w i n t e r 2 0 23 -24

v o lu m e 3 4
issue 1

special edition

50 BEST FILMS OF 2023

HO W M A N Y H AV E YOU SEEN?
£7.75
 CONTENTS

THE BOY AND

THE HERON
Miyazaki Hayao’s constantly surprising new
feature blends animated fantasy with the director’s
own memories of growing up in post-war
Japan to create another triumphant exploration
of life, loss and death. By Nick Bradshaw

108

26
IN MEMORIAM
Bob Mastrangelo’s roll of
honour, along with obituaries
of and tributes to some
of the important names
in the world of film who
have died in the last year
88
SCALA!!!
To celebrate a new doc about
London’s much-missed
picture palace, we asked John
Waters, Bette Gordon, Peter
Strickland, Edgar Wright and
others for the post-Scala flicks
they’d want to put on the bill
96
ALEXANDER PAYNE
The director, whose film
The Holdovers is a glorious
return to form, discusses
his debt to early 70s cinema,
his favourite Christmas
movies and his love of Paul
Giamatti. By Philip Horne
IN THIS ISSUE
102
MICHAEL MANN
Ferrari is a high-octane tale
of the crises faced by the racing
legend in the mid-1950s.
The director tells Nick James
about life in the driving seat
on set and why the drama
feels operatic in its intensity

39 FILMS OF THE YEAR

The Sight and Sound critics’ poll to find the 50 best films of 2023 is here,
along with the best television shows, film books and home cinema releases
 WINTER 2023-24 148
KING VIDOR
REVIEWS CONTRIBUTORS

A 1968 interview
with the director

6 116 | FILMS
of Stella Dallas
· All of Us Strangers
· Priscilla
EDITORIAL · The Boy and the Heron

FROM THE ARCHIVE

2023 and the battle for · The Zone of Interest
the soul of cinema · Scala!!!
· Every Body
· The Peasants
· Ferrari

9
OPENING SCENES
·
·
·
·
The Book of Clarence
Tchaikovsky’s Wife
One Life
Poor Things
MOLLY HASKELL
lives in New York City and is the
author of numerous books, including
· The Holdovers From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of
· Opener: 2024 preview · Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer Women in the Movies. She has taught
· Editors’ Choice · Queendom at Columbia, Barnard and Sarah
· In Conversation: · Sweet Sue Lawrence and served as film critic for
Totém director Lila Avilés the Village Voice and New York magazine.
· Trenque Lauquen
· The Ballot of… Emma Seligman · Maestro
· In Focus: interview with Musée · Samsara
Lumière’s Thierry Frémaux · Freaks vs the Reich
· Mean Sheets: posters by · Napoleon
Sam’s Myth

136 | DVD & BLU-RAY

20 · Worlds: Selected works by
IN THIS ISSUE

Ben Rivers
· Early Skolimowski
LETTERS · Blackhat
BOB MASTRANGELO
· The Spanish Dancer
· Rediscovery: Black God, is a freelance writer and historian

22
White Devil with a particular emphasis on the
· Archive TV: Ivor the Engine, silent era. He has also compiled the
obituaries for Sight and Sound since
Clangers, Bagpuss
2004. He lives in New York City.
· The Last Picture Show
TALKIES · The Hot Spot
· The Long Take: Pamela · Typhoon Club
Hutchinson on the pain and · Bluebeard’s Castle
artifice behind the glamour of · Ghost Stories for Christmas Vol. 2
dance, in life and on screen · 23 Seconds to Eternity
· Flick Lit: Nicole Flattery on the · Lost and Found: Some Interviews
alcohol-fuelled suburban on Personal Matters
nightmare of The Swimmer
· TV Eye: Andrew Male wonders
whether true-crime drama can
ever really do justice to victims 144 | WIDER SCREEN
· Poll Position: Kevin B. Lee on · Ian Christie immerses himself
the films once deemed great that in XR technology and Susannah KEVIN B. LEE
have fallen out of favour Thompson sees Beagles & Ramsay has produced nearly 400 video essays
poke fun at capitalism in Glasgow and is a pioneer of the ‘desktop
documentary’ format. He is the

162
Locarno Film Festival professor for the
future of cinema and the audiovisual
146 | BOOKS arts at Università della Svizzera italiana.

· Hannah McGill on Sam Wasson’s

ENDINGS adulatory biography of Francis Ford
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

· Michael Haneke’s Time
of the Wolf plunges the
audience into an apocalypse,
but ends with a sudden,
uncharacteristic surge of hope
159
Coppola and Kim Newman on
another exploration of the mythology Ben Walters, Kate Stables, Alex Ramon,
of Stanley Kubrick Stephen Dalton, Mark Le Fanu,
David Thomson, Michael Atkinson,
THIS MONTH Jessica Kiang, Adam Nayman,
Roger Luckhurst, Philip Concannon,
IN… 1962 Annabel Bai Jackson, Megan Feeney,
Lillian Crawford, Mark Asch,
Richard Harris
Rachel Pronger, Ben Nicholson,
on the cover, Carmen Gray and more
and Godard’s
Vivre sa vie
 EDITORIAL
From poll to poll, 2023 was
a battle for cinema’s soul
When we announced a year ago this issue that an
expanded pool of critics had voted Chantal Aker-
man’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Brux-
elles (1975) number one in our once-a-decade Great-
est Films of All Time poll, we broke the internet.
The results of the poll, first published in 1952,
have always been influential in film circles, but the
2022 edition, thanks to a combination of fastidious
planning and the potency of social media, became
an international news sensation. #sightandsound-
poll trended globally for days, with millions of inter-
actions inspiring hundreds of broadcast pieces and
written stories, including an amazing infographic
by the New York Times that I encourage anyone
interested in the history of the poll to explore. The
scramble to locate copies of the special edition of
our magazine was an online sensation in itself.
The impact on cinema culture was huge. Film
institutions from Bristol to Delhi to Philadelphia
built their programming around the list. Jeanne
Dielman and many other high-ranking films were
rereleased in cinemas and on DVD/Blu-ray. A com-
plete screening of the top 100 films became BFI
Southbank’s most successful ever season. On BFI
Player Jeanne Dielman clocked up tens of thousands
of viewings. On Letterboxd it became the most
logged new title. The appetite for discovery was
rumbling beyond the usual hardcore cinephiles,
and film culture was richer for it.
As 2023 began, and we revelled in the spotlight,
we couldn’t have foreseen how much the 12 months
ahead would be a battle for the soul of cinema.
The year was full of huge moments and great films,
many of which we covered in our pages and online,
but three events stand out to me above the rest as
defining the mood.
The WGA and Sag-Aftra strikes, which took
Barbie and Oppenheimer place between May and November, parallel protests
both posed existential centred on working conditions, increases in royalty
questions and proved a payments for streaming content and contractual
protection against the stalking threat of AI, felt like
mass audience for auteur an industry waking up from a sleepwalk towards
cinema still exists oblivion. The WGA hailed its deal as “exceptional
– with meaningful gains and protections for writ-
ers in every sector of the membership”. Sag-Aftra’s
president, Fran Drescher, insisted, “We began this
journey [as] the largest entertainment union in the
world and we finish it the most powerful.”
Barbenheimer, a contrived but exciting head-to-
head between Greta Gerwig’s subversive comedy
Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s brooding biopic
Oppenheimer, created one of cinema’s most memora-
ble days of the year in July. The hit films, poles apart
aesthetically and tonally, both posed existential
questions and proved a mass audience for auteur
cinema still exists. The snappy portmanteau didn’t
Mike Williams
@itsmikelike
hurt either. Did the phenomenon inspire confidence
in an enduring pulling power of cinemas when audi-
ences are given films they want to see and are actu-
ally told they’re playing? It’s too early to tell, and
next summer will give us more of an answer, but in
the short term, the fact that Alexander Payne’s The
Holdovers – a brilliant film and potential Christmas
classic – was made available on VOD platforms in
the US only a fortnight after a hugely positive open-
ing suggests Barbenheimer was more of a lucrative
inconvenience than a moment of clarity.
My final example is less a specific moment in time
but just as important and inextricably linked; the
euthanising of one of social media’s dreariest attrac-
tions, the Super Babies vs Scorsese. Despite con-
tinuing to hoover up significantly more revenue and
marketing spend than any other kind of filmmak-
ing or TV, 2023 was a catastrophe for the superhero
genre. Failures included the streaming miniseries
Secret Invasion and theatrical feature The Marvels,
which were critically panned and underperformed
financially. Nothing new in this flop era for the
MCU, but what’s interesting is that the fanbase has
turned on itself and gone into full meltdown. The
Marvels director Nia DaCosta is the current scape-
goat despite her film being the highest-grossing
ever for a Black female filmmaker.
Meanwhile 81-year-old Martin Scorsese was
serenely making TikToks with his daughter Fran-
scesca, including the very funny ‘Dad Guesses
Slang’, and continuing to eloquently and persua-
sively advocate for the art and history of cinema in
interviews and talks. The people who denounce
him as a malevolent babysitter taking away their
toys sound ever more unhinged. The noise will
continue but the battle is over and sanity prevails.
It’s apt that a year which began full of buzz about
one poll should close with Scorsese’s Killers of the
Flower Moon, his most talked-about film since The
Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and most acclaimed since
Casino (1995), being voted by our critics as the best
film of the year in another. The full results begin on
page 39.
A few days before we announced our poll’s results
ILLUSTRATION BY FERNANDO COBELLO; BYLINE ILLUSTRATION PETER ARKLE
in December 2022 I was named Editor of the Year
by the British Society of Magazine Editors. A
couple of weeks ago I was given the prestigious title
for the second year in a row. A magazine is a col-
lective endeavour and an editor-in-chief ’s role is no
more important than any other position. Our ability
to document such an important year in film history
and drive so much of the discourse is down to Sight
and Sound ’s team of brilliant editors, writers, subs
and designers who make this amazing magazine
and its online cinematic universe what it is today.
Here’s to 2024.
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OPENING SCENES
9

OPENING SCENES
AMERICA Uncut Gems will be pleased to see Safdie
Let’s start with the film that’s hulking return to the underbelly of the sporting

Films to over the cinema landscape like a mist-

shrouded skyscraper. Francis Ford Cop-
pola’s Megalopolis, which has swallowed
world: Sandler is reportedly starring as
an opportunistic memorabilia agent.
Spring will bring four big American

watch out for more than £95 million of the director’s

vineyard-rooted fortune, ought to be the
movie event of 2024; Mike Figgis, who
films by non-Americans: first, Bong Joon
Ho’s sci-fi Mickey 17, which has Robert
Pattinson playing two (if not more) itera-

in 2024 is directing a documentary about the

With the strikes firmly in the rearview mirror,
the coming year has a bonanza in store
from Bong Joon Ho, Joachim Trier, Rose
Glass, Steve McQueen and plenty more
BY ARJUN SAJIP
ABOVE
Robert Pattinson in
Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17
production, described Coppola’s epic
as “Julius Caesar meets Blade Runner”.
Probably no one is looking forward to
the film’s premiere – as yet unannounced,
but Cannes seems likely – quite as much
as Coppola himself, who’s been dream-
ing of making it for more than 40 years.
What will audiences make of two
upcoming movies by directors best
known for collaborations with their
brothers? Technically, Ethan Coen has
already directed a film – his solo direc-
torial debut was last year’s documentary
Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind – but Drive-
Away Dolls, whose release was bumped
from autumn 2023 to February 2024 in
the wake of Hollywood strike action,
marks his first fiction feature. It’s a queer
road-trip movie Coen wrote with his
wife Tricia Cooke, who, having edited
numerous films by the Coen brothers,
is also cutting this one. Meanwhile, Josh
Safdie is helming a new, as yet untitled,
Adam Sandler film without his brother
Benny (who is currently riding high as
an in-demand actor). Still, fans of 2019’s
tions of an ‘expendable’ employee clone,
complete with embedded memories,
on a space mission. The ‘what exactly
makes us human?’ idea might be old
hat for the genre, but in Bong’s hands
such existential musings are likely to be
sharpened by socioeconomic commen-
tary and smuggled into the shape of a
thriller. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part
Two, another casualty of the strikes, will
now come out in March. After a nine-
year wait, George Miller is following up
Mad Max: Fury Road with a prequel, Furi-
osa, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the title
role. And Luca Guadagnino is also back,
with Challengers (out in April), which sees
a Grand Slam winner go head to head
against the former lover of his wife/
coach. Its screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes,
also penned Guadagnino’s next film, on
which production has already wrapped:
the William S. Burroughs adaptation
Queer, starring Daniel Craig.
Which cinephile won’t be thrilled
by the return of Joshua Oppenheimer?
That the celebrated documentarian is
to release a post-apocalyptic musical,
 10
The End, seems like a left turn, until
you remember the garish, disturbing
song-and-dance sequences from 2012’s
The Act of Killing. The End, which stars
Tilda Swinton and could be a Cannes
contender, comes a full decade after his
last film The Look of Silence (2014). This is
unsurprising, perhaps, given that anyone
who spends ten years documenting the
OPENING SCENES
personal toll of the mass murders that
took place in mid-1960s Indonesia could
probably do with a break.
Movies by Paul Schrader and Sean
Baker have also f inished f ilming:
Schrader’s Oh, Canada, an adaptation of
a Russell Banks novel about an Ameri-
can who heads north across the border
in the 1960s to avoid the draft, stars
Richard Gere – in his first collaboration
with the director since 1980’s American
Gigolo – and Jacob Elordi. Baker’s Anora
confines the action to the US, but skips
between New York and Las Vegas, two
more stops in the director’s career-length
mapping of America’s less salubrious
environs. Meanwhile, production isn’t
far from wrapping on Clint Eastwood’s
Juror #2, starring Nicholas Hoult as a
jury member in a murder trial who real-
ises he may have played a part in the vic-
tim’s death. Eastwood turns 94 in May;
the film will likely premiere some time
after that.
As for the best of the rest: Barry Lev-
inson’s Alto Knights sees Robert De Niro
pulling double duty as two 1950s Mafia
bosses; Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has
Adrien Brody echoing The Pianist (2002)
by playing a Hungarian Holocaust survi-
vor; Eli Roth’s adaptation of the hit video-
game Borderlands, starring Cate Blan-
chett, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Jamie
Lee Curtis, could make for a fun summer
outing; Pixar’s Inside Out 2 follows the
mind of its predecessor’s protagonist
into adolescence; and Robert Zemeck-
is’s Here – as reported in a previous issue
of this magazine – uses AI to face-swap
and de-age its cast (which includes Tom
Hanks and Robin Wright) in real time
rather than in post-production.
BRITAIN
Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really
Here, a visceral showcase for the talents
of Joaquin Phoenix, was a hit at Cannes
in 2017. The sunny Riviera may yet wel-
come their chilly follow-up Polaris (which
Ramsay has said may be renamed Dark
Slides). It sounds a little like a horror
version of Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland
(2022): an ice photographer meets the
devil in 1890s Alaska.
Phoenix is incredibly busy, report-
edly following up the Ramsay film and
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon with projects for
Ari Aster, Paul Thomas Anderson and
Todd Haynes that are unlikely to come
out next year. But no less hardworking
is Franz Rogowski, for whom having
acted in nine films in the last three years
evidently isn’t enough: as well as appear-
ing in David Michôd’s upcoming stoner
comedy Wizards!, he’ll be starring in the
new Andrea Arnold movie Bird. Barry
Keoghan dropped out of Ridley Scott’s
Gladiator 2 (also out next year) to fea-
ture, heavily tattooed, in Arnold’s Kent-
set drama – further proof, if any were
needed, of his near-unerring taste.
Bird is backed by ubiquitous produc-
tion house A24, which is teaming up with
Film4 to put out Rose Glass’s romantic
thriller Love Lies Bleeding. Kristen Stewart
will play a gym employee in the sweaty,
steroidal, highly competitive world of
bodybuilding. It’s been touted to pre-
miere at Sundance. Film4 is also partly
behind Hot Milk, the directorial debut of
Rebecca Lenkiewicz, one of the writers
of 2022’s #MeToo drama She Said. This
new film, set mostly in Spain, suggests
the wave of mother-daughter studies is
far from over, and the cast – Fiona Shaw,
Emma Mackey, Vicky Krieps – make
it an enticing prospect. There’s more
globetrotting in Alice Lowe’s new movie,
Timestalker, which sees the writer/direc-
tor play Agnes, a woman who, through
repeated incarnations in 17th-century
Scotland, 1980s Manhattan and a post-
apocalyptic 22nd century, keeps falling in
love with the wrong guy. But it’s not just
women who are lighting up the slate of Steve McQueen
British films. Steve McQueen is follow-
ing up his epic documentary Occupied is following up
City, which surveyed the horrors of the Occupied City,
Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, with which surveyed
Blitz, a drama about Londoners coping
with bombardment during World War the horrors of the
II. The starry cast, which includes Sao- Nazi occupation of
irse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Amsterdam, with
Graham, Kathy Burke and, in his fea-
ture film debut, musician Paul Weller, Blitz, a drama
might be typical of British prestige about Londoners
period pictures, but with McQueen coping with
writing and directing, it’s fair to expect
some unpalatable home truths. bombardment
Fresh from his Oscar-winning war-
time drama, All Quiet on the Western
Front, Edward Berger (who is currently
in talks to direct the next instalment in
the Jason Bourne franchise) will have
his new film Conclave released in the
coming year. Shot in Rome and starring
Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, Stanley
Tucci and Isabella Rossellini, it’s based
on the Robert Harris thriller about
papal intrigue.
FRANCE
A stellar year for French directors lies
ahead. There’s the new film by Leos
Carax, whose unique Holy Motors
proved an unexpected hit at Cannes in
2012, and whose madcap musical Annette
opened the festival in 2021. His latest – a
supposed self-portrait and career recap
– is titled, in typically perverse fashion,
C’est pas moi. Fans of Denis Lavant’s
recurring character Monsieur Merde
will have that particular itch scratched.
Three other directors who scored
festival hits in 2021 are also reappear-
ing. After the Golden Lion-winning
abortion drama Happening, Audrey
Diwan is making an unexpected turn
into erotica: she’s rebooting Emmanuelle
ABOVE
with Noémie Merlant in the title role, Margaret Qualley and
though unlike the 1970s originals, this Geraldine Viswanathan in
Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls
one will be in English. Similarly sur-
prising, perhaps, is Jacques Audiard OPPOSITE
Lily-Rose Depp in
following up Paris, 13th District with Robert Eggers’s
a Mexico-set musical: Emilia Perez, Nosferatu remake

which stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena
Gomez, sees a high-powered criminal
lawyer help a cartel boss (played by trans
actress Karla Sofía Gascón) who hopes
that achieving a dream of transitioning
will help them leave their dirty deeds
behind. Bruno Dumont completes
this triumvirate of genre-switchers: his
L’Empire, which sees aliens running
amok on northern France’s Opal Coast,
has already been given a March release
date in its home country.
Julie Delpy stars in her eighth feature
as director, Les Barbares, which finished
filming in August; it tackles the timely
topic of a Breton town expecting to
welcome Ukrainian refugees but receiv-
ing an influx of Syrians instead. Also in
the final stretches of post-production is
Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s French remake of
his own 1998 Japanese thriller Serpent’s
Path, about a man seeking revenge for his
daughter’s murder. Cannes premieres for
both films are hoped for.
AROUND THE WORLD
Where to begin surveying the rest of
the world’s output? Let’s start in South
America: after the disappointment of
his Henry VIII drama Firebrand, Karim
Aïnouz is back on home turf in north-
eastern Brazil to shoot Motel Destino, a
love story that unfolds against the back-
drop of social inequality and violent
patriarchy. After 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s
Spencer, Chilean director Pablo Larraín
continues his studies of high-profile his-
torical women with Maria, an interna-
tional co-production which sees Ange-
lina Jolie play the opera singer Maria
Callas in Paris towards the end of her
life, in the 1970s.
Over in Italy, Paolo Sorrentino is in
post-production on Parthenope, a Naples-
set film which follows the life of its title
character from the 1950s to the present
day, a story that, in Sorrentino’s words,
“embodies the full repertoire of human
existence: youth’s lightheartedness and
its demise, classical beauty and its inexo-
rable permutations, pointless and impos-
sible loves”. Gary Oldman has enlisted.
Abderrahmane Sissako, who hasn’t
made a feature since 2014’s celebrated
Timbuktu, is set to return with The Per-
fumed Hill, an epic romance that takes
place across Ivory Coast, Cape Verde and
Guangzhou, China. Some speculated
that it would grace this year’s Cannes, but
now we must hope for a 2024 premiere.
In colder climes, Norwegian direc-
tor Joachim Trier is reuniting with
Renate Reinsve, star of The Worst Person
in the World (2021), on Sentimental Value,
in which her character Nora, together
with her sister Agnes, navigate their
relationship with their filmmaker father,
Gustav. Panning east, to 1990s Poland,
Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry play an
American music journalist and her Hol-
ocaust survivor dad taking a trip to his
homeland in Julia von Heinz’s Iron Box.
The premise carries a hint of the oddball
father-daughter dynamic of Toni Erdmann
(2016), undergirded by a reckoning with
Nazi and Soviet legacies. New films
by two key Russian directors are also
eagerly awaited: Kirill Serebrennikov’s
Disappearance, about the Nazi physician
Josef Mengele’s fugitive years in South
America, and Andrey Zvyagintsev ’s
Jupiter, which, in its focus on a Russian
oligarch grappling with the fate of his
family, has been described by its pro-
ducers as an “unrelenting exploration of
power and corruption”.
In Georgia, Alexandre Koberidze is
patiently editing Dry Leaf, a film about a
father searching various backwaters for
his daughter, accompanied – in a magi-
cal touch typical of the director – by a
friendly disembodied voice. Dea Kulum-
begashvili is following up her 2020 San
Sebastián winner Beginning with another
provincial drama, Those Who Find Me,
about an obstetrician-gynaecologist
accused of negligence when a baby dies
in her care.
Further east, Portuguese direc-
tor Miguel Gomes has finished work
on Grand Tour, whose plot kicks off in
the 1910s in Rangoon, Burma (now
Myanmar) – a lightly comic existential
romance in which an English colonial
administrator is pursued across Asia
by the woman he jilted. Jia Zhangke is
filming the final parts of We Shall Be All,
his first fiction film since 2018’s Ash Is
Purest White; it tells the story of a solitary
woman’s life over the last quarter-century
– parts of it, remarkably, were shot as
long ago as 2001. Meanwhile, in South
Korea, Na Hongjin is courting the inter-
national audience he cultivated with the
2016 horror hit The Wailing: his new pro-
ject, Hope, is largely in Korean but stars
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.
A thriller revolving around menacing
forces set loose on a remote port town,
it’s being shot by Hong Kyungpyo, who
served as director of photography on
Parasite (2019) and Burning (2018) as well
as The Wailing.
Two leading lights of south-east Asian
cinema should also have films out next
year: Lav Diaz’s Henrico’s Farm, which fol-
lows a migrant Filipina worker stopping
over in Singapore en route to her mother
country from Frankfurt, has been shoot-
ing since at least 2017, while Indonesian
director Edwin, best known interna-
tionally for his Golden Leopard winner
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
(2021), is in post-production on Borderless
Fog – a crime thriller that is, unusually, set
in Borneo rather than Java, where most
of the country’s cinematic output is.
GENRE SPOTLIGHT: HORROR
In last year’s Greatest
Films of All Time poll,
Robert Eggers voted for
F.W. Murnau’s gothic
classic Nosferatu, which
was then celebrating its
centenary. His remake
will premiere some
time next year; Bill
Skarsgård will play
the fanged count
11
Na Hongjin is of the title, alongside Lily-Rose Depp
as the would-be paramour. Also in the
courting the 2024 remake pipeline is Faces of Death, the
international third feature by How to Blow up a Pipeline
audience he (2022) director Daniel Goldhaber. The
new movie folds the 1978 mondo horror
cultivated with original into its own narrative, and if it’s
2016 hit The anywhere near as profitable as that cult
Wailing: his new item turned out to be, Goldhaber and his
producers will be happy.
project, Hope, is A Cannes premiere seems likely for
largely in Korean David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which
but stars Michael stars Vincent Cassel, Guy Pearce and,
in three roles, Diane Kruger. Chrono-
Fassbender and logically, it comes after 2022’s Crimes of
Alicia Vikander the Future, but in spirit it seems closer
to the one-minute 2021 short The Death
of David Cronenberg, which he directed
with his daughter Caitlin. Specifically,
The Shrouds is about an entrepreneur
who pioneers a device to allow people
to commune with the dead under a
burial shroud. According to Kruger, it’s
the director’s most personal film, and
is haunted by the death in 2017 of his
wife Carolyn.
The Cronenbergs aren’t the only ones
keeping horror in the family. Next year
brings the feature debut of M. Night
Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana: The Watch-
ers features creatures hiding in the woods,
a premise that superficially recalls her
father’s 2004 hit The Village. (M. Night
OPENING SCENES
also has a film due for 2024 release: Trap,
a thriller set at a concert.)
After the rapid one-two punch of X
and its prequel Pearl (both 2022), Ti West
has been keeping audiences waiting for
the third instalment in the franchise. But
not for long: MaXXXine is a direct sequel
to X, and sees Maxine, the sole survivor
of that film’s massacre, pursuing fame
and fortune in 1980s LA. Zach Cregger
is also attempting to deliver on the prom-
ise of Barbarian (2022) with Weapons,
which – unusually for a horror film – is
a multi-narrative epic in the vein of Mag-
nolia (1999). Like Paul Thomas Ander-
son, Cregger has been granted final cut.
Pedro Pascal and Renate Reinsve have
signed on.
Following the critical and cult success
of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021),
Jane Schoenbrun is continuing their
exploration of screens’ scream potential
with I Saw the TV Glow. Produced by A24
and Emma Stone, the movie mines chills
from the premise of a TV show getting
mysteriously cancelled and the unset-
tling consequences that visit two of the
show’s young fans.
Wrapping up next year’s horror
package with a (blood-stained?)
bow around Christmastime
will be the new, as yet
untitled Jordan Peele
film, which he has said
will be “a little bit of
horror, a little bit of
comedy”. After the
expansiveness of Nope
(2022), exactly where
he’ll be taking audi-
ences next is anyone’s
guess.
 12

EDITORS’ CHOICE Gift recommendations from the Sight and Sound team

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF BRESSON ON BRESSON:

