That Amber’s horrible, racist mama (Miss Soft Crab 1945) is played with shellacked, gimlet-eyed glamour by Debbie Harry, while Sonny Bono plays her die-hard anti-integrationist father, only adds to the music-scene in-jokiness, and to the sense of Waters cannily spending his hard-won countercultural capital and getting the biggest bang for his buck.

And then, of course, there’s Divine, long the cross-dressing muse of Waters’ most fetid and febrile imaginings, here pulling double duty as Tracy’s put-upon mother, Edna, and the loathsome WZZT station manager Arvin Hodgepile. Edna is the film’s best comic creation, her political awakening (“Tracy, honey . . . we joined the NAACP!”) is its most satisfying arc, and the cross-gender casting single-handedly gives an otherwise straightforwardly heterosexual narrative its vibrant queerness. And beyond the intersectional-feminist oddness of having a man playing a housewife who is (initially, at least) oppressed by the crushing patriarchal conventions of domesticity, it’s the cadences of Divine’s inimitable speech patterns that give Hairspray its most quotable dialogue, often in tandem with Jerry Stiller—no slouch in the distinctive-line-reading department himself—playing Wilbur, Tracy’s fondly indulgent dad. Just listen to the singsong rhythms as Edna declares indignantly “My Tracy’s a clean teen!” while Wilbur chimes in with “There’s no bugs on our babyyy!” And who among Hairspray’s legions of fans has not occasionally felt their blood sugar plummet, or glanced at an empty coffee cup, or licked the last amphetamine granule from a depleted wrap of speed and felt Divinely inspired to warn anyone within their blast radius, “My diet pill is wearing off . . .”?

Hairspray was not the first time Divine had played a woman chafing against the shackles of a man’s world. Nor, strictly speaking, was it the first time Waters had shaken a tail feather in the direction of the commercial mainstream—or at least the outer edge of it. Polyester (1981) starred Waters’ regular crew of so-called Dreamlanders, including Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and Mary Vivian Pearce (incidentally, Waters’ partner the two times he himself went on Buddy Deane as a teen), alongside resurrected fifties matinee idol Tab Hunter. But it is primarily a love letter to classical Hollywood melodrama and to Divine’s colossal charisma, swaddled in glossier production values than Waters had ever attempted before. The critical establishment garlanded the movie with the best notices of both their careers to that point, as though its relative polish and narrative coherence were evidence of a long-overdue learning curve. But while the budget-challenged, willful shonkiness of Waters’ earlier films was partly necessity, it was also partly choice. As author Gary Indiana put it in a 2004 essay—perhaps the best piece ever written about John Waters not written by John Waters—“the Sirkian patina of Polyester and a film like Serial Mom amply prove[s] that Waters knows how to do a lot of things he doesn’t bother doing in a lot of his films.”

Still, Polyester’s gentle shift away from the excrement-eating grossness that characterized those early films feels in hindsight like an acknowledgment by Waters, the Alexander of the Abject, that having established unimpeachable midnight-madness credentials on multiple maniacal occasions, there were now new worlds to conquer. And what, in the end, is the best way to subvert? To get to very few people a lot or to very many people just a little, perhaps so subtly that they don’t even notice the tender massaging of their prior preconceptions? Why not, over the course of a long career, do both? Short of going door-to-door through the suburbs and strip malls of the flyover states, Hairspray is how John Waters, refusing to sell out to the mainstream, instead slyly hoodwinked the mainstream into buying into John Waters.

As part of that stealth campaign, alongside Polyester, Waters unleashed his first memoir, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste. And perhaps the most fascinating piece of Waters ephemera from this era, especially for students of pop-cultural manipulation, is his first appearance, with Divine, on the then-brand-new Late Night with David Letterman, in 1982, promoting both book and film. Divine is out of breath, post–singing performance, wearing a hairdo that implies some deranged wigmaker went berserk inside a cotton-candy machine; Waters is eager but composed. And it’s remarkable to witness the young and kinda greenhorn Letterman warming to his guests—Waters would go on to become a regular—in real time. Initially nonplussed by the director and a little flustered by Divine (which you can tell because he admits, “Well, I’m a little flustered”), Letterman prefigures the reaction of mainstream America to Hairspray by visibly relaxing into Waters’ pointed but genial repartee. The host concludes the segment by not even attempting to keep the note of sincere amazement from his voice when he gives his benediction, saying, “You both seem like very nice individuals.”

More than maybe any other incident, it is Divine’s tragic early death, just days after Hairspray opened, that can now be seen as the pivot point between the first and second halves of Waters’ filmography. He went on to work with stars like Johnny Depp (Cry-Baby, 1990), Kathleen Turner (Serial Mom, 1994), and Melanie Griffith (Cecil B. Demented, 2000). But as good as they often are, with them, you cannot help but see the wheels of long-game career ambition in motion. Working with Waters came to be a handy career reset, effective in redefining the boundaries of a calcifying star image and letting the public know you could take a joke. The debutantes and Divine-led Dreamlanders of Waters’ output up to and including Hairspray, by contrast, leave it all up there on the screen every time, as though another opportunity may not present itself. You never get a second chance to make a last impression.

And so, if you imagine Waters’ overarching strategy as a kind of Napoleonic pincer-movement attack on the United States of complacency, hammering in from the extreme fringes with his earlier, filthier films, but also sneaking right up to the hearthside with Hairspray, suddenly the PG-rated anomaly starts not to seem so anomalous. What it shares with all of the Waters catalog is an innate affection for the “outsiders who lose in real life but win in my movies,” and the same simple dividing line between the good and the bad, which has nothing to do with how you look or even how you (mis)behave. It’s all about disposition: Waters heroes like themselves, no matter how the outside world sees them, and their found families and friendships are marked by ferocious camaraderie and loyalty. His villains are jealous, petty, miserable, and correspondingly lonely, each one an Amber sitting on her stolen throne, screeching and alone.

Tracy’s inherent good nature does not set her against Waters’ previously established cavalcade of happily perverted scumbags—quite the contrary. More than its right-on racial politics, more than its offbeat queerness, and certainly more than its as-yet-unsuccessful agenda to literally broaden the permissible physical dimensions of the prototypical Hollywood heroine (in the age of Ozempic, any body-positive #OscarsSoThin movement seems further away than ever), Hairspray spreads the dangerous disease of Waters’ skewed, absurdist worldview by putting Tracy on the same side of the fence as even his most grotesque and twisted prior protagonists. Viewed through a Watersworld lens, innocence and idealism are just as troubling to the powers that be as degeneracy and lasciviousness, because they stand united in splendid opposition to the compromised cynicism and stifling conformity of “normal” society. Exulting in their own true natures, in their zaftig bodies and zany debaucheries, these ladies all, in their way, just wanna dance.

So to look again at Hairspray is to appreciate the cunning smuggled into the cornball, like a time-delayed bomb hidden in a hairpiece. It’s to notice the way it gently warped “the best minds of my generation,” to quote Pia Zadora’s beatnik quoting Allen Ginsberg, at exactly the moment of our maximal impressionability, nudging eighties and nineties tweens away from the reactionary politics of our parents, toward a sunny kind of social radicalism—or at least demonstrating that the option of righteous rebellion was open to us. Indeed, Hairspray has so comprehensively Trojan-horsed us all (should have known to beware of freaks bearing gifts) that perhaps, if we try very hard, we can even gin up a little outrage at how wantonly we’ve all been duped by its apparent decency, violated by its vivacity, and swindled by its sweetness. And perhaps then we can spearhead a movement to retroactively strip Waters of his unwanted respectability and restore him to his rightful perch atop the pantheon of disgrace and transgression. Given the debt of fervent gratitude that the movie world owes John Waters for the many, many years of liberating, subversive joy he has given us, it’s the least we can do.

In 1971, upon the release of his first and only feature film, James Bidgood pulled a disappearing act. He had spent the better part of seven years shooting Pink Narcissus, a hallucinatory tale of a daydreaming gay hustler, on an anemic budget, only for a meddlesome financier to snatch the film from him and see it to completion.

Bidgood—who had been precious about the final cut—was furious. As a matter of artistic principle, he disavowed the film. In a fit of anger, he even purchased an axe and thought of how he might wield it against the editors, avenging their mutilation of what he called “my seven-year-old.” (He reneged on his plan when he thought of his seven cats. What would they do in his absence, if he were to end up in jail?)

