One word; two worlds.

It isn’t all that surprising that Welcome II the Terrordome’s radical storytelling was received with so much confusion. Onwurah’s vision of how racism and bigotry could look in the future was not sympathetic to the white gaze. It blasted the postracial illusion and did not position white people as saviors or allies but as corrupt, or even plain evil. It showed anti-Blackness as a system that underpins the modern world, and it challenged the idea of the West as a meritocracy, something that many white liberals had long believed in.

If white critics saw Welcome II the Terrordome as provocative or hyperbolic, it was because they could not or did not want to reckon with the real current and historical events that informed the film, be it the crack epidemic of the 1980s and early ’90s, which had destroyed entire communities in the U.S., or the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, which had resulted in a deep recession and long-term unemployment.

As Sylvia Wynter writes about in the 1977 essay “ ‘We Know Where We Are From’: The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley,” lowly unskilled “native”/“negro” cum casual laborers and school dropouts had been finding themselves redundant in their nations and in an increasingly automated labor market. They were “relegated, thereby, to their criminalized, impoverished ‘inner city ghettos,’ together with the latter’s prison extensions, as a permanent underclass mired in poverty,” she writes.

Onwurah also roots Welcome II the Terrordome in an understanding of African mythology, which includes folklore, deities, and cosmological concepts. Those themes and Welcome II the Terrordome’s use of speculative fictional forms to imagine Black people into an alternate reality—even if that reality is a bleak dystopia based on the kind of brutality members of the Black diaspora were facing in real life—place the film in creative sympathy with the Afrofuturist movement. Black people had typically been excluded from science fiction, despite the clear parallels between sci-fi tropes of societies facing exclusion, isolation, and disempowerment at the hands of tyrannical forces and the everyday experiences of working-class Black communities. Welcome II the Terrordome is foundational in showing that Black storytelling isn’t monolithic—it can be expansive and experimental.

The film opens with a reimagining of the 1803 Igbo landing at Saint Simons Island, Georgia, where seventy-five captured Igbo people from what is now Nigeria took control of their slave ship and committed mass suicide to avoid submitting to slavery in the United States. We see them submerge themselves in the water, their chained bodies falling deeper and deeper into the abyss. “Most people nowadays think that we simply drowned, but on that day long ago, we proved everybody wrong,” a male voice-over says. Their bodies end up in “a place where neither our spirits were free nor our bodies were dead.” It’s a place that has many names: Babylon, no-man’s-land, Transdean (the official name of the film’s slum), the Terrordome (as it is known to its inhabitants).

As the gates to the Terrordome open, a voice can be heard saying, “If you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future.” The line furthers the idea that this story is about what it means to exist in a transitional zone, caught between history and the future, between imprisonment and freedom. The Black people living in the Terrordome are not in chains, but they are not liberated either. They are confined to a site that is rife with decay and poverty, “a dirty, rancid, stinking shithole,” as the voice-over says. A police car makes its way through the Terrordome, and onlookers jeer and shout from the sides of the streets. It’s clear that, in this dystopian reality, the police force still functions as an extension of white supremacy—constantly surveilling, constantly dominating.

Early on, hip-hop is introduced as a key component of the film, which takes its name from a 1990 Public Enemy song. You can hear the New York group’s influence in the style of rapping that features throughout the film. It’s in the cadence, the punchy beats, the sociopolitical lyrics. Many of the songs on its soundtrack were produced by the British MC Black Radical MKII, a.k.a. Felix Joseph, who also plays the character named Black Rad. Onwurah has said that she used hip-hop in the film for its ability to be blunt and hard-hitting while still being listenable and providing some form of relief. It’s true. The music helps to carry context and thoughts that would otherwise be too wordy for dialogue or voice-over. The lyrics are directly linked to and provide commentary on the plotlines, giving the film a musical theater–like quality. There are lines about how every man has a price, how it’s better to sell drugs than to take them, how you should keep an automatic gun in the small of your back, how you should keep your dick hard, and how if a man’s from hell, you should send him back. Is it on the nose? Yes. But it prepares you for some of the brutal scenes you’re about to witness.

Onwurah saw Welcome II the Terrordome as a hip-hop film in the tradition of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), which itself makes good use of another Public Enemy song, “Fight the Power.” There are nods to Do the Right Thing throughout: a central character is called Spike; music and DJ culture bring people together. Movies such as the cult-classic comedy House Party (1990) and the seminal hood drama Boyz n the Hood (1991) had also featured hip-hop soundtracks that caught on with audiences. But Onwurah’s use of the music was as much about continuing the kind of oral storytelling that can be traced back to West African griot traditions as it was about harnessing the popularity of the genre.

The actors from the Igbo-landing scene take on new roles in the film’s present day, perhaps as a gesture to the belief among members of the African diaspora that we are spiritually tethered to our ancestors. The main narrative starts as a familiar ghetto tale of a gang leader living a double life. Rad shares a tender kiss with his wife, Anjela, as he leaves their apartment to sell drugs to sustain the family. But we see from the get-go that his two lives are not wholly separate, when Anjela’s sister uses drugs in the flat straight after Anjela puts the kids to bed. The scene then cuts to a pregnant white woman called Jodie, in another Terrordome room with Anjela’s brother, Spike, who cuts the white powder he plans to sell to “white trash” alongside Rad as part of the Blue Gang. Spike and Jodie argue about his disdain for white people, but he eventually comforts her, telling her she is “one of us” because she is pregnant with his Black child. When they climb into bed to make love, the purple-blue lighting enhances this most erotic moment of the film. Here, interracial love is beautified, though perhaps in juxtaposition with the destruction it will later catalyze.

Violence and brutality are not undercurrents of Welcome II the Terrordome; they are at its core. In films depicting gang violence, there are frequently scenes of torture and suffering, but here, watching a man scream and beg for his life as he is chained up, covered in gasoline, and set on fire by the opposing Red Gang is true horror. The grit and immediacy of such scenes, shot on very little money, make them terrifying in ways a bigger budget might have rendered overpolished.

Because of an opportunity to expand the gang’s drug-dealing operation to the white world outside the Terrordome, there is tension in the air. Rad tells Spike that he questions Jodie’s loyalty, implying that her whiteness means she is likely to betray them. Even though she rejects this idea, her presence in the Terrordome does exactly that. After her abusive white ex-boyfriend sees her hanging out with the Black folks, the night takes a sudden turn. Rad raps about Spike’s love of white girls and how he didn’t think “that who he sleeping with could have such an effect on my wife and my kids.” The lyrics let us know exactly what the takeaway is: sleeping with the enemy means they all will pay the cost. The eeriness that follows peaks when Hector, Anjela and Rad’s young son, sneaks out of the house to attend the Blue Gang’s party, unbeknownst to his mother, who is busy dancing. In what feels like foreshadowing, the camera zooms in on a shattered photograph of Jodie’s face.

Writing in Cinema Journal in 1999, Anne Ciecko noted that it was “unclear where the film stands on race mixing because of its sympathy for the plight of the white character Jodie.” Onwurah was born in Nigeria in 1966 to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and raised in Newcastle, England. Her first film, Coffee Coloured Children, released in 1988, is an autobiographical work exploring the internalized anti-Blackness experienced by two mixed-race children. The filmmaker appears to have a personal investment in exploring the dynamics of intimate relations between Black men and white women, but it seems to be less about positioning them as either holy or evil than as unsustainable while the fight for Black liberation is ongoing. There’s a naivety in Jodie and Spike’s belief that love can conquer all, a myth that is quickly exploded when Jodie’s ex crashes the Blue Gang’s party (which before this offered a brief moment of joy) and repeatedly punches Jodie in the stomach, causing her to suffer a miscarriage.

The boy Hector, who was hiding when Jodie’s ex and his white mob arrived, jumps out of the dark, shouting for them to stop. But his choice to defend Jodie ultimately leads to his own tragic end. He is menacingly chased through a building before bursting through a door and falling to his death. The bird’s-eye view of his body, blood pooling behind his head, is deeply harrowing. When Anjela, looking for her missing son, eventually finds his corpse, her scream is bodily, visceral. It’s a sound only a grieving mother could make.

In Hector, you can’t help but see every Black boy killed at the hands of racism. You see Emmett Till lynched in Mississippi in 1955. You see Stephen Lawrence stabbed by a group of white thugs in southeast London in 1993. You see Trayvon Martin shot by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012. The death of Hector Pieterson, a South African schoolboy who was shot and killed during the Soweto uprising and massacre in 1976, was a direct inspiration for this section of Welcome II the Terrordome. Later in the film, Rad carries Hector’s body during a memorial ceremony in a way that mirrors Pieterson’s lifeless body being carried, as seen in a widely circulated photograph taken by Sam Nzima. Onwurah has said that connecting the diasporas in this way was an intentional choice.

However, Welcome II the Terrordome does not end with tragedy alone. It doesn’t end with the heavy heart of a woman forced to make peace with her son’s untimely death, as so many Black mothers have had to do in the real world. When Anjela sees the white gang responsible for her son’s demise, she points a gun and shoots them down. Calmly. No hesitation. It’s almost as if there’s a spirit gently guiding her hand. She goes on to shoot the police too. The actor Suzette Llewellyn, who plays Anjela, does a brilliant job of embodying her sense of detachment. Viewers get to live out their revenge fantasies vicariously through her, which is effective not least because of how different revenge is from hate. Revenge is about retribution, which implies the pursuit of justice. Hate is unfocused, undefinable, messy. Hate is what the police who harass the inhabitants of the Terrordome feel. Hate is what Jodie’s ex feels as he smears her face with her own blood. Anjela’s “killing spree” is a rare scene of a Black woman leaning into her anger. Her rage isn’t hysterical or easy to dismiss as a shock tactic. It is pointed and confident. It’s a foreseeable part of the trajectory of a life lived under such subjugation, even if it ends with her own hanging.

Welcome II the Terrordome puts forward the questions of whether forgiveness is a necessary part of freedom and whether empathy is progressive or holds us back. When Anjela’s sister begs her grandmother to help her look after the beaten-up Jodie, the older woman has no interest. “Enough is enough,” she says. For her, Jodie symbolizes distraction. She is a figment of Babylon.

Echoing throughout the film are the radical words and ideologies of revolutionary and Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, most notably a line from a 1963 speech: “We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.” Thus, the film ends with fire, riots, and the Blue Gang hijacking a mainstream television station to broadcast a Black-liberation manifesto. “The mother is rising,” Rad concludes.

Welcome II the Terrordome’s final images depict the drowned enslaved people from the begin­ning emerging from the water. This is intercut with a scene of Anjela in the middle of the street in daylight. Both she and one of the enslaved men break free from their chains, implying that there is hope after resistance. If Welcome II the Terrordome was ahead of its time when it was first released, it can finally rest in the here and now.

Born in 1961 in the Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan as the son and grandson of leading Buddhist teachers, and trained since childhood as a monk, he got his start in film as the Buddhism advisor to Bernardo Bertolucci on location for Little Buddha (1993), in which he ultimately also had a small but meaningful speaking role. Inspired by the experience, he soon after wrote his first screenplay, and the resulting feature film, directed by him and produced by the legendary Jeremy Thomas (among others), was the surprise 1999 indie hit The Cup, a neorealist dramedy about a group of soccer-obsessed young monks at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India.

Norbu’s subsequent films have been made in Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, all with nonprofessionals in front of and behind the camera. His success in film has in a way inspired a generation of filmmakers in Bhutan, including Pawo Choyning Dorji, his producer for the 2016 Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait, whose own debut feature as director, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, was Bhutan’s official submission to the Academy Awards and garnered a nomination for Best International Feature—a historic first for the kingdom.

Norbu, whose films can now be viewed on the Criterion Channel, was certainly not the first filmmaker to undertake Buddhist stories—Bertolucci, Scorsese, Im Kwon-taek, Annaud, Ichikawa, and others (dating back to Franz Osten and Himansu Rai in 1925) preceded him. But he was the first Buddhist teacher to take up cinema (a few have since followed), as much an indication of his unique gifts as of the changing landscape for Buddhist traditions around the world.

This interview was conducted over multiple conversations.

Given your intensive traditional training and education as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, what led you to cinema?

In a word, storytelling. As soon as videotapes became available (yes, monks have TVs!), I became fascinated with the power of movies, the emotional influence of storytelling through sound and motion pictures. I also see in filmmaking—directing and editing—a connection to vipassana meditation, where you bring your attention to one thing. But it’s also that Buddhist traditions have always embraced art forms to express wisdom and compassion, and perhaps we can look at cinema as a possible modern form of thangka painting, which is an older way to tell stories. Making a good film is somewhat like doing a good Buddhist practice—both require an awareness of how we’re conditioned.

Who were your inspirations?

I was particularly inspired by the films of Yasujiro Ozu, his simple subject matter and static camera work. I also like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Antonioni, Satyajit Ray’s films, Kubrick’s 2001, Kurosawa, Kiarostami, Imamura . . . One of my favorite films is Natural Born Killers, by Oliver Stone.

For your first professional project, you got to work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. How did that come about? And what was it like with him?

I was in London (this was the early ’90s), ostensibly studying comparative religion at SOAS (School of Oriental Studies), but I was mostly just watching lots of movies. A friend told me that Bertolucci wanted to meet me, having heard that a Buddhist lama was in town. We met and spent a lot of time discussing philosophy—Buddhist, yes, but also existentialism, Marxism, all kinds of things. He was very interested in reincarnation, of course, and we discussed the differences between reincarnation, emanations, and avatars. I gave some advice to Bernardo and the screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, on philosophical issues in Buddhism, and on set I made suggestions about where ritual objects might go, and what kind of movements and behaviors would be normaI for a lama, things like that. Bernardo made it clear he saw the film as a children’s movie, and I was all in favor of that. I ended up having a bit part in the film that wasn’t in the script. There was some sort of delay on set, and Bernardo asked me to improvise. I think, though, I learned more about filmmaking from watching the interaction between him and his great cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro.

The Cup was an audacious debut. How did you come to write it?

That was based on a true story! Growing up in a monastery, I knew that monks are obsessed with football [soccer]. Monks are just human, with normal enthusiasms, especially the young ones. Satyajit Ray’s simple approach to storytelling gave me the confidence to try to make a film. I wanted to maybe demystify the Western sense of Tibetan Buddhist monastery life. Making that film in a real monastery, with mostly monks performing all the roles, involved the whole community, and they had to do their meditations and prayers at 4 a.m. before filming began for the day.

The late Jeremy Thomas, who was Bertolucci’s longtime producer, came on board as a producer and executive producer for The Cup. How did that come about?

Jeremy was on set for Little Buddha, of course, and one day we were flying from Bangkok to Paro [in Bhutan], and there’s not much to do on those Drukair flights, so I was reviewing my script. He was sitting right behind me, and he asked me what I was working on. I told him it was the first draft of a script, and he asked to read it. He read it right then and asked if I really wanted to do it, and I said yes, and he said he’d help. Eventually his Hanway Films took on international sales. He was always interested in my films, and even if he wasn’t officially involved he offered advice and encouragement. I owe him a lot.

You once gave a talk called “Life as Cinema.” What was that about?

Cinema can perhaps be understood as a metaphor for the Buddhist teachings about samsara and nirvana, right? Suppose we were born in a cinema. We only know what’s on the screen; we don’t know it’s only a projection, that nothing is real, that nothing we see has a true existence. But someone in the theater says, “This is just a movie, it’s not really happening.” Perhaps we get it, and then we can just relax and enjoy the show, enjoy the drama, the emotions, not get lost. Well, Buddhist practitioners train to understand, to internalize, that this life—samsara/nirvana—is as essenceless as a movie. Getting even just a glimpse that appearances are not real can give us confidence. It’s more complicated than that of course, but . . .

In most of your films there’s a suggestion of amusement, not just in the stories themselves, but in the tone of the performances, and by extension, in your direction. How do you see that?

Some of that is just in the nature of the stories, but perhaps there is something of the Buddhist view that what we ordinarily experience is without essence, and that can be funny if we see that, no? Amusement at the delusion sort of lurks beneath the surface.

Why do you tend to work with nonprofessionals?

Mostly out of necessity! I make these films on very low budgets, so there’s that. I also enjoy offering young people a chance to learn about filmmaking, about teamwork, about technology, etc. It’s also true that nonactors often are capable of giving very believable performances if given the right environment.

Some find Hema Hema your most mysterious film, primarily because we rarely see anyone’s face. What’s it really about?

That film was an experimental approach to some ideas about identity and the sense of self. The use of masks in a ritualized setting brings to mind Carnival/Carnevale, celebrated in some Christian cultures before the observance of the abstemious Lent each year, an accepted way to briefly be free of one’s identity and any rules that limit experience. We filmed that in Bhutan and were a bit surprised it was banned there, for using masks outside of traditional Buddhist rituals.

Do you have an audience in mind when you write your scripts?

I wish I was that disciplined, but no. I have stories I’d like to tell, but even I don’t know who they’re for, even after I’m done. I am aware that this film may not be for a wide audience or that film might work well in such-and-such a country, but it’s never intentional. I’m always grateful for whatever audience finds these films of interest.

Which is the film you’re most satisfied with?

I have to say Pig at the Crossing. It’s a film about the bardo of dying, that liminal interval between this life and what’s next that can be a time of confusion, fear, attachment, frustration, etc. Bardo also can refer to the interval between birth and death, of course . . .

Image at top of page © Pawo Choyning Dorji

Then there was the 1967 Maoist uprising in the village of Naxalbari, in northern West Bengal. Led by tribal Santal peasants and Communist leaders, it was soon spreading throughout the countryside, tearing apart a left already beleaguered by the Sino-Soviet split. By 1969, the movement had spilled over into the city: in April of that year, the architects of the Naxalbari revolt announced the formation of a new, revolutionary party—the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)—in Calcutta. Students dropped out of universities and joined the armed struggle in droves.

For many of those tumultuous months, Satyajit Ray was not in Calcutta. The situation was not conducive to making films, he had said in a letter to critic and biographer Marie Seton in 1967, before setting out to the forts of Rajasthan and the snowy valleys of Himachal Pradesh to make a musical fantasy for children, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969). In the early and middle months of 1969, he was in Palamu, a wooded tribal region more than three hundred miles to the west of Calcutta, in what was then the Indian state of Bihar. Ironically, Ray was there shooting Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), a film about four bachelors who also leave the roil of the city for the respite of the countryside. The sole, stray glimpse in the film of the events of the day is a copy of the Calcutta newspaper the Statesman, whose headline—“Another Sino-Soviet Border Clash Reported”—is fuzzily visible as one of the men sets it on fire and declares, “All connection with civilization is over.”

Ray’s absence from the melee angered viewers and critics. His influence was already tremendous—so much so that he had managed to persuade Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to release Utpal Dutt, who had been imprisoned for his Marxist publications, so the actor could work on the Merchant Ivory film The Guru (1969). Yet Ray’s films, commentators argued, were apolitical. While colleagues like Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak were responding to the moment with angsty Brechtian polemics, he was making movies about fantastical kingdoms and the holidays of bourgeois youth in picturesque locations. Ray didn’t necessarily refute the charge but insisted that he was not interested in ideology as much as in individual motivations. “A person with a definite political line is often psychologically less interesting,” he once said in an interview. “Revolutionaries don’t think for themselves all the time.”

By 1970, he had conceded that his cinema had to confront the times. After Days and Nights in the Forest, he embarked on his Calcutta trilogy, starting with the bristling, burning The Adversary (1970)—a film he described to Seton as “basically though not blatantly pro-revolution—because I feel nothing else can set the country up on its feet.” The protagonist, one among the hundreds of unemployed youths trying to find a job, remains somewhat ambivalent and disaffected; he is angry but unsure until the very end of what to do with his mounting rage. But his brother sets off to join the Naxals, and the young militant’s clear-cut conviction throws our hero’s aimless drift into relief.

The Calcutta trilogy is often considered Ray’s decisive political turn. But I’ve always found Days and Nights in the Forest to be the real key to his evolution as a director—a film whose structuring absences reveal an artist grappling with the inadequacy of his mode for the moment.

Ray’s cinema had sprouted from the literary word. Of the nearly twenty films he had made by 1970, only two were based on original screenplays (1962’s Kanchenjunga and 1966’s The Hero); the rest were adapted from either short stories or novels. For him, reality was filtered through the lens of the modernist novel, which centered the individual as the subject of history; literature was his conduit to the inner truths of everyday people, rendered distinct and psychologically complex, unlike the broad archetypes of commercial cinema. He was a particular devotee of modern Bengali literature, and his films are less indebted to neorealism—a label that chased him throughout his career and beyond—than to a kind of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary realism. “The true basis of the film style of Pather Panchali is not neorealist cinema or any other school of cinema or even any individual work of cinema, but the novel of Bibhutibhusan [Banerjee] itself,” Ray wrote.

Days and Nights in the Forest continues that tradition—it is adapted from a
novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, who also wrote the book that inspired The Adversary—but it also questions it, evincing metatextual traces of self-doubt. In Gangopadhyay’s semi-autobiographical text, four city-bred youths get on a train to the countryside without a destination in mind and get off arbitrarily in the town of Dhalbhumgarh on the recommendation of a fellow passenger. In the film, these men—Ashim, Shekhar, Sanjoy, Hari—are headed by car to a premeditated destination, Palamu, inspired by a famous travelogue from the 1880s by Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the opening scenes, Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee) is reading excerpts from the text’s exoticist descriptions of the area’s natural beauty, including that of its Indigenous Santal women. “They are all as black as ebony and in the bloom of youth,” reads out Sanjoy, exciting his car-mates. “Their groins are scantily covered with a small piece of fabric.” The rest of the film will slowly strip our protagonists of the illusions that texts such as these, filtered through the paternalistic voyeurism of the urban intellectual, have conjured for them.

Much of the film concerns the men’s nasty lording of bourgeois privilege over the poor tribal workers of Palamu. They find a forest bungalow and decide to set up camp there; when the caretaker protests, insisting that a reservation is required to stay in the house, Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) hands him some cash and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) bullies him into submission, muttering, “Thank God for corruption.” They hire a local youth, Lakha, as an errand boy, before Hari (Samit Bhanja) wrongly accuses him of stealing a wallet and kicks him out. At the village bar, they soak up the local mahua and marvel at the Santal women who, too, partake in alcohol. One of them, Duli (the fair-skinned Simi Garewal in unfortunate brownface), catches Hari’s eye, and later he will demean and seduce her. The men’s performance of superiority is punctured only by their encounter with two refined young women from Calcutta, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose), who are also holidaying in Palamu.

Masculine fragility is one of Ray’s enduring themes; his male characters tend to be insecure, indecisive, even pathetic. Both Amal and Bhupati in Charulata (1964) are oblivious in their own ways, blinkered by their self-important preoccupations. In The Hero, Uttam Kumar’s Arindam Mukherjee drowns his regrets and the loneliness of fame in drink. In Kanchenjunga, the industrialist patriarch is so intent on imposing his choices on his daughter that he fails to see not only her true self but also the mountain peak for which he has traveled all this way when it emerges from the clouds. Each of these characters is frustrated by a woman whose self-possession assaults his pride. And yet Ray’s men are almost never entirely irredeemable. One of my favorite moments in his filmography comes when the husband in The Big City (1963), who has grown resentful of his wife’s success at work while he endures unemployment, tells her that by standing up to her boss to defend a mistreated colleague, she has shown more courage than he ever could have.