AND GOD AGAINST ALL
Vintage, £20
Werner Herzog is no fan of self-
reflexivity. He can’t stand to look at
himself in the mirror. He’d “rather die”
than see an analyst, he explains in his
new memoir, because “if you harshly
light every corner of the house, the
house will become uninhabitable”. And
so, this book is a carefully managed
but memorable tour around the house
of Herzog. The headline-grabbing
stories make an appearance – moving
OPENING SCENES
INTERVIEWS 1943-1983
New York Review Books, £17.99
Notes on the Cinematograph (1975) is the
book most people think of when they
think of Robert Bresson. The French
filmmaker’s lyrical aphoristic jottings
(“Your film must be like the one you see
on shutting your eyes”) came second TOD BROWNING’S SIDESHOW SHOCKERS
in the film books poll that Sight and Criterion Collection, £25
Sound conducted in 2010. A worthy The pre-Code cult classic Freaks (1932) may be a bizarre and uniquely provocative
companion to that slender manifesto is movie, but can you name a more powerful film about found families and community
this lengthy collection of interviews – spirit? Exactly – which makes it a perfect Christmas movie to share with your nearest
now available in paperback – spanning and dearest, even if the shock ending may make you think twice about the roast
bird on your dinner table. Criterion packages this talkie with two of director Tod

the steamship in Fitzcarraldo (1982), his
clashes with Klaus Kinski – but more
intriguing are details of his happy but
impoverished and “archaic” childhood
in the Bavarian village of Sachrang, like
his memory of being read Winnie the
Pooh with his siblings: “I swear to God,”
he writes, “we forgot to breathe.”
Katie McCabe, reviews editor
the 40 years during which Bresson
made his 14 features. He ruminates on
each one here (including a conversation
about 1966’s Au hasard Balthazar with
Jean-Luc Godard), expanding on many
of the ideas and theories found in Notes.
Isabel Stevens, managing editor
Browning’s silent films, both set in a sideshow milieu. First, the deathless melodrama
The Unknown (1927), which stars Lon Chaney as a lovestruck knife-thrower and Joan
Crawford as the object of his affections, a woman mortally afraid of the male touch;
then the lesser-known gem The Mystic (1925), starring a fabulously overdressed Aileen
Pringle. Supplements include scores for the silents, alternative endings for Freaks, a
wise essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme and some very sharp packaging.
Pamela Hutchinson, Weekly Film Bulletin editor

THE LAST ACTION HEROES WORLD NOIR VOL 1

Picador, £14.99
I’m going out on a limb here, but I
suspect Empire editor Nick de Semlyen’s
formative cinematic experiences took
place in the 80s, and with our world
so disrupted by political and cultural
atrocities he wants to share his joy with
the rest of us. His previous book Wild
THE RED SHOES LIMITED EDITION WRAPPING PAPER
and Crazy Guys (2019) was a high-speed
BFI, shop.bfi.org.uk, £3
rampage through the chaotic lives of the
Once you’ve got your holiday shopping out of the way, add a touch of cinephile
decade’s comedy cartel of John Belushi,
indulgence to your gift-giving with this Powell and Pressburger-inspired wrapping
Steve Martin and the gang, and the
paper. Designed by The Red Shoes’s set designer Hein Heckroth in the 1950s (originally
follow-up applies the same approach to
as a wallpaper), and incorporating some of the thousands of sketches he made
the story of 80s action, with Arnie, Sly
during the film’s production, this paper will make even the most last-minute gift feel
and Van Damme among the heroes. It’s
luxurious and stylish. For the ultimate Archers experience, pair with one of the BFI’s
a great read full of laughs and mayhem
two excellent new Powell and Pressburger books: The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger
and you’re left with a sense that when
(Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith, eds) and The Red Shoes (Pamela Hutchinson).
the 90s arrived and sent the beef out to
Thomas Flew, editorial assistant
pasture, we lost an era that will never
be replicated.
Mike Williams, editor in chief
Radiance, £44.99
Coming out a week before Christmas,
this box of three noirs by the Radiance
label gives a different curatorial spin
to the popular sets that tend to group
films according to the studios that
produced them. This is the first in an
ongoing series that will attempt to
follow the trails of noir influence across
the globe, from pre-war through to
neo-noir. The focus here is the 1950s
and includes Kurahara Koreyoshi’s I Am
Waiting (1957) from Japan’s pioneering
Nikkatsu studio, Édouard Molinaro’s
Paris-set Witness in the City (1959),
starring Lino Ventura, and Pietro
Germi’s The Facts of Murder (1959),
in which he also stars as the Roman
investigating inspector. Perfect late-
night fare for that quiet time between
Christmas and the New Year.
Kieron Corless, associate editor
“Emerald Fennell displays a
wickedly twisted
imagination”

“crackling, clever dialogue”

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

IN ALL CATEGORIES INCLUDING

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 14
IN CONVERSATION
ABOVE Naíma Sentíes and Montserrat Marañon in Totém
LILA AVILÉS WRITER/DIRECTOR Q Tótem depicts a whole world
in less than 24 hours. It covers
INTERVIEW BY JONATHAN ROMNEY a continuous day, but is also
fragmented. Sol experiences
The Mexican director’s her own version of time,
OPENING SCENES
second feature, Tótem, while the adults around
her seem to experience the
explores a young girl’s sad, day at a different speed.
magical universe A It’s how we live. Sometimes
there are moments in our lives
The debut feature by Lila Avilés, when time expands. I want to
The Chambermaid (2018), was set entirely play with those moments. Every
in the cloistered world of an upmarket single human on this planet – or
hotel. Her follow-up, Tótem – which animal, I guess – has their days.
premiered in Berlin in February and will We all have days that mark us,
be Mexico’s Oscars submission – is also that make a profound wound.
set in a closed world, but a much warmer There’s biological death, but we
one. An ensemble piece set in Mexico City, go through lots of deaths, we
it is centred around a seven-year-old girl change. I’m not the same Lila that
named Sol (Naíma Sentíes), who spends I was 18 years ago, or even one year
a day at her family’s house as they prepare ago. So, for me, it was important
a party for her father, a young painter who to give the focus of the day that
is terminally ill. It’s a teeming ensemble everyone is in, in that moment.
piece mixing intimate emotion with chaotic
incident and humour in the space of one Q How much freedom was there
household, and over a single day. Tótem also for the actors, especially the
gestures at a broader non-human universe children? For example, did
through the prevalence of animals and Naíma prompt you to do what
plants, and at the dimension of the mystical, you needed to in the story, or was
supernatural or traditionally folkloric, it all planned out in advance?
signalled by the visit of a shamanic healer. A There’s a structure, there’s a
screenplay, but that’s something
you need to throw to the actors, so
that they return it to you. Naima
is very sensitive – it’s a treasure to A In Mexico, we come from a culture
find such maturity in a child. On the
first day, she was telling me, “You
know, I would love to make Tótem 2.”
I said, “Yes, yes, but let’s see…” If
her grandmother was bringing
Naíma to set, she was more [puts
on a soft, shy voice], “I don’t want
to do this…” And on days when
her mother was bringing her, she
was like [bigger, bolder voice], “Hey,
LEFT
hey!” You need to catch that vibe.
Lila Avilés You need to let her be herself.
Q Animals appear throughout the
film, in and around the household
– dogs, birds, insects – as well as
in the painting Sol’s father makes
for her, and in the end credits.
Is the title related to that?
A ‘Tótem’ can mean whatever
each person wants it to be, but
it’s also about family. It’s about
something like a feeling that
you cannot describe, something
that is intuitive, something
animal – and we are animals.
It’s not the most original title,
there are lots of films called
Totem, but this is my totem. Since
Berlin we have been travelling
a lot and in every single country
people come up to me and say,
“I think that the totem is this…”
– and often it’s totally different.
Obviously, it’s the tribe, it’s the
family, the animals, it’s friends. It’s
something ritual. It’s something
sacred. It’s a lot of layers.
Q Did the actors have to spend
a lot of time together to become
believable as a family?
A We didn’t have so much time,
because we needed to finish the
house [set]. Obviously I wanted
two weeks to rehearse but no, the
house had to be ready. Sometimes
I would hear the actors say, “We
had so much time rehearsing on
this film or that film…” The first
day we were filming, they were
still doing stuff with the set, so we
didn’t have that time to rehearse,
not at all. But in casting, somehow
you start understanding and
you have a relationship with the
characters and with the people.
It was also about talking a lot.
As a filmmaker, I love the
mystery of understanding that
the cast will feel real. You can
tell if they are comfortable. For
me, it’s super important that
for every single character, even
if it’s for one second, you give
them time to express themselves.
You’re like: trust in me. It’s nice
when they have real confidence
– “Now you’re playing!”
Q Tell me about the ritual when the
healer comes and burns bread
around the house. It’s played as
a comic scene, but presumably
it’s based on something real.
where shamanism is really old
and sacred and powerful. There
is lots of knowledge not only about
plants but about the universe,
and it’s intuitive. In Mexico,
you can find all sorts, something
that’s super profound or someone
who tells you, “Now drink this
cockroach tea, or this elixir.”
I love that. It’s pretty normal.
Totém is in UK cinemas now

NEWS
BFI honours
Christopher
Nolan with
Fellowship
The British director Christopher
Nolan will be given a BFI Fellowship
in 2024, receiving the award which
is granted “in recognition of an
outstanding contribution to film or
television culture”. He will become the
92nd person to hold the honour, which
has been given since 1983 to esteemed
filmmakers from around the world,
including Kurosawa Akira, Thelma
Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese,
Ousmane Sembène, Tilda Swinton
and last year’s honouree Spike Lee.
The fellowship is recognition of
Nolan’s towering body of work as a
director – from the early small-scale
psychological thrillers Following (1998)
and Memento (2000), through to his
Dark Knight trilogy (2005-12), which
introduced a dark, serious aesthetic
to the superhero genre, and this
year’s atomic-age epic Oppenheimer
– which is rare in its ability to win
big at the box office while gaining
near-universal critical acclaim. But
it also acknowledges his staunch
commitment to the future of films
being shot and shown on celluloid.
Speaking at the BFI London Film
Festival in 2015, Nolan explained:
“The fascinating and positive thing
about the threat that [physical] film
has been under for so many years
now is that it forces you to examine
your own passion for the medium.”
This passion has been shown in
Nolan’s insistence on shooting on
65mm and 70mm Imax film and
giving his films extensive theatrical
windows – including Tenet (2020),
which was released at a perilous time
for cinemas during the pandemic.
In a statement, BFI Chair Tim
Richards made clear the extent of
this dedication to film: “Nolan has
been at the forefront of preserving
celluloid through his involvement
with the Film Foundation and his
own support via the Morf Foundation
for the BFI’s photochemical work,
which will ensure that current
and future audiences will be able
to continue to enjoy and learn
from our incredibly rich history of
SELIGMAN PORTRAIT: HUNTER ABRAMS
cinema for many years to come.”
An ‘In Conversation’ event with Nolan will be
held at BFI Southbank, London, on 15 February
2024, along with a BFI Imax screening of
Tenet, presented by Nolan. Oppenheimer will
have further BFI Imax screenings in January
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY
(ROB REINER, 1989)
It’s my favourite romcom. We have a
lot of female writers and journalists
in my family, so I grew up watching
Nora Ephron’s movies and reading
her books and journalism. The
actors’ chemistry in that movie is so
incredible. The conversations they
have around men and women dating
are timeless. It’s just a beautiful
movie, well shot, and the narrative
is so tight. It’s also one of the best
depictions of New York.
INCENDIES
(DENIS VILLENEUVE, 2010)
I was 14 or 15 when I watched this
with my dad and I had quite an
emotional reaction to it. I love to
watch a Canadian filmmaker go from
making his independent films like
Incendies to Dune [2021] to see how
he’s been able to keep his artistry at
a massive budget level. I know that
directors still have to fight, no matter
how big you are, to make artistic
choices. The way that he combines
CGI with live-action shooting, those
are choices you still have to fight for.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
(DAVID FINCHER, 2010)
I just think the combination
of Fincher’s direction and Aaron
Sorkin’s writing will never be
matched in anything else. It’s so rare
for movies to capture a moment in
modern history so effectively in a way
that feels current still. It’s timeless,
ABOVE Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
THE BALLOT OF…
Emma Seligman
On the first anniversary of our Greatest
Films of All Time poll, we present the
top choices from the American director
of Shiva Baby and this year’s Bottoms
E M M A S E L I G M A N WA S TA L K I N G T O I S A B E L S T E V E N S
and yet it was so current when it
was made. Not a lot of people could
have made something that felt
rhythmic and sexy and beautiful and
cinematic that’s about the internet.
I was 13 when the movie came out
and Facebook was my whole life;
seeing it had an effect on the way I
saw the world politically and socially.
THE GODFATHER
(FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 1972)
I don’t know what else I can say
that’s original, but I’m just a basic
girl who loves The Godfather.
SOME LIKE IT HOT
(BILLY WILDER, 1959)
I love Billy Wilder. Screwball
comedies are a huge reference for
anything I do. It’s just one of those
movies I love rewatching, it makes
me happy. Sometimes comedy
doesn’t stand the test of time,
but it still makes you laugh.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
(FRANK CAPRA, 1946)
I rewatch it every Christmas with
my dad and every time I still feel
affected by the message that it gives
at the end to my cold heart.
E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
(STEVEN SPIELBERG, 1982)
I think he’s the only director who can
make kids’ movies for adults, or make
adults feel like children and have
wonder. This movie has so much
wonder and it’s maybe easier for
15
adults to watch teen movies because
teens can be more inappropriate and
relatable and don’t say everything
they’re thinking. It’s rare for me to
watch a kids’ movie and feel like
I relate to the characters and want
to aspire to be them.
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
(SIDNEY LUMET, 1975)
It’s rare to see something that’s so
stressful and funny and weird that’s
also true. And I don’t know, this is
why I didn’t pursue film criticism.
I’m just like: “Yeah, I love it.”
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF
(JOHN HUGHES, 1986)
It was a huge influence on both Shiva
Baby [2020] and Bottoms. People
have written so much about John
OPENING SCENES
Hughes, but he really was the first
director whose films took teens
seriously, other than maybe Rebel
Without a Cause [1955]. In a teen
comedy, he was the first one to make
them feel real. And I think especially
with the role of Cameron [played
by Alan Ruck] – now, when you see
depressed teens on screen, it’s very
traumatising and worrisome and
exploitative. It’s such an existential
movie and it has a tight narrative,
but it also digresses and has these
wonderful set pieces like ‘Danke
Schoen’ and ‘Twist and Shout’.
I think it nails teenage existentialism
and not knowing what you’re doing
with your life and what life means.
And the fact that it all takes place
in a day is also just really whimsical
and impressive.
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
(NORMAN JEWISON, 1971)
I love musicals. When I was writing
this list, I thought: I have to have
a musical, and this is my favourite.
There are still very few depictions
of Jewish history that aren’t
traumatising. And obviously the end
of the movie isn’t the happiest, but
it’s the only representation of shtetl
life other than maybe Yentl [1983]
that I can think of which made it
into the mainstream. So it holds
a really important role in terms of
Jewish representation that’s fun and
positive, as well as being steeped
in Jewish history in terms of that
moment in time of migration.
I would love to make a musical.
I don’t know if I’m ready for that,
but down the line potentially…
Bottoms is in UK cinemas and
streaming on Amazon Prime
 16
IN FOCUS
Empire of light
Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux on Lyon’s Musée Lumière, a shrine to cinema and photography
which celebrates the brothers Louis and Auguste’s pioneering contributions to moving pictures
BY PAMELA HUTCHINSON
“What about these words ‘old movies’?
We don’t say ‘old Shakespeare’, we don’t
say ‘old van Gogh’, but cinema is ‘old’! A
film is old after one week? No.” Thierry
Frémaux has taken time out of Festival
Lumière, the archive-based companion
to his other, better known festival of new
films in Cannes, to talk to me about a
museum, the origins of cinema and the
importance of our moving-image herit-
age. And, naturally, about Auguste and
Louis Lumière, the brothers after whom
both the festival and the Institut that Fré-
maux directs are named.
I tell him that I don’t like the phrase
‘old movies’ either and prefer to say
‘young cinema’. “Exactly,” Frémaux says,
OPENING SCENES
“because cinema has only been around
for 128 years. So it’s young compared
to literature, music, painting. But we
don’t know when they were invented.
Cinema, we know.”
This is why the city of Lyon, home
once upon a time to the Lumière family
and their photographic factory, hosts
not only an annual celebration of film
history in the form of Festival Lumière,
but a recently revamped museum paying
tribute to the inventors of the Cinéma-
tographe. Musée Lumière, inside the
handsome art nouveau villa built by the
parents of Auguste and Louis at the
turn of the century, is a shrine to cinema
and photography: specifically, but not
exclusively, to the Lumiéres’ Cinéma-
tographe, the machine that famously
projected ten films, none of them more
than 50 seconds long, to the public at the
Grand Café in Paris on 28 December
1895. You can see that very object on dis-
play in the museum’s grandest hall. It is
a small wooden box, but one that gleams
with historical significance.
“I am quite reluctant to say it is ‘the
invention of cinema’. Inventing cinema
was a really big world project,” Frémaux
says. “I like the idea that it was a channel,
which starts with Leonardo da Vinci, in
a way, to go to that moment, which is the
moment of the Cinématographe. This
is why we say [Louis] Lumiére is the
last inventor, but we also insist he’s the
first filmmaker, because he made a lot of
wonderful films.” The exhibitions in the
museum, and the plaques outside lining
the path to another site of pilgrimage, the
hangar of the Lumière photographic fac- ‘To bring to
tory, make this clear. They plot a course
from da Vinci’s study of movement via
life a place of
such figures as Eadweard Muybridge, memory, I think
Thomas Edison and the Skladanowsky you must give
brothers, inventors of the Bioscop pro-
jector, to the Cinématographe.
the place a
When the bulldozers came to this site heart and soul.
in the 1960s, the brothers’ own house, a And that feeling
symmetrical building where they lived
with their families and worked together,
comes from
was destroyed. But the hangar was the history of
saved. The first film to be projected at the cinema, because
Grand Café that day was Workers Leav-
ing the Lumière Factory (Louis Lumière,
we are, first,
1895), that famous set-up of the workers movie buffs’
tumbling out of the factory gates at the THIERRY FRÉMAUX
end of their shift: movement and charac-
ter combine in the flow of this gender-
segregated group of workers. And the
occasional dog. The road on to which BELOW
those gates open was named rue du Pre- Auguste and Louis Lumière,
pictured in 1925
mier Film in the 1920s. The entrance to
the hangar is decorated with glass plates OPPOSITE, TOP
Inside the refurbished
printed with images from the film so that Musée Lumière
visitors must weave past the workers of
OPPOSITE, BOT TOM
1895 to enter the building, which houses The Cinématographe used
a cinema. This week at the festival I went in the 1895 screening
IMAGE: COLLECTION INSTITUT LUMIÈRE
 17

there to see both Jonathan Glazer’s chill-

ing Auschwitz drama The Zone of Interest
and a selection of early Disney shorts to
celebrate that studio’s centenary. I didn’t
choose those tickets in order to empha-
sise the plurality of the Cinématographe’s
potential, but I might have been pleased
with myself had I done so. The villa itself
has two further screens.
This year, Wim Wenders, recipient
of the Prix Lumière, will follow festival
tradition and shoot a ‘remake’ of Work-
ers Leaving the Lumière Factory in his own
style. Frémaux has been inviting contem-
porary filmmakers to engage with the
Lumières’ work since he witnessed an
outpouring of emotion from Joseph L.
Mankiewicz during a visit to the hangar
in the early 1990s. Wenders was, in fact,
Frémaux’s first guest when he took over
as director in 1995 and has been vocal in
his admiration for the Lumière films.
Chief among the new additions to
Musée Lumière are further smaller
screens that give visitors direct access to
those films, hundreds of them, each one
elegant, eye-catching and as addictive
as chocolate. Each light-flooded frame
bursts with life caught in motion, with

OPENING SCENES
the frisson of immediacy and chance.
Of 1,422 films made by the brothers, the
Institut Lumière has gathered optimal
material for 1,417, and 300 have already
been pristinely restored. Further screens
in the museum offer side-by-side compar-
isons of the compositions in the Lumière
films to 19th- and early 20th-century art,
and run Frémaux’s 2017 documentary
Lumière! L’aventure commence. “It’s impos-
sible to imagine a museum of cinema
without having a screening room,” Fré-
maux says, “in order to make people
understand that it’s the same world, for
us, the origin and the cinema of today.”
Elsewhere Lyon-born composer
Jean-Michel Jarre has set excerpts from
the films to a new score. And there will
be an interactive video installation that
plays all of the restored films at once, duty of my colleagues here to be good showed the factory gates film. “Of course
modelled after the exhibition that movie buffs, and with Bertrand Tavern- I could have said, ‘I know it’, but I didn’t
appeared in Bologna in 2015: an oppor- ier [president of Institut Lumière before know it. Nobody in Lyon knew those
tunity to reintroduce 21st-century view- Frémaux became director], with Martin films, nobody outside the pure special-
ers to the novel thrills of the very earliest Scorsese, who used to come here, we ists… So the impact was very strong.
moving-picture shows. have good examples, but also to be These films, in my city, in that street,
Further displays give an insight into strong historians of cinema of the origins.” near here.”
the Lumières’ domestic lives: from inti- Frémaux praises the former Museum Now, the Lumières’ films are vis-
mate action photos captured by the of the Moving Image in London and ible alongside the Lumières’ technology.
patented blue-plate camera that made the Academy Museum in Los Angeles And this way, the living people of the
the family fortune to a as examples of cinema museums. turn of the century who animated those
reconstruction of the par- Here in the UK we have impres- first moving images – the chess players,
ents’ smartly appointed sive collections in a few differ- babies, workers, gardeners and mischie-
bedroom, complete with ent institutions, though we may vous schoolboys – are visible again to the
all mod cons, including hope for a venue as well-funded curious tourists or reverent cinephiles
a telephone. as the one in LA, or indeed the who make the journey. A journey to the
“To bring to life a place sleek Musée Lumière. city of Lyon, and one nearly 130 years
of memory, I think you Frémaux has been living back to the origins of the cinema.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOIC BENOÎT

must give the place a
heart and soul,” Frémaux
says. “And that feeling comes from
the history of cinema, because we are,
first, movie buffs. It is my duty and the
the buff-historian life since he
started out at the Institut as a
volunteer in the early 1980s, fol-
lowing his attendance at a press
conference where Tavernier
“For me, for you, I guess, cinema is
the most important thing of our lives,”
Frémaux says. “We had the privilege to
have this discovery. We need now to give
it back to people.”
 18

MEAN SHEETS
The designer Sam’s Myth
has created an intricate
collage filled with puzzles
for Laura Citarella’s film
BY THOMAS FLEW
Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen
centres on an absence – a woman
also named Laura, who works
cataloguing flowers and presenting
a radio segment, absconds from the
eponymous Argentinian town – but
its four hour and 20 minute runtime
is packed to the brim with intrigue,
from epistolary investigations to
supernatural phenomena. Sam’s
Myth (aka designer Sam Smith)
was tasked with encapsulating the
film for its US poster. He aimed
“to present the film as the earthy,
mysterious puzzle that it is, a rich
text dense with signs and signifiers”.
Smith continues: “The viewer –
of the poster and of the film – steps
back and sees a patchwork of clues
and leads, as a detective would.
The film has been described as
novelistic and, being a lover of book
OPENING SCENES

covers, I asked myself what kind of

design would make someone want
to pick this up for a good read.”
Smith is chameleonic with his work
but often creates a bold statement
for his poster designs, not least in
his famed 2010 poster for Ōbayashi
Nobuhiko’s House (1977). He explains:
“One thing I enjoy is making a poster
that ‘looks like’ or ‘feels like’ the film
it’s announcing. In particular, I love
when the title treatment on the poster
can match that of the film’s titles.”