And so it was that Pink Narcissus would, in its rather amusing end credits, attribute the production, writing, photography, and direction to, simply, “ANONYMOUS.” This authorial absence certainly contributed to the film’s allure. Some asked if it was Andy Warhol’s doing, while others speculated Kenneth Anger must have been responsible. But this mystery also expedited the film’s slide from public view, relegating it to a modest afterlife on the gay festival circuit in the 1980s. At a wispy sixty-eight minutes, the film is a beguiling mix of the lewd and the sensual—a parade of dangling dongs, bushy pubes, and peachy posteriors, all soaked in a soft palette of cotton-candy blues and pinks. Even when trade publications like Variety pointed to “one Jim Bidgood” as its possible creator as far back as 1974, Bidgood, a nebbish costume designer, remained secretive about his involvement.

It wasn’t until the late nineties that Bidgood was, by his own admission, “outed” by the inquiring author Bruce Benderson. Following a rumor that the film was Bidgood’s creation, Benderson found the director’s number in a phone book and rang him. Bidgood, in turn, fessed up promptly: Benderson had the right guy. In 1999, the writer published a monograph on Bidgood, who told the Advocate: “I’m grateful for the attention. It would have been better forty years ago.” By the time the filmmaker Wolfgang Hastert got Bidgood on camera for the television documentary The Queer Reveries of James Bidgood (2000), it was clear that Bidgood’s self-imposed reclusion had cost him something: he was living in financial precarity, with a hernia truss and rotting teeth. 

Money never seemed to get much easier for Bidgood, even as Pink Narcissus enjoyed that reputational renaissance around the turn of the millennium. When he died in 2022, at age eighty-eight, due to complications from COVID-19, the executor of his estate set up a GoFundMe page to cover his funeral costs—a sad irony, when one considers the artists in his debt. The works of photographers David LaChapelle and Pierre et Gilles bear his aesthetic imprint; the likes of Charli XCX and Olly Alexander have spoken of their obsessions with his film.

Today, Pink Narcissus is still escaping the cult status that Bidgood’s anonymity conferred upon it. A meticulous restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive last year, plus the release of the documentary Velvet Vision and the publication of a book of Bidgood’s photographs alongside a corresponding exhibition, have kept his flame lit. The film, now playing on the Criterion Channel, may still present formidable challenges to a casual viewer given its near absence of dialogue, its gratuitousness, and its elliptical, languid pacing. But it endures in large part because of the sincere, even earnest spirit that undergirds it.

Granted, “earnest” might not exactly be the first descriptor that springs to mind when one thinks of a film as horny as Pink Narcissus. Much of the critical writing on the film—and there’s been a veritable raft of it, despite its low name recognition among general audiences—fixates, justifiably, on its homoerotic pageantry. Bidgood bestows nearly as many extreme close-ups on male appendages as he does on his star (Bobby Kendall). Shot on both Super 8 and 16 mm, Pink Narcissus imagines the reveries of Kendall’s young, nameless character puttering around his New York City apartment. He is beautiful and aware of it, blessed with a princely pout. The sight of his own reflection is enough to send him slipping into trances.

Early on, he preens before a wall of mirrors, All About Eve–style, and envisions that his crisp, white muscle tee has become a matador’s cape. Cue a fantasy sequence that resembles a bullfight ripped from a Tyrone Power film, only the animal here is a biker propositioning Kendall; cut to a different leather-suited stud servicing our narcissist near a row of grimy urinals. This fellation results in a climax so intense that the entire room floods with milk.

Such scenes are especially striking, considering that Bidgood filmed the majority of Pink Narcissus in his Midtown Manhattan apartment. The diegetic intrusions of the outside world are minimal, save the occasional sound of street chatter or the yammering of a radio pundit. Yet Bidgood made his potentially claustrophobic confines feel expansive.

This ability to defy spatial constraints—to see possibility in restriction—was a skill that Bidgood developed early on, a condition resulting from his family’s material realities. Born into the throes of the Great Depression, Bidgood came of age in Madison, Wisconsin, where his parents ran a roadside restaurant. He was, like many Americans of his generation, weaned on the products of Hays Code–era Hollywood, a time of sexual stringency that left little room for overt queer representation. (Bidgood once quipped that he had “been out since I was, like, five!”)

But Bidgood found plenty to love despite that, namely in the films of Busby Berkeley, who organized his dancers into dazzling prismatic patterns, and Esther Williams, famous for her balletic showcases of synchronized swimming. Bidgood once begged his mother to splurge on a dime-store book of paper dolls. With it, he crafted a dioramic display in his bedroom, affixing some folded paper to his Homasote walls to create a makeshift staircase, as in a number from The Great Ziegfeld (1936).

An encounter with the fantasy-adventure film The Thief of Bagdad (1940), however, awakened something deeper in him. The British production featured the teenage Indian actor Sabu in the title role. Sabu went on to become a durable figure in Universal adventure films, and in adulthood, his body, often on proud display in his films, became a site of erotic charge and projection for audiences. Bidgood would later speak of The Thief of Bagdad’s hold on him—“the impact such opulent imagery had on the relatively colorless existence of this scrawny ragtag first grader.” It was the film’s costuming—the actors’ “Technicolor flesh almost covered by bits of satin vests and gossamer harem pants, all surrounded by palace walls from what seemed to be pink frosting ice,” as Bidgood put it—that left an especially lasting impression. 

Bidgood carried these influences with him as he boarded a Greyhound to New York in 1951, when he was eighteen, hoping to hack it as a singer and dancer. That didn’t quite work, so he took a detour into studying fashion design at Parsons while falling in with the crowd at Club 82, a famed Manhattan drag bar where he performed under his rambunctious alter ego, Terry Howe, while decorating the stage and designing costumes.

But he metabolized his creative impulses more fully through fitness-magazine photography, which he began pursuing seriously in the sixties. It was a time when America’s federally sanctioned obscenity laws had popularized the circulation, particularly among gay men, of publications featuring scantily clad bodybuilders. Bidgood found them wanting. Photographers so often framed these chiseled hunks free of context, as if deracinating them: “Why are all these boys standing in front of the same frigging fireplace with the same funny little piece of jersey over their dingies?” he asked in a 2006 interview.

Ever the deviant, Bidgood initiated a style that rebelled against the dominant sensibility of his physique-magazine peers, treating his subjects with the same love that a studio-era auteur may have bestowed upon his leading ladies. He thought back to his boyhood, a time when he found beauty where others hadn’t thought to look—how he idled away his time by sitting on curbs where trails of car oil would meet water, fascinated by the rainbow slicks that the convergence created. (This may explain why so many of his subjects would seem to glow under his camera, as if slathered in Crisco.) He would set his men—lithe, lean, usually in some state of undress—against lush backdrops of foliage, on flower beds, beneath willow trees. Bidgood heightened the artifice of these constructed settings by bathing his models in vibrant psychedelic light.

He would take this vision to its most refined end point with Pink Narcissus, which he began working on in 1963—a period of transformation for both queer and pornographic cinema in the United States. By the end of that decade, Hollywood had shed the moral straitjacket of the Hays Code; by 1970, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) would become the first X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, an astonishing fact when one realizes that the MPAA rating board—the post-Code analog to the Hays Office—reprimanded the film’s “homosexual frame of reference.” The country was also in the midst of a golden age of pornography, a time when theaters routinely programmed pornographic features alongside studio fare.

Critics today tend to connect Pink Narcissus with the ambient aesthetics of Bidgood’s sexually liberated era, but he diverges from his contemporaries in several key ways—evident in scenes that, despite their flirtations with indecency, he stages with orchestral precision. In an entrancing seven-minute sequence, Bidgood’s chief character spreads his bare body on a field, skin to earth, and massages his lips, then his nipple, then his belly button, with a blade of grass. He grabs a butterfly and holds its wings to his ears; he then reaches down to his groin and begins to pleasure himself. With a mix of quick cuts and more relaxed dissolves, Bidgood flits back and forth between his subject’s bedroom and this verdant pasture. His fingers are, by the scene’s end, sticky with nectar; he puts them in his mouth. However graphic these implied acts are, Bidgood dresses them up in visual ostentation. Where other filmmakers of that generation could be strident in their representations of sexuality—the film was released in the same year as Wakefield Poole’s gleefully explicit Boys in the Sand (1971), which carries the honor of being the first gay pornographic film reviewed by Variety—Bidgood worked with a lighter touch, reminiscent of the films that had been his early education. 

