Could you talk about how this series relates to themes you discuss in your book?

Caden Mark Gardner: In 2018, Willow and I started a conversation series called Body Talk. When we got to discussing the film Boys Don’t Cry, Willow very eloquently said something about how the history of the trans image is a lost highway of corpses, fools, and monsters—and we realized that that was probably the title of what would become our book. We were going over ideas about how the trans film image, even when it appears on-screen for just the blink of an eye, often presents transness in the abstract, or as a cheap joke or gag. And even in well-meaning efforts to try to “understand” us, filmmakers often turn us into corpses—we’re the victim who is overwhelmed by society, like Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry or Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl.

After we had our first run of promoting the book in 2024, we thought it would be cool if we were able to explore one of the threads in the book as a film series. For this program on the Criterion Channel, we focused on trans-directed works that really spoke to us, and though there is a limit to how many films we could include, we thought gathering some of the directors we’ve written about—both in the book and in our own criticism—would be a good way of showing some of the different frameworks that trans directors have operated in.

Willow Maclay: Yes, this series is of course just a sample of all of the many films we could have chosen. There are so many films by trans filmmakers coming out now that it’s difficult for us to keep all of them under one umbrella. The work we’re showcasing in this series shows us that each of these filmmakers sees transness in a specific way; it shapes how they view the world and how they make their art. One of the most exciting things for us, when we were putting together Corpses, Fools, and Monsters, was that the rise of a New Trans Cinema forced us to modify the shape of our book. In our last chapter, we were going to center trans-authored films and try to make a claim for how these movies offer something different from the trans film images that we have all become familiar with through the twentieth-century tropes we explored, but the sheer volume of films that were being made was something we could not have expected. These films refracted our history in the twentieth century while charting new ground in the twenty-first in a very exciting way.

How has the political climate today influenced trans cinema?

Maclay: There’s this contradiction in the fact that the New Trans Cinema is growing while our rights are receding. In a lot of the newer films, you have this feeling that things are getting worse for queer people, and even in some of the poppier genre films there’s a sense that the filmmakers are grappling with the terrifying political reality that trans people are facing at the moment.

 

Gardner: As we were promoting the book, we were seeing a mainstream cultural backlash against the trans community. Trump was elected a second time while we were on our tour, and it just felt like the anti-trans tropes that had had a chokehold on cinema for so long were being reanimated in the form of the rhetoric of right-wing influencers and politicians. So, while these filmmakers are showing a new sense of freedom by presenting transness in their own way, on its own terms, they also seem to be engaging with the backlash in a political, social, and cultural sense.

 

We did want to make sure, though, that we weren’t presenting all of this as if it were happening just now. A central film that I wanted to make sure was included in this series is Gender Troublemakers (1993), which was made by two trans women—Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa Mackay—who talk about their relationship and the politics of being trans in the nineties. Though they’re using the language of the time period, it’s a film that I’ve noticed has kept recirculating in our community and has meant a lot to people. There’s also Sydney Freeland, who premiered Drunktown’s Finest at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. For me, it is significant for being trans-directed and also a film about being Navajo and living on a reservation, a side of contemporary America that is rarely told on-screen.

Castration Movie Anthology is a remarkable example of how contemporary trans cinema can be really bold and unapologetic because of the grassroots nature of its making and distribution. Can you say more about that film and its success?

Maclay: Castration’s word-of-mouth reputation has been built almost entirely by trans people discussing it with other trans people. I think it’s important to talk here about Muscle Distribution, a company that trans film archivist and queer historian Elizabeth Purchell started a couple years ago. I think that she is doing a wonderful job centralizing these movies and presenting them to the exact right audience. Through us sharing these films online, whether through Vimeo links or Google docs, or by going to screenings at microcinemas—and Louise has been traveling across North America and Europe getting Castration Movie Anthology out there—a community experience has been created around modern trans films, and it feels not only like Muscle is catering to us but also that it’s being driven by the power that we have as viewers and consumers. Louise just started a Kickstarter for Castration Movie Anthology III—she needed many thousands of dollars and raised it very quickly. This is showing us that this type of circulation, which enables us to use our modest economic means to help get money into the hands of trans filmmakers, can succeed. Maybe we can have an ecosystem of trans films that are on a smaller scale, and it doesn’t matter so much if they break into the mainstream if the trans audience is seeing them—as long as these films are mattering to the community itself.

 

Gardner: This makes me think of the rise of VHS, and the idea that that format created an alternative mode of distribution and an archive for trans images. One of the things that popped up in the VHS landscape were tutorial films about voice-training, makeup, hair, and wardrobe. But it was also common for films of the past—like Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and The Queen (1968)—to circulate on tape. The trans activist Lou Sullivan would have viewing parties that showed movies like Lee Grant’s What Sex Am I? (1985) and also made pirated VHS tapes and sold them in his newsletter. That community energy that was developed by zine culture has been converted to online spaces and the microcinema scene. And in addition to new work being circulated this way, it’s been great to see that the community is looking at our past, including films that have not been very accessible.

 

When it comes to new films, for the last two decades there has been an idea that we still have to be beholden to the studios or the festivals to get a certain type of film seen and distributed. I think, especially in this moment, when arts funding is being gutted, there’s a kind of fearmongering that makes it hard for people to even bother making a film. So it’s great to see crowdfunding for works like Louise’s, and I hope there are other filmmakers who might find this method useful.

There are some fascinating documentary portraits of trans elders and pioneers in this series.

Gardner: Yes, there’s No Ordinary Man (2020), which is a film about Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who was discovered to have been a trans person in the closet and was outed after he died. The story was that he had duped everyone around him, but as the filmmakers go around talking to people who actually knew Tipton, and people who had lived through the fallout of this discovery, you get a sense of how trans people of his time were stuck between a rock and a hard place. They could be outed, putting their reputations and their employment at risk, or they could live stealth and just continue not addressing their trans identity without being able to actively engage with that side of themselves in public.

 

Rupert Remembers (2000) is about Rupert Raj, one of the great trans male activists who was involved in a lot of trans publishing and newsletters that highlighted real people in his native Canada and all over the world. There’s a tendency to want to canonize trans elders into sainthood, but one of the great things about this film is that it allows us to remember that there were regular everyday people in the late twentieth century who took the extraordinary step of being out and advocating for other people. Rupert Raj was a real trailblazer.

Maclay:  With nonfiction work, Caden and I quickly discovered that you could write an entire book on all of the depictions of trans people in documentary. There’s always been a deep fascination with trans people in that form, but usually these films were made with a cis gaze, which could sometimes result in fascinating films, but typically ran into some problems. Of course there’s the controversy surrounding Paris Is Burning, a film that I love, but one whose subjects felt exploited when it became popular and they did not reap the benefits of its success. What we tried to convey with the inclusion of these two documentaries is a new idea of how a trans subject can be approached within the form—what can happen when a trans filmmaker is exploring the history of another trans person’s life. It illuminates new ways that we can interact with our own culture across generations, and allows us to have a better understanding of our history outside of the ways cis people have presented it.

In recent years, we’ve also seen the emergence of some singular auteurist voices within trans cinema, including Jane Schoenbrun and Isabel Sandoval, who both have very distinctive styles.

Maclay: One of the most interesting things that’s happening in the modern trans film movement is that we’re getting a feel for the taste of trans directors and their cinephilia. Some of these filmmakers are working through the context of genre: Jane Schoenbrun is interested in horror and David Lynch; Vera Drew (The People’s Joker) is influenced by the maximalist comic-book movies of the ’90s. And then you have Isabel Sandoval, who is working in the classical mode of melodrama. Sandoval grew up watching pirated films in her native Philippines; she would get DVDs of films by Fassbinder and Sirk and Wong Kar Wai, and that is obviously a part of her film language, as is Chantal Akerman. What’s interesting with her film, Lingua Franca, is that you can spot those influences, but you see them through a new lens of transness, as we follow a trans woman who is in love and is an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S during the first Trump administration.

Gardner: There’s also Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s So Pretty (2019), which is a very beautiful and very playful film, with a lot of colors and textures. It operates in many modes, notably as a radical adaptation of a German novel by Ronald M. Schernikau. The film turns the adaptation process into its own metanarrative within the film, and it also serves as a contemporary polemic during the first Trump administration. Also, we see how cinephilia can inform a strong political allegory like Maggots and Men (2009), in which director Cary Cronenwett uses the influence of the silent era and Soviet filmmaking to show us how trans people fight not just for their own rights but also for a utopian idea of a better world. It’s a political film, and also a very DIY film. Cary has talked about how he and his crew were relying on the Craigslist free section to make their sets.

How fortunate we are to have had Cowie there to chronicle this most fertile era—and with such intelligence and flair. One of the elements of this bounteous book that struck me is his indefatigable writing and publishing, starting with his first published review, on Bergman’s The Magician—for the Cambridge University weekly arts magazine, Broadsheet—and his correspondences with such luminaries as Bergman, Ray, Brooks, Lindsay Anderson, and Orson Welles, and growing to pamphlets, books, columns, and the output of his groundbreaking and influential publishing house, the Tantivy Press, notably the International Film Guide, an indispensable  annual survey of world cinema, published for more than four decades starting in 1963. During the course of all of this, Cowie also became a beloved—and essential—contributor to Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. 

On the occasion of the publication of Flashbacks, out from Sticking Place Books, I wanted to give readers a sneak peek into its riches, and ask Cowie about his approach to writing it—and about film criticism then and now.

You were there at the beginning of so many aspects of film culture as we know it today: the emergence of the filmmakers themselves, the art-house movement, the subsequent explosions of festivals around the world and of writing and publishing about the films and filmmakers. Take us back there for a moment.

I cherished the privilege of having come of age at the end of the 1950s, when world cinema was entering a vintage period akin to that of jazz in the 1920s. Everywhere you looked, talent was evident—from Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti in Italy to the New Wave in France, from Bergman in Sweden to Kurosawa in Japan, from Satyajit Ray in India to Wajda and Munk in Poland, not forgetting maverick directors like Cassavetes in the U.S. and Carlos Saura in Spain. This energized the fledgling art-house movement in Europe and the States, and festivals began to burgeon. Some of my earliest acquaintances were the buyers of art-house movies, who would frequent the corridors of events like Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, and even Oberhausen, the mecca for short films in the 1960s. The cinema was the art of the moment and a prime subject for cocktail-party chatter—a mood that Pauline Kael satirized in an article for Sight and Sound entitled “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience.” In these circumstances, it seemed logical for me to devote my career to serving the cause of film, as a medium capable of dealing with life’s most profound dilemmas.

How did you come to choose film criticism as your métier?

The notion of writing has always sustained me. My father was a poet born and bred and could express himself in words with a facility that I admired. He encouraged me to write and gave me a typewriter when I was eleven years old. But it was only at university that I realized that my best chance of doing that was in reviewing films.

 

Cambridge during my time there, in the late fifties and early sixties, was a hive of writing of one kind or another, from the magazine Granta, edited by David Frost, to the weekly campus newspaper Varsity, via another weekly devoted to the arts in the town, under the title Broadsheet. So I cut my teeth by contributing to all these publications and soon became involved in the editing and publishing process. Simultaneously, I learned to write to deadline, both for these university magazines and for the London weekly What’s On in London—a forerunner of Time Out. So, if you like, I was acquiring the label of “journalist” as well as “critic.” This in turn bred in me a distrust of academic language, and I admired the clarity of contemporary film analysts like Penelope Houston, Charles Barr, and Peter Graham. But I did not respond to the vernacular, so beloved, of, for example, Pauline Kael. It’s always seemed to me that it’s rather lazy just to put down on paper your unvarnished, conversational reactions to films, books, music, or painting. Writing does require polishing and sometimes needs planing like a raw plank of wood.

What filmmakers first wowed you?

I’ve often said that the screening of The Seventh Seal I attended with my parents in early 1959 convinced me that the cinema was an art form. Had I discovered Strike or Citizen Kane or Children of Paradise or a host of other monuments in film history, then the Bergman might not have had quite the same effect. But coming as it did just before I went to Cambridge and was immersed in the French New Wave, the Italian giants like Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti, and the great British proletarian cinema, I think that The Seventh Seal remained a lighthouse that guided my approach to movies for many years thereafter. I also fell under the spell of Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Andrzej Wajda, and the young Carlos Saura.

When did you decide that you could make a living at this?

It was an instinctive response to the zeitgeist. Whenever you went out with friends, the topic of conversation inevitably focused on cinema—and art-house cinema, because my generation tended to regard Hollywood with lofty disdain. That said, it was only when I developed the annual International Film Guide from 1963 onward that the operation became financially viable. My simplistic but effective goal with the Guide was that by selling ads inside the book to film distributors and institutions I could offer it for sale at a bargain price. Thus, more people would buy the book, and the advertisers would, I hoped, get more results.

Tell us a little about the origins of Tantivy Press, and how you came up with the idea for the International Film Guide.

My father had founded a small publishing enterprise called the Tantivy Press (a quote from Walter Scott’s novel Woodstock) at the close of World War II. He published poetry, satire, and oddities like a facsimile edition of Wordsworth’s A Guide Through the District of the Lakes in the North of England. When he retired, he gave me the name, and I was able to use that to launch my first titles. The concept behind the International Film Guide was quite simple: to open a window on the burgeoning art of film in as many countries as possible, and to bolster that with sections on film books, film magazines, film bookshops, art houses around Europe, and so on.  The response in 1963 was so overwhelming that I knew there was a yearning for books about films and filmmakers. 

 

French publishers were far ahead of the pack by the turn of the 1960s, and when we started putting out original monographs on directors, we stole a march on the Americans. We were soon followed by Ian Cameron’s Movie paperbacks, and by Secker and Warburg’s Cinema One series in association with the BFI.

I was struck by something you wrote, that at the time you first started publishing these books, “each new monograph was almost always the first of its kind in English.” This might be hard for some people to imagine today!

Absolutely. It was an exciting time, somehow rhyming with the hopes of the early 1960s in so many fields—politics, with the advent of John F. Kennedy; fashion, with Courrèges and Mary Quant; theater, with John Osborne, the Royal Court, and so on. It was gratifying to put out the first book-length studies in English of directors like Hitchcock, Dreyer, and Polanski—not forgetting one of my personal favorites, Allen Eyles’s still definitive analysis of the Marx brothers and their films. Today there must be some thirty books available on Hitchcock, Bergman, Welles, Kubrick, etc. But in 1963 the field was largely unplowed.

Give us a sense of your peak Tantivy years.

By the late 1960s, the law of diminishing returns soon began to hover at my shoulder. We had started with the International Film Guide and one or two other titles each year, but encouraged by our distributors and by letters from film buffs, we expanded the program to as many as a dozen paperback originals per year. I tried to edit each title myself, but I found I had to take on assistants like Derek Elley (who would himself become a noted critic). On top of that we were distributing several film titles originated in the U.S. by A. S. Barnes & Company, and I found that I was spending more time on administrative chores than I was on editing or indeed on my own writing, which took a back seat for several years.

You even anticipated IMDb with your very ambitious idea to publish a world filmography.

Indeed, and not just with those two volumes of World Filmography (1967 and 1968) but also with our Screen series, which featured illustrated dictionaries of national cinemas (Germany, France, Swede, Eastern Europe) and genres (the gangster film, the American musical). This was due to the success of Peter Graham’s path-finding A Dictionary of the Cinema, which we published in 1964 and had to reprint twice.

When did your long relationship with Janus Films and Criterion begin?

The moment I saw the patrician elegance of the Janus logo, I sensed that here was a distributor bent on serving the art-house world. Bill Becker and Saul Turell held the rights to a cluster of great directors, from Eisenstein to Bergman, Renoir to Truffaut, and Fellini to Kurosawa. Their catalogs and promotional flyers were five star all the way, scrupulously researched and printed on high-quality paper that did justice to stills. Even the Janus offices at 745 Fifth Avenue were spacious and thickly carpeted.  Everyone who worked there did so with total commitment, among them Peter Meyer, who first had the idea of sending me round the U.S. on lecture tours featuring Janus titles.

 

I began writing catalog notes for Bill and Saul in the very early 1970s, and so when a decade or so later the company entered a joint venture with Voyager to release classic films on laser disc, I was asked to essay a full-length commentary on my favorite film, The Seventh Seal. I describe in my book the often hazardous process of recording these commentaries, and the grueling research required to “keep talking” for a hundred minutes (or even three hours, as I did later for The Leopard and Fanny and Alexander). I sometimes ask myself who listens to these commentaries, and then, out of the blue, I receive a letter or an email from a film buff in a distant land, saying how much they enjoyed my track.

I was amazed reading the book by your prolific and precocious letter-writing habit. Starting with one to your idol Bergman before you even started at university, I believe.

Sixty to seventy years ago, phone calls from one country to another were expensive and cumbersome. Letters were the principal means of maintaining contact with others around the world. Correspondence of this kind were supplanted by emails—emails, furthermore, that most people lose over time as they switch from one electronic device or provider to another. It’s such a pity, because what would we know about previous centuries were it not for letters? Ingmar Bergman, for example, kept about twenty thousand letters during his lifetime, and François Truffaut’s letters constitute a mini-history of the French New Wave. The irony is that emails are themselves now regarded as “so twentieth-century.” On the other hand, the age of the internet has given us access to an almost unquantifiable amount of knowledge, all at a few clicks of a keyboard. Just occasionally, I like to think, the flashbacks in my memoir offer insights or incidents that one will not find in Wikipedia.

The richness of your relationships with these important artists certainly comes across in those “Flashbacks”—your short personal remembrances, many first written for Criterion. I think the way you interweave them with the main narrative of the story of your life is very effective.

For a majority of people, their private life is distinct from their professional work. I loathed the idea of describing the intimate moments of my existence unless, and it’s a big “unless,” they impinged directly on my career as a publisher and film historian. So I tried to adhere to this approach.

What are you working on now?

There’s no doubt that in one’s mideighties, there are only a few hours each day when one feels top-notch and ready to write or research. I’m content to do two or three pieces a year for the arts section of the Wall Street Journal, to moderate a panel at the Venice Film Festival, and write the occasional liner note for Blu-rays. There are two book projects for 2027, however: the first is a revised and expanded version of my monograph on Orson Welles, published in 1965 and now out of print; and the second will be a study of the films of Kon Ichikawa, whose achievements rival those of the Big Three in Japanese cinema—Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu.

From your eminent vantage point, how would you assess the state of cinephilia today?

I believe that the state of art-house cinema today rhymes with the situation in what one might term “cine-literature.” When my slender monograph on Bergman appeared in 1961, cinephiles leapt upon it eagerly because it was the first study of Bergman in English. So few books on the movies were being published, and there were far fewer films being made. Today, however, more films than ever before are available on various formats and platforms, and most are seen by fewer spectators than there were for art-house titles sixty years ago. A plethora of books on film emerge from a wide range of publishers, but again, most of those titles sell a handful of copies by comparison with the sixties and seventies, when even our paperbacks on Carl Dreyer or Luis Buñuel went through a first edition of four thousand or more.

 

Does that mean that the films of the sixties were intrinsically better than those of today? I don’t think so. The landscape, rather than the trees, has changed. More movies and, as I’ve said, more books and essays about the movies. And, miracle of miracles, every few months a new talent emerges. Classic films are so much more accessible now, thanks to restoration programs, and the presence of older feature films all over the internet as well as on disc and on streaming services like the Criterion Channel. So, despite the decline in theatrical audiences, I still believe that the art of film can go from strength to strength. In Flashbacks, I have tried to express not so much nostalgia as a passion for cinema in all its forms.

Since then, he has made five more films, widely different but with the same basic elements: a playful film language; a strong presence in the acting; an exploration of what community gives, what community takes, what community is, the emptiness outside it. Place is important, memories are important, and death—often as a way out—is never far away. Nevertheless, I would not dream of calling the films dark or pessimistic, for they are also filled with a remarkable energy, a kind of undercurrent of enthusiasm—about being able to tell a story?—in addition to the fact that their more or less damaged characters all find themselves in that recognizable here and now, depicted with care and an eye for its beauty.

In Oslo, August 31st (2011), Trier’s second film, this dynamic is the driving force: we follow Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through a day and a night in the city, seeing all the life and care that surround him but also that he is unable to accept them, pushing everything away. One scene from that film in particular has stayed with me: Anders is sitting in a café listening to all the conversations around him. To his ears, the conversations are banal, trivial, meaningless—and he seeks meaning, something to hold on to—while for us, who also see him from the outside, alone in this room filled with voices, it is perhaps first and foremost the connecting power of the conversations that becomes apparent.

In Sentimental Value (2025), the main character, Nora (Renate Reinsve), struggles with a similar conflict. She is an actress, so every evening she leaves her life and enters another, and she does this well; she is successful but has problems with who she is—the person she leaves behind when she enters the world of fiction. She is unable to form close relationships, she cannot handle intimacy, and toward the end of the film she falls into a depression. Depression is a state where everything becomes unbearable, where everything must be rejected and only passivity remains. But while Anders in Oslo, August 31st ultimately takes an overdose, Nora gets a visit from her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). In a truly outstanding scene near the end of Sentimental Value, naked and simple and deeply moving—in what I think of as the film’s innermost room, the place that everything else in it has been moving toward—Agnes breaks through to Nora, they come very close to each other, and what happens there, I think, what Trier has managed to do, is to show what love is. I was completely defenseless when I saw that scene, which for the most part plays out only on the faces of the two sisters, and I cried.

Had the film opened with that scene, it would not have meant much, because that’s how it is with simple truths, isn’t it? We know them so well that we just tick them off when we encounter them, a bit like how we just tick off what we see every day—a tree, a traffic jam, a kitchen sink—there’s no reason to take it in. What a film can do, and what Sentimental Value does, is set something in motion; we are heading inward—in this case into the life of a family—and along the way our attention is drawn to ever new elements that together create a place where the simple truth does not exist but arises. Then we see it for what it is. An essay like this can make no such place, and cannot say what love is without becoming a cliché—in other words, something we know all too well.

The question is, What good is this? Why should we sit there choked up watching two actors say they love each other? Because, of course, there is a difference between understanding something rationally and understanding something emotionally. Not least because we control the rational, while emotions are beyond our control. They just rise up, as if by themselves. Why? What do they want? Why did I cry when I saw the scene with the two sisters? I didn’t want to—if there’s one thing I hate, it’s losing control of my emotions, and I see crying as shameful, something I fight with everything I have. Probably because emotional outbursts were frowned upon when I was growing up. Not just in my family, but in the culture. Crying was something girls did. Emotions were not something you showed. No hugs. I have never told my brother, my mother, or my father that I love them, and they have never said it to me. So much of what went on in my family was left unsaid, unspoken, if not secret then at least well hidden. There is nothing wrong with that; it is a way of life that is as good as any other. But it was probably all this unspoken, all this unthought, that Sentimental Value circulated within and brought to life, through emotions, and that thus became clear to me, without me really wanting it to. Or in other words: Sentimental Value tries to loosen something hard, and something hard loosened in me when I saw it.

The film is about the relationship between a father and his two daughters, and it begins when the father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), unexpectedly shows up at a memorial the daughters have organized for their recently deceased mother, in the house where first Gustav and then his daughters grew up. Gustav is a charming, slightly boastful type who takes up a lot of space, but there is something in his gaze that does not match his behavior. We understand that he was once an important filmmaker but that that was a long time ago. Fallen and alcoholic, he lives on his past achievements. He jokes with his daughters, teases his grandchild a little, but not quite successfully. What he does gets no response, falls flat. He seeks intimacy that is not given. Nora’s gaze reveals every conceivable form of distancing—coldly observing, cheerfully laughing, defiantly challenging—all demonstrative. What we see in her eyes is not a passive reflection of her inner state of mind but something she chooses to signal. What she is saying, without words, is that Gustav does not deserve the intimacy he is playing for. Intimacy is not something he can take but something he must be offered. And he will not get it from her. Agnes reacts differently. Her gaze is softer, without edges of resentment, and she tries harder to meet him halfway.

In other words, Gustav is no longer a filmmaker except in name, and he is no longer a father except in name. He has come to Oslo to reclaim both roles, to regain what he has lost. He has written a new film script, and he offers Nora the lead role. It is his way of trying to get closer to her. But of course she does not want that; her father has let her down her whole life, never been there for her, always put himself and his work first. And now he wants to use her for his own purposes? Will it never end?

This scene between father and daughter, as played by Skarsgård and Reinsve, is absolutely brilliant, not only because it is intensely credible and emotionally precise but also because both sides are given space: the grief of rejecting as well as the grief of being rejected.

Gustav later gets another actor to play the role he intended for Nora. It turns out that his new film is autobiographical and about his mother, who took her own life when he was a young boy. The most important scene in this film within the film, which we are first presented with when Gustav goes over it with Rachel (Elle Fanning), the American actor playing his mother, is to be shot in one take and is about the last time he saw his mother alive. She says goodbye to her son, and when he is out of the house, she goes into a room, closes the door, and hangs herself. The essential thing, Gustav tells Rachel, is her facial expression after she has said goodbye but before she enters the room. What moves in her face at that moment. Gustav talks about the scene as he imagines it in the film he is going to make; he is clearly not in touch with the event as he himself experienced it as a child, even though he is going over the scene in the house where it actually took place. He even makes a morbid joke, tricking the actor into believing that the IKEA stool in the room is the same one his mother used back then.