See more at cargocollective.com/samsmyth

Ōbayashi Nobuhiko’s House (1977) Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973)
 20
READERS’ LETTERS
SPACE CANON
Is there “such a thing as a director’s
film versus a critic’s film?” (Sight and
Sound, December). Of course there
is. A critic will see the finished work,
whereas a director knows what effort
is required and how incredibly dif-
ficult it is to create a great work.
Which is partly why I think Kevin B.
Lee’s request to extend the franchise
in the poll is nonsense. Where does it
stop? Why not the person who sells
the popcorn since they will, inevitably,
have seen a great many films?
This seems to me the main problem
with the new polling and subsequent
APOCALYPTIC TRACES
Keith Knight’s account of seeing a
creditless showing of Apocalypse Now
in 1979 (Letters, S&S, December)
brought back memories of a similar
experience I had when visiting Los
Angeles in September of that year.
Seeking refuge from the stifling
OPENING SCENES
heat (37C) and accompanying smog,
I bought a ticket for a matinee perfor-
mance of the film (featuring Dennis
Hopper, pictured below) at the Cin-
erama Dome on Sunset Boulevard –
one of only three US cinemas equipped
to show Dolby Stereo 70mm prints
in surround sound, a requirement
stipulated by Francis Ford Coppola
and/or the film’s distributor. Having
surrendered my camera and shoulder
bag at the box office (was this standard
articles – people simply haven’t seen
enough films on which to base a
worthwhile judgement (the director
Lila Avilés, whose Greatest Film poll
choices were the focus of ‘The Ballot
of…’ in the same issue, is a notable
exception). When I asked students for
the greatest film, they came up with
all kinds of answers; but when I asked
them which film they would send to
an alien civilisation, they all returned
to the canon. Maybe that should be
the question in the next poll.
Stephen Dorril, director of the Holmfirth
Film Festival
practice or a security measure imposed
by the distributor?), I entered the vast
but almost deserted auditorium. The
ticket prices – the equivalent of around
£17 in today’s money – were regarded
as a new high by LA’s cinemagoers
and may have been a deterrent. There
were no opening or closing credits and
as the film came to an end a stentorian
voice declaimed – in surround sound
– “This performance of Apocalypse Now
has concluded. Please make your way
to the exits.”
I collected my belongings, together
with a booklet listing the credits, and
emerged into the Californian humidity
after experiencing the horrors of Viet-
nam in air-conditioned comfort.
Terry Hanstock, Mapperley, Nottingham
TOO MUCH JOHNSON
Saltburn (Reviews, S&S,
December) played like
The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
without the subtlety or
sophistication. It replaces
the elegance of that film with
Barry Keoghan’s knob
(Barry Keoghan pictured, right).
Stephen Hammal, via Facebook
SHADOW OF AN UNMAN
I was very pleased to see Trevor
Johnston’s detailed and perceptive
appreciation of the Arrow Blu-ray of
Unman, Wittering and Zigo (Rediscov-
ery, DVD & Blu-ray, S&S, Decem-
ber). As he says, this is a major Brit-
ish film of the early 70s which has
been unavailable until now. I am as
puzzled as he is that the film is only
being released as a Region A disc.
Is it a rights issue? Curious that the
BFI has not made it its business to
issue the film on disc, along with a
slew of equally significant and long
unavailable British films of this
period (The Long Day’s Dying and The
Strange Affair, both 1968; Laughter in
the Dark, 1969; Leo the Last, 1970).
Unman’s importance in British film
history is not only as a riposte to If....
(1968); it also skewers the arrogance
and entitlement of the public school
mentality (I half-expected to hear
Johnson, B., on the roll-call). It is
also a study of a man rather lost and
directionless, in a loveless marriage,
who sinks gradually into impotence
as he succumbs to class (in both
senses) power. Matthew Sweet, in
an extra on the disc, compares the
film to Straw Dogs, also released in
1971, but Unman is a subtler explora-
tion of similar terrain.
Just as fascinating as the cultural
history of this film – mutating from
radio play to TV drama to feature
film – is its cultural legacy, referenced
obliquely in the Rowan Atkinson
headmaster sketch in The Secret Police-
man’s Ball (1979) and more explicitly
in an episode in Series 5 of Endeavour
(2018). Clearly, we were not the only
people who caught that late-night
screening on BBC more than 40
years ago and found that the film
made an indelible impression.
Noel Hess, via email
Unman, Wittering
and Zigo skewers
the arrogance and
entitlement of the
public school mentality
Get in touch
Email: sightandsound@bfi.org.uk
Twitter: @sightsoundmag
By post: Sight and Sound, BFI,
21 Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN
This was my first
encounter with a film
in which one of the
title characters was
unseen, a trope that only
added to the mystery
ABSENT MINDED
With regards to Trevor Johnston’s
excellent piece on John Macken-
zie’s half-forgotten classic Unman,
Wittering and Zigo (S&S, December)
– my response, had he mentioned
the title to me, would have been
“Absent”! I am one of the lucky few
who remembers seeing the BBC
screening all those years ago, and
my abiding memory is that you
never got to see the character of
Zigo – any time his name was
called the response was “Absent”.
I believe this was my first encoun-
ter with a film in which one of the
title characters was unseen, a trope
that only added to the overall mys-
terious feeling that the film left me
with – why was he never at school,
what happened to him, did he ever,
in fact, exist? It was this mystery that
has caused the film (starring David
Hemmings, pictured below) to stay
with me over all these years.
Like Johnston, I am disap-
pointed that Arrow has released
only a Region A-coded disc,
not Region B – this is one film
I would love to add to my collection
as a companion piece to If.... (1968).
Kevin Rawlings, North Somerset
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (1)
 “An unmissable cinema event”
ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS, AWFJ

“Sprawling, Adventurous, Wildly Imaginative ...Compulsively watchable”

ANKIT JHUNJHUNWALA, SCREEN ANARCHY

“Finds liberation in being lost. A wondrous multipart epic”

DEVIKA GIRISH, NEW YORK TIMES - CRITIC’S PICK

A FIL
ILM BY LAUR
R A CI
CITA
T RE
R LL
L A

PARTS 1 & 2

IN SELECT CINEMAS
& ON CURZON HOME CINEMA NOW
W
22 TALKIES
The Long Take
For all its fantasy and glamour, The Red Shoes reveals
the real blood, sweat and tears behind ballet
There was a new film with a familiar name
released this summer. The Red Shoes: Next
Step is an Australian drama set in a ballet
academy. Beyond the name, it appears to
have very little in common with Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948
film. But perhaps a story such as this
one, of a young woman’s struggles as she
embarks on a career in dance, cannot now
be told without a reference to the saga of
Victoria Page and Boris Lermontov in the
beloved British classic The Red Shoes. Some
films have an influence that can hardly be
overstated. After Moira Shearer danced
in crimson slippers, the ballet melodrama
was never quite the same again.
During the preparation for making
The Red Shoes, the cinematographer Jack
Cardiff pointed out a problem. From a
distance, as seen by the audience, the bal-
lerinas all looked beautiful. But backstage,
anyone mingling with the dancers would
see that their stage makeup was a crude
exaggeration of their natural features:
“Close up, it was as grotesque as a Fau-
vist painting, but from the auditorium it
looked quite natural.” Cardiff ’s solution,
offered to Powell, was two sets of make-
up, one for close-ups and the other for long
shots. But Powell embraced the vision of a
beastly ballerina. Key close-ups of Shearer
capture her face outlined with thick black
lines to create false lashes and eyebrows
and dabs of scarlet on her lips and eyes. In
her most important close-up, at the mid-
point of the film’s terrifying, spectacular,
extended ballet sequence, beads of salt
water hang on her forehead.
The Red Shoes accentuates what other
ballet films choose to hide: that behind
the graceful performance on stage, the
ballerina is a living, sweating human.
That the discipline of barre exercises and
rehearsals is fatiguing and that ambition
can be ugly. Above all, as expressed in the
blood-red symbol at the heart of the film, a
ballerina’s body suffers, not least from the
pain of dancing en pointe, practising until
one’s feet bleed. Or, as Anton Walbrook
puts it, playing the impresario Lermon-
tov, “a great impression of simplicity can
only be achieved by great agony of body
and spirit.” Drawing on Hans Christian
Andersen’s blood-soaked fairytale and
Some films have numerous real-world ballet traumas, pri-
marily Nijinsky’s brutal expulsion from the
an influence that Ballets Russes, The Red Shoes dances on the
can hardly be precipice of full-blown horror.
overstated. After Previously, adaptations of Compton
Mackenzie’s novel Carnival (1912), notably
Moira Shearer the very good Dance Pretty Lady (Anthony
danced in crimson Asquith, 1931), available on BFI Player,
slippers as had portrayed ballet dancers as working-
class waifs, ephemerally beautiful on stage
Victoria Page in and vulnerable off it. We could include
The Red Shoes, the here Vivien Leigh as a dancer who turns
ballet melodrama to sex work during wartime in the poign-
ant Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940).
was never quite Two films of 1947, the British title The
the same again Little Ballerina (Lewis Gilbert), featur-
ing a cameo by Margot Fonteyn, and The
Unfinished Dance (Henry Koster), starring
Margaret O’Brien and Cyd Charisse, a
remake of a French film, took us into the
world of juvenile dancers and the ballet
school, a space fixed firmly in the (young,
female) public imagination following the
tremendous popularity of Noël Streat-
feild’s Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children
on the Stage, published in 1936. My own
early understanding of the true ballet art-
ist’s monstrous ego was due to reading and
BELOW
Moira Shearer in
rereading this addictive book as a girl who
The Red Shoes (1948) performed clumsy pliés in the church hall,
Pamela Hutchinson
@PamHutch
getting to know tiny Posy Fossil, the preco-
cious red-headed ballerina who will stop
at nothing to further her nascent career.
O’Brien’s character in The Unfinished Dance
shares the same volatile passion, causing a
terrible injury to a dancer who threatens
the position of her idol. Posy Fossil, you
rather feel, would have had no issue with
sending a fellow dancer crashing through
the trapdoor on her own behalf. As a ten-
year-old, Shearer posed for publicity pho-
tographs as Posy, and the character she
played a dozen years later in The Red Shoes
is similarly dangerously driven. Like Posy,
Victoria might well be told, “it was all very
well to be ambitious, but ambition should
not kill the nice qualities in you”.
Since The Red Shoes, ballet melodrama
has been forced to grow up and get messy:
Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft did
battle over Victoria’s own choice between
life and art in Herbert Ross’s The Turn-
ing Point (1977), a film about the regrets
of mature dancers that is frank about the
pains and pitfalls of the artform, the blis-
tered feet and the sweat of the labour in
the studio. Even such aspirational, teen-
friendly fare as Center Stage (Nicholas
Hytner, 2000) contains gruesome close-
ups of bloody toes and is candid about
eating disorders among young dancers.
For a more nuanced exploration of the
same themes, Robert Altman’s excellent
The Company (2003) remains an underrated
film, both within and without the ballet
melodrama genre. Of course, without The
Red Shoes, there would be no Black Swan
(Darren Aronofsky, 2010), which draws
explicit body horror from the psychologi-
cal agonies of a mentally ill ballerina. The
genre must change as it evolves, though,
and while it was a neat touch on the part
of The Red Shoes to make Victoria a rich
woman, whose life could be devoted to
art for art’s sake, the archetype has room to
expand. I am naturally fond of Lee Hall’s
Billy Elliot (2000), which externalises the
psychological turmoil of the conflicted
BYLINE ILLUSTRATIONS: PETER ARKLE
young dancer living through the violence
of Thatcher’s Britain. Some die for art,
while others fight for it.
Pamela Hutchinson wrote the BFI
Classics volume on ‘The Red Shoes’

Nicole Flattery
@nicoleflattery
John Cheever’s gin-soaked suburban nightmares
are out of fashion, but their intensity survives
The American writer Emma Cline’s latest
novel The Guest, about an attractive young
woman grifting her way around The
Hamptons for a week, has revived inter-
est in the John Cheever story ‘The Swim-
mer’. Cline has said that she was inspired
by it, and The Guest shares qualities with
Cheever’s classic: the same atmosphere of
long summer afternoons, the same dark-
ness and self-delusion lurking underneath
the frictionless façade.
‘The Swimmer’ first appeared in the
New Yorker in July 1964; it’s considered
the masterpiece of the man known as ‘the
Chekhov of the suburbs’. There are certain
writers who have fallen out of fashion, their
suburban malaise seeming outmoded and
largely irrelevant in our more tumultuous
times: Richard Yates, John Updike and,
most importantly, Cheever (1912-82). There
are fewer and fewer screen adaptations of
their work. The world has lost interest in
businessmen who wear their suits like cos-
tumes, take the train to the city for unfulfill-
ing work, drink too much, conduct quiet
affairs – men whose grasp on reality is all
too frail; I’ve no doubt these writers were
a major influence on the creation of Don
Draper from Mad Men (2007-15).
I was mostly unfamiliar with Cheever’s
work, which I began reading after finishing
The Guest, but from what I’d heard, I imag-
ined it to be relentless, straight realism.
A rccent selection of his short stories by
Julian Barnes, A Vision of the World (2021),
offered a corrective to that idea. In the
introduction, Barnes describes Cheever’s
“ability to change register suddenly with-
out announcing the change, and without
being troubled by it”. That’s what most
surprised me about these stories: their
dense, dreamlike logic. His characters
seem to operate on two different levels of
reality: they are nostalgic for their idealised
pasts, often as athletes, and confounded
by the present. What happened, they con-
tinuously seem to be asking, how did I get
here? Life, and their own characters and
failings, escapes these men. (From the 1953
ILLUSTRATION BY BETH WALROND
story ‘The Sorrows of Gin’: “…the club car
that her father travelled on seemed to have
the gloss and monotony of the rest of his
life.”) But none more so than Neddy Mer-
rill in ‘The Swimmer’.
Burt Lancaster In the book, Cheever takes his charac-
ters’ disorientation and sense of dislocation I was wrong, I happily discovered. Frank
has a showdown to their absurd conclusions: time passes
with an ex-lover, seemingly in seconds, summer becomes
played by Janice autumn, friends become enemies. From
its opening sentence – “It was one of those
Rule; the dialogue midsummer Sundays when everyone
is electrifying and sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last
pure Cheever: night’” – Cheever masterfully shows the
world of Merrill, crystal-clear waters, end-
the excuses of the less pool parties, a plentiful supply of gin
unhappily married and tonics, an easy and entitled environ-
man, the barbs ment. But as Merrill swims home across
his neighbours’ pools, things begin to
of the hurt and change – there is a noticeable lack of friend- the stars of the film are the dazzling swim-
furious mistress liness from certain parties, a mention of
financial troubles, an occasional comment
about his marital struggles. Merrill, one of
Cheever’s most self-aggrandising antihe-
roes, seems to believe in himself as a sort of
legendary figure, a local stud. Pool by pool, hasn’t been adapted more. Hamaguchi
this idea of himself is obliterated until he
gets back to his family home and finds it
locked, empty and abandoned.
“I drank too much last night”: the clue,
if you’re looking for clues, is in the open-
ing. ‘The Swimmer’ doesn’t tell you that
Merrill is an alcoholic – those chilly and
withholding male story-writers weren’t
too interested in stating things plainly –
but, instead, replicates the mindset and
doomed confusion of the drinker. Time
and money are lost in the upswing of a
party, and when he eventually emerges eve-
rything has disappeared, destroyed irrevo-
cably (Cheever himself was an alcoholic
for much of his life, and was influenced by Nicole Flattery’s novel ‘Nothing Special’
another writer exploring similar themes, F. is published by Bloomsbury
23
Flic k Lit
Scott Fitzgerald). ‘The Swimmer’ is unset-
tling because it is nonlinear and erratic.
It doesn’t follow conventional logic, the
beats that we’re familiar with, but the logic
of time itself: how it makes fools of all of
us, the indignity of ageing, the humiliat-
ing gap between who we are and who we
perceive ourselves to be.
I was reluctant to watch the 1968 adap-
tation with Burt Lancaster as the mis-
guided Merrill. I didn’t see how a film
could capture the loneliness and malaise
of the story. Short stories are often so self-
contained, deliberately evasive and resist-
ant to narrative closure that something
is lost when they’re moved to the screen,
when their ambiguities are made concrete.
Perry’s film – with various scenes reshot
by Sydney Pollack – is hallucinatory and
faithful in tone. There is the addition of an
angelic babysitter character who echoes a
similar character in another Cheever story,
‘The Country Husband’ (1954). There is
also a long showdown with an actress
and ex-lover of Merrill’s, played by Janice
Rule. The dialogue in this scene is elec-
trifying and pure Cheever: the excuses of
the unhappily married man, the barbs of
the hurt and furious mistress. However,
ming pools themselves, the cinematogra-
phy of David L. Quaid – “the transparent,
clear water”, as a trance-like Merrill tells
a neighbour.
I finished it wondering why Cheever
Ryūsuke scored a hit in 2021 with his adap-
tation of a Murakami Haruki story in the
form of the Oscar-winning Drive My Car
– but it’s his anthology film Wheel of Fortune
and Fantasy (which came out the same year)
that shows how the work of story writ-
ers could be adapted. The film has three
vignettes that allow for ambiguity, but also
capture the emotional intensity that under-
pins stories. I’d love to see a similar adapta-
tion of some of Cheever’s work; the world
shouldn’t give up on him just yet. For me,
his vision of the lives, and self-deceptions,
of adults will never go entirely out of style.
24 TALKIES
TV Eye
A true-crime drama may be in part an act
of remembrance – but one that distorts reality
There is a scene early on in the first episode
of ITV’s The Long Shadow (Lewis Arnold),
the recent seven-part dramatisation of
the hunt for the British serial killer Peter
Sutcliffe, in which Detective Chief Super-
intendent Dennis Hoban (Toby Jones)
is introduced to the four children of Sut-
cliffe’s first known murder victim, Wilma
Mary McCann (Gemma Laurie).
Asked by seven-year-old Sonia (Alexa
Goodall), “Is mummy coming soon?”,
Hoban replies, “Mummy’s not coming,
love. Mummy’s had an accident… She says
you’re not to worry. She’s in heaven and
she’s waiting for you.”
Next, he asks the children to pose for
a subsequently infamous series of press
photos in which McCann’s young chil-
dren are shown looking into the camera,
holding their “favourite toys”, a gambit
that Hoban hoped would help to garner
sympathy from the public. “That’s the mes-
sage,” says Hoban. “She were a mother,
with four kids.”
Shot in ochre and pale blue chiaro-
scuro and underscored by a limpid piece
of piano music by Sarah Warne, it’s a
curious scene. Hoban’s actions can now
be seen as ill-judged and exploitative but
also, within the context of the times, com-
passionate and enlightened; a man out
of step with the misogynist ethics of his
own police force, keen to present Wilma
Mary McCann as something more than
a sex worker and a victim. As filmed by
Arnold, it’s a scene that is both maudlin
and unnerving. Jones’s delivery of Hoban’s
words is simultaneously phrased as sym-
pathetic and a little too earnest, a perfor-
mance by the DCS that doesn’t quite ring
true. We’re left thinking something can be
well-intentioned and moving, yet also ill-
judged, counterfeit and upsetting. It is, as
a result, a scene that perfectly encapsulates
the coexisting strengths and flaws of The
Long Shadow, a drama that is, like DCS
Hoban, not so much enlightened as in the
process of becoming enlightened, yet ulti-
mately failing.
Response to The Long Shadow has been
generally favourable, with both critics and
viewers commending writer George Kay
for his decision to focus on the female lives
destroyed by Sutcliffe; not just the women
Andrew Male
@Andr6wMale
he killed but those who were attacked and
escaped, those left bereaved, or simply
those who inhabited the world of fear and
dread that Sutcliffe engendered in the
north of England in the late 1970s.
There have been dissenting voices. In
a recent brace of New Statesman articles
devoted to The Long Shadow, the critic
Rachel Cooke asked, “What is wrong
with our culture that stories about abused
women are served up, like so much supper
on a tea tray, week after week?” Cooke
questioned the arrogance of the (usually)
male writers, who are seeking to “explain”
these events, but also the ethics of making
entertainment from these horrific crimes
against women.
I was watching the final few episodes of
The Long Shadow while visiting friends in
Liverpool recently, and on Remembrance
Sunday we attended the Eucharist at the
Anglican cathedral. Amid the prayers,
hymns and Bible readings, the Reverend
Debs Davies gave a sermon on grief, cen-
tred around a quote from Thessalonians
4:13, which she paraphrased as “we want
you to be informed about those who have
died, brothers and sisters, so that you may
grieve – as those who have hope”. She then
addressed the complexity of grief around
acts of remembrance, saying that “commu-
nities who do not have a platform for their
grief are denied the opportunity to process A telling comparison with the pro-
their loss. Permission to grieve… is greatly
Pondering the gramme would be Liza Williams’s brilliant
sought after, but rarely found.” sermon I wondered three-part 2019 documentary on Sutcliffe,
Pondering Davies’s sermon the next whether true- The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British
day, I wondered whether these true-crime Crime Story. Directed, written and almost
dramas weren’t, in part, a flawed process
crime dramas entirely produced by women, here was a
of grieving; in the process of becoming, yet weren’t, in part, series about the silencing and erasing of
ultimately failing. a flawed process women by men – Sutcliffe, the police, the
For beyond their reassuring narrative media – in which female survivors and wit-
structures, satisfying moral resolutions
of grieving; in nesses were given back their voices: a com-
and wallows in grim nostalgia there is, in the process of munity previously denied the opportunity
these shows, a distorted attempt at an act becoming, yet to process their loss informing us about
of public remembrance. The limitations, of those who have died. Because they’re
course, are inherent in who is writing these
ultimately failing telling the truth, because their voices are
acts of remembrance (mostly men) and in real and not created for the purposes of
the utilisation of dramatic structures that dramatisation, because these women are
inevitably place narrative pleasure ahead survivors who have been allowed to speak
of historical truth. “Some scenes and and share their grief, they also allow us to
characters have been created for the pur- ABOVE
grieve and move on with hope.
poses of dramatisation,” to quote the title Toby Jones as Detective
Chief Superintendent
card that precedes every episode of The Dennis Hoban in
Andrew Male is a freelance critic
Long Shadow. The Long Shadow who lives in South London

Kevin B. Lee
@ alsolikelife
As films slip down the rankings over the decades,
will we forget what made them seem great?
When I first watched my way through the
Sight and Sound polls’ top tens in my teens,
the film I struggled most to understand
was La Règle du jeu (1939). It was perhaps
the first great film for which I had to over-
come an initial indifference to appreciate.
Through college readings that explicated
its nuanced cinematic staging, applied to
anti-fascist French farce, I came to value
it as Europe’s alternative to Citizen Kane
(1941). It was also how I interpreted its
decades-long placement right behind
Kane at the top of the poll. But the 2022
poll had it at 13, ending its run as the
only film to have placed in every edition
of the top ten. To see it lose its standing
was as epochal to me as the dramatic rise
of Jeanne Dielman (1976) to the top, as if
a time-honoured philosophy of cinema
embodied by Renoir’s masterpiece was
fading from view.
Some may dismiss the significance
of these rises and falls when all of these
movies are unquestionably important,
but canonical status doesn’t ensure a film’s
contemporary resonance. Tracing the
changes between each edition of the poll
reveals some of the historical forces that
determine such resonance. The first poll
in 1952 was heavy with post-World War II
humanist sentiment, led by Bicycle Thieves
(1948) only four years after its release.
France was never more dominant, with
four titles in the top ten. Of the six silent
films on that list (subsequent polls have
never had more than three), Chaplin’s
City Lights and The Gold Rush (1925) took
second and third place; they now stand
at 36 and 352, respectively. Why did the
former become Chaplin’s signature work?
Perhaps the passage of time distinguished
it as an apotheosis of silent filmmaking,
made defiantly in 1931 when the form had
already succumbed to the sound age.
By 1962, both Chaplin titles and five
others were ousted by the likes of Citi-
zen Kane and L’avventura (then only two
years old). These films, with their formal-
ILLUSTRATION BY MARC DAVID SPENGLER
ist interrogations of cinematic realism
beyond humanism, mark the influence
of André Bazin and Cahiers du cinéma on
the preceding decade of film criticism.
Fitting the Bazinian mode, Mizoguchi
Kenji’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) made the
25
Poll positio n
first appearance by a film from outside
Yesterday’s best
the US and Europe, repeating the feat Current placement of f ilms that placed highly in past editions of the poll
in 1972 before giving way to Seven Samu-
rai (1954) in the 1980s and Tokyo Story Bicycle Thieves # 1 (1952) #41 (2022)
(1953) in the 1990s. Nowadays, Miyazaki
The Gold Rush #3 (1952) #352 (2022)
Hayao’s films rank higher than Mizogu-
chi’s, while Chaplin ranks higher than Louisiana Story #5 (1952) #839 (2022)
Michelangelo Antonioni. L’Av ventura #2 (1962) #38 (2022)
While Battleship Potemkin (1925) was Greed #4 (1962) # 184 (2022)
shut out of the last two editions of the Ugetsu Monogatari #5 (1962) #90 (2022)
top ten, it enjoyed its best placing in 1972,
Bat tleship Potemkin #3 (1972) #54 (2022)
possibly due to the strength of leftist and
avant-garde cinema at the time. Auteur 8 1/2 #4 (1972) #31 (2022)
theory was well established by then, with The General #8 (1972) #95 (2022)
Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman as the The Magnificent Ambersons #8 (1982) # 169 (2022)
causes célèbres with two films each in the
Pather Panchali #8 (1992) #35 (2022)
top 11, a feat not repeated since. With The
General (1926) at number eight, Keaton’s
kinetic brilliance supplanted Chaplin as The films that have After decades of languishing just outside
the silent comic of choice. Fast forward the top ten, Sunrise (1927) finally broke
to the current poll, where City Lights has taken their place through as a silent film for the 2000s,
retaken the lead and Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. are the benefactors while Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie
(1924) ranks higher than The General. Is of an unprecedented Camera (1929) replaced Potemkin as the
that because Sherlock’s post-cinematic leading Soviet-era entry, benefitting in
dream sequence holds up better than The shift towards part from the 21st-century renaissance of
General ’s problematic sympathies with a global, sexual and nonfiction art cinema. In the strongest
racist regime? racial inclusion, the showing of silent-era films since 1972,
US cinema was never so dominant as both films appeared in 2012 alongside
in 1982, holding six spots in the top ten. historical hallmarks 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl
This was partly due to the exalted status of the last poll Theodor Dreyer’s film has, somewhat
of genre f ilm studies, with an MGM bizarrely, appeared in every other top ten
musical, a Hitchcock thriller and a Ford since 1952; while it dropped to 21st last
western cracking the poll, and even Seven year, look for its comeback in 2032).
Samurai serving ass a global counterpart. Amid
Am the grand shake-up of 2022,
In 1992, the pendulumulum swung towards mainstays like Potemkin, 8½ (1963) and La
mains
global humanist cinema,
nema, with Tokyo Story Règle have seemingly lost their footing,
and Pather Panchali ali (1955) debuting. I the bases
ba for their appreciation less ubiq-
would have predicted cted greater fortunes uitous. The films that have taken their
uitou
ahead for Satyajit Ray’s film given India’s place are undoubtedly the benefactors of
indomitable film culture, but it is Ozu an unprecedented
un shift towards global,
Yasujirō who has since
ince held his spot, per-
r sexual and racial inclusion, the historical
sexua
haps because his serene view on urban hallmarks of the last poll. Some of these
hallm
family crisis resonates
ates with newcomers are bound to meet the same
newc
viewers across Asiaa declining standing as their predecessors,
declin
and beyond. as new phases of history will lead to new
The 2002 and 2012 concerns and corresponding resonances
conce
polls saw the least east with certain films. If that becomes the
number of debuts into case,
ca one hopes that those in the
the top ten, of whichich future
fu will at least strive to under-
two were films from om stand
sta why so much worth was once
the 1920s, a sign off seen
see in them.
the era’s penchantt
for DVD -fuelled d Kevin
Ke B. Lee is Locarno Film Festival
archival rediscovery. professor
pro for the future of cinema at USI
 In Memoriam
26