Days and Nights in the Forest, however, gives us no such reprieve from the small-mindedness of its men. The film is biting in its critique: in a memorable scene, Aparna tells Ashim that when she first saw him, she thought, “It would be nice to crush this gentleman’s confidence a little.” Soumitra Chatterjee reportedly disliked the characters of the movie, though he admired Ray’s style; he preferred Gangopadhyay’s characters, who he believed still retained some vestiges of idealism. The men of Days and Nights in the Forest are lost causes.

The tension at the heart of the film is that all of this moral ugliness unfolds with splendid visual grace. I already knew Days and Nights in the Forest was an exquisite film when, years ago, I first saw a grimy, pixelated version on YouTube; the restoration, with its deep shadows and sharp, sun-scorched silhouettes, is breathtaking. The beauty, as always with Ray, is less a function of what’s in front of the camera—although the svelte Tagore, with her dimpled smile and kohl-lined eyes, and Soumitra Chatterjee, tall and elegant, are beauty epitomized—than of how the camera perceives its subjects. Like so many of his films, Days and Nights in the Forest frames a distinct point of view right from the beginning: the artful calligraphy of the opening credits perforates a black screen, the letters becoming narrow windows through which we see the forest pass by in a blur.

Pauline Kael described the film as “overwhelmingly, sometimes unbearably beautiful.” Like most of Ray’s work, it emanates something larger than the sum of its parts: a transcendent sense of harmony that feels deeply satisfying and intuitive. Each shot is perfectly choreographed yet unshowy, and sharpens the characters’ personalities. The camera looks at the suave, sophisticated Ashim, a rising star at a corporate job, from a low angle, framing his towering figure against a bright, hot sky. It peeks at the diminutive Shekhar, the jester of the group, from behind a car, so that his head seems to emerge comically from the hood. It attends to how the wind ruffles the bookish Sanjoy’s floppy hair and how sweat glistens on cricket star Hari’s handsome, arrogant face. Ray’s gaze endows people and places with a radiance that pleases and soothes, like a new-yet-familiar tune. How bad could someone or something be if looked at with such rapture?

This contradiction between appearances and intentions—between surface and depth—is a central tension of Days and Nights in the Forest, and it plays out in the film’s iconic “memory game” sequence. The four men and two women go around adding names to a list that each of them must recite again from the start; whoever slips up and misses a name loses. The invocation of memory, and the game’s structure of spontaneity, implies an unearthing of sorts, something summoned from the subconscious. But the references thrown about—Marx, Mao, Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Tagore—are rarefied and pretentious. The game is about perception rather than remembering, about gazes rather than words. Sanjoy begins to pick up on Jaya’s flirtations and rushes inside to fetch her a pillow, pausing to check his hair in the mirror. Ashim and Aparna last the longest, trading names like Cupid’s arrows, until Aparna concedes the game to Ashim, recognizing that what’s at stake here isn’t memory but desire.

Indeed, the game completes a shift that begins earlier, the moment Aparna and Jaya appear: rather than a story about men encountering nature, it becomes that well-worn tale of men encountering desirable women. Our heroes proclaim that they’ve come to Palamu to give in to the therapeutic pleasures of primitivity, but the flimsiest of their commitments to bare their inner, uncultivated selves—not to shave during their stay in Palamu—goes out the window once the ladies enter the picture. Yet Sanjoy can’t even muster lust, the basest of base impulses, when Jaya offers herself to him, decked in glowing tribal jewelry; he is paralyzed by fear. What they truly desire is desire itself, a force powerful enough to pierce through their alienation and draw them into the present. It doesn’t come.

Ray has employed tragedy before—in The Apu Trilogy, in Devi (1960), in The Music Room (1958). Driving back to the city in Ashim’s handsome car, the characters of Days and Nights in the Forest in some ways resemble the feudal aristocrat of The Music Room, clinging to a world that is rapidly receding into the past. But there is no tragedy at the conclusion of Days and Nights in the Forest; only unease, a sense of irresolution. Aparna chastises Ashim for his naive indifference to the suffering of others, including that of the caretaker he and his mates have pushed around while the man’s wife fights a grave illness. But when Aparna goes with him to the caretaker’s house, she only looks through the window and says she’ll talk to her father to have the matter “settled.” She may be worldlier than Ashim, and more experienced in loss and pain, but she is no less passive an observer of a burning world.

Hari, meanwhile, is beaten up by Lakha in a sweet moment of revenge, but his comeuppance—an individual act of violence—also feels feeble, particularly given the then-ongoing uprising of a whole people against their bourgeois overlords. The characters remain unchanged, save for a bandaged head and hangdog looks; a holiday in the village is no match for the stubborn existential accoutrements of class. One has the feeling that they, and we, have only encountered negative space—only the blinding light of day and the suffocating dark of night. Fittingly, a year later, Ray began The Adversary with a photonegative image of a funeral, the human figures glowing in the gray, X-ray-like screen. Dark gives way to light, and light to dark: now, the moment of change has arrived.

When I saw my first Carax film—Mauvais sang (1986), his second feature—I was young too. I was at the very beginning of my life as a writer, and after watching Mauvais sang, I immediately wanted to write. I was mesmerized by the iconic scene in which the film’s main character, Alex—in this trilogy of films, which also includes The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Denis Lavant plays a character named Alex, though a different Alex each time—begins to move immediately upon hearing David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Slowly at first, a cigarette in his mouth, holding his stomach, limping, then faster, abjectly almost, punching the air, dragging one leg after the other, jumping up to hit a wall and then turning in circles against it, hitting himself, running with his head forward and then back, faster now, running, running completely.

But I was equally taken in by Alex’s magic tricks and ventriloquism and by the moments in which we hear characters talk to each other in voice-over while we watch them do something else entirely, which is another kind of ventriloquism. Like Alex’s breakup with his young and impressionable lover, Lise, played by Julie Delpy. We hear him say goodbye to her in voice-over while she chases him. Their faces blur, almost into each other, the running sped up. “Lise, my little Lise, I’m leaving . . . I know, I’m a killer. I’m a killer, my warm gun left at the scene.” Later, we will watch Anna, played by Juliette Binoche, walk toward a phone we don’t hear ringing. She moves her lips, but we don’t hear her speak. I was enthralled as well by the slapstick choreography of the greeting between Marc and Charlie; the choreography of the fight between Alex and Marc, their faces pressed grotesquely against a glass window as they try to wrestle each other to the floor; the choreography of Alex stumbling drunk around a corner and down the street, holding onto the wall of a building, a toddler stumbling behind him. I loved the film in its entirety, but these were the moments that existed on a special plane for me, where a portal opens, and something fleeting—jagged or comic or uncanny or beautiful—comes into view.

The Seine, the radio, voyeurism, couples on the verge of breaking up or of forming, suicide, the thief/con man, Bowie songs, hitting oneself, movement and dance, Mireille Perrier and Juliette Binoche recur across this trilogy. And, of course, Denis Lavant. But perhaps more than anything else, what links these films is a sense of aesthetic experience, due, in part, to the extraordinary cinematography of Jean-Yves Escoffier, whom Carax worked with in each. Quite simply, the films are deeply pleasurable to watch, not only because they are visually appealing, but also because they are satisfyingly strange, a welcome discordance. The same is true for Carax’s later films, the dark and haunting Pola X (1999), the utterly original and genre-defying Holy Motors (2012), the enchanting and monstrous musical Annette (2021), even though each is from a very different era of filmmaking, made many years apart and with different preoccupations.

All of Carax’s films are rich in symbols, often mysterious. Sometimes we don’t know whether to read them as symbols at all; maybe they do exist as doorways to the subconscious mind, from Carax’s mind to ours. The face of the older man that the camera fades to in an early scene in Boy Meets Girl that just as quickly fades away. Is it Henri, the man who has just been left by Maïté? We don’t know. Later, a man’s voice whispers Alex’s name, waking him up. Who is he? The man who follows directly behind Bernard in another odd moment of choreography before Bernard descends into a subway station. The huge picture window in Mireille’s apartment in which she can see her neighbors and be seen in return, that at times makes it look as if she is sitting outside. A long monologue from Alex to Mireille that lapses into nonsense. It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense, because it brings into existence what I think is the film’s reality—silence, absurdity, the sublime.

Both Alex and Mireille have been rejected by their lovers, he by his girlfriend, Florence, and she by her boyfriend, Bernard. Alex finagles his way into a party where he knows he will see Mireille, following her into the kitchen, where they talk into the late hours. It is a film of the night, beginning with that child going to bed, while beyond, the Seine flows in the darkness. There is an obvious sense of aloneness in that first scene, and a deep aloneness and finality in the last scene of the movie. When Alex and Mireille are together at the party, it is a lovely period of suspension. They remain in the kitchen after everyone else has gone home. This is a film in which all the stakes are in the present moment. At one point Alex says to Mireille, “Sitting beside you this way is like eternity.” The viewer feels this too.

Boy Meets Girl is also a movie of youth, not as cutting as Carax’s later films, including The Lovers on the Bridge, yet by its final scene it will head in that direction. It is more like a dream of isolation, full of peculiar moments and unusual conversations. Not much happens, but it needn’t. It wasn’t a story that drove Carax to make this film, after all, but the creation of a world, as is true for all the films he makes. He has said that when he begins a new project, he tries to write a score, not a script, which offers us a clue to how music and narrative are intertwined in his films. He begins with something as simple as two feelings, or images, that he puts together to see if they will stick. From there, the story comes.

This second movie by Carax is equal parts science fiction, crime thriller, black comedy, love story, French New Wave, and film noir. The Alex of this film is older than the Alex of Boy Meets Girl, more experienced, harder, sometimes without emotion. After his father, Jean, throws himself onto the train tracks, Alex doesn’t bother to identify him at the morgue. We’re told several times that they’d “lost touch.” But now, Alex is stepping into his father’s shoes to help Marc and Hans steal a vial containing a new vaccine for the STBO virus, which a person catches if they have sex without love.

Mostly, though, Mauvais sang is surreal. Halley’s Comet is passing over the city, which makes Paris hot as an oven. When Anna attempts to cross the street, she burns her feet. Later, it will snow. But before that, after Alex’s botched attempt at stealing the vaccine, Lise will swoop in on the motorbike Alex has left her, speeding away from the crime scene with him on the back of the bike. There, they’ll have a telepathic conversation. What is it that makes this so moving—more so than if they were standing in front of each other, talking?

Suddenly, fireworks shoot into the sky and fall all around them, part of the celebrations for the bicentennial of the French Revolution. In the clamor, the two of them fire Michèle’s gun, Alex limping along the length of the bridge in that strange and hypnotic gait of his, Michèle shooting from the back of the bronze statue of Henri IV’s horse. When music begins playing, Michèle starts moving first, spinning around on the bridge, her arms outstretched, spinning faster when the music changes, throwing her arms crazily out into the air, Alex following her with bottles in his hands, shattering them on the ground, then kicking a stone post, until he and Michèle fall and run against each other, finally dancing some kind of waltz, Michèle shrieking with drunken ecstasy. Then comes the famous scene of Michèle water-skiing in the Seine, Alex pulling her along in a boat they stole for the occasion. Some critics have argued that this should have been the climax of the movie. Perhaps, but why shouldn’t an exhilarating scene like this exist in the middle, for its own sake, an experience unto itself, not simply for the sake of narrative? It changes what the space of the film will be. And it is, after all, when Alex and Michèle begin to fall in love, when they break through to each other. Why should the complexities of the film be smoothed over?

The next evening, Alex and Michèle lie in the green grass, blanketed by shadows. It is the first time in this trilogy that we see love expressed physically. Their love is imperfect, maybe even abusive on the part of Alex, but deep and real. Arm in arm, they walk through Paris to Bowie’s “Time Will Crawl.” When they pass a nightclub with ground-level windows shining out into the dark, Michèle drops to the sidewalk to look at the feet of the dancers, strobe lights flashing around them. What does looking mean to her here, now when she is losing her sight? She nods her head to the music, a faint smile on her face.

When Alex sees missing-person posters of Michèle in a subway station announcing a possible cure for her eye condition, he destroys them. When he discovers more of the posters in the back of a van, he sets them on fire, and when the van explodes, the man putting up the posters catches on fire too. Alex just stands there, watching. But he can’t in the end block Michèle from learning of this news, because it’s on the radio too. When she hears the missing-person message put out by her father, she’s in disbelief, stumbling and mumbling to herself. “A hope . . . The end of this nightmare . . . Just think, Alex.” For the second time, Alex just stands there. “My eyes!” Michèle yells. In that moment, she understands that Alex doesn’t want the best for her if it might take her away from him.

It was hardly an auspicious beginning, when the sixteen-year-old girl calling herself Jeanne la Pucelle arrived at the French court in February of 1429. Here was a young woman, a provincial illiterate in men’s clothes and with her hair cut short, who claimed to have been sent by God. While working in her garden in the village of Domrémy, she had received a series of ecstatic visions, all instructing her to drive out the English invaders and reunite the shattered kingdom of France under the Dauphin Charles, whom she would deliver personally to be coronated in the holy city of Reims. All the court had to do was hand the teenaged mystic command of the royal army, and turn her loose on the besieged city of Orléans.

That the young woman we now call Joan of Arc would achieve all this—and more—is the stuff of national and religious myth. Yet one wonders how, in the moment, this messenger and her convictions must have appeared to the people around her. Is it even possible to know the person behind the myth? This is the task that Jacques Rivette set for himself with Joan the Maid, his epic historical drama from 1994. The French New Wave legend had felt connected to Joan from his childhood in the ancient city of Rouen, where the saint and martyr was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in 1431. Yet it was only after the international success of 1991’s Cannes Grand Prix–winning La belle noiseuse that the director could assemble the budget to make a proper film about her.

Divided into two parts, The Battles and The Trials, Rivette’s film tells Joan’s story from her first appearance in the walled town of Armagnac to her public execution at the age of nineteen—a three-year period that excludes both her formation and her holy visions. The Maid (art-house icon Sandrine Bonnaire) arrives in the film, then, as a figure of stubborn conviction, privy to a message and mission that we have not seen. When she demands to be taken to see the Dauphin, the authorities doubt her, and dismiss her outright. She spends the rest of The Battles proving herself to them and the whole of The Trials being punished for it.

Joan the Maid is a misty, mucky movie, set across a series of ravaged battlefields and in a number of real and rather drafty-looking castles. This is a France scraped bare by decades of war, a place of ruins and petty feuds with little space for the miraculous. The armor looks heavy, the clothing itchy, and the language spoken is intimate and familiar, with little of the high-flown pseudo-poetics one typically finds in period pieces. Rivette’s austere vision of the medieval past owes at least as much to Marketa Lazarová as to the many preexisting adaptations of Joan’s story. By my count it is the twelfth of at least sixteen films about the life of the teenaged saint, including versions starring Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, and, well, Milla Jovovich. With its symphony of close-ups and tracking shots, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) transformed Renée Falconetti into the epitome of devotion and conscience, and made the Maid a fitting martyr for the coming century of show-trials. Robert Bresson, too, found in Joan a woman of pure principle, and staged her trial as a showdown between truth and equivocation, the certainty of faith vs. the exigencies of law. (The less said about Luc Besson’s catastrophic The Messenger, the better.)

Rivette gets there eventually. Yet he deploys his film’s substantial resources and 336-minute run time to allow us to see Joan as a person: a sincere young woman of both faith and calculation who could not help but affect the people around her. As Joan travels through history, Rivette intersperses the proceedings with testimony from various characters—soldiers, assistants, even the Maid’s own mother—who reflect on the time they spent with the holy woman. Their words, apparently drawn from the transcripts of her 1455–56 nullification trial, lend the film a curious documentary quality, as if we being invited to witness this nearly six-hundred-year-old story for the first time.

The aim is to overturn our expectations, to reconceive a famous story with the shock of the new. Thus we receive the familiar highlights—the cutting of Joan’s hair, the arrival at court, the lifting of the siege at Orléans, and her capture and conviction for heresy—yet they are embedded in what might often be described as a medieval hangout movie: call it Rio Loire. Rivette relays these scenes through sinuous long takes, carefully blocking his rooms full of courtiers and theologians like the faces one finds carved onto a wooden altar piece. Both battles and trials are largely elided, barring a bravura assault on the English army at Orléans, and Joan’s awful ascent to the stake. Instead, the Maid and her companions spar, tease, and quibble, and gradually their skepticism gives way to trust, and then to awe. By refusing us access to Joan’s visions, Rivette strips away her mythological status—and reveals her as a remarkably human figure, a girl whose presence and persistent faith could convince others to fight and die beside her, and who was made to suffer for this power.

Much of this feat comes down to Bonnaire’s astonishing performance. Previous Joans tended toward either the passionate or the steely, fixing the girl into the role of the useful symbol. Cast to embody what Rivette called Joan’s “popular side,” Bonnaire emphasizes the Maid’s conviction, which is not the same thing as certainty. Rather than ecstatic shouts or principled declarations, she speaks slowly, thoughtfully considering her words in light of both strategy and belief. Her Joan is unique among modern depictions of religious figures, for she neither preaches nor doubts; her faith is a matter of plain reality, as much the substance of her life as the devastation of the English invasion or the omnipresent threat of sexual violence. She consults her holy voices, but she cannot speak for them. She charges bravely into battle, but her wounds produce real pain, and she experiences real and overwhelming panic at the thought of her own death. Her ascent to the stake is lonely, dispirited, and despairing, and even the presence of the cross does not give her much relief.

Joan the Maid understands that Jeanne la Pucelle was not born to be channeled, or martyred, or made use of by clerical and national myths. Yet without these stories, without Joan’s transformation into a symbol, how would we know her today? In The Trials, Rivette stages a coronation ritual in the cathedral at Reims, an extensive sequence composed of gestures and formulations, all lavishly invested with royal and religious symbolism. It is Joan who has brought this about, yet she is oddly sidelined throughout the proceedings, and her standing at the French court begins to decline. Even her holy advisors have become murkier, their directions no longer so clear. She has gone from an actor to a vessel to a nuisance. Was she only ever a useful tool?

Here Rivette inserts a note of doubt into the heart of Joan’s hagiography. While bidding farewell to her spiritual advisor, the friar convinces Joan to put her signature on a condemnation of the followers of Czech cleric Jan Hus, a dissident theologian who was burned alive in 1415. Hus was a victim of politically motivated theology, and his fate both reflects and anticipates Joan’s own, illustrating how easily even those of sure and serious faith can find themselves coopted to serve the petty interests of the material world. Kings and cardinals, politicians and demagogues—up to the present day all have made use of the girl who, as Joan’s mother declares at the very beginning, was tried “without the shadow of the law, condemned in a damned and criminal way, and cruelly died by fire.”

A weaker film would make a polemic of this point, and drive itself into the ground. To his great and lasting credit, Rivette understood that it was just one piece of this story. By calling his film Joan the Maid, he emphasized not only her humble beginnings, but her essential humanity, the great contradiction of being that transcends all reductive symbology. To stake his epic duration and sizable budget—the film was “such a wreck from the point of view of production costs,” Rivette reflected in 1999—on such an intimate claim was a genuine risk. That it did not draw in audiences or pay off financially is not much of a surprise. Yet it is so rare for a film to invest the past with the same instability and uncertainty that we associate with life in the present. As with the Maid behind the myth, Joan does not deserve to be forgotten.

The portmanteau became increasingly popular in the 1940s on both sides of the Atlantic, with filmmakers using the structure to riff on a single motif or subject. The form gained a foothold in the United States with two films by Julien Duvivier: Tales of Manhattan (1942), punningly titled for the tailcoat that links the episodes as it changes hands, and Flesh and Fantasy (1943), where the stories are connected by their supernatural themes. Also released around the same time were Forever and a Day (1943), made by seven different directors to support the British war effort, and Dead of Night (1945), a suite of interlocking horror stories that remains one of the best anthology movies ever made.

In 1948, Gainsborough Pictures had a major hit with a portmanteau that took a slightly different approach, showcasing the world of a single acclaimed writer. Quartet strings together four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, introduced by the author himself. Each segment had a different director, an idea that had worked well for Dead of Night. Instead of employing the earlier movie’s “frame” story, Quartet used screenwriter R. C. Sherriff for the whole movie, lending a subtler kind of unity. The cast was made up largely of beloved character actors like Basil Radford, Cyril Parker, and Hermione Baddeley, and up-and-comers including Mai Zettlerling and Dirk Bogarde.

For much of the twentieth century, Maugham was one of the most famous and best-selling fiction writers in the world. Born in 1874, he first achieved real fame in the early 1900s as a playwright. But it was the 1915 novel Of Human Bondage that made him a worldwide sensation. By the late ’40s, numerous Maugham works had been adapted into feature-length movies, including Of Human Bondage and other novels such as The Razor’s Edge and The Moon and Sixpence. Hollywood had also done well with multiple movies of two of his short stories: “Miss Thompson” (which became Rain on the stage, then on film) and “The Letter,” which also went from play to film. The prolific Maugham also published nine collections of short stories, from Orientations in 1898 to his last, Creatures of Circumstance, in 1947.

The idea for Quartet came from UK producer Antony Darnborough, who was eager to make British films that could be successful in the States. Maugham seemed ideal for this aim, since his books had always sold better with Americans than with his fellow Brits. And because Maugham’s stories—about a hundred in all—are widely seen as his best work, the focus on his short fiction made sense. Straightforwardly written, the tales feature odd, often two-faced or deceptive characters, and swift, engrossing plots. While few of Maugham’s stories end with a total switchback or O. Henry twist, they often close abruptly on one startling incident.

With Gainsborough head Sydney Box, Darnborough chose four stories for screenwriter Sherriff to adapt, looking for dramatic potential and choice roles that would tempt actors. Big-name players were not deterred by the relatively small size of the roles. As Ken Annakin (director of “The Colonel’s Lady” in Quartet, and “The Verger” and “Mr. Know-All” in Trio) told film scholar Brian McFarlane in 1992, “They all loved the idea of working on a Maugham story because he was recognized as one of the best storytellers of that era.”

Despite the lack of a frame story, there are connections among the Quartet segments, all four of which feature oblivious families, upended expectations, and the conflict between selfishness and love. “The Kite”—directed by Arthur Crabtree, who began as a cinematographer—is about a young man who finds himself torn between his mother, his wife, and his obsessive devotion to kite-flying. The opening section, “The Facts of Life,” tells the tale of a well-heeled father (Basil Radford) who sends his callow son Nicky (Jack Watling) to Monte Carlo, half expecting the kid to be swindled—and ends up chagrined when the boy returns happier and richer, not sadder and wiser. Though it’s the weakest segment of the four, there is charm in the casting. Director Ralph Smart makes sly use of Radford and Naunton Wayne—a.k.a. Charters and Caldicott, the comic team that began its career with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1938. And a young Mai Zetterling plays a glamorous con artist, a role that (in one of several instances of censorship-related alterations in the film) was changed from a sex worker in the original story.

The rest of Quartet abounds with standout performances. “The Alien Corn,” directed by self-professed “actor’s director” Harold French, features Dirk Bogarde doing some of the best work of his early career as a sensitive young man named George, a child of privilege hellbent on becoming a concert pianist. At the urging of his wily sweetheart (future Bond girl Honor Blackman), George strikes a bargain with his parents: he will go abroad and spend two years in training for his art, after which he will relinquish his dream if a pianist of note tells him he has no future as a professional. “The Colonel’s Lady” revolves around another aspiring artist—the wife (Nora Swinburne) of a Blimp-ish British colonel (Cecil Parker), who causes a stir when she publishes a collection of fiercely sensual poetry. The book becomes so popular that the colonel finds himself at his own club being told that his wife writes like Sappho. Annakin, the most visually dynamic of the Quartet directors, later said “The Colonel’s Lady” was “one of the best pictures I’ve ever directed,” and that he was especially pleased with the performances of Swinburne and Parker. The ending is more sentimental here than in Maugham’s original, again in line with the demands of the censors. But like the other segments, “The Colonel’s Lady” retains enough of the author’s characteristic sting and humor.