Here, almost in passing, we encounter the main theme of Sentimental Value—at least as I understand the film—which is trauma, and the way trauma affects people’s lives. It seems that Gustav’s mother was involved in the resistance movement during World War II; she was reported to the Germans and sent to the Grini prison camp, where she was tortured; and later, unable to cope, she took her own life. This obviously affects Gustav’s life—it becomes the very foundation of it, and that foundation in turn affects his daughters’ lives.

A trauma is really nothing more than a memory, but a memory of something overwhelming, life­-threatening, or destructive, and what characterizes this memory is that its power remains undiminished and that it cannot be controlled. It can take over a life. It is also wordless. Not only in the sense that language is powerless in relation to the overwhelming and cannot grasp it but also because the memory lives through emotions and is physical. Such a state, where the past lives on in the present, wordless and unprocessed and overwhelming, like a kind of emotional wilderness, has repercussions in the social sphere, because when energy is used to deal with the presence of the past, the bonds to the present and to those who are in it are weakened. And what happens to them? To those who have had a parent who drinks, or who is depressed, or who is aggressive, or who takes their own life? In a way, the trauma lives on in them, albeit indirectly and in a different form. And it doesn’t stop there, because their children will also experience the aftereffects of what they were exposed to, to a greater or lesser extent: a shadow of something that once happened to one of their grandparents will hang over their lives, something unspoken and invisible, often unknown.

And it is more common than one might think. “One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo, to encounter trauma,” writes Bessel van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score. “Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors.” Suicide happens, domestic violence happens, sexual abuse happens, drug abuse happens. But trauma happens in isolation and is like a kind of hidden enclave in society. In Sentimental Value, the trauma began some eighty years earlier; it has long since left its concrete starting point, the torture, and become something completely different. But what? It is something beyond definition, and that is what Sentimental Value explores: how the past lives on in us, shapes us, partly determines who we are and how we feel. That also requires a language, or an expression, that can move beyond definition but at the same time be able to grasp it.

I have interviewed Trier twice: the first time about his relationship with the painter Edvard Munch, for a book I wrote; the second time about Sentimental Value, for a Norwegian newspaper. Both times he talked about the connection between trauma and the sublime.

“Trauma exists in the nonsocial, outside language, in the transmissions we are blind to,” he said. “There, in that space, art also exists. What we sense but cannot put into words has its place there, can be seen there. Trauma and the sublime are connected.” It is in this light that I see the film within the film, Gustav’s attempt to capture the gaze before the abyss when he wants to recreate the expression on his mother’s face in the seconds before she ended her own life. Gustav is clearly an emotionally damaged man; he is unable to relate to his own children, to be close to them, and he has failed them massively; but in another way, in relation to the films he has made, he is just as clearly emotionally expressive and insightful. This is not an unusual combination; art history is full of narcissistic, tyrannical men who have created uniquely enriching and deeply humane works of art, and there is no contradiction in this, precisely because art, at least in its innermost essence, exists outside the social sphere, free from its constraints, and because its language, when it is good, is about presence, about getting close to something. This may sound like an apology, a mythologization of the artist, and an expression of a deeply romantic view of art—that art has its own privileged language for human existence—but in Sentimental Value, the opposite happens: Gustav’s film is drawn completely into practical, tangible, everyday reality. We see it first as a pile of scripts on a café table in Oslo, absolutely subordinate to the meeting between father and daughter, then in the rehearsal with Rachel, where Gustav describes how he imagines the scene, and then we encounter it again in the form of many long script rehearsals, before we finally get to see the scene about the mother’s suicide, with Nora as the mother, in one long take, but not as an illusion, not as presence, because what we are seeing is the filming of the scene, with Gustav sitting there surrounded by his film crew. It is an effective device, because Gustav’s film becomes fiction while Sentimental Value becomes the reality that encompasses the fiction, inevitably credible, at the same time as the film as a phenomenon becomes just one of many ways of dealing with and understanding life. It is somewhat reminiscent of something that happens in Trier’s first film: its title, Reprise, alludes to a wish of the main character Phillip, who at one point attempts to recreate a memory—he takes his ex-girlfriend to Paris and wants them to do exactly the same things they did when they met there, down to the smallest detail. These scenes are extremely uncomfortable to watch, perhaps because they simultaneously convey a sense of hope—Phillip’s hope of winning back his girlfriend, who is his gateway to life—and the impossibility, indeed the hopelessness, of this hope, since we who are watching know that life and living exist only in the moment, which is constantly changing and cannot, under any circumstances, be held on to without becoming something else. Yes, that’s true, one might think. But the film’s power of illusion is so great that when we see Phillip standing there in Paris, carefully instructing his ex-girlfriend to sit in a certain way on a wall, it is easy to forget that behind that scene there is a director and a film crew working with reality in exactly the same way as Phillip does.

It is probably no coincidence that Sentimental Value opens backstage at a theater, where Nora stands dressed in costume, half herself, half her character, preparing to go onstage. We find ourselves in a transitional space, in a room between reality and fiction. The film ends in a similar transitional space, zooming out from the set where Nora stands as herself, having just played her grandmother, as the reality outside becomes more and more visible. That reality is, of course, fiction, part of the film, and one must imagine that a film crew is standing outside it again, in our world, the one I am sitting in writing this, and where Sentimental Value is just one of many films. Elements from this real world have probably slipped into the film—Trier’s grandfather was Erik Løchen, a Norwegian filmmaker who was held captive at Grini by the Germans during the war, and the film’s narrator is a legendary actress, Bente Børsum, who starred in one of Løchen’s films—but more important, of course, is what goes the other way, from the film into reality. For me, as I said, it loosened something hard, and that might have been about my father, an irritable, unpredictable, quick-tempered, harsh, and strict man, later an alcoholic, incapable of intimacy. I never thought about why he was the way he was while he was alive. After he died, I heard from neighbors and colleagues that when he got drunk, he always talked about the same thing: events from his childhood, how he had often been beaten and locked in a dark closet, clearly traumatized. That explained something, but it didn’t change anything. When I saw Sentimental Value, this fact-based insight was filled with emotion, and brought to the fore the equally terrible and good thought: What if he had no choice? And then: Do I have a choice?

Then we have left fiction and film behind and are deep into reality, but, and this is probably the point of this essay, the film is also there, as one of the many ways we have of dealing with and understanding life.

A countertradition emerged when some ethnographers abandoned this positivist gaze, and did so not just by introducing a new style but by shifting their assumptions. Filmmakers of this school have refrained from objective claims of cultural knowledge in favor of more ambiguous, aesthetic engagement with the people and places before the lens. Rather than attempting to produce knowledge from on high, these artists foreground the textual work of the medium—and the fact that all captured meanings are partial, in both senses of the word. This method originated in the “ethno-fictions” of Jean Rouch and the distanced observational mode of Robert Gardner, but it is perhaps epitomized by filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose groundbreaking experimental ethnography Reassemblage (1982) made the radical claim to not “speak about” the other but rather “speak nearby.”

The work of New York–based filmmaker Kimi Takesue, the subject of a retrospective now playing on the Criterion Channel, is a potent contemporary example of this philosophical approach. In a career that began in the mid-1990s, Takesue has taken her camera to distant locations such as Vietnam, Uganda, Laos, and Peru. She has also made a number of short narrative films, like the environmental warning That Which Once Was (2011) and the dreamlike, Maya Deren–esque Bound (1995). Despite the wide range of their subjects and forms, all of the director’s films share a palpable curiosity about people and the spaces through which she and her camera move. Although her stance generally seems objective, one never loses awareness of the woman behind the lens, someone responding in real time to situations as they evolve around her. Even at their most rigorous, Takesue’s films are spaces to get lost in, defined by unexpected byways and digressions.

Takesue’s most recent film, the 2023 feature documentary Onlookers, is a perfect demonstration of this aesthetic. Shot in Laos, it observes the interconnections of local monks and artisans with the tourists who have come to observe them. Using a static camera and flat, planimetric compositions, Takesue creates a simulacrum of the traveler’s gaze. But of course Onlookers unfolds in time, and it is within this fourth dimension that the complexities and contradictions of the human interactions on-screen come into focus.

In a conversation I had with Takesue, she noted that in some ways the film adopts the classic touristic gaze in order to subvert its meanings: “The film is structured in tableaus that are almost like moving-image postcards. On the one hand, they present the idealized, exoticized version of the place. The ultimate signifiers of this are the monks and their rituals. If you get a tourist book on Laos, that’s going to be what’s on the cover. You see how tourists are continually attracted to that, and the commodification of it, the constant taking of photographs.”

While much of Onlookers consists of the interface between travelers and locals, the film also captures moments far from the centers of tourism, offering a portrait of exchange governed by the rules of gift-giving and charity instead of capitalist economics. Takesue explained: “Part of my response to the exoticization I was seeing was to bookend Onlookers with the Lao people who are giving alms to the monks. What is distinct about Laos is this different sense of time and generosity of time that is revealed through this daily ritual, where you have people waking up every single morning at 4:30 to make rice, to sit by the side of the road at five in the morning and give alms.”

The Gardner mode of pure observation, which has been consistent in Takesue’s work since her earliest documentaries, has experienced a major resurgence in recent years through the efforts of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (which itself grew out of Gardner’s academic work at the university). Rather than attempting to provide metonymic examples of a singular culture, this more experimental style entails taking the camera into various situations and allowing them to unfold in time without subjecting them to a dominant interpretive framework. The films often become records of their maker’s own curiosity and confusion, as he or she traverses a given cultural zone and tries to make sense of it through immersion. In this way, the films are not the end product of prior research but are themselves both the research and the results.

This guiding principle can be seen quite clearly in Heaven’s Crossroad (2002), which Takesue made in Vietnam. The film is characterized by a peaceful but continual kineticism. Its most common motifs involve transportation, as Takesue’s camera quickly moves through the landscape, jostled by fellow passengers who share at least some part of Takesue’s itinerary. We see boats and beaches, moments of work and leisure, and, above all, close-ups of people the filmmaker encounters on her journey. The film is structured like a mosaic, all of its elements given equal weight in the final edit. It is, to borrow Umberto Eco’s terminology, an open text, one that emphasizes its own incomplete character and implies that it is but one set of impressions among many. In other words, Vietnam cannot be exhausted by any single film, and so Heaven’s Crossroad suggests other possible versions and iterations.

Takesue’s next feature, Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), was shot in Uganda. Beginning in Kampala and working her way to the countryside, Takesue passes through marketplaces and chapels, checking in with hairdressers, weightlifters, newlyweds, and schoolchildren. The result is a composite view of Ugandan life decades after the end of a civil war that devastated the country in the ’80s. As Takesue explained, this film was sparked by a timely commission from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and came on the heels of six years of preproduction on a feature film that never came together. Going into the Uganda project, Takesue had no agenda but knew that she would not be making “a film that proffers stereotypes around victimization, poverty, or the sensationalizing of violence.”

This freedom from preconception is evident throughout Where Are You Taking Me? Even its title, which might initially sound like a question posed in a hostage situation, is indicative of Takesue’s willingness to follow anyone who will bring her into their quotidian experience. Much as the West has come to mythologize Vietnam as a war and not a country, the news media has made Uganda synonymous with civil unrest, child soldiers, and, more recently, the rise of repressive Christian politics. All of this is refreshingly absent in Where Are You Taking Me?, which instead evokes the varied textures of ordinary daily life in the country.

The film of Takesue’s that has the most in common with Onlookers is Looking for Adventure (2013). Filmed in Peru, it also examines the interaction between tourist groups and locals, in particular the Indigenous peoples of the Andes who have made their traditional practices and handicrafts available for the consumption of outsiders. Looking for Adventure begins with a middle-aged man standing outside a building as pedestrians rush past him. We don’t know what he is waiting for, and after watching passersby going about their business (and a young girl who bends down and directly addresses Takesue’s camera), he simply walks off. As is the case in Onlookers, Looking for Adventure is less about tourism or cultural exploitation than about the point at which incommensurable time structures meet. People come to Peru to experience an “other time,” one that is separate, to some degree, from industrial pressures and the global attention economy. But in order to maintain that distance from the habitus of the metropole, these people must offer themselves as spectacle.

Takesue noted that, in all of these films, “it takes a while to understand where you are and what the context is. They play a lot with the dynamic of overstimulation followed by real reflection, pause, contemplation.” And because she works without a crew, Takesue is able to enter a variety of situations without being a disruptive presence. “I was able to go into more intimate spaces, dealing with people in much more intimate ways. I was using a DVX100, a camera that ergonomically I feel very comfortable handling. There is a lot more handheld in Where Are You Taking Me? and Heaven’s Crossroad, whereas in Onlookers and in Looking for Adventure, I used cameras that I really wasn’t comfortable with shooting handheld. And so that’s part of the reason that those films have a more formal kind of aesthetic.” While a change in equipment may have been the cause for this shift, what carries through all four of these films is an intimacy that seems to result from Takesue’s specific presence and bearing.

She explained: “I am very interested in the interaction that’s happening between me as the filmmaker and the people that I’m filming. I think the gaze is kind of a circulating gaze. I am observing, but I am being observed. In all the films I make, I’m trying to be very upfront about my subjectivity. It comes back to the ideological assumption within film theory, that the person with the camera possesses the gaze, possesses the power, that the camera is a kind of power. But I think that what we see is that if you are patient and you give that interaction time, it will evolve into a lot of different kinds of looks and gazes. And to the degree that there are power relationships at all, they’re actually very fluid.”

In the one instance when Takesue has brought her camera closer to home, she has captured a similar network of multivalent gazes. For 95 and 6 to Go (2016), the filmmaker went to Hawaii to visit her grandfather Tom—one of the most captivating subjects in her oeuvre—to help ease him into a new phase of life following the death of her grandmother. Takesue did not set out to make a film. She was in a bit of a creative lull after spending several years working on a fiction film that never came together. But while observing and speaking with Tom, she began to see him open up in new ways. He had never previously expressed interest in Takesue’s filmmaking, but during this time he spent days reading the screenplay for her halted project and became focused on giving her extensive notes and creative advice.

“He reads my screenplay and I see this whole new dimension in him,” she said. “It animated him in this totally surprising way. Fast forward several years, and the script has not been made. I’m in this complete limbo state, and my grandfather is too. And so we’re together for the first time in our lives. But all the while this is happening, he is saying, ‘If you show this to anyone, I will disown you and I will never forgive you.’ And of course it’s resolved at the end, but while I was shooting I never in any way thought I was going to make the film. I’m from a Japanese family, and that issue of privacy is very serious. People asked me, why would you film him if you weren’t going to make a film? And I said, because this was the way that we were able to connect. It was the catalyst for me looking at him carefully and for him engaging with me.”

Tom is a fascinating screen presence: terse, irascible, no-nonsense, but with a romantic side that comes to the fore when discussing his granddaughter’s script. He suggests the inclusion of 1940s torch songs (and sings a few of them), gives character advice, and, most poignantly, implicitly reads the love story in the screenplay through the lens of his own memories of courting his late wife. In a sense, Takesue’s unproduced screenplay does get “filmed” in 95 and 6 to Go. It becomes the central object by which Takesue and her grandfather are able to understand one another and their very different lives. I cannot say definitively that this is Takesue’s best film, but it is indeed my personal favorite. In it, we see the patience and generosity of the filmmaker, honed through interactions in distant lands and foreign cultures, brought back into the family fold. The result is a bracing reminder that we all contain multitudes, and that those closest to us may benefit the most from having the space to reveal themselves.

It was the invention of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century that first brought women into the white-collar workplace in large numbers. In films such as the selection of Office Romances now streaming on the Criterion Channel, Hollywood grappled—sometimes clumsily or ambivalently, sometimes daringly, sometimes frivolously—with what heterosexual relationships might look like in a world where women are no longer relegated to the home, where they might be men’s colleagues, their rivals, or even their bosses. The genre is also, in a profoundly American way, about the romance of work itself. It captures the sounds and textures, the joys and frustrations, of the daily routine, and the glories and pitfalls of building one’s identity around professional achievement. Asked how she can endure the long hours and endless demands of her job, a magazine editor played by Kay Francis in Man Wanted (1932) beams, “It’s all in the game—and I love it!”

In Conference

Set in a publishing company, The Office Wife opens with an editor, Larry Fellowes (Lewis Stone), meeting with one of his authors, a middle-aged woman (played by Blanche Friderici) who sports man-tailored clothes and cropped hair and smokes a cigar. He suggests that she write a series of articles on the proposition that “the modern businessman’s secretary is closer to him than his wife.” Oddly, the elegant, silver-haired Fellowes seems oblivious to the fact that his efficient but plain secretary (Dale Fuller) is in love with him, until she faints, and then quits, upon learning that he is getting married. Proving his own theory, Larry is soon spending more time and getting along better with his new assistant, Anne (Dorothy Mackaill)—who is both efficient and lovely—than with his high-society wife, who responds to his neglect by taking a lover. Based on a 1930 novel of the same name by Faith Baldwin, The Office Wife tempers its Cinderella plot with a dose of Depression-era cynicism. This is mostly injected by Joan Blondell, as Anne’s wised-up sister, who works as a dress model and pragmatically accepts that her position depends on tolerating a certain amount of her boss’s pawing. (Workplace sexual harassment was frankly exposed in Hollywood movies long before it became the subject of scandals, laws, and corporate policies.) Blondell, making her talkie debut here, would become one of Warner’s hardest-working stars in the thirties, bringing a reliable radiance and sweet-tart fizz to every single appearance.

Two years later, Warner Bros. thriftily recycled the same story with a gender reversal: in Man Wanted, David Manners is the secretary whose loyalty, tireless energy, and pretty face endear him to his boss, Lois Ames (Francis), who runs a magazine called the 400. The film opens with a receptionist insisting that Ames cannot see anyone because she is “in conference”: a cut reveals her conference to be a desktop smooching session with her husband, an idle polo player who can’t fathom why she relishes her job. Not surprisingly, she soon has even better chemistry with a man who respects and shares her appetite for work and toils constantly by her side. Both versions of this story reveal that it is not only since the advent of email and cell phones that professionals have been expected to work late nights and weekends, and during vacations. Not that dictating letters while lounging by the pool, or talking over editorial decisions in a palatial hotel suite at a summer resort, looks terribly stressful; handsomely directed by William Dieterle and shot by Gregg Toland, the whole film has a frictionless sheen. At home in these sleek settings, the eternally soignée Kay Francis could not be further from the stereotype of the high-powered woman as joyless, driven, and brittle. She has the warm, easy luster of someone truly satisfied by doing a good day’s work.

Punching the Clock

Annoyed by his employees’ chronic tardiness, a blowhard boss instructs his office manager to fire the next person who comes in late. By chance, that happens to be Arthur Ferguson Jones (Edward G. Robinson), a timid clerk who has hitherto had a perfect record for punctuality. While he is still making excuses about a malfunctioning alarm clock, a young woman swaggers through the door, puffing on a cigarette. Told she is late, she quips cheekily: “Late—what for? Did something happen?” She is promptly canned as of the end of the week, but she shrugs it off; the camera tracks backward as she strides gaily into the room, sits down, puts her feet up on the desk, and opens a newspaper. This is Miss Clark (Jean Arthur), the object of Jones’s dazzled crush. He has a picture of her hanging on the wall of his bedroom and anonymously sends her what she calls “sloppy” poems.

The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), an offbeat blend of workplace romantic comedy and gangster farce (directed by, of all people, John Ford), revolves around Jones and his exact resemblance to “Killer” Mannion, Public Enemy Number One, also played by Robinson in a snarling spoof of his Little Caesar persona. But the best thing in the movie is the incandescent Jean Arthur. She was one of the 1930s’ archetypal working girls, and here she creates the most dashing and confident of her many versions of that character. When she and Jonesy, as she calls him, are arrested while lunching together—the police mistake him for Mannion—he is mortified, but she takes the whole thing as a lark, gleefully playing the role of the gangster’s moll and feeding false leads to the gullible cops. And she is delighted when Jonesy, after getting drunk with his boss during working hours, finds the courage to kiss her—in front of the whole office—afterward letting out a woozy “whoopee!”

Arthur plays something almost like a double role herself in More Than a Secretary (1936). Faced with a nice-looking man, she turns on a dime from a capable, tart-tongued professional to a lovelorn, mooning schoolgirl. Her character, bespectacled Carol Baldwin, runs a secretarial school with her friend and roommate, played by the redoubtable Ruth Donnelly. The film opens with the two teachers instructing classrooms full of young women hammering away at their typewriters. They roll their eyes in despair over one student who, when chided for her poor work and lazy attitude, explains that she is only looking for opportunities to “meet a nice man.” The school is not a matrimonial agency, the owners insist, to which the student, Maisie, retorts, “That’s what you think.”

Maisie (Dorothea Kent) is a one-dimensional foil to Carol: a baby-faced, baby-talking blonde whose cute-but-dumb persona and shameless flattery work on men like hypnosis. Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls (1931) presents a far more nuanced picture of two blondes, in this case sisters named Mae and June, who arrive in New York devoid of any education or skills and stumble into jobs for which they are vastly underqualified, while getting entangled with three very different men. The screenplay, by Zoë Akins, was adapted from a 1930 play called Blind Mice, by Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan. With so many women involved in its creation, you might expect a celebration of female independence and capability; instead, the film is a realistic portrait of precarity and confusion. These girls do not work because they want to but because they have to, and they are vulnerable to both romantic illusions and the hardnosed assumption that security lies in latching on to a well-heeled man. If one is lucky, he might also be nice.

Five years later, in More Than a Secretary, this pre-Code frankness is replaced by a fanciful Hollywood version of Depression-era America in which jobs are easy to come by, and to walk away from. The plot’s premise, initially, seems far-fetched. Mistaken for an applicant for a secretarial position, Carol spontaneously goes along with the mix-up because she fancies the boss, Fred Gilbert. (He is played by George Brent, whose lack of charm never stopped him from being inexplicably cast as an irresistible heartthrob.) Gilbert is the editor of a health magazine called Body and Brain, and the film amusingly satirizes its culture of mandatory office calisthenics, fresh air, and raw carrots. Carol, a steak-and-martini gal, is appalled by this but so savvy that she has soon boosted circulation and been promoted to associate editor. She understands what readers want: entertainment, with a soupcon of sex. Journalism, with its high-pressure deadlines, circulation wars, and storytelling sizzle, is in Hollywood movies the most romantic of professions, and perhaps an allegory for moviemaking itself.

Office Politics

In His Girl Friday (1940), journalism is a contact sport and conversation a speed event. One of the most exhilarating of all romantic comedies, the film is set in a series of drab, generic interiors: a newspaper office, a restaurant, a courthouse pressroom, and a jail cell. When Howard Hawks directed the second film adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s seminal newspaper drama The Front Page, he and screenwriter Charles Lederer did nothing at all to “open out” the stage play—yet few movies crackle with more electric energy or move at a more frenetic pace. What Hawks did change was the gender of reporter Hildy Johnson, so that the story of unscrupulous editor Walter Burns trying to inveigle his star writer into coming back to work on the paper became also the story of an ex-husband trying to win back the wife who divorced him and is planning to marry a stodgy insurance salesman and settle down in Albany.

From the moment Hildy (Rosalind Russell) enters the newsroom, we know she’s in her element. In a snazzy pinstriped suit and a kooky hat that dares you to find it ridiculous, she sails across the room, tossing off greetings to former coworkers, basking in the raffish atmosphere. However insistently she may tell Walter (Cary Grant) that she wants to get away from this chaotic racket and go “someplace where I can be a woman,” we know that he is right when he tells her that she is a “newspaperman,” and will never be happy as a hausfrau. He may want her as his wife, but that comes a distant second to his respect for her professional skills. The paper comes first, and he needs her to cover the sensational story of a mentally disabled man about to be executed for killing a policeman, and the corrupt politicians eager to hang him for the sake of votes. When the two get going on a wild spree of scoops and skullduggery, they are like jazz musicians jamming on a crazy high, talking over each other, battling for dominance, feeding off each other’s inspiration. Grant harangues like a cross between an auctioneer, a prosecuting attorney, and an evangelist aflame with the holy spirit. Russell lunges and sprints, all elbows and knees, fueled by a volatile mix of aggravation and ecstasy. Walter and Hildy end up literally and figuratively handcuffed together: no one else would put up with them.

If they are two of a kind, the couple in Woman of the Year (1942) are opposites who attract. Sam Craig and Tess Harding work for the same newspaper (the fictional New York Chronicle), but he is a down-to-earth sportswriter and she is a highflying, globe-trotting political columnist. After she speaks dismissively of baseball on a radio program, they spar in print, but strike sparks the moment they meet. This was the first on-screen encounter between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn: in their legendary meet-cute, Sam walks into an office to see Tess perched on a desk, mid-laugh, extending one slender leg to adjust her stocking. They proceed to flirt through interoffice memos. She has a bigger and fancier office, where he—pushing past her officious male secretary—barges in to find her with her shapely feet up on a desk, talking on the phone in Spanish to Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. He proposes to her in the wire room, amid the tap-tap-tapping of incoming news items. Both adore their work.