Obituaries of Those who died in 2023

COMPILED BY BOB MASTRANGELO

Glenda Jackson
9 M AY 1 9 3 6 — 1 5 J U N E 2 0 2 3
“All that I am is an actress. I’d sooner not
work than do work I don’t like.” As fear-
less in her career choices as she was in her
art, Glenda Jackson achieved the rare feat
of two considerable careers, when as one
of the greatest stage and screen actors of
her generation, she became a successful
Labour politician in a surprise second act.
Born in Birkenhead, her early career
was transformed, after Rada and rep jobs,
by a fruitful RSC stint from 1964 with
Peter Brook, where her memorably psy-
chotic Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade was
captured on film in 1967. Having caught
Ken Russell’s eye with a caustic turn in the
psychosexual oddity Negatives (1968), she
made two groundbreaking films with him
which would alter the course of both their
careers. Her spiky, mercurial performance
as sexually curious Gudrun in Russell’s
heady classic-meets-counterculture adap-
tation of Women in Love (1969) brought
her an Oscar. Displaying the singular
over by a Bedford truck”). Along with her
sexually confident Nina in the florid The
Music Lovers (1970), in which she famously
rolled naked on the floor of a train, Jack-
son’s portraits of frustrated sexuality made
her an unlikely arthouse sex symbol, incon-
gruously dubbed ‘Britain’s First Lady of
the Flesh’ by Photoplay magazine. What she
was actually exposing was female discon-
tent – best exemplified by her brittle divor-
cée in a bisexual love triangle in Sunday
Bloody Sunday (1971), desperation leaking
gently through her surface sophistication.
The year 1971 became her annus mirabilis,
when she also brought her natural author-
ity and rich commanding alto voice to the
BBC’s landmark miniseries Elizabeth R (in
an age when film stars routinely eschewed
TV). A sharply human portrayal of the
Tudor queen’s struggle with duty and
desire from wary teen to imperious elderly
monarch, the role brought her mainstream
fame and a pair of well-deserved Emmys.
Jackson’s other fierce portrayal of Elizabeth
In the 70s, I energised the tasteful Mary Queen of Scots
that same year, capped by her spoofing her
her abrasive, regal screen persona playing Cleopatra on
challenging TV’s The Morecambe and Wise Show.
qualities on Jackson’s rapid success and her cool,
combative style helped her become the
screen embodied archetypal 70s British female star. Her
a decade of abrasive, challenging qualities on screen
discontent and embodied a decade of discontent and fast-
growing feminism. Even her comedies had
fast-growing a bellicose edge, 1973’s A Touch of Class a bat-
feminism. tle-of-the-sexes comedy pitching Jackson’s
Even her chic, deadpan wit against a wisecracking
George Segal, and winning her a second
comedies had Oscar. Joseph Losey, directing her in the
a bellicose edge sly Stoppard-scripted The Romantic English-
woman (1975) thought her “the best techni-
cal actress I ever knew”, though Jackson
cheerfully admitted that her full-tilt harri-
dan Lady Hamilton in Bequest to the Nation
(1973) and a whip-wielding Bernhardt in
The Incredible Sarah (1976) were mistakes.
Founding Bowden Films with producer
(1978), in which Jackson expertly revealed
the poet Stevie Smith’s pluck and vulner-
ability. A pair of breezy US romcoms with
Walter Matthau, House Calls (1978) and the
nimble Hopscotch (1980), showed off her dry
wit, but were the last hurrah of her most
successful screen decade.
For just as theatre gave her a run of
extraordinary 80s roles (she scorched
through Strange Interlude, Phaedra and The
House of Bernarda Alba between 1984 and
1986 alone), her cinema options became
noticeably narrower. Aside from sensitive,
understated roles as a dowdy first love
in Return of the Soldier (1982) and a lonely
reptile-rescuer in 1985’s Turtle Diary, she
was game and good in lesser Altmans like
Health (1980) and Beyond Therapy (1987).
Ever loyal to Ken Russell, her scornful
Herodias in Salome’s Last Dance (1988) and
an impressive Mrs Brangwen in The Rain-
bow (1989) were among those films’ few
good points. Perhaps, as the critic Barry
Norman suggested (paraphrasing Norma
Desmond), it was the movies, not Jackson,
that had grown smaller.
Increasingly politically active in the 80s,
she was propelled by her anger at Thatch-
erism to stand as Labour candidate for
Hampstead and Highgate in 1992. A
conviction politician, she was as fierce in a
23-year career in the Commons as she had
been on screen, savaging the Tories over
welfare reform, then increasingly criticis-
ing her party from the back benches, espe-
cially over the Iraq war.
A final, astonishing third act material-
ised after she retired from politics in 2015,
with a ferocious King Lear on stage, and
a Tony for her monstrous mother in Three
Tall Women on Broadway. Film offers were
slower to materialise, but 2019’s BBC film
Elizabeth Is Missing showed she’d lost none
of her acerbic power, playing a dementia-
ravaged elderly woman aggressively piec-
ing together a family mystery. Her last film
performance, as a sardonic wife covering
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

steely intelligence and powerful playing
that became her trademark, her forceful
performance stood up to Russell’s inven-
tive excesses (co-star Oliver Reed said that
acting opposite her “was like being run
OPPOSITE
Glenda Jackson as Vickie in
A Touch of Class (1973)
Robert Enders gave her better options,
helping her put her stage hits like a darkly
comic Hedda (1975) on film, alongside the
misfiring Watergate satire Nasty Habits
(1976) and the quietly excellent Stevie
for Michael Caine’s runaway veteran in The
Great Escaper, released in the UK in Octo-
ber, was as satisfyingly sharp and unsenti-
mental as any that she’d given in her pomp.
k ate stables
28

Actors
Inna Churikova (5 Oct 1943 – 14 Jan
2023): Russian actor known for frequently
starring in the films of her husband Gleb
Panfilov (The Beginning; Vassa).

Marlene Clark (19 Dec 1937 – 18 May

2023): actor mostly seen in 1970s
Joss Ackland (29 Feb 1928 – 19 Nov
genre pictures who made her biggest
2023): character actor whose strong
impression as Ganja in the arthouse
presence and workaholic tendencies led
horror Ganja & Hess.
to a wide variety of roles (White Mischief;
Lethal Weapon 2).
Teodor Corban (28 Apr 1957 – 17 Jan
2023): actor who was prominent in the
Alan Arkin (26 Mar 1934 – 29 June
Romanian New Wave (12:08 East of
2023): actor of great versatility whose
Bucharest; Aferim!).
remarkable career spanned 60 years (The
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; The In-Laws; Little
Michel Côté (25 June 1950 – 29 May
Miss Sunshine).
2023): Quebecois actor who was among
Canada’s most popular screen stars ABOVE Byun Hee-bong (1942-2023)
Keith Ba xter (29 Apr 1933 – 24 Sept
(Cruising Bar; C.R. A.Z.Y.).
2023): stage veteran occasionally seen in
Glenda Jackson (9 May 1936 – 15 June Murray Melvin (10 Aug 1932 – 14 Apr
films who made a memorable Prince Hal
Patricia Dainton (12 Apr 1930 – 31 May 2023): see obituary on page 26. 2023): broke ground as one of the cinema’s
opposite Orson Welles’s Falstaff in Chimes
2023): Scottish actress who started in earliest sympathetic gay characters in A
at Midnight.
films as a teenager in the 1940s, then Vani Jairam (30 Nov 1945 – 4 Feb 2023): Taste of Honey and played roles for Kubrick
moved into leading roles in the 50s (The playback singer of Indian cinema who and Ken Russell.
John Beasley (26 June 1943 – 30 May
Dancing Years; The Third Alibi). performed in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu,
2023): made his film debut in his forties
Malayalam and over a dozen other Hildegard Neil (20 May 1939 – 19 Sept
and worked steadily in supporting parts
Melinda Dillon (13 Oct 1939 – 9 Jan languages (Guddi; Dheerga Sumangali). 2023): actor who starred as Cleopatra in
for over 30 years (The Apostle; The Sum of
2023): delivered sensitive performances Antony and Cleopatra and played second
All Fears).
in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Inga Landgré (6 Aug 1927 – 31 July 2023): leads in A Touch of Class and England
Absence of Malice and was Ralphie’s Swedish actor who starred as young Made Me.
Harry Belafonte (1 Mar 1927 – 25 Apr
long-suffering mom in A Christmas Story. Nelly in Bergman’s debut film Crisis and
2023): see obituary, opposite.
was the knight’s wife in The Seventh Seal. Barry Newman (7 Nov 1930 – 11 May
Ted Donaldson (20 Aug 1933 – 1 Mar 2023): played the lead role in the
Helmut Berger (29 May 1944 – 18 May
2023): child actor (A Tree Grows in Piper Laurie (22 Jan 1932 – 14 Oct 2023): existential road movie Vanishing Point
2023): Austrian star of Visconti’s later
Brooklyn) who starred in the boy-and-his- gave an unforgettable performance in The but was more often seen in support
films (The Damned; Ludwig) who also
dog Rusty film series of the 1940s. Hustler, then abandoned film acting for 15 (The Limey).
worked with De Sica and Losey.
years before returning to play the fanatical
Sharon Farrell (24 Dec 1940 – 15 May mother in Carrie. Richard Ng (17 Dec 1939 – 9 Apr 2023):
Jane Birkin (14 Dec 1946 – 16 July 2023):
2023): had major roles in Marlowe and popular actor of Hong Kong comedies,
English actor and singer who found
The Reivers and was the mother to the Sarah Lawson (6 Aug 1928 – 18 Aug especially the Lucky Stars and Pom Pom
greater fame in France (La Piscine; Jane B.
murderous newborn in the cult horror 2023): played leading roles in the series of movies.
par Agnès V.; La Belle Noiseuse).
It’s Alive. 1950s (You Know What Sailors Are) and
co-starred in the Hammer horror The María Onet to (18 Aug 1966 – 2 Mar
Robert Blake (18 Sept 1933 – 9 Mar
Frederic Forrest (23 Dec 1936 – 23 June Devil Rides Out. 2023): gained international attention
2023): child actor who turned to darker
2023): played the title role in Hammett, for The Headless Woman and played
roles as an adult in TV (Baretta) and films
romanced Bette Midler in The Rose and Michael Lerner (22 June 1941 – 8 Apr leads in several other Argentinian films
(In Cold Blood; Lost Highway).
was a favourite of Francis Ford Coppola 2023): character actor (Rafelson’s The (2010’s Puzzle).
(Apocalypse Now). Postman Always Rings Twice; Eight Men
Jim Brown (17 Feb 1936 – 18 May 2023):
Out) who had the role of his career as the Mat thew Perry (19 Aug 1969 – 28 Oct
superstar athlete who successfully pivoted
Michael Gambon (19 Oct 1940 – 27 Sept studio chief in Barton Fink. 2023): catapulted to fame as Chandler
from American football to acting, mostly
2023): powerful actor of stage, TV (The Bing on TV’s Friends and starred in some
in action roles (The Dirty Dozen; 100 Rifles).
Singing Detective) and films (The Cook, the Gina Lollobrigida (4 July 1927 – 16 big-screen comedies (Fools Rush In; The
Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) who reached Jan 2023): glamorous star who also Whole Nine Yards).
Byun Hee-bong (8 June 1942 – 18 Sept 2023):
new audiences as Dumbledore in the distinguished herself as a photographer
South Korean actor who had prominent
Harry Potter movies. and sculptor (Bread, Love and Dreams; Beat Gordon Pinsent (12 July 1930 – 25 Feb
supporting roles in the films of Bong Joon Ho
the Devil; Beautiful but Dangerous). 2023): distinguished Canadian actor and
(Barking Dogs Never Bite; The Host).
Léa Garcia (11 Mar 1933 – 15 Aug 2023): occasional writer and director who also
Brazilian actor who had a key supporting Ignacio López Tarso (15 Jan 1925 – 11 Mar found work in Hollywood (The Rowdyman;
Margit Carstensen (29 Feb 1940 – 1 June
role as Serafina in Black Orpheus and 2023): played the title role in Mexican classic Away from Her).
2023): German actor who was a regular
starred in the cinema novo classic Macario and supporting roles for Buñuel and
in Fassbinder’s productions, including
Ganga Zumba. Huston (Nazarín; Under the Volcano). Lance Reddick (7 June 1962 – 17 Mar
playing the title roles in The Bitter Tears of
2023): actor who was often cast as
Petra von Kant and Martha.
Carlin Glynn (19 Feb 1940 – 13 July Antonella Lualdi (6 July 1931 – 10 Aug commanding figures for TV (The Wire)
2023): character actor who split her time 2023): Italian leading lady of the 1950s and films (Angel Has Fallen) and was
between stage, TV and films (The Trip to and 60s who also worked in France the hotel concierge Charon in the John
Bountiful; Judy Berlin). (Autant-Lara’s The Red and the Black; Wick movies.
Let’s Talk About Women).
Lelia Goldoni (1 Oct 1936 – 22 July 2023): Paul Reubens (27 Aug 1952 – 30 July
earned Bafta nominations for her lead Mark Margolis (26 Nov 1939 – 3 Aug 2023): acted in a variety of roles but
role in Cassavetes’s landmark Shadows and 2023): long-time character actor (Scarface; is most identified with his surrealist
her supporting turn in Alice Doesn’t Live Pi) who found late-career recognition on character Pee-wee Herman (Pee-wee’s Big
Here Anymore. TV’s Breaking Bad. Adventure; Mystery Men).

Barry Humphries (17 Feb 1934 – 22
Apr 2023): actor (The Adventures of Barry
McKenzie; Finding Nemo) who was one
of Australia’s most famous exports,
especially as Dame Edna Everage.
Gayle Hunnicut t (6 Feb 1943 – 31 Aug
2023): American actor who spent much
of her career in England (Marlowe; The
ABOVE Piper Laurie (1932-2023)
Legend of Hell House).
Juliet te Mayniel (22 Jan 1936 – 21 July
2023): had prominent roles for Chabrol and
Franju (Les Cousins; Eyes Without a Face) and
won best actress at the Berlinale for Kirmes.
David McCallum (19 Sept 1933 – 25
Sept 2023): supporting actor who found
stardom on TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,
which briefly elevated him to leading roles
(The Great Escape; Sol Madrid).
Richard Roundtree (9 July 1942 – 24 Oct
2023): achieved screen immortality in the
title role of Shaft and continued acting for
TV and films for 50 years (Q: The Winged
Serpent; Se7en).
Bet ta St John (26 Nov 1929 – 23 June
2023): leading lady of the 1950s, both
in the US and the UK (Dream Wife;
Corridors of Blood).
 IN MEMORIAM 29

Harry Belafonte
1 MARCH 1927 — 25 APRIL 2023

“I wasn’t an artist who’d become an activ-

ist,” clarified Harry Belafonte in his 2011
memoir My Song. “I was an activist who’d
become an artist. Ever since my mother
had drummed it into me, I’d felt the need
to fight injustice wherever I saw it, in what-
ever way I could.”
Singer, actor, producer, protester,
human rights ambassador and all-round
barrier-breaking American icon, Bela-
fonte was one of the 20th-century cultural
figures in whose life and career activism
and art intersected most profoundly. As
Belafonte opened doors for other Black
performers, he often quoted the words of
another mentor, Paul Robeson, including
in the speech he gave as he received the
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in
2014: “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.
They are civilisation’s radical voice.”
Belafonte bravely raised his voice
throughout his lifetime, not only in the
US civil rights struggle – a confidant of
Martin Luther King, he was one of the
leaders in the 1963 March on Washington
– but in the service of causes worldwide.
Part of Belafonte’s greatness was to think
and act globally, whether by performing
songs from many different traditions and
cultures and promoting international art-
ists, or by campaigning to end apartheid in
South Africa and combat poverty on the
wider continent.
Belafonte’s ethnic heritage itself con-
stituted a transgression of America’s iniq- exchange taking place between me and my Buck and the Preacher (1972), which memo-
uitous racial divides. Born in Harlem in Belafonte’s audience that was forbidden under other rably roughed up his image, was especially
1927 to parents of Scottish Jamaican, Afro film career is conditions,” he said. good. And he made a sensational return to
Jamaican and Dutch Jewish descent, Bela- sometimes By contrast, Belafonte’s film career is the screen in Robert Altman’s Kansas City
fonte lived with his maternal grandmother sometimes perceived as unfulfilled. But (1996) as the gangster Seldom Seen: cigar-
in Jamaica throughout much of the 1930s. perceived as the 14 features he made, with roles rang- smoking, coke-snorting and delivering
Returning to New York, his passion for unfulfilled. But ing from leads to supporting parts and profane putdowns with relish.
performing was stimulated when, while the 14 features tiny cameos, demonstrated that he never Belafonte remained politically active
working as a janitor’s assistant, he was shied away from morally complex charac- to the end; responses towards him in his
given tickets to see a production by the he made showed ters – or from comedy. Three diverse films later years tended to be reverent but he
American Negro Theatre. The experi- that he never alongside Dorothy Dandridge – his debut strongly divided opinion with scathing
ence was epiphanic, inspiring Belafonte to shied away from in the small-scale school drama Bright Road denunciations of George W. Bush and
study acting under the renowned German (1953), the spectacular musical Carmen support for Hugo Chávez. His aforemen-
expat director Erwin Piscator (his contem- morally complex Jones (1954) and the incisive West Indies- tioned 2014 speech also openly criticised
poraries included Marlon Brando, Rod characters set ensemble piece Island in the Sun (1957), the history of Hollywood racial represen-
Steiger and Tony Curtis). with its controversial interracial romance tation, a reference to The Birth of a Nation
A discovery of folk music in all its – were highlights. (1915) surely inspiring his scene in Spike
variety set him on a path that led to his His founding of the HarBel production Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018), his final film.
Calypso (1956): the US’s first million-selling company sadly led to only two releases: Yet Belafonte’s belief in the transformative
album by a solo artist. Belafonte remained the compromised but fascinating post- potential of art never wavered. “Much that
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

modest about his skills as a singer, but his
warm, inviting tone, charisma and striking
good looks soon won him a devoted fan-
base – a power that he harnessed for the
greater good. “I knew that there was an
apocalyptic drama The World, the Flesh and
the Devil and the excellent noir Odds Against
Tomorrow (both 1959). Collaboration on
ABOVE
two films with his friend Sidney Poitier
Harry Belafonte also proved fruitful: the revisionist western
we know about human existence has been
what artists have left for us,” he said. His
own exceptional life and work provide just
such a resource and ongoing inspiration.
Alex ramon
30 IN MEMORIAM

Sakamoto Ryuichi
17 JANUARY 1952 — 28 MARCH 2023

When Sakamoto Ryuichi – musician, film

score composer and occasional actor –
died from cancer in March, aged 71, his
family shared one of his favourite quotes:
“Ars longa, vita brevis” – “Art is long, life
is short.”
Sakamoto did indeed leave behind an
immortal body of work, spanning quirky
electro-pop, lavish orchestral film scores,
new age ambient pieces, experimental
opera, computer game soundtracks and
even mobile phone ringtones. His rich
legacy also includes collaborations across
multiple artforms, from Pina Bausch to
Youssou N’Dour, Iggy Pop to Madonna,
David Bowie to the Dalai Lama.
After a chart-topping pop career in
Japan, first with the trailblazing synth-rock
trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, then as a solo
artist, Sakamoto moved into scoring films
with Ōshima Nagisa’s Merry Christmas Mr.
Lawrence (1983), a drama about repressed
homosexuality and erotically charged
sadism in a Japanese POW camp. Blend-
ing electronics with sampled gamelan
instruments, chimes and woodblocks, this
luminous score spawned a Top 20 hit for
Sakamoto in collaboration with singer
David Sylvian, ‘Forbidden Colours’.
Sakamoto went on to soundtrack more
than 40 film and television projects over
four decades, for Brian De Palma, Pedro
Almodóvar, Koreeda Hirokazu, Oliver
Stone and others; but the Italian maestro
Bernardo Bertolucci would become his
prime cinematic collaborator. Sakamoto’s
ravishing symphonic score for The Last
Emperor (1987), completed in just two
weeks following a frantic phone call from
producer Jeremy Thomas, earned him an
Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe. Sakamoto’s The Sheltering Sky [1990], the relationship underwent major surgery: the cancer had
Sakamoto’s film work also included a got a little better. And then the third film, returned, spreading to both lungs.
handful of acting roles, generally in feature ravishing Little Buddha [1993], it got much better. We Even while suffering stage 4 cancer,
projects that he also scored, but he was a score for The just needed time.” Sakamoto continued to compose and
reluctant screen presence – he hated his Last Emperor, Sakamoto never stopped restlessly record. “Since I have made it this far in
scowling performance as the closeted gay experimenting. His score for Alejan- life,” he wrote in 2021, “I hope to be able
prison guard in Merry Christmas Mr. Law- completed in dro González Iñárritu’s frontier western to make music until my last moment, like
rence. Even so, he grudgingly accepted a just two weeks, The Revenant (2015), in conjunction with Bach and Debussy whom I adore.” So it
small part in The Last Emperor. “If you get earned him Carsten Nicolai, aka electronic artist Alva proved. Among his final cinematic works
a phone call from Bertolucci, you can’t Noto, is a boldly austere mosaic of drones, are two fine documentaries, Stephen
refuse,” he told me in 2005. an Oscar, a brooding silences and digitally tweaked Nomura Schible’s career-spanning portrait
Musician and director shared a fruitful Grammy and a nature sounds. When Sakamoto described Coda (2017) and this year’s elegiac concert
bond, after initial tensions. “In the begin- Golden Globe The Revenant as a “return from death”, he film Opus, beautifully captured in glow-
ning, Bertolucci was not easy,” Sakamoto was speaking personally as much as cin- ing monochrome by Sakamoto’s son, Sora
IMAGE: JOHNNY GREIG/ALAMY

told me. “We are from different cultural
backgrounds, our generations are different,
he is ten years older than me. He’s Italian,
he’s a hippie, he used to be a communist.
Ha! But the second film we worked on,
ematically. He composed the music soon
after being diagnosed with oropharyngeal
cancer, in June 2014. Responding well to
ABOVE
treatment, he resumed his prolific work
Sakamoto Ryuichi schedule soon afterwards. But in 2021, he
Neo. Released posthumously, it serves as
an elegant encore to a unique career. Life
may be short, but Sakamoto filled his with
exquisite musical and cinematic riches.
stephen dalton
 31

Julian Sands (4 Jan 1958 – c.13 Jan 2023):
portrayed romantic leads and villains
but also had a refreshing taste for more
bizarre or offbeat roles (A Room with a
View; Warlock; Naked Lunch).
Cinematographers
Wei Wei (17 May 1922 – 2 Nov 2023): actor
whose most famous role came as Yuwen,
the lonely wife who reunites with a former
lover in the Chinese classic Spring in a
Small Town.

Henri Serre (26 Feb 1931 – 9 Oct 2023):
French actor who was best known for his
portrayal of Jim in Jules et Jim.
Carmen Sevilla (16 Oct 1930 – 27 June
2023): starred in Spanish musicals,
comedies and melodramas (1958’s
Vengeance) and was Mary Magdalene
in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings.
Peter Simonischek (6 Aug 1946 – 29
May 2023): leading actor of the Austrian
stage who had his greatest film role as
the father who challenges his daughter’s
complacency in Toni Erdmann.
Tom Sizemore (29 Nov 1961 – 3 Mar
2023): specialised in tough, dangerous or
even unhinged characters, seen on either
side of the law (Natural Born Killers; Heat;
Saving Private Ryan).
Stella Stevens (1 Oct 1938 – 17 Feb
2023): played leading lady to Jerry Lewis
in The Nutty Professor, co-starred in The
Ballad of Cable Hogue and was a passenger
in The Poseidon Adventure.
Ray Stevenson (25 May 1965 – 21 May
2023): actor whose imposing presence led
to frequent casting as warriors and villains
(Thor movies; Kill the Irishman; RRR).
Raquel Welch (5 Sept 1940 – 15 Feb
John Bailey (10 Aug 1942 – 10 Nov
2023): memorably wore a fur bikini in
2023): cinematographer (Ordinary People;
One Million Years B.C., was a microscopic
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters; Groundhog
scientist in Fantastic Voyage and proved
Day) who also served two terms as
her comic skills in Lester’s The Three
president of the Motion Picture Academy.
Musketeers.
Bill Butler (7 Apr 1921 – 5 Apr 2023):
Cindy Williams (22 Aug 1947 – 25 Jan
cinematographer renowned for his
2023): had a few film roles in the 1970s
work on several classics of the 1970s
(American Graffiti; The Conversation) before
(The Conversation; Jaws; One Flew over the
achieving stardom as one-half of TV’s
Cuckoo’s Nest).
Laverne & Shirley.
ABOVE Carl Davis (1936-2023)
Jacques Haitkin (29 Aug 1950 – 21 Mar
Treat Williams (1 Dec 1951 – 12 June
2023): shot many horror pictures (Craven’s
2023): actor whose performances regularly Joseph Koo (23 Feb 1931 – 3 Jan 2023):
A Nightmare on Elm Street) and handled
dug beneath the surface of his classical composer whose pop songs and scores
second unit photography on big-budget
movie star looks (Hair; Prince of the City; were a staple of Hong Kong TV
action films (Fast & Furious series).
Smooth Talk). (Below the Lion Rock) and films
(Fist of Fury; A Better Tomorrow).
Elemér Ragályi (18 Apr 1939 – 30 Mar
Yoon Jeong-hee (30 July 1944 – 19 Jan
2023): Hungarian cinematographer who
2023): actor who was one of South Bill Lee (23 July 1928 – 24 May 2023):
also worked in the US (István Gaál’s The
Korea’s greatest screen stars, from her composer, bassist and father of Spike Lee
Falcons; Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar).
1967 debut Sorrowful Youth to her 2010 who scored his son’s early films (Do the
swan song Poetry. Right Thing; Mo’ Better Blues).
Owen Roizman (22 Sept 1936 – 6 Jan 2023):
director of photography who captured
Burt Young (30 Apr 1940 – 8 Oct 2023): Robbie Robertson (5 July 1943 – 9 Aug
some of the defining images of the New
character actor who specialised in 2023): songwriter and guitarist with The
Hollywood era (The French Connection; The
streetwise working stiffs and no-nonsense Band who regularly worked with Scorsese
Exorcist; Network).
gangsters (Rocky movies; The Pope of in various musical capacities from The Last
Greenwich Village). Waltz to Killers of the Flower Moon.
Soumendu Roy (7 Feb 1933 – 27
Sept 2023): camera assistant on
Sak amoto Ryuichi (17 Jan 1952 – 28 Mar

Sylvia Syms (6 Jan 1934 – 27 Jan 2023):

versatile actor who became a star in the
late 1950s and later transitioned into
character parts (Ice Cold in Alex; Victim;
The Queen).
Miiko Tak a (24 July 1925 – 4 Jan 2023):
made her acting debut as Marlon Brando’s
love interest in Sayonara and co-starred in
Cary Grant’s last film, Walk, Don’t Run.
Nadja Tiller (16 Mar 1929 – 21 Feb 2023):
Austrian actor who was a leading star of
German-language films in the 1950s and
60s (Das Mädchen Rosemarie; 1962’s Lulu).
Chaim Topol (9 Sept 1935 – 8 Mar 2023):
Israeli actor (Sallah; Losey’s Galileo) who
had his defining role, on both stage and
screen, as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Tina Turner (26 Nov 1939 – 24 May
2023): rock icon who was the Acid Queen
in Tommy and Aunty Entity in Mad Max
Beyond Thunderdome and sang the title tune
to GoldenEye.
CARL DAVIES PORTRAIT: TREVOR LEIGHTON
Animation
Per Åhlin (7 Aug 1931 – 1 May 2023):
filmmaker who pioneered feature
animation in Sweden, often incorporating
live-action elements (Out of an Old Man’s
Head; Dunderklumpen!).
Paul Bush (2 Feb 1956 – 17 Aug 2023):
independent filmmaker known for
his experimental animation technique
(The Albatross; The Five Minute Museum).
Ian Emes (17 Aug 1949 – 16 July 2023):
animator who visualised the music of
Pink Floyd and later expanded into
live-action filmmaking (French Windows;
Goodie-Two-Shoes).
Keith Learner (25 Dec 1936 – 13 June
2023): early collaborator with Bob
Godfrey whose distinguished animation
career included film, TV and advertising
(Watch the Birdie; Do Be Careful Boys).
Burny Mat tinson (13 May 1935 – 27 Feb
2023): spent 70 years at Disney as an
animator, story artist, director, producer
and, latterly, mentor (Mickey’s Christmas
Carol; Beauty and the Beast).
Raoul Servais (1 May 1928 – 17 Mar
2023): Belgian filmmaker whose versatile
animation style could shift dramatically
from one film to the next (Chromophobia;
the ‘Apu Trilogy’ who graduated to
cinematographer, shooting over a dozen
features for Satyajit Ray (Three Daughters;
The Chess Players).
Brian Tufano (1 Dec 1939 – 12 Jan
2023): cinematographer who spent many
years at the BBC before filming some
classics of British cinema (Quadrophenia;
Trainspotting; Billy Elliot).
Oliver Wood (21 Feb 1942 – 13 Feb 2023):
photographed the cult film The Honeymoon
Killers, but made his name on action
pictures, especially The Bourne Identity and
its first two sequels.
Composers &
Musicians
Burt Bacharach (12 May 1928 – 8 Feb
2023): composer and songwriter who
regularly contributed to movies during
his most popular period (Alf ie; Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Arthur).
Carl Davis (28 Oct 1936 – 3 Aug 2023):
composed for TV (1995’s Pride and
Prejudice) and films (The French Lieutenant’s
Woman) and was celebrated for his many
new scores for silent films (Napoleon).
Gerald Fried (13 Feb 1928 – 17 Feb 2023):
composer on Kubrick’s early films (The
Killing; Paths of Glory) who spent much of
2023): see obituary, opposite.
Tom Whitlock (20 Feb 1954 – 18 Feb
2023): lyricist whose film work included
the classic soundtrack to Top Gun, notably
the hit songs ‘Take My Breath Away’ and
‘Danger Zone’.
Directors
Kenneth Anger (3 Feb 1927 – 11 May
2023): influential underground filmmaker
(Fireworks; Eaux d’artifice; Scorpio Rising)
whose book Hollywood Babylon explored
the movie colony’s scandalous past.
Abdellatif Ben Ammar (25 Apr 1943
– 6 Feb 2023): major figure of Tunisian
cinema who directed its first film to
compete at Cannes (A Simple Story;
Sejnane).
Michael Blackwood (15 July 1934 – 24
Feb 2023): directed and produced
over 100 documentaries with subjects
ranging from Cristo and Zaha Hadid to
Thelonious Monk and Philip Glass.
Nancy Buirski (24 June 1945 – 29 Aug
2023): founded and ran the Full Frame
Documentary Film Festival before
shifting to making her own films (The
Loving Story; The Rape of Recy Taylor).