Bidgood’s reverence for the grammar of classic Hollywood situates Pink Narcissus within a richer cinematic tradition than the underground films of his time, and the movie wears these influences openly. While making it, Bidgood drew on the memory of the films that had enlivened what he called his “impoverished gray existence” back in Wisconsin. As the scholar Michael Lawrence notes in his monograph Sabu (2014), Bidgood pays direct homage to The Thief of Bagdad and other films starring the actor in what is likely the most distinctive set piece in Pink Narcissus. And the very title of Bidgood’s film recalls another Sabu film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947). 

With one spin of a spangly globe sitting near his bed, Bidgood’s subject is whisked off to some nondescript locale in the Near East. He is lounging in a sheik’s tent, observing a male dancer who is wearing only a turban, a thick rope of pearls, and a cobwebby cloth barely obscuring his privates. The dancer helicopters his manhood around frantically for eight minutes until Bidgood treats us to a close-up of him ejaculating neon drops of sperm that resemble the beads dangling from his neck. This messy finish to such a luxuriant scene still has the power to shock. (It may also court offense given its gesture to some vague “exotic” territory, but Bidgood would likely have been the first to admit he did not care about political correctness.) Such challenging formal elements certainly flummoxed the critical guard of Bidgood’s era. The film’s more vicious detractors, mostly in the mainstream, found Pink Narcissus a confounding object: a meandering chronicle of a mute, inexpressive sissy moping around his bedroom and jerking off, his mind transporting him anywhere but his reality. “It is sad and very vulnerable and as serious as it is sappy,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times, struggling to reconcile that emotional content with the film’s luridness. 

Canby meant it as a dig at Bidgood’s film. But today, perhaps, one can see this quality—its sentimentality—as a virtue, especially when read in conjunction with Bidgood’s own life. “I didn’t want to put my name on it,” Bidgood once said of Pink Narcissus. “Not that my name meant anything to anybody.” Bidgood never made another feature, though he tried, only to face the same financial obstacles that had been his lifelong albatross. As other critics have noted, there’s no telling how close this hacksawed product is to the film that Bidgood had pictured in his mind. One can hope that, in his final years, he made peace with the film that he once swore off in shame, and that he understood the profound effect it came to have—enough for his name to mean something to somebody.

Let me start with the most basic question: What, in this case, is a generative film?

It’s a film that’s created dynamically in software, according to rules created by human beings. It’s pulling from this much larger pool of material—edited scenes, music, raw footage—and it’s constructing a film from that material that’s different every time. But the system knows how to put together a narrative arc, regardless of what the individual pieces in each iteration are, so that it still tells a story about Brian Eno. You’re just getting a different story about him every time you watch it.

There’s this idea that the essence of art is in the artist’s choices. “You need to cut away the parts of the marble that aren’t David.” But you’re kind of avoiding that here. You’ve left at least those final editing choices to the software.

I think you have to take a bigger-picture view of it, because I’m still making all those choices in the sense that I’m curating all the material that is available for the system to choose from, and I’m designing all the ways that those things can interact. If you look at it from a conventional filmmaking lens, then yeah, I am not controlling the content of each iteration of the film. But I’ve designed it—with my team, an incredible group of people, who put thousands of hours of work into making it possible—so that when I click “generate,” it’s going to work every time. And there’s a freedom to that, as a creator. I get to be surprised by my own film every time.

 

People have asked me, “Are there versions of the film that come out that you don’t like, or that you wouldn’t normally have made?” And there definitely are! There are times where the system will come up with something at a screening, and I’ll scratch my head and go, “God, I might have maybe put that scene in a different place. Maybe this isn’t my favorite version of the movie.” And then somebody will come up to me afterward and say, “This was my favorite version of the movie so far!” So I came to this realization that it’s all subjective, and I don’t need to be so precious about each individual iteration.

Can you give me an example of what kind of parameters you’re defining? For example, in the version I saw, we had a couple scenes early on where Eno asks, in the middle of a conversation, “Is it lunchtime yet?” kind of urgently. And then toward the end—again, of the version I saw—we get this explanation of his new philosophy of skipping breakfast. And I laughed out loud at it; it was this great punchline that had been set up the whole way through. But there’s probably a version where the punchline comes before the joke and it plays very differently. Is there a comedy parameter?

No, and sometimes those things just happen by chance. But there is a thematic parameter to the film. If a scene is selected, the system is more likely to place it in a part of the film where it thinks it’s going to make sense thematically and then figure out things that could come before and after it that might work well. It is very—intentionally—chaotic sometimes. But we establish early on that, scene-to-scene, you could be anywhere. You could be in the 1970s, you could be with Brian in the present, you could be with a band that he’s working with. And I think there’s an excitement about that too. I like films where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s part of the reason that we let the software show itself in the film. There are certain points where you’ll see code on-screen or you’ll see it scrubbing through different files in the data set, as a signal to the viewer that something’s happening now. In reality, most of those choices that the system is making, it makes in like a thousandth of a second at the beginning of the output. But there were places where we wanted it to show its process a little bit.

At one point, toward the beginning, there was something that looked like a serial number in the corner?

Oh yeah! That is a real number. Yeah, each iteration has a generation number in the opening titles.

So could you, in theory, generate that version again from that number?

No, it would never be the same. Even if we forced it to use the same footage, it would still not be the same because there are unique things—the transitions, and some whole scenes—that the system is making in real time for that version alone.

 

There was no precedent for how to make a film that could change every time. How much should it change? Or why should it change? A lot of our development process was about trial and error, too. There were outputs early on that just were horrible, that did not work, that were too random. And ones that were too structured. We just kept experimenting until we found what we thought was a good medium for it. That process of inventing the software, digitizing hundreds of hours of Brian’s archival footage, and filming all the new interviews took about four years.

Which are the chicken and egg here? Did you have the idea for this type of filmmaking and thought Eno would be a great subject for it, or did you want to make an Eno film and this grew from that?

Initially, I was getting bored with the constraints of filmmaking—or mostly film exhibiting. You know, going out on screening tours for my design films. I’d be going to sixty or seventy cities for each film, pressing play, and then going to a bar or something for ninety minutes and then coming back for the Q and A. Because I can’t watch the film anymore, I’m completely sick of watching it! My background was in music before I got involved in film. So it felt like I was a band, but for my tour I was just going onstage and pushing play on my record and walking off. So I was dreaming of a way of showing a film that was more like a performance, more like music. Not just the same thing over and over again. That was the initial impetus.

 

Brian did the soundtrack to Rams (2018), my previous film. At that point I had approached him about making a film about him, and he said no. He’d turned down many filmmakers, because he thought bio documentaries were horrible, they were just one person telling their version of another person’s story. But I have this incredible friend, Brendan Dawes, who’s a digital artist and coder and just a super creative individual. I asked him, “Hey, I want to make a film that could be assembled in software and be different every time it’s shown, but still feel like a cinematic documentary. Do you think we could do that?” And he thought we could. We started working on an early demo of the platform, using the raw material from Rams, including some of Brian’s music. After six months of doing that, we were already making an Eno generative movie, in a sense, by using that as our raw material. So I decided to approach Brian about the idea, and showed him the demo. He loved it and agreed to participate. I still don’t think he wanted to have a film made about himself, but he wanted to be part of this experiment. I knew he was thinking about these kinds of ideas, different ways of trying to make art that could have a life of its own.

You’ve been working on this project for many years. I imagine when you started, you wouldn’t have predicted that you’d be releasing it into a world overwhelmed by AI discourse. But it seems to me that the thing you’ve built is actually kind of the opposite of what we think of as generative AI. I think of AI as basically built to elide the whole artistic process. Just press a button and here’s your art. Whereas your film is largely about its process, right?

It’s also organic to Brian’s process. But I think that the main difference is that this is all our own material. We’re dealing with real footage; the system is not making anything up. The algorithms are written by us as the artists. There is so much human creativity in this—I would say more than even a conventional movie. The reasons that we designed the system were not to make a movie cheaper or faster, or to cut people out of the process. This was a capability that we didn’t have as filmmakers, to make a film that could change and could tell different stories every time. And so we invented the software to get to that capability. It wasn’t the other way around. Sometimes I hesitate to even use the word generative in what we do because people automatically assume it’s generative AI. But there’s been generative software for decades now. I mean, Eno was writing generative music software back in the ’90s. It’s not something that just happened with ChatGPT. I think there’s this whole universe of new cinema that our technology can enable that I’m excited about exploring. Those are the projects that we’re working on now, in addition to continuing to evolve Eno. We’ve added hours of footage to the film since it premiered. I just added another thirty minutes last month.

I found that watching Eno recontextualized some of your earlier films for me in interesting ways, in terms of narrative structure especially. Helvetica is pretty chronological, right? You’re telling a history and a relatively straightforward chronology. Then by the time you get to Urbanized, you’ve already expanded into a more kaleidoscopic style of storytelling. Can you talk a little bit about that progression?