Hepburn and Tracy would make several more films where they are brought together by professional activities: in Adam’s Rib (1949), they are married lawyers who wind up on opposite sides of a case; in Pat and Mike (1952), she is an athlete and he is her coach; and in Desk Set (1957), discussed below, they cross paths in a broadcasting company. Woman of the Year is firmly populist: Tess must learn to appreciate America’s national pastime, but Sam is never required to get up to speed on foreign affairs. After the two marry, the film’s attitude toward her shifts gradually from awe tinged with light mockery to disapproval mixed with pity. That she is forced to demonstrate at excruciating length her inability to cook breakfast can be written off as dated (this ending was rewritten and reshot, against the wishes of the two primary screenwriters, Ring Lardner Jr., and Michael Kanin, after initial test screenings), but a subplot in which she adopts a European war orphan only to neglect him feels far more punitive and at odds with the warm, self-aware woman we’ve met. Fortunately, the rapport between Hepburn and Tracy rises above clumsy gender politics, and director George Stevens knows how to make the most of it. He proves here, as he would again in The More the Merrier (1943) and A Place in the Sun (1951), that no Hollywood filmmaker was better at bottling the elusive lightning of romantic chemistry.

Office Parties

Bunny is already involved in an office romance when the film begins. She is dating her boss (Gig Young), a conventional type who leans on her plainly superior intelligence while stringing her along and avoiding commitment. Richard, by contrast, immediately recognizes her as unique. In the film’s best scene, over a brown-bag lunch on a chilly rooftop patio, he presents her with a series of brainteasers and memory tests and probes the way she forms associations that give her spooky powers of recall. This is both an eccentric form of flirtation and an introduction to the themes of how human and machine intelligence differ. Bunny sees “Emmy” (the nickname for Richard’s room-size computer) as a rival who will always come first in his affections. Fear spreads among employees that they will soon be replaced by the “electronic brain”—hence the gloom underlying the holiday party, as they attempt to drown their anxieties in paper cups of champagne.

In the end, Desk Set presents a reassuring vision of technology, partly by showing it as too temperamental and error-prone to be reliable, and partly by conjuring up ethical corporate heads who have no desire to cut their staffs. (Alas, when was the last time anyone called up a reference department and asked a woman with a pencil in her hair for information instead of a search engine or chatbot?) Desk Set feels both prescient and nostalgic, with its colorful midcentury modern design and blithe midcentury optimism. But its message is timeless: that intelligence is sexy and using one’s brain can be exciting. Why should AI get to have all the fun?

In the more than fifty years since its release, Bob Fosse’s Lenny, which seemed certain to serve as a permanent enshrinement of Bruce’s legacy when it opened in 1974, has receded from cultural centrality in tandem with its subject. In its time, the movie competed with the likes of Chinatown and The Godfather: Part II at the Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay. But the film is now remembered primarily through the prism of Fosse’s next movie, 1979’s autofiction masterpiece All That Jazz, in which director-choreographer Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is seen driving himself toward a heart attack while struggling with the editing of a stark, adult, black-and-white movie about a stand-up comedian that is, in all respects short of the use of actual footage, clearly Lenny.

The reputation of Lenny Bruce himself was in a long, slow fade even before Fosse decided to memorialize him in a movie. A nightclub comic (he was not, to put it mildly, TV-friendly) who was determined to say the unsayable—about the Kennedy assassination, bigotry, religion, and, most frequently and profanely, sex—he was arrested half a dozen times for obscenity in the last five years of his life. His legal battles consumed him, contributing to his drug spiral; his once incendiary performances turned into increasingly erratic, rambling, alternately furious and incredulous recitations of court transcripts and legal documents. As a comedy phenomenon, Bruce peaked long before his death, and by the time Fosse’s biopic arrived, some of his admirers were worried that it was already too late to recapture what had made him so remarkable. Some leading critics were skeptical; in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael complained that Lenny worked too hard to humanize a man whose “cool pimp’s mask of indifference was almost reptilian” and argued that the film was only interested in wooing “audiences who want to believe that Lenny Bruce was a saintly gadfly who was martyred . . . well-meaning innocents who never saw [him].” In other words, she felt, to “get” Bruce, you had to have been there—an impossible hurdle for any filmmaker seeking to tell his story.

But Kael conceded that Bob Fosse was not just any filmmaker; she called him “a true prodigy” and wrote, “I don’t know of any other director who entered moviemaking so late in life and developed such technical proficiency.” Today, with the real Lenny Bruce a distant memory for some and a nonmemory for most, it’s possible for us to see Lenny for what it is: the exact midpoint of Fosse’s brief five-act filmography, an essential key to understanding his obsessions, and a gesture of postmortem outreach from one prickly, difficult, jagged-edged artist to another.

Fosse, whose work as a director and choreographer of Broadway musicals made his reputation, had barely embarked on his career as a filmmaker when Lenny was first conceived, just three years after Bruce’s death. Commissioned to write Bruce’s life story for Columbia Pictures in 1969, Julian Barry turned in a screenplay that was deemed too much of a downer (it’s hard to imagine what the studio was expecting). He decided to turn his script into a play; the result opened in New York in 1971, ran for a year, and won its star Cliff Gorman the Tony for Best Actor. Lenny’s Broadway success got Hollywood interested again, and Fosse found himself drawn to the project. His directorial debut, an adaptation of the musical Sweet Charity, had been released in 1969 to indifferent reviews and poor box office. But it wasn’t long before he had a run that started with the release of his breakthrough smash Cabaret (1972), continued with the Emmy-winning concert special Liza with a “Z” and the opening of Pippin for what would turn out to be a nearly five-year Broadway run, and crested in early 1973 with an Oscar for Best Director. Sweet Charity was forgotten; Fosse, now in his midforties, could do what he wanted, and what he wanted to do was Lenny.

He did not, however, have the clout to get the film made without a big name. Cliff Gorman would not sell tickets; Dustin Hoffman would, and the country’s most popular Jewish movie star playing its most notorious Jewish comedian felt like such a natural sell that nobody even needed to say it out loud. Years later, Fosse did put Gorman in All That Jazz as the star of The Stand-up, the Lenny-esque movie within the movie, possibly as a make-good to him but just as possibly as a finger in Hoffman’s eye. According to Sam Wasson’s biography Fosse, the director and his leading man were at odds even before a single frame of Lenny was shot. Hoffman didn’t think the script had a story, didn’t think Fosse knew how to direct actors, and bristled at—and finally ignored—Fosse’s insistence that he forgo doing research for the role. When Hoffman returned to New York after a trip to Los Angeles brimming with new information about Bruce’s personality and performance technique that he had gleaned from talking to the comic’s friends and colleagues, Fosse declined to add any of his discoveries to the script. “What do you find funny about Lenny Bruce?” the exasperated star finally asked him. Fosse’s reply: “I don’t think Lenny Bruce is funny.” Hoffman immediately tried to get out of the film.

One doesn’t have to take sides in the dispute between two intensely driven perfectionists to see that Hoffman is not an ideal fit for the role; the friction that that generates is one of the things that makes Lenny fascinating. Reality turned out to be more complicated than “They’re both Jewish,” given that Hoffman’s and Bruce’s approaches, worldviews, and even speaking styles came from wildly different parts of the Jewish tradition. As artists, they differed just as much: Hoffman tended to build his characters from within, trying to understand everything about them, working from and toward empathy, and in Lenny, he was tasked with playing a man who was not especially empathetic and—except in court—not all that interested in being understood. As many critics noted at the time, Hoffman doesn’t look or sound all that much like Bruce; it’s easy to understand his plea to Fosse that they just invent a new character from whole cloth and call the movie Benny. But as you watch him perform Bruce’s routines in the movie—many of them verbatim—it’s impossible not to appreciate the work of a brilliant actor internalizing his subject syllable by syllable, trying to make sense of him and trying to help us make sense of him.

Fosse was coming from a different place, and his icy, at times detached objectivity works with—and against—Hoffman’s essential warmth in ways that increase the movie’s power. Late in the development of Lenny, Fosse and Barry came up with the idea, extraordinarily novel for the time, of structuring the movie as a mock documentary, with on-camera interviews with Bruce’s survivors—his widow, Honey (played with affecting sincerity by Valerie Perrine); his mother, Sally Marr; and his manager—interspersed with scenes from his life, relationships, and trials both literal and figurative. Fosse decided to shoot the film in black and white (along with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, Lenny was one of the first 1970s studio movies to opt out of color). But there is nothing gentle or nostalgic about the bravura high-contrast work of the young cinematographer Bruce Surtees—Lenny often looks as if it’s shining a flashlight in its characters’ faces. The film’s visual aesthetic is harsh and unrelenting, and the quasi-documentary format eventually suggests that Fosse is interrogating the act of interrogation itself—he’s asking questions about how much truth there can possibly be in any movie that purports to show you a life, and, perhaps, about how much Lenny Bruce’s routines were an attempt at raw honesty, and how much they were an unconscious means of disguise. Can we “get” Lenny? Did Lenny get himself?

Questions about performance versus reality define not just Lenny but Fosse’s entire filmography. Sweet Charity—which had its origins in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria—is about a taxi dancer (Shirley MacLaine) whose job it is to sell the lie of romance to her customers even as she finds herself succumbing to it. Cabaret treats many of its musical numbers as escapes from the ugly truths of the outside world, then has those ugly truths reassert themselves as showbiz razzle-dazzle. And the movies with which Fosse followed Lenny, All That Jazz and Star 80 (1983), are even darker, ending, as Lenny does, in death and suggesting that those invested in creating illusions—of art, of beauty, of stage magic—are all spiraling toward the same fate. As perhaps Fosse knew he was. All That Jazz wasn’t lying; he really did have his first cardiac crisis while pounding down the addictive prescription drug Dexamyl as he simultaneously edited Lenny and staged the new musical Chicago, in which life is one big production number featuring murder, manipulation, and serial lying. With every subsequent project, Fosse’s work becomes more urgent, more death-haunted, more terrifying. In that context, Lenny feels like the last moment before he leaps off the cliff: the film is a coolly controlled performance piece about a man whose coolly controlled performance pieces made him famous—until he started to lose his cool and control.

Lenny is not an inviting movie in the same way that Lenny Bruce was not an inviting man. Fosse stayed true to his statement to Hoffman; he did not make a film that was likely to persuade anyone that Bruce was particularly funny. The story starts and ends with him bombing onstage, the first time because he tries to be somebody else, and the last because he cannot manage to get out of his own head. And yet along the way, Bruce becomes both the sympathetic figure that Hoffman wanted him to be and the case study that Fosse saw him as. The last, bleakest third of the film, in which Bruce faces endless legal crises and is shattered by his inability to surmount them with the only tool at his disposal, his words, is both moving and deeply disquieting; sixty years does not seem to be reassuringly long past a moment when an artist could face four months in a workhouse—the sentence Bruce was fighting at the time of his death—for saying dirty words onstage.

The gravity of the threat Bruce was confronting is brought home in a sequence at the end of Lenny that depicts the performer at his lowest and showcases both director and star at the height of their powers. Here, the clashing approaches of Fosse, Hoffman, and Bruce come together beautifully, perhaps because they’re all, in different ways, forensic. Ruined by drugs and by legal woes, Bruce takes the stage in a club one more time, maybe one last time. In a scene that Fosse presents in one unbroken seven-minute take, Bruce rails against the police, the judges, the hypocrisy of his persecutors. He paces, slumps, sits on the rail of the stage, stands up again, chases and loses his thoughts, fumbles frantically for meaning, can’t remember what he was going to say, and eventually disintegrates into a narcotic haze. The audience watches with sorrow and respect, and so does Fosse, who positions Surtees’s camera slightly to the side, high up in an apparently tiered performance space that makes Hoffman look like a subject in an old-fashioned medical theater—a cadaver-to-be. There is no flashiness or showy technique in the scene, only an actor trying to embody a tragedy in progress and a filmmaker who knows that all he can ultimately do is bear witness. You don’t have to have been there to get it.

Gorky was dazzled, as were many others, by the Lumières’ 1895 invention, the Cinématographe, a major advancement on the first attempts at motion picture photography. Before the Lumières, the most successful of these was Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, which presented films in a box that viewers peered into. Auguste Lumière reportedly said of it, “We have to get the image out of the box and project it in front of an audience.” And so they did, with their elegant contraption, which could photograph, process, and project moving images. Within a decade, the Lumières used it to create more than two thousand films.

As Thierry Frémaux shows in his enthralling new film Lumière, le cinéma!, now on the Criterion Channel, these were the works not just of inventors but of the first film artists. With dynamic compositions, endlessly fascinating subjects, and ingeniously choreographed action, the films—each under a minute—are surprisingly modern and beautifully structured in their control of time and space, showing us how to see the world in a new way.

Lumière, le cinéma! compiles 120 of them, beautifully restored, into a coherent feature-length work that functions as a love letter to cinema and as an essay film. Serving as a loquacious benshi, Frémaux narrates, sharing fascinating historic details, critical observations, and philosophical thoughts. As head of the Cannes Film Festival and director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, he has the perfect vantage point to draw stylistic connections between the Lumière films and the work of great directors to follow.

The Lumières dispatched cameramen around the world, to capture teeming cityscapes, domestic scenes, acrobatic performances, military exercises, and the urtexts for such future genres as the cat video, the martial arts film, and, presaging Jackass, the prank film. A bustling Paris scene lingers on a family at rest in the foreground, a moment in time that reminds Frémaux of Proust; a cavalry charge surges from deep background to immediate foreground, then carries on, leaving an empty frame; workers exiting a factory in Vietnam (then Indochina), passing a formation of French soldiers, evokes a colonial past; a scene of women loading wheelbarrows outside a coal mine shows their role in this physically grueling work. And even the simplest subjects—a shoreline, waves breaking against rocks—filmed with the minimalism of Chantal Akerman—take on a striking modernity. 

Frémaux’s film is a celebration and a reminder. At a moment when theatrical exhibition faces ongoing uncertainty, it returns us to cinema’s foundational gesture: the shared experience of watching moving images together. I talked with Frémaux at the Criterion office about Lumière, le cinéma! As always, his energy matched the enthusiasm of the film’s well-earned exclamation point.

Your film addresses a few misconceptions about the Lumière films. Often people say that Georges Méliès was making narrative films and that Auguste and Louis Lumière were just filming life, which takes away from what they really achieved.

And those two conceptions became: Lumière is documentary, and Méliès is fiction. It’s not true. Because one of the first Lumière films is The Gardener, which is a fiction and a comedy. The Lumières right away understood that they can film a story. And, by the way, the first Méliès films were documentaries he did at a railway station.

 

When you watch the Lumière films, you understand they are putting on-screen the daily poetry of life, and Méliès reinvents what life is, creating magic and illusion. That’s why I say in the movie that Lumière is Rossellini, and Méliès is Fellini. Lumière is the French New Wave, the modern. Méliès is maybe Hollywood. And I love both. But it’s not about documentary and fiction. As an artist, writer, or painter, you have two approaches. You make something very realistic—though it won’t be totally realistic, because you find your own way to do it—or you make it from your imagination and you are Picasso. So there is on one hand George Méliès, Stanley Donen, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron. And on the other you have Lumière, Murnau, Bresson, Renoir, Kiarostami, Pialat. And that path. So you have those two. And the history of cinema is the development of those two families. And me, as a movie buff, I love both. I don’t take one over the other.

I think it’s important that you connect the Lumières to these great directors, like Bresson and Chantal Akerman, because there’s so much artistry to what the Lumières are doing. And that’s always what amazes me about their films. The decisions they made about composition and camera placement are so rich. I don’t know if you have an idea of where that came from. They seem to have such a deep understanding of the medium right at the beginning.

We have some archival material and letters about the scientific process but little else. So it’s like with Shakespeare—we don’t know, we have to make hypotheses. The Lumières are the same. Did they know the painting of their time, the literature of their time, the photography of their time? We don’t know. But we do know that they were fully of their time. In the first montage in my film, I mention a Lumière short that is very similar to a Cézanne painting. Did they know the Cézanne painting or not? If they knew it, it’s extraordinary how they remade it, and if they didn’t know the painting, then the anonymous Lumières from Lyon made something similar to the great artist Cézanne. The Lumières were industrial photographers. So the quality of the black and white, the quality of the grain, the quality of the focus looks like the best photography of the time. But the word cinématographe means “writing movement,” so the Lumières made each film as cinema and not a photograph.

Even if they were thinking of paintings, there was an instinct about what to do with those fifty seconds.

Yes, exactly. The story of cinema is not the story of images. It’s the story of shots. And each film is a shot, and a shot that means something. And there are some films without any movement, only I don’t want to say silence, but you can feel the silence of the room or of the scene. So they understood that cinema was about movement but could also be about silence, about time. Like Ozu. They tried a lot of things. And that’s what we wanted to show.

I think that’s why it’s great that you start with the quote from Agnès Varda that stresses that, as a modern filmmaker, she sees the Lumières as peers, as contemporaries almost.

Cinema is a young art. One hundred and thirty years is nothing.

I just want to pick up on one thing you said about the quality of the images. How are the films preserved so beautifully? In the U.S., we’re used to seeing copies of the Edison films and other early films coming from paper prints, so the quality is not as good. Were the negatives preserved by the Lumières themselves?

After World War II, in 1946, Georges Sadoul, the great French historian, went to see Louis Lumière. Lumière’s wife had died already, so he was living alone in the south of France, and they had a great conversation. Sadoul’s last question was: Where are the films? And Lumière said, I have them. And he had the films in Lyon, protected. Sadoul told him he needed to send them to Henri Langlois, to the Cinémathèque française. So that’s why the Cinémathèque has such a good collection of the films, and that’s why our film is partly dedicated to Langlois, because he was one of the first Lumière fans and supporters, and he screened them. On seeing them in 1965, Godard said that the Lumières are the extraordinary inside the ordinary thing, and Méliès is the opposite, the normal thing inside the extraordinary.

 

So, thirty years ago, for the centennial of cinema, the Lumière Institute, the Cinémathèque, and the government restored many of the films, from negatives and from some positive prints. [My producer] Maëlle Arnaud is in charge of the new process of restoration. After 130 years, the film is fragile, so we have to do digital restoration. There are two thousand movies, and we have restored five hundred. So we have a lot to restore, and will maybe make a third compilation or a fourth. And this year we are going to open a web platform for people to see films without my commentary. Shut up, Frémaux [laughs]! We also want to make a catalogue raisonné. We are really focused on our responsibility to protect those films. Cinema is a young art, and we have to preserve it.

But there is a phenomenon now in repertory theaters; there’s a younger audience going to theaters. I wanted to ask about the role of Antoine, the Lumières’ father. It seems like he really saw the need to show these films in a theater.

The father did two very important things. First, he said no to the Kinetoscope, that we can do better. And one year later, when the Lumières were ready to show films, he organized the first public screening with tickets, in Paris at the Grand Café. Who could guess then that cinema would become what it became?

It’s very touching at the end of the film when you suggest that, early in the twentieth century, the Lumières realized that they were finished with cinema. Why did they stop?

Two things. First, Louis Lumière said, “We left the cinema to the artists.” We say he was an artist. You have to just look at the work. Those films are made by people with a total consciousness of the art. But the Lumières were very interested in two things: one was cinema, the other was color photography. In 1903, they moved on to something new, inventing the Autochrome color process. And that was the main color process until 1930, when George Eastman created a new kind of film.

 

The Lumières epitomized that moment at the end of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth century, when humanity thought that the new century would be great. It may have been the worst century of the world. But at that time, even Marcel Proust thought that life was great. And then World War I and the rest of the twentieth century happened.

I love the connection to Proust you make in the film, you know, that little film of the family.

Yes, it’s like having in one shot what Proust used two hundred pages to describe.

Forty years into an expansive career, the artist and networker Shu Lea Cheang has moved fluidly between cinema and new media in a body of work that centers technology’s entanglements with sexuality, power, and alternative social systems. Even now, as an artist still working at the edge of what’s next, she refuses to settle into reverence or retrospection. But that doesn’t stop the art world from trying to crown her with career-capping awards. That 2024 gala was the New Museum’s Rhizome benefit; she also received that year’s LG Guggenheim Award, which recognizes groundbreaking practitioners of technology-based art. A year earlier, at the Museum of Modern Art, she had premiered UKI, a long-gestating sequel to I.K.U. (2000); together, the films envision new markets powered by pornographic data. My millennial obsession with Cheang, who is in her early seventies, isn’t unique. You’ll consistently see her in the company of eager young artists. Several years ago, some of them could be found harvesting garlic from her lot in upstate New York, for an adaptation of GARLIC=RICH AIR, her 2002 project that imagines a postcapitalist barter economy with the bulb as currency. Most recently, in Berlin, Cheang debuted a new adult short film—making porn is an escape mechanism she turns to when she’s tired of art-world bureaucracy. But amid a rich oeuvre that spans cinema, software, multichannel installations, and durational performance, the eco-cyberpunk thriller Fresh Kill (1994) is a defining work.

It’s an urgent and abrasive viewing experience. Watching it feels like turning the knob on a CRT monitor and stumbling onto pirate television, as crackling scenes of domesticity are intercut with hacked broadcasts and fake commercials. Fresh Kill now plays less like the anxious fantasies of science fiction than like an apocryphal account of the political and material world we live in today. With it, Cheang diagnosed sociopolitical patterns, from corporate environmental violence to data as a tool of governance, that would only intensify in the decades following its release. Cheang coined the term eco-cybernoia for Fresh Kill’s billing, to evoke the feeling of being in a world so saturated with corporate waste that it intrudes into both personal and planetary existence. The film embodies the sensations of being alive when ecological ruin and digital connectivity pulse through every aspect of the everyday. It feels as apt in 2026 as it was in 1994.

At Fresh Kill’s center are Shareen Lightfoot (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire Mayakovsky (Erin McMurtry), young lesbian parents who are raising their daughter, Honey (Nelini Stamp), in a converted garage at the edge of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Shareen salvages refuse while Claire works as a waitress, and both become caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. Punctuating scenes of their domestic life, a crisis of transnational corporate waste unfolds through local broadcasts and crackling news clips. When Honey begins to glow an eerie radioactive green, visibly contaminated by the city’s poisoned food supply, Claire and Shareen partner with Jiannbin Lui (Abraham Lim), a computer hacker, to infiltrate corporate databases and pirate media. After Honey disappears, investigation gives way to resistance, as the activists reclaim the media networks originally built to serve capital in order to broadcast the responsible corporation’s crimes.

To understand Fresh Kill, we must understand the specific cultural milieu from which it emerged. Downtown New York in the early nineties was a crucible of experimental art, LGBTQ+ activism, anti-globalization consciousness, and early digital-network culture. Computers were connected in what was still a pre-browser global network, where bulletin-board systems hummed with chatter from activists sharing strategies long before online social platforms existed. The city’s public-access cable television was a contested space where artists and activists seized airtime as a way to dismantle corporate media. Collectives like Paper Tiger Television exposed how power operated through images by dissecting news graphics with hand-drawn diagrams and photocopied texts. Deep Dish TV used satellite broadcasts to assemble grassroots programming on topics like AIDS and the Gulf War, stitched together from VHS tapes and material shot in community studios and living rooms. It was an ecosystem defined by urgency, rooted in the belief that access to transmission was itself an important goal of political struggle. Cheang, who had migrated to New York from Taiwan in the late seventies and earned a master’s degree in cinema studies from New York University, quickly embedded herself in this culture of counterbroadcasting at both Paper Tiger and Deep Dish, where the question of who controlled media was inseparable from that of how power operated.

The alternate version of early-nineties New York that Cheang shows us in Fresh Kill has accelerated into dystopia: Staten Island’s shorelines are clogged with industrial runoff, and animals glow an unnatural radioactive green. Domestic interiors are realistically warm and cluttered, like any small family apartment, yet they are constantly disrupted by flickering screens. Advertisements intrude throughout: for Sea Wonder canned fish, an activist ranting about the “big boys of City Hall,” a sex toy introduced alongside Saran-Wrapped vegetables, a lightbulb as bright as an atomic bomb. A looping PSA from the GLOBEX corporation features a suited man with arms outstretched, a levitating Earth suspended between his hands. “We care,” the slogan repeats, hollow and relentless. Corporate power appears not as looming skyscrapers but as omnipresent branding and inescapable media noise.

In a 2024 interview with Dazed, Cheang describes how “living with the AIDS epidemic in New York City during the eighties and nineties shifted the focus of my work toward transmission. I’m conceptually interested in orgasms as data, in signals, airwaves, and viruses.” By the midnineties, Cheang was expanding her praxis into cyberspace, bringing these corporeal and technological modes of transmission to the screen. Media junk and toxic matter circulate together—the glowing screen, the glowing fish, and the glowing child render pollution both chemical and semiotic. Pleasure, contamination, information, and illness all move through shared channels. Fresh Kill takes place in a world where technology feels sticky and bodily, and where networks seep into food, water, and flesh.