Pegasus; Harpya).
Yamamoto NizŌ (27 June 1953 – 19
Aug 2023): Japanese art director and
background artist with a long tenure with
Studio Ghibli (Grave of the Fireflies;
Spirited Away).
ABOVE Peter Simonischek (1946-2023)
his career scoring for television (Roots).
Christopher Gunning (5 Aug 1944 – 25
Mar 2023): composer of much TV work,
including the series Poirot, as well as
some films (When the Whales Came;
La Vie en rose).
Román Chalbaud (10 Oct 1931 – 12 Sept
2023): writer-director who influenced
Venezuela’s cultural scene through his
work for the theatre, TV and film (Caín
adolescente; The Smoking Fish).
32

ABOVE Safi Faye (1943-2023)
Terence Davies (10 Nov 1945 –
7 Oct 2023): created some of the most
significant British films of recent
decades, often drawing on his own
experiences (Distant Voices, Still Lives; The
Long Day Closes; The House of Mirth).
Michel Deville (13 Apr 1931 – 16 Feb
2023): French writer-director who rarely
received as much attention abroad as he
did at home (Ce soir ou jamais; La Lectrice).
Safi Faye (22 Nov 1943 – 22 Feb 2023):
Senegalese filmmaker who was a pioneer
of sub-Saharan African cinema, including
as one of its earliest female directors
(Letter from My Village; Mossane).
William Friedkin (29 Aug 1935 – 7 Aug
2023): redefined the police and horror
genres (The French Connection; The Exorcist)
and later saw his less acclaimed work find
renewed appreciation (Sorcerer).
K.G. George (24 May 1946 – 24 Sept
2023): Indian writer-director of
Malayalam-language films who had
critical and commercial success in the
1970s and 80s (Swapnadanam; Yavanika).
Roger Gnoan M’Bala (1943 – 9 July 2023):
Ivorian filmmaker whose profile was most
prominent in the 1990s and 2000s (In the
Name of Christ; Adanggaman).
Ebrahim Golestan (19 Oct 1922 – 22 Aug
2023): director, writer and producer who
played a major role in the Iranian New Wave
(A Fire; Crown Jewels of Iran; Brick and Mirror).
Bert I. Gordon (24 Sept 1922 – 8 Mar
2023): see obituary on page 34.
Hugh Hudson (25 Aug 1936 – 10 Feb
2023): directed the global hit Chariots
of Fire and eclectic credits including
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the
Apes, documentaries and countless TV
commercials.
Leon Ichaso (3 Aug 1948 – 21 May 2023):
independent filmmaker who explored
Latino culture in the US, especially the
Cuban community (El Super; Piñero).
Juraj Jakubisko (30 Apr 1938 – 24 Feb
2023): leading Slovak filmmaker who
faced years of censorship but rebounded
in the 1980s (Birds, Orphans and Fools; The
Millennial Bee).
Konuma Masaru (30 Dec 1937 – 22
Jan 2023): Japanese director who was
prominent during Nikkatsu’s controversial
‘Roman Porno’ period (Flower and Snake;
Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession).
Alfred Leslie (29 Oct 1927 – 27 Jan
2023): painter who came out of abstract
expressionism and was also a noted
experimental filmmaker (Pull My Daisy;
The Cedar Bar).
Peter Lilienthal (27 Nov 1927 – 28 Apr
2023): German filmmaker who moved
from TV into features in 1970 with
Malatesta and won the Golden Bear at the
Berlinale for 1979’s David.
Jessie Maple (14 Feb 1937 – 30 May
2023): TV news camerawoman and author
who is believed to be the first Black
American woman to write and direct a
feature film (Will; Twice as Nice).
Eugenio Martín (15 May 1925 – 23 Jan
2023): Spanish genre specialist whose output
included horror, westerns, adventures and
musicals (The Ugly Ones; Horror Express).
Francesco Maselli (9 Dec 1930 – 21 Mar
2023): protégé of Antonioni who directed
explicitly political films and woman-oriented
dramas (1975’s The Suspect; Storia d’amore).
Sid Ali Mazif (16 Oct 1943 – 2 May 2023):
Algerian director who worked on shorts and
collective films before establishing himself in
features (Les Nomades; Leila and the Others).
Dariush Mehrjui (8 Dec 1939 – 14 Oct
2023): Iranian New Wave innovator who
regularly battled censorship, both before and
after the Revolution (The Cow; The Cycle; Leila).
Gerry O’Hara (1 Oct 1924 – 9 Jan 2023):
served as an assistant on Olivier’s Richard
III and other high-profile films before
Editors
becoming a journeyman director
(The Pleasure Girls; The Bitch).
Horace Ové (3 Dec 1936 – 16 Sept 2023):
Donn Cambern (9 Oct 1929 – 18 Jan 2023):
pioneering filmmaker who started in
editor who helped shape Easy Rider and had
documentaries and was the first Black
further credits on The Last Picture Show and
British director to make a feature
Romancing the Stone.
(Pressure; Playing Away).
Garth Craven (28 Feb 1939 – 20 May 2023):
Gleb Panfilov (21 May 1934 – 26 Aug
film and sound editor for Peckinpah in the
2023): established his reputation in the
1970s, starting with Straw Dogs, who later
late 1960s as one of Russia’s pre-eminent
largely worked on comedies (Legally Blonde).
filmmakers and continued directing into
the 2020s (The Beginning; The Theme).
Raimondo Crociani (14 Jan 1946 – 14 June
2023): prolific Italian film editor who was a
Pema Tseden (3 Dec 1969 – 8 May 2023):
regular collaborator with Ettore Scola for
brought world attention to Tibetan
over 40 years (We All Loved Each Other So
culture, including making some of the
Much; Le Bal).
earliest Tibetan-language films (Old Dog;
Tharlo; Jinpa).
Robert Dalva (14 Apr 1942 – 27 Jan 2023):
edited Hollywood films from The Black
Sumitra Peries (24 Mar 1935 – 19 Jan
Stallion to Captain America: The First Avenger
2023): started as an editor on her husband
and directed The Black Stallion Returns.
Lester’s films, then became Sri Lankan
cinema’s first female director (Girls; A
David Finfer (7 June 1942 – 3 Apr 2023):
Letter Written in the Sand).
worked on four films for Albert Brooks and
played an important part in the notoriously
Leonard Retel Helmrich (16 Aug
complex task of editing Andrew Davis’s
1959 – 15 July 2023): Dutch documentary
The Fugitive.
filmmaker who received international
acclaim for his Indonesian trilogy (The
Mike Hill (24 Mar 1949 – 5 Jan 2023): editor
Eye of the Day; Shape of the Moon; Position
who worked on 22 films for Ron Howard
Among the Stars).
over more than 30 years (Splash; Apollo 13; A
Beautiful Mind).
David Rimmer (20 Jan 1942 – 27 Jan
2023): Canadian experimental filmmaker
John Refoua (20 Aug 1960 – 14 May 2023):
(Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper;
editor known for his collaborations with
Canadian Pacif ic).
James Cameron (Avatar films) and Antoine
Fuqua (Olympus Has Fallen).
Jacques Rozier (10 Nov 1926 – 31 May
2023): see obituary on page 36.
Marion Rothman (3 July 1928 – 17 May
2023): co-wrote the early Jack Nicholson
Carlos Saura (4 Jan 1932 – 10 Feb 2023):
film The Wild Ride before embarking on
filmmaker who had one of the most influential
a long career as a film editor (The Boston
and admired bodies of work in Spanish
Strangler; Starman).
cinema (The Hunt; Cría cuervos; Blood Wedding).
Arthur Schmidt (17 June 1937 – 5 Aug 2023):
Donald Shebib (27 Jan 1938 – 5 Nov
edited for top directors, including a long
2023): documentarian who switched to
association with Robert Zemeckis (Back to
fiction and directed some of the seminal
the Future trilogy; Who Framed Roger Rabbit;
Canadian films of the 1970s and early 80s
Forrest Gump).
(Goin’ down the Road; Between Friends).
John Wright (4 July 1943 – 20 Apr 2023):
Michael Snow (10 Dec 1928 – 5 Jan 2023):
earned Oscar nominations for The Hunt for Red
multi-faceted Canadian artist whose
October and Speed and also edited several other
work had a seismic impact on avant-garde
blockbusters (The Passion of the Christ).
cinema (Wavelength; La Région centrale;
*Corpus Callosum).

Piers Haggard (18 Mar 1939 – 11 Jan

2023): directed the groundbreaking TV
production Pennies from Heaven as well as the
folk-horror feature The Blood on Satan’s Claw.
He Ping (1957 – 10 Jan 2023): Chinese
director known for his wuxia westerns and
historical dramas (The Swordsman in Double
Flag Town; Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker).
Birgit Hein (6 Aug 1942 – 23 Feb 2023):
director, performance artist and scholar
who was a pioneer of German experimental
film beginning in the late 1960s (Rohfilm;
Baby, I Will Make You Sweat).
Ellen Hovde (9 Mar 1925 – 16 Feb 2023):
documentary filmmaker known for her
work with the Maysles brothers as an
editor and co-director (Christo’s Valley
Curtain; Grey Gardens).
Christopher Miles (19 Apr 1939 – 15 Sept
2023): filmmaker whose credits reflect his
literary tastes, especially his deep interest
in D.H. Lawrence (The Virgin and the
Gypsy; Priest of Love).
George T. Miller (28 Nov 1943 – 17 Feb
2023): director whose debut feature The
Man from Snowy River remains one of
Australia’s most enduringly popular films.
Giuliano Montaldo (22 Feb 1930 – 6 Sept
2023): Italian writer-director who started
in films as an actor before moving behind
the camera (The Reckless; Sacco and Vanzetti).
Malcolm Mowbray (24 June 1949 –
23 June 2023): director of comedies who
scored at the box office with his debut
feature, A Private Function.
Paul Vecchiali (28 Apr 1930 – 18 Jan
2023): veteran French director, producer,
writer and occasional actor (Drugstore
Romance; Once More).
Agustí Villaronga (4 Mar 1953 – 22 Jan
2023): Spanish director who competed at
Cannes with Moon Child and whose drama
Black Bread won ten Goyas.
K. Viswanath (19 Feb 1930 – 2 Feb 2023):
Indian writer-director, primarily of Telugu-
language films (Sankarabharanam; Swathi
Muthyam), who also kept busy as an actor.
Paul Watson (17 Feb 1942 – 18 Nov 2023)
documentary filmmaker best known for
inventing the fly-on-the-wall TV serial
and giving voice to hitherto excluded
working-class voices in the likes of The
Family, and for making the first reality TV
show Sylvania Waters, in 1992.
Producers &
Executives
Marina Cicogna (29 May 1934 – 4 Nov
2023): Italian producer and distributor of
auteurist classics (Belle de jour; Once upon a
Time in the West; Investigation of a Citizen
Above Suspicion).
Eva Maria Daniels (5 July 1979 – 30 June
2023): emerging Icelandic independent
producer whose films frequently screened at
major festivals (What Maisie Knew;
2023’s Reality).
Gordon T. Dawson (1938 – 6 Mar 2023):
close associate of Peckinpah for a decade,
graduating from costumer to producer and
writer (The Ballad of Cable Hogue; Bring Me
the Head of Alfredo Garcia).

Michel Ciment
2 6 M AY 1 9 3 8 — 1 3 N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 3
Not since the time of André Bazin in
the 1950s is it likely that France has
had as famous a film critic as Michel
Ciment, whose death at the age of 85 was
announced on 13 November. Bazin was a
liberal Catholic, whereas Ciment’s outlook
was more or less secular, but they met in
their shared moral integrity, their extraor-
dinary intellectual energy and their stupen-
dously wide-ranging critical enthusiasm.
Both of them possessed a sort of natural
authority that attracted the allegiance of
the intelligent young, drawing them hap-
pily into their respective circles – Bazin
as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, Ciment (a
decade or so later) first among equals at
the rival monthly film review Positif.
Here is another thing that could be
said to link them: as working film crit-
ics they were absolutely in French film
Many of his best
books are
simply extended
conversations
with his chosen
subjects, the
narrative always
backed up, however,
by enormous
research
IMAGE: RAPHAEL GAILLARDE/GET TY
RIGHT
Michel Ciment
culture on a week-to-week basis, seeing
new films as they came out and taking a
leading part in the critical controversies
of the time (wonderful controversies they
were too: one could wish that modern
debates about cinema were as lively and
irreverent). Yet at the same time both
were important and serious film histori-
ans – Bazin bequeathing us seminal texts
on Orson Welles and Jean Renoir, Ciment
a seemingly endless flow of classically
conceived auteur studies encompassing
many of the major filmmakers of his time:
Kubrick perhaps most famously, but also
wonderful books on Francesco Rosi, Billy
Wilder, Elia Kazan, John Boorman, Jane
Campion, Joseph Losey, Andrei Konchal-
ovsky… and many more.
Ciment’s prose was always simple, ele-
gant and to the point – one of the reasons
IN MEMORIAM 33
that his works did so well in translation.
Although he earned the major part of his
income as a salaried professor at the Sor-
bonne, he was impatient with academic
pretension, and with theory in general. He
was on the left but not a Marxist. Many of
his best books are simply extended con-
versations with his chosen subjects, the
narrative always backed up, however, by
enormous research, and a deep fund of
knowledge across all the arts, literature
especially. He never wrote an autobi-
ography as such, but most of the facts
anyone might care to know about his
life may be gathered from another fine
book of conversations, Le Cinéma en part-
age (‘Shared Cinema’, éditions Rivages,
2014), where Ciment himself is the sub-
ject, answering questions about his life
posed by his Positif colleague and friend
N.T. Binh (aka Yann Tobin).
Ciment came from recent immigrant
stock, his father a Hungarian Jewish tailor
who settled in Paris in the early 1920s, mar-
rying in due course a native Frenchwoman,
Hélène, who worked as a skilled artisan in
couture. They lived all their lives (as did
Ciment) in the artisan 9th arrondissement,
on the Right Bank – close enough, how-
ever, to the Grands Boulevards to sample
their multitude of cinemas. During the
war, he and his father hid out with farmers
in Normandy, though were clandestinely
visited, from time to time, by his suppos-
edly ‘Aryan’ mother. Astonishingly – he
only discovered this fact on her death bed,
and his father apparently never knew – she
was Jewish herself (which of course would
make her son Jewish too), and had either
hidden the fact from everybody, or simply
conveniently forgotten it. In any event, the
omission meant that Ciment started his
life baptised, and commenced his second-
ary education at Catholic lycée.
Not that, as an adult, religion meant
much to him. He was a secular French
intellectual through and through.
As well as being the kindest of men, he
was extraordinarily urbane, and possessed
a beautiful speaking voice. As much as
through his books, the French public
knew him for the unmissable weekly
broadcasts he made, across a period of 50
years, for the radio programme Le Masque
et la Plume (France Inter); as well as, more
recently, another long-running radio series
Projection privée (1990-2016), put out by
France Culture.
mark le fanu
34 IN MEMORIAM
A pivotal brand-name schlockmeister of
post-war drive-in cinema, who died in
March at the age of 100, Bert I. Gordon
virtually invented the 1950s in one unfor-
gettable respect – as an era in which
mundane American anxieties were rou-
tinely manifested as giant mutationism.
Or, at least, he grabbed the nuke-phobic
zeitgeist and steered it toward domes-
tic stress. In the nascent 50s wave of
low-budget pulp, always sky high on the
possibilities of rampaging publicity and
including the fun factories run by Roger
Corman and William Castle, Gordon
was an expansive fantasist, seizing on
any opportunity to turn a buck, and
even taking credit for his films’ special
effects, which mainly consisted of min-
iature props, upward camera angles and
back projection.
He toiled in various hustles in the pio-
neer days of television until 1955, when in a
burst of hubris he wrote and directed King
Dinosaur, a charming creaker in which
an iguana and an armadillo stand in for
dinosaur-sized extraterrestrials. He was off
and running, leaning in to the simple-yet-
crude concept of monstrous scale reversals
Bert I. Gordon
24 S E P T E M B E R 1 9 2 2 — 8 M A R C H 2 0 2 3
with The Cyclops, Beginning of the End and
The Amazing Colossal Man, all in 1957.
Gordon was far from the first to arrive
at the nonsensical-therefore-metaphorical
notion of radioactive gigantism (that
might’ve been 1954’s Them!, a giant ant
saga that came just a year and a half
after the first H-bomb test). But there
was something in the water of 1957 that
brought the uneasy concept home – The
Amazing Colossal Man, shamelessly thieved
by Nathan Juran and the Woolner Broth-
ers the next year with the even more com-
bustible Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, was the
first film to link sky-high atomic distortion
with the masculine-patriarchal tensions
of film noir. Not merely the giant bugs of
other films, Glenn Langan’s hapless irradi-
ated Everyman, hairless and near-naked,
bestriding toy cars in the California desert
as he slowly goes mad with frustration and
uncorked aggression, was a glimpse of an
Eisenhower-era manosphere run amok,
both horny and impotent, powerless and
pointlessly destructive.
In partnership with Samuel Z. Arkoff ’s
AIP, Corman’s home at the time, Gordon
was even encouraged to craft a sequel,
The Amazing
Colossal Man
was the first
film to link sky-
high atomic
distortion with
the masculine-
patriarchal
tensions of
film noir
War of the Colossal Beast (1958), which true
to its degenerative title saw the doomed
character re-emerge in Mexico as a raven-
ous brain-damaged behemoth. As the 50s
morphed into the 60s, Gordon’s anten-
nae became gradually less sensitive – The
Spider (1958) and Attack of the Puppet People
(1958) were spry xeroxes of other films,
leading him (perhaps in an effort to cash
in on imported sword-and-sandal hits from
Italy) to try his hand at family fantasy, with
The Boy and the Pirates (1960) and the St
George-and-the-Dragon-themed The Magic
Sword (1962).
The record from there hits on several
low-cost exploitation genres, but he’d
return again, via H.G. Wells, to bigness,
in the teen-tilted Village of the Giants (1965),
based on the 1904 novel The Food of the Gods,
and then again in 1976 with a slightly more
serious adaptation, this time actually titled
The Food of the Gods (which provided us
with the indelible image of an ageing Ida
Lupino grappling with a voracious earth-
worm the size of a snake). He even went
back, in the post-Jaws era, to old-school
entomophobia (Empire of the Ants, 1977 –
another Wells adaptation). But as with all
acute exploitationeers, Gordon’s window
was modest, and what was provocative
IMAGE: ALLIED ARTISTS PICTURE/PHOTOFEST
from your parked car’s expansive front seat
in the middle of the century soon became
the kitsch that seemed to define its era. It
was a career of silliness and shortcuts, but
the iconic vision of Langan’s desperate
LEFT
colossality can still perturb.
Bert I. Gordon Michael Atkinson