When I first started thinking about Helvetica, I wasn’t thinking, “I want to make a film about this one font, let’s go!” I’d been a design geek and I had played around with typography and graphic design for fifteen-plus years before I got involved in making films. So I really wanted to watch a film about type in our environment and all the words that we see every day. But one didn’t exist. Originally the film was going to be more expansive and a bit more like a tone poem. And it was around that time that Helvetica had a resurgence, and it was very polarizing. So I thought, “Oh, this is a kind of interesting mix here. Maybe I could do all those things that I wanted to do with the film, but I could do it through the lens of this one typeface.”

 

But in the subsequent films, it was more about all these different things that connect. They were more like surveys of these areas of design that I was interested in, but that nobody had made a documentary about. That’s always been my big factor in my creative choices. All the films that I’ve made are things that there was no documentary about and I was just like, “God, I really wanna watch the documentary about urban planning!” They’re seemingly boring subjects that I was personally obsessed with and couldn’t believe there weren’t films about already.

In those early films, your subject matter is very visual, obviously. It’s typography. It’s design. But then you get to Eno, and while Eno’s work has some visual components to it, it’s primarily audio. Did that affect your planning or thinking at all?

It didn’t, because all the other films are still about the creative process, and that’s something I’m always fascinated by. I want to try to decode what these people do and how they do it and why they do it. I think Brian is like the pinnacle of creative experimentation: the work that he’s done with his own music, with all the bands that he’s produced, and then these tools like the Oblique Strategies cards and other games that he created to disrupt his creative flow or inspire others.

Eno’s form of creativity is an interesting contrast with the methodology of a lot of the designers and planners that you’ve talked to in the previous films, who have a tendency toward rule structures and toward creating universal principles, like Dieter Rams’s ten principles for good design. Then Eno is on this other end of the spectrum where he doesn’t have rules, he has strategies. Or, maybe they are rules, but they’re only valuable insofar as they’re useful. On that spectrum of rules to strategies, where would you place yourself?

Obviously with this movie and the approach that we took, it’s the complete opposite of when I started making the design films. There was very much a sense of construction and obsessing over sequence: controlling the story and controlling the audience’s experience. But after I’d made the Design Trilogy films, I was burning out. I felt like I was making almost the same film, but with different subjects. I wanted to disrupt that. And it was interesting because around that time, I went and talked to Massimo Vignelli, who is in Helvetica. He’s an incredible, legendary designer, he did the whole New York subway system signage and map design, and so many other projects. I was trying to tell him that I felt like I was making the same film. And he said, “You invented a new language with Helvetica. Don’t be afraid to keep speaking it.” And I thought that was really great, wise advice . . . but I still felt like formally I needed to change things up.

I love that quote because it defines everything that the modernists were trying to do, right? They had this idea that there’s a universal best design, that there is some universal truth of design. And then Eno is, in some ways, the opposite.

Well, like Vignelli said, designers can make everything from a spoon to a city. You have a point of view, you have an aesthetic, you have a strategy. You have a design philosophy. It doesn’t matter if you’re designing a phone or a table or an education system; you’re going to use the same principles and the same methodology for every project. And what’s fascinating about Eno is he does the opposite, intentionally. He reinvents his process with every project, even if it’s the same type of project, or if he’s producing yet another record. He’ll intentionally force himself to change his process to not get stuck in a creative merry-go-round.

I notice there’s a throughline in the Design Trilogy, I think especially in Objectified, about finding the hidden humanity and intention underneath modern manufactured life, right? That everything has a designer or a human that was behind it.

Yep.

And your films show the stories of those people who are lucky enough to have been able to have this measurable impact on the world. But what do you think about people who maybe don’t command industrial resources, or who don’t have the Braun brothers sponsoring them? Is there a way to have a creative impact in a smaller way, on a smaller scale? Or is it a symptom of modern life that everything has got to be—

—has got to be commodified? Yeah, obviously, everything we do after we open our eyes every day is some sort of creative act, you know? How we arrange our home and the clothes we wear and what our haircut is. It’s all a form of self-expression. And the things that we make, even if they’re of a very modest scale, are that too. I think it’s all creativity and it’s all valuable and important for us to do. It helps us process what’s happening in our world. I think art has always been that for us. It’s a way of feeling like we’re part of something bigger. So yeah, I think we’re all designers. We’re all creatives. The scale doesn’t matter. We’re all creating all the time and it’s all valuable.

This month on the Criterion Channel, celebrate the hundredth birthday of the great Harry Dean Stanton, delight in the twists and thrills of our Murderous Melodramas collection, or binge the surreal cult-favorite TV series The Prisoner. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including four idiosyncratic gems by Jonathan Demme, a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with underground-comics legend Daniel Clowes, a selection of highlights from the BlackStar Film Festival, an intimate documentary portrait of Marc Maron, and three unclassifiable wonders directed by a Buddhist lama.

If you haven’t signed up yet, head to CriterionChannel.com and get a 7-day free trial.

*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Featuring Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (2012), a documentary by Sophie Huber

With his lean, hangdog face and sunken, soul-weary eyes, Harry Dean Stanton—born one hundred years ago this month—was one of the all-time great character actors. He inhabited the cinematic margins for more than six decades, imbuing his portrayals of drifters, down-and-outers, mystics, and all-American eccentrics with a singular gravity and offbeat charisma. From his indelible supporting turns in films like Cool Hand Luke, Straight Time, and Wise Blood to his breakthrough roles (in his late fifties) in Paris, Texas and Repo Man, Stanton remained a sui generis, unfailingly authentic presence whose merest glance or gesture hinted at profound existential depths.

FEATURING: Ride in the Whirlwind (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Where the Lilies Bloom (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Straight Time (1978), Wise Blood (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Christine (1983), Paris, Texas (1984), Repo Man (1984), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988),* Wild at Heart (1990),* Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998),* The Straight Story (1999), Inland Empire (2006), Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (2012), Lucky (2017)*

In its midcentury heyday, Hollywood melodrama wallowed in blazing Technicolor, operatic plot twists, gloriously bad behavior, and even foul play. These films’ surging emotions push their characters toward outright violence, infusing the women’s picture with noirish thrills. In the hands of masters such as Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind) and Vincente Minnelli (Some Came Running), melodrama became a vehicle for subversive critiques of American life, using stylization and excess to reveal the dark currents beneath a repressed, conformist society. Above all, the genre was a gift that kept giving to women stars like Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Dorothy Malone, who sank their teeth into juicy parts that let them “do a little exploding,” as Mary Astor said of her role in the deliciously perverse Desert Fury.  

FEATURING: Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Desert Fury (1947), Niagara (1953), Queen Bee (1955), The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), Violent Saturday (1955), A Kiss Before Dying (1956), Bigger Than Life (1956), Written on the Wind (1956),* No Down Payment (1957), Some Came Running (1958), The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Home from the Hill (1960), Portrait in Black (1960)*

Now in its fifteenth year, the BlackStar Film Festival was established in 2012 to platform the voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists who expand the possibilities of cinematic storytelling. Showcasing one film from each year of the festival’s history, this selection of highlights brings together dazzling, thematically rich features from major filmmakers like Andrew Dosunmu (Restless City), Blitz Bazawule (The Burial of Kojo), and Jessica Beshir (Faya dayi), as well as stunning shorts by acclaimed artists like Cauleen Smith (The Changing Same) and Ja’Tovia Gary (An Ecstatic Experience). From dreamlike journeys to urgent social thrillers, these films have helped shape a new generation of independent cinema. 

FEATURES: The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Restless City (2011), Evolution of a Criminal (2014), A Moving Image (2016), The Burial of Kojo (2018), Test Pattern (2019), Landfall (2020), Faya dayi (2021), Fire Through Dry Grass (2023) 

SHORTS: The Changing Same (2001), An Ecstatic Experience (2015), To Be Free (2017), The People Could Fly (2024), We Were the Scenery (2025)

With his groundbreaking comics series Eightball and the acclaimed graphic novel Ghost World, Daniel Clowes brought the alternative-comics underground to mainstream recognition, channeling outsider alienation and an edgy humor steeped in the weirdo fringes of American pop culture. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with his friend Ari Aster to discuss the exploitation classics, counterculture oddities, and art-house touchstones that shaped his brilliantly cracked sensibility. The selections he has chosen to present include cult favorites like Peter Weir’s subversive thriller The Plumber and the jaw-dropping animated odyssey Journey to the Beginning of Time, films that have left a mark on his own work.