When Quartet was in production, Maugham was spending most of his time in the south of France. Darnborough persuaded the writer, well into his seventies and uneasy about his lifelong stammer, to travel to Pinewood Studios and film a prologue for the movie. The eager producer even duplicated Maugham’s French study, down to the worn patches on his favorite chair. Perhaps in response to this hospitality, Maugham seems visibly happy in the film. The sole trace of his stammer is a deep intake of breath here and there. One self-deprecating moment in his introduction became famous: “In my twenties, the critics said I was brutal. In my thirties, they said I was flippant; in my forties, they said I was cynical; in my fifties they said I was competent. And then, in my sixties, they said I was superficial.” In fact, while Maugham seldom complained in public, the dismissiveness of critics had stung, and the warm reception for Quartet pleased him a great deal. The British style of filmmaking brought out the essence of Maugham’s restless characters. With sympathy and wit, Quartet portrayed the problems that befall these people, and the problems they bring down on themselves.

Quartet’s rousing critical and commercial success made a sequel not just logical but inevitable. Trio was released two years later, with brief prologues that Maugham again shot at Pinewood, this time with him puffing heartily on a cigarette and walking around the duplicate office. Maugham introduces each story in just a sentence or two. Despite his overall pleasure in the success of Quartet, Maugham had politely disapproved of a couple of the new endings, notably the one for “The Colonel’s Lady.” As a form of redress, he shared in adapting the stories in Trio, along with Sherriff and Noel Langley. While promoting the film, Maugham told an American reporter, “There isn’t a single line of dialogue written by anyone but myself.” Any changes to the material were cleared by the author.

The best of Trio’s segments, “Sanatorium,” is its last and longest. The story could have supported a ninety-minute film, but at this length, poignant moments are never stretched out into mawkishness. The setting is a tuberculosis sanatorium in Scotland, presumably based on the one where Maugham himself spent months fighting off the disease in 1918. New patient Ashenden (Roland Culver) stands in for the author (as Maugham says in the prologue), and through him we meet patients who are there either to recover, to live out an existence too frail for anywhere else, or to die. The population of this little world is shown in pairs, including two elderly Scots who carry out a guerilla war of minor irritations against each other and a self-pitying patient who hates his wife for her good health. Ravishing Jean Simmons, barely in her twenties, plays Evie, who has spent most of her life in sanatoriums. She falls in love with George (Michael Rennie), a new arrival and barely reformed rake.

Director Harold French said he “particularly liked” making “Sanatorium,” but “I didn’t think I did it as well as I should have done. I should have been more honest about the disease than I was; I was concentrating on the romance too much. I should have made them more ill.” Viewing the film now, however, doesn’t support this assessment. Despite the beauty of the place—this nursing home could give Manderley a run for its money—there is always a sense of hovering death. One of the most haunting moments comes when Finlay Currie, as one of the squabbling Scots, tells Ashendean that he’s been there so long he can tell how long a patient has left as well as a doctor. And George, the man adds calmly, has at most two years.

Ready to test their luck with one more group of stories, the crew went to Maugham for Encore. The author’s prologues were shot at his house on Cap-Ferrat, the Villa La Mauresque. Maugham’s prologues still avoid details of plot, but here he offers broad hints as to interpretation and his own view of the characters. “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is perhaps the only story in the series of films that doesn’t work in any sense. The tale of two brothers, a worker and a sponger, features Nigel Patrick at his least engaging. If you’re watching in order, you may start to wonder if the series had already peaked.

Fortunately, the last two shorts are much better. “Winter Cruise,” Maugham tells us, was suggested by a woman he met on a voyage to the South Seas. Miss Reid (a superb Kay Walsh) is a good-natured spinster who likes to spend her winters sailing to and from the Caribbean on a regular working ship, as it’s cheaper and more practical than a cruise. Owing to a snafu, she is the only passenger on the ship's return trip. The officers are panic-stricken at the idea of having their peaceful male world invaded by her female chatter, and plot to escape her. Maugham was frequently accused of misogyny, but in this case, the charge doesn’t stick; Miss Reid knows herself better than anyone else suspects. The slightly noirish “Gigolo and Gigolette” plays out as a near-melodrama, its view of the importance of love to a woman set against a biting look at rich, jaded thrill-seekers. Circus performers Syd and Stella Cotman (Terence Morgan and Glynis Johns) have just one act: Stella’s dive from an eighty-five-foot tower into a five-foot-deep tank of burning water, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds. When Stella loses her nerve, she begins to think her earnings are more important to her husband than she herself is.

Although Maugham’s stories would later become staples of television anthologies, Trio marked the end for this postwar big-screen trilogy, intended to show off the strengths of British filmmaking. And in many ways these movies did, highlighting the excellence of British acting and the intelligence of its adaptations. Quartet, Trio, and Encore remain well-loved by many to this day, though their multiple directors and emphatic literariness make them unlikely to gain much favor with the rock-ribbed auteurists of the world. Still, they have played an invaluable role in cementing the legacy of a writer who was at once a widely read and esteemed literary figure and a victim of the vagaries of critical reception. Just as notably, these films are shining examples of how, as Gore Vidal put it, “Maugham dominated movies when movies were the lingua franca of the world.”

Much of The Secret Agent unfolds over a few days during Carnaval, squarely in the midst of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Crucially, the word dictatorship is never once mentioned in the movie, not even in the opening titles, which situate us instead within “a period of great mischief.” This sly understatement points to the dominant mood and mode of Mendonça Filho’s film, and to its thematic concerns. The dictatorship was a time of violent repression, but it also produced multiple forms of resistance, daily work-arounds, coded language, an anarchic irreverence that could double as shield and weapon. How else to explain why the newspapers of Recife, the northeastern coastal city that is Mendonça Filho’s hometown, ran story after story in the midseventies about a disembodied “hairy leg” terrorizing the local population, pinning all manner of assaults—including what one can only assume were instances of state violence—on a zombie appendage?

Although grounded in period-specific details, The Secret Agent is interested less in the literal events of those anxious days than in what Mendonça Filho has called “the logic of that time,” shaped by daily realities but also by popular culture and urban legends—including the aforementioned hairy leg that here makes its first appearance in the belly of a shark. The film’s opening sequence crystallizes an atmosphere of absurdist dread. A man we first know as Marcelo (Wagner Moura) pulls up to a rural gas station in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and immediately notices a corpse mere meters from the pump; its feet protrude from under a sheet of cardboard, and it is starting to smell, to judge by the swarming flies and marauding dogs. The pot-bellied attendant explains that the dead man was a would-be thief, dispatched by the attendant’s night-shift colleague. A police car pulls up on cue, but the officers—one of whom has a conspicuous bloodstain on his shirt—pay no attention to the body, and instead proceed to search Marcelo’s car and coerce a bribe, making do with the remainder of his pack of cigarettes.

The widowed Marcelo is returning to Recife to reunite with his nine-year-old son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who has been living with his maternal grandparents. Marcelo finds safe haven in an apartment complex where the chain-smoking septuagenarian spitfire Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) is harboring a motley group of displaced persons fleeing political or domestic strife (an exiled Angolan couple, a queer teenager estranged from his family, a single mother who takes a liking to Marcelo). His fixers help Marcelo secure a job at the local identification institute, where he digs through the files seeking information about his mother, or simply a record that she existed. But the matter of most pressing urgency—once it transpires that he is under a travel ban and a threat against his life is imminent—is to secure fake passports for himself and Fernando so that they can flee the country.

As in the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, one of several genres that this splendidly polymorphous film evokes, the big picture remains, for much of the running time, out of view. “Marcelo” turns out to be an alias; our hero’s real name is Armando, and he used to be an academic. By the end of the movie, we understand the enraging circumstances that forced him into hiding and the tragic particulars of his family background. But it is a mark of Mendonça Filho’s confidence and generosity that he takes his time.

Although the magnetic Moura, with his watchful, layered performance, is the inarguable center of The Secret Agent, this is a richly populated ensemble film, full of indelible faces and personalities to match. “Elza is the most important character in the story now,” someone tells Armando, referring to a leader, played by Maria Fernanda Cândido, of the resistance network that is helping him. This assertion could be made many times over: almost anyone who enters the frame sparks immediate interest and becomes, for a moment, the movie’s focal point. A brazenly corrupt police chief (Robério Diógenes), perpetually flanked by his henchmen sons (Ítalo Martins and Igor de Araújo); an odd-couple assassin duo (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) and the dark-skinned laborer (Kaiony Venâncio) to whom they hand off the dirty work of murder; a gay German tailor, played by the singular Udo Kier in his final role, tagged by the bullying cops as an ex-Nazi but in fact a Holocaust survivor; the residents of Dona Sebastiana’s compound, who gather for an evening toast in one of the most moving scenes, a temporary community about to disperse to disparate fates. The overall effect, as Mendonça Filho moves from one situation to the next, is of a living, breathing story being fashioned in real time—and the construction of narratives turns out to be a central preoccupation of The Secret Agent.

Aside from the 1980-set prologue of his second feature, Aquarius (2016), this is Mendonça Filho’s first period piece, and he revels in the textures and details—the fashion, music, cars, and other trappings—of the late seventies, summoned as if from sense memories. (Born in 1968, he would have been Fernando’s age in 1977.) He also incorporates some of the era’s cinematic language, deploying split screens, wipe transitions, zooms, and split diopter shots that toy with depth of field. Shooting with vintage anamorphic lenses, Mendonça Filho and his cinematographer, Evgenia Alexandrova, opted for a brightly saturated palette to capture the sun-drenched vibrancy of Brazil during Carnaval. But about forty-five minutes in, a disorienting cut throws us into the present day—one immediate clue is a glimpse of an iPhone’s cold, flat hardness. This is the film’s boldest gambit, a flash-forward that reframes everything that precedes and follows. The flesh-and-blood people we have encountered are suddenly voices on tape, their accounts of persecution and resistance being transcribed by a couple of young researchers. Mendonça Filho returns us promptly to the Recife of February 1977, but we are now acutely aware that we are watching a fragment of history, one likely to have remained dormant had no one undertaken the work of remembering and preserving it.

The cassette tapes, part of a documentation project that Elza undertakes to counter misinformation and censorship, are totemic objects in The Secret Agent. They activate a form of time travel, embodying—as Mendonça Filho puts it—“the idea that there is somebody listening in the future.” One locus of that future is our here and now. Circulating between past and present, The Secret Agent is a rebuke to the historical amnesia and revisionism that has been a recent feature of Brazilian life, reaching its peak during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right populist regime. Outspoken critics of their country’s creeping authoritarianism, both Mendonça Filho and Moura were frequent targets of right-wing media during the Bolsonaro years, which saw a backsliding in Brazil’s troubled relationship with the crimes of the military regime. Forgetfulness was encouraged—as in Bolsonaro’s notorious remark that “those that look for bones are dogs”—and the brutal actions of the dictatorship justified and even celebrated.

It is significant that Armando, despite what the film’s title suggests, is not an enemy of the state but an ordinary citizen whose downfall begins when he crosses the wrong person. His plight owes to a pervasive confluence of corruption, cruelty, and impunity that is no less present today, in any number of authoritarian-leaning societies far beyond Brazil. Seen in flashback, Armando is a long-haired academic who heads his university’s engineering department. He plays host to Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), an executive from the then-state-owned utility company Eletrobras, who arrives dripping condescension for what he deems the provincial North and sets about defunding the research activities of Armando’s team. The scenes in which Armando and his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), stand up to the sneering intimidation of Ghirotti and his goonish son bristle with the righteous anger that is an underremarked signature of Mendonça Filho’s. It makes sense that a body of work so attuned to the extreme divides of class and race in Brazilian society would find room for some memorably powerful explosions of fury: the cathartic uprising of the besieged townspeople in Bacurau (2019) and the stubborn crusade of Sônia Braga’s character against ruthless real-estate developers in Aquarius come to mind.

But the Mendonça Filho film that The Secret Agent most recalls—and that qualifies in fact as a companion piece—is 2023’s Pictures of Ghosts. A capacious essay about its maker’s actual and spiritual homes in Recife—the family apartment that served as a film set for his early endeavors, the movie palaces of the once vibrant downtown, where he cultivated his youthful cinephilia—that documentary also contains what we might take as The Secret Agent’s statement of purpose. Interviewed in a television clip, Mendonça Filho’s late mother, Joselice Jucá, a historian, describes oral history as the work of collecting information that has been “left out of history.”

Pictures of Ghosts and The Secret Agent go about that work assiduously, hopeful that what has been cast aside may yet be rediscovered and reclaimed. Both films remind us that cinema is itself an archive and a time machine. Marquees and posters double as timepieces. Fiction movies contain documentary traces of their day, and in an era when cinema was a popular art nonpareil, films could shape the dream life of a populace. Jaws, still playing in theaters over a year after its release, is a recurring specter in The Secret Agent: mirrored in the tabloid headlines about the shark that washed ashore with that human leg in its stomach, and an obsession of the young movie buff Fernando, who has not yet been granted permission to see it. The Cinema São Luiz, one of the venerable single-screen theaters that Mendonça Filho consecrates in Pictures of Ghosts, is a critical location in The Secret Agent. It is where Armando’s father-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), works as a projectionist (the character is named for and modeled on an old friend of Mendonça Filho’s who makes a lasting impression in Pictures of Ghosts), and it is also where Elza records Armando’s testimony for posterity.

A film of continual surprise, The Secret Agent keeps things off balance through its extraordinary final passages. It is here that we fully grasp that Mendonça Filho’s narrative and formal choices are inseparable from his ethical and political considerations. As Carnaval heats up, the walls close in on Armando. Most other movies would have positioned his doom as the narrative’s tragic climax, but Mendonça Filho handles it with astonishing understatement. Armando’s killing takes place offscreen: an act of mercy and a principled refusal of spectacle, but also a gut punch in its brute finality. Flávia (Laura Lufési), one of the students listening to Elza’s tapes in the present, learns what happened to Armando from a newspaper scan: the item includes the false charge of corruption that dogged him after his entanglement with Ghirotti, and a blurred photo of his body in the street. Time turns lives into footnotes, if it does not erase them completely. Our hero is but one of countless pointless casualties of the dictatorship and its miasma of depravity.

Mendonça Filho concludes the film in our unsteady present. Echoing the fate of Armando’s engineering lab decades earlier, the university pulls the plug on Flávia’s research project, wary of sensitive information coming to light. Unable to shake Armando’s story, she seeks out his son, the now middle-aged Fernando, who works as a doctor at a blood bank in Recife. (Moura, with cropped hair, also plays this role.) There is an important revelation in their exchange; Fernando shares what little he knows about Armando: that he was the product of a liaison between a seventeen-year-old boy and the fourteen-year-old daughter of his family’s Indigenous housekeeper, and that he had little contact with his mother. Fernando, with visible discomfort, describes the grandmother he never knew as “an enslaved person.” Accordingly, there was no trace of her in the registry office when the adult Armando went looking. Mendonça Filho has never shied from examining the persistent scars of his country’s colonial past—this was already evident in his first feature, Neighboring Sounds (2012), which acknowledged Recife’s history as a city built on sugar plantations and slave labor. The dictatorship, as the potent coda of The Secret Agent makes clear, is hardly Brazil’s only unresolved trauma.

The analog tapes that are records of Armando’s existence—that prove he lived—are back in the possession of those who would prefer to suppress their contents, but Flávia has copied them onto a flash drive for Fernando. He barely remembers his father and doesn’t seem keen to delve into the past, but he accepts her gift. As the film ends, the drive sits in the pocket of Fernando’s lab coat, a latent archive that awaits, perhaps, a listener in the future.

Certainly, Linklater’s wide-ranging experience, creative curiosity, high-quality filmography, and consistent concern with the promise of youth made him a uniquely apt fit for this material. It also likely helped him bypass any French resistance to an outsider dealing with the country’s cultural legacy. But another easing factor must have been that so much of the discourse within the cinephile community—particularly around the auteur theory, devised by Cahiers gurus André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc and championed in the U.S. by critic Andrew Sarris—has always been a Franco-American love affair, and Nouvelle Vague is a superb continuance of that.

The binational romance between France and the U.S. is, of course, central to the original film, in its match between an American girl in Paris, Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), and a young French hoodlum, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), as well as in the keen admiration for American cinema shared by the Cahiers directors—all playing supporting roles in Linklater’s film. Another such romance is central to what is probably Linklater’s best-known work, The Before Trilogy, about the enduring romance between the American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and the French Céline (Julie Delpy), the second installment of which, Before Sunset (2004), takes place in Paris. Nouvelle Vague calls upon all of these resonances.

When we meet the first of the French critic-filmmakers in Nouvelle Vague, however—Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), alongside their key script collaborator Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest)—they’re in a screening of The Devil’s Pass, a quasi-ethnographic tale, produced by their friend Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), about a young Afghan boy trying to reach Kabul for a horseback-riding competition. We see their faces lit up by the screen in the dark, but all we experience of that film is a snatch of voice-over commentary: “The great Asian dust covers the past and shrouds the future.” I take this as a key to how Linklater and scriptwriters Holly Gent and Vince Palmo decided to treat the creation of Breathless, restricting themselves to an exclusive slice of time, from the film’s first possibilities of being made to its final shot, with no early historicist contextualizing nor any flagrant presaging of the eventual fates of its participants.

For instance, when Juliette Gréco (Alix Bénézech) appears at the drinks party after the screening and we see Godard compliment her rather clumsily and get the brush-off, if you don’t know who Gréco is—a figure with so much of the mythology of postwar Paris about her (chanteuse, friend of the existentialists, in a relationship with Miles Davis, etc.)—you must take her as depicted, simply as a famous actress who doesn’t get cast in Breathless. Rather than constantly explaining the culture of Paris 1959, Nouvelle Vague is steeped in it. Real-life character after real-life character is introduced in this way, with a lingering, captioned portrait or group shot, visual likenesses being of huge importance for both the plausible belief of the preinformed and the curiosity of the unacquainted.

What better way to avoid weighing your film down with cultural baggage than by plunging viewers into the story in medias res and having them find a visual exactitude that so fully and beguilingly brings a vanished moment back to cinematic life? I’ll come to the look of Nouvelle Vague shortly, but in terms of resemblances, Linklater’s most important achievement here is to have assembled a young French cast (Zoey Deutch as Seberg being the American exception) that so vividly evokes the key figures of a near-mythical time and place. Marbeck in particular, wearing Godard’s trademark shades, even in the dark, and his practiced, hard-to-impress deadpan, is a marvel as the pushy, sometimes funny, often annoying, devastatingly dry iconoclast, whose first gambit with Beauregard—whom he wants to produce his own first feature—is to tell him that The Devil’s Pass is “a piece of shit.”

Marbeck necessarily dominates Nouvelle Vague, at least until the shoot begins, playing up the duplicitous rogue, a character perhaps not too dissimilar to the casual criminal at the center of Breathless, but one bursting with rule-breaking ideas about filmmaking that he needs to try out, being the last of the New Wave critics—after Chabrol, Truffaut, Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), and Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy)—to make a feature. We soon come to admire his audacity and cheek. He is fortunate to have the immediate, instinctive backing of his friend Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), with whom he had made the short film Charlotte et son Jules.

When Godard first shows a picture of Seberg to Beauregard, and Beau-Beau (his nickname) says, “We’ll never get her,” it’s the first indication that Otto Preminger is an invisible influence on Godard and his film. Preminger, who directed several noirs in the forties, discovered Seberg in Marshalltown, Iowa, via a talent search for a teenager to play Joan of Arc in Saint Joan (1957). He followed that bet on an unknown ingenue by immediately casting her again as the lead in Bonjour Tristesse (1958). In the first of many moments in Nouvelle Vague where Godard is cajoling Seberg into her role, he tells her that Patricia Franchini is a continuance of the teenager she played in the latter film. Deutch portrays Seberg as a sophisticated survivor of bullying, someone who has learned to roll with the metaphorical punches and give as good back. She tells Godard that Preminger was a sadist. When Godard denies her the surety of a script, she continues to dangle the possibility of pulling out of the film. Their fragile to-ing and fro-ing remains a key tension throughout the daily process of shooting.

But Nouvelle Vague is not just a portrait of Godard and Seberg’s struggles to collaborate; it’s also a snapshot of the culture of New Wave critics turned directors. If Preminger is a visually absent influence, Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) is a present one. Rossellini comes to give a speech to the Cahiers crowd not long before Godard begins his shoot, telling them to seek the truth, that the camera is “a ballpoint pen, an imbecile.” He elaborates further to Godard, who gives him a lift to his hotel, extolling many of the ideas—“shoot quickly; interrupt shooting when inspiration flags”—that Godard will employ and that drive Beau-Beau to distraction. Just before Godard’s first day of filming, after a screening of Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Truffaut bombards him with playful, impossible advice: “Think of Rossellini. Be fast like him. Be witty like Sacha Guitry, musical like Orson Welles, simple like Marcel Pagnol. Be wounded like Nicholas Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman, and insolent like no one else.” Chabrol and Rohmer join in, and then Schiffman delivers the punch line: “Just don’t fuck it up.” It’s a wonderfully alarming snapshot of the pressures on a first-time director of such ambition.

As the shoot kicks off, and Godard keeps everyone on the back foot, the filmmaking advice, literary quotations, and philosophical musings pile up (much as they continue to do in Godard’s later films). This is how the more general cultural idea of Paris in the late fifties makes its presence felt. Godard does all his writing in cafés, just as the existentialist-philosopher pair Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre famously did, and conducts his script meetings with Truffaut in the Richelieu-Drouot subway station. At Godard’s bidding, first assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) quotes Sartre as a way of launching the production, and later, Godard supplies Seberg with a line that might have been lifted out of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “Am I unhappy because I am not free, or not free because I am unhappy?”

Paradoxes abound, but the one at the heart of Nouvelle Vague is that, in celebrating and eulogizing Godard’s off-the-cuff, improvisatory approach, Linklater himself mostly did the opposite. As he explained in a Lincoln Center interview, he and his young cast and crew did much careful preparation and rehearsal before they began the shoot. And it is easy to surmise that the very reason the film is so charmingly convincing, and so plausible a re-creation of a film being made up as it goes along, is precisely because of that thorough prep. The script relishes gossip and film lore and is full of succinct humor. There’s a lot of goofing off and mutual teasing on set. Much of the fun revolves around the technology that Godard put to use, in particular the postman’s cart adapted to hide cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) for the famous street scene where Patricia is selling the New York Herald Tribune, and the fact that they’re using the actual Éclair Cameflex CM3 camera that the real Coutard wielded, which was so noisy that all the dialogue in Breathless had to be dubbed in afterward. Linklater’s own stricture on his cinematographer, David Chambille, was that they should only employ shots that were possible in 1959, in monochrome and at the same 1.37:1 aspect ratio as Breathless. This, too, makes the period re-creation feel all the more accessible, following, as it does, Rossellini’s dictum that the best way of filming is the simplest. Black and white also made it easier for Linklater to incorporate period shots of Paris and Cannes to help achieve verisimilitude.

Chambille’s work here is a treat, comparable to other great monochrome period-reconstruction dramas, not least Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), the film that Linklater has said put him on the road to filmmaking. Gorgeous black-and-white images combined with a jazz soundtrack act like a mnemonic to allow the late-fifties/early-sixties period to manifest itself and say, “This was a cool time to be young.” Seberg’s nocturnal, clothed dip in a public fountain is like a more modest variation on Anita Ekberg’s Trevi Fountain display in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). In their growing amiable flirtation, dancing in sync to the Olympics’ “(Baby) Hully Gully,” Seberg/Deutch and Belmondo/Dullin anticipate the famous Madison dance scene that will be in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964). In a couple of scenes, there is just the slightest hint that Seberg’s marriage to wannabe filmmaker François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé), whose arrival at the end of each day is like a proverbial wet blanket, will not endure (Seberg would file for divorce in 1960).

