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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep.

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

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

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

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

*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Starring Harry Dean Stanton

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

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

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

Murderous Melodramas

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

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

BlackStar Film Festival Presents

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

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

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

Daniel Clowes’s Adventures in Moviegoing

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

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

Two Films by Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes 

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

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

Directed by Jonathan Demme 

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

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

The Prisoner*

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

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

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

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

Are We Good?

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

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

The Energy War

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

People’s Hero

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

Pom Pom and Hot Hot

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

Bye Bye Love

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

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Desire, Death, and Samsara: The Films of Khyentse Norbu

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

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

Short Films by by Onyeka Igwe

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

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

Two Black Comedies by Joel Potrykus 

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

FEATURING: Buzzard (2014), Vulcanizadora (2024)

ACTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Ninón Sevilla: Queen of the Mexican Cabaret

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

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

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

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

Bad Influence

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

MUSIC FILMS

A Band Called Death

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

Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC

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

DOCUMENTARIES

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

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

SHORT FILMS

S the Wolf 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Criterion Cinema

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

Reserve your seat →

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

Screening Schedule

July 10 and 11:

12 p.m–2 p.m.: The Darjeeling Limited
2 p.m.–4 p.m.: Yojimbo (July 10), Amarcord (July 11)
6 p.m.–7:30 p.m.: Wes’ short films
8 p.m.–11 p.m.: Music from the Films of Wes Anderson concert

July 12: 

Get your ticket →

The Criterion Mobile Closet

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

Timed-Entry Hours

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

Pick your time slot →

The Mobile Closet will be open exclusively to concert ticket holders 6 p.m.–10 p.m. on July 10 and 11 and 5 p.m.–9 p.m on July 12.

More on the Experience and What You Can Expect

• Criterion Mobile Closet and Criterion Cinema Opening Hours:
  
  Friday, July 10: 11 a.m.–4 p.m., 6 p.m.–10 p.m.
  Saturday, July 11: 11 a.m.–4 p.m., 6 p.m.–10 p.m.
  Sunday, July 12: 10 a.m.–3 p.m., 5 p.m.–9 p.m.
• Ticketing info:
  
  For the first time, we are introducing a timed-entry lottery for the Criterion Mobile Closet. Enter for a chance to visit. You can also reserve seats for screenings at the Criterion Cinema throughout the weekend at the Hollywood Bowl.
  
  Registration opens June 16 and closes June 23. Selected participants will be notified by email after the lottery is conducted on June 26.
• The full screening schedule will be announced by July 5.
  
• The Criterion Closet is stocked with every in-print edition from the Criterion Collection, including box sets, as well as all in-print releases from our Eclipse and Janus Contemporaries lines.
  
• As long as supplies last, you’ll receive a Criterion tote bag and a printed pocket guide to the Criterion Collection.
  
• Each Closet visit will last three minutes. Once the clock starts (spoiler: it’s when you enter!), you’ll have that time to explore the collection or talk about your selections. Don’t worry—the Criterion Closet team is there to help you find what you’re looking for, and if all you want to do is look around, that’s okay too!
  
• No purchase is required, but you are able to buy up to three items with our special Mobile Closet discount of 40 percent off, in honor of our fortieth anniversary. We accept credit cards only.
  
• At the end of every Closet visit, we take a Polaroid of our visitors with their selections, which will be yours to keep as a souvenir along with the tote bag and guide to the Collection, while supplies last.
  
• Please review our terms and conditions before attending the event.
  
• You might be featured on our social feeds, so keep an eye out and be sure to follow us on social media:
  
  Instagram: @criterioncollection
  X: @criterion
  Facebook: @CriterionCollection

FAQ

Is the Criterion Cinema accessible?

Yes.

Do you need a ticket to enter the Criterion Cinema?

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

Is the merch also 40 percent off?

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

Is the Criterion Cinema open during the concert?

The cinema will close thirty minutes before the concerts begin.

How do I get tickets to the concerts?

Tickets for the concerts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday can be purchased on the Hollywood Bowl’s website.

Are all Closet videos filmed in this Mobile Closet?

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

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

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

Do I have to be filmed if I want to enter the Closet?

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

Why can I shop for only three items? Can I shop more?

We want everyone to have a good Closet experience, so we need to protect against the limited Mobile Closet inventory being depleted too quickly. You are welcome to shop for more discs at our online store.

Why is my visit limited to three minutes?

We want this to be a fun experience for everyone. In our experience, 3 minutes hit the perfect balance for most people, giving people enough time to explore the Closet and express themselves.

Do I have to sign the legal waiver?

Yes, to participate in the Mobile Closet experience, you must agree to our terms and conditions.

Is the tote bag free?

Yes, the tote bag, pocket guide, and Polaroid photo are yours to keep!

Is the Mobile Closet wheelchair-accessible?

Unfortunately, the Freightliner MT45 step van is not wheelchair-accessible.

Can I still come if, for accessibility reasons, I’m not able to wait in line or enter the Mobile Closet?

Yes, we’ll be happy to welcome you. You’ll get a tote bag, a pocket guide (while supplies last!), a Mobile Closet shopping discount, and a Polaroid at the Mobile Closet with your selections. If you require any special assistance, please email us at mobilecloset@criterion.com ahead of an activation.

Where can I find the Closet next?

Our goal is to bring the Mobile Closet to as many film-loving audiences as we can. Subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on social media to find out what our next stops will be.

I don’t have a DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K disc player. How can I access Criterion Collection films?

Criterion Collection physical-media editions require a disc player. The best streaming source for Criterion Collection films and their special features is the Criterion Channel, which also features the best new films, fresh from theaters, and your favorite movie classics in new curated collections every month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How has the political climate today influenced trans cinema?

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

What filmmakers first wowed you?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Give us a sense of your peak Tantivy years.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

What are you working on now?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Conference

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

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

Punching the Clock

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

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

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

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

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

Office Politics

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

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

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

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

Office Parties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

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

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

Coprogrammed by Sean Fennessey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STREAMING PREMIERES

Eno

Premiering June 16, with a new version featured each month

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

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

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

CRITERION ORIGINALS

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

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

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

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

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

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOLLYWOOD HITS

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

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

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

ANIME

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

DOCUMENTARIES

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

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

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

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

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

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

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

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

SHORT FILMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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