FEATURING: Umberto D. (1952), Ugetsu (1953), Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), The Plumber (1979)

United by their roots in the alternative-comics underground, a shared love of eccentric Americana, and a misfit misanthropy that belies a cracked humanism, director Terry Zwigoff and cartoonist-screenwriter Daniel Clowes are uniquely well-matched collaborators. Adapted by Clowes from his own graphic work, the cult classics Ghost World and Art School Confidential capture the awkwardness, melancholy, and absurdity of youth with dark, deadpan humor and a refreshingly cynical edge, seamlessly making the leap from page to screen through Zwigoff’s idiosyncratic direction.

FEATURING: Ghost World (2001), Art School Confidential (2006)

Jonathan Demme moved fluidly across genres while maintaining an unmistakably humanist sensibility, from the kinetic screwball anarchy of Something Wild and Married to the Mob to the restrained terror of The Silence of the Lambs to the overwhelming emotions of Rachel Getting Married. Animated by unforgettable characters in states of reinvention, his films overflow with warmth and affection for even the most damaged souls, as well as an easygoing grace that gave his extraordinary actors space to shine.

FEATURING: Something Wild (1986), Married to the Mob (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Long before Twin Peaks beamed prime-time surrealism into the American living room, there was The Prisoner, the 1960s British cult sensation that pushed television into new realms of unsettling, Kafkaesque mystery across seventeen hypnotic, thrilling episodes. Series creator Patrick McGoohan stars as a nameless spy who, after he abruptly resigns from his highly classified job, is kidnapped and held in a strange, deceptively idyllic town known only as the Village, where his quest for freedom collides with the sinister machinations of a mysterious authoritarian sect determined to keep him under their control. With its prescient exploration of free will in the age of surveillance, this pop-culture touchstone remains one of the most discussed and endlessly analyzed series in television history.

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic Soviet prosecutor (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) pushes past the jail’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Alexander Filippenko) condemned as a political undesirable. The young attorney, determined to expose this miscarriage of justice to the authorities in Moscow, soon finds his efforts stymied as an ever-tightening net of suspicion encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the great purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, the latest triumph from director Sergei Loznitza is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of totalitarianism.

Plus: The Trial (2018), a mesmerizing documentary that Loznitsa assembled from footage of a 1930 Stalinist show trial.

Frank, caustic, and fearlessly funny, comedian and podcast pioneer Marc Maron has built his career on holding nothing back. Yet the famously outspoken comic continues to reveal new sides of himself in this poignant documentary. Filmed in the wake of the sudden and shocking death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, Are We Good? finds Maron reflecting—with his inimitable candor—on grief, loss, disillusionment, and growth as he struggles with how to move forward and channel personal tragedy into comedy.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

In the 1970s, the U.S. faced an energy crisis so severe that President Jimmy Carter declared it “the moral equivalent of war.” Seeking to curb the country’s dependence on foreign oil, Carter kicked off a legislative melee with the divisive Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978 at its center. This epic look at the inner workings of government chronicles the arduous efforts of lobbyists, senators, cabinet members, and the president himself to reach a compromise amid a deeply divided Congress. Directed by legendary documentary filmmakers D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, and Pat Powell as a three-part PBS special, The Energy War is a riveting immersion into the high-stakes world of DC dealmaking as well as a timely account of the messy realities of lawmaking in a fractious political environment.

Something like Dog Day Afternoon amped up through the operatic grit of Hong Kong action cinema at its peak, this electrifying, morally complex thriller unfolds almost entirely within the tense confines of a bank in the middle of a robbery gone wrong. As the two bumbling crooks (Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Ronald Wong) see their perfect crime go spectacularly awry, one of their hostages (Ti Lung)—who happens to be a murderous ex-con—takes over and quickly turns the situation to his own ruthless advantage. People’s Hero pushes claustrophobic tension and barely contained chaos to the breaking point.

Rollicking buddy-cop comedy meets action spectacle in this Hong Kong joyride. Following the exploits of police-officer partners Shin (Jacky Cheung) and Chiang (Stephen Tung Wai) as they try to bring down a crime syndicate while dealing with family and romantic complications, Pom Pom and Hot Hot ambles through an entertaining mix of crime thriller and comic misadventure—until it explodes in a jaw-dropping, outrageously acrobatic gun-fu climax that pushes everything into overdrive and rivals the best of John Woo in its bullet-spattered delirium.

When lost and nihilistic drifter Utamaro (Ren Tamura) chances upon Giko (Miyabi Ichijo), a female-presenting shoplifter, one thing leads to another and the couple soon find themselves on the lam for murder. As the pair get to know each other on the road by way of encounters alternately surrealistic, psychedelic, and sexual, what emerges is a daringly liberated portrait of social malaise, free love, and gender fluidity in a rapidly changing 1970s Japan. The sole feature directed by Isao Fujisawa, who learned his craft as an assistant director to Hiroshi Teshigahara on New Wave classics like Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another, this landmark of Japanese queer cinema is a deeply personal reckoning with sexual and personal identity that bridges the distance between Pierrot le fou, Bonnie and Clyde, and Funeral Parade of Roses with an impeccable sense of style, splashes of Godardian color, and potent anti-imperialist and existential themes.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

An FBI trainee (Jodie Foster) enlists the help of an infamous serial killer (Anthony Hopkins) to gain insight into the mind of another murderer in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning horror classic.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A classic Criterion commentary by Demme, Hopkins, Foster, screenwriter Ted Tally, and former FBI agent John Douglas; deleted scenes; four documentaries featuring hours of cast and crew interviews; and more.

Professional ambition and personal attraction become dangerously entwined when a young magazine editor falls in love with the lesbian photographer she is determined to rescue from obscurity.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Lisa Cholodenko,  a conversation between Cholodenko and filmmaker Karyn Kusama, interviews with actors Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell and photographer JoJo Whilden, and more.

Director Nicholas Ray deconstructs the 1950s suburban family in this shocking tale of an ordinary father whose experimental medication transforms him into a psychotic household despot. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by critic Geoff Andrew, a television interview with Ray, an appreciation by author Jonathan Lethem, and more.

Martin Scorsese’s controversial, profoundly personal work of faith imagines an alternate fate for Jesus Christ (Willem Dafoe).

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Martin Scorsese, actor Willem Dafoe, and writers Paul Schrader and Jay Cocks; location production footage; and more. 

A straitlaced businessman (Jeff Daniels) and an eccentric free spirit (Melanie Griffith) set out on an impromptu road trip that spirals from kinky comic thriller to radiantly off-kilter love story.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Jonathan Demme and writer E. Max Frye.

A journalist and his loose-cannon attorney barrel toward Las Vegas on a feverish psychedelic odyssey in this unhinged adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s excoriating vision.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Gonzo commentaries featuring director Terry Gilliam, actors Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, and Thompson; deleted scenes; and more.

Two teenage misfits confront an uncertain future amid the cultural wasteland of consumerist America in this cult-classic comedy of adolescent alienation.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Terry Zwigoff, writer Daniel Clowes, and producer Lianne Halfon; interviews with actors Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, and Illeana Douglas; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

A leading Buddhist teacher and lama, Bhutanese auteur Khyentse Norbu is a cinematic philosopher whose visually ravishing, spiritually profound films feel at once ancient, radically contemporary, and thrillingly alive. Travellers and Magicians reframes the road movie as a meditation on fantasy and desire, Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait unfolds like a tantric masquerade suspended between rave and ritual, and Pig at the Crossing turns absurdist comedy into existential vertigo.

FEATURING: Travellers and Magicians (2003),* Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait (2016), Pig at the Crossing (2024)

Playful, absorbing, and deeply inquisitive, the films of Onyeka Igwe turn to the archives to challenge official narratives and excavate hidden histories. Whether tracing fragments of her own family history in the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered, reimagining anticolonial activism in 1940s London in A Radical Duet, or conjuring the absent images of Britain’s colonial record in a so-called archive, Igwe’s work shifts inventively between documentary, narrative, and performance to bring the nearly forgotten past into dynamic dialogue with the present.

FEATURING: We Need New Names (2015), Specialised Technique (2018), the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019), a so-called archive (2020), The Miracle on George Green (2022), A Radical Duet (2023), Penkelemes (2025)

Working defiantly out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, underground auteur Joel Potrykus makes scrappy, darkly comic portraits of the losers, slackers, metalheads, outcasts, and weirdos raging against the system as they struggle to get by on the margins of America’s heartland. Starring Potrykus himself alongside his Keatonesque regular Joshua Burge, the caustic, apocalyptically funny Buzzard and its startling quasi-sequel Vulcanizadora are raw, anarchic visions of alienated masculinity hurtling toward shocking self-destruction. 