“Good thing the camera really loves these two,” says Coutard of Seberg and Belmondo toward the end of filming Breathless, knowing, as he must have, how precarious what he’d shot might seem, and not able to anticipate how effective Godard’s famous use of the jump cut would be. But since postproduction falls mostly outside the parameters of Nouvelle Vague, we must leave speculations about the editing room behind.

Godard later said of Breathless, in relation to Preminger’s noir Fallen Angel (1945), that “the characters played by Belmondo and Dana Andrews are somewhat alike. They’re people who . . . must have represented for me at the time a certain ideal of freedom, meaning doing whatever you want.” Linklater portrays Godard exactly like this, as someone striving to do things his way against all odds, yet with the distinction of having allies in the fellowship of cinephiles. The fact that Linklater has pulled off so many hugely ambitious films himself—the twelve-year production of Boyhood (2014), for instance, or the eighteen-year span of The Before Trilogy, from Before Sunrise (1995) to Before Midnight (2013), with Sunset in between—makes his keen sympathy with Godard’s plight all the more convincing. With Nouvelle Vague, the “making of” film becomes a rich feature event all its own (as it did for Godard in 1963’s Contempt and 1982’s Passion), and it’s terrific to see so much venerated cinephile history handled with such grace and wit by a director who has found a whole new tribe of French actors whom the camera also loves.

Hideaki Anno wrote these words in 1993, just two years before he would definitively disprove them with the creation of his magnum opus, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–6). His pessimism was not without cause: the anime industry was in a slump, even before the bursting of Japan’s “bubble economy” in 1992 lead to major contractions. In particular, the science-fiction and mecha (a.k.a. “giant robot”) genres that had forged Anno’s own fandom, and on which he’d cut his professional teeth, had mostly disappeared from the airwaves and migrated to the home-video market. Anno and his studio Gainax had broken it big there with his first directorial project, the 1988 miniseries Gunbuster—an eccentric mash-up of giant robots, sports anime, hard sci-fi, and the then-recent Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun—but had hit much harder resistance on television. His first TV series, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990–1), suffered an arduous production, and left Gainax with major financial losses. Anno found himself emotionally in step with the medium he loved—which is to say, he spent the early nineties in a period of severe depression.

Produced in the wake of this personal and professional malaise, Evangelion proved both an emotional exorcism and a huge commercial paradigm shift. Its twenty-six-episode run sparked a new boom in anime production, fandom, storytelling, and merchandising that carried into the twenty-first century. It popularized the late-night anime block—where shows were broadcast in inexpensive time slots late at night or in early morning hours, creating a haven for more experimental and adult-oriented series—while further intensifying the already-hot home video market. And that was all before Evangelion left Japan: the series was also a crucial leader in establishing a durably popular anime market in the United States and other English-speaking territories. In the nineties, anime in America largely existed either as an underground, bootlegged subculture or through dubbed “cartoons” on TV edited to disguise their “foreign” nature. Evangelion’s release on both dubbed and subtitled VHS, beginning only months after the end of the Japanese broadcast and without content edits, refused this binary, and its popularity proselytized anime to a new generation of fans. (This dub, beloved by English-speaking fans but out of circulation since a new version was recorded in 2019, is the option presented on the Criterion Channel, alongside the original Japanese, restoring official access to an important piece of anime history).

In the case of a more sober and conventional series, this is the point at which I would introduce the plot. I would describe the then-future setting of 2015, fifteen years after a cataclysm known as the “second impact” decimated human civilization; and I would explain how and why the race of giant, Lovecraftian monsters known as Angels can only be stopped by the intervention of biomechanical mechas called Evangelions, which must be piloted by emotionally unstable teenagers speed-running their way through every psychological roadblock known to Freudian psychoanalysis. But the plot, lore, and logic of Evangelion is a Pandora’s box even Evangelion itself is hesitant to fully unseal, especially in its increasingly experimental second half, which ultimately jettisons narrative coherence in favor of thematic resolution. To experience Evangelion is to be confused by Evangelion, and to be confused by Evangelion is part of the pleasure of Evangelion.

One will quickly realize that what matters most are the minds and hearts of its vivid, complicated characters, principally the teenage protagonist Shinji Ikari, a vessel for Anno’s own depression, self-loathing, and indecision. While the opening episodes—in which Shinji is pressured to pilot the eponymous Evangelion at the behest of his simultaneously domineering and absentee father, Gendo—are full of bombast and spectacle, Evangelion declares its true intentions in its fourth episode. This half-hour features no robots, no monsters, no action or external threat of any kind, instead offering a startlingly intimate portrait of depression as Shinji withdraws into himself while receding further and further from civilization. Although the series excels in sequences of kinetic action, it here establishes its equally potent penchant for slowness, for compositions filled with negative space, and for confrontationally long takes—in sum, a devotion to sitting with emotional discomfort, and using the hollow stillness of an exterior landscape to express the desolation of a person’s interiority.

Indeed, the true artistic legacy of Neon Genesis Evangelion isn’t as a feat of world-building or narrative, but as the work that fully inaugurates anime’s postmodern moment of looking inward. Inward to anime’s own history, own subcultures, and own aesthetics; inward to the material essence of animation itself, as Evangelion’s later episodes and feature-film follow-ups play with rough sketches, unfinished animation, and other preproduction material, using such imagery as an expressive metaphor for escaping from narcissistic self-withdrawal and developing a healthy ego; and inward, most of all, because the series identifies its core battlefield not as the land upon which the monsters and robots fight, but the space within the mind of its emotionally insulated protagonist, which by the end of the television series comes to wholly overtake the external diegesis.

The series’ creators were all dyed-in-the-wool anime fans whose influences and tastes were forged not only by the shows they grew up on, but by the well-developed fan culture surrounding the industry. Among their key touchstones was Mobile Suit Gundam (1979–80), which had shifted the course of mecha anime with its focus on in-depth character psychology, scientific plausibility, and detailed world building. Shinji himself is a clear descendent of Gundam’s protagonist Amuro Ray, moodier and more introverted than the nekketsu “hot-blooded” young boy character type found in earlier “super robot” anime.

Here, Anno identified a place where his own depressive tendencies and thematic interests mapped onto a durable archetype. But if other boys had refused to “get in the robot” before Shinji Ikari, few did so with the sheer degree of despondency and diffidence as he, and few works prioritized that study of depression and interiority above all else. The innovation of Evangelion lay not in rejecting or deconstructing the last fifteen years of anime, but in refining and pushing these ideas even further. In Japan, the series is known as the progenitor of the sekai-kei (“world type”) anime, stories in which the personal crisis of an individual or romantic pair is mirrored in an apocalyptic danger of global proportions. If you’ve ever seen a film by Makoto Shinkai—Your Name, Weathering with You, and Suzume are among the most popular animated films of the twenty-first century—you’ve seen a sekai-kei narrative, one marked by the influence of Evangelion’s emotionally maximalist storytelling.

Evangelion should also be understood as a descendent of the live-action tokusatsu series—special effects–driven sci-fi/fantasy shows depicting mankind’s battles with giant kaiju invaders—that emerged in the 1960s. Anno is particularly indebted to Tsuburaya Productions’ Ultraman, from which Evangelion inherits three fundamental characteristics: First is the series’ setup, in which a secretive UN-chartered organization, usually boasting a three or four-letter name, leads the fight against giant monsters (the original Ultraman has the SSSP, while Evangelion has NERV). Second is its copious Christian imagery. Creator Eiji Tsuburaya’s devout Catholicism made this a fixture of Ultraman, where the eponymous hero—a being from the “Land of Light” who walks among humanity by taking the form of a man—is an obvious Christ allegory. Anno doesn’t deploy spiritual iconography to such theologically coherent ends, instead mixing crosses, stigmata, and spears with other pieces of Judeo-Christian mysticism (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and Japanese Shinto cosmology (the vision of a “primordial cosmos”) to create a mythology that is highly evocative without cleanly mapping onto real-world faith traditions. Third is the extreme visual style pioneered by Ultraman’s greatest director, Akio Jissoji, whose episodes are filled to the brim with shots of such conceptual and practical complexity that each would be the standout image in any other production. His contributions to Ultraman (1966–7) and Ultraseven (1967–8) are the greatest formal influence on Anno’s style from Evangelion to the present day, obvious whenever characters are framed through a prism, reflected in a mirror or pair of sunglasses, or accompanied by compositions from the canon of classical music. These influences run so deep that, when interviewed for this year’s The Origin of Ultraman documentary, Anno stated, with an air of artistic resignation, that “the curse of Ultraman will last until I die.”

As this rich mélange of influences attests, Evangelion was a product of true otaku, the Japanese word for hardcore fans of anime and related pop culture (and which, in Japan, carries a much more ambivalent connotation than its more neutrally descriptive English usage, thanks to high-profile cases of violence, withdrawal, and other antisocial behavior in the eighties and nineties associated in the public consciousness with anime fandom). Anno’s professional life was intertwined with his fandom from the very beginning. Although accepted to the prestigious Osaka University of Arts, he was expelled after three years. Instead of attending classes or paying tuition, he’d been making connections with other anime fans turned artists, who banded together to create a pair of short films for the Daicon III and IV sci-fi conventions in 1981 and 1983. Gleeful mash-ups of copyrighted characters and songs animated with a delirious sense of style, these shorts got Anno and company’s foot in the door in the industry and led to the formation of Gainax in 1984 (the same year Hayao Miyazaki’s epochal Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released, itself featuring animation by Anno). The artists who would serve as Evangelion’s creative leads assembled at Gainax over the next few years, including assistant directors Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki, character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, mechanical designer Ikuto Yamashita, cowriter and storyboard contributor Shinji Higuchi, and composer Shiro Sagisu. All were born within less than a decade of one another, and were in their late twenties to midthirties at the time of Evangelion’s production, placing them at the forefront of a new creative generation: one that had never known a time before mecha anime, tokusatsu shows, or the fan cultures they inspired.

Yet as was often the case at Gainax, budgetary mismanagement and creative indecision plagued the production down the home stretch. The final two episodes of Evangelion are infamous, as they fully abandon all narrative momentum and giant-robot action in favor of a decidedly avant-garde approach attending squarely to Shinji’s bruised psyche. Closer to the latter-day essay films of Jean-Luc Godard than any other mecha anime half-hours, these episodes depict a dense, verbally aggressive, but visually ascetic Socratic dialogue with the self, a sort of personal interrogation illustrated through a combination of reused footage, sparse and simple new animation, on-screen text, and unfinished drawings and production materials. Although they provide a thoughtful and powerful thematic closure to the ideas undergirding the series, their near-total abandonment of the show’s plot, mythology, and exterior stakes understandably baffled and upset contemporary fans, leading to calls for a do-over. The series’ immense commercial success enabled Anno and Gainax to do just that, in the form of two feature films.

The first, Evangelion Death (True)², is a compilation film re-editing the first twenty-four episodes of the TV series. Although relatively unfamiliar to American audiences, compilation films have been a common practice in Japanese cinema for decades. They provide an opportunity for fans to catch up on the story while seeing their favorite scenes play out on the big screen, and give animators a chance to touch up or replace certain shots, or even create all-new scenes that weren’t a part of the TV broadcast. Death (True)² fulfills each of these functions, but is also unusually bold in style and rigorous in structure for this kind of film. Presented not as a chronological plot recap but a series of thematic movements, the film is structured around the motif of Shinji and the other Evangelion pilots rehearsing in a string quartet for a performance of Pachelbel’s Canon, with aggressive, free-associative editing layering events from across the series on top of one another, accompanied by quick, staccato text inserts, often of just a few frames. The result is a dynamic and provocative viewing experience worth the time of even those who know the series by heart.

This film was first released to theaters in March 1997 as part of Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth, where it was followed by twenty-five minutes of all-new animation—announced, at the end of the presentation, as an extended preview of the second film, Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion. Released in full that July, this ninety-minute feature presents an alternate version of the series’ last two episodes. Where the original ending was sparse, still, highly interior, and ultimately quite optimistic in its vision of Shinji’s emotional rehabilitation, the version found in The End of Evangelion is almost the exact opposite: a spectacular, bombastic kaleidoscope of violence and kineticism, its animation overwhelming in scale and speed, its tone bleak and its imagery grotesque. Different as they are, these two disparate endings are connected by their penchant for avant-garde experimentation, with the feature’s rapid frame-by-frame edits recalling the experimental animations of Stan Brakhage, and a live-action interlude musing on the nature of anime fandom playing once again in the essayistic tone of Godard or Chris Marker. Both versions also share a common thematic arc, in which the “end of Evangelion” means rejecting Evangelion as a tripartite signifier: the in-universe mechs, the series and story they exist within, and the insular world of anime fandom itself. As indelibly touched by fandom as the series is, Evangelion ultimately reflects the ambivalence the word otaku occupies in Japanese culture, making the series both a product of and manifesto against the insularity of fandom.

That said, this would not, in fact, be the end of Evangelion, as Anno and much of the original crew revisited their seminal work with the four-part Rebuild of Evangelion film series from 2007 to 2021. Far more than a straightforward remake, these features begin from a shared narrative foundation with the TV series before striking out in an entirely different direction, providing the creators a chance to reflect on a story born from youthful passion with the prudence and insight of age and experience. They are among the great achievements of global animation in the twenty-first century.

But whichever the telling, Evangelion in all its forms is a work worth watching for the strong reactions it prompts. Love it, hate it, or simply walk away baffled, one will be marked by the encounter. I myself confess to having a tenuously passionate relationship to the original series and The End of Evangelion, vacillating between intense identification with its raw, deeply felt depiction of depression, awe at the most daring and virtuosic stretches of animation and direction, and feeling some alienation toward the show’s “fan service” imagery and generally schizophrenic depiction of women. But I love the Rebuild tetralogy profoundly, and that love only exists in the context of the broader conversation with the original work those films both practice and encourage. Whether one is a seasoned anime veteran or a relative newcomer to the world of Japanese animation, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a must-watch: a series worth experiencing and grappling with, in no small part for what it may teach you about yourself. Despite Anno’s anxieties of the early nineties, animation is far from over, and Evangelion is an exemplar of the relentless passion, innovation, and never-ending dialogue between creator and audience that has kept anime alive and at the forefront of global pop culture for so many years.

Thanks to Sean Chapman for the translation at the top of this piece.

This October, hitch a ride to the heart of terror: our Halloween programming includes a full-throttle tour of cinema’s scariest road movies, an anthology of TV-movie nightmares, and collections built around our fears of sinister intruders and mysterious possessive forces. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the films of contemporary Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Marc Maron’s Adventures in Moviegoing, selections from the landmark box set The Complete Kubrick, transgressive cult favorites from Bruce LaBruce, and the riveting anime series Terror in Resonance.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

Terror takes the fast lane in these souped-up joyrides into fear. While the road movie typically imagines the open highway as a conduit for freedom and self-discovery, these films explore the genre’s dark underside, where a wrong turn, a chance encounter along a desolate byway, or a serious case of road rage plunges travelers into a desperate fight for survival. From pedal-to-the-metal tales of crazed killers behind the wheel (Duel, The Hitcher) to terrifying detours into the hostile wilderness (Alone) to careening journeys into the occult and supernatural (Race with the Devil, The Appointment), these nightmares on wheels turn the open road into a freeway to hell.

Programmed by Clyde Folley

FEATURING: And Soon the Darkness (1970), Duel (1971),* The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Race with the Devil (1975), Road Games (1981), The Appointment (1982), The Hitcher (1986),* Maximum Overdrive (1986), The Wraith (1986), The Vanishing (1988), Cohen and Tate (1989), Highway to Hell (1991), Dust Devil (1992),* Joy Ride (2001), Alone (2020)*

The small screen delivers big shocks in these horror gems from the golden age of the American television movie. Both a proving ground for up-and-coming talent and a haven for Hollywood veterans, the TV movie gave viewers the chance to see a new feature-length film in the comfort of their home nearly every week, with horror and thriller films making a particular impact. From genre touchstones like Steven Spielberg’s high-octane directorial debut, Duel, and Tobe Hooper’s atmospheric Stephen King adaptation Salem’s Lot to ripe-for-discovery cult favorites like the indelibly creepy slasher Dark Night of the Scarecrow, these exemplars of taught, economical filmmaking deliver maximum thrills.

FEATURING: Duel (1971),* Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), Salem’s Lot (1979), Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

The sanctuary of the home becomes a terrifying trap in these disturbing tales of sinister, unannounced guests who arrive at the door with shocking consequences. Whether the menace comes from the satanists next door in Rosemary’s Baby, the gang of masked home invaders who interrupt a family reunion in You’re Next, or the seemingly innocuous acquaintance who turns up and refuses to leave in The Gift, these domestic nightmares invite us to consider a most unsettling question: How do we react when the horror is already inside the house?

FEATURING: The Night of the Hunter (1955), Rosemary’s Baby (1968),* Play Misty for Me (1971),* Homebodies (1974), The Plumber (1979), Pacific Heights (1990), When a Stranger Calls Back (1993),* La cérémonie (1995), Funny Games (1997), You’re Next (2011), The Gift (2015)*

On his recently retired podcast WTF with Marc Maron, the fearlessly unfiltered comedian and cultural commentator often used his platform to delve into the creative lives and processes of some of contemporary cinema’s most vital filmmakers. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he joins The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey for a typically probing discussion of his own relationship to cinema, from childhood exposures to highly age-inappropriate films to his obsession with silent-movie stars to his evolving relationship with the French New Wave. The films he has selected include art-house touchstones by Michelangelo Antonioni (Red Desert), John Cassavetes (A Woman Under the Influence), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Veronika Voss), auteurs whose films he views as puzzles that continue to inspire questions and fascination even after multiple viewings.

FEATURING: Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Red Desert (1964), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The American Friend (1977), Veronika Voss (1982)

These boundary-pushing visions of total takeover examine the terror and transgressive thrill of losing oneself to a host of uncanny forces. Ancient demons (The Omen), AI gone rogue (Demon Seed), alien parasites (Lifeforce), and adolescent bloodlust (Jennifer’s Body) turn the body into a battleground in tales of physical and psychic invasion that explore the primal anxieties and provocative possibilities of transformation from within.

FEATURING: Itim (1976), The Omen (1976), Demon Seed (1977), Possession (1981), The Entity (1982), Lifeforce (1985), The Faculty (1998),* Jennifer’s Body (2009), The Wailing (2016)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

A casual caper, a tribute to a vanishing industrial Italy, a scruffy intergenerational odyssey, and a free-flowing bender through time and space: this amiably ambling, booze-soaked road movie follows Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla), two small-time Italian crooks confronting a lifetime of failure as they face middle age. The return of an exiled partner in crime affords a second chance for long-lost riches—but can they put down their beers long enough to keep their eyes on the prize? Along their slow-motion, alcoholic grand tour of the Venetian countryside, they cross paths with Giulio (Filippo Scotti), a shy, heartsick architecture student who reluctantly warms to the sodden pair. Beautifully shot on 16 mm film and soundtracked by a wistful blues-rock score, The Last One for the Road captures the wonderfully woozy wobble of a life lived moment to moment and drink to drink.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Groundbreaking when it was made and still fiercely original today, this trans and butch buddy film chronicles three weeks in the life of Shy (Silas Howard), a handsome, gender-bending small-town dreamer with a nagging messiah complex. Reeling from his father’s death, Shy heads to the big city to sink himself into a “life of crime.” He is quickly distracted by Valentine (Harry Dodge), a deliriously expressive wiseacre on a misguided search for his birth mother. The two misfit grifters join forces and learn the true meaning of “poise under pressure” in this endearingly lo-fi, antiauthoritarian tale of friendship, trust, and redemption.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Celebrate the October release of Criterion’s monumental box set The Complete Kubrick with three masterworks by the auteur who opened up popular cinema to new realms of moral profundity and metaphysical mystery. With Lolita, Kubrick turned Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous bestseller into a surreally absurdist satire of self-delusion; with Barry Lyndon, he took the historical epic to new heights of painterly visual majesty; and with his final film, the psychosexual riddle Eyes Wide Shut, he brought twentieth-century cinema to a tantalizing, hypnotic close.

FEATURING: Lolita (1962), Barry Lyndon (1975), Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

On her remote country estate, a mother (Nicole Kidman) keeps her light-sensitive children enshrouded in darkness and isolation, until unwelcome intruders begin to haunt her insular world.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Alejandro Amenábar, a  conversation between Amenábar and film critic Pau Gómez, making-of programs, and more.

A couple experience tragedy and supernatural terror amid an elegantly decaying Venice in Nicolas Roeg’s brilliantly disturbing horror milestone.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between editor Graeme Clifford and film writer and historian Bobbie O’Steen, an interview with composer Pino Donaggio, programs on the making of the film, and more.

A researcher’s psychological experiments take him to the outer limits of consciousness in Ken Russell’s brainwave-blasting cosmic freakout.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan, interviews with Russell and actor William Hurt, and more.

A young mother-to-be (Mia Farrow) grows increasingly suspicious that her overfriendly neighbors are concealing satanic secrets in the ultimate occult shocker.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary featuring interviews with director Roman Polanski, Farrow, and producer Robert Evans; an interview with author Ira Levin; and more.

Two Jeremy Irons are twice as diabolical in David Cronenberg’s chilling tale of twin gynecologists caught in a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Cronenberg, Irons, editor Ron Sanders, production designer Carol Spier, and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Bathed in electric color, bursting with kaleidoscopic set pieces, and dripping with blood, the thrillers of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento are vivid excursions into baroque excess and dreamlike abstraction. Setting a new benchmark for the giallo murder mystery—complete with black-gloved killers, intricately staged violence, and psychosexual delirium—with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Argento continued to push his style into increasingly surreal realms with masterpieces like the supernatural tour de force Inferno and the self-reflexive giallo deconstruction Tenebrae.

FEATURING: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Two Evil Eyes (1990)

Merging psychological dread with existential inquiry, the films of Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa use genre trappings to probe the alienation and anxiety underpinning modern life. Quivering with whisper-quiet unease that gathers with slow-burn intensity, the J-horror touchstones Cure and Pulse are indelibly disturbing visions of psychic disintegration and technological contagion, while thrillers like Serpent’s Path and Cloud blend gripping suspense with incisive social commentary. And in sui generis dramas like Bright Future and To the Ends of the Earth, Kurosawa brings his keen-eyed formalism to stories of characters cast adrift in an increasingly uncertain world.

FEATURING: Door III (1996), Cure (1997), Serpent’s Path (1998), Spider’s Eyes (1998), Charisma (1999), Pulse (2001), Bright Future (2003),* Penance (2012), Creepy (2016), To the Ends of the Earth (2019), Cloud (2024), Serpent’s Path (2024)

Godfather of the queercore movement that challenged respectability politics with punk defiance, Bruce LaBruce leaves no taboo unshattered in his outrageously subversive, unabashedly kinky cinematic provocations. Bringing underground camp humor to a queer reimagining of Sunset Boulevard with Hustler White, necrolust to the goth zombie satire Otto; or, Up with Dead People, and surprising tenderness to the sexually frank age-gap love story Gerontophilia, LaBruce asserts a radically queer vision that finds liberation in transgression.