James Flynn (21 Aug 1965 – 11 Feb 2023):
producer who was a long-time fixture of
the Irish TV and film industry (The Secret
of Kells; The Banshees of Inisherin).
Daniel Goldberg (7 Mar 1949 – 12 July
2023): Canadian producer-writer who
frequently teamed with Ivan Reitman
(Meatballs; Stripes) and also produced the
massive hit The Hangover.
Walter Mirisch (8 Nov 1921 – 24
Feb 2023): producer who backed an
impressive list of box-office smashes,
three of which won the Oscar for best
picture (The Apartment; West Side Story;
In the Heat of the Night).
Hengameh Panahi (c.1956 – 5 Nov 2023):
French-Iranian sales agent and producer
whose company Celluloid Dreams had
been a major player in the global arthouse
film world since the 1980s.
Edward R. Pressman (11 Apr 1943 – 17
Jan 2023): producer who was a directors’
champion, including important credits for
Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma, Kathryn
Bigelow and Charles Burnett.
Jess Search (15 May 1969 – 31 July 2023):
producer who was a vital supporter of
documentary filmmakers, especially through
her work with the groups Shooting People
and Doc Society (Citizenfour; Virunga).
Kevin Turen (16 Aug 1979 – 12 Nov 2023):
producer and executive for TV (Euphoria) and
films (Pieces of a Woman; Ti West’s X series).
Lawrence Turman (28 Nov 1926 – 1 July
2023): had his greatest success with The
Graduate but also backed other notable
works (John Carpenter’s The Thing;
American History X).
Screenwriters
Bo Goldman (10 Sept 1932 – 25 July 2023):
writer who was admired for his original
scripts and his skills at adaptation
(One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Melvin
and Howard; Shoot the Moon).
Gregory Allen Howard (28 Jan 1952 – 27
Jan 2023): writer-producer who explored
Black American history of the 19th and 20th
centuries (Remember the Titans; Harriet).
Evan Jones (29 Dec 1927 – 18 Apr 2023):
Jamaican poet and TV writer who wrote
screenplays for Ted Kotcheff (Wake
in Fright), John Huston (Victory) and
especially Joseph Losey (King & Country).
Robert Klane (17 Oct 1941 – 29 Aug 2023):
writer of the dark comedies Where’s Poppa?
and Weekend at Bernie’s who also directed
the hit disco film Thank God It’s Friday.
Christine Laurent (29 Mar 1944 – 5 Jan
2023): screenwriter for Rivette (La Belle
Noiseuse; Va savoir) who was also a director
(Vertiges) and costume designer.
Vahideh Mohommadifar (c.1969 – 14 Oct
2023): Iranian screenwriter and costume
designer on the later films of her husband
Dariush Mehrjui (Mom’s Guest; 2014’s Ghosts).
Arnold Schulman (11 Aug 1925 –
4 Feb 2023): adapted his play A Hole in
the Head for film and wrote several other
screenplays (Love with the Proper Stranger;
Tucker: The Man and His Dream).
Norman Steinberg (6 June 1939 – 15 Mar
2023): veteran comedy writer who had his
greatest success with Blazing Saddles and
My Favorite Year.
Set & Costume
Designers
Nitin Chandrak ant Desai (9 Aug 1965
– 2 Aug 2023): leading Indian production
designer and art director (Kama Sutra:
A Tale of Love; Lagaan: Once upon a Time in
India; Devdas).
Osvaldo Desideri (16 Feb 1939 – 18
Oct 2023): Italian set decorator and
production designer who had credits for
Antonioni, Cavani, Pasolini and Leone
and won an Oscar for The Last Emperor.
Charles Knode (c.1942 – 16 Feb 2023):
designed the costumes for Monty Python’s
Life of Brian, then showed off his versatility
with Blade Runner and Braveheart.
Norman Reynolds (26 Mar 1934 – 6
Apr 2023): production designer and art
director who helped shape the visual style
of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman
and Mission: Impossible franchises.
Sound &
Special Effects
Pete Kozachik (28 Mar 1951 – 12
Sept 2023): visual effects artist and
cinematographer who was a leading
specialist in stop-motion photography
(The Nightmare Before Christmas; Coraline).
François Musy (6 Oct 1955 – 22 Nov
2023): Swiss sound engineer and mixer
known for his long collaboration with
Godard (First Name: Carmen; Histoire(s)
du cinéma).
Rob Young (c.1946 – 11 June 2023): sound
mixer who amassed over 100 credits
in a decades-long career that spanned
Hollywood and his native Canada (The
Grey Fox; Unforgiven).
Stuntpeople
Ricou Browning (16 Feb 1930 – 27 Feb
2023): played the title role in Creature from
the Black Lagoon for the swimming scenes,
then became an underwater specialist as a
2nd unit director (Thunderball), stuntman,
director and writer.
Dean Smith (15 Jan 1932 – 24 June 2023):
Olympic gold medallist who spent
decades performing stunts in Hollywood,
especially in westerns (The Alamo;
McLintock!).
ABOVE Ricou Browning (1930-2023)
Ginger Stanley (19 Dec 1931 – 19 Jan
2023): swimmer who worked in films as
an underwater double, notably for Julie
Adams in Creature from the Black Lagoon
and Esther Williams in Jupiter’s Darling.
other key figures
Simone Bär (1965 – 16 Jan 2023): German
casting director whose ability to spot
talent made her highly sought after by
top directors (The Lives of Others; Berger’s
All Quiet on the Western Front; Tár).
Pearl Bowser (25 June 1931 – 14
Sept 2023): historian and collector
who brought attention to early Black
filmmakers, including Oscar Micheaux,
through her research and screenings and
her documentary Midnight Ramble.
Robert L . Carringer (c.1941 – Mar
2023): scholar who did groundbreaking
research into Orson Welles, including the
books The Making of Citizen Kane and The
Magnif icent Ambersons: A Reconstruction.
Bernard Chardère (21 Sept 1930 – 25 Aug
2023): French critic, curator and cinephile
who co-founded Positif and served as the
first director of the Institut Lumière.
Jamie Christopher (1971 – 29 Aug 2023):
assistant director who worked on all
of the Harry Potter pictures as well as
several Marvel movies.
Michel Ciment (26 May 1938 – 13 Nov
2023): see obituary on page 33.
Noah Cowan (22 July 1967 – 25 Jan 2023):
programmer, curator and distributor who
had tenures as co-director of the Toronto
International Film Festival and executive
director of SFFILM.
Leslie Hardcastle (8 Dec 1926 – 14
Mar 2023): BFI controller who played a
critical leadership role in the NFT (BFI
Southbank) and helped establish the
London Film Festival and the Museum of
the Moving Image.
Stephen Herbert (20 Dec 1951 – 3 Sep
2023): historian of early cinema who was
head projectionist at the National Film
Theatre and the Museum of the Moving
Image, and an adviser on Hugo.
35
Iain Johnstone (8 Apr 1943 – 4 May
2023): film critic, author, screenwriter
(Fierce Creatures) and documentary
filmmaker who also produced and
occasionally presented the BBC’s
Film… programme.
Roger K astel (11 June 1931 – 8 Nov 2023):
illustrator who created the famous Jaws
paperback cover and movie poster as well
as the poster for The Empire Strikes Back.
Tom Luddy (4 June 1943 – 13 Feb
2023): film programmer, producer and
co-founder and artistic director of the
Telluride Film Festival who was a close
ally of numerous filmmakers.
Derek Malcolm (12 May 1932 – 15 July
2023): film critic with the Guardian for
over a quarter-century who also served as
director of the London Film Festival in
the 1980s.
David Meeker (22 Dec 1935 – 24 May
2023): long-time BFI archivist whose
legacy includes greatly expanding its
acquisition and preservation efforts and
exploring the presence of jazz in film.
Russell Merrit t (31 Aug 1941 – 3 Mar
2023): historian known for his research
on the silent era and co-authoring books
chronicling Walt Disney’s films of the
1920s and 30s.
Victor S. Navasky (5 July 1932 – 23 Jan
2023): journalist whose book Naming Names
is considered one of the more important
accounts of the Hollywood blacklist.
Pat Rambaut (25 July 1944 – 5 Oct 2023):
script supervisor recognised by Bafta in
2019 for outstanding contribution to her
craft, with credits including Local Hero,
The Mission and The House of Mirth.
bérénice reynaud (27 June 1951 –
17 Sept 2023): Paris-born critic, curator
and writer who taught in the School of
Film/ Video at CalArts in Los Angeles for
over 30 years and was the author of New
Chinas/New Cinemas and the BFI Film
Classics volume on A City of Sadness.
Michael Parkinson (28 Mar 1935 – 16
Aug 2023): broadcaster whose long run
interviewing actors, musicians, athletes
and newsmakers set the standard for the
celebrity talk show.
Donald Spoto (28 June 1941 – 11 Feb
2023): author known for his biographies of
Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Audrey
Hepburn and especially Hitchcock.
Ravi Srinivasan (13 Nov 1985 – 14 Jan
2023): programmer who was an important
behind-the-scenes player at the
Toronto International Film Festival
for the past decade.
Dee Dee Wood (7 June 1927 – 26 Apr
2023): choreographer who, with then-
husband Marc Breaux, created the dance
numbers for Mary Poppins, The Sound of
Music and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The full ‘In Memoriam’ list, including
those who died after we went to press in late
November, will be published online in the
new year at bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound
36 IN MEMORIAM
When Cahiers du cinéma published a nou-
velle vague special issue in December 1962,
the film it chose for its cover was not by
Truffaut, Varda or Rivette. It was Jacques
Rozier’s first feature Adieu Philippine, whose
female leads Yveline Céry and Stefania
Sabatini embodied the spirit of youthful
energy with which that movement was
identified. Cahiers declared Adieu Philippine
“the paragon of the nouvelle vague… where
the virtues of young cinema shine with
their purest brilliance”; Jean-Luc Godard
called it “quite simply the best French film
of recent years”.
But Adieu Philippine was a commer-
cial failure and would long be regarded
as the great forgotten film of the nouvelle
vague – and Rozier, who died on 31 May,
aged 96, as the movement’s lost auteur.
He only directed five cinema features, but
Jacques Rozier
1 0 N O V E M B E R 1 9 2 6 — 3 1 M AY 2 0 2 3
was productive over a long career, making
several shorts (he was an early adopter
of video) and consistently busy in televi-
sion. A 2001 Pompidou Centre retrospec-
tive included some 30 works of varying
lengths; Rozier claimed that this covered
perhaps a third of his oeuvre, with many
pieces uncompleted or lost.
Born in Paris in 1926, Rozier attended
the film school IDHEC, then worked as
an assistant in TV and film, notably on
Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1955). His first
short was Rentrée des classes (1955), about a
schoolboy playing truant, followed by Blue
Jeans (1958), both co-written by Rozier’s
then wife Michèle O’Glor. The latter
film follows two young men as they try to
attract girls in Cannes in summer, their
aggressive tactics bordering on the down-
right predatory; the film remains a prime
Adieu Philippine example of early nouvelle vague style, with
its outdoor shooting and non-professionals
endures as a improvising their parts.
work of radiant Adieu Philippine (1962) pursued the same
freshness in its methods and themes but incorporated
more of a female viewpoint. Again co-
loose, freewheeling written by O’Glor, it concerns a young TV
construction studio technician and the two teenage girls
and its sense of who become rivals for his affections. Much
of the film is set in Corsica, with vérité-style
youthful liberty observation of a raucous holiday resort.
Adieu Philippine endures as a work of radi-
ant freshness in its loose, freewheeling con-
struction and its sense of youthful liberty
under the shadow of political reality (the
boy faces military service in Algeria). The
behind-the-scenes portrayal of TV produc-
tion in its glamour and mundanity adds a
BELOW
self-referential dimension.
Jacques Rozier (1926-2023) In 1963, Rozier made two shorts on the
Capri set of Godard’s Le Mépris: Le Parti
des choses, a brief lyrical ‘making of ’, and
Paparazzi, about the frenzy around Brigitte
Bardot’s presence on the island. Paparazzi
uses a jazzy staccato style to evoke BB
mania and to explore the fraught relations
between the star and the photographers
pursuing her. Another short from 1963,
Dans le vent, depicted that year’s sartorial
chic and the promotion of fashion trends.
Rozier made four more features. Du
côté d’Orouët (1971) again involved young
women on holiday, and enjoyed a leisurely
running time of 150 minutes. The Casta-
ways of Turtle Island (1976) was about an
eccentric scheme for adventure holidays;
it failed commercially despite starring the
popular comic actor Jacques Richard.
Maine Ocean (1985), a comedy set on a train,
starred and was co-written by Rozier’s
long-term collaborator Lydia Feld. She
also appeared in the theatre-themed Fifi
Martingale; premiered in Venice in 2001,
it was never released, although the actor-
director Mathieu Amalric was later an
ardent defender.
Other work included a wide range of
television, including a 1964 portrait of Jean
Vigo; and the documentary Revenez plaisirs
exilés (2012), about a production of Lully’s
opera of 1674 Alceste.
Long overlooked, Rozier enjoyed reap-
praisal this century, with Adieu Philippine
restored and shown in Venice Classics in
2018; there were also retrospectives at the
IMAGE: PATRICE TERRAZ
Pompidou Centre and the Cinémathèque
française, and a book of critical essays was
published by Cahiers in 2001.
Jonathan romney
Congratulations to the winners of the
BMW Filmmaking challenge, We Collide.
Five filmmaking teams were offered the opportunity to push boundaries
using the ultra­wide theatre screen in the all­electric BMW i7.

Congratulations to the winners, the shortlisted nominees,

and thank you to their mentor Michaela Coel and our judges,
Asif Kapadia, Terri White and Ncuti Gatwa for their contribution.

For more info and to see the shortlisted films, scan the QR code.
 THE
BEST FILMS
OF
2023
 40
Our annual round-up of the best
films, as voted for by our contributors,
is as eclectic and unpredictable
as it has ever been – reflecting
a year of remarkable cinematic
achievements, from arthouse
blockbusters like Oppenheimer
to small-scale heartbreakers like
Past Lives, against a background
of strikes and financial uncertainty
for both theatres and streamers.
Introduction by Isabel Stevens
How will 2023 in film be remembered?
As the year that the business models of
streaming and Marvel started to wobble;
the year that Hollywood learned to start
worrying and fear the AI bomb ticking
beneath it; the year when film production
halted due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes
and the unseen labour behind cinema
FILMS OF THE YEAR
took the spotlight – from the minions of
the ‘mini-room’ to extras who risked being
replaced by pixels in perpetuity. Fonder
reminiscences may come from those with
fuchsia-tinted lenses who will recall the
summer when pink ruled, when people
actually queued to go to the movies again
and when the phrase ‘double bill’ came
back into popular parlance for the first
time in 60 years. “Do you guys ever think
about dying?” Margot Robbie asked in
Barbie, an existential question directed
frequently at cinema in recent years. If the
big screen could talk, in 2023 it would have
shouted back “No!”
Let’s hope such a seismic 12 months
behind the screen doesn’t overshadow
what’s been on it. For 2023 has been one
of the best years in recent memory for the
art of cinema. Yes, the highlights reach far
beyond the Barbenheimer phenomenon,
but let’s not just dismiss either part of that
duo as simply a film about a toy, or about
a boy and his toy – for wasn’t it a joy and a
balm to see films that tackled subjects like
the atomic age and the patriarchy, crafted
with analogue special effects as opposed to
bland CGI, and for them to be the talking
points of the summer? Not to mention the ABOVE
fact that Barbie’s $1 billion global tickets Guslagie Malanda as Laurence
in Alice Diop’s Saint Omer
haul was a first for a female director. In
OPPOSITE
a touch of synchronicity, both Barbie and Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in
Oppenheimer received exactly the same Yorgo Lanthimos’s Poor Things
number of votes in our end-of-year poll. BELOW
That cinema was here to grapple with Alma Pöysti as Ansa and
Jussi Vatanen as Holappa in
and probe key issues and debates in the
Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves
wider world, rather than simply to lecture
about them, was clear from two films that
bookended the year: Todd Field’s portrait
of monstrous artistry in Tár and Todd
Haynes’s uncomfortable melodrama May
December both explored abuses of power,
though in very different stylistic registers.
Cord Jefferson’s literary satire American Fic-
tion (perhaps not seen at enough festivals
to make our top 50) reckoned with the

limitations placed on Black artistic expres-
sion. Like Alexander Payne’s The Holdo-
vers – which also featured a delightfully
grouchy antihero – it was a surprisingly
touching family drama. Those movies,
and many others, from Argentinian heist
comedy drama The Delinquents to Emma
Seligman’s raucous high-school outing Bot-
toms and Sebastián Silva’s morbidly funny
Rotting in the Sun, suggested that humour
has too often been a missing ingredient
in recent cinema. Comedy was dark and
unnerving in Killers of the Flower Moon,
Martin Scorsese’s exploration of the geno-
cide of the Osage Native Americans in the
1920s – a subject hitherto little noticed by
filmmakers. A period of history that has
been explored repeatedly, the Holocaust,
was seen afresh in Jonathan Glazer’s Aus-
chwitz drama The Zone of Interest, shot from
the point of view of an SS officer and his
family – the film that used cinema’s toolkit
to most novel and disquieting effect.
Glazer was one of several auteurs
making an overdue and welcome return
in 2023. Joining him were the French pro-
vocateur Catherine Breillat, whose erotic
drama Last Summer, like May December,
explored the relationship between an
older woman and a teenage boy; Hayao
Miyazaki, with his coming-of-age fantasy
The Boy and the Heron; and Wim Wenders,
whose tale of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, Perfect
Days, was charming if occasionally too
whimsical. If there was one director whose
latest film matched up to earlier hits, it was
the Finnish deadpan maestro Aki Kau-
rismäki, with his melancholy romantic
comedy Fallen Leaves (he has called it a lost
instalment of his 1986-90 ‘Proletariat’ tril-
ogy), which contained one of the best cin-
emagoing scenes this year. None of those
had been absent for quite as long as Victor
Erice, whose resplendent mystery about a
disappeared actor, Close Your Eyes, marked
the Spanish director’s return to feature-
filmmaking after a 30-year hiatus.
Erice’s meandering detective story
exemplified a trend for directors to toy
with genre: Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-
winning Anatomy of a Fall breathed new
life into the courtroom drama, as fellow
French director Alice Diop had with Saint
Omer earlier in the year. Celine Song’s deci-
sion to explore immigration and fate within
a love triangle tangle – and to treat all three
participants evenhandedly – ensured Past
Lives took romance to new places, as Molly
Haskell discusses on page 72. Also of
genre-spinning note were Joanna Hogg’s
playful, wistful haunted-house two-hander
The Eternal Daughter and Andrew Haigh’s
41
FILMS OF THE YEAR
masterful reinvention of the ghost story in Movies from
All of Us Strangers. Both made me wonder
what the late Hilary Mantel – novelist, Argentinian heist
patron saint of the unseen and once a film comedy drama
critic – would have made of them. The Delinquents
As Hannah McGill argues (see page
48), it was a stellar year for British cinema to the raucous
– though British audiences won’t be able high-school outing
to see one of the most jaw-dropping cin- Bottoms and the
ematic spectacles, Yorgos Lanthimos’s
adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, morbidly funny
until it is released here in January. I hope Rotting in the Sun
they embrace the film’s vision of a naive, suggested that
gallivanting woman who questions the
society constricting her, as they did with humour has been a
Barbie. The year ended on a note of worry missing ingredient
for independent cinemas, with reports that in recent cinema
many are struggling: the Watershed in
Bristol is the latest to sound the alarm, as
the city council has announced that it will
no longer support the venue.
If there was one story that hung on from
years past it was that those films blessed
with multimillion-pound marketing
muscle and giant awards-season promo
budgets can gobble up all the attention.
As ever, we hope our list, voted for by
more than 100 contributors to these pages,
works as an invitation to dig deeper, to find
new films and directors rather than simply
those that shout the loudest.
 50
42

=38 =38 =38

11
A Prince All Dirt Roads Earth Mama
PIERRE CRETON, FRANCE Taste of Salt S AVA N A H L E A F, U S

French ‘cineaste-peasant’ Pierre R AV E N JAC K S O N , U S Without preaching or editorialising,

Creton’s portrait of the lives of gay
horticulturalists in rural Normandy
is a spellbinding, formally innovative
curio. Jozef van Wissem, who scored
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), supplies
another otherworldly soundtrack.
Awaiting UK distribution
FILMS OF THE YEAR
Raven Jackson’s lyrical stream-of-
consciousness debut comprises
vignettes that span several decades
in the life of a Black woman in
Mississippi, each showing her
connection to the earth.
Awaiting UK distribution
Savanah Leaf ’s compassionate, poetic
debut depicts a care system that’s
stacked against poor American single
mothers, with a subtle, sullen and
understated performance by newcomer
Tia Nomore.
In UK cinemas now

=38 The
Holdovers
A L E X A N D E R PAY N E , U S
=38 The Killer
DAV I D F I N C H E R , U S

Michael Fassbender stars as a hitman

=38 Menus-Plaisirs:
Les Troisgros
FREDERICK WISEMAN, FRANCE, US
=38 Our Body
CLAIRE SIMON, FRANCE

Comprehensively cataloguing the

Consciously evoking the cinema of
mid-budget early 70s Hollywood,
Alexander Payne’s high-school
heartwarmer, starring a never-better
Paul Giamatti, is every bit the equal of
the films that inspired its aesthetic.
In UK cinemas from 19 January
and reviewed on page 128
who becomes a target himself after
a job gone wrong in David Fincher’s
intriguing, freshly staged procedural, a
film which entertains and unsettles at
the same time.
On Netflix now
The 93-year-old Frederick Wiseman
patiently examines every facet of the
eponymous French three-Michelin-star
kitchen in this four-hour documentary
feast for the senses, with delectable
diversions to vineyards, fromageries
and farms.
Awaiting UK distribution
events in a Parisian gynaecology ward,
this observational documentary gains
added poignancy when Claire Simon
steps in front of the camera for her
own treatment.
Awaiting UK distribution

=38 Priscilla
SOFIA COPPOLA, US

Graceland becomes Heartbreak

=38 Reality
T I N A S AT T E R , U S

Tina Satter’s exacting recreation

Hotel for a young Priscilla Presley of whistleblower Reality Winner’s
in Sofia Coppola’s melancholic, FBI interrogation is a tense,

utterly gorgeous tale of young love
turned sour by Elvis’s alienating
superstardom.
In UK cinemas from 5 January
and reviewed on page 118
=38
expertly modulated study of state
control and the vulnerability of
truth-tellers, starring an impeccable
Rye Lane
Sydney Sweeney. RAINE ALLEN-MILLER, UK
This vivacious south London-set romcom channels genre classics as its flirtatious,
On major streaming services now
quick-witted pair race around the city in a whirlwind 24-hour narrative heavy on
high jinks and belly laughs.

On Disney+ now
 43

=38 Samsara
LO I S PAT I Ñ O, S PA I N

The Spanish director probes spiritual

=38 Suzume
M A KO T O S H I N K A I , JA PA N

A whirlwind of tentacled monsters,

and cinematic boundaries with a interdimensional portals and

=38
symphonic, shapeshifting voyage talking chairs make up this stunning
through a Buddhist temple in Laos
and a seaweed farm in Zanzibar.
supernatural fantasy by the director
of Your Name, but its more grounded
Trenque Lauquen
moments are just as beautiful. L AU R A C I TA R E L L A , A R G E N T I N A
In UK cinemas from 5 January
and reviewed on page 133 On Crunchyroll now This languorous, two-part shaggy-dog story, about the search for a missing
woman from the titular Argentinian town combines outlandish sci-fi elements with
grounded characterisation, for a wonderfully off-kilter triumph.

In UK cinemas now and reviewed on page 131

FILMS OF THE YEAR

=34 Infinity Pool
B R A N D O N C R O N E N B E R G, CA N A DA

Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth

=34 One Fine
Morning
M I A H A N S E N - LØ V E , F R A N C E
excel in Cronenberg Jr’s outré satire

=34
of the super-rich, in which a striking Juggling care duties for her daughter

The Human Surge 3 sense of style enriches a lively kill-your-

clone concept.
and stricken father, Léa Seydoux’s
single mother gains a rush of new love
in Mia Hansen-Løve’s stealthy, sublime
E D UA R D O W I L L I A M S, A R G E N T I N A portrait of life’s sea changes.
On Sky and Now TV now

Cutting between groups of young friends in Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Peru,
On Mubi now
Argentinian director Eduardo Williams shoots the low-key interactions using an
eight-lens VR camera, to disorienting but mesmerising effect.

Awaiting UK distribution

=34 The Taste

of Things
T R A N A N H H Ù N G, F R A N C E
=31 Hit Man
R I C H A R D L I N K L AT E R , U S

In Richard Linklater’s strange,

=31 Music
A N G E L A S C H A N E L E C, G E R M A N Y

Angela Schanelec is on typically

multilayered comedy, whose surface
Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche charm belies a pervasive sense of
sauté up a storm in this delightfully callousness, Glen Powell gives an
sweet romance between a man and his audaciously on-point performance
cook, which features many a mouth- as a nerdy philosophy professor
watering scene. masquerading as an assassin.
In UK cinemas from 16 February Release date yet to be announced
=31 Talk
to Me
DA N N Y A N D M I C H A E L P H I L I P P O U, AU S T R A L I A
enigmatic form with this series
of poetic visual riddles, which This social-media-age teen horror
draws loosely on the myth of grabs the attention with the help
Oedipus – perhaps confusing, of an evil ceramic hand that allows
but never frustrating. the living to be possessed by
disembodied spirits.
Awaiting UK distribution
On Netflix now
 44

=26
The Beast
BERTRAND BONELLO, FRANCE

A focus on omnipresent AI makes this era-hopping sci-fi,

starring Léa Seydoux, Bonello’s most topical film to date.

W e said : “ The film’s central segment takes place in Paris in

2044; Bonello’s rendering of this era is counterintuitive but
intriguing – no screens, internet, cars or social media, a world
where relationships are disembodied and isolation is the norm.
The past’s lingering impact in the present has been a recurrent
and resonant Bonello theme, but in terms of narrative scale
and conceptual scaffolding The Beast is easily Bonello’s most
ambitious film to date, not to mention his first attempt at sci-fi.”
(Kieron Corless, S&S online)

Release date yet to be announced

=26
Beau Is Afraid
ARI ASTER, US

Joaquin Phoenix sets off on a surreal journey through the

United States to visit his overbearing mother in Ari Aster’s
Oedipal epic.

W e s a i d : “ “Stop incriminating yourself,” Amy Ryan’s Grace hisses

fiercely, apropos of nothing, at the bewildered protagonist
Beau Wassermann over a homely breakfast table. Yet Beau Is
Afraid is a wig-out Freudian picaresque journey that lets all
its neurotic complexes hang out to the max. The last section
reaches a jaw-dropping crescendo in which any shreds of
FILMS OF THE YEAR

subtext are blasted away in a welter of images of full-on sexual

anxiety. It is funny and horrifying, grievous and grief-stricken,
and as incriminating as hell.” (Roger Luckhurst, S&S, June)

On major streaming services now

=26
The Delinquents
RODRIGO MORENO, ARGENTINA

Rodrigo Moreno’s three-hour heist movie is a low-key comedy

epic, with time aplenty for playful interludes and dead-ends.

W e said : “ This is a film of two very different halves. In the first,

bank clerk Morán – thirsting for life – steals $650,000 from the
vault and blackmails his colleague Román into hiding the cash.
In the second, Román falls in with a bunch of filmmakers he
meets in the hills. Éric Rohmer, Alexandre Koberidze and even
Hong Sangsoo come to mind, but this stately, wistful epic has a
flavour all of its own. Stunning.” (Arjun Sajip, S&S, Summer)

Release date yet to be announced

=26
The Fabelmans
STEVEN SPIELBERG, US

Critics, fans and other armchair therapists will enjoy the keys
Spielberg’s gratifying movie memoir provides to the director’s
larger-than-life, era-defining entertainments.

W e said : “For the young Sam Fabelman, movie-making is an

escape and more than that, an escapade, an adventure, a
three-ring-circus. There are literally skeletons in the cupboard
here, rigged in the service of one of his horrorific home movies
for a shock scare that prefigures Gertie discovering ET.”
(Tom Charity, S&S, November 2022)

On Sky and Now TV now

 45

=26
Rotting in the Sun
SEBASTIÁN SILVA, US/MEXICO

Sebastián Silva plays a version of himself in this mordantly

meta satire, which draws uneasy parallels between social media
and drug addiction.

W e s a i d : “Rotting in the Sun is as queer as a £12 note, pirouetting

giddily from the existential musings of E.M. Cioran in The
Trouble with Being Born (which the protagonist is reading as the
film begins) to a bit of knockabout comedy with a double-
ended dildo. It’s the film’s daring association of nihilism,
homosexuality and social media that elevates it to required
viewing status for, particularly, clued-up gay audiences.”
(Caspar Salmon, S&S, October)

On Mubi now

=24
The Boy and the Heron
MIYAZAKI HAYAO, JAPAN

Miyazaki’s new film – which won’t be, as originally stated, his

last – builds from gentle enchantment to frenetic incident, and
shows that the master has lost none of his energy and creativity.

W e s a i d : “Miyazaki’s screenplay retains nothing of its source

material’s original narrative – and in fact piles on a swaying heap
of mystic/mythic complications. Distilled down to its essence
The Boy and the Heron is a story about the necessity of recognising
and accepting one’s responsibilities – about the interior journey
from innocence to experience, which gets thrillingly externalised

FILMS OF THE YEAR

through a series of surreal and epically scaled landscapes that
are only familiar from the iconography of Miyazaki’s own body
of work.” (Adam Nayman, S&S, see review on page 119)

In UK cinemas from 26 December

=24
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
PHAM THIêN ĀN, VIETNAM

Vietnamese writer-director Pham Thiên Ân’s hypnotically

paced debut is an odyssey about a young man who travels to
the countryside following a family tragedy

W e s ay: The film combines themes of national history,

Catholicism and the search for meaning – the titular shell,
Pham has said, being the worldly illusions we should strive to
shed. While the style might recall Apichatpong Weerasethakul
or Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey into Night, 2018), the execution
and the existential questioning show a very individual
artist bursting from his own cocoon and taking wing.
(Jonathan Romney)

Awaiting UK distribution

=20
Afire
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD, GERMANY

Love and jealousy simmer as a forest fire grows in

Christian Petzold’s satirical statement about love and its
devastating power.