FEATURING: Buzzard (2014), Vulcanizadora (2024)

ACTOR SPOTLIGHTS

The sultry, vivacious Cuban-born star Ninón Sevilla reigned as queen of the Mexican cine de rumberas, a genre that deliriously fused noir, melodrama, and musical spectacular. Sevilla lit up the screen playing fallen women caught between virtue and vice in films built around the kinetic, high-voltage dance numbers that she famously choreographed herself. This selection of some of her defining showcases—including hothouse masterpieces Aventurera and Victims of Sin—explodes with the fiery passion and intoxicating Afro-Cuban rhythms that made her an enduring icon of Mexican cinema’s golden age.

FEATURING: Carita de dielo (1947), Aventurera (1950), Victims of Sin (1951), Take Me in Your Arms (1954)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Two slacker teens (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) embark on a totally bodacious time-travel odyssey to save their history grade—and possibly the fate of mankind.

An LA yuppie (James Spader) is initiated by a dangerously charismatic stranger (Rob Lowe) into a world of kinky sex, drugs, and crime in this darkly seductive neonoir. 

MUSIC FILMS

Discover the incredible, nearly forgotten story of three Black brothers from Detroit who forged a visionary proto-punk sound years before the Ramones.

Time travel back to the heart of 1970s bohemian New York with this vivid look at Max’s Kansas City, the counterculture nexus that helped spawn the downtown punk scene.

DOCUMENTARIES

This intimate, poetic portrait of the legendary actor unfolds through film clips, folk songs, and reflections from collaborators like David Lynch and Wim Wenders. 

SHORT FILMS

A playful, hand-doodled animated short explores family, first love, masculinity, and identity through the director’s evolving relationship with his hair. 

High Art arrived at an interesting cultural moment. Throughout the nineties, the movement known as the New Queer Cinema had been delivering genre-defying films filled with daring camera work and story lines that defied political correctness. Initially shaped by the shock of AIDS and the fury over governmental inaction and punishment of gay and lesbian communities, the field broadened over the decade, with successive “generations” responding with new hybrids that attracted wider audiences. Once made possible simply by technological advances (camcorders, cable TV), friendship networks, and big cities’ temporarily low cost of living, the NQC began to grow up—and get bigger budgets—as filmmakers started playing with traditional film narratives that had previously been rejected.

As creative filmmaking was fomented, queer storytelling expanded into new nooks and crannies—and sexiness. The rise of Sundance as tastemaker and deal-broker was not incidental, for it had been there that the movement was announced, in 1992, with the legendary Barbed Wire Kisses panel (chaired by this writer). Soon, Sundance was the marketplace where the next steps would be taken: previously unthinkable sales and bidding wars for queer films. However improbably, Park City became a hotbed of a new queer cinema that was integral to the new American independent cinema being fashioned there.

Initially dominated by gay men, the field of the New Queer Cinema progressed to include a clutch of features by lesbian directors. Early entries were low-budget, scruffy, full of heart, and sometimes not as audience-friendly as other NQC films, since their directors had less access to big-ticket performers, instead casting friends, lovers, or even themselves. Such films as Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996)—shot on tiny budgets in Chicago and Philadelphia—created out of necessity, in the Andy Warhol tradition, their own stars. But as with the rest of the independent film movement, eventually these films, too, would get bigger.

Enter Lisa Cholodenko. She had grown up in Los Angeles, surrounded by the film industry and its standards, working briefly on its fringes before migrating to New York City in the early nineties for graduate school at Columbia. There, Miloš Forman was her screenwriting mentor, and producer James Schamus was supportive. With their advice, the new market for NQC films, and producer Dolly Hall on board, Cholodenko was able to cast her film with professional actors. With a polished script, a terrific cast, expert camera work, and fine-tuned editing, High Art was the first of the “lesbian NQC” to cross over in a big way to mainstream audiences, still commanding attention to this day.

No wonder: it was nothing short of a revelation, a view into a heroin-addled subculture of artists, strivers, and hangers-on, making pacts with the devil and each other. Filled with piercing looks at the price of fame and the social mores of its art-world arbiters, High Art is incredibly attuned to the subtleties of a particular moment in New York. Cholodenko came by her fascination with the scene honestly: after landing in New York, she quickly became mesmerized by the “heroin chic” lesbian milieu she encountered in the East Village (though she has said that she hadn’t had the nerve to try heroin herself). The film never for a second reads as dated: drugs and fame have not yet gone out of fashion. The art-photography magazine Frame—where Syd (Radha Mitchell) works and where Lucy (Ally Sheedy) was once a subject of great interest, before exiling herself to Berlin—may be fictitious, but its tastemakers and style are very much on point for anyone familiar with Interview, Aperture, Paper, or other journals of the period.

Syd is a young assistant editor determined to carve out a career in the art and publishing world of New York City, where she lives in a scene-suitable loft with an annoying boyfriend—until the ceiling starts leaking. She becomes entranced by the cloistered world she finds in the loft upstairs, a latter-day Alice stumbling into Wonderland. It’s there that Lucy; her girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson); and a coterie of junkie hangers-on spend time snorting heroin and listening to Greta reminisce about her bad old days with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The source of the leak is the bathroom, which doubles as Lucy’s darkroom and is filled with photographs hung up to dry. Syd may be a lowly assistant editor, but she knows her aesthetics and is dumbstruck by the genius of what she sees, raining praise on a visibly amused (and visibly delighted) Lucy. While it was widely assumed that Nan Goldin was the model for Lucy—with her photographs of a world-weary inner circle full of drugs and lovers and cigarettes, up close and uncensored—Cholodenko has credited JoJo Whilden, who took the photographs presented as Lucy’s work in the film, as well as the Boston School of photography as a whole, including Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and others known for capturing transgressive images of friends in states of euphoria, from sex, drugs, and other pastimes not always documented so intimately. In imagining the character of Lucy, Cholodenko also borrowed liberally from the life of Diane Arbus, who came from a world of great wealth but was drawn to darkness.

It’s Lucy’s money that seems to be bankrolling the scene at her loft and the piles of heroin that Greta (and sometimes Lucy) manages to consume. Her pedigree is revealed in visits to her wealthy mother, Vera (deliciously embodied by the great Tammy Grimes), who seems as rich as she is emotionally unavailable and mentally absent, carelessly forgetting how she could have just spent six thousand dollars at Henri Bendel’s, the prestige fashion address of the era.

There are only two scenes of Lucy visiting Vera, but they are indelible. Protective of their Jewishness, Vera sneeringly refers to Greta as “that German.” She refuses anything that might disrupt her hazy fantasies of her daughter, to the point of walking out of the room when Lucy wants to share the facts about an “issue” that might be a “problem.” Addiction can’t be spoken. Vera’s world of fantasy can’t be disrupted.

Meanwhile, Syd has realized that her neighbor Lucy is a famous photographer whose rediscovery could be her own ticket to editorial advancement at the office, where she’s disrespected. Syd is dazzled by Lucy, who in turn is flattered and revived by Syd’s admiration. From such connivance will a romance bloom, unsettling all expectations and wreaking havoc in lives and lofts both upstairs and downstairs. What fun Cholodenko has lampooning the art and editorial worlds adjacent to the East Village poseurs. She reconstructs likely realities just enough to construct a plot, though not enough to allow the audience to become comfortable.

Notably, up until the penultimate scene, Cholodenko does not descend to street level, does not move her camera outdoors into the world of New York. As in the photographs that inspired this story, life unfolds indoors. Gay men, back in the day, may have been cruising at the Greenwich Village piers or in the Central Park Ramble, but the ladies were indoors, tempting lovers to bed with the charm of interiority, through seductions that needed private space to thrive.

If Cholodenko’s screenplay knowingly violated the rules of engagement governing lesbian representation in her time, it’s undeniable that she thrilled new audiences with her transgressions. For every angry dyke who stormed out cursing the ending, there were hundreds who were thrilled with its outlaw sensibility and sexiness. Arguably, though, what made the film truly convincing, what made it work then and what enables it to remain enticing today, are the performances.

Patricia Clarkson’s tiny but memorable role as Greta—with her insane German accent and hilarious languor—would turbocharge her career. The film marked a comeback for the legendary Ally Sheedy (she read the script and demanded an audition). And it introduced Australian actress Radha Mitchell in what may well be her greatest role to date. Cholodenko chose her offscreen collaborators well too: there’s impeccable editing by Amy E. Duddleston, who cut her teeth on early Gus Van Sant films, and finely detailed camera work by Tami Reiker (who had a few years earlier shot The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love) that resists the temptation to borrow the style of Lucy’s photography.