In the nineties, Cheang lived on the Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and belonged to a community of independent filmmakers including the likes of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. “For a woman filmmaker, particularly of Asian descent, to try to make an independent film in 35 mm was quite a task,” she said in an interview. “It was more like a political statement.” The film’s crew was racially mixed and predominantly women. With cinematographer Jane Castle, Cheang juxtaposes carefully staged family scenes in deep, saturated colors with grainy television clips.

The film’s frenetic editing (by Lauren Zuckerman) approximates the experience of channel surfing, an embodied mediation that anticipated how our media consumption would evolve over the subsequent decade, first with web surfing and now with doomscrolling. Other American independent films of the time that were similarly shaped by the AIDS crisis are also formally disruptive and politicized, as articulated in B. Ruby Rich’s conceptualization of a New Queer Cinema. Works like Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) and Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) embrace queer lives as unstable, defiant, erotic, and politically charged, often foregrounding antiheroes and leaving endings unresolved.

Fresh Kill participates in the New Queer Cinema while also drawing from cybernetic critique, a framework that understands how power is exercised through systems and feedback loops rather than by singular agents. Cheang visualizes this logic through interconnected scenes of toxic waste, food supply chains, and broadcast media. After Claire and Shareen team up with Jiannbin, their investigation unfolds through acts of interception. They tap into corporate databases, trace waste shipments across borders, and pirate broadcast channels to leak information. These narrative moments are punctuated by hijacked television segments and fake commercials, mimicking the tactics of signal jamming. In staging the tactical misuse of corporate media infrastructures as resistance, Fresh Kill anticipates what would soon be named “hacktivism,” the use of hacking as civil disobedience to expose and resist systems of power. Soon after its release, the film was noted in hacker circles as an influence on cyber-activist thinking, and one of the earliest mentions of the term hacktivism was in a review of Fresh Kill.

At the film’s heart is an ecopolitical terrain in which waste is a lived reality. The Fresh Kills landfill, a literal mound of consumed and discarded lives and objects, is both backdrop and character—an omnipresent deposit of capitalist ruins. Throughout Cheang folds shots of this American wasteland into footage of Orchid Island, a nuclear-waste site in Taiwan tied to her own early life. The film opens on that island, with three rowboats silhouetted against open water, bells chiming faintly on the soundtrack. This serene image is immediately ruptured by the vibrating blue screen of a CRT monitor, scored by blaring electric guitar, before giving way to the chaotic life of the landfill. The sequence establishes the film’s governing logic of relay and interruption, between land and screen, periphery and metropolis. Shareen, a picker, hustles through winding mounds of refuse, passing figures staged like allegories of disposal: a woman racing with an overloaded cart, a man pantomiming a bath in a discarded fountain drained of water, an Indigenous activist hammering a sign into a post. A wall of CRT monitors, evoking a rogue Nam June Paik installation, flickers with unstable news footage announcing a waste barge searching for a port. The broadcast collapses into Orchid Island once more, where a mother and child watch American television and waves crash over the black screen of a computer monitor, half buried in the surf.

This oscillation continues as the film cuts to Claire working at the opulent sushi restaurant, serving suited elites. As she ferries home, we see the city skyline under a veil of red smog that bleeds down the frame. Documentary-like footage of Indigenous rowers on Orchid Island punctures the fiction. Capital accumulates in metropolitan interiors while risk is displaced outward, along racialized and colonial lines. From its opening movements, Fresh Kill identifies environmental racism as a planetary system.

The film’s casting extends this critique into kinship itself. Racial differences are neither explained nor resolved: Shareen is South Asian, Claire is white, Honey is Black; Shareen’s father is Native American; Claire’s mother is Black, her brother East Asian; and so on. Multiracial family ties are presented as given rather than exceptional. Identity operates here as a networked condition, reflecting both the global composition of New York City and the chosen families that queer life sustains and reproduces.

Peeking through the toxic media and material bombardment, we witness the protagonists hacking into broadcasts to expose corporate malfeasance. Cheang situates her practice in this dual sense of media as both an actual instrument of domination and a potential instrument of resistance. She demands that we intervene and recognize our own agency in the act of transmission. In doing so, she anticipated the feminist and political strategies that would later shape net art and digital activism, from Old Boys Network, whose internet art hacked the language of technology with sex and slime, to Electronic Disturbance Theater, which used websites to coordinate digital disruptions as protest. Like Fresh Kill, these practices treated networks as contested terrain.

For Cheang, that strategy would culminate in Brandon (1998–99), a monumental project that became the first web-based artwork commissioned and acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. This was at a time when publishing art online was still novel—only a few years after the World Wide Web had entered public use. The commission was pivotal: a major institution entrusting an emergent technology to an artist whose work had long questioned systems of visibility and control. Cheang used this unprecedented platform to construct a nonlinear, hyperlinked narrative around the life and 1993 murder of Brandon Teena in Nebraska, foregrounding a trans man’s story in a space typically associated with heteronormative visions of the future. In doing so, she demonstrated how the web could function as queer historiography. Brandon did for identity what Fresh Kill did for ecology: it rewired the conditions under which representation and power could be contested.

Unlike many films of its era, Fresh Kill weaves eroticism into the fabric of resistance. Pleasure becomes a language of insurgency, just as intimacy in “deviant” bodies can become a site of political contestation. After Honey disappears, Shareen and Claire are overcome with grief. They make love, disheveled, eyes swollen from crying, lipstick smeared. The encounter is slow, fraught, and emotionally raw. It cuts abruptly to a television newscast with a suited commentator who declares they “shouldn’t have had a kid in the first place . . . unfit, unsettled, untidy, unsafe, unmoral.” Their queerness is weaponized as evidence of deviance; they and their fellow activists are branded terrorists. A close-up of a mouth follows—it’s GLOBEX again: “We care.” Cheang’s later films push these explorations even further: I.K.U. is a sci-fi cycling of orgasmic data and the corporate commodification of pleasure, and UKI is a viral, queer saga of infected bodies and techno-liberation. But even in the early exercise of Fresh Kill, eroticism is already present as a force, insisting that desire and politics are inseparable.

Three decades after the premiere of Fresh Kill, we realize how little some conditions have changed and how many of the film’s insights describe our current political moment. Corporate power remains unrestrained, environmental injustice has accelerated, queer kinships are still contested, and hacktivist interventions are on the front lines of cultural struggle. But in celebrating Fresh Kill and its place within Cheang’s work, we see that her science fiction is inseparable from her lived politics. From Fresh Kill’s eco-cybernetic exposé to UKI’s viral insurgencies, I.K.U.’s pornographic data economy, and GARLIC=RICH AIR’s satirical commons, she consistently locates the future in sites of contamination. Taken together, this extraordinary oeuvre affirms Cheang as a foundational architect of queer science fiction, anticipating contemporary debates around technology and power. Within Cheang’s world, scenes from a near-distant future create diagnostic tools for the present.

When we next see Ned, a judge reprimands him for his client’s attempt to “defraud the county” over a bulk order of toilets that never arrived. His prosecutor friend (Ted Danson) jokes that he’s surprised Ned wasn’t “in on that toilet caper,” adding that it could have been “that quick score you’ve always been searching for.” As if on cue, Ned meets and falls into bed with the stunning Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Married to a rich older man named Edmund (Richard Crenna), she lives mostly alone in a grand old house in nearby Pinehaven. If you’ve seen Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) or any other classic noir, you might anticipate the next move, and that’s part of the giddy thrill. Matty claims she’s in love with Ned and wants a divorce, but why settle for a small fraction of the money when you could have all of it? Swiftly, a plan to murder Edmund is afoot, one that succeeds until it doesn’t—because Matty is not as she seems, and Ned, for all his scheming and hustling, doesn’t stand a chance. From here, the plot corkscrews through a series of dizzying twists as Ned sinks deeper and deeper into a hole that he has mostly dug himself.

Widely praised on its release, Body Heat launched the directing career of Kasdan, a screenwriter coming off the back-to-back successes of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It also marked a pivot from the moody, downbeat, noir-inflected movies of the 1970s (Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves), with their emphasis on corruption and stealth power, to a spate of erotically charged neonoirs (Body Double, Basic Instinct, The Last Seduction) that flourished in the eighties and nineties. At the time, Body Heat received particular attention for its provocative sex scenes—ones that classic noir could only hint at through a shared cigarette, suggestive repartee, a desperate embrace fading to black. Many contemporary critics focused on the movie’s winks to the genre—the venetian blinds, the chiaroscuro lighting, the sultry saxophone on John Barry’s score—and judged it a sleek, expertly mounted exercise in nostalgia, style, and fetish. But Kasdan, who also wrote the cunning script, had far more in mind than simple pastiche. Today, it’s clear that Body Heat is about precisely the historical moment in which it was made. Like its genre predecessors, the film uses the vehicle of a stylish sex-and-murder plot to deeply mine the anxieties of its current moment—in this case, the creeping dawn of the eighties and everything that decade would bring.

Body Heat arrived in theaters a mere seven months after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, which marked a seismic political realignment to supply-side economics and free-market capitalism. In an interview shortly after the film’s release, Kasdan said the idea for Body Heat sprang from a growing feeling that, in the seventies, his friends and contemporaries had entered the postcollege world only to discover that they could no longer do whatever they wanted, and had ended up “casting about for quick solutions.” Feeling stuck and restless, many found themselves “looking around for that great business deal or that great scam that’s going to make them a mint and buy their freedom.”

We see this political and cultural shift (foregrounded two years later in Kasdan’s The Big Chill) manifested both in Ned, unforgettably played by Hurt as a purring hustler forever looking for an angle, and in Edmund, the kind of scorched-earth venture capitalist who would ride high and unencumbered in the eighties. Much of the plot hinges on Edmund’s dubious and ruthless business dealings, which include buying up a historic beachside hotel called the Breakers to redevelop. But most seductively, we see the spirit of the age in the machinations of Matty herself. In her first major film role, Kathleen Turner, with her world-weary voice and beauty-queen face, plays Matty as the shape-shifting embodiment of the temptations of capitalism—predatory capitalism without regulation, without moral pause, without a history. As she tells Ned, her temperature “runs a couple degrees high. Around one hundred all the time. I don’t mind it. It’s the engine or something.” The engine, indeed. Matty operates like a machine, man-made and powered by desire, hers and that of others. Like the flames that decimate the Seawater Inn in the opening scene, she only moves forward—in the movie’s vernacular, she is relentless.

If, in classic film noir, the femme fatale embodies the male characters’ fears of impotent obsolescence in the post–World War II economy, Matty gives shape to Ned’s growing panic that he may not be man enough to go the distance in Reagan’s America, her escalating sexual voracity only underlining a deeper hunger, not just for money but for all the money—and for the future too.

Matty gives Ned the initial sense that he’s unlocked something in her, telling him, “I’ve never been this way. I can’t remember how I lived before.” From the beginning of their relationship, however, recalling Ned’s lover in the opening scene, she suggests he may not be up to the task. “Hey, gimme a break here,” he says as she reaches for him in a postcoital moment. “It takes a little while.” It’s a teasing exchange, playful. But when, a few scenes later, he tells her, “You’re killing me,” his tone is graver. Ned’s plaint is echoed on the night of the murder when Matty tries to prolong a strategic sexual encounter with her husband. “You trying to kill me?” Edmund asks with a rueful laugh. In the end, both men are right.

In one of the movie’s pivotal scenes, Ned runs into Matty and Edmund at a local restaurant, marking a chilling collision between fantasy and cold reality. “He’s small and mean,” Matty has told Ned. “And weak.” But, confronted with Edmund in real life, Ned finds him neither small nor especially mean, and definitely not weak. Instead, he looks powerful. When Matty excuses herself to visit the restroom, Edmund confides that he met Matty through her ex, a “dorkus” who didn’t know the score: “You’ve got to know the bottom line. That’s all that counts. He didn’t have the goods, this guy. He was like a lot of guys you run into—they want to get rich, they want to do it quick, they want to be there with one score.” That description, as Ned charmingly admits, could easily be applied to himself. Both men laugh, but Edmund is deadly serious. As if he were an early spokesperson for the eighties ethos, Edmund says one must be “willing to do what’s necessary,” his voice tightening as he adds, “whatever’s necessary.” Just as Matty’s supposed insatiability manipulates Ned into proving his manhood, Edmund’s diminishment of men who don’t “have the goods” motivates Ned to prove that he does have them. Listening to Edmund, Ned seems momentarily lost in thought, in anxious calculation. In Shakespearean terms, he’s screwing his courage to the sticking place.

But of course, the only person in Body Heat’s mercenary world who truly has the goods is Matty. At first, she performs for the libidinous Ned the part of aloof object of desire, a classic femme fatale in tight skirts and silk blouses. Then, once Ned is hooked, she transforms herself into a lovestruck girl in shorts and barrettes. With Edmund at dinner, she’s in another kind of drag: pearls, a near-Victorian updo with an extreme side part, a very feminine dress. Later, we’ll see the same prim hairstyle when Ned finds the yearbook photo of a young Matty smiling back at him. He never knew her at all. She became whatever it took to move him forward. Late in the movie, Ned tells his police-detective friend that he believes Matty had set him up from the start. “That was her special gift. She was relentless,” he says, echoing Edmund’s words. “Matty was the kind of person who could do what was necessary. Whatever was necessary.”

Matty’s greatest gift, however, is knowing her mark. Early in their affair, she gives Ned an old-school fedora, with all its connotations of hard-boiled virility. “I’ll bet I guessed the size right,” she says coquettishly, watching him try it on. But even after she tells him she loves it, he seems unsure. “I want to see,” he says, looking into the side-view mirror of his Stingray. Still, he can’t be certain. Even when she rolls up the passenger-side window so that he can get a better view, he doesn’t seem to like what he sees. Back in his office, he ponders the fedora, as if asking himself if he’s man enough for it. Or for Matty. When he tries to hurl it to the hat rack, even he catches the symbolism when it falls to the floor. He never wears it again.

Throughout the film, Ned gazes into his own reflection—literally or figuratively. Moments after killing Edmund in the ramshackle Breakers, he’s startled by a figure in a broken mirror: a homeless man in a baseball cap, squatting in the debris. Ned stares at him and then back at the mirror, as if seeing a premonition of what’s to come. And, in one of the film’s oddest moments, Ned spots a clown in full costume and makeup behind the wheel of a passing car, and watches with a mix of surprise and confusion, and perhaps a flash of self-recognition. Ned does a similar double take when, moments after meeting Matty, he clocks a young hustler cruising him in the men’s-room mirror. In another scene, after visiting an incarcerated client, Ned hears a jail door clank behind him. Indeed, Ned is a low-rent hustler, a clown, a bum, a patsy headed for the electric chair. And Matty knows it from the start, from before they even met. Eventually, we learn that she handpicked Ned after hearing about a case he bungled. In their first encounter, she even tells him, in one of the movie’s most iconic lines: “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” And she begins to play with him like the marionette he is. Forever searching for a quick score, he’s fated to be the sap—a fate of his own making. As Raymond Chandler famously wrote, “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

But, in the movie’s final moments, Kasdan hints that Matty, too, might be entrapped by such a fate. Safely ensconced in her luxurious new life, she appears to have fulfilled her yearbook ambition: “To be rich and live in an exotic land.” As she lounges on a tropical beach, the camera moves around her, closing tight on her face. Her expression is enigmatic, shifting. She wipes away not a tear but a bead of sweat. The man next to her says, “It is hot.” And Matty replies, her voice weary, unsettled, “Yes.” The film closes on her ambivalent expression, which suggests not triumph but something else: dissatisfaction. Putting on her sunglasses, she turns to directly face the sun. The fever is still in her. She will never be sated.

This month on the Criterion Channel, set out on an epic journey with our Odysseys collection, or revisit the foundational Bond classics that introduced the silver screen’s most iconic superspy. A spotlight on Courtney Love’s acting career reveals an incandescent screen performer, while a collection of wedding movies explores the tension and breathless expectation surrounding that fateful walk down the aisle. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a selection of LGBTQ+ Favorites, Steven Spielberg’s jaw-dropping classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the exclusive premiere of Gary Hustwit’s shape-shifting portrait of Brian Eno, cult classics from Alex Cox, and stylish shorts by Yann Gonzalez.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

The road of return is studded with adventure, discovery, and surprise in these tales of epic quests that draw on one of literature’s most enduring narrative archetypes: the journey back home. Whether traversing the hardscrabble highways of Depression-era America (Sullivan’s Travels; O Brother, Where Art Thou?), the surreal labyrinth of New York City after dark (After Hours), or the elemental wilderness of the frontier (The Searchers, Walkabout), these by turns tragic, comic, mythic, and deeply personal tales of wanderers and seekers tap into the fundamental human yearning to find our way back to where we belong.

FEATURING: Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Searchers (1956), Walkabout (1971), After Hours (1985), The Straight Story (1999),* O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Coprogrammed by Sean Fennessey

The legend of cinema’s most iconic superspy begins here, with the trio of films that turned writer Ian Fleming’s suave secret agent James Bond into a global phenomenon. Featuring Sean Connery’s still-unmatched portrayal of 007—equal parts danger, charm, and wit—Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger established what would become the series’s signature elements: exotic locales, shadowy villains, ingenious gadgets, and indelible style. Among the most rewatchable blockbusters of all time, these thrillers laid the groundwork for one of the most influential and enduring franchises in film history.

FEATURING: Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964)

A performer of rare volatility and range, Courtney Love brings a feral intelligence and bruised glamour to the screen, meriting a place in cinematic culture alongside her hallowed stature in music. In films, Love is not merely an icon crossing mediums; her work with auteurs like Alex Cox (Straight to Hell), Julian Schnabel (Basquiat), and Miloš Forman (The People vs. Larry Flynt) reveals a deeply intuitive actor with an instinct for showcasing contradictory impulses: tenderness edged with danger, charisma undercut by disarming rawness. Messy, magnetic, and defiantly alive, Love’s is a screen presence that resists containment.

FEATURING: Straight to Hell (1987), Basquiat (1996), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), 200 Cigarettes (1999),* Beat (2000), Trapped (2002)

With wedding season upon us, take a walk down the aisle of some of cinema’s most unforgettable nuptials. Focusing on the lead-up to and spectacle of the big day itself, these films dramatize the often-conflicting dreams, desires, and fears that bring two people together before the altar, with directors like Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette), Jonathan Demme (Rachel Getting Married), and Lars von Trier (Melancholia) examining the emotional ambivalence and intersecting familial expectations surrounding the main event. Replete with will-they-won’t-they romantic tension, simmering family drama, and extravagant mise-en-scène, these films look past the pageantry to reveal the fractures that underpin the promise of “happily ever after.”

FEATURING: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Wedding in White (1972), A Wedding (1978), Golden Eighties (1986), Muriel’s Wedding (1994),* Marie Antoinette (2006), Rachel Getting Married (2008),* Melancholia (2011)*

Proud, rebellious, colorful, intimate, and frank, these essential visions of LGBTQ+ life find boundary-pushing filmmakers turning the richness of the queer experience into indelible art. From taboo-shattering art-house classics to defining works of the 1990s New Queer Cinema explosion to contemporary showstoppers from emerging talents, these films represent just a sample of the wide world of queer cinema, but they offer a taste of its breadth, creativity, and defiance in the face of adversity.

FEATURING: Portrait of Jason (1967), Pink Narcissus (1971), Je tu il elle (1975), Regrouping (1976), Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), Jubilee (1978), Querelle (1982), Born in Flames (1983), The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), Desert Hearts (1985), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Mala Noche (1985), Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), Paris Is Burning (1990), Poison (1991), Totally F***d Up (1993), Fresh Kill (1994), The Watermelon Woman (1996), Nowhere (1997), Benjamin Smoke (2000), Lan Yu (2001), The Aggressives (2005), Weekend (2011), So Pretty (2019), Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later (2023), Orlando, My Political Biography (2023), All Shall Be Well (2024), Daughter’s Daughter (2024), Misericordia (2024)

STREAMING PREMIERES

Eno

Premiering June 16, with a new version featured each month

A documentary as innovative as its subject, this kaleidoscopic portrait of visionary musician, producer, and self-described “sonic landscaper” Brian Eno is a different experience every time it’s shown. Using custom non-AI software, director Gary Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes created the world’s first generative feature film, which endlessly reedits and resequences hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, interviews, and unreleased music into 52 quintillion (or 52 billion billion) possible permutations. Chronicling Eno’s legendary contributions to the band Roxy Music, his influential work as a pioneer of ambient music, and his producing career for artists like David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads, Eno is a fittingly form-breaking tribute to an artist who changed the way modern music is made.

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

Suffused with tenderness and deadpan humor, The Love That Remains asks: What happens when a relationship ends but the bonds of caring endure? Moving unpredictably through four seasons in the lives of a separating couple—artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and fisherman Magnus (Sverrir Guðnason)—and their three children, Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature is as vibrantly attuned to the ebb and flow of domestic routine as it is to the stark, spectacular landscape of coastal Iceland. Juggling intimate scenes of adults at work and children at play with wild intrusions of surrealism, this strange and poignant film is a rare study of family life in all its beauty and confusion.

CRITERION ORIGINALS

With Criterion Editions of Hairspray and Desperate Living coming to home video this month, there’s no better time to watch the Pope of Trash discuss his formative moviegoing memories and introduce a selection of favorites.

FEATURING: Brink of Life (1958), The Naked Kiss (1964), Wanda (1970), Story of Women (1988), Last Summer (2023)

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

A work of raw, elemental power widely regarded as director Shinji Somai’s finest achievement, this intensely visceral take on the coming-of-age film follows an ensemble of junior-high students in a provincial town beset by a summertime malaise as a typhoon looms. When the storm makes landfall, the teens find themselves holed up in their school unsupervised, while another classmate (Yuki Kudo) disappears alone on a harrowing trek to the big city. Set adrift in a world suddenly unmoored, the students let loose their pent-up angst and burgeoning passions in a series of propulsive, phantasmic scenes—part apocalypse, part utopia—as the deluge rages on into the night. In daring long takes, Somai gives material form to the students’ turbulent inner lives.

An audacious blast of pop subversion, this touchstone of the Hong Kong New Wave by director Patrick Tam begins as a blissed-out portrait of carefree youth—and continually spins off into ever more shocking realms. In his breakthrough role, golden boy Leslie Cheung stars as one of a quartet of beautiful drifters who spend their days staving off ennui through the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, until a figure from the past reappears to shatter their idyll. Merging genre-cinema gloss with jolts of avant-garde disruption, Tam arrives at a sublimely destabilizing vision of youthful abandon giving way to harrowing reality.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Shu Lea Cheang and actor Sarita Choudhury, a discussion with Cheang for the film’s thirtieth anniversary, a program on the 2024 theatrical rerelease of the film and Cheang’s self-distribution, and more.

An invitation to a mysterious game upends a wealthy investment banker’s calculated existence in David Fincher’s noirish descent into one man’s personal hell.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Fincher and cast and crew members, behind-the-scenes footage, and more.

Celebrate the centennial of the Martha Graham Dance Company with this sampling of the legendary choreographer’s stunning craft.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Martha Graham: The Dancer Revealed, a 1994 documentary produced for PBS’s American Masters series; excerpts from a television pilot featuring composer Aaron Copland discussing his work on Appalachian Spring; and more.

In the reggae film that brought Rasta rhythms to the world, genre legend Jimmy Cliff stars as a rural musician chasing fame in Kingston—only to achieve notoriety as an outlaw.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Perry Henzell and Jimmy Cliff and an interview with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.

An uptown office worker’s downtown hookup spirals into a late-night odyssey of surreal menace in Martin Scorsese’s darkly comic cult classic.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between Scorsese and writer Fran Lebowitz; audio commentary by Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, director of photography Michael Ballhaus, actor and producer Griffin Dunne, and producer Amy Robinson; and more.

Wes Anderson directs this dazzling comedy about three estranged brothers forced to confront their emotional baggage on a soul-searching train voyage across India.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Anderson and cowriters Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, a discussion between Anderson and filmmaker James Ivory on the music used in the film, a behind-the-scenes documentary, and more.

A veteran repo man and his punk protégé chase a mysterious Chevy Malibu across a desolate LA in this grungily hilarious cult favorite.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Alex Cox and cast and crew members, deleted scenes, a roundtable discussion about the making of the film, and more.

A Hollywood director posing as a hobo in his quest to make a socially conscious film finds romance and comic chaos on his journey across Depression-era America.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by filmmakers Noah Baumbach, Kenneth Bowser, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean; the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer (1990); and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

A patron saint of punk cinema and borderless storytelling, Alex Cox remains one of the greatest subversives to ever pick up a camera, a rebel auteur who blends gonzo surrealism, anarchic irreverence, and blistering anticapitalist and anti-imperialist critique. From the radioactive deadpan of the sci-fi comedy Repo Man to the hallucinatory fever dream of his audacious biopic Walker, his films burn with a restless outsider energy, while smuggling politics, poetry, and outré humor into every frame.

FEATURING: Repo Man (1984), Straight to Hell (1987), Walker (1987), Highway Patrolman (1991)

Sexy, surreal, and darkly stylish, the short films of French director Yann Gonzalez (Knife+Heart) capture ecstatic moments of human (and sometimes beyond human) connection, merging throbbing eroticism with a charge of giallo-like menace to probe the inextricable links between love, sex, death, and transcendence. Shot in ravishing neon-noir style and submerged in hypnotic synth soundscapes, these fearlessly queer fusions of art and pop cinema—including the beautifully kinky, strangely life-affirming monster movie Islands—pulse with polymorphous sexuality and gothic romanticism.