FEATURING: Hustler White (1996), Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008), Gerontophilia (2013)

One of the defining figures of Philippine cinema, Mike De Leon brought a razor-sharp formal precision, fierce political intelligence, and subversive edge to a remarkable array of genres. From the claustrophobic domestic horror of Kisapmata to the harrowing college-hazing drama Batch ’81 to the wild rock-opera satire Will Your Heart Beat Faster?, his rigorous, intensely psychological films deploy potent symbolism and provocative allegory to attack patriarchy, abuse of power, and the authoritarian brutality of the Ferdinand Marcos regime.

FEATURING: Itim (1976), Will Your Heart Beat Faster? (1980), Kisapmata (1981), Batch ’81 (1982)

EPISODIC SERIES

From Shinichiro Watanabe, the visionary creator of Cowboy Bebop, this provocative anime series wraps a potent critique of nationalism and abuse of power in the guise of a tantalizing cat-and-mouse puzzle. Operating under the name of Sphinx, two teenage boys unleash a wave of terrorist attacks across Tokyo. As demoted detective Kenjiro Shibazaki races to decipher their cryptic online clues, he gradually uncovers the shocking motive behind their campaign of destruction. With its mesmerizingly moody visuals and a gorgeous score by Yoko Kanno, Terror in Resonance emerges as a haunting meditation on trauma, alienation, and the consequences of institutional violence.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Violent, confrontational, and shockingly realistic, Tobe Hooper’s horror landmark remains one of the most terrifying movies ever made.

Nineties indie queen Parker Posey is at her effortlessly cool best in this irresistible comedy as a hard-partying scenester who must take a job as a librarian after she’s arrested for throwing an illegal rave.

Threatened with eviction, six elderly people devise a grisly plan to protect their home in this offbeat, darkly comic ’70s horror gem.

An ancient Chinese vampire navigates life in the modern world in this wildly imaginative blend of folkloric fantasy and punk irreverence.

In anticipation of The Social Reckoning, revisit one of the great films of the twenty-first century thus far. David Fincher’s brilliant and unsettling look at the rise of the social-media era goes behind the scenes of early-2000s startup culture to reveal the moral bankruptcy between the billions.

In Michael Mann’s darkly ravishing second feature, Nazi invaders unwittingly unleash a sinister presence lurking within the walls of an ancient fortress in the Carpathian Alps—a presence that doesn’t take kindly to unwanted guests.

MUSIC FILMS

Bucolic isolation takes on a sense of impending doom in this full-album video for the blistering second album by experimental rock outfit YHWH Nailgun.

Yann Gonzalez directs this luxuriantly transgressive queer horror fantasia starring the xx’s Oliver Sim and featuring songs from his synth-drenched debut solo album.

Just steps away from TIFF Lightbox and Scotiabank Theatre, this space establishes a new physical destination for movie lovers to discover cinema, build their collections, and connect with the community around them.

Last year, the Criterion Mobile Closet made its first international stop at the Toronto International Film Festival, welcoming more than a thousand visitors over the festival’s first weekend. This year, we’re excited to return to Toronto with a new home for the city’s film community.

To celebrate the store opening during TIFF 2026, Criterion is taking over the space throughout the festival, with an extensive selection of titles spanning the breadth of the Criterion Collection, alongside merch—with all Criterion discs 30% off. Cinema Cellar will serve as a destination in the heart of the festival action, offering audiences a place to explore the Criterion Collection at a store conveniently located near the festival’s major downtown venues.

Visitors will have a first look at Criterion’s forthcoming box set The Complete Kubrick, ahead of its official release on October 20, and the chance to shop for recent Criterion editions, including The Elephant Man, Network, Hairspray, Sentimental Value, and many others.

Cinema Cellar’s Criterion offerings will span classic and contemporary cinema from around the world, with a section where Canadians can rediscover some of their country’s most celebrated films. Among the Canadian titles available will be Criterion editions of David Cronenberg’s Crash and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Two Janus Films titles that had their Canadian premieres at TIFF last year, Magellan and Two Prosecutors, are currently available through the Criterion Premieres line. This year, Janus returns to TIFF with its upcoming release The Dreamed Adventure, making its North American premiere at the festival.

Beyond TIFF, Criterion will have a dedicated section at Cinema Cellar year-round, so Toronto movie lovers will always have a place to discover what Criterion has to offer.

Location:
Cinema Cellar
129 John Street
Toronto

You used to say, “June?
Honey when you come down here you
supposed to stay with me. Where
else?”
Meanin home

—June Jordan, “1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer”

A few minutes into I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), a restless work of documentary filmmaking starring James Baldwin and directed by Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, the author, fifty-six and graying, grins at his younger brother, David. The two share a burst of laughter in a room adorned with a bed and a wide window. Rays of sunlight flicker through and beam. Black-and-white photographs of marches and protests held during key battles of the mid-twentieth-century freedom movement intercut the intimate scene as the elder brother recounts his recent travels down south, where he’s gone to revisit the sites of those struggles. His recollecting takes on the world-weary knowing of the old spirituals: My soul looks back in wonder . . . I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now. 

In the world of the film, now is 1980, the year Carter’s administration curled into Reagan’s. As a candidate, Reagan delivered a critical campaign speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where voting-rights organizers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been disappeared and murdered in 1964. It was a gesture toward the South, which the candidate needed to win, as well as to the past. Focused on his belief in “states’ rights,” Reagan’s speech coyly signaled his support for the white-supremacist ideology underlying the region’s history of slavery and segregation. The multiracial, multigenerational movement for civil rights had challenged the South’s ruling class and won a number of political victories. By the end of the seventies, its achievements were already under threat.

Baldwin had lived long enough to witness the darkest depths of this caste system; his own grandmother had been born enslaved. He was born in Harlem in 1924 and, in 1948, famously fled America’s racial hostilities to become a writer in Paris. In the City of Light, he cobbled together a living, but also witnessed the brutal treatment of brown-skinned Algerians. “It was strange to find oneself, in another language, in another country, listening to the same old song,” he once wrote.

In 1957, Baldwin returned to the American South, where pitched battles were unfolding over school integration. He soon befriended the movement’s leaders and its rank and file and began to raise money, march in the streets, and rally media attention. He shadowed organizers as they faced retaliation. All the while, he reported from the field, intent on bearing witness. He suffered losses: Medgar, Malcolm, Martin had become his friends. He suffered the loss of his own peace.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine is Baldwin’s attempt to take account of what happened during those years and in the ever-ongoing after. The documentary constantly shifts between modes and focus, roving through towns and highways; still photography and moving images; wide-framed crowd shots and individual, anguishing close-ups. Like a refrain, the main melody keeps returning: A generation fought to win freedom for all. Some died, and others had their “lives smashed on Freedom Road,” Baldwin says. “What does this say concerning the morality of this country?” The film’s record of distinctly American rot and betrayal is both call and response. Through Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, New Orleans, and St. Augustine, Baldwin is our ever-present guide. Sometimes he is weary, pessimistic, astonished; elsewhere he exudes affability and warmth. He often disappears into the background—both a stately presence and a witness to the bravery of others.

Throughout its hour-and-a-half runtime, I Heard It Through the Grapevine uses Baldwin’s body and his memory to swing between the past and present, which haunt each other so much they collapse, at times, into one. The film draws on the writer’s abiding belief in the redemptive power of love, an ethic he revisited and revised across his astonishing body of work. Early in his career, he probed the American racial dilemma with sophisticated sociocultural analysis often aimed at moving Black and white Americans toward right relationship with each other. The work sought to “crack the American image and find out and deal with what it hides,” a distortion that kept us separated from God’s liberatory love. In later works, he trained his gaze more deliberately on the love Black people must cultivate for each other. His final novel, Just Above My Head (1979), dealt with longing and ambition on the soul and gospel music circuits against the backdrop of the movement. In 1985, he scrutinized African American leadership for its neglect of the poor in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, an investigation into the Atlanta Child Murders of the late seventies and early eighties. I Heard It Through the Grapevine is quintessential late Baldwin in its querulous style and its concern about the movement, its aftermath, and the souls and flesh most directly involved.

Another abrupt cut in the film’s opening minutes brings the Baldwin brothers from their daylit parlor into the shadows of a nightclub. They’re seated at a jazz lounge formerly on the corner of 97th and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan called Mikell’s. Cornell Dupree’s quartet circles and lands on a groove. They draw out the titular song’s long jazz lines, its thick, driving blues. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” had been written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong in 1966 (the year Stokely Carmichael called for Black Power in Greenwood); recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1967 (when Newark burned); and made a pop hit by Marvin Gaye in 1968 (the year “Martin’s head was blown off” in Memphis). Baldwin drags on his cigarette as his brother grins in the background. Then Baldwin smiles so intensely it impresses every line in his face. The intimacy of their togetherness, their deep pleasure in the music, belie the treacherous road of this return.

Throughout Baldwin’s road trip, Fontaine and Hartley’s camera is just as attentive to the old friends, mentors, and allies he visits along the way as it is to him. Some of them are giants in their own right. “You always see Sterling first,” David notices during another moment of the brothers’ conversation, which frames the film across its different chapters. The poet and educator Sterling A. Brown orients Baldwin to the American South just as he did in 1957. Born to formerly enslaved parents in 1901, Brown had lived an even longer stretch of Black American time than Baldwin. An elder writer of blues poetry and steward of the Black American literary tradition, Brown taught Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Lucille Clifton at Howard University. Baldwin’s return visit is that of yet another student at the professor’s feet.

Together they remember the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when Brown, the Baldwin brothers, and a crowd of 250,000 listened to King proclaim his dream and faith that his listeners would “stand up for freedom together.” Key civil rights legislation followed, but four little girls were killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church just two and a half weeks after the march. King delivered their eulogy: “They didn’t live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives.” Was he also speaking of himself?

King’s ghost hovers over Atlanta, his birthplace, which Baldwin describes as unrecognizable compared to how it looked and felt during the movement. The town, now “too busy to hate,” boasted skyscraper hotels, a bustling international airport, and a Black mayor. But King’s tomb was a monument built with a flickering “eternal flame.” What good is a monument when the people for whom the martyred die continue to suffer? Grand, hallowed figures like King and Evers are frequently invoked throughout the film, but Baldwin shares the frame most often with “another roll call,” the lesser-known veterans still struggling through the bloody aftermath. They detail present-day disinvestment in Black neighborhoods, diminished job prospects, the militarization of the police. Hosea Williams, King’s former field director, says the wave of integration that opened white businesses to Black patrons left Black Atlanta more economically and politically disempowered than ever before.

Bethel Baptist Church was bombed three different times during the movement, and a mob attacked its pastor, Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth, when he attempted to register his daughter for public school. During Baldwin’s visit to Birmingham, Shuttlesworth recalls telling his family, “This is freedom’s price.” The film implies the paying will continue as long as conditions remain unlivable. When a choir assembled by Shuttlesworth during the late 1950s holds court for the two men in a present-day sanctuary to sing the movement’s songs, the minister tells them to keep on singing.

The songs—many of them old spirituals adapted for the struggle at hand—buoyed the veterans during the movement and continue to transmit memory in their frequencies. Those veterans carry memory in their bodies, and the weight is heavy. David Dennis, head of Mississippi’s CORE chapter in 1964 when Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were disappeared, recalls the forty-four-day search operation in the creeks and rivers of Neshoba County. The waters were thick with dead bodies, face down, he remembers—bodies that did not belong to the three civil rights workers known to be missing.

The film flashes back to Dennis at the organizers’ funeral, his eyes aflame with despair. Chaney’s mother holds and comforts her younger son, Ben, as he joins in the chorus of “We Shall Overcome” through his tears. In another clip, Ben tells a reporter that he’s “ready to take [his] brother’s place” in the ranks of the movement. But back in the present, Dennis tells us that the young boy is now an adult serving time. The living bodies are mangled like the corpses, and all the South is a graveyard, the film seems to say.

A short distance from New Orleans, Baldwin visits a literal graveyard in Bunkie, Louisiana, the rural town where one of Baldwin’s uncles has been buried. “There was another brother,” Baldwin explains to his brother David, “a brother grandma had by the master.” Still images of a white ancestor flash and disappear. “It was strange to see, in effect, your father in whiteface,” Baldwin tells David. Here, we have descended into the original wound.

“[How] hopeless for them to deny their kinfolk, and do so in the name of charity and love and the name of Jesus Christ,” David says, circling a recurring motif in his brother’s writing. White and Black Americans have never lived in true isolation from each other. Slavery’s central realm was domestic. And the suffering that the perpetrators inflicted on their victims was and is a domestic drama, a tragedy staged among kin.

The tombs in Bunkie sit on top of the soil. Just three miles down the road at Clarendon Plantation, my own paternal relatives were enslaved by their father. The Anglo-Dutch planter Jonathan Koen left the parish in 1844, fleeing debt with his Black children Hannibal and Clarissa, and later freed them in his will. His white daughter, my great-aunt Martha, sued to re-enslave her siblings.

When Motown writers composed “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” they drew from a well much older than themselves. The “grapevine” can be traced to the antebellum years, when news of coming war, rebellions, and changes in the political landscape reached the enslaved by way of person-to-person transmission. Sailors and carriage drivers were key sources of information, as well as workers hired out by their masters to other plantations or across town. In Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington remembers:

Though I was a mere child during the preparation for the Civil War and during the war itself, I now recall the many late-at-night whispered discussions that I heard my mother and the other slaves on the plantation indulge in. These discussions showed that they understood the situation, and that they kept themselves informed of events by what was termed the “grape-vine” telegraph.

We’ll likely never know all the names of those who shaped this “common wind,” the individuals who provided contraband intelligence to other bondspeople. Just like we may never know all the names of the civil rights fallen. Baldwin must have known how evoking an anonymous network, the kind that shaped community bonds and spread knowledge and truth amid a system of crushing repression, could provide an opening, a way to keep singing.

The civil rights movement was one inflection point of a centuries-long reckoning with American society that dared the nation to apply its liberatory ethos democratically. Its gains were incremental, partial, and reversible. Some of the lessons Baldwin takes away are bitter indeed. “I think we learned something, which we now have to use,” he says. “The system cannot change itself, cannot transform itself. There is no morality which one can beseech in America.”

The balm is the community that witnesses you. The people who teach you. Despite its blood- soaked bayous and living graveyards, the South itself is a balm to James Baldwin. “I felt very much at home among the dark people who lived where I, if so much had not been disrupted, would logically have been born,” he wrote in 1972. Both his parents had been born below the Mason-Dixon, and, in his easy laughter and relaxed bearing, his comfort among the people is apparent. In a schoolhouse in New Orleans, Baldwin tells a room of small children that they “contain the hope of the future.” He had been invited by Jerome Smith, a former Freedom Rider who joined CORE at nineteen as a student at Southern University. Jerome, Baldwin tells us, has now founded an organization through which children learn from movement workers the history of their land and its people. In New Orleans, where jazz was born, and Congo Square held sacred space for ancient rhythms and let them breathe and change, Smith hoped to “reestablish a communication between the old and the young,” Baldwin says. “[Between] the dead and the living.” Put another way, the grapevine lives in Black time, which means that it yet lives.

“So we say to a child,” Smith tells us, “when trouble come, we’re here. We’re here. We’re here.”

Considering what he’s up to, though, it’s odd that he keeps insisting on his anonymity. The first thing we see Joshua actually do is cross a street in Los Angeles’s Little Russia. There are palm trees in the background, but the sky is as gray and dreary as it will be throughout the film. He walks up to an older man sitting on a bench and puts a bullet into him. A paid assassin who shoots people in broad daylight can’t necessarily count on going unnoticed. And yet Joshua, who always walks with his shoulders hunched against the wind whether or not one is blowing, is capable of committing homicide in public without anyone in his vicinity raising an eyebrow.

Despite what seems to be his knack for murdering with impunity, Joshua won’t emerge from the film unscathed. The protagonist is about to be sent across the country, setting into motion a drama of profound alienation and violent reckoning. Having accomplished his task in LA—“It’s done,” he says into the receiver of a pay phone—Joshua is immediately charged with another. The target of the assignment is an Iranian jeweler in Brighton Beach, also known as Little Odessa, the neighborhood in New York City where Joshua grew up. “Brooklyn’s no good for me, you know that,” he says, maybe trying not to sound too peeved so that he stays on his overseer’s good side. But his boss reminds him: “You owe us a debt.” As it turns out, Joshua owes several.

In these first scenes, we get a sense of how painstakingly distilled this movie is, in a way that very few debut features are. The inexorability of Gray’s films has been likened to that of Greek tragedies, and from the opening moments of Little Odessa, the misery to come is already in the air. The film is also akin to more than one Old Testament narrative—stories about fathers and sons, about brothers. Joshua’s destiny begins to collide with that of his estranged family when, against his will and better judgment, he skulks back to Brighton Beach, at the end of the B subway line, a quick transfer to Coney Island proper. In some noteworthy recent films, including Sean Baker’s Anora and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, the neighborhood is busy as a hive with reprobates, hustlers, con artists, and other criminal types, but in Little Odessa it’s dark, furtive, skeevy, and mostly cold. Gray shot the film during a particularly brutal winter, and the dirty snowbanks we see are perfect correlatives for the movie’s mood.

Amid this desolate landscape, the crime-film trappings of the opening are revealed to be a feint of sorts, for Little Odessa is ultimately an intimate tragedy in which Joshua must confront crucial figures from his past. Joshua’s reunions begin with his teenage brother, Reuben (Edward Furlong), who first appears on-screen in a repertory cinema watching a not terribly distinguished western called Vengeance Valley, starring Burt Lancaster. The picture gets stuck in the projector gate, causing its frames to melt, but Reuben shrugs it off and leaves without getting a refund or seeming to care that he’s missing the film’s ending. His inclination to roll with such punches suggests that he’s accustomed, in a way, to living life in suspension, aimlessly. When he gets home, he absconds with a piece of mail from the local board of education, no doubt pertaining to his truancy.

One afternoon, Reuben is working his father’s newsstand when wannabe neighborhood tough guy Sasha (David Vadim) comes by, demands cigarettes for the inside dope he’s about to lay on Reuben, and tells him that his brother’s back in town. Soon Reuben is looking for Joshua in a Queens hotel. Joshua, when he turns up, has one thing to say: “Get out of here.” It’s not safe, he tells Reuben. Nevertheless, Joshua can’t help himself. He sizes the kid up with affection, pulling off his wool cap. Then Reuben tells Joshua that their mom is dying, not knowing that he’s laying the foundation for a still greater catastrophe.

A native New Yorker, Gray has returned to Brooklyn many times throughout his career, and his depiction of the borough has a bone-deep credibility. His path to filmmaking, though, began in Los Angeles, where he has now lived for many years. He studied film at the University of Southern California, and his thesis project impressed producer Paul Webster, who approached him about making a feature. There was nothing in Gray’s quiver at the time, but Webster said that was no problem, that he should go ahead and write something. In Nathan Heller’s 2019 New Yorker profile of Gray, the director recalls Webster suggesting that he tell “the story of your relationship with your family, but add a genre hook.” When I spoke to Gray in 2024, he explained how much the film drew from his personal experiences: “I had met somebody I based Tim Roth’s character on . . . The mood of that apartment was the mood of my house in that period of my life.” The Russian hit men whom Gray had encountered in his youth were not “home cooks like the Italian mob guys in Goodfellas.” Rather than “colorful” characters, “they were actually sociopaths and psychopaths.” Dead souls, one might say.

The drilled-down quality of Little Odessa reminds me of a saying in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The film’s narrative thrust is well served—no, is actually defined—by Gray’s sense of purpose. This is a movie he needed to make. These are characters he needed to bring to life. The urgency that propels the film is heightened by its sense of realism and local detail, combined with a directness that has led some critics to describe Gray as a classicist. His visual style here is marked by the resolute perspective of his camera, which may have arisen in part from necessity—even in 1994, a budget of a little over two million dollars didn’t invite stylistic indulgence. And while some of the most startling imagery in Gray’s future films, like the final shot in 2013’s The Immigrant, does look as if it took some doing, the accomplished but much more unadorned imagery in Little Odessa hardly lacks for immediacy. Gray never averts his gaze, no matter how painful the scene.

Behind the camera was cinematographer Tom Richmond, who brought with him both a keen eye and a wild-man reputation. Gray once recalled that he didn’t quite know what to make of Richmond during preproduction, particularly when he repeatedly announced, “I’m going to be the camera.” But with Richmond’s intense commitment established, the filmmakers developed a strong rapport. Gray was grateful for the elder man’s generosity; the director was only twenty-four years old at the time, and the DP encouraged Gray as he insisted on choosing lenses and adjusting lighting setups.

There’s a key passage about twenty minutes into the picture that serves as a beautiful example of their collaboration. While Joshua is still antsy about people knowing that he’s back in Brooklyn, he has gotten more comfortable spending time with Reuben. The sequence begins with an almost surreal shot of three pristine white gulls hovering in a gray (of course) sky, followed by a view of a Coney Island street covered in snow. The brothers are enjoying maybe the only real moment of reprieve they’ll share in this story, and all around them is the dead of winter. Richmond’s camera is so acutely perceptive that you can practically feel the cold. Joshua is tearing into Nathan’s french fries; Reuben’s got a frank. Joshua interrogates Reuben, casually teasing the kid: Was he bar mitzvahed? Did he get a lot of money? Does he have friends? Reuben shrugs, and Joshua kicks him playfully. They both throw their trash over onto the beach. Of course these guys would be litterbugs.

Joshua getting goofy with his kid brother is a strangely sweet sight, but the joy can’t last. One of the movie’s most punishing ironies is that things begin to go terribly wrong once Joshua decides to act as his brother’s keeper, even as he tries to maintain a relative distance. In the next scene, the protagonist carries Reuben’s bike up the stairs to the family’s apartment. Richmond and Gray’s framing of the ensuing near-showdown—in which patriarch Arkady (Maximilian Schell, perfectly understated even in rage) balks at Joshua’s presence—is startling. In a 1997 interview, Roth said the film is about “a family where the devil has gotten into their house.” Compounding the calamity, of course, is that this devil belongs to the family. (Though the domestic conditions of Gray’s youth were not quite as extreme, he experienced a good amount of family unrest; his father, a businessman, was indicted on multiple counts of fraudulent activity, and his mother was dying of brain cancer while he was in college.) In future Gray films, brothers will reconcile (as in 2007’s We Own the Night, where the peace is terribly hard-won), and a son will find a father as well as the revelation and/or resolution that said father could not (in 2016’s Amazon-set epic The Lost City of Z and in 2019’s space-exploration drama Ad Astra). Such moments of catharsis and reconciliation do not even present themselves as flickers in this picture.

No relationship in Little Odessa is easy. Joshua looks up an old girlfriend, Alla (Moira Kelly), and her first words to him are “What do you want from me?” “I wanted to see you,” he tells her. “But I didn’t do anything,” she says, as if a curse has been delivered to her. Nonetheless, she later lets him make love to her, and the way he physically handles her is odd—a kind of aroused tenderness teetering on the edge of brutality, as if she’s an alien life-form. True connection sometimes seems to be just a pipe dream.

A wide vein of melancholy runs through this concise, diamond-hard film, whose riches are abundant. Among them are the remarkable performances that Gray elicits from his cast, a splendidly luminous one for a first-time director to be gifted with. As Irina, the incredible Vanessa Redgrave conveys the constant pain of the cancer that’s killing her character without ever overtly expressing it. Schell depicts the self-delusion of someone who finds himself impotent wherever he turns, until he discovers he can be quite horrifically powerful as a betrayer. Furlong and Kelly represent two different kinds of innocence betrayed. Paul Guilfoyle, as the mobster Volkoff, is as lizardlike as the reptiles Joshua and Reuben check out on a visit to the New York Aquarium. And Vadim, as the flunky Sasha, is eye-rollingly clueless.