The narrative hinges on subtle emotions, from the alternating play of anguish and seduction on Lucy’s face as she realizes she’s falling into a major life decision to the inscrutable gaze of Syd, taking it all in and tearfully processing the implications. The film may have elements of nostalgia, but its moral tale has not gone out of style: ambition, heartbreak, the ruthlessness of emotion. The equal risks of love, fame, sex, and addiction are all present, but the film is smart enough to take its viewers below the surface into the eternity of risk. With a style that’s loyal to the emotional registers of character and narrative, High Art is a film of moods that charms its viewers into lowering their guard—until the finale delivers a heartbreaking, lethal blow. The final scenes constitute the film’s ultimate transgression: revealing that being a lesbian is no guarantee of a happy ending.

Cholodenko would go on to create a series of films that broke new ground in terms of narrative, representation, and modes of unsettling lesbian viewers. She examined the nature of sexual experimentation and betrayal in Los Angeles in Laurel Canyon (2002); adapted the acclaimed radical lesbian novelist Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller for Showtime in 2004; transfixed viewers with the masterful HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014), casting Frances McDormand as an isolated woman cut off from community; directed the first three episodes of Unbelievable (2019), a series based on true cases of rape, victim reports, and police responses; and reportedly spun The Kids Are All Right (2010) out of her own experience of getting pregnant and having a child. She has gone from strength to strength, relying on fine scripts and brilliant casting to draw audiences into the worlds she invents. As High Art proved long ago, Cholodenko has a knack for finding a confident, sure-footed way into our imaginations and our broken hearts.

As the longtime home of Wes Anderson’s work—gathered in the box set The Wes Anderson Archive—Criterion is uniquely positioned to bring audiences closer to the worlds he has created.

And this July 10–12, Criterion will be part of the Hollywood Bowl’s Music from the Films of Wes Anderson concert into our largest public event yet. This experience steps beyond the performance and into the director’s creative universe for a weekend celebrating film, sound, and discovery.

Alongside the return of the beloved Criterion Mobile Closet, we’re launching the first-ever Criterion Cinema, offering fans special screenings, access to the Criterion Channel, special merch, and space to unwind and get inspired.

July 10, 11, and 12, 2026
Hollywood Bowl—Kagan Patio
2301 N Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90068

The Criterion Cinema

Celebrate one of cinema’s most distinctive artists at the first-ever Criterion Cinema, featuring a program curated by Anderson himself, including his own films and works that inspired him.

Reservations are closed

Just steps away, check out soundtracks from the films of Wes Anderson on vinyl in our Listening Booth, or unwind at the Viewing Lounge, where the Criterion Channel streams cinema’s boldest filmmakers. Take the magic home with exclusive merch: limited-edition Wes Anderson apparel and a collection of his films in Criterion 4K and Blu-ray editions, plus your favorite Criterion swag.

Screening Schedule

July 10 and 11:

12 p.m–2 p.m.: Hotel Chevalier + The Darjeeling Limited
2 p.m.–4 p.m.: Yojimbo (July 10), Amarcord (July 11)
6 p.m.–7:30 p.m.: Bottle Rocket (the short film) + original Criterion documentaries on Wes’ films
8 p.m.–11 p.m.: Music from the Films of Wes Anderson concert

July 12: 

Reservations are closed

The Criterion Mobile Closet

Explore Criterion’s legendary film collection in the Criterion Mobile Closet, stocked with over 1,700 essential films from around the world. For the first time, we are going to have a timed and ticketed entry to the Criterion Mobile Closet. Entries will be decided based on a lottery. Pick your preferred one-hour time slot and enter the lottery for a chance to make your own Closet Picks video.

Timed-Entry Hours

July 10 and 11: 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
July 12: 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

The lottery has ended

The Mobile Closet will be open exclusively to concert ticket holders who have been selected through the timed-entry lottery during the following hours: 6:00–7:30 p.m. on July 10 and 11, and 5:00–6:30 p.m. on July 12.

More on the Experience and What You Can Expect

• Criterion Mobile Closet and Criterion Cinema Opening Hours:
  
  Friday, July 10: 11 a.m.–4 p.m., 6 p.m.–7:30 p.m.
  Saturday, July 11: 11 a.m.–4 p.m., 6 p.m.–7:30 p.m.
  Sunday, July 12: 10 a.m.–3 p.m., 5 p.m.–6:30 p.m.
• Ticketing info:
  
  For the first time, we are introducing a timed-entry lottery for the Criterion Mobile Closet. Enter for a chance to visit. You can also reserve seats for screenings at the Criterion Cinema throughout the weekend at the Hollywood Bowl.
  
  Registration opens June 16 and closes June 23. Selected participants will be notified by email after the lottery is conducted on June 26.
• The full screening schedule will be announced by July 5.
  
• The Criterion Closet is stocked with every in-print edition from the Criterion Collection, including box sets, as well as all in-print releases from our Eclipse and Janus Contemporaries lines.
  
• As long as supplies last, you’ll receive a Criterion tote bag and a printed pocket guide to the Criterion Collection.
  
• Each Closet visit will last three minutes. Once the clock starts (spoiler: it’s when you enter!), you’ll have that time to explore the collection or talk about your selections. Don’t worry—the Criterion Closet team is there to help you find what you’re looking for, and if all you want to do is look around, that’s okay too!
  
• No purchase is required, but you are able to buy up to three items with our special Mobile Closet discount of 40 percent off, in honor of our fortieth anniversary. We accept credit cards only.
  
• At the end of every Closet visit, we take a Polaroid of our visitors with their selections, which will be yours to keep as a souvenir along with the tote bag and guide to the Collection, while supplies last.
  
• Please review our terms and conditions before attending the event.
  
• You might be featured on our social feeds, so keep an eye out and be sure to follow us on social media:
  
  Instagram: @criterioncollection
  X: @criterion
  Facebook: @CriterionCollection

FAQ

Is the Criterion Cinema accessible?

Yes.

Do you need a ticket to enter the Criterion Cinema?

No, it’s free and open to the public. However, to attend a screening, you do need a ticket.

Is the merch also 40 percent off?

The discount extends to Mobile Closet physical-media purchases only.

Is the Criterion Cinema open during the concert?

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Hondo was born in 1935 in Morocco to a mother from Mauritania—a nation that bridges the Arab Maghreb and sub-Saharan West Africa regions—and a father from Senegal, the westernmost country in Africa. Hondo spent his childhood in a Mauritania that was still under French colonial rule (it would not win independence until 1960). As a young man, he found a creative outlet working as a chef in Morocco, but his immersion in artistic practice—and in the often grinding realities of life as a Black African immigrant—truly began following his emigration to Marseille, France, in the 1950s. In between various low-paying jobs, Hondo took theater classes, moved to Paris, became a mentee of the legendary French actress Françoise Rosay, and started to perform in classic plays by the likes of Shakespeare, Racine, and Molière. Small film roles eventually came calling, and Hondo appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966), Costa-Gavras’s Shock Troops (1967), Robert Enrico’s Zita (1968), and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death (1969).

Increasingly aware of the way Black and African experiences were absent from, or misrepresented in, much of Western art—and smarting from the lack of multifaceted roles for Black actors—Hondo sought means of authentic expression. In 1966, against a backdrop of successful decolonization efforts by many African nations and a radicalizing international Black consciousness, he cofounded a theatrical company called Shango (named after the Yoruba god of thunder) that performed work by playwrights from the African diaspora, including Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka, and René Depestre.

Simultaneously, Hondo’s burgeoning cinematic ambitions began to flower: he spent six months learning how to operate a camera and then made two short films on the cheap—Ballade aux sources (1965) and Partout peut-être ou nulle part (1967). He then started work on his debut feature, Soleil Ô, with no allocated budget, alongside a group of friends who agreed to work for a share of any profits. Formally freewheeling, filmed in brusque monochrome, and laced with mordant humor, the bracing Soleil Ô follows a wide-eyed young West African immigrant looking for work in Paris—just as Hondo had done. “If I had to sum up the film in a single word,” Hondo told journalist Guy Hennebelle in 1970, “I would say it’s an attack of vomiting! I didn’t want to simply do cinema, but rather express, cry, scream the outrage of the Negro I am. I would have made the film even if I had been certain that it would be left in cans under my bed.” Soleil Ô traveled far beyond the underside of Hondo’s mattress: in 1970, it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and won a Golden Leopard award at the Locarno Film Festival.