FEATURING: By the Kiss (2006), Intermission (2007), I Hate You Little Girls (2008), Three Celestial Bodies (2009), We Will Never Be Alone Again (2012), Land of My Dreams (2012), Islands (2017)

Among the most singular, miraculous bodies of work in all of cinema, the films of French auteur Eric Rohmer constitute a genre unto themselves. Gently existential, hyperarticulate character studies set against vivid seasonal landscapes, these dialogue-driven yet gracefully cinematic films probe universal moral questions about love, desire, and the intricacies of connection with wry humor and an invitingly relaxed naturalism. From the wintry philosophical parable My Night at Maud’s to the sublime summertime melancholy of The Green Ray to the autumnal emotional maturity of Love in the Afternoon, his work is evergreen in its piercing insight into human contradiction and folly.

FEATURES: Suzanne’s Career (1963), La collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), Love in the Afternoon (1972), A Good Marriage (1982), Pauline at the Beach (1983), Full Moon in Paris (1984), The Green Ray (1986), A Tale of Springtime (1990), A Tale of Winter (1992), A Tale of Summer (1996), A Tale of Autumn (1998)

SHORTS: Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak (1951), Véronique and Her Dunce (1958), The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), Nadja in Paris (1964), A Modern Coed (1966)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day in theaters this month, there’s no better time to revisit his sci-fi landmark, an awe-inspiring vision of contact with extraterrestrial life.

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are outlaw lovers on the run in David Lynch’s berserk blend of nightmare noir, southern-gothic soap opera, and surreal Americana.

It’s the ultimate yuppie nightmare when a young couple rents their spare apartment to a psychopath in this twisted thriller starring a memorably villainous Michael Keaton.

ANIME

Visionary animator Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) explores the universal search for connection through the story of a bittersweet summertime friendship between a teenage boy and a mysterious woman.

DOCUMENTARIES

From the cities we live in to the products we use every day to the typefaces we communicate through, how do the subtle but impactful forces of design shape our lives? That’s the question at the heart of the illuminating documentaries of Gary Hustwit (Eno), who invites us to see the world around us with fresh eyes. Whether delving deep into the story behind one of the world’s most recognizable fonts (Helvetica) or breaking down the complex art of urban planning (Urbanized), Hustwit’s films reveal the often hidden connections between design, psychology, and human behavior.

FEATURING: Helvetica (2007), Objectified (2009), Urbanized (2011), Rams (2018)

See the vibrant metropolis of Istanbul through the eyes of the street cats who roam the city freely and have become essential parts of the communities they inhabit.

Filmed in New York City between 1997 and 2003, Daniel Peddle’s The Aggressives broke new ground in cinematic representation with its bold, unfiltered immersion into the lives of trans men and masculine-presenting lesbians of color who defy social expectations in their quest to live authentically. Peddle revisits the trailblazing subjects of the original film in Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later, a timely, intimate update that captures their ongoing struggles and hard-won victories in a world shaped by the turbulence of ICE arrests and evolving attitudes toward trans rights and health care.

FEATURING: The Aggressives (2005), Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later (2023)

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

A Kafkaesque transformation into a mute purple spirit sends an average security guard on a surreal journey through the city of Lagos.

Loyalties and desires intertwine at a roadside sex hotel under the burning blue skies of the Brazilian coast in this feverishly erotic tropical noir.

SHORT FILMS

Stories of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and the simple but radical, often dangerous act of just existing as a queer person are on display in these empathetic and innovative shorts, which reflect the wide spectrum of experiences that make up the LGBTQ+ rainbow.

FEATURING: Greetings from Washington, D.C. (1981), Janine (1990), She Don’t Fade (1991), Pull Your Head to the Moon: Stories of Creole Women (1992), Vanilla Sex (1992), Gender Troublemakers (1993), The Potluck and the Passion (1993), Snowfire (1994), Greetings from Africa (1996), I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard (2012), Blood Below the Skin (2015), The Foundation (2015), Vámonos (2015), Bayard & Me (2017), T (2019), Rupert Remembers (2000), Another Hayride (2021), i get so sad sometimes (2021), The Man of My Dreams (2021), Bold Eagle (2022), A Place on the Edge of Breath (2022), How to Carry Water (2023), MnM (2023), The Script (2023), Vermont (2023), The Callers (2024), God Is Good (2024), Grace (2024), One Day This Kid (2024), Newbies (2025)

A young content creator learns how far she’ll go for a chance at viral fame in this clear-eyed and compassionate look at coming of age in an era of parasocial intimacy.

On a neon-drenched New York City night, two strangers wrestle with queer longing and desire as events rewind to reveal what broke them.

That revolutionary movement—which sprang up in the wake of the AIDS crisis and was enabled by an independent-film boom that allowed artists to express themselves with more accessible gear and lower budgets—was not governed by dictates of realism. But Sachs’s coming-of-age film feels brutally authentic, rewriting the rules of the adolescent drama in ways both invigorating and unsettling. (Sachs’s simultaneous interest in and distrust of realism was evident in two early shorts he made in the first half of the 1990s, Vaudeville and Lady, both of which poked at vérité traditions, existing on the razor’s edge between realism and camp.) Though The Delta was acclaimed at its Toronto and Sundance Film Festival premieres and went on to receive domestic theatrical distribution, it is perhaps not as widely remembered as other New Queer Cinema cornerstones. This is likely owing to its refusal to provide easy answers to the questions it poses about the unbridgeable chasms that define American society.

The Delta’s original marketing materials give no indication of its ambition and curiosity, or its sensitivities to the experiences of nonwhite immigrant communities. Most of the New Queer Cinema’s breakout hits were made by and feature white men, and their theatrical and home-video ad campaigns capitalized on stars who conformed to the period’s racially coded standards of attractiveness—and who were often baring skin. Strand Releasing’s poster for The Delta is a prime example of a distributor leading with beefcake in the promotion of a gay film: the image includes only a shirtless, smiling Shayne Gray. Yet this conventionally handsome white teenager, who plays closeted upper-middle-class high schooler Lincoln Bloom, represents only one half of the film’s pair of starring roles. The other is the nuanced, wildly charismatic Thang Chan, a biracial Black and Vietnamese first-time actor cast as Minh Nguyen, a gay immigrant from Vietnam whose life intersects fatefully with Lincoln’s while the two are out cruising one night.

The setting of The Delta is Memphis, Tennessee, where Sachs grew up, and the rich, tactile sense of place all but wafts off the screen. The grain of the 16 mm stock on which the film was shot is as essential to its overall feel and texture as the naturalism of the actors and the hushed, contemplative way that Sachs trains his camera on quiet back rooms and dark roads. The opening shot is bathed in shadow, as a young man, his face obscured but his torso exposed, ambles down a clandestine street to the sound of crickets. Soon we realize that this is a spot where young hustlers wait for johns to pick them up in cars; Sachs captures the street trade with patience and a sense of simple witnessing, with no musical score to betray authorial judgment or perspective. Here is where Lincoln and Minh first meet, connecting with a kiss and a blow job. After Lincoln drives off, Sachs cuts away to Minh, who is seen heading home on his moped. It seems unlikely that these two young men, their brief sexual union shrouded in darkness, will ever meet again.

Sachs subsequently follows the daytime customs and nighttime exploits of Lincoln, who, we quickly learn, comes from privilege, as indicated by the glistening white Dodge Dynasty parked outside his pristine suburban home, situated in a neighborhood far more moneyed than the areas of Memphis that Sachs introduces us to later in the film. The director efficiently lays out the racially charged dynamics within this house: Lincoln’s parents employ a Black maid, in front of whom they make sarcastic, hushed remarks about “our esteemed congressman” (evidently a Black man) during a starched-shirt family lunch. Oblivious to all this, Lincoln—just another horny teenager, after all—is excused from the table to fetch his grandmother’s pills, but while in the bathroom he can’t resist a quick masturbation session while his family waits for him at the dining-room table. It’s the first of many divides—in this case, one between appearances and impropriety—that Sachs will illustrate throughout the film.

Even within Lincoln’s predominantly white community, Sachs is careful to expose stark differences in social strata. As Lincoln and his pals embark on one long night of hanging out, they pick up a female friend from a house considerably more modest than Lincoln’s, and the teenage girl’s expletive-laden front-yard quarrel with her mother, who accuses her daughter of stealing cash from her purse, harshly and uncomfortably underlines the divergent ways in which families discuss—or, in Lincoln’s case, likely don’t discuss—the specter of money. As the night wears on, the kids aimlessly smoke pot, chilling in outdoor garages or indoor rec rooms, enacting obscure fragments of fights and flirtations. Lincoln forcefully tries to kiss Monica, the pertly perfect blond girl he’s dating, and becomes offended when she resists, calling her a “bitch.” Then Lincoln retreats into his shadow self, returning to the cruising spot we saw at the film’s opening. But this time, he tests his own boundaries by allowing himself to get picked up by a white, middle-aged businessman, who brings him to a local hotel room. Lincoln’s moonlighting only goes so far; after he is commanded to strip during the older man’s awkward attempt at dom-sub role-play (“You like being Daddy’s boy?”), a turned-off Lincoln gathers his things and leaves. In a film about the tentative breaching of divides, this line—the boundary that would typically separate a rich kid from the hardscrabble life of a rent boy—is one that even teenage sexual curiosity can’t bring him to cross.

After this moment of self-subordination, Lincoln retreats to a more familiar enactment of desire and goes furtively cruising in a local arcade. Here he reencounters Minh and again becomes the object of another man’s lustful glance. At this point, Thang Chan overtakes the movie. Magnetic and aggressive in his pursuit of Lincoln, Minh is forthright, unapologetic: he calls Lincoln “cute” and “sexy,” comes right out and asks if he is gay, and constantly refers to him with the diminutive “boy,” a word that has both sexual and racial connotations as a term of implied inferiority—though coming from Minh it sounds as much like a term of endearment as a power move. Minh—who goes by John—seduces Lincoln, at least emotionally. Just hours after Lincoln had somewhat needily asked his girlfriend if she loved him, Minh is now the one asking Lincoln, “Do you want to love me?” Lincoln’s curiosity is piqued, his youthful ego likely stroked. When the two decide to abscond with a boat to go downriver on the Mississippi, it’s still unclear who is using or exploiting whom.

These knotty—and irresolvable—issues are not the normal province of gay coming-of-age stories, which often build to some kind of confrontation or redemptive conclusion. Here, Sachs provides no easy comfort; instead of fashioning a common cause-and-effect arc, he allows the film to ebb and flow around the inchoate feeling of experiencing the world as an outsider. A portrait of queer interiority, The Delta explores how such emotions are compounded by parallel oppressions. The film’s sense of authenticity—or at least humane curiosity—is likely thanks to Sachs’s approach to the material. After writing a string of initial drafts, the director had reconstituted the script after meeting and getting to know Thang Chan. Sachs later said, “I rewrote the film with him in mind, using a lot of his own history. So the character couldn’t have existed without the actor . . . He was an immigrant. He grew up in Saigon with a GI for a father.”

In preparing for The Delta, Sachs spent nearly half a year back in Memphis, familiarizing himself with the city’s Vietnamese community. After writing an early version of the screenplay, he conducted a series of videotaped, improvisational exercises with his nonprofessional actors, the results of which would inspire new drafts. It’s difficult to imagine The Delta without this step in the process, which evidently allowed Sachs to see the world from a perspective different from his own; when making a film about the wide gap between the privileged few and those who are never given the opportunity to rise, the author’s ability to put himself in a position of discomfort—an act of self-implication—is crucial. Among The Delta’s most discomfiting ideas is that queerness can create only a momentary bond between people from different sides of stark socioeconomic and racial divides.

In the film’s controversial final passage, Sachs overturns everything we may have come to expect. Following Lincoln and Minh’s fleeting connection on the river, Lincoln goes home and tries to rekindle a romantic relationship with Monica, once again seeking the comforts of the closet and suburban privilege, at least for now. Minh—beaten and abandoned by a desperate, scared Lincoln after the two nearly get arrested for playing with illegal fireworks—returns to his own life as well, though by contrast it is one marked by economic deprivation and stasis. In the last scene, Minh tells a sweet-natured African American man who picks him up at a bar that he “plays games with people.” He claims, with a hollow forlornness, that he is a liar by nature, and that, though he can flatter and whisper sweet nothings, he never thinks of his hookups again.

Are we to believe that everything Minh told Lincoln was a lie, a ploy to get closer to him, to try and transcend the socioeconomic and racial boundaries that keep him impoverished and feeling unloved? Or is he lying now, as a way of creating distance between himself and his failed relationship with the white boy he seemed to have true affection for? Did we—like Lincoln—only hear what we wanted to hear? We will never know; the shocking act of violence that closes the film doesn’t provide an answer, just further fogs the lens. For his part, Sachs has said he always felt The Delta “was too German! I had watched just a hair too much [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.” One can sense, in the final scenes, the grim influence of that great queer auteur’s work (particularly his darkest, most unsparing films, such as In a Year of 13 Moons or Fox and His Friends), but these fatalistic moments carry the weight of a specifically American tragedy.

However one feels about the swift, sad ending, it’s undeniable that it represents a kind of challenge largely unseen in gay-themed films, which continue to revolve around images and stories of positivity and pride. In a Village Voice article about the state of queer cinema in 2002, B. Ruby Rich, who just a decade earlier had coined the term “New Queer Cinema,” wrote: “The prevalent Queer Lite formula endlessly recycles romantic comedy, pausing every now and then for tragedy, then getting back on the dance floor. Issues of race, class, family trauma, and life-changing desire are not likely to pop up on the current menu.” Rich then identified The Delta as one of the rare exceptions, calling it a “groundbreaking work.”

Throughout his career, Sachs has proved his commitment to questions of contemporary queer living. In such films as Keep the Lights On (2012), a startling portrait of an on-again, off-again relationship severely strained by drug addiction, and Love Is Strange (2014), about an aging long-term couple separated by cruel economic realities, Sachs dramatizes deeply personal stories in which gay men are never arbiters of social assimilation, and always exist outside the forward march of hetero time. Like these films, The Delta reminds viewers of those untraversable regions that make queer sexuality both a privilege and a burden in a world that has traditionally made no physical or emotional space for it.

You look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), and you see the snarky, risky spirit of the New Wave movements that emerged around the world in the 1960s and ’70s in full, defiant bloom. But what does that mean, exactly, and what is this crazy, goofy, pugnacious movie-movie really up to? This particular late RWF is, in its appetite for farcical social critique and artfully canned melodrama, typical of its manically prolific filmmaker. (Let’s recall the deluge: over forty projects in fourteen years, not including the scripts he didn’t direct or the theater productions he didn’t record.) The tone is characteristically arch, but at the time the topic was new and raw. The subject at hand is the revolutionary pretensions of the Red Army Faction, the anti-imperialist guerrilla-terrorist outfit that terrorized Germany with bombings and assassinations throughout and beyond the seventies.

We usually get a hold of political movies by determining whether they are pro or con, progressive or conservative, but this film begs to be scanned as something else, something distinctly unserious but also dead serious about its lack of seriousness. In other words, what we have is the rampant flowering of the Ironic Film—an impertinent New Wave spawn of which Fassbinder was a committed practitioner. Coming between the less brazenly ironic but still ironically seasoned The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), The Third Generation is a full-on siege of hyper-irony, snarking and cosplaying and mocking its own diegetic constructions. Violent political reality is merely meat into the grinder.

What we usually think about when we consider “irony in film” is merely irony expressed or manifested in a narrative twist or a performance moment or a doubled meaning in a bit of dialogue. In the sixties, the Ironic Film became an entire genre, composed of works that were conscientiously ironic in their essential identity, fiber, and visual makeup. Broadly speaking, this phenomenon could include the overt metafilm as solidified by Godard and Rivette (inhabited by people who seem to know they’re in a movie) as well as the films of their many successors (Dušan Makavejev, Věra Chytilová, Nagisa Oshima, Kira Muratova, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, etc.) and contemporary filmmakers working in disparate modes, from Quentin Tarantino and Radu Jude to Joel and Ethan Coen, Roy Andersson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Charlie Kaufman, and Wes Anderson. You could say that the Ironic Film is a realm in which the distance between the viewer and the characters on-screen is doubled, while the distance between the viewer and the filmmaker is halved. “Realism” is sometimes present, but often in cracked-mirror form. It would seem, surveying the field, that a sense of spirited irreverence—toward classical earnest storytelling and the world in general—is required.

Fassbinder was a card-carrying Ironist; though a few of his films (such as 1974’s Effi Briest) seem sincere top to bottom, the bulk of his mountainous oeuvre is chin-deep in reflexivity, anti-nostalgic nostalgia, bitter camp, and satirical archness. The Third Generation, in fact, barrels closer to the edge of outright farce than many. Immediately, we’re hit with a contextual title scroll explaining that this film about domestic terrorism is “a comedy about parlor games . . . full of suspense, excitement, logic, cruelty, and madness, just like the fairy tales we tell children to help them prepare for death through the changes of life.” Well now—knives out. Of course, it was hardly as though Fassbinder didn’t see that making a German film in 1979 riffing on the Baader-Meinhof atrocities (which involved bombing corporate buildings and kidnapping politicians) was playing with a loaded gun. (You didn’t see Herzog or Wenders signing up for that kind of risk.) He had actually put off addressing the topic for years—his initial launch into filmmaking, in 1969, came a year after the RAF’s first major bombing, of an empty department store. A full decade and nearly thirty Fassbinder films and TV projects later, the man finally decided to tackle the scenario on the big screen, exposing it as a circus of opportunism, hypocrisy, and foolishness.

Often augmented with obscene and/or cryptic texts copied from public bathroom walls and overheard conversations, The Third Generation’s “action” begins with Eddie Constantine’s double-dealing industrialist manipulating the Schopenhauer-quoting terrorist cell into kidnapping him, it seems, to somehow help his company sell computer technology. The hint of unlikely conspiracy is merely the undernote to the madness, as the cabal otherwise flounces, plays spy games (and Monopoly), dresses in drag, screws, cites Bakunin and Hegel, discusses guerrilla camps while drinking champagne, watches TV, meets covertly in Japanese restaurants, and tries to figure out what to do with a wan junkie in their secret crash pad. It’s an all-star cast running impishly in circles (Hanna Schygulla, Bulle Ogier, Udo Kier, Volker Spengler, Margit Carstensen, Harry Baer, Y Sa Lo as that junkie, and Günther Kaufmann, who is at one point in blackface), and somehow, weirdly, the absurdities build inexplicable tension and the film quickly gets hot to the touch—as if we’re watching chimpanzees having a catch with a hand grenade. (The soundtrack, which gradually accumulates shrill layers of crosstalk, TV, radio reportage, off-screen speechifying, and the sound of a wailing baby, contributes significantly to the mounting stress.) Eventually, shit actually begins to go down, bodies fall, and the cell scrambles into abrupt action, going underground, donning new getups (clown costumes, even), and deciding to knock over a bank—resulting in more chaos and bloodshed.

As raucous and barbed as Fassbinder’s movie is, plenty of critics at the time still suspected that he hadn’t quite figured out how he felt about domestic terrorism. By the midseventies he was on the record as considering the RAF crimes to be “incomprehensible.” Could there, within the golden bad boy of the New German Cinema, have lurked a play-safe bourgeois? Anyway, we certainly know the RAF vexed Fassbinder, because we can see him in the remarkable anthology film Germany in Autumn (1978), exhausted and naked and wrestling melodramatically with, among other things, his yen for pills, his new film about the terrorists, and his moral confusion over the murder of industrialist/ex-SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer the year before, as well as the subsequent suicides of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof renegades. The ultraviolent “German Autumn” of 1977 got its historical name from this film, in fact, not vice versa; assembled without credits by assorted New German filmmakers and artists, including Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Heinrich Böll, and Edgar Reitz, it is nothing if not a tissue of uncertainty, an unresolved and spontaneous impression of the agonies of the moment. Germany in Autumn seriously poses the eternal toxic question of all radicalism: when does violent resistance to homicidal authority by way of “unconventional” (read: non-state-funded) means transcend ethical righteousness and become “terrorism”? And who gets to decide?

Fassbinder wouldn’t live long enough to experience the distance in years often needed to sort out the ethical spaghetti of citizen-vs.-state conflict, a task finally attempted by Uli Edel (only two years younger than Fassbinder) decades later, with The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008). A missile barrage of protest action and rock-and-roll cool and alarmingly decisive street combat, Edel’s film may not quite heroize its titular guerrillas, but it certainly exults in their crusade, sympathizing perhaps most with the young Europeans in the seventies who took Andreas Baader et al. as messiahs and who were knowingly, innocently appalled by bureaucrats and CEOs staging bloodshed in Vietnam and Iran and elsewhere and getting away scot-free and with pockets bulging. Edel implicitly asks (and so do we): who could blame them?

In contrast, Fassbinder offers no such sympathy to either side of the struggle. His politics were always personal and social and sexual, and most often concerned with autopsying the layers of hypocrisy therein. Hence, while The Third Generation’s few cops and corporate figures are spies and crooks, its RAF warriors are in turn charlatans and rapists and cosplayers, cornered into actual violence by the industrial state itself. But is it a relativist fallacy, to think that just as citizen-on-state violence breaks the social contract, state-on-citizen violence does as well, and so therefore warrants a response? It’s a question that continues to dominate our media dialogue, in a post-9/11 America and a landscape newly injected with stormtroopers and extra-judiciary killings. If The Third Generation is any indication, Fassbinder must’ve thought the whole discussion to be naive, and that to come down solidly on either side of the conflict is to fall victim to idealism or power madness or both. A cynical position, to be sure, particularly for an artist who didn’t seem to want to take a position at all. Outside Germany, the film was hailed by New Wave–loving critics, but at home its theatrical run was tellingly the occasion for violent protests and death threats—presumably at the hands of those pro-RAF young radicals, who had probably longed for a compadre in Fassbinder, and instead found their generation’s most defiant ironist.

From the moment he graduated film school in 1990, at the age of twenty-two, Singleton was insistent on obtaining creative control, because he wanted to demonstrate the humanity of the people living in his community, flaws and all. In a string of movies he called his Hood Trilogy—Boyz n the Hood (1991), Poetic Justice (1993), and Baby Boy (2001)—he showcased his gift for grounding his characters in the specificities of time and place. The Angelenos in these films work at the Fox Hills Mall, party on Crenshaw Boulevard, and spend wild nights at the Snooty Fox Motor Inn. They put tinted windows and ten-inch gold Dayton rims on their Honda Accords. They belong to street gangs like the Rollin’ 60s Crips and the Crenshaw Mafia Bloods. Details like these—along with the characters’ clothes, hairstyles, and accents— met Singleton’s high threshold for authenticity.

As a subject for his filmmaking, South Central remained a place of comfort and expertise for Singleton, even as his ambitions carried him elsewhere—to 1920s rural Florida in Rosewood (1997), one of his best films, and then to the world of Hollywood franchises with 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), which became his greatest commercial success. No matter where his career took him, he was always rooted in his respect for the place where he grew up. His trilogy is the key to understanding his artistry; taken together, these three movies shine a light on a community that was still trying to make good on the promise of the Great Migration, in which droves of Black Americans moved from the South to cities like Los Angeles in pursuit of better lives—only to encounter racism, violence, and injustice in their new homes. Throughout these films, Singleton shows how, generations after this huge demographic shift, Black people continued to make their own way in the face of extraordinary obstacles.

Boyz n the Hood laid the foundation for Singleton’s LA. This groundbreaking film—a loosely autobiographical tale of Black teenagers trying to dodge the violence and inertia of their neighborhood at the tail end of the crack epidemic—grew out of a screenplay that the director had worked on while studying at the University of Southern California’s Filmic Writing program. By the time he graduated, Singleton had already pulled off an unimaginable feat by getting the attention of Columbia Pictures chair Frank Price, who wanted to develop the script. Realizing that he needed to think beyond the role of writer to ensure that his work would be faithfully translated to the screen, Singleton said yes on the condition that he could direct the project. Despite his lack of experience and his sparse reel of two Super 8 films, he was adamant that a white or non-Angeleno director would be unable to execute his vision. He spent the fall of 1990 in the director’s chair, making what would become his debut feature.

In Boyz n the Hood, LA is where children walk through dice games that erupt into fights, where kids are robbed of their youth after leading one another to the remnants of crime scenes and rotting corpses, where the innocent can fall victim to targeted attacks and stray bullets. But while the film never shies away from the dangers of its setting, Singleton is deliberate in showing that South Central is a place where real people live, and that its inhabitants are not defined by circumstances they didn’t create. The film devotes time to its characters’ interior lives, offering familiarity to one sector of the audience while providing context and insight to those whose only knowledge of LA’s Black communities comes from what they’ve seen in the news.