Gray is attuned to idiosyncratic, lived-in detail in every part of the film. There’s the mordant humor of a missing prosthetic leg; the cramped, smoky quarters of the social club where Joshua enlists his comrades to carry out his next assignment; the crying of the jeweler as he’s about to be killed, and Joshua’s merciless remark—“Wait ten seconds and see if God saves you.” By presenting the execution in silhouette, Gray spares us gore but not destruction. His gaze is steadfast to the end, as Joshua does what needs to be done in the wake of multiple senseless shootings, without shedding a tear. His near-ritualistic shrouding and burning of a body reflects his determination to leave no trace. Joshua knows that he has just committed acts even more unspeakable than what he has been used to committing for a living. And now he seems to have a quiet awareness that he has annihilated himself—and is condemned to keep walking the earth anyway.

Given the devastation Joshua leaves in his wake, his words early in the movie take on a terrible irony. Brooklyn’s no good for him? Turns out it’s even worse for those he loved, and those he tried to love.

The film follows workers at a Hormel Foods meat-processing plant in Minnesota as they negotiate with management and then go on strike from 1985 to ’86. As she had for Harlan County, Kopple lived in the community during the production, and she served as her own sound recordist in a two-person crew, working alongside a 16 mm cinematographer. They were continuously cash-strapped, relying on grants and donations that trickled in. The harsh winter on the picket line was agonizing, and so were the stories unfolding on camera. We witness union members turn on one another as their convictions diverge, over whether to go on strike in the first place and, later, over whether to stay on strike or cross the picket line. Families and friendships are torn apart. While Harlan County is a case study in solidarity, American Dream captures the anguish and perils of disunity.

Like Harlan County, the film debuted at the New York Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. But otherwise the two had different trajectories. Harlan County USA had played in theaters across the country, becoming a breakthrough success for documentaries at the time. After premiering in 1990, American Dream saw a more limited release in 1992. In the decades since, Kopple has noted, Harlan County USA was more frequently sought for retrospective screenings. But as I write this in May 2026, American Dream has been restored and rereleased, and new audiences are experiencing it as a revelation. It lands amid fresh upheavals in the labor market against the backdrop of the gig economy, wholesale corporate embrace of AI technology, and ever-widening disparities in wealth.

I got to see American Dream during its theatrical release, just a couple of years before I would enter the documentary field myself, part of a midnineties generational wave beckoned by the possibilities of new digital video technologies. In the same way that All the President’s Men had brought about a rise of investigative journalists in the seventies, Harlan County USA and American Dream were key inspirations for budding doc makers in the nineties. Kopple’s approach, of embedding herself in a community midcrisis and filming under conditions where nothing was guaranteed—not access, not safety, not narrative resolution—was bracing. It showed us how documentary film could capture history while it was being lived. I can point to countless films released in the late nineties and the aughts that were motivated by her example, including Oscar-nominated works such as The Farm: Angola, USA; On the Ropes; Capturing the Friedmans; Street Fight; Deliver Us from Evil; and Jesus Camp. Especially for women who wanted to direct, Kopple stood out as a rare example. Hollywood’s institutional barriers in that era were formidable, and they’ve barely improved.

Nonfiction filmmaking itself has undergone seismic transformations in the decades since. Distribution has moved from art‑house cinemas to global streaming platforms. As documentaries have become more visible and commercially viable, they have also become more tightly managed, with predefined arcs, beats, and emotional payoffs. The experience of watching American Dream today is exhilarating partly because it is the antithesis of this way of thinking. It is in a tradition of observational cinema that Kopple learned when working on Gimme Shelter (1970) with Albert and David Maysles, two of the originators of Direct Cinema, and, as part of the antiwar Winterfilm Collective, on Winter Soldier (1972).

For me, as a Midwesterner, Kopple’s work on the Hormel strike hit especially close to home. During the mideighties, when the film takes place, I was coming of age in Detroit’s suburbs and witnessing an economic crisis all around me. For much of the twentieth century, industrial labor had underwritten the American dream. At the height of union power, in the fifties and sixties, these jobs provided pathways for working-class people to the kind of stability and prosperity associated with being middle-class, including homeownership, health insurance, and the ability to send kids to college. You wouldn’t have called the relationship between owners and workers equitable, but it at least felt reciprocal.

That equilibrium was unraveling by the seventies. Inflation, globalization, automation, and financialization were eroding industrial employment. Executive compensation soared as wages stagnated. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked a tipping point. Despite his earlier leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan cast organized labor as an obstacle to growth. His decision to fire more than eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers in 1981 sent a signal. CEOs grew even bolder about demanding concessions and punishing resistance.

The archipelago of industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest once known as the Steel Belt was now dubbed the Rust Belt. Those of us living there witnessed the transformation, as factories closed and storefronts, from urban downtowns to small-town Main Streets, were boarded up. Places engraved in our families’ histories were being shuttered at an alarming rate, accompanied by an existential dread that no one could stop the spiral. This was an experience I seldom saw evoked on a movie screen. One notable exception was Roger & Me (1989), the satirical documentary by Michael Moore, who grew up in Flint, Michigan. American Dream offered a different kind of validation. Kopple was an Oscar-winning New Yorker, and she was dedicating her talents to showing why this story mattered.

American Dream unfolds in Austin, Minnesota, a small city, surrounded by cornfields, whose civic identity is inseparable from Hormel, which is headquartered there. In the 1930s, company founder Jay Hormel oversaw the creation of Spam, a low‑cost canned meat that became a wartime staple and a symbol—perhaps ironic—of American industrial ingenuity. After his death in 1954, Hormel was remembered locally with nostalgia, as an employer who had honored an implicit social contract between labor and management.

By the early eighties, that contract had begun to fray. No longer family-run, Hormel was increasingly beholden to its shareholders. In 1984, despite posting nearly $30 million in profits, management announced a painful wage cut for meat-packers—from $10.69 an hour to $8.25. For workers whose bodies bore the marks of years spent inside the slaughterhouse, it felt like a betrayal.

Kopple’s camera takes us inside the plant to show precisely what labor that wage buys. Hogs are stunned, hoisted, disassembled. Their carcasses are carved into portions that will later appear shrink‑wrapped and cheerful in grocery aisles. The work is brutal, repetitive, and dangerous. We can see the physical toll and guess at the psychic cost. Harlan County similarly showed the bodily impact of coal mining. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t ignore it.

The first main figure we meet is Jim Guyette, president of Local P‑9, the union representing Austin’s meat-packers. He’s a third‑generation Hormel employee in his thirties. Local P-9’s members voted him into leadership for his willingness to fight, in contrast to prior leaders who were more conciliatory with management. The film begins as the calendar is running out on P-9’s previous contract. Guyette feels he needs more leverage to face Hormel’s hardball negotiators, so he recruits the New York–based labor consultant Ray Rogers, who earned a name for himself working on the late-seventies textile-workers campaign dramatized in the film Norma Rae. Rogers uses confrontational tactics and media events in an effort to win popular support for unions. He devises a strategy for union supporters to hold demonstrations outside the headquarters of a key Hormel stockholder, First Bank of Minnesota.

Throughout this process, Kopple captures the mood swings within the P-9 community. Hormel workers hadn’t been on strike since 1933. During meetings at the union hall, we witness diverging opinions. Some members are fired up. Others are skeptical about whether Rogers’s approach is working. The film skillfully interweaves a range of voices that foreshadows greater tensions ahead.

The dynamics grow more fraught when the film reveals that Guyette and Rogers face another source of friction from within the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union—Local P-9’s parent organization. We meet Lewie Anderson, the chain-smoking UFCW negotiator who represents tens of thousands of meat-packers nationwide, including members at plants making far less than Hormel’s workers. Anderson believes it’s the wrong time for hardball tactics. He’s convinced that Local P-9’s tactics are counterproductive and will further weaken the already fragile position of the union’s members throughout the country.

Kopple’s access to these men is extraordinary. She captures meetings thick with tension, where strategy collides with ego and adrenaline. Each figure is granted dimension, dignity, and contradiction. I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d held her own judgments about them or any of their strategies. “No, I was drawn to all of them,” she told me. “I felt so unbelievably lucky that I was able to tell their stories.”

Time itself becomes a central character in the film, wearing down resolve and exposing fault lines. We see the majority of the P-9 membership vote to go on strike in August 1985, against the advice of the UCFW. As the strike drags on, Kopple shows us how the jubilance and camaraderie of the union members give way to the grinding realities of winter on the picket line and households that have to be sustained without a Hormel paycheck, along with doubts about whether they can outlast management. The company shifts production elsewhere, then eventually reopens the plant with replacement workers. One of the film’s most poignant story lines follows two brothers, R.J. and Ron Bergstrom, both Local P-9 members, who find themselves in different camps and, ultimately, on opposite sides of the picket line. R.J. remains loyal to Local P‑9, while Ron loses faith in Guyette’s approach. Ron belongs to a splinter group of Hormel workers who wish Local P-9 had followed the advice of Anderson instead of Rogers. Kopple sits down with several of these members to hear their perspectives. Late in the strike, one normally stoic man breaks into tears as he describes the shame he feels at not being able to provide for his family. But emotions run high on both sides. At one point, R.J. tells a TV reporter of Ron, “He won’t be my brother if he crosses the line.”

Peter Gilbert, Kopple’s main cinematographer on American Dream, told me, “That was such an education, how Barbara treated everybody with this beautiful grace and dignity, no matter if she believed your side or not. I learned from her that the real importance of documentary is not which side you’re on. It’s more about presenting a gray area somewhere in the film, where people who are on opposing sides can connect and have a conversation.”

Today I sense a growing curiosity from a younger generation about organized labor. Maybe it coincides with the popularity of Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s the strength in numbers that people feel in grassroots movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Debt Collective. Maybe it’s the inspiration of organizing Amazon workers, as captured in the 2024 documentary Union. Whatever the source, I wasn’t feeling that same zeal among young liberals of my generation when American Dream came out. Unions felt parochial, unglamorous, even vaguely regressive. On college campuses in those days, you were more likely to find solidarity groups for distant causes—the anti‑apartheid movement in South Africa, revolutionary struggles in Central America—than for working‑class communities closer to home.

When I recently shared that impression with Kopple, she disagreed. “Labor has always been out there,” she told me. “Your father worked in a union, or your grandmother or somebody else. It’s always of interest to people.” I think Kopple is expressing a parallel truth. As we can clearly see in American Dream, she was engaged with a full-fledged movement of demonstrations, news coverage, and high-profile advocates like Jesse Jackson. But perhaps none of that was reaching my generation, many of whom grew up taking middle-class gains for granted.

Kopple didn’t approach the Hormel strike as an allegory or a case study. She went to Middle America and stayed there. She filmed people whose politics were mixed, whose values were contradictory, whose grievances were rooted in economic survival rather than ideology. In doing so, she asked her audience to sit with individuals they might otherwise dismiss or overlook. In the decades since, she has continued to apply these filmmaking practices, rooted in her social consciousness and talent for patient observation, spanning topics that include transgender expression, the experiences of war refugees, and voter activation. Two highlights of her later work for me are Shut Up & Sing (2006), about the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks as they mount a comeback from controversy, and Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), about the soul singer as she mounts a comeback from cancer.

It makes sense that one of the people who immediately grasped the importance of American Dream was Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago oral historian and author of Working. Terkel devoted his career to amplifying the voices of ordinary Americans. He hosted Kopple on his radio show for the film’s release. “It has Greek-tragic aspects to it. Only it’s not the gods that did it. Here, it’s a company and a union‑busting climate,” he said. “For me it’s the film—feature or documentary—of the past ten years I’ve seen. And I’ll remember this long after I’ve forgotten every extravaganza.”

“I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society.”

Hara Kazuo

This collection represents the finest work to come from the partnership between director Hara Kazuo and producer Kobayashi Sachiko. Together, they have created a diverse body of films that marks a turning point in post–World War II Japanese documentary. Indeed, their work helped drive this transformation, while also influencing documentarians around the world. The five films gathered here span the breadth of what I think of as two Hara Kazuos: Hara 1 and Hara 2. They have an interdependent relationship—one is unthinkable without the other. Each is always secreted inside the other. Hara 1 centers on spectacular, edgy personalities, and Hara 2 is embedded in collectives under duress.

Interestingly, these two phases can be seen as corresponding to two fiction filmmakers in Hara’s life; he served as an assistant director for both, and they deeply impacted his thinking about the world and cinema. In a 2017 interview, Hara told Joel Neville Anderson about these two mentors, Imamura Shohei and Urayama Kirio. Both encouraged him to concentrate on people and to elevate their humanity, but in seemingly incompatible ways. Imamura told him that people are “cowardly, they’re lecherous, they’re cheap, they’re immoral—and that’s what makes them interesting.” By contrast, Urayama told Hara to focus on the proletariat in order “to make the lives of the downtrodden and the weak better, and bring happiness to them.” This conflicting advice is at the heart of the two Haras.

The director’s reputation, particularly outside of Japan, is almost entirely built around his first handful of films—what I am calling Hara 1: Goodbye CP (1972), Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), and A Dedicated Life (1994). These are works that are profoundly inflected by Imamura’s earthy anthropology or, as the fiction filmmaker famously put it, “the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Each of the above films pivots around a charismatic individual’s body. And to one degree or another, each involves a struggle over directorial control.

In contrast to this, there is the more challenging Hara 2, who emerges in his works of the new century. Here he embeds himself—and the viewer—in groups of regular folks engaged in struggles and in need of advocacy: the weak and downtrodden people that Urayama encouraged Hara to support. This mode is epitomized by Sennan Asbestos Disaster (2016).

This arc is fascinating in relation to the larger backdrop of Japanese cinema. Postwar documentary was dominated by filmmakers allied to massive social movements, such as those protesting American military bases, nuclear weapons, industrial pollution, and the Vietnam War. This trend is best represented by Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s Minamata series (on mercury poisoning caused by chemical-factory wastewater) and Ogawa Productions’ Sanrizuka series (on the epochal protests against the construction of Narita Airport). Around the turn of the century, this kind of collective, politicized 16 mm filmmaking was eclipsed by essayistic, personal films that were often made by single directors with consumer camcorders and without crews. Amid these historical developments, Hara always chose to push against the prevailing currents.

Hara had initially aspired to a career in still photography, and to that end entered the Tokyo College of Photography. He decided to leave that path for motion pictures because “photography only allowed me to get to know people on a superficial level.” This was his starting point, in the wake of the failed 1970 protests against the security treaty that kept Japan under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and amid the newly extreme militancy of the Japanese Red Army. However, he rejected radical collectivity to embark on profoundly personal films as a lone, maverick, independent director. Decades later, as those political collectives gave way to young filmmakers making private documentaries, Hara, always the contrarian, turned to collectivities, traversing the historical arc backward.

He navigated this path with his life partner, Kobayashi Sachiko. When they met, he took the role of director and she producer, and their practice formed around a deep collaboration that has spanned more than half a century. The Hara I’ve known over the decades is a funny and charming figure. Possessing an almost aggressive curiosity, he is both an incessant talker and a listener who leans into every conversation with total concentration. He’s also a mess. “I’m a ball of complexes,” he told critic Nicolás Carrasco, and indeed he is. By contrast, Kobayashi is self-deprecating and strikes one as anxious and flighty at first glance. In fact, I’ve found she has nerves of steel, and her steady brilliance is what has ultimately made Hara’s films possible. It is a partnership of strange and wonderful complementarity.

Getting Personal

Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko’s first work depicted people living with cerebral palsy (CP). From a certain perspective, this places it among the movement documentaries of disability activism, such as the powerful films of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Yanagisawa Hisao, which elevate their subjects in an aura of purity and innocence. However, Goodbye CP was something entirely new: an unsentimental portrait of the daily life of a poet with the disease, Yokota Hiroshi, his body and voice cruelly distorted as if trapped in eternal agony. He argues with his wife, gets drunk with his disabled friends. In a society going to great lengths to hide the disabled, he crawls across city streets buck naked. The film offers a frank visual and aural representation of the damage the disease wreaks on the human body. Scholar Phil Kaffen has pointed out that this film forces spectators to think about their own bodies in relation to the bodies on-screen. He argues that Hara is not “building easy bridges or . . . erecting insurmountable barriers. Instead, the various excesses of the film push viewers into an uncomfortable in-between space, a deep chasm without rope or ladder in which we must wade through the muck of their own sensibilities, knowledge, perception of their own bodies, and understanding of film and documentary.” Faced with not only the struggles of the physical handicap but also the indignity of being disregarded by the “normal” people surrounding them, Yokota and his friends are shown in a new, taboo-breaking light.

Two years later, Hara again sent a shock wave through the Japanese film community with Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974. The documentary chronicles something of a love triangle between Hara, Kobayashi, and Hara’s ex-wife, Takeda Miyuki. It’s an unlikely situation. Kobayashi was, at the time, both the director’s lover and producer. As for Takeda, she proves to be a force of nature—a feminist activist interested in both men and women, and not only Hara’s former lover but also the mother of his child. The film centers on the spectacular life and personality of Takeda, but it is really about her tangled, three-way relationship with Hara and Kobayashi.

Extreme Private Eros’s most powerful setting is the environment where Takeda is living, near a military base on the island of Okinawa, so the film skirts the edges of the anti-American base movement as well as contemporary feminism. However, the focus is singular, or perhaps I should say triangular. The film is, as the title announces, extremely personal. Takeda allows the other two to enter the deepest, most private spaces of her life, but she is no mere object of scrutiny. Hara appears entranced by Takeda’s mercurial and unpredictable behavior as she throws herself into life, berates this filmmaker from her past, and cajoles Kobayashi into her world. The relationship between the three comes to a head during the most intimate of moments, the home birth. Hara had long promised to shoot Takeda’s home birth and fulfills his promise halfway through the film. The delivery is without complications, but Hara’s nervousness is registered in the camera’s lack of focus. Takeda then encourages Kobayashi, who is also pregnant, to follow her lead and give birth on the kitchen floor. Shot long before the age of home video, this extraordinary scene is the culmination of their complex, intersubjective relationship—with Hara’s camera work, Takeda’s instructions, and Kobayashi’s cries. It is with this film that the individualized stance of Hara 1 comes into sharp focus: a director turning his camera on a charismatic individual while revealing his own messy individuality, all orchestrated by an equally strong, if quiet, woman in the background.

Truth and Violence

In Hara Kazuo’s third feature, the award-winning The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, he and Kobayashi Sachiko take a back seat while his subject essentially commandeers the film. This remains the best documentary about the Second World War in the Pacific, and the best exploration of documentary’s relationship to violence and ethics. Five years in the making, the film traces a quest for truth by Okuzaki Kenzo, a survivor of the battlefields of New Guinea who is now on a crusade to abolish Japan’s emperor system. The veteran had initially approached Imamura Shohei, who was unnerved by Okuzaki’s behavior and passed the project on to Hara and Kobayashi. Okuzaki had a vendetta against Emperor Hirohito and any vets who harbored no regrets about fighting for the imperial cause. He proudly admitted that he had shot pachinko balls at the royal family, distributed pornographic images of the emperor, and once killed a man who tried to swindle him. When Hara and Kobayashi embarked on the film, they doubtless knew that they were in for some drama.

Although generally understood as an antiwar film, The Emperor’s Naked Army is profitably seen as a struggle over the souls of the war dead. The film centers on Okuzaki’s determination to reveal the truth behind an incident involving his old unit: twenty-three days after the war ended, two low-ranking Japanese soldiers were executed for “desertion” under very mysterious circumstances while Okuzaki was away in a prison camp. Visiting the surviving members of his unit one by one, the vet slowly uncovers what happened. Along the way, his interview tactics escalate from verbal abuse to physical violence. Okuzaki is motivated by a desire to soothe the souls of the two victims, and while he is encouraged by their surviving family members, his search is stymied by fellow veterans who tell him to stop for the sake of the two men’s spirits. The Emperor’s Naked Army is thus a pragmatic antiwar film that takes on a surprising metaphysical dimension.

The film was inspirational for Michael Moore, who serendipitously walked into a movie theater playing the film, having been seduced by the title. Moore was editing Roger & Me (1989) and was racked by insecurities about his interventional approach. The Emperor’s Naked Army rocked his world. He found in Hara a “kindred spirit” who was also searching for a way to make documentaries that didn’t numb his spectators. I brought the two directors together to finally meet onstage in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Moore told Hara, “I felt after watching that film that I had permission—I gave myself permission—to make Roger & Me the way I was making it.”

Moore found The Emperor’s Naked Army attractive mainly for its strategy of provocation. However, over the years, it has become the test case for documentary ethics. Hara’s tolerance for his subject’s violent tactics has enabled a lively and ongoing discussion about the stakes of nonfiction filmmaking. The film, as documentarian Errol Morris has said, “makes you think about the incredible power of truth-seeking.” This is a power that necessitates a self-consciousness around the ethics of every filmmaking decision. Near the end of the film, Hara and Kobayashi discover the redline they were unwilling to cross with Okuzaki. The question for every spectator is where they’d draw their own redline.

Farewell to the Individual

Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko’s next film, A Dedicated Life, is their final documentary centered on an individual personality. In this case, it’s the famous novelist Inoue Mitsuharu, a Marxist from the far west of Japan. He came to national prominence when his People of the Land (1963) was nominated for a major prize. Hara and Kobayashi catch Inoue toward the end of his life, when he was holding seminars with his fans. Most of them were older women. Some of them he was sleeping with. Considering their previous work, it is clear why Hara and Kobayashi were initially attracted to Inoue. He had a big personality and a quirky lifestyle. However, in the course of shooting, they discovered that Inoue’s biography was itself fiction. As they uncover one lie after another, the film transforms into a meditation on fiction, documentary, and truth. And Inoue raises the stakes of all these questions by revealing his terminal cancer diagnosis.

This film in particular casts new light on Hara’s previous work by demonstrating how all the profound issues in documentary cinema pivot around the human body. Actual human bodies racked by disease, giving birth, fighting each other, undergoing surgery—different sets of ethical quandaries spin around these bodies and their representations on film. Hara has thought deeply about this:

I like action films, so I often use the phrase action documentary. What I mean is this: Let’s say I begin by initiating things . . . Those who are provoked take in my words and filter them through their bodies, then take action. I believe that to take action with your body means to see things that you would otherwise not be able to see—and to see things is better than not to see things. The flip side is I also want to be provoked. All the time . . . I need to be stirred up . . . I want to take action with my body, because a body that takes action is a wonderful thing . . . Therefore, our films are not action movies: they are action itself.

A Dedicated Life is thus not only the final but one of the key films of Hara 1, a group of works that are ultimately defined by this concentration on individual bodies moving through the world. These films are portraits of individual passion set against grand sociopolitical backdrops. The lives of these exceptionally captivating figures are shambolic and vulgar, and, like Hara, we cannot help but find them frightening, frustrating, and seductive all at once.

A Commitment to Confrontation

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, young filmmakers like Kawase Naomi hit the scene, following Hara Kazuo’s example of the extremely personal documentary by working in a form often called the “self-documentary” or “private film.” These filmmakers shared Hara’s lack of interest in radical political movements, but they did not have the older director’s curiosity about the messiness of the world and its people. Their films were divorced from, or ignorant of, politics. While Hara was seen by many as this movement’s progenitor, it’s a terribly thin comparison, as the young filmmakers tended to focus on the personal because it was a safe space. In contrast, Hara’s “personal” was always raked by the social, the political, and the historical. And Hara was deeply attracted to risk.