We said: “Afire doesn’t enter explicit psychological thriller territory,

but its teasing out of the emotional shifts in character dynamics,
and the gradually intensifying pace of the action, all while the
forest fires get closer and closer, amount to an electric sense of
atmosphere. Petzold’s concerns with love as a consuming force
continue to inspire some of his most poetic onscreen relationships,
and by taking a more comic approach, the director homes in on
the humanity of it all.” (Caitlin Quinlan, S&S, September)

On major streaming services now

 46

=20
La chimera
ALICE ROHRWACHER, ITALY

Josh O’Connor plays a melancholic tombarolo who loots

artefacts from ancient Tuscan burial sites in this joyous work of
folk magic.

W e said : “Connecting the realm of the dead and the land of the
living, there’s Arthur (Josh O’Connor, whose performance is
one of the film’s many miracles), a young Englishman in an
increasingly grimy linen suit, returning to the region after a
stint in jail for grave-robbing. No description of what happens
in La chimera can adequately convey what happens in La
chimera, which feels like watching ancient magic from the point
of view of the spell. Arthur awakens to the realisation that his
lifestyle is built on a desecration of the very things he loves.
But Rohrwacher’s real story – splitting the difference between
the earthiness of The Wonders (2014) and the whimsicality of
Happy as Lazzaro (2018), and surpassing them both in vivid
strangeness – is the story of the Tuscan ground and the
beautiful secrets that sleep beneath our feet.” (Jessica Kiang,
S&S, Summer)

Release date yet to be announced

=20
Evil Does Not Exist
HAMAGUCHI RYŪSUKE, JAPAN

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke follows Drive My Car (2021) with an

ambiguous, elegantly told story of a lakeside community’s
resistance to an intrusive corporate ‘glamping’ development.
FILMS OF THE YEAR

W e said : “Hamaguchi steers clear of the traditional ecological

drama this local/outsider impasse might invite, in part
with his elegantly diffuse approach. The feedback meeting
that crystallises the conflict between the villagers and the
glamping concern has recent cinematic kin in the town hall of
Cristi Mungiu’s R.M.N. (2022) or possibly the teacher-parent
gathering in Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021).
But Hamaguchi puts his scene earlier, letting us track how
the tensions seep throughout the community, without letting
the film be overtaken or defined by the seemingly intractable
dispute with pure profit motive. Kitagawa Yoshio’s lambent
cinematography lets us breathe in the natural beauty of their
woodsy surroundings, though the movie also does not hold
up their way of life as somehow pure.” (Nicolas Rapold,
S&S online)

Release date yet to be announced

=20
Return to Seoul
DAV Y CHOU, FRANCE

A woman takes a trip from France to Seoul in search of

her birth parents in this shapeshifting story of identity and
self-exploration.

W e said : “Our adoptee is Freddie (Park Jimin), a headstrong

young woman who makes the impulsive decision to visit her
country of birth. Freddie is moody, outspoken and gets a kick
out of making people uncomfortable, and these characteristics
are presented not only as specific to her, but as expressive of
the culture in which she was raised. Can a young woman raised
to value spontaneity, frankness and individualism find worth
in a culture more inclined to prize reticence and the collective
good? And can that culture find worth in her? Freddie charges
on in, contacting the national adoption agency and having them
contact her birth parents for her – but the route to any kind of
resolution will be fraught. What, after all, does Freddie expect
to find out about herself?” (Hannah McGill, S&S, May)

On Mubi now
 47

=17
How to Have Sex
MOLLY MANNING WALKER, UK

This winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes is

an exuberant but devastating take on female friendship and
teenage sexual awakening, seen through the lens of a chaotic
Greek holiday.

W e s a i d : “Following three best friends as they embark on a

rowdy girls’ holiday on the Greek party island of Malia, Molly
Manning Walker’s blistering first feature captures the chaos,
mischief and excess of British teens abroad. Fuelled by silly
jokes, cheesy chips and endless sticky vodka shots, the girls tear
up the town, and reluctant virgin Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce)
sees an opportunity to finally undergo a crucial rite of passage.
But behind Tara’s bravado lies a young woman trying to find
herself. Manning Walker offers a nuanced exploration of the
effects of a highly sexualised, casually misogynist subculture.”
(Rachel Pronger, S&S, November)

In UK cinemas now

=17
Last Summer
CATHERINE BREILLAT, FRANCE

Catherine Breillat is in typically provocative form here, as a

well-respected lawyer begins an affair with her teenage stepson.

FILMS OF THE YEAR

W e s a i d : “Much less explicitly sexual than Breillat’s previous
films (which is to say that the various sex scenes play out with
minimal nudity, with close-ups on the characters’ faces), Last
Summer is a complication of the age-gap dynamic that casts
the older individual as a Svengali figure. The insolent Théo,
who at 17 is no stranger to matters of the flesh, is persistent
in his pursuit of Anne. She cannot deny her attraction, the
thrills Théo offers so unlike her conjugal routines. At first, the
affair comes across as a mere reckless rebellion born of sexual
dissatisfaction, but the drama and eventual fallout amount to
something much more chilling. Anne refuses to fall. To protect
what’s hers – her family, her reputation and the privileges of
her domestic life – she lies, indignantly denying Théo’s weepy
confession, knowing her age and position give her greater
authority.” (Beatrice Loayza, S&S, Summer)

Awaiting UK distribution

=17
TÓtem
LILA AVILÉS, MEXICO

Lila Avilés’s dazzling film takes a child’s-eye view of jubilation

and tragedy in the build-up to a party for her dying father.

W e s a i d : “No one grows up in one day; on the other hand, maybe

it can happen in an instant. Towards the end of Lila Avilés’s
exuberantly lovely Tótem, there’s an unearthly moment – made
all the eerier in a film otherwise raucous with the rattle of real
life – that suggests as much. Seven-year-old Sol (a wonderful
Naíma Sentíes) looks up from her father’s blazing birthday
cake, suddenly sombre, suddenly still. There are many ways
to read it, but Sol’s gaze has a strange and profound effect on
our very sense of the film, telescoping all the vitality of this
crowded, clattering day into a held breath. Yet the film is
nothing so manipulative as a tearjerker. Avilés’s exceptional
direction keeps sentimentality at bay while still, almost
magically, sampling the different flavours of grief that run like
currents and cross-currents between the members of this close-
knit, bickering family.” (Jessica Kiang, S&S, December)

In UK cinemas now
 48
The Year In
BRITISH
CINEMA
A particularly challenging
year for the sector still saw
plenty of reasons for optimism,
with a host of striking
debuts finding audiences
alongside big-budget fare from
heavyweights like Christopher
Nolan and Ridley Scott
BY HANNAH MCGILL
FILMS OF THE YEAR
Did the afterglow of Aftersun (2022) create
a welcoming environment for little UK
indies in 2023? Did an unprecedented
£6.27 billion spend on UK film and high-
end TV production over 2022 bear fruit?
Have visible efforts to diversify the UK
industry meaningfully impacted upon
what stories we hear, and from whom?
Recollections will vary, of course – and
complications are plentiful. A year that
began with the long-tail effects of Covid
still making themselves felt on cinema
admissions and ended with the disrup-
tions generated by the US writers’ and
actors’ strikes was more than usually chal-
lenging for an always challenged sector.
Despite that record inward investment
figure for UK film and TV in 2022, cel-
ebrated in February, independent film
production remains squeezed compared
to high-end television and international
co-productions. In November the produc-
ers’ body Pact warned the UK government
that the independent film sector is “at the
point of market failure”, with active govern-
ment intervention essential to its survival.
An overview of the year’s more talked-
about releases engenders a slight sense of
plus ça change, with prominent films appear-
ing to occupy long-established slots within
British film culture. The likelihood of such
films issuing from the hitherto underrepre-
sented perspectives of women and people
of colour, however, has increased: Emerald
Fennell’s Saltburn, Shekhar Kapur’s What’s
Love Got to Do with It, Carol Morley’s Typist
Artist Pirate King and George Amponsah’s
Gassed Up all represent novel takes on very
familiar formats: the arch country house
mystery, the twinkly wedding-centric
romcom, the quirky state-of-the-nation
road movie, the gangster thriller. Not that
the more conventional model of a major
British filmmaker – white, male and
wealthy – was dormant. Christo-
pher Nolan riveted interna-
tional attention with Oppen-
heimer, Oliver Parker gave
Michael Caine and the
late Glenda Jackson
their final film roles
in The Great Escaper;
and Ridley Scott
rounded off
2023 with the
release of his
epic Napoleon.
Sam Mendes’s
Empire of Light,
Richard Eyre’s
Allelujah and
Ken Loach’s
The Old Oak
all s ought to
speak not for the
influential, but for
the marginalised
– victims of racism,
poverty, public sector
cuts and exploitation.
Whether for these filmmak-
ers to take on these subjects
represents responsible use of their
ABOVE Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex
own class power or paternalistic appropri-
ation of experience, is not a question that
will be settled in this column – or indeed,
in the course of Loach’s career, since at 87,
he now considers himself retired. Con-
tenders to fill this vacated national treas-
ure spot? We could look at promoting
Andrew Haigh, whose thrilling engage-
ment with human intimacy has continued
and expanded with All of Us Strangers; or
Joanna Hogg, whose upper-crust psycho-
dramas took a ghostly turn with The Eter-
nal Daughter, starring Tilda Swinton. Still
more self-possessed and uncompromising
is the work of Christine Lawlor and Joe
Malloy, who have continued their artistic
partnership with Baltimore (seen at festivals
in 2023 and set for release next year), and
that of Jon Sanders, who added the beau-
tifully acted A Clever Woman to his small-
scale, unconventional, defiantly middle-
aged oeuvre.
What of those filmmakers at the very
start of their journeys? Georgia Oakley
set a high standard early in the year with
her subtle and empathetic Blue Jean, and
actor Neil Maskell tried dark comedy
from behind the camera with his directo-
rial debut Klokkenluider. Molly Manning
Walker’s relationship drama How to Have
Sex made a justifiable splash, evincing a
warmth and empathy that lifted it far from
the movie-of-the-week it could have been,
and showcasing jaw-droppingly good per-
formances by its young cast, led by Mia
McKenna-Bruce. Also serving sensitivity
and positivity, but with an energising twist
of stylised comedy, were Charlotte Regan’s
irrepressible Scrapper, Thomas Hardiman’s
hairdressing whodunnit Medusa Deluxe
and Raine Allen-Miller’s internationally
acclaimed Rye Lane. Adura Onashile’s Girl
was a quieter piece, but no one who saw
it will forget its slow-burn intensity and
exceptional lead performance by Déborah
Lukumuena. Dionne Edwards’s Pretty Red
Dress, meanwhile, starring the singer Alex-
andra Burke, used music as the way into
its warmly immediate study of masculinity
and responsibility.
Questions of identity and representa-
tion have been prominent within both
movie plots and industry conversations
in the past year – but approaches to this
theme have been varied and energetic,
rather than monotonously pious. Anyone
still fretful about an excess of earnest-
ness, however, or a dearth of experimen-
tal energy, might wish to consider Yorgos
Lanthimos’s Poor Things, and Jonathan
Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, two of the most
internationally acclaimed UK produc-
tions of the year. Each is a literary adap-
tation by a heavyweight author, each is a
lavishly mounted period piece and each is
directed by a known auteur – yet neither
could be accused of being conservative,
complacent or predictable. In a time of
polarised politics and intractable financial
woes, the place of both films in the Oscar-
baiting big leagues plots a hopeful path for
UK newcomers hoping to hang on to their
individualism through the storms to come.
 49

=15
Fallen Leaves
AKI K AURISMÄKI, FINLAND

In Aki Kaurismäki’s bittersweet cinephile romance, love

represents the possibility of transcending – or at least surviving
– the grinding reality of life under capitalism.

W e s a i d : “More than three decades have passed since Aki

Kaurismäki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy but not much has
changed. In Fallen Leaves, the world is still various shades
of grey and teal, livened up by the occasional splash of vivid
colour: a woman’s bright red blazer, a dumpster of deep blue.
Lonely men and women still toil away their days at dreary
and precarious working-class jobs. After clocking off, they
still go to bars where they drink and smoke and talk to each
other in comically clipped sentences – if they talk at all, that
is. Kaurismäki’s characteristic nostalgia has its narrative
advantages: when Ansa (Alma Pöysti) gives Holappa (Jussi
Vatanen) her phone number, had she typed it into his mobile
instead of writing it down on a piece of paper, the wind
couldn’t have blown it away.” (Giovanni Marchini Camia,
S&S online)

In UK cinemas now

=15
Saint Omer
ALICE DIOP, FRANCE

Based on a real-life infanticide court case, Alice Diop’s

fiction feature debut is a haunting drama that plays on deep
maternal anxieties.

FILMS OF THE YEAR

W e s a i d : “Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a successful young novelist
expecting a baby with her loving partner. Sometimes she is in
denial of her maternal situation; other times, she is terrified
by the baby growing inside her. Rama’s paradigm of maternal
fear shifts to something far worse once she starts attending
a courtroom in the run-down town of Saint-Omer, northern
France, to follow an infanticide case. This film is a remarkable
feat in numerous ways. The acting is uniformly superb, even
when it’s simply dispassionate testimony that’s being dispatched.
Kagame plays Rama in a state of continual displacement, ill at
ease at dinner with her mother, uncomfortable on the streets
of Saint-Omer and conspicuous in the courtroom; Guslagie
Malanda, as the defendant Laurence Coly, evokes profound pain
through the tiniest cracks in her expressions and voices as she
revisits traumatic memories.” (Leila Latif, S&S, March)

On Mubi now

=13
Asteroid City
WES ANDERSON, US

Wes Anderson’s charming 1950s-set sci-fi features an ensemble

cast, alien invaders and a dizzying ‘play within a TV show
within a film’ structure.

W e s a i d : “A one-car pioneer town, somewhere in the parched

wilds of the California-Nevada desert, in the fresh-faced post-
war years of the expanding American empire, on the third
rock from the sun. This remote outpost, and the few days we
spend there with a ragtag group of visitors both scheduled
and unscheduled, lend Wes Anderson’s latest world-rebuilding
confection more dramatic unity than perhaps any of his
previous ten cavorting cine-capers. It also sees a filmmaker who
has insistently followed his inclinations eastward finally turning
west: the film is festooned with markers of 1950s Americana,
from freight trains, singing cowboys and saturated Technicolor
to tract-home salesmen, atom-bomb tests and military-scientific
sequestration. The name ‘Asteroid City’ may be a sci-fi come-on
for this dreaming toehold in the desert, but the film precisely
evokes that time when America’s frontier was moving from the
West to the skies above.” (Nick Bradshaw, S&S, Summer)

On major streaming services now

 50

=13
Tár
TODD FIELD, US

Cate Blanchett gives a career-best performance in this sly,

scabrous symphony, as a monstrous conductor losing her grip
on power.

We said: “Tár is a slow dive into the increasingly alienating

psychology of Lydia Tár, a world-famous orchestra conductor.
It moves to a rarefied tempo: philharmonic politics, contested
cello solo auditions and live-recording contract negotiations
for one of Mahler’s more daunting works. It is replete with
classical-music-world in-jokes and casually caustic namedrops
that must mystify anyone who failed to graduate from Juilliard…
before pursuing a doctorate in Advanced Stravinsky. It has
absolutely no business being even remotely watchable, and yet
here it is, one of the most grippingly brilliant films of the year,
featuring, in Cate Blanchett’s mesmerising central turn, a truly
irreplaceable star performance. Most of the film’s subtly queasy
mood comes direct from Blanchett, who uses every aspect of
her physicality to embody the crescendos and diminuendos of
this acerbic cautionary tale of genius and cruelty and towering,
monstrous ego.” (Jessica Kiang, S&S, March)

On Sky and Now TV now

12
All of Us Strangers
ANDREW HAIGH, UK

Andrew Haigh’s time-slipping film is a deeply affecting,

supernatural exploration of the profound consequences of grief
and homophobia.
FILMS OF THE YEAR

W e said : “Adam (Andrew Scott) spots a handsome man (Jamie

Bell) who returns his gaze. They walk with nonchalant purpose
in the same direction, crossing woodland, converging on a shop
to buy booze and fags. “Shall we go?” the man asks. “Where?”
Adam replies. “Home,” comes the answer. Home is not just
where the man lives. It is where Adam spent his childhood.
The man is his father. But not his father as an old man – as a
young man, younger than Adam is now. Adam is cruising the
past, seeking meaning and connection, an unlocking, a release,
a path. He is a blocked writer but also a traumatised queer
person reckoning with the intimate and profound consequences
of structural homophobia and his parents’ deaths. He wants to
go home and to find a home and needs to learn the difference
between the two.” (Ben Walters, S&S, see review on page 116)

In UK cinemas from 26 January

11
Close Your Eyes
VÍCTOR ERICE, SPAIN

Victor Erice’s first feature in 30 years deals with the

disappearance of a fictional actor and explores loss, grief and
the exquisite power of cinema.

W e said : “ The unfussy elegance of Erice’s filmmaking remains

as fresh and clear as ever. It’s a contemplative style, allowing
his superb cast time and space. It’s a film made by, and about,
true believers in the transcendent potential of sound and
image. Still, this isn’t blind cinephile love. The climax, set in
a closed-down, small town cinema, is no simplistic paean to
‘the magic of the movies’. In fact, editor Max gruffly jokes that
“miracles in movies haven’t existed since Dreyer died!” And
yet Erice has dreamed in light an extraordinary ambition for
what film, certainly his films, can strive for. As his characters
gaze up at the screen, and out, perhaps for the final time,
at their audience, it’s hard to envisage a more emotionally
overwhelming farewell, if that’s what Close Your Eyes becomes,
from a vital, too-often missing, force in world cinema.”
(Leigh Singer, S&S online)

Release date yet to be announced


HORROR
The Year In
A host of Exorcist knock-offs, Dracula
retreads and franchise instalments shows
that tradition is still strong – but the
underlying theme of today’s horror is
the collapse of all the old certainties
BY KIM NEWMAN
Either to honour or to desecrate the
50th anniversary of William Friedkin’s
The Exorcist (1973), possession was the
big theme of mainstream horror in 2023
– culminating in David Gordon Green’s
clumsy, needless reboot/sequel The Exor-
cist: Believer. That wasn’t even the loopiest,
most entertaining Exorcist knock-off in a
year that stretched to Russell Crowe in
and as The Pope’s Exorcist, Taissa Farmiga’s
rematch with a demon in the form of a
churchwoman in The Nun II, and Jacobo
Martinez’s grittier 13 Exorcisms. NB: all of
these purport to be drawn from real cases
of possession, though any factual basis has
long since been abandoned for Conjuring
spin-offs and Exorcist follow-ups – as ever,
‘based on a good story’ is a more promis-
ing tagline than ‘based on a true story’.
Far more original, interesting takes on the
theme have included Danny and Michael
Philippou’s Talk to Me, in which temporary
possession becomes an internet challenge;
Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, in
which an epidemic of possessions rewrites
the rules of the subgenre; Cameron and
Colin Cairnes’s what-if-Regan-out-of-
The-Exorcist-guested-on-a-1970s-talk-show
found-footage film Late Night with the
Devil; and Nick Kozakis’s resolutely anti-
clerical revisiting of the Exorcist premise
Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism. Three of
these films are Australian, which suggests
something is afoot down there.
Vampires also put in their usual show-
ing, though an inability to cross running
water, or something, meant that André
Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter
didn’t make it to UK cinemas alongside
Chris McKay’s black comedy Renfield (Nic
Cage plays Dracula as the worst boss in
the world) or even to a streaming plat-
form next to Pablo Larraín’s icily gothic
satire El Conde (General Pinochet as
Dracula). More romantic were a pair
of French essays in the subgenre,
Romain de Saint-Blanquat’s
La Morsure (‘The Bite’) –
a 1960s-set teen picture
with a lurking, cloaked
homme fatal – and
Adrien Beau’s The
Vourdalak, an adap-
tation of a much-
f ilmed Russian
folk-horror tale
which inverts
the concept of
A Muppet Christ-
mas Carol by
having one key
character (the
vampire) played
by a puppet inter-
acting with regu-
lar, mostly doomed
folk. Other major
monster-movie arcana
got makeovers at dif-
ferent ends of the budget
spectrum, with Eddie Izzard
holding court in Joe Stephen-
son’s theatrical Doctor Jekyll and
ABOVE Mia Goth in Pearl
51
Emma Stone as a patchwork Bride of
Frankenstein in Yorgos Lanthimos’s lavish,
lush, steampunk picaresque Poor Things.
Off-the-peg horror ground on, as ever
– with possible franchises-to-be (M3gan,
Cocaine Bear, Five Nights at Freddy’s) rais-
ing hopes that sequels might improve on
the shortcomings of initial instalments,
while others (Unwelcome, The Boogeyman,
Cobweb, There’s Something in the Barn) are
complete and effective in themselves –
which isn’t to say their menaces won’t be
back. Middling but serviceable entries in
the Evil Dead, Insidious, Scream, Meg and
Saw sagas eclipsed a few by-the-numbers
efforts (It Lives Inside, The Piper, The Black-
ening). Worst in show in this category is
Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie-the-Pooh
Blood and Honey, which demonstrates
that just because it’s legal to make some-
thing is no reason to toss out a minimal
effort and greenlight sequels or spin-
offs on the same pattern. The year’s best
sequel was Ti West’s Pearl, which is due
to be extended into a trilogy – almost
entirely on the strength of Mia Goth’s
commitment to weirdness, which was
also on view in Brandon Cronenberg’s
gruesome, witty Infinity Pool. The likeli-
hood that more inventive one-off horrors
will find their home on streaming plat-
forms was furthered by a couple of fresh,
under-the-radar efforts – Brian Duffield’s
FILMS OF THE YEAR
near-wordless home invasion/alien body-
snatcher showcase No One Will Save You
and Nahnatchka Khan’s knowing Back
to the Future-but-with-a-slasher entertain-
ment Totally Killer.
Auteur horror offered M. Night Shy-
amalan’s Knock at the Cabin, at once an
enclosed drama and an apocalypse; Ari
Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, a blistering, ambi-
tious exercise in self-flagellation which
is a lot funnier and stranger than it got
credit for; and Joanna Hogg’s two Tildas
take on the haunted hotel visit The Eternal
Daughter. These worthy filmmakers are
at risk, however, of seeming mainstream
and aboveground when compared to a
clutch of very independent, challenging
personal works which are likely to polarise
critics and audiences but represent work
being done at the bloodier cutting edge
of genre… the Adams Family’s Where the
Devil Roams, Laurence Vannicelli’s Mother,
May I?, Sean Hogan’s To Fire You Come at
Last, Barnaby Clay’s The Seeding, Teresa
Sutherland’s Lovely, Dark and Deep (and its
doppelganger Joe Lo Truglio’s Outpost),
Chris Cronin’s The Moor, Ted Geoghegan’s
Brooklyn 45, John Pata’s Black Mold, Steven
Pierce’s Herd, Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace,
Onur Tukel’s Poundcake, Pete Ohs’ Jethica,
Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion, Kyle Edward
Ball’s Skinamarink and Robbie Banfitch’s
The Outwaters. The overall theme of this
selection of films – perhaps of 21st century
horror in general, minus the franchise
stripmining – is collapse, whether mental
or societal, and often of narrative itself as
horrific effects and imagery (and sounds)
overwhelm conventional storytelling in
favour of the logic of the nightmare.
52
FILMS OF THE YEAR
10 MAY DECEMBER TODD HAYNES, US
A housewife’s scandalous past is probed in this dark comedy that
explores the thin line between truth and self-delusion
Ever since W e s a i d : “Todd Haynes knows how to
write complicated women. Ever since
Julianne Moore’s Julianne Moore stepped into the role of
role as a housewife a housewife suffering from a mysterious
suffering from a quasi-psychosomatic illness in Haynes’s
environmental thriller Safe (1995), his
mysterious illness films have featured a number of heroines
in Safe, Haynes’s who are hard to fathom, yet infinitely
films have featured fascinating. In Haynes’s dark comedy,
May December (2023), Moore plays Gracie
heroines who are Atherton-Yoo, a former pet-store worker
hard to fathom, whose affair with an adolescent boy, Joe,
yet infinitely created a media frenzy in her middle-class
community in Savannah, Georgia. The
fascinating story begins more than two decades after
the scandal, as an indie film is to be made
about Gracie and Joe, who’s now 36 – we
discover that the two dutifully married and
Gracie had Joe’s baby in prison.
ABOVE
Natalie Portman and
Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth Berry,
Julianne Moore the actress who’s to portray the younger
Gracie. Elizabeth arrives at Gracie’s family
home to shadow her in her daily chores,
to observe and later imitate her subject’s
gestures, but also, increasingly, to probe
the murkier depths of her affair and psyche
– which turns out to be near impossible.
Here lies the plot’s central paradox: played
by Moore as mostly unfazed, though at
times unexpectedly inconsolable, Gracie
isn’t actually looking to be redeemed. The
more Elizabeth snoops around, inter-
viewing Gracie’s loved ones, such as her
ex-husband and children, and the more
she insists that Gracie acknowledge the
permanent damage that the affair caused
to her family, the more Gracie rebuffs any
notion that her love for Joe can be some-
how wrong.
As the baby-faced, delicate Joe, Charles
Melton infuses the story with a welcome
forthrightness that’s the opposite of Gracie
and Elizabeth’s infinite cat-and-mouse
dance. Where, despite professing good
intentions, Elizabeth is ruthless in her
ambition to break out in a new role, to the
point of predating on Gracie and everyone
in her household. Meanwhile, Gracie’s so
addicted to the single version of the events
that paint Joe as her equal – no matter
at what age – that she never gets past all
the smoke and mirrors. Unlike them, Joe
appears to be on a real quest for a deeper
personal truth. Even if, in the end, such
reckoning cannot be fully gleaned from the
fractured, conflicting versions of his life.
Haynes’s film shines brightest in moments
of such genuine anguish and ambiguity,
which clash, rather tragically, with Gracie’s
obdurate clinging to her persona.” (Ela Bit-
tencourt, S&S, December)
On Sky Cinema and Now TV now