At the heart of the film are Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Ricky (Morris Chestnut), and Doughboy (Ice Cube), three adolescents with simple desires and dreams. In addition to his goal of going to college, Tre’s priority is consummating his relationship with his girlfriend, Brandi (Nia Long). He’s very bright, but that alone doesn’t insulate him from the brutality of his surroundings, no matter how proactive his parents (sharply played by Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett) try to be. Tre’s friend Ricky, who is already a father, just wants to play football at USC, but his prodigious talent won’t save him. Doughboy, Ricky’s half brother, is hoping to stay out of jail, a fate he has struggled to avoid since his arrest for theft as a young child. And though he can’t fully admit it, he wants his mother (Tyra Ferrell) to adore him as much as she does Ricky.

Like a large swath of his generation, Singleton grew up a fan of the teen movies that John Hughes made during the 1980s. But the slice of mostly white, suburban Reagan-era life presented in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off wasn’t representative of what Singleton had experienced in his youth. He wanted to tell stories about Black adolescence but with a sharper edge than Cooley High (1975) or House Party, the latter of which became a success the same year that Boyz n the Hood went into production. When it was released during the summer of 1991, Boyz n the Hood was an even bigger hit than either of these earlier films, earning nearly $58 million against a $6 million budget. Aside from making Singleton an instant star (and a rare young Black director willing to speak his mind about the entertainment industry while operating within the studio system), the film introduced audiences to his world through the kind of narrative details that could have been captured only by someone intimately familiar with this milieu.

Unlike many of its predecessors in the canon of Black teen movies, Boyz n the Hood treats survival as uncertain. Tre, Ricky, and Doughboy understand that they are as likely to meet their demise at the hands of their peers as they are to be killed by the police. While the film positions Black male adolescence as fraught, the three friends don’t spend the movie wallowing in misery, largely because of their relationships with one another. Tre regards Ricky and Doughboy as his brothers, and Singleton makes sure to show them experiencing the everyday joys of youth despite the perils they face. There are moments of levity amid the hardships, as in a montage in which Ricky runs the gauntlet at football practice while Tre tries to convince Brandi to sleep with him and Doughboy crassly remarks, “He still ain’t fucked her yet,” after a swig of St. Ides.

The balance of coming-of-age earnestness and devastating tragedy in Boyz n the Hood pushed Singleton to the forefront of a new class of Black filmmakers. It had not been until the eighties that several Black directors—including such pioneers as Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, and Keenen Ivory Wayans—were given the opportunity to helm major studio projects about Black characters. For a brief period in the nineties, Hollywood took interest in expanding this group, opening its doors to Reginald Hudlin, Albert and Allen Hughes, Julie Dash, Ernest Dickerson, Mario Van Peebles, Kasi Lemmons, and Matty Rich. Among this cohort, Singleton was the most lauded right out of the gate. In 1992, he received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, becoming both the first Black nominee and the youngest to ever compete for the latter award. That same year, he also directed the nine-minute music video for Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time,” an ambitious project that cast Eddie Murphy, Magic Johnson, and Iman in a grandiose re-creation of ancient Egypt.

Singleton had grown up idolizing art-house titans like François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa, but he also referred to himself as “a child of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.” Soon, he was socializing with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and other members of Hollywood’s elite. But perhaps the most meaningful relationship he had with another filmmaker during this time was the one he formed with Lee, whose feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It, he had watched just before arriving at USC. Lee’s success in the late eighties had inspired Singleton, who wanted to deliver a distinctive cinematic vision of Los Angeles in the same way that Lee’s work had made audiences see New York City anew. In his next film, Singleton continued exploring the world of South Central, this time through the prism of a romantic drama.

Poetic Justice begins, in disorienting fashion, with a movie within a movie: we see two characters (played by Billy Zane and Lori Petty) sharing a romantic dinner that soon turns confrontational. When a shooting breaks out at the drive-in theater where the film is being shown, Justice (Janet Jackson) experiences a traumatic event that thrusts her into a deep state of depression: the death of her boyfriend, Markell (Q-Tip). The violence of these initial moments echoes the tragic circumstances surrounding the release of Boyz n the Hood. Two people were killed and over thirty were injured in incidents that took place during the film’s opening weekend. When some theaters began canceling screenings and the media suggested the movie itself should be held accountable, Singleton called any attempts to blame his work “artistic racism.”

Poetic Justice departs from its predecessor in notable ways. Where Boyz n the Hood zeroed in on the plight of young Black men, its follow-up is propelled by a female perspective. Justice’s poetry, which Singleton often features through voice-over, conveys her innermost thoughts. Art is an outlet of self-expression for Justice, as well as a coping mechanism. Though primarily set in South Central, Poetic Justice is also a road movie that ventures up the gorgeous Northern California coast to Oakland. Justice is goaded by her friend Iesha (Regina King), a lush with a knack for cutting insults, into accompanying her on a trip with her vain, insecure boyfriend, Chicago (Joe Torry), and his coworker Lucky (Tupac Shakur). Reluctant from the beginning, Justice nearly abandons the journey at the last minute when she spots Lucky, who has tried, unsuccessfully, to charm her while dropping off mail at the salon where she works. While confined to the delivery truck, the four of them spend significant time bickering—particularly Justice and Lucky, whose fights turn vicious on occasion.

Though the film explores the friction between Black men and women, it also examines broader divisions within the Black community—strife that travels across gender and generational lines. Older women castigate their younger counterparts for their naivete in romance. At the same time, the collision of pride and perceived disrespect makes it easy for conflict to erupt among men; for instance, when Lucky chides Chicago for not joining their union, it becomes clear that their relationship as colleagues has not matured into a true friendship. Poetic Justice places its characters in tight spaces, forcing them to work their shit out—with one another and themselves.

The film was a massive flex for Singleton because of the creative latitude he was granted and the attention he was able to attract. He wrote the role of Justice specifically with Jackson in mind and brought the performer (who had begun her career as a child actor) back to the screen in between the release of Rhythm Nation 1814 and Janet—two albums that showed her willingness to take creative risks and her propensity for reinvention, and that cemented her as one of the biggest pop stars in the world. (Janet has always been viewed in tandem with Poetic Justice: Jackson promoted the two projects simultaneously, and “Again,” her Oscar-nominated song originally written for the film, plays over its closing credits.) Knowing that he needed a commanding presence opposite Jackson, Singleton cast Shakur, whose charisma, forthrightness, and volatility had made him increasingly popular as a rapper, in demand as an actor, and frequently discussed in the media. Singleton also recruited literary icon Maya Angelou to write Justice’s poetry and to play a community elder named Aunt June in a sequence highlighting the generational conflicts explored in the film. “Baby, what would you know about love?” she asks Iesha with a mixture of sweetness, wisdom, and condescension.

The scope of Singleton’s ambition and power couldn’t guarantee the results that studio executives value. Poetic Justice received more than twice the budget of Boyz n the Hood and made less than half of what that film earned at the box office. Years later, though, the success of Singleton’s sophomore feature can be found beyond these numbers, in the way Justice and Lucky’s relationship has endured in the popular imagination, their images immortalized by graphic T-shirts and GIFs. Once again, Singleton had created a cinematic world out of details from his neighborhood: the signs marking the Crenshaw district, the murals adorning its walls. Poetic Justice travels from South Central to the Bay and back; by the film’s conclusion, the characters are different versions of themselves. Years later, Singleton returned to South Central with a sharper perspective.

Each film in the Hood Trilogy opens with some indication of the territory Singleton intends to cover. The opening title card of Boyz n the Hood pushes forward over a black screen while the sound of a drive-by breaks out, a frenzy of screeching tires, gunfire, and panic. The words that appear at the beginning of Poetic Justice—“Once Upon a Time in South Central LA”—are an ironic nod to the fact that this love story will not be a fairy tale. Baby Boy takes a similar introductory approach. After a quote from psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing, which addresses the effects of racism on young Black men’s development, Singleton cuts to the most surreal image in the trilogy: that of a grown man nestled in a womb, amniotic fluid sloshing around him. This is Joseph “Jody” Summers (Tyrese Gibson), a twenty-year-old who, despite having fathered two children with two different women, still lives at home with his mother, Juanita (AJ Johnson). She is young enough to want her own life, and her new love interest—Melvin (Ving Rhames), a brawny ex-con with a landscaping business—is a major threat to Jody’s infantile existence. Instead of moving in with his girlfriend, Yvette (Taraji P. Henson), Jody navigates life like an overgrown teenager, stuck between childhood and adulthood.

Though it explores themes similar to those in Boyz n the Hood, Baby Boy isn’t a coming-of-age film in the same way. Jody is a legal adult, but he’s trapped in a postadolescent limbo despite having grown-man responsibilities. His narrative trajectory gave Singleton the chance to update his view of South Central. In Boyz n the Hood, the neighborhood is what Tre wants to escape; in Poetic Justice (whose themes of gender and generational conflict reverberate in Baby Boy), it’s a place the characters leave and then return to with new outlooks on life. In contrast, Baby Boy focuses on people who have survived their teenage years but never left the area, either because they chose not to or because of a lack of options. And though Jody has reached young adulthood, he still isn’t safe from an early grave—his biggest fear.

Baby Boy’s presentation of the city is also an extension of what Singleton achieved in Boyz n the Hood and Poetic Justice. He captures the beauty of South Central in subtle ways, in scenes that chronicle times spent in backyards, salons, and shopping centers off Crenshaw. Like Singleton’s previous films, Baby Boy emphasizes the importance of Black fatherhood—a subject explored in Boyz n the Hood through the character of Furious Styles, who offers Tre the kind of structure and guidance his friends lack, and in Poetic Justice through Lucky’s development as a present and caring parent. Jody wants to be that for both of his children, but his immaturity makes it hard for him to be a capable provider, forcing the gainfully employed Yvette to shoulder more responsibility. Considering the film’s depth of insight into the challenges of parenthood, it’s understandable that Singleton felt he couldn’t have made it until that point in his life, after he had become a father himself.

Despite the dysfunctional, sometimes toxic nature of Jody and Yvette’s relationship, they clearly love each other. Even when he shows these characters at their worst, Singleton handles them with care and an understanding that extends to all people who share their circumstances. He saw Baby Boy as an extension of the Italian neorealist tradition, which examined real-world struggles in the wake of World War II. Like the masters of that movement, Singleton believed that his characters deserved thoughtful portrayals, even when they fell short of society’s ideas of respectability.

A key to Singleton’s brilliance as a director was his gift for cultivating stars—a quality fully on display in Baby Boy. The chemistry between Gibson and Henson—like that between Jackson and Shakur in Poetic Justice—is a major part of the film’s legacy. At the time of the movie’s release, Gibson was best known for his career as a singer, especially for the 1998 hit single “Sweet Lady”; Singleton took a chance on him and revealed another side of his talent. Henson had only appeared in sitcoms and a few movies, and Baby Boy gave her a major career breakthrough.

Singleton’s eye for great actors—apparent in the extraordinary cast of his debut film—had enduring effects on the culture at large. He was willing to cast hip-hop artists in substantial roles at a time when the music was not as popular as it would later become among mainstream audiences. Casting Ice Cube—who at that point in his career was not far removed from his acrimonious exit from N.W.A, just a few months after the group’s song “Fuck tha Police” had been denounced by the FBI—in Boyz n the Hood was a bold decision that gave the rapper a chance to expand his career beyond music.

Hip-hop was the sound of Singleton’s era, and many of the performers the director featured in the trilogy were his generational peers. He had imagined the role of Jody for Shakur, who was killed in 1996. And long before Snoop Dogg covered the Olympics, Singleton cast him in Baby Boy as Rodney, Yvette’s wicked, wraithlike ex-boyfriend. The lasting impact of Singleton’s trilogy is felt through its ongoing dialogue with hip-hop culture, as evidenced in a generation of artists who grew up watching these films and whose lives are reflected in, and have been shaped by, them. The late rapper Nipsey Hussle—who hailed from the Crenshaw district and didn’t let anyone forget it—once compared his own explorations of Los Angeles to Singleton’s. Compton native Kendrick Lamar’s major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city, echoes Boyz n the Hood with its striking portrait of a teenager on the straight and narrow, trying his hardest to avoid being devoured by his environment. Among the album’s highlights is the song “Poetic Justice,” built around a canny sample of Janet Jackson’s “Any Time, Any Place.” The trilogy’s influence can also be felt in the stories that Leimert Park rapper Dom Kennedy tells in “South Central Love.” The song’s music video, which features a title card reminiscent of the one that opens Poetic Justice, is filled with scenarios that immediately call the trilogy to mind: young people hanging out on front porches, hopping fences to avoid their parents, and having potentially fatal encounters with the police.

Music is not the only medium that has drawn inspiration from Singleton’s films. The video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, set on the West Coast in 1992, recreates imagery seen throughout Boyz n the Hood. Most importantly, a number of the issues addressed in the trilogy—gun violence, police misconduct, gender wars within the Black community—have remained topics of discussion across media. It’s unlikely Singleton believed that any of those problems would be solved during his lifetime, but his trilogy added much-needed nuance to the conversations around them.

In addition to resonating across multiple areas of American culture, Singleton’s trilogy is also a deeply personal project. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the director admitted that the conflicts between the characters in Baby Boy were partly inspired by his own experiences. The tension among Black men and women explored in Poetic Justice was informed by Singleton’s desire to address a problem he felt had worsened during the early nineties. In Boyz n the Hood, Tre’s life mirrors the director’s own: Singleton was also raised by teenage parents who never married and lived separately, but who worked their way into the middle class. Though he attended high school in Pasadena, he was never too far removed from life in South Central. These elements further rooted the films in realism and underlined Singleton’s bond with the neighborhood.

In his final years, Singleton, who died in 2019 at the age of fifty-one after suffering from a stroke, would return to the setting of his trilogy. He executive-produced the 2017 documentary L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later, revisiting the uprisings he spoke so passionately about during his youth. And he was a cocreator of the crime series Snowfall, a fictional exploration of how the crack epidemic and the war on drugs originated in South Central, helping to create the conditions seen in Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice, and Baby Boy.

The memory of South Central—which was officially renamed South Los Angeles in 2003—lives on through Singleton’s trilogy. The movies cemented him as one of the most important directors in the city’s history, foregrounding his passion for the true-to-life stories of Black people in his community. But to simply call them love letters would be insufficient. They are works of advocacy, creating a space for people who still aren’t always given room to be their complex selves. These vital films continue to speak to everyone who grew up just like Singleton did, as well as to generations of audiences who have come to understand South Central through his eyes.

Several of the directors Tanaka had worked with actively supported her career transition: Mikio Naruse gave her the chance to observe and assist him on the set of Older Brother, Younger Sister (1953), the closest she came to having any experience or training before her debut; Keisuke Kinoshita and Yasujiro Ozu wrote the screenplays for her first and second films, respectively. A notable exception was the director with whom she remains most associated, Kenji Mizoguchi, who openly opposed and disparaged her ambitions—a disappointing response from a man whose films chronicled the brutal subjugation of Japanese women.

Women’s lives are at the center of almost all of Tanaka’s films—three of which had female writers—but her six directorial efforts are strikingly diverse: they range from delicate romantic comedy to three-hankie tragedy, from raw studies of postwar social problems to lavish, color-saturated historical dramas. Each project was a chance to try something new.

Love Letter: Old Acquaintance

The reunion between the two is perhaps the most striking moment in the film, illustrating Tanaka’s restrained treatment of melodrama and her instinct for the cinematic possibilities of everyday surroundings. They meet on a crowded railway platform; just as they come face-to-face, the door of a train slides shut, framing them for a moment in the window. Only then do we realize that the camera has moved into a passenger car, and as the train moves off it carries us, in a gliding movement, into an idyllic flashback of Reikichi and Michiko’s childhood friendship.

Love Letter captures a postwar Tokyo bustling with hectic vitality. When the production filmed in the streets, press photographers swarmed, excited by the novelty of a female director. The film, which played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, was well received by both audiences and critics (though the latter often patronizingly gave credit to Tanaka’s male collaborators). The story sensitively argues that the way forward lies in responsibility and forgiveness, not victimhood, and balances the wounds of the war with budding hope for renewal and second chances.

The Moon Has Risen: Poetry by the Numbers

A series of static shots sets the scene, framing temples and pagodas nestled in a tranquil park. The camera kneels ninety centimeters above the tatami to observe a family of marriageable daughters headed by a widowed father, played by Chishu Ryu. Is this a film by Yasujiro Ozu? When The Moon Has Risen (1955) came out, many critics treated Ozu as its presiding spirit. Indeed, he had written the screenplay with Ryosuke Saito and had originally planned to direct it himself, but after delays and complications caused by studio and Directors Guild politics, the project wound up at Nikkatsu and became Kinuyo Tanaka’s second directing assignment. There is not a trace of this bumpy genesis in the charming comedy, whose serene surface is gently ruffled by romantic confusion. While presenting a graceful homage to Ozu, Tanaka also animates the film with her own humor and energy.

The upper-class family at the center of the story lives in Nara, an ancient capital of Japan. The formalities and hierarchies they maintain—including the rather feudal treatment of their two servants—suggest timelessness, tradition, and conservatism. Yet reminders of modernity keep cropping up. The Moon Has Risen was partially sponsored by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, which accounts for its recurring references to the wonders of communications technologies. In perhaps the classiest example of product placement ever, a pair of separated lovers exchange coded telegrams that cite poems from The Ten Thousand Leaves (Manyoshu).

Setsuko (Mie Kitahara), the youngest of three sisters, is a vivacious and outspoken young woman sporting stylish Western clothes. Convinced that her reserved older sister Ayako (Yoko Sugi) and the equally shy Amamiya (Ko Mishima) like each other, she becomes determined to set them up, and enlists the help of her friend Shoji (Shoji Yasui) in her clumsy matchmaking schemes. In one comic scene, Setsuko rehearses the willing but clueless family maid, played by the director herself, in how to impersonate her sister on the phone. The small roles that Tanaka took in her first three films are so modest that they feel like inside jokes or gestures of humility.

Meanwhile, as a filmmaker she pays attention to subtle but telling gestures and the minutiae of polite conversations, shot through with oblique hints of hidden feelings. As in the works of Jane Austen, trivial follies give rise to blinding flashes of self-knowledge. In the film’s centerpiece, Setsuko connives to get the reluctant couple alone outdoors on a moonlit night. The long sequence intertwines humor (“Stop the moon!” Setsuko cries at one point, frustrated that her sister is wasting precious minutes indoors) with an ethereal nocturne. As they bathe raptly in the moonlight, all of the characters use the same conventional phrases to describe its beauty; Tanaka tenderly shows how these shared and repeated clichés connect them like joined hands.

Forever a Woman: Portrait of the Artist

With her third film, Kinuyo Tanaka stepped out from under the wings of her mentors and developed a project on her own initiative, collaborating with Sumie Tanaka—no relation to the director—one of Japan’s foremost female screenwriters. A newspaper advertisement for the film trumpeted, “The pathos and intensity of women’s lives have never before been so revealed,” and there is some truth in the promotional hyperbole. Based on the life of tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo, Forever a Woman (1955) depicts the protagonist’s battle with breast cancer with a frankness that would have been unthinkable in Hollywood at the time. It also tells the complicated story of a woman emerging as an artist and a celebrity while contending with infidelity, divorce, motherhood, female friendship, and desire.

In her finely tuned performance, Yumeji Tsukioka doesn’t flinch from Fumiko’s unruly, confused response to her illness and her changed body. After a double mastectomy, she cycles through anger, grief, spurts of gaiety, flirtatiousness, tortured vanity, and interludes of serenity. Near the end, dying in a hospital, Fumiko asks her mother to wash her hair, and on a hot night she lies down next to Otsuki (Ryoji Hayama), a visiting reporter with whom she has formed a bond, and begs him to make love to her. (The journalist character is based on Akira Wakatsuki, who wrote a book about his relationship with Nakajo, The Eternal Breasts, which forms the basis for the film, originally released under the same title.) The film uses wintry locations in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, to ground the tragedy in an everyday realism that makes it hit even harder.

Showing her confidence as a director, Kinuyo Tanaka trimmed dialogue from some scenes, communicating instead through compositions, blocking, and cutting. One of her favorite visual devices is to use sliding doors like horizontal wipes. In The Moon Has Risen, she often places her camera outside the threshold of a room so that the fusumas (traditional interior doors made of white paper) reveal or conceal the scene within. Throughout Forever a Woman, the constant opening and closing of doors, gates, and windows suggests the possibilities that emerge or vanish for the heroine as she moves from a disappointing marriage through an unrealized romance, recognition as a poet, and terminal illness. Even as she stubbornly resists being framed by society in a conventional narrative of gallant martyrdom, she is often visually trapped. Yet her active gaze and her complex relationship to her own image prevent her from becoming an object of pity.

Graced with moments of ordinary kindness, the story refuses to locate meaning in the senselessness of disease, and it builds to an ending that quietly, mercilessly pulverizes your heart. Widely recognized as Kinuyo Tanaka’s masterpiece, Forever a Woman distills the unsentimental humanism of her vision to its essence.

The Wandering Princess: A Royal Pawn

In 1959, the memoirs of Hiro Saga became a best seller in Japan. Born into an aristocratic family, Saga had entered an arranged marriage with the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, a puppet state in Manchuria that was part of the Japanese empire and dominated by Japan’s Kwantung Army. After the fall of Manchukuo and its royal family during the Second World War, she endured imprisonment, separation from her husband, and a grueling trek across northern China before eventually being repatriated to Japan. Daiei snapped up the rights to this autobiography, and the studio cast its biggest star, Machiko Kyo, as the lead in The Wandering Princess (1960).

The project gave Kinuyo Tanaka the chance to return to directing after five years away. It was heavily promoted as a josei-eiga, or woman’s film, for which the director, star, and writer were all female (the screenplay was by Natto Wada, best known for her collaborations with her husband, filmmaker Kon Ichikawa). The Wandering Princess was Tanaka’s first film in widescreen and in color, and her first historical drama, with a large cast and epic narrative. Both it and her second period film, Love Under the Crucifix (1962), view history through the eyes of women whose desires are at odds with their status as powerless pawns. The films employ a tableaulike formality to evoke the stultifying ceremonies of the ruling classes and the rigid strictures that govern the ways women dress and move, giving them scant control over their bodies or their fates.

The film’s main flaw is its flawless heroine, a departure from Machiko Kyo’s sexy image and her association with rebellious modern women and scheming vamps. The script’s willingness to acknowledge Chinese resentment of Japan’s hegemony is undermined by the presentation of Ryuko (Kyo) as a paragon of dutiful, selfless stoicism, dedicated to promoting Sino-Japanese friendship. The most memorable scenes juxtapose her with a very different woman, her sister-in-law, the empress (Atsuko Kindaichi). Described by her husband as “beautiful, but just a doll,” the empress breaks down both mentally and physically during their ordeal, and despite Ryuko’s faithful efforts to care for her, she winds up as a horrifying emblem of human wreckage, crushed in the gears of historical change and discarded like refuse. Even more tragedy is in store for the heroine, as an opening flash-forward warns us. The year after the film’s release, however, Saga was finally reunited with her husband, and she lived with him in China until her death in 1987.

Girls of the Night: Street Without Shame

In several of her most celebrated films with Kenji Mizoguchi—Women of the Night (1948), The Life of Oharu (1952), Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—Kinuyo Tanaka played women forced into prostitution, plumbing harrowing depths of suffering and degradation. Girls of the Night (1961) can be seen as a kind of sequel or companion piece to Mizoguchi’s final film (in which Tanaka did not appear), Street of Shame (1956), a portrait of the workers in a brothel as a proposed law banning prostitution hangs over their heads; in reality, such a law passed after the film’s release and went into effect in 1957. Tanaka’s film follows former sex workers trying to rebuild their lives in the face of both social and psychological obstacles. Sumie Tanaka’s screenplay, adapted from a 1960 novel by Masako Yana, is both tough-minded and compassionate, free of judgment and of most cinematic clichés about sex work.

The film begins as a collective portrait of women at a reformatory where they have been sent for rehabilitation following arrests for violating the antiprostitution law. They are a motley group, some defiant and rebellious, some physically or emotionally scarred by their lives. Relationships between women—sisters, friends, rivals, mothers and daughters—take on more weight and significance in each of Tanaka’s films, culminating in Girls of the Night, which openly portrays same-sex desire among the female inmates, as well as bullying and fights. Women, in this film, are never merely victims of a patriarchal system: they are complex and contradictory human beings. Gradually, the focus narrows to one inmate, Kuniko (Chisako Hara), who is placed in a succession of jobs. Embittered by the prejudice, exploitation, and hostility she encounters from both men and women, she becomes nostalgic for the “freedom” of the streets. When she finally meets with acceptance and the possibility of love, she feels unworthy of it.

Tanaka returns here to the raw, location-shot, black-and-white realism of Love Letter. Drab, cramped, and dark settings establish the tone for upsetting scenes of violence and cruelty. But the episodic story varies its tones and complicates any simple conclusions. In an intense and subtle performance, Hara makes Kuniko hardened, vulnerable, intelligent, and confused—telling us all we need to know about her past experience and allowing us to cherish the hope that her future life may change after all.

Love Under the Crucifix: Star-Crossed

Set in the late sixteenth century, against the backdrop of warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaign to stamp out Christianity in Japan, Love Under the Crucifix opens on a battlefield in flames. But Kinuyo Tanaka’s sole jidai-geki (feudal-era historical drama) is not about armed combat; instead, it focuses on quieter but no less fierce conflicts between austere religious devotion and earthly passion, and between ostentatious, abusive power and the humility and integrity of the tea ceremony.