Finding himself increasingly frustrated by these young filmmakers, he and Kobayashi Sachiko began turning away from charismatic individuals to collectives. They started to follow and simultaneously shoot three groups of regular citizens engaged in righteous fights against industry and government cruelty. Their Reiwa Uprising (2019) is about a newly formed political party with a menagerie of spectacular characters, while their epic Minamata Mandala (2020) tracks the ongoing legal battles over Minamata disease.

However, the film that best represents their new approach, and the scale and tone of Hara 2, is Sennan Asbestos Disaster. This also follows the legal battles of a group of citizens, in this case poisoned by asbestos factories in their Osaka neighborhood. Kobayashi and Hara participated in their struggle for almost ten years, but the film’s purview reaches back to the industrialization of the country after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The setting is Sennan, whose economy had come to revolve around the spinning of asbestos into fireproof fabric. Most families were involved in this work in one way or another, but no one was left untouched because of the dangerous nature of asbestos.

The film makes clear that the government long knew about the perils of these factories, but it looked the other way while protecting the factory owners. Waves of illnesses finally provoked the lawsuit that Hara and Kobayashi follow. After its swift historical overview, this lengthy film focuses on the victims. Hara introduces them one by one as the lawsuit moves through the courts at a most painful pace, and follows them as some pass away. From time to time, the action-film approach of Hara 1 appears, as we see him frustrated at the victims’ timidity, goading them on to act before the camera and in the face of the government’s cruel indifference to their suffering.

In this sense, the apparent divide between Hara 1 and Hara 2 ultimately resolves into a single, evolving practice—one that moves from the volatile singular body to the fragile, embattled collective without ever relinquishing the tensions that define either mode. The later films do not abandon the provocations of the earlier work; rather, they redistribute them across a wider social field, where individual bodies remain the irreducible sites through which history, violence, and responsibility are felt. What emerges is not a softening but an expansion: a cinema that insists on the inseparability of the personal and the political, the singular and the communal. If Hara’s films continue to unsettle, it is because they are driven by a restlessness that refuses resolution, a commitment to confrontation that is directed as much inward as outward. As he has reflected, “In my case, my sustenance is my own question mark about myself. There is the unknown within me that would lead me somewhere that I don’t know, and I’m perhaps afraid of that . . . Therefore, although I am shooting my subjects with my camera, I am also carrying the camera toward the inside of myself, and going further and deeper within.” It is this recursive movement—between others and the self, between action and reflection—that binds this body of work together, and that ensures its enduring urgency.

This month on the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating a truly independent artist with a career-spanning retrospective dedicated to the always-provocative, fiercely creative Abel Ferrara. The classic series Neon Genesis Evangelion joins our anime offerings, while Girl Bands! collects high-energy tales of female rockers getting together to make noise. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a conversation with Paul Dano on his craft, a trio of movies starring Madonna, exclusive premieres of Carla Simón’s Romería and Lucrecia Martel’s Our Land, the Oscar-winning animated odyssey Flow, the directorial debut from Academy Award nominee Wagner Moura, and a centennial celebration of Japanese New Wave legend Shohei Imamura.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Featuring a new introduction by critic Sean Fennessey, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Pulsing with operatic intensity and a furious moral vision all his own, the films of Abel Ferrara comprise one of the most fearless and uncompromising bodies of work in modern cinema. Emerging in the New York of the seventies, he used the grime and sleaze of the city’s margins as a backdrop to subversive tales of sin and redemption, from the urban-nightmare thrillers Ms .45 and Bad Lieutenant to the delirious gangster saga King of New York and the provocative vampire allegory The Addiction. Whether working in science fiction (New Rose Hotel), horror (Body Snatchers), or inside-Hollywood melodrama (Dangerous Game), Ferrara has fused genre thrills with searing personal expression. And since relocating to Rome in his later career, he’s continued to direct searching meditations on art and life like Tommaso. Spanning nearly five decades of defiant independence, his films wrestle with profound themes of faith, power, guilt, and salvation, confronting the depths of human degradation in search of transcendent purity.

FEATURING: The Driller Killer (1979), Ms .45 (1981), Fear City (1984), China Girl (1987), King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992), Body Snatchers (1993), Dangerous Game (1993), The Addiction (1995), The Blackout (1997), New Rose Hotel (1998), ’R Xmas (2001), Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009), 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011),* Welcome to New York (2014),* The Projectionist (2019), Tommaso (2019), Padre Pio (2022),* Turn in the Wound (2024)

The boundary-pushing franchise that propelled anime to new heights of psychological, moral, and philosophical complexity, Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a landmark of both adventurous visual storytelling and profound existential inquiry. Set in a postapocalyptic world where teenagers are recruited to pilot giant Multipurpose Humanoid Decisive Weapons—artificial humans known as Evangelions—to defend humanity from mysterious beings called Angels, the story evolves from high-stakes action spectacle into a deeply introspective exploration of identity, trauma, loneliness, and human connection. The original twenty-six-episode series is presented here in both its Japanese-language version and the Classic English dub—the latter of which is made available on streaming for the first time. Revised and expanded by its acclaimed companion films The End of Evangelion and Evangelion Death (True)², Neon Genesis Evangelion represents narrative and aesthetic world-building of the highest order.  

SERIES: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996)

FEATURES: Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997), Evangelion Death (True)² (1998)

Women come together to make noise in these electrifying tales of girl bands defying the establishment, chasing stardom, and making their voices heard. From ferocious anthems of punk rebellion like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains to wildly satirical takes on fame and the music industry like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Josie and the Pussycats to deeply felt stories of friendship and belonging like Linda Linda Linda and K-On! The Movie, this selection of cult favorites (Desperate Teenage Lovedolls) and pop fantasias (Grace of My Heart) celebrates the collective joy of women creating their own sounds, identities, and mythologies.

FEATURING: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Times Square (1980), Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982), Streets of Fire (1984),* Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984), Lovedolls Superstar (1986), Grace of My Heart (1996),* Josie and the Pussycats (2001),* Prey for Rock & Roll (2003), Clean (2004),* Linda Linda Linda (2005), K-On! The Movie (2011)

More than a conventional actor, Madonna brings the full force of her own mythology—the raw magnetism, glamour, contradictions, and restless instinct for self-reinvention—to the characters she inhabits. In Desperately Seeking Susan, she updates the classic screwball heroine for the 1980s with effortless charisma and downtown New York cool; in Body of Evidence, she embodies the stylized excess of the erotic thriller; and in Dangerous Game, she draws on her real-life stardom to deliver one of her most vulnerable and unsettling performances, blurring the lines between identity, performance, and fame.

FEATURING: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Body of Evidence (1993), Dangerous Game (1993)

A quietly electric screen presence whose ability to convey simmering internal tension has made him one of his generation’s most respected actors, Paul Dano has delivered unforgettable performances for a remarkable roster of major directors, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Steve McQueen, Denis Villeneuve, and Bong Joon Ho. In this edition of The Craft of Acting, Dano joins writer Isaac Butler to explore the art of bringing a character to life. Through discussing the formative influence that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s fearlessly vulnerable performance in Boogie Nights had on him, his process of channeling the creative spirit of Brian Wilson in the acclaimed biopic Love & Mercy, and how he harnessed the contrasting acting styles of Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal in his striking directorial debut,Wildlife, Dano offers insight into how he transforms rigorous preparation into riveting, in-the-moment screen alchemy.

FEATURING: Boogie Nights (1997), Love & Mercy (2015), Wildlife (2018)*

STREAMING PREMIERES

Featuring an introduction by director Carla Simón, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

An orphaned young woman’s search through the shards of her family’s past becomes an encounter with the missing pieces of her identity, in this graceful reflection on memory and inheritance. Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an aspiring filmmaker, visits the luminous seaside city of Vigo in Northwestern Spain seeking answers about her biological parents’ turbulent lives and mystery-shrouded deaths. As she gets to know her father’s fractious family, she confronts competing narratives and long-buried secrets. Unfolding with a free-flowing lyricism that tips into dream and fantasy, Romería finds director Carla Simón turning a compassionate gaze on her own complex heritage, reclaiming hidden history through the alchemical magic of cinema.

With her first documentary feature, acclaimed director Lucrecia Martel (Zama, The Headless Woman) continues her career-long exploration of the injustices and colonial violence lurking beneath the veneer of Argentinean society. Combining urgent moral force and restless formal invention, Our Land illuminates the circumstances surrounding the murder of Javier Chocobar, an unarmed Indigenous activist who was shot while defending himself and his people from encroachment on their land. Connecting Chocobar’s killing to the centuries-old legacy of land and property theft across Latin America, Martel offers an at once intimate and sweeping account of Indigenous resilience in the face of ongoing erasure.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

A courageous cat embarks on a journey through a ruined world in this thrilling, Oscar-winning tale of friendship and survival that took indie animation to new heights of ambition and imagination.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Away (2019), director Gints Zilbalodis’s debut feature; audio commentary by Zilbalodis; interviews with Zilbalodis and cowriter-coproducer Matīss Kaža; and more.

James Caan is a professional thief struggling to break free from the criminal underworld in the stylishly moody, neon-spattered debut by action auteur Michael Mann.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Mann and Caan and interviews with Mann, Caan, and Johannes Schmoelling of the band Tangerine Dream, which contributed the film’s soundtrack.

Hey, hey, it’s the Monkees . . . being catapulted through one of American cinema’s most surreal sixties odysseys: a kaleidoscopic blend of media satire, concert movie, and antiwar cry. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by the Monkees, an interview with director Bob Rafelson, screen tests, and more.

Joan Micklin Silver digs fearlessly into the psychology of a toxic relationship in this thorny anti–romantic comedy about a man desperately trying to rekindle lost love.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A 1983 documentary about Micklin Silver; a program featuring producers Griffin Dunne, Mark Metcalf, and Amy Robinson; and more.

Satyajit Ray deconstructs the male buddy comedy in this subversive portrait of four friends whose urban prejudices and entitlements are exposed during a trip to the countryside.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An introduction by filmmaker Wes Anderson; a making-of program featuring interviews with Ray, actors Sharmila Tagore and Rabi Ghosh, and cinematographer Soumendu Roy; and more.

A severed ear leads a young man down a rabbit hole of depravity in David Lynch’s journey into the nightmare realm beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town America.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: The Lost Footage, fifty-three minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes assembled by Lynch; three documentaries on the making of the film; an interview with composer Angelo Badalamenti; and more.

With his father away battling wildfires, a boy watches his family unravel in the quietly revelatory directorial debut from Paul Dano. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Dano, screenwriter Zoe Kazan, actors Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, cinematographer Diego García, production designer Akin McKenzie, and costume designer Amanda Ford; and more.

OUT-OF-PRINT EDITIONS

Collectors rejoice! Not every film the Criterion Collection has released over the last four decades remains in print. Formats change, licenses expire, and catalogues evolve. But here on the Channel, we’re thrilled to showcase some of the special editions we once released on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, along with the supplements that accompanied them.

Cult icons Udo Kier and Joe Dallesandro star in Paul Morrissey’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s myth, a riot of kinky transgression that fuses exploitation thrills with an ironic reflexivity. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Morrissey, Kier, and film historian Maurice Yacowar.

Udo Kier sinks his teeth into the role of the infamous Transylvanian count in underground auteur Paul Morrissey’s outrageously subversive, elegantly perverse reinvention of horror mythology.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Morrissey, Kier, and film historian Maurice Yacowar.

The otherworldly David Bowie is perfectly cast as an extraterrestrial posing as a human in Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory examination of alienation in contemporary life.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Roeg, Bowie, and actor Buck Henry; interviews with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and actors Candy Clark and Rip Torn; and more.

Identities shift, blur, and dissolve in an existential ghost story, a shocking erotic fable, and a sci-fi nightmare by the visionary Japanese modernist.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Video essays on all three films by critic James Quandt, a documentary about the working relationship between Teshigahara and author Kobo Abe, and more.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Featuring an introduction by director Terence Nance, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

Terence Nance emerged as one of the most exciting and unique voices in American independent cinema with his audaciously original, dizzyingly inventive debut feature. With disarming vulnerability, formal daring, and a playful sense of humor, this one-of-a-kind confessional multimedia collage uses a kaleidoscopic mix of live action, animation, and unchained surrealism to trace the ever-shifting relationship between a sensitive young artist (Nance) and the elusive woman (Namik Minter) who becomes the catalyst for his journey of self-reflection.

One of the first films to confront the horrors of the Holocaust remains one of the most powerful. Suffused with the visceral dread of a waking nightmare, Distant Journey draws from director and Holocaust survivor Alfréd Radok’s own experiences to tell the story of a Czechoslovak Jewish family—including a young doctor (Blanka Waleská) and her gentile husband (Otomar Krejča)—whose lives are torn apart by the terrors of the Nazi occupation, leading them inexorably to a grim fight for survival in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Blending expressionistic cinematography with archival documentary footage (some drawn from Triumph of the Will) to potent effect, this harrowing vision of human atrocity was banned in its home country for more than forty years, only to reemerge as urgent and impactful as ever. 

Shot on a shimmering mix of black-and-white 35 mm and hallucinatory Pixelvision video, Michael Almereyda’s gothic mood piece follows New York–based vampire Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) as she reconnects with her twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris) following their father’s death, even as vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) pursues her from Manhattan to Transylvania. Executive produced by David Lynch, this Gen X cult favorite merges elements of the 1936 horror classic Dracula’s Daughter and André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja for a singularly dreamy, sexy, deadpan reinvention of vampire mythology.

EPISODIC SERIES

An unsolved murder haunts the lives of four childhood friends in this eerie, intense five-part psychological thriller from master of ambient dread Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Cloud). On a small-town playground, a mysterious stranger approaches a group of young girls. When one is found murdered, the victim’s grief-stricken mother (Kyoko Koizumi) demands that the shaken survivors identify the killer or face a penance of her choosing. Growing up in the shadow of this tragic debt, each of the four girls cultivates a warped survival mechanism: avoidance, desperation, fear, and obsession. A disturbing, intricately constructed exploration of trauma, guilt, and memory from a female perspective, Penance blends Kurosawa’s trademark atmosphere of creeping unease with a quietly devastating commentary on Japanese gender expectations. 

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Featuring an introduction by Seidelman, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

In 1982, Susan Seidelman instantly established herself as one of the decade’s freshest cinematic voices when her debut feature, Smithereens, became the first American independent film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. A vividly gritty time capsule of downtown New York’s postpunk underground, the film caught the attention of Hollywood and led to her bigger-budget follow-up, Desperately Seeking Susan, starring Madonna in a screwball romp through bohemian Manhattan. With subsequent gems like the clever sci-fi rom-com Making Mr. Right, Seidelman confirmed her flair for crafting offbeat comedies built around memorably messy, idiosyncratic women.

FEATURES: Smithereens (1982), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Making Mr. Right (1987)

SHORTS: And You Act Like One Too (1976), Yours Truly, Andrea G. Stern (1979)

One of contemporary cinema’s most perceptive chroniclers of fractured family bonds, Spanish director Carla Simón draws from her own complex history for this pair of empathetic, delicately observed portraits of girls growing up in the wake of profound loss. Infused with childhood memories, her luminous debut feature, Summer 1993, is a tender immersion into the world of a newly orphaned six-year-old girl navigating a tangle of confusion after she is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in the Catalan countryside. In the exquisite Romería, Simón once again revisits the unresolved questions of her own heritage, this time from the perspective of a teenager uncovering the long-buried secrets behind her parents’ lives and deaths.

FEATURING: Summer 1993 (2017), Romería (2025)

Born one hundred years ago this month, Shohei Imamura left behind a body of work chronicling a Japan transformed by war, occupation, and rapid social change, yet still governed by the most primal of human instincts. Though he began his career as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, Imamura forged an explosive cinema that stood in direct opposition to the classical master’s elegant restraint. Raw, earthy, sensual, and irreverent, Imamura’s films train an almost anthropological eye on the roiling underclass of Japanese society, revealing a world of criminals, outcasts, deviants, and subjugated women fighting to survive on the margins. From breakthrough works like Pigs and Battleships and The Insect Woman to late-career triumphs like the Palme d’Or winners The Ballad of Narayama and The Eel, Imamura’s films pulse with the anarchic, irrational force of the id.

FEATURING: Stolen Desire (1958), Endless Desire (1958), The Insect Woman (1963), Intentions of Murder (1964), The Pornographers (1966), Profound Desire of the Gods (1968), Vengeance Is Mine (1979), Eijanaika (1981), The Ballad of Narayama (1983), Zegen (1987), The Eel (1997)

Heralded as “the Godfather of Asian American media,” Robert A. Nakamura was profoundly shaped by his childhood incarceration in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, an experience that informed his lifelong exploration of identity, memory, and belonging through activist filmmaking. In landmark works like the intimate documentary Manzanar—one of the first films to confront Japanese internment from a personal perspective—the lyrical Wataridori: Birds of Passage, and the groundbreaking epic Hito Hata: Raise the Banner, Nakamura told stories long excluded from the American narrative, paving the way for the vibrant Asian American independent cinema movement that would flourish in the 1980s. His life and legacy are explored from an intimate vantage in Third Act, a moving documentary by his son Tadashi Nakamura, also presented here. 

FEATURES: Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), Third Act (2025)

SHORTS: Manzanar (1972), Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1976)

SHORT FILMS

The films of Darol Olu Kae assume a free-flowing, almost musical structure to tell richly textured stories of Black family, community, creativity, and inheritance, dissolving time to connect cultural memory to the living present. I Ran from It and Was Still in It interweaves archival fragments with home video to interrogate the personal experience of loss; Keeping Time plays like free-jazz improvisation as it portrays the interplay between multiple generations of musicians honoring and building on each other’s legacies; and Blur draws on family memories to tell a radiantly tender story of connection and caregiving amid the AIDS crisis.

FEATURING: I Ran from It and Was Still in It (2021), Keeping Time (2023), Blur (2025)

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Featuring an interview with Anna Biller, part of Criterion’s Under the Influence series

A lovelorn witch uses her powers to seduce men in this deliciously subversive brew of classic Technicolor gloss, retro-camp excess, and wicked humor.

INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS

A cemetery caretaker (Rupert Everett) contends with love and zombies in the ultimate erotic/romantic/existential cult-horror gorefest.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

A young woman navigates her lesbian identity and loyalty to her French Algerian family in this emotionally resonant portrait of queer awakening, winner of the Best Actress and Queer Palme prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.

Taiwanese national trauma takes on supernatural form in this gripping coming-of-age nightmare adapted from the hit horror video game.

Directed by Wagner Moura—the Oscar-nominated star of The Secret Agent—this electrifying portrait of Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella combines riveting action with a galvanizing antiauthoritarian punch. 

MUSIC FILMS

Indie-rock royalty the Yeah Yeah Yeahs channel the spirit of David Lynch with this exquisitely ethereal, sublimely surreal record of a Los Angeles concert performance.

DOCUMENTARIES

Abel Ferrara’s documentary filmmaking channels the same mix of raw immediacy and heightened expressionism that drives his narrative work. From the vanishing traces of New York City’s downtown culture (The Projectionist) to the gritty urban reality of Naples, Italy (Napoli, Napoli, Napoli), to the war-torn landscape of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian invasion (Turn in the Wound), his nonfiction films blur the lines between observation, drama, and performance to provocative, hypnotic effect.

FEATURING: Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009), The Projectionist (2019), Turn in the Wound (2024)

A vivid portrait of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s captures both the neighborhood’s challenges and the vibrancy of its Puerto Rican and Dominican community.

Journey into the surreal, hilarious, and poignant world of Frank Sidebottom—the outsider comedy hero who became a cult icon in 1980s Britain—and the complicated man who created him.

Mile-high hair. Synthesized music. Underground parties. Discover the untold story of the young Vietnamese American rebels who forged their own Southern California subculture.

Follow avant-garde theater legend Robert Wilson as he struggles to create one of the great unrealized stage productions of the twentieth century.

A nephew’s search for his filmmaker uncle’s archive becomes a poignant elegy for a vanished New York and a lost generation of gay artists.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Oliver Stone traces the brief, incendiary life of counterculture icon Jim Morrison with this hallucinatory look at his acid-fueled ascent and spectacular implosion.

Sofia Coppola brings a female point of view to her hypnotic remake of a story about sexual tensions and rivalries run amok at a girls’ boarding school in the Civil War South.

In 1972, on the occasion of the Summer Games in Munich, the first-ever Olympic mascot made its debut. Waldi, a cheerful, bright-blue dachshund, was heavily merchandised, with over two million toys, keychains, T-shirts, and other memorabilia created in its image. Among these products were twenty-five thousand handcrafted Waldis made in the Philippines and brought to Munich by a not-yet-filmmaker named Eric de Guia, who had recently left his job as an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and would soon rename himself Kidlat Tahimik (“quiet lightning” in Tagalog).

The Munich Games are remembered for a much darker incident, in which eleven members of the Israeli team were killed by a Palestinian militant group. The violence cast a pall over the Games and, for thirty-four hours, all competition was suspended. With no one in the mood to purchase Waldi souvenirs, a now-bankrupt Tahimik decamped to an artist commune outside the city. These events turned out to be pivotal for him, and they form the basis of his second feature, Turumba, a playful and unpredictable blend of fiction and documentary that follows a Filipino character who manufactures Waldi souvenirs for the Munich Olympic Games. 

At the commune, Tahimik met his wife, Katrin, and the couple had their first child, whom they named Kidlat. The future filmmaker also made the acquaintance of Werner Herzog, who cast him in a small part in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). Tahimik’s interest in film was piqued, and in 1977 he completed his first feature, Perfumed Nightmare, about a Filipino jeepney driver whose dream of becoming an astronaut in the West is dashed after a dispiriting visit to Europe and America. This debut—which was championed by the likes of Susan Sontag and Fredric Jameson, and is now considered a foundational work of Third Cinema—established the director’s reputation as a sharply critical and scrappy auteur of postcolonial film.

Turumba began as a segment in a six-part omnibus commissioned for television by a Christian production company. With each episode helmed by a director from a different continent, the show revolved around the theme of the Apostles’ Creed. Tahimik chose to focus on the phrase “our daily bread” as his inspiration, and the result was Olympic Gold, a forty-five-minute short that he would later expand into the feature-length Turumba. Like all of Tahimik’s films, videos, and performances, both iterations of this project draw on autobiographical elements and add whimsical flourishes. Young Kadu (Homer Abiad, Tahimik’s nephew) watches as his father, Romy (Iñigo Vito), leads the residents of Pakil—the village where Tahimik’s father grew up—in the religious ceremony of the Turumba, a procession of a centuries-old Catholic icon. In preparation for the festival, the family also makes colorful papier-mâché dolls and animals that they sell in town. Throughout the film, the frequently handheld camera is like an eager participant in the proceedings, attentive to the elaborate beadwork on the dress worn by the village idol, the deep green of the jungle, and a small child asleep in the lap of a clarinet player during rehearsal.

While Kadu and his siblings work in the yard outside their hut, their grandmother tells incredible stories. “Did I tell you I was once a princess?” one of her tales begins. The family arranges their creations on the steps of the church, catching the eye of a German businesswoman (Katrin de Guia, Tahimik’s wife), who commissions twenty-five thousand papier-mâché Waldis for the Munich Olympics. Romy enlists the village children in around-the-clock production. Kadu suddenly becomes so busy that he no longer has time to visit Pati (Patricio Abari), who is something of a father figure to the protagonist and works as a blacksmith making machetes from discarded foreign automobiles. Romy, meanwhile, neglects his duties as kantore, the conductor of the musical procession, and fantasizes about buying a BMW. When the German woman requests his presence abroad, he eagerly complies. Along with the completed Waldi order, he brings Kadu to Munich, though it means that they will miss the Turumba.