In the early seventies, Hondo staged Les négriers (The Slavers), by Daniel Boukman, a Martinican playwright living in Algeria. The director saw cinematic potential in the play’s foregrounding of a Black African perspective on the history and reverberations of the transatlantic slave trade, and he set about adapting it for the screen as a musical, to be called West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty.

It took seven years for Hondo to research, raise funds for, and complete West Indies, which is named after an English designation for the Caribbean islands. In this frantic period, he also learned Creole (to better understand the West Indian people he was making his film about) and finished three feature-length documentaries: Arabs and Niggers, Your Neighbors (1974), We Shall Have the Whole of Death to Sleep (1977), and Polisario, a People in Arms (1978)—the latter pair a record of the Saharawi people’s struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara. Hondo was hell-bent on avoiding reliance upon European financing for a project that would excoriate the continent’s colonizer history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Hondo’s explicit intent to unshackle the musical from its American brand image, Hollywood was not a fruitful avenue, but you can’t blame him for trying. MGM offered to invest “if only I changed the subject,” he told scholar Mark A. Reid in 1982. “I told them: ‘Fuck it. If it’s not the same subject, why ask me to do it? Do it yourself.’ ” Hondo finally convinced the chief of Algerian state television to underwrite the provision of the camera crew, technical equipment, and film labs. He was also able to persuade individual funders from Senegal, Mauritania, and the Ivory Coast to chip in, adding to a modest contribution from France’s Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC). West Indies’ final budget came in at roughly $1.35 million—then a record sum for an African film.

The film is a genuinely unique work. On paper, its premise seems, quite frankly, hard to believe. Is it really possible for one film—specifically, a satirical song-and-dance affair confined to a single set: a giant mock slave ship—to effectively address nearly four centuries of French colonial aggression, the enslavement of African peoples and their subsequent liberation struggles, and the contemporary immigration issues and economic exploitation suffered by Caribbean people? The answer, as proffered by the industrious and inspired hands of Hondo, is a resounding “yes.”

In freely adapting Boukman’s text, Hondo’s first masterstroke was to transpose the entirety of the action onto a setting of his own invention, the slave ship, which he saw as rich in symbolic potential. The film’s opening-credits sequence features a long, sinuous tracking shot that begins outside its shooting location—a cavernous disused Citroën factory in Paris. (“Why shoot in a factory? Because since [slavery], the wealth of Africa and the Caribbean—whether people or raw materials—has ended up in factories,” Hondo told journalist Catherine Ruelle in 1979.) The camera then slowly pulls inside to reveal the painstakingly constructed ship, which instantly offers a stark visual shorthand for viewers to interpret how the class system functions. The upper levels are inhabited by the modern bureaucratic administration and the wealthy colonizers of yore; the middle belongs to the bourgeoisie, who help their superiors to maintain control; and the subjugated and dispossessed are mostly confined to the hold, where they plot rebellion. There was a crucial autobiographical aspect to Hondo’s staging decision: he never forgot that, as he embarked on his very first sea voyage—from Dakar to Marseille via Casablanca—he found himself in the ship’s hold.

As West Indies unfolds in a blaze of vivacious color, it’s astonishing to behold the successful realization of a project so ambitious. It glides along, vignette to vignette, on thrilling waves of contrasting yet somehow complementary tones: abrasive and seductive, didactic and balletic, joyous and despairing. West Indies is distinguished by spirited and expressive performances from a large cast of actors who often inhabit multiple roles, a creative decision that helps to underscore Hondo’s linkage of slavery to the conditions driving migration in the postwar era.

“Today, there are no more chains, no more dogs, no more animal fangs or slave ships,” Hondo told Ruelle, “but there are planes, departures, and thousands of African people outside Africa.” One of the film’s most striking and bitterly humorous musical dance sequences depicts the jazzy efforts of sharp-suited West Indians recruited by the government to tempt locals away from their island (unnamed but said by Hondo to be based on Guadeloupe and Martinique). Their revue is interrupted by the arrival of wealthy white holidaymakers, to whom they promptly turn their attention. “No niggers around,” they trill, “except, of course, to cook, clean the toilets, run elevators, haul garbage . . . and provide a wild time.” West Indies takes repeated aim at the French governmental Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer (BUMIDOM), which, from 1963 to 1982, oversaw the migration of around 160,000 people in search of employment from the Caribbean to France, where menial labor, cultural alienation, and impoverished conditions often awaited them. Amid the formal potpourri, Hondo even finds time for a brief, colorful animated sequence depicting patterns of migration.

The film is further elevated by the artistry of Hondo’s collaborators behind the camera, who blend theatrical and cinematic styles to consistently surprising and exciting effect. François Catonné’s fluid cinematography seamlessly transports the action from one historical era to another, and Jacques Saulnier’s production design provides the backdrop for myriad elaborate widescreen tableaux populated by elegantly blocked actors striking confrontational poses. The choreography—including contributions from Linda Dingwall, an African American graduate of the School of Pennsylvania Ballet—is a dazzlingly unpredictable buffet of diasporic styles. Ingenious sonic interventions foster an unsettlingly immersive atmosphere, such as the eerily amplified heavy breathing of an enslaved African man that provides the aural background to one lengthy sequence.

Hondo’s heart is clearly with the rebels of the film’s subtitle—the fugitive slaves who stand their ground, and would rather die than be oppressed—and he reserves his greatest ire for Black people who participate in the subjugation of other Black people. This dynamic is personified most clearly by the character of Justin, an ambitious, blithely venal politician who saunters to victory in a blatantly rigged election and expends his energy helping the film’s core cast of modern colonial villains—the abbot, the social worker, the representative of Employers United, and death incarnate, none of whom mask their indifference to the obsequious Justin—to achieve their stated goal: “that those tiny little people on those tiny little islands vanish from the map.” The last we see of Justin is a photograph of his face taped to a flaming effigy that is carried aloft, mid-uprising, as the camera rotates around and around at increasing velocity until the image becomes an ecstatic blur.

Justin is embodied with stiff-backed, odious smarm by the French West Indian actor Robert Liensol, a longtime friend and associate of Hondo’s. Liensol had played the lead role in Soleil Ô, and he was a founding member of Les Griots, a pivotal Afro-Caribbean theater company that formed in Paris in 1953 and later merged with Hondo’s Shango outfit. Future trailblazers among Les Griots’ ranks included directors Timité Bassori (The Woman with the Knife, 1969) and Sarah Maldoror (Sambizanga, 1972), and the Haitian actress and singer Toto Bissainthe, who is memorably chilly in West Indies as a prim and pompous missionary officer. Another notable French West Indian actor who appears in Hondo’s film, Gabriel Glissant, also directed The Machete and the Hammer (1975), a Marxist documentary about striking sugarcane workers in Guadeloupe that, in a neat metatextual flourish, the colonial administration is watching on a projector screen in West Indies’ opening.

Unfortunately, the film’s original French release was compromised, reportedly because the Gaumont Film Company reneged on a distribution agreement. West Indies was never especially widely seen, yet it gradually developed a cult reputation. In a moving instance of artistic-diasporic solidarity—the type of which politically engaged, antiestablishment Black and African filmmakers have needed to pursue in order to get their work seen—the Ethiopian American filmmaker Haile Gerima arranged a limited American release in 1986 through his independent distribution company, Mypheduh Films. Hondo’s own institution, Comité Africain des Cinéastes (CAC)—a subgroup of the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI)—arranged the belated French release of Ousmane Sembène’s harrowing Camp de Thiaroye (1988), a dramatization of the 1944 massacre of Black African soldiers by the French army.

Hondo, who was best known in his later years as a voice actor—he provided the French-language dubbing of Eddie Murphy characters in films like The Nutty Professor and Shrek—died in Paris in 2019 at the age of eighty-two. Blessedly, though, he lived to see a major reappraisal of his work. At a 2017 retrospective at Bologna, Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, Hondo was reportedly unable to stem the tears during introductions to his films, so overwhelmed was he by the fact that his long-underseen work was at last being presented to grateful crowds. West Indies, which had been particularly difficult to see, was restored in 2021 (alongside Hondo’s anticolonial epic Sarraounia) by Ciné-Archives in Paris—under the supervision of Annabelle Aventurin, Hondo’s archivist there—and the Harvard Film Archive. Now returned to its full glory, this vital, blazing, one-of-a-kind triumph can, and should, be enjoyed by a new generation of film lovers.