Released by Shochiku, the film was developed by an independent production company called Ninjin Kurabu (Carrot Club) founded by three actresses—Yoshiko Kuga (who had starred in Love Letter), Keiko Kishi, and Ineko Arima—in an effort to gain more creative control and improve conditions for themselves and other actors. Arima plays Ogin, stepdaughter of the legendary tea master Sen no Rikyu (Ganjiro Nakamura); both are threatened by Hideyoshi, who wants to control Rikyu’s art and possess Ogin’s body. She boldly declares her love for the pious—and married—Christian samurai Ukon (the dreamily handsome Tatsuya Nakadai), who initially rejects her. For women in this period, to express their own desires or deny the lusts of powerful men constituted acts of radical self-determination. Early in the film, Ogin witnesses a gruesome procession taking a peasant woman (Kishi) to be crucified for refusing to comply with a warlord’s customary droit du seigneur. She gazes at the defiant captive with more awe than pity, observing, “She looks so alive!”

Tourneur spent his life in between his native France and America, and many of his best films follow people traveling to unfamiliar places or encountering the foreign at home. These themes are especially strong in three noir films he directed, currently playing on the Criterion Channel. Made nearly a decade apart, Out of the Past (1947) and Nightfall (1956) both open with a man living under a false name, on the run from something that happened in a different place and time. In Berlin Express (1948), a group of travelers in postwar Germany venture into a profoundly unsettled and unsettling landscape.

Whether they are real locations or studio sets, the places in these films are never merely backdrops; they envelop and influence the characters. Tourneur was sensitive and exacting about the lighting of scenes: one might be hearing him speak when the protagonist of Nightfall describes how often he has watched the day’s end from the window of his furnished room: “I know how every shadow falls.” The director also makes us aware of what is unseen and unheard, the paradoxical presence of absence: the “friendly” darkness of Cat People (1942), or the silence of the “Soundless Shore” in Circle of Danger (1951), where an American visitor takes in the eerie stillness beside a Scottish loch and observes, “It’s as if everything is waiting.”

Berlin Express: Displaced Persons

The scenes that hit hardest involve a coerced betrayal of an old friend, and a spy disguised as a clown from one of Frankfurt’s illegal, “off limits” nightclubs. Tourneur said that he had a “complex” about clowns: “They’re characters out of a nightmare . . . What’s sadder than a clown all made up?” This figure of false fun, with a painted grin and frightened eyes, is chased through a rubble field at night, lurching bloody and wounded, hiding in the tracery of shattered buildings. The people living in this shell of a town peddle personal belongings out of suitcases to survive, and post notices seeking missing loved ones. They have not left home but become strangers and refugees in their own city.

Out of the Past: Drifting and Dreaming

“You’ve been a lot of places, haven’t you?”

“One too many.”

“Which did you like the best?”

“This one right here.”

“I bet you say that to all the places.”

Nightfall: Wanted Man

“You change inside,” Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) says of being on the run. He is the man who searched the Home Town Papers for Evanston, and who has memorized how the dying light looks from his window. His name is not really Jim Vanning. Fleeing after an incident during a camping trip in Wyoming—the harrowing nature of which emerges only halfway through the film—he has drifted through New Orleans, Dallas, and now Los Angeles, taking different names and jobs. Innocent or guilty does not matter; he has become a fugitive in his soul, a man who instinctively shrinks from the light and hunches his shoulders at the sight of a police car.

Nightfall is based on a novel by noir master David Goodis, which provides its unabashedly far-fetched plot and tone of hunted, haunted anxiety. Stirling Silliphant, who wrote the screenplay, cocreated the television series Naked City, Perry Mason, and Route 66—the last of which is a paean to rootless wandering, an anthology show built around two young men’s aimless road trip through America. Nightfall’s most famous line of dialogue plays on the glamour of the fugitive, when Marie (Anne Bancroft) tells Jim, “You’re the most wanted man I know.” He is being pursued both by a pair of violent bank robbers who believe he has their loot, and by an insurance detective, Fraser (James Gregory), who has surveilled him so long and closely that he feels he has come to truly know his quarry, almost to be living his life. On a warm evening, at the start of the film, Fraser approaches Vanning at a bus stop and asks for a light; they talk about tropical islands, the detective’s generic fantasy of escape to a remote paradise running up against Jim’s actual experience fighting on Okinawa.

I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document (2019). The wig takes on a presence of its own, allowing Gary to embody a talk-show-host persona as she stops Black women on the streets of Harlem to ask, “Do you feel safe?” This character dons a navy blue, military-style jacket with gold buttons (think Michael Jackson) and speaks with a palpable warmth as she extends her mic to passersby. The multi-award-winning film traverses between Harlem and a very different location—the lush gardens of Giverny, France, where Gary held the Terra Foundation Summer Artist Residency in 2016. In the scenes shot in this Edenic sanctuary, Gary plays the Negress, wandering in an easy floral dress—and sometimes in Eve-like nudity. She is bold, curious, and unashamed, certain of her right to be there just as she is. In both settings, Gary is channeling someone who isn’t quite herself but somehow reveals an essential part of who she is: “I think both the character of the Negress in the Garden and the Woman on the Street who’s wearing Pam—those are iterations of myself in some regard,” Gary tells me.

The Criterion Channel is now presenting a showcase of Gary’s work featuring three of her films. Alongside The Giverny Document are Quiet as It’s Kept (2023), her pulsating call-and-response tribute to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and An Ecstatic Experience (2015), which explores the meaning of liberation through testimonies of Black women. Gary’s films blend animation—created through handmade techniques applied directly to film stock—with Kuleshov-style montage and audiovisual citations from nontraditional archives like the internet. Though she delights in abstraction and nonlinear form, Gary doesn’t love being labeled an “experimental filmmaker.” “If experimental wasn’t marginalized and diminished, I would have no problem being called experimental,” she says when we speak in February. Gary has just gone through an initiation practiced in her longtime religious tradition of Lucumi, which requires her to keep her video off during the interview. Her West African, Yoruba-based religion centers around the veneration of ancestors. “If stories are how we formulate reality—how we make sense of our experience here—but they all follow the same outline,” she continues, “then by changing the form, I’m modeling that you can create a reality radically different from the one you exist under.”

Ja’Tovia, who gave you your name, and what meaning does it hold for you?

My name, which I’ve grown to love over the years—I didn’t always love it—was given to me by my mother, Jocelyn. Everyone in my nuclear family has a name that starts with J.

My mother didn’t really have a meaning for it. She and my father were living in Palermo, Sicily—my dad used to be in the Navy. The story goes that they knew someone named Octavio, and—you know how Black people are—they decided to add the “Ja” and make it Ja’Tovia.

My theater teacher at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas—Ms. Vicki Washington—gave me a meaning for the name: “she who will not be deterred.” And I hang on to that.

You grew up in the Pentecostal church. Do you think there’s a connection between that background and performance? People talk about answering the call to ministry—did theater feel like your version of that?

What I’m doing right now may be a version of that. When I was a young person, theater was more about self-regulating. That was before I even understood what that meant. I just knew that when I got onstage and expressed myself physically and creatively through performance, I felt better. I felt better in my body and about who I was. It quieted my mind and gave me an outlet. Having access to arts education and the stage—and these incredible instructors and mother figures—really was lifesaving.

How did you make the transition from being a student at Booker T. Washington and acting to being interested in making films?

I made my first film on VHS while I was at Booker T. Washington. I was probably sixteen or seventeen. I had this boyfriend at another school—Mrs. Washington is actually his mother—and we were just two young artists. That first film was a kind of love letter to him. I got all my friends together. At that school everyone is extremely talented—dancers, singers, visual artists, musicians. People recited poetry, people sang. It was kind of a precursor to this nontraditional, nonlinear narrative structure in my work. It was a mosaic.

I didn’t start taking cinema seriously until I moved to New York and was pursuing acting. I started running into limitations around representation and autonomy in the roles I was being asked to audition for. Not all of them were disturbing, but enough of them made me feel that acting wasn’t giving me the freedom I needed.

At the same time I became interested in documentary and history. I was watching all kinds of historical documentaries—about Marcus Garvey, about Josephine Baker, about political issues. Eventually I returned to school and studied Africana Studies and documentary film production. It became a way to bring together my curiosity about Black culture and history with storytelling.

I want to get into the films that are on Criterion. I’d like to start with Quiet as It’s Kept, especially since yesterday was Toni Morrison’s birthday.

Originally the idea of exploring Toni Morrison cinematically was presented to me by a critic who wanted to commission it for a show. I usually don’t do commissions because I don’t like having a boss. But I loved the idea of thinking through Morrison cinematically. We used The Bluest Eye, which is one of my favorite texts, as a point of departure. I wasn’t interested in adapting it. I wanted to be in conversation with it. If Morrison were here, this film would be what I’d say to her about that book from my perspective as a Southern Black millennial queer woman.

You’ve said editing is where you make the film.

Yes, I remember going to the Flaherty Seminar when Christopher Harris and Cauleen Smith were speaking. Someone asked why they edit their own films, and they said the edit is where we make the film. I almost screamed when they said it.

Everybody’s process and practice is their own and deserves consideration, but for me, the edit is where the thing called filmmaking occurs. The edit is like writing. I wouldn’t hand my notes to another writer to assemble them into a text. The edit is the writing.

When you were interviewing people on the street in Harlem wearing the wig in The Giverny Document, were you consciously creating a character?

Yes. Something shifts when I put on the wig. I’m channeling talk-show culture from the 1990s—Rolonda Watts, Oprah, Phil Donahue, even Ricki Lake. Talk shows were an important cultural commons. I feel talk shows are very much within a documentary tradition. They revealed the desires and anxieties of the collective. So I wanted to think about the various modes that documentary has gone through over the ages. One of those modes is vox populi, voice of the people. You can sometimes get to a really intimate and revelatory moment with a stranger on the street.

The interviews in The Giverny Document were really moving to me as a Black woman who’s experienced some of the things that your woman-on-the-street interviews revealed. Did you have a lot more interviews than you included in the film?

Every person who stopped, I included. It wasn’t just about one or two, it was about the chorus. Saidiya Hartman talks about how the chorus can provide a mosaic of the reality that we live in, especially if the chorus is voices that are historically silenced. If anything, the experiment feels incomplete because I didn’t encounter transwomen during filming. If we really want to talk about safety, that’s who we need to be talking to.

I would describe The Giverny Document as your breakout film. Do you agree?

I don’t know. I think if we were to go by the amount of screenings and the response, that definitely had the largest response.

Why do you think that is?

I think there are many factors. My goal when I make these films is for someone to see them a hundred years from now and say this is resonant and applicable or restorative for me, but I think the timing was key. And I think it’s so densely layered that even though it does not reflect everyone’s lived experience, there are pieces, moments, and feelings that emerge that people can latch on to. It feels like a poem in a way, and you don’t understand every line of the poem, but maybe there’s this one stanza or this one couplet that does something for you.

Your films also feature a technique that involves etching directly onto 16 mm film.

So, direct animation is the overarching name of several techniques. Etching is one of the techniques; you are etching directly into the surface of the film, into the emulsion. Sometimes people are painting onto the surface of the film, or you are masking out certain parts of the film. It’s basically hand-processing techniques. Some people, like Stan Brakhage and Len Lye, call this cameraless filmmaking. I had a really interesting professor in graduate school called Michel Negroponte, and he told me that I was going to need to supplement my education, that I was going to need to use New York City as my other classroom. ​​And I found a place in Brooklyn called Mono No Aware. This is where I began to learn about these techniques and incorporate them into my practice. For me, the handmade element is important. I consider the films to be objects as well as experiences. There’s a sculptural element. I am not one of those filmmakers who’s always chasing the latest and greatest gadget, the sharpest camera. I’m absolutely consumed with the archive and small-gauge filmmaking and hand-processing. I think the intimacy that is created while you are making something can be transmitted, so it’s important for me to hold on to that and to spend that time creating that relationship with the material. It takes a really long time to etch, and that’s where the magic is stored.

You’ve also talked about Soviet montage theory as an influence.

Yes, the Kuleshov effect. When you place one image next to another, meaning emerges. If you change one image, the meaning changes. They are these psychological landscapes that are being painted. So I find this technique and the various ways that montages can be assembled extremely helpful. When I’m trying to paint an interior picture for a viewer, there’s so much meaning that can be made just by placing images next to one another. John Akomfrah and Arthur Jafa would call this “affective proximity.” What are you feeling emotionally? What are you feeling psychologically? Not just: what happens next in the narrative?

On the topic of citing internet archives, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message is one of the most well-known examples of films that do this. But your film An Ecstatic Experience actually came out a couple years earlier.

You know how many people say, “Oh, you were inspired by Arthur Jafa”? Everyone wants to make Arthur Jafa my dad, and I love AJ. He hates when I call him Uncle, but this is my southern uncle. We’re from the same region of the country. We come from very similar traditions, so it's no wonder that there are threads that are similar. But I’ve had multiple curators—usually they’re white men, sometimes they are Black people—say “you’re very much in this tradition of Arthur Jafa.” It’s erasure. It’s all love and respect to my uncle. I’ll forever give him his praises. He is my elder. I have learned a lot from him. He’s given me permission to speak very freely about my practice and to be my full self, which is why I don’t feel no type of way saying this: I did not get my ideas around montage editing from his film.

How do you listen for what a particular piece is asking of you while you’re making it?

I can’t even tell you how I listen. I just know that it is a listening. Initially, I’m working with ideas and thoughts and feelings that I’m scribbling down, and then I start culling images. If we’re talking about Quiet as It’s Kept, I knew that I wanted Toni Morrison’s voice in there somehow. And again, to shout out Michel Negroponte, he would always say to me, “Just put it on the timeline.” In your editing software, just start putting things there. Beginning is hard, but if you just start putting things down, like a painter would begin to put a stroke down or make a mark, then you begin to see things next to one another. So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making. And this is something that I tell younger filmmakers: “Don’t just go to film school. What do you know about the world?”

As a Black woman, I feel nourished by your films. There’s a caring that happens. I may not understand everything, but I know I can watch this and I’m not going to be harmed by it. And I think that’s really powerful, and something more filmmakers ought to think about.

We are deeply invested in care. These are restorative gestures. These are healing gestures. Some things are going to be uncomfortable, but we’re not trying to break you. We’re destabilized only in that we have to rip off the veil. We have to tell the truth straight. We’re operating in the Black feminist tradition, and that’s one of restoration and repair.

May 29–31: Criterion x PAM CUT

Location

SW Madison Street and South Park Blocks, across the street from the Portland Art Museum’s main entrance

Opening Hours

Friday, May 29: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Saturday, May 30: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Sunday, May 31: 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Additional Programming

PAM CUT will present three films programmed by Criterion: Monterey Pop (May 23), Paris Is Burning (May 24), and Something Wild (May 30).

On Sunday, May 31, at 7 p.m., Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein will join us for a live recording of the Criterion Channel original series Adventures in Moviegoing. In this intimate conversation, the longtime collaborators will reflect on how they came to love cinema and on the movies that inspire them.

Buy tickets here!

Enjoy this teaser for our weekend in Portland!

Getting to the Mobile Closet

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• 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. A limited amount of Criterion merch may also be available for purchase at the time of your visit. We accept credit cards only.
  
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FAQ

Are all Closet videos filmed in this Mobile Closet?

No, the Mobile Closet is a replica of our original Closet, which is located at our offices in Manhattan.

Is the Mobile Closet the exact same closet as the one at the Criterion office?

The Criterion Closet in the Criterion office is a few inches narrower, and the ceiling is slightly higher, but the contents and arrangements of the two Closets are identical.

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Yes, visiting the Criterion Mobile Closet is free.

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The camera in the Closet is always rolling, so you will be filmed. Some of the footage may be included in Criterion Closet supercuts or other videos we share through our social and other communications channels.

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The protagonist of The Hunter is called Parker. Of all the changes made to the original script—“appalling,” in Boorman’s opinion, “a collection of clichés,” he told Lee Marvin when they first met; “a piece of shit,” Marvin agreed—none was more fundamental than the switch from Parker to Walker. The hunter, one who hunts, was Parker, one who parks. Marvin does a bit of parking, outside Lynne’s LA apartment building, for example, though we never actually see him park, which is fine because parking can be as difficult to make interesting on film as it is sometimes difficult to do in real life, and if the scene in which Walker takes the convertible for a punishing test-drive from John Stegman’s car lot is anything to go by it’s likely that parking in a tight spot will result in severe damage to any vehicles in the vicinity. So, no parking but plenty of walking. “Walking is a form of thinking,” writes John Berger in Pig Earth, and Walker is always thinking. Even when he’s not walking—just sitting or standing—he’s thinking, and what he’s thinking about is getting his money back. What does he want? His money. What does he really want? I really want my money, he says after a moment of puzzled reflection, really putting the dead in deadpan, but the more he repeats this answer the less convincing it sounds, or the more the quest for his ninety-three thousand takes on the financially incalculable quality of deeper existential questions. It was Pinter rather than Beckett who influenced the “laconic and oblique dialogue” of the rewritten script, but Walker might as well have said he was waiting for Godot, even if he’s not waiting but walking. If walking is a form of thinking it might also be a form of not waiting, the opposite of waiting, and although Walker is so determined to get his money as to seem possessed by a kind of somnambulistic patience, it would be absurd if he’d been called Waiter. So that’s what Walker wants—his money—and does: walks.

When we think of a painting we see it whole in our mind’s eye. Films are remembered synecdochically, a few images or scenes standing in for the unfolding whole. Point Blank imprints itself in memory with the sequence of the aptly named Walker walking along the aptly named walkway after arriving at LAX, propelled by the percussive beat of his brogues. The camera is waist-high, looking up at him as he looks straight ahead, walking through the extreme anamorphic perspective of the walkway. Walking on film is not just walking, it’s also acting, one of the ways in which psychology is manifested externally. So there’s a lot going on in this walk, and much of that lot involves reducing everything about the walk—thinking, psychology—to nothing but walking. Even to say he’s thinking about walking is to overburden what he’s doing with cognition. He’s walking briskly, not dawdling, but neither is he hurrying.

Arriving at LAX I enjoy walking this same walk, but it’s always compromised by my casual clothes, my soundless sneakers, and—worse still—the fact that I’m usually dragging a wheelie suitcase. I mention this because Walker is luggage-free, which is odd given the number of costume changes he’ll make during his highly eventful sojourn in Los Angeles. This means either that he’s checked a bag and will have to wait at the luggage carousel (which seems out of character) or that, in addition to taking down all the people standing between him and his money, he’ll have to go clothes shopping on Rodeo Drive (even more out of character). The relentless clacking of brogues continues on the soundtrack even after Walker’s stopped walking and started driving, after he’s parked and waiting for Lynne to get home. When she does he bursts in behind her—unannounced, to put it mildly—storms into the bedroom, and shoots Mal where he lies, before realizing that he’s been blasting away, impotently, at an empty bed.

By now we realize what’s going on. Namely, that the young English director has got so much cinema in him he’s going to spike this hard-boiled thriller with all the stuff he’s absorbed from other films, other directors, often European (the “fractured structure” of Renoir) but also American (is there a hint of Corman psychedelia as the bottles of liquids and perfumes slosh around in the basin of Lynne’s bathroom after Walker has accidentally smashed a bottle of something that might appropriately be called blue ruin?).

Walker pauses in the vacant aftermath of this strange, oneiric episode. There’s lots of other stuff and people he’ll have to smash up in pursuit of his dough, and this will lead him ultimately not to smashing but to putting a dent in “the Organization.” Unnamed or perhaps named in the same generic way as Walker himself, the Organization suggests that America is, in David Thomson’s phrase, “a complex of organized crime,” but it would be a mistake to think of Marvin as some kind of avenging fallen angel trying to tear down the corrupt and complex edifice of American capitalism. He wants his money.

So on he goes, violently biting his way up the fiduciary food chain, dressed casually only in flashback, back in his early days with Lynne, before she started leaning toward Mal, or when they were doing the Alcatraz heist, but this simple claim is a little hard to sustain since everything from that point on might be a flashback from the moment of his dying, when a movie-dream of impeccably dressed vengeance floats through his head. The suits and sports coats he sports for the rest of the movie are not the best clothes for fighting, especially from a contemporary perspective of hoodies and trainers, but as Boorman explained, Marvin’s clothes were “severely tailored to allow no wrinkle or ruck—they were armor.” There’s no excess cloth on the suits, and after Marvin had contrived to give the novice director the boon of final approval on everything, Boorman shored up this position of extraordinary freedom by shooting a minimum of footage so that even if the studio did try to recut his movie they’d have little filmic cloth to play with. The bond between director and star was tight.

In the catalog to the exhibition of William Eggleston’s photographs that he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, John Szarkowski wrote of how Eggleston had “learned to see in color.” Point Blank was Boorman’s first experience of shooting in color, but to say he was a quick learner is to understate his precocity. Not only did he become instantly fluent in this new language, he developed a grammar of cinematic color as advanced as Antonioni’s in Red Desert or Blow-Up. The clothes, along with everything else—furniture, curtains, cars, sky—are color coordinated, each scene having its particular color harmony, from the silver grays of the early scenes at Lynne’s place to deep blues at the car lot, and on to yellows and browns at Huntley House, where Angie Dickinson (Chris, a seductive Trojan horse) agrees to yield to Mal’s advances. But—and this is essential—there is nothing schematic about this color scheme. It looks so natural that you barely notice it—you notice and respond to the colors, of course, without that response being resisted and therefore diminished by consciousness of directorial insistence. This is all the more remarkable given that all the needs of plot and story—including locations—are subordinated to the film’s aesthetic and rhythm (which, as that walkway sequence makes clear, are inextricably linked). That might be why, watching Point Blank on TV as a seventeen-year-old, I first became dimly—unconsciously, even—aware that there might be more to a movie than what was happening to the people on-screen. The most remarkable thing, though, is that the film never seems overstylized. Why? Because there’s nothing inessential in Boorman’s vision. Devoid of all twists and turns, so little remains of the plot that it can be powered by the director’s saturated aesthetic, a dream of full-color noir.

Devoid of irony and knowingness, it’s also unexpectedly funny. In addition to the Pinteresque dialogue, we have Carroll O’Connor (later to find fame as Archie Bunker in All in the Family) telling Walker—after he’s walloped someone in the kisser with a .44 Magnum—that he’s a very bad man, asking why he’s running around doing things like this. The night before, in that same house up in Curson Canyon, Angie Dickinson (who compels David Thomson to confess that the alphabetical imperatives of his Biographical Dictionary of Film leave him “torn between his duty to everyone from Thorold Dickinson to Zinnemann and the plain fact that Angie is his favorite actress”) starts slapping Walker around in the living room. He has survived getting shot on the Rock, and he stands there and takes it, like a rock. At the end of this sequence (which can be seen on YouTube, with Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” cleverly substituting for the original audio) Angie collapses in the face of—at the feet of—his implacable Walkerness. Next she sets in motion a kind of revolt of the appliances, turning on every mixer, stereo, blender, toaster, and gadget in the modernist house where they’re holing up. Earlier, after she’d helped him get to Mal in the Huntley, she’d left him in the street with the parting words, “You died at Alcatraz, all right.” In this she was echoing Boorman’s suspicion that one of the things that drew Marvin to the role was the fear “that he had lost some essential element of his humanity in [the] brutal experience” of fighting and being wounded as a combat marine in the Pacific. Certainly it’s only as a result of violence that Walker ends up in Chris’s arms, after she decks him with a pool cue. This is not the only time that violence has the quality of quasi-erotic dance. The ballet of assault and battery that erupts backstage at the nightclub—with the projections and blaring funk, it’s like an auto-destructive Happening—comes to a climax with Walker taking deliberate aim and punching one of his assailants between the legs. Mal thinks he’s about to have sex with Chris (at last) only to find that it’s Walker and his naked gun—the white hair encourages this association—inching their hard way toward him under the slinky color-coordinated sheet. That sheet is the only thing he’s wearing as he’s sashayed to the penthouse balcony, forced to acknowledge that, since it barely covers him, it’s not going to serve as much of a parachute. It’s not just a matter of movement, either the actors’ or the camera’s; it’s also about Marvin’s “way of looking”—Thomson again—“when blank hostility faded into hopeless desire.” Which brings us back to his money, to that ninety-three grand he’s determined to get his hands on. The violence might not be a means to get at the money; it might be a way of buying narrative opportunities for inflicting—and being on the receiving end of—hurt. Either way, as he kneels down to rip open the packet of money with his handgun in the concrete trickle of the LA River, he doesn’t seem unduly surprised or concerned to find that it’s stuffed with worthless paper. Maybe he’s relieved because what would he go on to do if he did get his $93K back? That’s a question he’s not going to answer until, with the inevitability of a parable, we end up back where it all started—or ended—at Alcatraz.