The film stands out in Tahimik’s oeuvre as the only production for which he has used a script (one was required for the commission). And though the full-length version is one of his rarest works, the original short is one of his most widely viewed, having aired on German public television—to a prime-time audience, no less. The eighty-eight-minute feature incorporates everything from the earlier film, except a playful introduction that Tahimik added for its broadcast. In that excised section, he explains how he came to use “our daily bread” as his theme, as a reference to both the Catholic community depicted in the film and the hustle required for it to survive. Cheekily, he unveils a microphone made of bamboo and offers it for sale.

Tahimik’s wide grin in this unorthodox segment conceals his slyness behind the camera. On its surface, Turumba is a parable about the temptations of Western wealth. Certainly, the German woman’s manufacture order results in exploitation, familial strife, and the decline of village traditions. But the film and the context surrounding it are more complex than these problems would suggest. If Turumba was meant to be a warning, the message came too late, because the forces of global commerce had already reached neighboring Balian, where Perfumed Nightmare is set. There, villagers were already producing handicrafts to be shipped for Western export from Manila, only a hundred kilometers away. Then there is the question of the film’s audience. Olympic Gold was first seen by the German public in 1981, and Turumba was released in New York in 1984. Meanwhile, screenings in the Philippines were infrequent and sporadic, despite the film’s cautionary tale being ostensibly aimed at a Pinoy audience.

Tahimik fills the frame with lush detail: music from the Turumba revelers, children strumming guitars, brisk winds rustling the palms. The image of the village is bucolic and isolated, save a few key references to the outside world that Tahimik slips in. In one scene, as a few men play checkers with recycled bottle caps, a radio broadcast situates the film in 1971, during the global energy crisis. In another, Kadu brings Pati to a graveyard of Japanese war trucks—“top-quality steel,” Pati says approvingly—to source material for his machetes. Like the army vehicles repurposed into jeepneys in Perfumed Nightmare, these are remnants of imperial conquest fought on and over Philippine soil, from centuries of Spanish colonial rule to the fifty years of American empire, including the United States’ Pacific theater during the Second World War. Even after the Philippines gained independence in 1946, its people faced repression from within. On September 21, 1972, a couple of weeks after the massacre in Munich, Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law, beginning a notoriously brutal dictatorship that lasted for the next fourteen years. Turumba leads up to the precipice of these events, but instead of showing them unfolding, it depicts a literal typhoon descending on the village. This is not merely symbolism—in Tahimik’s films, nature has world-historical implications. “Do you know Americans tried to steer typhoons against the Vietnamese?” Kadu asks in voice-over, with a wisdom far beyond a child of his age.

Tahimik’s own story is inseparable from that of his country. He grew up in a well-to-do family in Baguio, where success was measured financially and often by the ability to go abroad (he received his MBA from the Wharton School of Business). Heavily influenced by American culture, he was still a child when the U.S. policy of “benevolent assimilation” in the Philippines officially ended, and while working in Europe he saw firsthand the neocolonial system built around the balikbayan, or Filipino guest worker—a trained individual, often in a service field like nursing and housekeeping, who works in more affluent countries and sends their earnings back home. While making Turumba, Tahimik was already conceptualizing what would become one of his largest projects: the incomplete Memories of Overdevelopment and its 2015 follow-up, Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III (there is apparently no second installment in the series). In a nod to the Third Cinema landmark Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), by the Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, these films explore the story of Enrique de Malacca, a Tagalog-speaking slave whom Ferdinand Magellan purchased as an interpreter, and who accomplished the circumnavigation of the globe that Magellan himself failed to complete. In Tahimik’s speculative telling, Malacca is the original balikbayan, as well as the first person to experience the world in its entirety.

While some have justifiably criticized the tendency to reduce Tahimik to an avatar of Third World cinema, the mental maps drawn by his films are undeniably expansive; Jameson noted that Tahimik’s work “independently [seems] to have conceived of the vocation of art itself as that of inventing new geotopical cartographies.” Even their margins brim with adjacent places and histories, like concentric circles that radiate out from a drop of water that falls into a puddle. Meanwhile, Tahimik’s characters, wide-eyed travelers all, easily traverse bridges and oceans, and even—in Who Invented the Yoyo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy? (1978/1982)—the expanse of outer space that leads to the moon. To some extent, this kind of global awareness is the burden of the colonial or postcolonial subject. But Tahimik fashions this in his own delightfully off-kilter way. It would be wrong to cast him as antimodern: Tahimik has an ongoing fascination with aeronautic technology, and in Turumba, there’s plenty of laughter on the Waldi production line. When Romy has earned enough to bring electricity into the home, he also buys speakers to blast the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Kadu and his siblings dance to the music in the yard, and their grandmother even taps along on her knee. Just don’t forget the old songs, she says, smiling.

In Turumba, Kadu and his friends tear up a poster advertising a cigarette company. They take the paper scraps home, where they dip them in glue and add them to their papier-mâché creations. The action recalls a decisive moment in Tahimik’s own life, when he ripped up his Wharton diploma to sever his ties to that part of his life. (The gesture was primarily symbolic; acknowledging his parents’ well-intentioned wishes for him, he had the school send a duplicate copy of the diploma to them.) Paper doesn’t last long in a Tahimik film, at least not before it’s turned to another, better use. Maybe this is why he never bothered with another script, which to him would have amounted to another useless stack of papers. Back when he was preparing to make Memories of Overdevelopment, Tahimik had appealed to Francis Ford Coppola for assistance. (Though Coppola had shot the jungle scenes for Apocalypse Now ten kilometers from the site of Perfumed Nightmare, the two directors did not meet until 1979, at the Cannes Film Festival. Coppola later distributed Perfumed Nightmare.) Funding was ultimately approved, but by some accident the letter of confirmation never reached Tahimik. He now considers the mishap a saving grace: “I don’t know what it would look like. They could have controlled me a little bit or forced me to put things on paper. [Such funding] limits these cosmic options because you get stuck once it has been written on paper. It would have become a more conventional film.”

But it was well before all that, nine years before directing his first feature film, that Tavernier discovered Jim Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280 and knew he wanted to adapt it for the screen. In the intervening decade, he worked as a film critic, as a publicist and press agent (for Jean-Luc Godard and John Ford, among others), and briefly as assistant director for Jean-Pierre Melville. With those experiences, plus several shorts and six acclaimed features, under his belt, he finally returned to Thompson’s novel. Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) was released in 1981.

In his native United States, Thompson was long considered a pulp novelist, whereas in France, he has been appreciated for his dark vision and his modernist aesthetic. Published in 1964, during the civil rights movement, Pop. 1280 paints a merciless portrait of petty bickering and casual racism in a Texas town. Like other Thompson protagonists, Pop. 1280’s Nick Corey carries a hidden “sickness” that manifests itself in violence. Thompson’s feral antiheroes remain compelling because their individual slide into perdition, seen from the inside, is understood as a collective and social, even a cosmic, fate. They are trapped inside their lucidity, helpless to change the course of history. Stanley Kubrick, for whose Paths of Glory (1957) Thompson cowrote the screenplay, said of another Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me, that it was “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered,” a remark that describes Pop. 1280 just as well. Tavernier was drawn to the challenge of filming a novel that both Thompson and filmmaker Alain Corneau had declared, after their failed joint attempt, impossible to adapt.

Matching Thompson’s sardonic wit while bringing significant modifications, Tavernier made the story thoroughly French and uniquely his own. Most notably, he moved the action to French West Africa in July 1938, on the eve of the Munich Agreement and the Second World War. Shot in Senegal, the film begins in the imaginary backwater of Bourkassa-Ourbangui, where Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) plays at being a colonial sheriff. He knows he was appointed to the post because he can be counted on not to make waves or actually enforce the law. Between naps, he spends his days appeasing bullies and pimps and turning a blind eye to widespread ineptitude, corruption, and brutality. He plays childish pranks on his shrewish wife, Huguette (Stéphane Audran), and her moronic lover (Eddy Mitchell), whom she passes off as her brother. Lucien stands by while his mistress, Rose (Isabelle Huppert), is beaten by her husband and then hurries to comfort her afterward. Weary of being disregarded and humiliated, he finally takes it upon himself to purge the town of its miscreants, folding his personal vendettas into the mix. The plot, such as it is, consists of Lucien’s growing anguish about the inhumanity around him. His attempted remedies are of the same stuff as the problem itself, however, and he gradually capitulates to the overwhelming forces of evil in which he is rapidly submerging.

Coup de torchon marks the completion of a trajectory that includes four of the filmmaker’s earliest films, beginning with his first feature, The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974). Adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, that film focused on a father whose son has committed a crime. The protagonist of Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) is Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, regent during the minority of King Louis XV. The regent sees forewarnings of the coming revolution but is powerless to prevent it. The film incorporates episodes from memoirs by the regent’s friend, the Duc de Saint-Simon, and music composed by the regent himself. The Judge and the Assassin (1976) pits a serial killer against a judge obsessed with tracking him down, less to serve justice than his own ambitions. The historical criminal who inspired the film had been chronicled by none other than Tavernier’s father.

These four films have many commonalities, some more obvious than others. All four are adaptations. All are character-driven, with casts headed by the magisterial Noiret. These films of the 1970s, created in the aftermath of the 1968 revolts, foreground figures who lose faith in the established order—the law, the monarchy, and, in Coup de torchon, France’s colonial (mis)adventure—and struggle alone to negotiate their roles as men, as citizens, before God, and in history. The assassin calls himself “God’s anarchist,” and other characters (including Lucien Cordier) could say the same. Made in 1980 and released in 1981, Coup de torchon signals the end of the post-1968 era, just as the 1981 election of François Mitterrand to the presidency marked a turning point following the Gaullist years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all four films struggle to achieve resolution. The Clockmaker of St. Paul ends on a pensive, inconclusive note, with the father and his activist friend contemplating an unknown future. The other three leave narrative behind and freeze into symbolic tableaux that raise the stakes into an allegorical realm. Of the four, the ending of Coup de torchon is the most successful, perhaps in part because the whole film is about endings.

An early version of the script closed on a blend of science fiction and burlesque. At a village ball, while Lucien and the newly arrived schoolteacher, Anne, revolve in a slow dance, they and the other dancers disappear and are replaced by gorillas. As they dance, one of the gorillas asks where all the humans have gone. A second gorilla responds, “They’re all dead.” “Shit!” replies the first gorilla. “We’ll have to start over.” This conclusion literally takes the whole human enterprise back to the beginning, wiping everything away to start again with a “clean slate.”

Tavernier wisely set aside that draft. Instead, he bookended the film with two takes of a scene that is equally disconnected from the narrative. The opening sequence shows a desert landscape, where Lucien watches emaciated children digging in the sand for grubs to eat. A solar eclipse darkens the horizon, and the children begin to shiver. Lucien comes forward to build a small fire to warm them. We might be at the dawn of civilization. Lucien seems both protective and paternalistic, at once Prometheus, Christ, and the original colonizer, bringing warmth and enlightenment into a scene of poverty and darkness. The scene is mute except for Philippe Sarde’s otherworldly and discordant score, part jazz, part space music, thoroughly alarming and disorienting. The ending sequence returns abruptly to the same locale. Lucien squats under a baobab tree, an anguished expression on his face. He fingers his pistol, which he aims alternately at the children and at himself. Although this ending is continuous with the film’s beginning, now, after much mayhem, the scene is inflected differently. Lucien has failed to cast out darkness and hunger, and he has redefined his job as putting people out of their misery. No longer Prometheus bringing enlightenment, he has turned into the ultimate antihero: Lucifer, bearer of light, in the form of a firearm. After the first (the opening) version of the scene, Lucien stumbles back toward town, chased by a swaying Steadicam, as we hear the film’s first line: “I thought it was the end of the world.” That lament will recur twice more, suggesting the eclipse of a way of life.

Between these sequences, we witness the slow erosion of a character and a society. We initially sympathize with Lucien and wonder how he tolerates the degradations and humiliations visited on him by village lowlifes and even Marcel (Guy Marchand), his police counterpart in a larger nearby town. But we gradually come to understand that Lucien’s thickheaded-oaf persona is a facade, and that he is smarter than he lets on. He punishes his tormentors by manipulating them, laying clever traps that set them up to wipe one another out, while he looks on, feigning resigned impotence.

Contributing to the film’s moral and aesthetic complexity—and perhaps also to the viewer’s occasional disorientation—is that it never settles into a stable, recognizable genre. Is it tragedy or melodrama? Dystopia or slapstick? The answer is: all of the above. As its eclipse theme suggests, Coup de torchon clearly offers an apocalyptic vision: institutions have abdicated their moral authority, and divine intervention is no longer expected. All that remains is laughter. At the same time, there are bittersweet film-noir moments: Lucien and Rose’s farewell, for instance, underlined by Rose’s trench coat, evokes Casablanca and Jean Gabin classics like Pépé le moko.

The most sustained genre at play is Tavernier’s favorite, the western, with its tales of expansion and nation-building. The official rationale for Horace Greeley’s famous injunction to “go west, young man” was America’s manifest destiny to spread civilization into the wilderness. From there, it’s only a short step to the French mission civilisatrice that rationalized colonial conquest. Tavernier adapts recognizable tricks of the genre. As in Victor Fleming’s The Virginian, for example, a schoolteacher’s arrival in Wyoming from Vermont activates recognizable binaries that animate the western: America’s East Coast/western “frontier” divide is easily transposed to the French metropole/colonial settlement. Civilized institutions and prim manners are associated with femininity, while disregard for the law and disheveled cowboy masculinity align with the outpost. And so on. The western is a subgenre of melodrama, too, where social dramas lurk behind intimate ones, and Coup de torchon fully exploits this capacity for allegory.

Forever a Lyonnais at heart, Tavernier once declared that “a film is like a meal.” Much of the pleasure of his films stems from the creative team of colleagues he gathered around his table like a family, welcoming input from everyone on both sides of the camera. Tavernier was a voracious reader, a habitué of the theater, and enormously knowledgeable about music, particularly jazz. All of these passions provided sources of inspiration and informed his choices of collaborators.

Already, for his first feature, he was able to enlist Noiret, who even helped finance the project. A cinematic legend, Noiret would consider his numerous performances for Tavernier to be the highlight of his career. Coup de torchon attracted several other Tavernier veterans, notably Isabelle Huppert as Rose and Jean-Pierre Marielle as a pimp and his twin. To this team of old friends, Tavernier added some stellar discoveries. Eddy Mitchell, a contemporary of the more famous rocker Johnny Hallyday, had contributed songs to Tavernier’s A Week’s Vacation (1980); in Coup de torchon, he plays the farcical and disturbing Nono. Behind the camera, too, Tavernier enlisted his familiar team—cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, editor Armand Psenny, costume designer Jacqueline Moreau, composer Philippe Sarde—along with some inspired newcomers. He successfully recruited celebrated production designer Alexandre Trauner, who had lived in Africa, and who had designed films for such luminaries as Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, and Marcel Carné. Trauner would later create the moody, blue-toned sets for ’Round Midnight (1986), Tavernier’s tribute to jazz.

And let’s not forget the screenplay. Tavernier’s first feature had provoked a major kerfuffle because he chose the screenwriting team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, thereby giving the impression of casting his lot with the “cinema of quality” that preceded the nouvelle vague. Nevertheless, he cowrote two of his early features with the pair and then, after Bost died in 1975, he scripted Coup de torchon with Aurenche alone. Tavernier would go on to adapt a novel by Bost for the immensely successful A Sunday in the Country (1984); Safe Conduct, his 2002 drama about the cinema industry during the occupation, is based in part on memoirs by Aurenche.

Aurenche and Bost had been in the business for decades and had signed numerous titles, such as René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952) and Gervaise (1956), that are now considered masterpieces. But the pair became associated with a postwar cultural policy designed to raise the profile of French national cinema in order to counterbalance the influx of American films (implicitly a “cinema of quantity”) that was a condition of the Marshall Plan. Many of the “quality” films were indeed uninspired adaptations of French literary classics, in a style rejected by the Young Turks of the New Wave. “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” François Truffaut’s misguided 1954 manifesto in Cahiers du cinéma, served as a rallying cry, and “Aurenchébost” were effectively blacklisted by leading filmmakers and producers for almost two decades. Tavernier chose to bring them back for their masterly dialogue. He especially appreciated their wacky humor in Claude Autant-Lara’s postwar occupation comedy, La traversée de Paris (1956), and the covert Resistance themes in the apparently anodyne Douce (1943), also directed by Autant-Lara. Tavernier also relished their company and needed the perspective of an older generation for his father-son story in The Clockmaker of St. Paul.

Thanks in large part to its script cowritten with Aurenche, Coup de torchon is difficult to classify into a genre or trend or movement or style. What can be said is that, like all Tavernier’s films, this one is deeply engaged in social issues while remaining playfully experimental, mixing moods and tones from anger through hope, disillusionment, even hilarity. So instead of pinning it down, we might instead conclude quite simply that it’s a masterpiece.

The Sudanese Film Group was formed in 1989 with the mission of promoting cinema culture, with an emphasis on boosting both exhibition and production. Four years earlier, a popular uprising ended the sixteen-year dictatorship of Jaafar Nimeiri. Suddenly, hope filled the hearts of the Sudanese people, and democracy and a more equal society seemed possible. With the dream of an artistic renaissance now an achievable goal, Ibrahim Shaddad, Eltayeb Mahdi, and Suliman Mohamed Ibrahim Elnour—founding members of the Sudanese Film Group—sought freedom of expression and wanted to continue the grassroots movement that had taken down the corrupt oligarchy. They had gotten to know one another during their years of working within the Sudanese government’s Ministry of Culture, and had even collaborated on publishing a film journal.

Shaddad, Mahdi, and Elnour had all studied film in Eastern Europe in the seventies and were influenced by leftist ideals. They took inspiration from these experiences abroad, and from the Pan-African and Pan-Arab radical movements taking shape at the time. Their optimism was cut short, though, by a military coup d’état just a few months after they had formed their group. For the next thirty years, Sudan would be ruled by authoritarian military men and their Islamist technocrat partners. The coup’s leader, Omar al-Bashir, would completely change the fabric of the country, leaving no space for cultural enrichment. The Sudanese Film Group was targeted, and Shaddad was arrested and interrogated for pushing a foreign and antigovernment agenda.

The films that the trio made before they established the SFG give a sense of their shared goals. These works draw on symbolism, folklore, and local traditions to tell radical, forward-looking, and distinctly Sudanese stories that range from the historical to the observational to the expressionistic. Among the highlights is Shaddad’s The Rope (1984), which starts with a shocking image of a crying infant being covered in a white cloth and then punched to death. What follows is an exploration of a 1822 massacre that thwarted the Sudanese people’s attempts to revolt against their colonizers, a traumatic event allegorized through the story of two blind men leading a donkey (or is it leading them?) across the Sahara Desert. Shaddad repeatedly cuts to an image of a fez, the traditional hat worn by the elite Turkish classes, signifying a foreign colonial presence. Foreboding music merges with the sound of the haboob (the Sudanese Arabic word for the big, gusty winds characteristic of the region), while vultures circle overhead, thickening the atmosphere with unease. Taken together, these elements turn the film into a sustained meditation on history and the burdens that persist long after the violence is over. Nothing much happens, because nothing much changes. This use of repetition and stasis can be found in an earlier film by Shaddad, the 1981 documentary A Camel, which depicts the titular animal turning a sesame mill in a never-ending circle of forced labor. The only sound we hear is the camel’s moaning, an abstracted representation of painful and devalued servitude.

Like The Rope, Eltayeb Mahdi’s The Tomb (1978) is a fictional film that engages with real-life events. Sudanese folklore provides the framework for examining the nature of authority and how people create belief systems to avoid confronting an intolerable reality. The protagonist is the keeper of a holy man’s tomb who purports to be a conduit between God and the human realm. Claiming to be able to cure ailments and make dreams come true, he is transparently exploiting his fellow villagers—but are they really so gullible, or do they just need an alternative vision of life to escape into? Faith in spirits and the afterlife is an integral part of Sudanese society, and Mahdi takes a subtle approach to confronting these beliefs, using sparse dialogue and symbolic images that allow audiences to draw their own conclusions.

Mahdi’s equally compelling The Station (1989) focuses on the slow rhythms of everyday life at a traditional resting place (al mahatta), a space defined by stillness and waiting. In this microcosm of Sudanese society, people gather, lounge, and do very little in a narrative sense. Their state of repose—a metaphor for the nation’s endurance—is disrupted by a sudden intrusive alarm, the sound of distant geopolitical violence penetrating this enclosed society. Subtle signs of colonial influence also appear on the trucks that bring goods into the station. The film evokes the quiet persistence of life in a communal space beset by global pressures.

Unlike these works by Shaddad and Mahdi, Africa, the Jungle, Drums and Revolution (1979) is rooted in an outsider’s perspective. Elnour’s graduation thesis film, made while he was studying at the VGIK school in Moscow, juxtaposes archival footage of African heroes and traditional dancing with man-on-the-street interviews with Russian citizens sharing their preconceived notions about Africa. Some of the people whom Elnour engages are well-meaning, with generally positive and inclusive attitudes. But the film reveals a jaundiced and exoticized view of the continent, influenced by colonial depictions that have long permeated the Global North. By documenting such casual ignorance and racism, Elnour’s film anticipates the contemporary discourse around how the racialized gaze can shape our understanding of entire cultures.

As these works demonstrate, the members of the Sudanese Film Group did not make films for mass consumption, as did many of the filmmakers in neighboring Egypt, which had a thriving and commercial movie industry at the time. In contrast, the SFG eschewed the influence of Hollywood and pushed for social change. Using a patient sense of pacing and innovative editing techniques, as well as a storytelling style that made minimal use of dialogue and character psychology, they challenged audiences and took a bold stance in favor of artistic expression.

Though the group’s work was interrupted by political upheaval, the men have continued to advocate for cinema’s place in their local culture. Documentarian Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees (2019) catches up with the SFG in middle age. In the film, Shaddad, Mahdi, and Elnour are still friends, and are attempting to revive a dilapidated theater in Khartoum, an effort that requires them to communicate with the authoritarian government. Despite the hurdles they encounter, the tone of the film is playful and optimistic. Its best moments show the trio reminiscing about the projects they haven’t had the chance to make. And while there is heartache in their voices as they recall the arrests and interrogations they experienced under Bashir’s rule, their passion is evident and undiminished.

Gasmelbari’s film, which played at many festivals around the world, has bolstered the SFG’s legacy and led to a revival of their work. Over the past several years, the aesthetic language these pioneers developed has been adopted by a new generation of filmmakers who are carrying the torch for Sudanese cinema into the present. Shaddad’s indelible images of a camel circling around in futility are referenced in 2025’s Khartoum, a documentary directed by a collective of Sudanese filmmakers consisting of Rawia Alhag, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Anas Saeed, and Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad. A chronicle of the fall of Bashir’s dictatorship, the film also explores the aftermath of the revolution, which gave rise to another military coup and the 2023 war that continues to batter the people of Sudan.

At a time when the country is once again engulfed in turmoil, looking back on the films of the SFG is all the more inspiring. The fact that Shaddad, Mahdi, and Elnour were able to accomplish what they did years ago remains a source of hope for young directors today, like the makers of Khartoum, as well as Suzanna Mirghani, whose feature debut, Cotton Queen, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last year. These artists are contending with new challenges, including war and displacement, but like their predecessors, they continue to overcome extraordinary odds to bring their visions to life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you carrying forward from that collaboration?

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

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