Point Blank “did well” when it opened but, in Boorman’s words, “was not a blockbuster.” In France (understandably and a little surprisingly since L’Anglais Boorman had out-Frenched the French in their fascination with the cinematic possibilities of American policiers) it was acclaimed as a masterpiece. That’s been the consensus verdict for a long time now, but—and this is not always the case, as the accumulation of praise can cause masterpieces to suffer a paradoxical softening or erosion—it retains the jagged shock and jolt of its initial execution and release. An unexpected dissenter is Quentin Tarantino, who, in Cinema Speculation, is dismissive of both the film (“After the show-off opening Point Blank settles down into sixties television”) and its star, who acts “like a leafless tree.” Hmm. That is less persuasive and less important than the way Point Blank has embedded itself in movie culture as source, influence, and reference point. Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets has a Point Blank poster on his bedroom wall and, in a more mature incarnation, in Reservoir Dogs, listens as Michael Madsen tells him, “I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan, aren’t ya?” I’d always assumed this was a bit of ventriloquism on Tarantino’s part. And even if it’s not and he’s not (a fan) I can’t help but associate the attempted smackdown with that of Angie Dickinson: assault as expression of frustrated love.

This essay © Geoff Dyer. All quotations here, unless otherwise attributed, are from John Boorman’s Adventures of a Suburban Boy.

Whoops! Not quite two decades on from the Great Moderation, we find ourselves still stumbling through the social, political, and economic hangover it left behind. Rampant deregulation, accelerating deindustrialization, and an increasingly financialized and computerized economy gave us the GFC, and the vastly unequal economy it left in its wake—channeling gains toward capital, speculators, and a small number of professionals, while leaving workers in the lurch—helped birth the reactionary populism now tearing up global trade.

But how could the economists have known? Well, maybe they should have gone to more movies. In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP. Viewed from the C-suite and the private jet, the economy may have looked fine. But seen from the movie-theater seat and the Blockbuster aisle, it was quite clear something sinister was happening.

Early on in Wall Street (1987), the eager young stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is begging for a second chance from Gordon Gekko, a wily corporate raider played with slimy thrill by Michael Douglas. “What about hard work?” Bud whines in the back of Gekko’s limo. “What about it?” Gekko snarls. “You worked all night researching that dog stock you sold me and look where it got you . . . Wake up pal, will you? If you’re not inside, you’re outside.”

It’s this final line, more than the more famous “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” that typifies the corporate thrillers of the period, which are generally less concerned with specific assessments of capitalism than with quasi-allegorical journeys from the outside to the inside, where our hardworking and ambitious heroes confront the corrupt inner workings at the heart of the modern economy. On Stone’s Wall Street, only old-fashioned fools and dupes try to trade stocks based on sober analysis and within the bounds of securities law; the real advantage is provided by insider trading, straw buying, and other kinds of fraud. Having worked his way to the commanding heights of finance, Bud finds nothing but criminal conspiracy and nonproductive speculation. Bud, the son of an airline shop steward, is troubled by this nihilism. Gekko is not: “I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal,” he tells Bud.

What the movies that followed Wall Street took from it was less Stone’s grounded if shallow critique of financial capitalism and more the texture and structure of Bud’s descent from the grasping outside to the corrupt inside. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s, ambitious young naifs were constantly being inducted on-screen into tony corporate offices eventually revealed as frauds, scams, rackets, and even literal cults. In The Firm (1993), directed by Sydney Pollack, Tom Cruise’s Harvard Law grad—the Bud Fox–ishly named Mitch McDeere—discovers that the boutique Memphis tax-law firm that gave him a Mercedes 300CE convertible and settled his student loans is actually an arm of the Chicago Outfit, prone to killing partners who seem like they might talk. In Antitrust (2001), genius programmer Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) is recruited to work for the tech giant NURV, whose Bill Gates–like founder Gary Winston (an unsettlingly soft-spoken Tim Robbins) has built an empire out of code stolen from independent programmers murdered by a team of coder–hit men.

That it was Pollack steering the fine studio entertainment of The Firm is fitting, and not just because he had made his own journey to the inside, becoming one of Hollywood’s great company men and a trusted maker of corporate product. The Firm and Antitrust both closely resemble Pollack’s great Three Days of the Condor (1975) in their stories of low-level insiders who stumble upon conspiracies and find themselves surveilled, blackmailed, compromised, and on the run. The difference is that these movies were made in an era where the locus of power, and therefore conspiracy, had moved from the government to the corporation; here, it’s not the CIA you have to worry about but the boardroom. Indeed, in The Firm the feds are largely impotent and easily held at bay; in Antitrust, the justice department is just another tentacle of the NURV octopus.

Maybe just as importantly for fomenting paranoia, the corporation is where all the mystification happens. As the economy becomes all but illegible to ordinary people, the only possible way to explain consolidation and inequality is in terms of mafia-sponsored tax-dodging schemes and techie murder conspiracies. On the one hand, this is all a bit ridiculous; on the other, well, a tech giant built on a foundation of stolen intellectual property? A white-shoe law firm helping clients hide money offshore? Some specific details may be wrong—among other things, no programmer in history has ever looked or sounded like young Ryan Phillippe—but the broad strokes are correct: something rotten is happening within the upper echelons of corporate America.

No movie more explicitly, enjoyably, or flamboyantly articulates this intuition than The Devil’s Advocate (1997), directed by the reliable Hollywood veteran Taylor Hackford and written by Tony Gilroy, who would eventually enter the Disney inner sanctum as the showrunner behind Andor (2022–2025). Here, again, we have a beautiful young working-class go-getter—Keanu Reeves, intermittently affecting an accent as southern defense attorney Kevin Lomax—selected and groomed for success by a powerful older man, in this case a grinning Al Pacino, strutting about in Cuban heels, as the superlawyer John Milton. At Milton’s behest, Lomax moves from Gainesville to Park Avenue; he attends parties with senators and represents millionaires.

But something isn’t right. At home, his wife (Charlize Theron) is losing it; when she goes shopping with other lawyers’ wives, their smiles contort demonically, and she dreams of a baby playing with entrails. “I know we’ve got all this money, and it’s supposed to be OK, but it’s not,” she tells Kevin, before slitting her throat in a locked hospital room. In Milton’s concrete penthouse apartment, Lomax confronts his boss, who reveals that the firm is indeed a front, not in this case for an insider trading scheme, or the mafia, or a murder ring, but for literal, actual Satan—Milton himself. No actor in history (for better or worse) has ever had as much fun as Pacino does revealing the truth of his identity, and of the world: “Who, in their right mind,” he asks Lomax, “could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

Lomax, confronted with this reality, shoots himself in the head, and is transported back to Gainesville, where his adventure in New York is understood as a daydream. Fox, we assume, heads to jail; Hoffman exposes Winston on local cable-access; and McDeere moves back to Cambridge, where surely he’ll never encounter another powerful and menacing sexual-extortion racket.

These are all guys who wanted out, once they’d made it inside. But what about the reverse? If one version of the corporate thriller follows the journey from outside to inside, another draws its narrative tension from movement in the other direction, exploring what happens as you go from the inside to outside, and get left behind as the economy, and the social order, transform.

In Disclosure (1994), Michael Douglas, only seven years removed from Wall Street, trades in his contrast collars for a toothpaste-stained tie as Tom Sanders, a middle manager for the tech company DigiCom on the eve of an important merger. Sanders isn’t a Gekko-style slick—you can tell because his hair is too feathery, too mullet-like—but he’s no slouch, either; he expertly manages a global supply chain manufacturing CD-ROM drives and arrives to his Seattle office at the start of the movie expecting a deserved promotion. But even as he ably surfs the changing tides of globalization, he finds himself caught out by the treachery of gender politics: His new boss Meredith Johnson, a former girlfriend played by Demi Moore, seduces him and then accuses him of assaulting her. Sanders, in turn, accuses her of sexual harassment; as the case unfolds, it becomes clear that more is going on than the simple assignation.

Disclosure is lethally symptomatic of its era, and, as such, lethally prescient about ours: it’s hard to imagine a movie that more efficiently compresses preoccupations about male sexual anxiety in the workplace and a disruptive tech boom dependent on Asian manufacturing into an actually-fairly-entertaining two-hour feature. But at its core, it’s a movie about being left out—thinking you were on the inside and finding yourself on the outside. Sanders is constantly missing meetings, arriving late, finding himself a step behind, catching glimpses of things through the glass walls of the DigiCom office.

Befitting the strangeness of the Great Moderation economy, the stakes are effectively nonexistent—“If this deal goes through, we’ll be rich,” Sanders tells his wife, who responds, “we’re already rich”; when Johnson’s assault accusation is levied, the biggest threat to Sanders isn’t jail or even social sanction, it’s being sent to Austin, Texas—but are cast as existential. DigiCom’s business is about to be supercharged, everyone agrees, and the worst possible outcome is to be left behind. In the movie’s inevitable virtual-reality climax, Sanders becomes something like a ghost, watching helplessly as a wireframe Johnson, oblivious to his existence, goes about deleting exonerating files.

If the conspiratorial structure of corporate-thriller plots reflects an increasingly mystified and stratified U.S. economy, the recurring use of mergers and acquisitions to establish dramatic stakes in these movies—beginning with Wall Street, which uses Gordon Gekko’s hostile takeover of Bluestar Airlines its central dramatic device—should be seen as a reverberation of Hollywood’s own experience of consolidation over the twenty years between Black Monday and the GFC. Sanders’s jockeying for position around corporate restructuring was probably a familiar experience to the executives at Warner Bros who greenlit Disclosure; the studio had merged with Time, Inc., in 1989, in a deal that was nearly thwarted at the last minute by a hostile-takeover bid from Paramount parent conglomerate Gulf+Western.

The rapid consolidation that would follow over the following two decades didn’t necessarily seem like a hazard for the movie industry as either a creative or a business concern; major studios and especially their independent arms enjoyed a remarkable run of critical and commercial success even as their ownership concentrated, and corporate profits soared. In the eighteen months before Disclosure was released, Viacom bought Paramount for $10 billion, and Disney bought Miramax for $60 million; the resulting conglomerates would win the Best Picture Oscars for the next five years and make the executives involved unimaginably rich (while also, notably given Disclosure’s subject matter, ignoring horrifying whispers of serial sexual assault by Miramax’s CEO Harvey Weinstein). No wonder, then, that the DigiCom merger is treated mainly as a threat to Sanders’s personal standing and potential future earnings, rather than the business’s product or profits.

Sanders ultimately clears his name, and despite the internal conspiracy he’s discovered, the merger goes through. He isn’t left behind—yet. But who can say what might happen to DigiCom, over the next decade? Maybe it would be capsized by the tech bubble bursting in 2001, or, given the clear problems with its corporate culture, caught in an accounting scandal like the one that collapsed Enron that same year. Or maybe the disc-drive manufacturing company—a tempting acquisition for a media empire driven by DVD-sales profits—would end up as a subsidiary of one of the Big Six conglomerates that, by the mid-2000s, bankrolled the vast majority of movies seen by Americans.

Where the mergers and acquisitions in Wall Street, Disclosure, and Antitrust—morally ambiguous though they might be—appear as gateways to wealth and success for those movies’ heroes, the plot-driving merger in Michael Clayton (2007) is treated more like a closing bell. The New York–based firm Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is about to merge with an unnamed London counterpart, and the stakes are existential; if the deal doesn’t go through, explains partner Marty Bach—played by none other than Sydney Pollack—“we’ll be selling off the goddamn furniture.” (Pollack might well have been talking to himself: his personal shingle Mirage was one of the three production companies behind Michael Clayton, all of which were shuttered or reduced in size in the years on either side of the film’s release.)

In the movie’s opening scene, an army of lawyers gather in a conference room in an office high-rise, trying to get a settlement finished—and any bodies, metaphorical or literal, fully buried—before the merger deadline. The portentous emptiness of the office hallways, the secrecy of the meeting (Bach tells a Journal reporter fishing for info to kiss off), and the manic voice-over monologue of partner Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) make the scene feels like a prefiguration of the bankruptcy-driven mergers and acquisitions that would ripple through the finance industry the year after the film’s release—a series of all-night negotiations and conferences more literally depicted from the other side of the crisis in the 2011 financial thriller Margin Call.

Somebody might get rich from this deal, but it isn’t our titular hero (George Clooney); in fact, he’s worried it will end his career and leave him without protection, another casualty of a shifting economic environment, “trying to explain what the hell it is I do around here.” Unlike the Foxes and McDeeres of early-period corporate thrillers, Clayton isn’t a bushy-tailed young naif but a greying fixer. Those conspiracies that our heroes uncover in The Firm and Antitrust? That’s the kind of thing Clayton is paid to cover up. He’s there to keep business orderly and functioning, one bribe, bail bond, or called-in favor at a time. As he tells a client early in the movie, “I’m not a miracle-worker. I’m a janitor. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up.” (Tony Gilroy, making his directorial debut at fifty, could probably relate, having become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated script doctors in the years since The Devil’s Advocate.)

The mess, in this case, involves an agrochemical giant called U-North, facing a class-action lawsuit over toxic pesticides. Edens, overseeing the U-North defense, has diligently protected his client from accountability. But the constant stress that accompanies years of concealment and rationalization has broken him, and Edens can no longer live with himself. “Am I just some freak organism that’s been put here to eat and sleep and spend my days defending this one horrific chain of carcinogenic molecules?” he asks Clayton, his former protégé. After he steals an incriminating memo and threatens to release it, Clayton is tasked with tracking him down and cleaning up.

The feeling that dominates Michael Clayton is one of stress and urgency, contraction and imminent implosion, fissures showing in a previously stable world. Edens, once a master of compartmentalization and billable stability, has cracked wide open in a manic eruption of guilt and shame. Clayton’s brother has fallen off the wagon; the restaurant they started together has gone bankrupt. He owes a loan shark $75,000, but the partners are trying to play hardball on his new contract. Clayton knows they’re pulling up the ladder and he’s going to be left behind with only his debts—along with any liability he’s incurred as a bagman to the rich and powerful.

Clayton was not the only person coming to terms with an increasingly unsustainable world. By the fall of 2007, the party, such as it had been, was nearly over, in Hollywood as in the U.S. economy as a whole. The subprime mortgage crisis was in full swing; the credit crunch was beginning; and the structural debts incurred by two decades of deregulation, financialization, and stratification were coming due.

The presence of Pollack, drawing on memories of his turn as the sinister gatekeeper Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), suggests that Michael Clayton might be seen as The Firm from the other side of the Great Moderation—a lawyerly conspiracy, but not one where a recent grad uncovers the corruption he didn’t realize existed. Instead, Clayton is a veteran fixer admitting to himself the true nature of the world he’s been living in: decades of greed, fraud, compromise, and cover-up. Maintaining one’s position on the inside of corporate America requires a heavy dose of self-deception too. That’s why even an insider as seasoned as Clayton can find himself slipping back into the naivete of a Bud Fox. As Pollack, playing Clayton’s shrewd, compromised boss, tells him: “Fifteen years in I gotta tell you how we pay the rent?”

This May, take a peek at movie history through the prism of the ’80s: our collection of the decade’s best remakes and the originals that inspired them reveals an era of wild reinventions and sly revisionism. Office Romances collects some of classic Hollywood’s most winning workplace rom-coms, while David Chase’s Adventures in Moviegoing retraces the cinematic education that shaped the creator of The Sopranos. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the exclusive premiere of Debra Granik’s multipart documentary Conbody vs Everybody, a survey of radical Caribbean filmmaking, spotlights on genre-blending directors Kimi Takesue and the Ross brothers, and Bill Douglas’s landmark trilogy of autobiographical films.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

As a new generation of movie-mad directors emerged in the 1980s, they drew direct inspiration from the films they grew up watching and obsessing over. The result was a striking run of idiosyncratic Reagan-era remakes in which filmmakers such as John Carpenter (turning the Cold War sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World into a glacial descent into existential terror), Paul Schrader (transforming the shadowy horror landmark Cat People into a hypnotic vision of erotic obsession), and Jim McBride (reimagining Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave bombshell Breathless as a neon-soaked rock ’n’ roll reverie) breathed new life into familiar stories. Viewed side by side, these films reveal a decade in provocative dialogue with the past, infusing timeless originals with the aesthetics, politics, and cultural permissiveness of a new era.

REMAKES: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Cat People (1982), The Thing (1982),* Breathless (1983), The Man Who Loved Women (1983), Against All Odds (1984), No Way Out (1987), D.O.A. (1988), We’re No Angels (1989)*

ORIGINALS: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Cat People (1942), The Thing from Another World (1951), Breathless (1960), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Out of the Past (1947), The Big Clock (1948)*, D.O.A. (1949), We’re No Angels (1955)*

Beginning in the 1930s, the ever-growing number of working women inspired a new type of romantic comedy, where meet-cutes come amid desks and typewriters, and the course of true love is entangled with office politics and professional rivalry. The genre was tailor-made for stars like Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell who could dazzle with brainy repartee and make competence sexy. Elements of these films may be quaintly transgressive (boozy office parties! bosses dating their secretaries!), but they also tackle still-timely topics—work-life balance (His Girl Friday), gender equality (Woman of the Year), and even fears of jobs being eliminated by computers (Desk Set)—with crackling comic irreverence, finding laughter and romance in the nine-to-five.

FEATURING: The Office Wife (1930), Working Girls (1931), Man Wanted (1932), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), More Than a Secretary (1936), His Girl Friday (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Desk Set (1957), The Apartment (1960)

As a writer-director, producer, and creator of The Sopranos, David Chase has left an indelible imprint on popular culture, revolutionizing the art of television by bringing a boldly cinematic sensibility to the small screen. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with crime-fiction author Megan Abbott to discuss his formative cinematic experiences—from his early memories of the classic gangster movies that would influence his work to the filmmaker he considers his “first director crush”—as well as the selection of favorites he has chosen to present, including a jazz-inflected crime thriller by Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows) and a freewheeling Italian road comedy (Il sorpasso).

FEATURING: L’Atalante (1934), Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Viridiana (1961), Il sorpasso (1962), Lacombe, Lucien (1974)

Born from a period of intense political upheaval, these radical Caribbean films spotlight vital stories of workers’ movements, decolonial struggle, and liberation from economic exploitation and violent oppression. Including urgent, on-the-ground accounts of revolutionary movements (Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us), dynamic portraits of women on the frontlines of resistance (Women of Suriname, Sweet Sugar Rage), and a one-of-a-kind diasporic musical revue (West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty), they blend agitprop and grassroots pedagogy with living folk traditions to forge a collective counter-cinema built around the fight for freedom. 

Guest-curated by Jonathan Ali of Third Horizon Film Festival, who presented a version of this program entitled You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985 at THFF in 2025. 

FEATURING: Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973), The Terror and the Time (1978), Women of Suriname (1978), West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), Bitter Cane (1983), Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us (1983), Sweet Sugar Rage (1985) 

Filmed over eight years, this five-part documentary series from director Debra Granik combines a remarkable, against-the-odds story of grit, survival, and redemption with an incisive look at the harms of America’s prison industrial complex. After years in and out of prison, former drug dealer turned entrepreneur Coss Marte is determined to take control of his future by building Conbody, a New York City gym with a unique social purpose: to employ formerly incarcerated people like himself in an attempt to combat the high rate of recidivism. As Marte wages an uphill battle against the stigma of incarceration and the realities of a relentlessly gentrifying city where second chances are hard to come by, what emerges is both an inspiring portrait of a man on a mission and a powerful examination of a system that continues to punish people even after they have served their time.

Exclusive Premieres

Featuring a new introduction by director Lav Diaz, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

A hypnotic journey engraved in images of staggering beauty and horror, this monumental achievement from acclaimed Filipino auteur Lav Diaz boldly rewrites the imperialist mythmaking of the Age of Discovery. Elegantly minimalist yet overpowering in its scale and impact, Magellan follows the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) as he embarks on his epochal quest to cross the Pacific—a voyage that spirals into zealotry and violence when he attempts to impose Christianity upon the people of the Philippines. Abetted by Bernal’s radically antiheroic portrayal, Diaz composes a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past. 

Featuring a new introduction by director Thierry Frémaux, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the surname of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institut Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, le cinéma! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious (re)telling of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Cinematic champion of working-class solidarity Ken Loach (I, Daniel Blake) looks back at the remarkable twentieth-century socialist surge that changed modern Britain forever. Through a vivid mix of interviews and archival footage, Loach brings to life the crucial postwar period that swept Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s insurgent Labour Party into power over Winston Churchill’s Conservative government, inaugurating a sweeping series of reforms—including the nationalization of railways, energy, housing, and health care—that marked the birth of the UK’s welfare state. Connecting the era’s hard-won populist triumphs with their present-day precarity, Loach offers both a stirring celebration of collective power and a sobering reminder of its fragility.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

A newlywed woman discovers that her husband’s charm masks disturbing depths of cruelty and madness in Luis Buñuel’s fascinatingly perverse tale of love gone wrong.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An appreciation by Guillermo del Toro, an interview with Buñuel by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a video essay on Buñuel, and more.

Newlywed reporters find that love and careers clash in this razor-sharp screwball romance, the first of the iconic pairings between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director George Stevens, George Stevens Jr., and authors Marilyn Ann Moss and Claudia Roth Pierpont; and feature-length documentaries on Stevens and Tracy.

Terror lives in the suggestive shadows of this mood-drenched thriller about a woman haunted by a curse that turns her into a feline killer. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Gregory Mank, the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, an interview with director Jacques Tourneur, and more. 

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant play a recently divorced journalist couple brought back together in the newsroom in one of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Howard Hawks and film scholar David Bordwell, featurettes about Hawks and Russell, a radio adaptation of the film, and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

The visually mesmerizing and deeply reflective films of Kimi Takesue traverse genres—including documentary, fiction, and experimental forms—to explore the charged spaces between observer and observed. Often centered on the act of travel, Takesue’s work follows tourists and locals as they navigate shared yet unequal terrain. In evocative shorts and acclaimed features like Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, she turns an unblinking lens on cross-cultural encounters, revealing the subtle tensions, curiosities, and power dynamics that shape how we see and are seen across differences. Through her immersive long takes, Takesue invites audiences into moments of intimacy and unease that continually challenge our assumptions.

FEATURES: Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), 95 and 6 to Go (2016), Onlookers (2023)

SHORTS: Bound (1995), Rosewater (1999), Heaven’s Crossroad (2002), Summer of the Serpent (2004), E=NYC2 (2005), Suspended (2009), That Which Once Was (2011), Looking for Adventure (2013) 

Flowing freely between documentary and performance, the richly impressionistic films of brothers Bill and Turner Ross are wonders of regional American filmmaking made according to an unwavering philosophy: to be completely present in the moment and alive to the ecstatic humanity that passes before their camera. Whether capturing the rhythms of life along the Texas-Mexico border (Western), the vibrant tradition of color guard (Contemporary Color), or the bleary-eyed last night in a Las Vegas dive bar (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets), their films are vital records of a living, breathing Americana that approaches the mythic.

FEATURING: Western (2015), Contemporary Color (2016), Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)

Composed in stark, black-and-white images of working-class poetry that have the elemental power of silent cinema, these three works by Bill Douglas are among the most miraculous achievements of British independent film. Based on Douglas’s own hardscrabble upbringing in a postwar Scottish mining village, the Trilogy traces the coming of age of a boy named Jamie (Stephen Archibald) as he contends with poverty, neglect, and emotional isolation before a life-changing friendship sets him on a new path. Tempering harsh reality with moments of tenderness and unexpected lyricism, Douglas crafts an indelible vision of a soul blossoming in the most unforgiving of circumstances.

FEATURING: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), My Way Home (1978)

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Four temp workers stuck in cubicle hell find their friendship tested by the pressures of the capitalist rat race in this brilliantly deadpan satire of corporate malaise.

ANIME

Five high school bandmates make music and memories on a life-changing trip to London in this charming, heartfelt ode to friendship and growing up.

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Joan Crawford delivers a ferocious performance in this scorching domestic melodrama as a Southern socialite who rules her friends and family with an iron fist.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Reality and fiction blur to dizzying, emotionally gripping effect when a film crew reunites to finish a long-abandoned project—only to be locked down at the start of COVID-19. 

After a tragedy leaves her as the guardian of her late daughter’s frozen embryo, a woman must confront both her past and future in this elegantly emotional exploration of motherhood and regret. 

The limitless imagination of cinematic dream-spinner Michel Gondry is unleashed in a series of lovingly handmade animated adventures inspired by his daughter’s prompts.

DOCUMENTARIES

The reintroduction of brown bears into a traditional shepherding community sparks conflict high amid the majestic French Pyrenees in an immersive, folkloric documentary.

Using training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” this acclaimed documentary offers a poetic and furious reflection on the rebellions of the 1960s—and the machine that worked to destroy them.

Assembled from over nine hundred reels of archival footage, this monumental documentary from the great Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) examines the prosecution of Japanese war crimes and the fraught, often elusive pursuit of justice.

This lively portrait chronicles the rise and global influence of visionary designer Pierre Cardin, whose space-age chic designs propelled fashion into the future.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

An FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover as a surfer to catch a band of bank-robbing wave-chasers in the most ecstatically adrenalized cult classic of the 1990s.

Sean Baker’s feature debut raises the bar for the indie hangout movie with an acerbic, hilarious portrait of young men unwilling to jettison the raucous immaturity of adolescence.