AI
The Year In
The writers’ and actors’ strikes
in the US put the spotlight
on potential downsides
of artificial intelligence in
filmmaking. With the strikes
settled, some risks remain –
but so do dizzying possibilities
BY DOMINIC LEES
Just 12 months ago, on 30 November 2022,
ChatGPT was launched publicly, open-
ing a year in which artificial intelligence
has stormed through the world of film:
everyone – critics, filmmaking profession-
als, film theorists – has been forced to sit
up and learn fast about the new techno-
logical revolution. Recent movies have
also addressed the big issues around AI:
in Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, the US is
at war with AI after it has destroyed Los
Angeles, and John David Washington’s
protagonist, Joshua, confronts the threat
and dilemmas of AI. Central to Edwards’s
script is a question: is AI the real danger,
or is our own fear of the technology the
bigger problem?
The Creator was released in September
just two days after the end of the Writ-
ers Guild of America strike. For the film
world, it has been in labour disputes in the
US that arguments over the use of AI have
played out. Writers’ and actors’ unions
have faced down intransigent attitudes
from film and TV producers, reaching
agreements that will govern the future of
AI in mainstream filmmaking. The WGA
deal means that AI cannot be an originat-
ing author of a script, and if a producer
uses AI to generate a storyline and asks
a screenwriter to develop it, the human
writer’s role is the only one recognised in
the movie’s development. Importantly, the
deal affirms that the technology is now
completely in the hands of the creative
screenwriter: the writer decides whether
to use ChatGPT (or other AI) and cannot
be compelled to use it.
The deal won by the actors’ union, Sag-
Aftra, firmly allays fears that performers’
images could be appropriated through
AI and used in new films without their
agreement. The creation and use of ‘digi-
tal replicas’ of actors is now controlled
and subject to performers’ consent.
But there are some important
areas not covered by the
deal, and arguments will
continue into 2024. Tim
Friedlander, head of
the National Asso-
ciation of Voice
Actors (Nava)
in Los Angeles,
des crib e d to
me how the
Sag-Aftra deal
“s p e c i f i c a l l y
allows for for-
eign-language
AI usage in a
movie – it has
the potential to
destroy the dub-
bing industry in
every country out-
side of the United
States”. So, while
Manfred Lehmann is
a star in his own right in
Germany as the voice of
Bruce Willis, and Tom Cruise
insists on the German actor
ABOVE The Creator
53
AI means that film culture
may cease to be limited by
language barriers, with a
seamless cultural flow of
films across the world, but
at the cost of redundancy
for those actors whose
voice is their profession
Patrick Winczewski to dub his movies, AI
will kill off these careers and others in film
cultures where dubbed foreign movies are
the norm. The change has already begun
in TV streaming – in, for instance, the
Portuguese series Vanda, currently show-
ing on Hulu in the US. AI has been used
to translate the original actors’ voices
and perform automated lip-syncing to
dub perfect foreign-language versions for
English-speaking and other audiences.
Looking positively, AI means that film cul-
ture may cease to be limited by language
barriers, with a seamless cultural flow of
films across the world, but at the cost of
redundancy for those actors whose voice
is their profession.
AI in screenwriting will become widely
FILMS OF THE YEAR
adopted in 2024. The impact will come
first at the lower-budget end of film pro-
duction, where speed of project devel-
opment is often key. Bob Schultz writes
genre movies, often horror, and is an early
adopter of AI. He told me how, within
a few hours of a producer meeting, he
can deliver pitches of multiple GPT4-
generated storylines to meet their brief.
He warns that AI is good for structuring
narratives but is lousy at drafting: “When
you get it to write the actual screenplay, it’s
not very good, the dialogue is not believa-
ble.” The speed at which Schultz can write
is essential for his professional survival at
the low-paid end of the business: he needs
to deliver 20 screenplays a year to make a
living solely off screenwriting, and this is
possible for the first time with GPT4.
In 2024, AI will become an extraordi-
nary tool for film preproduction. Systems
will be able to take a completed screen-
play and automatically generate budgets
and script breakdowns – even shot-lists,
storyboards and animatics. Paul Trillo, a
pioneer of AI in filmmaking, sees 2024 as
a year when AI will begin to benefit film-
makers outside the mainstream. For exam-
ple, 3D motion capture “will be based on
video input alone – so no motion-capture
suit – and is going to be much higher fidel-
ity and will allow independent filmmakers
to do a lot more animated work”.
Finally, get ready for some great new
terminology. My favourite is ‘Gaussian
Splats’, a technology linked to 3D video
capture. In postproduction, a film editor
can now use this to change a camera angle
or create camera movements that were
never achieved on set.
 54

The Year In There used to be a rule on Twitter – heard above the stream of full-time opin-

SOCIAL
before it was bought by Elon Musk in
2022, rebranded X and gradually became
more user-unfriendly, more swamp-like,
more racist, antisemitic, transphobic and
misogynist – that there is one ‘main char-
acter’ on the site every day, one user who,
usually through the outrageousness or stu-
pidity of their piping-hot take, becomes the
ion-havers whose often less informed,
more incendiary points of view tend to be
boosted by the platform’s algorithm. A site
that only a couple of years ago felt like the
best place to make connections and share
published writing now feels unfit for that
purpose, especially with links to other sites
having been made less attractive to click

MEDIA
As Twitter has become ever more quarrelsome
and scabrous, online film chat and criticism
have begun to disperse to other sites, but
one subject has continued to dominate
the discourse – one subject and his dog
BY THOMAS FLEW
FILMS OF THE YEAR
object of scorn and ridicule. In 2023, things
were different on X, especially its haphaz-
ard cinephile subsection, still generally
referred to as ‘Film Twitter’: there was one
person whose ability to rile the masses was
so potent that he became the main char-
acter on Film Twitter every day, as well as
on Film TikTok (‘FilmTok’) and the film
social media site Letterboxd. All of this
he managed while making and promoting
one of the finest films in his half-century
career. Take a bow, Martin Scorsese.
As Film Twitter limped on, it played
out a greatest hits of its most tedious argu-
ments, with Scorsese acting as uninten-
tional firestarter. The 206-minute runtime
of Killers of the Flower Moon proved uncon-
scionable to many – 24 minutes longer
than Avengers: Endgame (2019), and with-
out even the threat of universal apocalypse
to keep you occupied, won’t somebody
think of the poor bladders! – provoking
the most Twitter-brained into accusing
the octogenarian Scorsese of bias against
on, in a futile attempt to promote publish-
ing directly on X. There is clear demand
for an alternative, as shown by the excite-
ment surrounding the launch of Meta’s
Twitter-imitating app Threads (usage
soon dropped off, though) and by a slow
migration towards Bluesky, at present still
invite only. Nevertheless, X’s doomscroll-
ing siren call is still seductive for many.
If a future for online f ilm criticism
exists, it may be with Letterboxd. The
site – which allows users to track their
viewing, post reviews and make lists –
has changed remarkably little since it was
launched in 2011, but exploded in popu-
larity after the pandemic shut millions of
people indoors with little but streaming
sites for company. What was once a place
where passionate amateur film criticism
(including embarrassing teenage efforts
from your writer, since excised) flour-
ished, has now gained several levels of
professionalism. Many full-time critics
post capsule reviews there, or link to their

elderly viewers. The pro- and anti-Marvel
camps set out their positions once more,
with Marvelites scoffing at the paltry eight-
figure sum earned in the US to date by Kill-
ers of the Flower Moon. The spat reached a
climax after an innocuous TikTok
posted by Scorsese’s daughter
Francesca, a silly riff on the Kule-
shov effect featuring a miniature
schnauzer named Oscar. Marvel
director Joe Russo responded
with a video with his own minia-
ture schnauzer, which he claims is
called Box Office.
Back on X, freelance film crit-
ics struggled to make their voices
ABOVE
TikTok legends Martin, Oscar
and Francesca Scorsese
full reviews on other sites, while actors
and comedians post meme-like one-
liners: Ayo Edebiri, star of Emma Selig-
man’s riotous high-school comedy Bottoms
posted her own review of the film, which
read in full “I’m in it with my friends so’’,
with a five-star rating.
Like Film Twitter, Letterboxd is now a
space shared by film fans and professional
critics – which is great for consumers wish-
ing for a variety of viewpoints, less helpful
to writers who hope to earn a living plying
their trade and find themselves having to
explain why their work is worth a fee when
thousands of others will perform the same
function for fun (and for free). But a fur-
ther layer of legitimacy was added to Let-
terboxd by our man of the year Marty, who
joined in October and overnight became
the site’s most-followed person.
The blurred line between critics and
fans is something that PR agencies are
all too happy to exploit for marketing
purposes; the online ad campaign for
Emerald Fennell’s class-drama Saltburn
prioritised quotes from X users (“Might
need clinical help, literally all I can think
about is Saltburn,” said @Dyl_Bows)
over reviews in the legacy media. And yet
what might be this year’s most unusual X
news story demonstrated that approval
from critics is still craved. Casey Bloys,
CEO of HBO. briefly took the mantle of
main character off Scorsese when it was
revealed that he had sent a “secret army”
of staff “on a mission” to anonymously
push back against a tweet by Kathryn
VanArendonk, TV critic for the entertain-
ment website Vulture, criticising his com-
pany’s reboot of the classic legal drama
Perry Mason. Some tweets are worth more
than others, it appears.

9 DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH
Radu Jude’s
latest film is quite
simply essential
viewing for anyone
trying to survive
the world as we
now know it
ABOVE
Do Not Expect Too Much from
the End of the World
FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
RADU JUDE, ROMANIA
Radu Jude’s rude, relentless and original provocation skewers the
managerial classes as it speeds through late-capitalist Bucharest
We said: “Funny, fierce, unstoppable, Radu
Jude’s latest film is quite simply essential
viewing for anyone trying to survive the
world as we now know it. It’s one woman’s
life caught at a gallop, as our hero Angela
(instant star Ilinca Manolache) motors
around Bucharest running down tasks
for a production company while keeping
a hold of what personal freedoms she can.
Enlivened by Jude and his lead’s humour
and weaving in not-too-distant visions of
the past, this formally brilliant film shows
how Angela’s resilience becomes one kind
of rebellion.
Bustling about, Angela faces a routine
litany of aggression and insults as well as
systemic debasements that see her doing
the work of titled positions while being
treated as a girl Friday. But she’s her own
force of nature, pushing through, her deal-
with-it attitude neatly expressed in the
disco-glitter dress she keeps wearing for
work; the film opens with her waking up
to her alarm and a full day ahead with an
eminently realistic opening line (“Fucking
shit!”). And in a stroke of genius by Jude
and Manolache, she repeatedly records
TikTok asides in the satirical persona of
‘Bobita,’ a filthy Andrew Tate type who
goes on nonsensically vulgar, incredibly
stupid tirades, with Angela’s blonde pony-
tail obscured by a unibrow bald-head filter.
It’s the sort of film that can sound like
satire at times but turns out to be a mirror
to twisted realities. Manolache has an envi-
able lack of self-consciousness in the role,
disappearing into Angela’s multitasking
momentum instead of centring on grand
statements. Jude too is fearless, lobbing
little stink bombs of humour and then
boldly switching playbooks for the final,
long-take sequence in which the company
Angela works for films an outdoor safety
video starring a Romanian worker for a
55
FILMS OF THE YEAR
multinational, Ovidiu, who is now in a
wheelchair.
The film shifts focus from Angela to
Ovidiu’s predicament for a moment: he’s
also in the middle of legal action against
the multinational, and the video may be
self-incriminating, but he can’t turn down
the money he’ll get from participating.
It’s a double bind in a broken system of
iniquities, the kind Angela has battled
throughout the f ilm and then f inally
plays out (with a characteristically inno-
vative twist from Jude). All this and I
haven’t even mentioned the scene featur-
ing renowned hack director Uwe Boll.
But Jude’s film rewards rewatching and,
down to the credits and Angela’s raucous
driving playlist, bristles with the detail
and the hum of a life in motion.” (Nicolas
Rapold, S&S online)
In UK cinemas from 8 March
 8 ANATOMY OF A FALL
56
JUSTINE TRIET, FRANCE
This sharply intelligent Palme d’Or-winning psychological drama
puts a wife on trial for the violent death of her husband
In vivid, clean W e s a i d : “If Marriage Story (2019) were
a murder trial, it might look a little like
lines, Anatomy of Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s grip-
a Fall navigates ping, sharply intelligent psychological
a moral morass drama, which collects itself in fizzing arcs
of strange electricity around a brilliant,
and exposes the edgy but elusive Sandra Hüller. A woman
absurdity of trying stands accused of killing her husband.
to pluck from the Her 11-year-old son, a key witness who was
blinded in an accident some years prior,
trial a simplistic, listens in the courtroom. Lawyers rant,
binary verdict theorise and nitpick, but what is really
being dissected is the mystery that is other
people’s passions. Where does responsibil-
ity lie when a marriage sours? Did love fall
away, did it jump, or was it pushed?
Sandra (Hüller), a successful novelist,
FILMS OF THE YEAR
is being interviewed by grad student Zoé
(Camille Rutherford) in the partially reno-
BELOW
Sandra Hüller as the wife
vated chalet in the French Alps that Sandra
accused of murder shares with her French husband Samuel
(Samuel Theis) and their son Daniel
(Milo Machado Graner). As Zoé leaves,
she passes Daniel taking his dog Snoop
for a walk in the dazzling snow, the border
collie’s pale blue eyes uncannily evoking
the boy’s impaired vision. When Daniel
returns, his father lies dead beneath the
attic window where he was working, blood
staining the snow.
A year later, Sandra stands in the dock.
A native German with fluent French but
even better English, she code-switches
in fascinating ways: does her reversion
to English at key junctures signal better
communication of the truth? Or is it the
language in which she can more easily
lie? As the ruthless prosecution advocate
(Antoine Reinartz, a cleverly counterintui-
tive casting choice) locks horns with San-
dra’s lawyer and old friend/flame Vincent
(an excellent Swann Arlaud), every piece
of evidence is opened to opposing, equally
plausible interpretations, and the cred-
ibility of each witness, especially Sandra,
becomes more important than the facts.
Between the absolute poles of ‘guilty’
and ‘not guilty’ lies a many-shaded spec-
trum of culpability and complicity. In vivid,
clean lines, Anatomy of a Fall navigates this
moral morass and exposes the absurdity of
trying to pluck from it a simplistic, binary
verdict. Is Sandra a loving mother, a mur-
derous wife, an egotistical creator, a guilt-
ridden destroyer? Tick all that apply. Triet
handles with magnificent certainty the
feeling/fact that none of the great three-
word statements – I love you, I hate you, I
forgive you, I am sorry – exists to the exclu-
sion of any of the others.” (Jessica Kiang,
S&S, December)
On major streaming platforms in 2024

The Year In
DOCUMENTARY
FILM
It’s been a year of rich achievement, with
doc makers thinking creatively about how to
increase representation and diversity on screen
– but at the same time, a lack of investment
threatens diversity behind the camera
BY NICK BRADSHAW
In 2022, a mini doc-world culture war
erupted around Meg Smaker’s Jihad Rehab
and perennial questions of representa-
tion and objectification. Accusations of
appropriation and exploitation of the film’s
former Guantánamo inmates were coun-
tered by cries of ‘cancel culture’, while the
film’s selection at Sundance fuelled criti-
cisms of the industry’s failures of diversity
and inclusion from those who felt such
showcases were not offered equally.
If there was a bright point in documen-
tary this year, it was the sense of the indus-
try stepping into this debate and making
some redress. Jennifer Tiexiera and
Camilla Hall’s Subject, a doc about docs
and their ethical obligations to the people
they frame, which had a timely premiere
shortly after Jihad Rehab in 2022, gained
more traction this year with releases in
countries including the UK, though in its
native US the business was keener to talk
about it than distribute it.
Most encouraging were the films that
walked the walk for diversity and inclu-
sion – and even strutted and danced.
Ella Glendining’s first-person doc about
bodily difference Is There Anybody out There?
opened my eyes to prejudice and double
standards in our construction of the
world. Jeanie Finlay’s Your Fat Friend (out
in the UK in February) expressed and
inspired awe for its blogger hero Aubrey
Gordon’s tireless fightback against our
society’s body-shaming ignorance and
punishment. D. Smith’s Kokomo City and
Agniia Galdonova’s Queendom showed us
trans expression and repression US- and
Russian-style, respectively, with collabora-
tive intimacy and empathy. Most formally
intriguing, Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba
Thieves, an experimental docudrama wend-
ing among deaf and hard-of-hearing Los
Angeleno musicians, found a medley of
creative audiovisual ways to challenge and
expand understanding of deaf culture.
Nicolas Philibert landed us amid
a mix of psychiatric patients and
carers on a floating Paris-
ian refuge in the vérité
portrait On the Adamant,
which won the Berli-
nale Golden Bear. It
joined several stud-
ies of health and
care in a rich year:
Claire Simon’s Our
Body, filmed in a
Parisian gynaecol-
ogy ward; Luke
L o r e n t z e n’s A
Still Small Voice,
following a trainee
New York hospital
chaplain in the early
months of Covid;
Maite Alberdi’s The
Eternal Memory, in which
life partnership arrives
at end-of-life care. Anna
Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
found restorative nurture in Esto-
nian communal heritage.
ABOVE D. Smith’s Kokomo City
57
A plethora of grim sociopolitical stories
emerged from around the world – 20 Days
in Mariupol, from Ukraine; Bobi Wine: The
People’s President, on repression in Uganda;
Total Trust, on China’s surveillance state;
Beyond Utopia, on escaping North Korea;
et al. To set against that were some cul-
tural gems: Errol Morris dived into John
le Carré’s looking-glass fiction-spinning in
The Pigeon Tunnel; Lizzie Gottlieb probed
Robert Caro’s nonfictional duty of care
with his editor, her father Robert, in
Turn Every Page. Wim Wenders sculpted
Anselm Kiefer’s towering take on art and
German history in the 3D Anselm; Paul
Sng revived late Tyneside photographer
Tish Murtha’s lost documentary art in
Tish. Lea Glob’s dedicated documentation
of her peripatetic friend and budding artist
Apolonia Sokol over 13 years became the
marvellous, novelistic Apolonia, Apolonia.
And Fred Wiseman hung out in a Michelin
three-starred restaurant in Menu-Plaisirs:
Les Troisgros.
The main documentary draw in 2023,
though, was easy to identify: fame. Epony-
mous portraits of Michael J Fox, Little
Richard, Brooke Shields, Judy Blume
and more personalities set the tone at
Sundance in January and seemed to be
the only titles the retrenching corporate
streamers were buying. Across the year,
films and series on Harry and Meghan,
FILMS OF THE YEAR
David Beckham, 1980s supermodels and
Taylor Swift sucked up further oxygen.
Access and insight were typically on a
need-to-publicise basis, with celebrities
usually co-producing their nonfiction
image-making. If there’s a mood for inclu-
sion in documentary, the big names want
in. Which is fine, of course, but we need a
way to provide the surprise films we also
love. This year saw companies behind
some of last year’s best award titles – HBO
(All That Breathes), CNN (Navalny) – pull
back their investment.
For those further down the documen-
tary pyramid, the picture looked grim. In
the UK in June a new cooperative Docu-
mentary Film Council launched to organ-
ise and advocate for the sector. Behind the
camera, as the council wrote in an open
letter to the screen sector, production fund-
ing for independent docs is chronically low,
and development, distribution and exhibi-
tion support worse. “Sustaining careers in
these conditions is all but impossible aside
for a relatively privileged few, which has
direct implications for filmmaker wellbe-
ing and the docs sector’s devastating lack
of diversity.” As if to underscore the point,
the council itself struggled to find funding
beyond seed money and its new members’
fees, with broadcasters and streamers so
far contributing only warm words.
In another setback, Jess Search, consec-
utive founder of the Shooting People col-
lective, the BritDoc festival and the Doc
Society, and producer and cheerleader
extraordinaire for the UK documentary
sector, died in July, aged just 54. Her work
and energy will be missed, but her legacy
and inspiration will endure.
58
FILMS OF THE YEAR
7 PASSAGES IRA SACHS, FRANCE
Franz Rogowski shines as Tomas, the controlling director at the centre of
Ira Sachs’s thorny, pleasurable exploration of a destructive love triangle
Passages asks W e s a i d : “Passages centres on a married
couple of some years’ standing living in
whether what Paris, German filmmaker Tomas (Franz
seems like sharing Rogowski) and British graphic artist
Martin (Ben Whishaw). The film opens
information might on the set of Tomas’s latest feature, where
in fact be avoiding he is seen growing increasingly frustrated
conversation; as he micromanages an actor struggling
to perform nonchalant enjoyment. This,
whether what it turns out, is a sideways case study in
seems like Tomas’s whole problem: he wants the
patience might be people around him to be happy and care-
free, and to dictate their actions and feel-
co-dependence ings, and for them to like it, and to be able
to change his mind at will, and for them to
like that too.
Passages traces the impossibility of this
desire and the pain it causes to Tomas, to
Martin and to Agathe (Adèle Exarchopou-
los), a schoolteacher whom Tomas begins
ABOVE
Franz Rogowski as Tomas,
seeing while still in his relationship with
Adèle Exarchopoulos as Agathe Martin. For a while it seems Tomas and
Agathe might bring up a child together,
then perhaps that the three might all co-
parent. Meanwhile, Martin meets novelist
Amad (Erwan Kepoa Falé), further com-
plicating his and Tomas’s feelings about
their bond.
Rogowski’s charisma and energetic
physicality are vital here: without them, it
might be too clear too quickly that Tomas
is, frankly, a bit of a shit. His passion for
pleasure and life is obvious but his heed-
less and selfish conduct – unconnected to
evident forms of disadvantage or trauma
– make him perhaps Sachs’s least sym-
pathetic protagonist to date. Part of the
film’s power is showing how counterpro-
ductive this is for Tomas himself, and we
hope he is changed by his experiences.
Our hearts surely go out more strongly,
though, to Agathe, curled up quietly on
a bed in a room whose walls are painfully
thin, or Martin, stoically trying to keep a
coffee cup from shaking too hard as his
body processes another outrage. Exar-
chopoulos and Whishaw each share a tell-
ingly extended sex scene with Rogowski,
character emerging through lust, and both
nicely balance desire, vulnerability and
dignity in differing ways, Whishaw more
weary, Exarchopoulos more green.
Passages is interested in asking whether
what seems like sharing information
might in fact be avoiding conversation;
whether what seems like patience might
in fact be co-dependence; whether what
seems like happy-go-lucky impulsiveness
might in fact be a way of asserting distance
and control with undesired consequences.
Tomas is always ready to hop on his bike
and start pedalling, whether or not he
knows where he’s going.” (Ben Walters,
S&S, September)
On Mubi now

60
OPPENHEIMER
FILMS OF THE YEAR
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN, US
While Christopher Nolan’s film was a commercial and critical success, the BBC beat him to
the story of the father of the atom bomb with a fine 1980 miniseries. Here David Thomson
examines the way the two portraits diverge and outlines their contrasting performance styles
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer takes
so long, it leaves us time to wonder what
it’s doing. Getting into the third hour, as
frustration mounts with our inability to tell
when a thing is happening, let alone why,
or to whom it means anything, we might
recall that there was another Oppenheimer.
I mean the BBC miniseries made in
1980. This was seven hour-long episodes,
written by Peter Prince and directed
by Barry Davis. Sam Waterston played
Oppenheimer, David Suchet was Edward
Teller and a host of lesser-known actors
filled out the cast. Manning Redwood was
a tough and rather nasty General Groves,
forgetting how much he couldn’t under-
stand in his pressure to make decisions.
He’s a boss who might have run the camps
on the other side.
We can agree how good Emily Blunt is
in the new movie as Oppenheimer’s wife,
Kitty. She is pained as a woman married
to a famously brilliant but elusive man, the
dad to her two children, but the father of
the atom bomb. Still, Blunt is less inter-
esting, or less interestingly written, than
Jana Shelden in the TV series. If you want
to reclaim the old TV show from BBC
iPlayer or YouTube as a model for deliv-
ering plot information, scientific practice
and human action, it may be instructive
to realise that ‘Lewis Strauss’ had only a
modest role in the TV version.
Yet Strauss may be the best thing in
the 2023 Oppenheimer, because Robert
Downey Jr runs wild with pursed lips,
rolled eyes and moody droops of his vain
head, like a simpering Iago. That may
sound like pantomime, but Downey deliv-
ers a riveting scoundrel performance, and
so consuming a portrait of intelligence
we never pause to ask why Strauss is in
the film – he’s there to justify its ponder-
ous third hour. His dramatic function is
to oppose poor Oppy, which is a way of
diverting attention from the confusions in
Dr Oppenheimer himself.
If you feel inclined to film the Oppen-
heimer story, you and your audience know
so much in advance, like the inevitabil-
ity of a ‘ten – nine – eight…’ scene at the
Alamogordo flats and then a screen-filling
whiteness. But that vividness on screen
only teaches us how inept film is at getting
at what has happened beyond or within
explosions. No doubt the crew members
who had built the bomb were in some
superficial suspense at what would happen
on 16 July 1945, but audiences cannot share
that narrative advantage. The bomb is
=5
going to go off. Once the Manhattan Pro- Once the
ject was set in motion, it was plain that
it would have to pop. It was like a major Manhattan Project
motion picture, soaring beyond control or was set in motion,
any suspicion that it wasn’t going to work. it was plain that
In the simple, stupid demonstration – igni-
tion – so many larger issues would be lost it would have
in the bright light. to pop. It was like
The crew, from Oppenheimer down a major motion
to every humble labourer, had something
close to that certainty. Don’t pretend they picture, soaring
thought a successful test would be the end beyond control
of the matter. Thorough plans existed for or any suspicion
shipping the bomb out to Tinian Island,
to be loaded on to the Enola Gay. At that that it wasn’t
point, the $2 billion investment had to be going to work
paid off. So Oppenheimer was aware that
the bomb was going to be exploded in the
fatal vicinity of Japanese citizens. It was a
given that in the region of 200,000 would
die at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – there
were two bombs being shipped to Tinian
Island. With more on order. The processes
of mass production and human insignifi-
cance were underway. 200,000? 220,000?
We don’t care which.
The new description of matter meant
that an erasure was coming: that the old
OPPOSITE
value systems of Hollywood and human- Cillian Murphy as
ism no longer mattered. J. Robert Oppenheimer
FILMS OF THE YEAR
 C
62

alling the show Oppenheimer
puts such a pressure on the
writers and the actors that
Cillian Murphy could easily
win an Oscar in the part.
But to look at the film closely
(and to compare it with Sam
Waterston from 1980), is to
suggest that Murphy and
Nolan have not decided what
they think about J. Robert
Oppenheimer. My sense
memory of the new picture
is of Murphy’s stricken and
dreamy face staring back at our attention,
vacant even if he finds himself in some
heroic poses and situations. He and Nolan
cannot face it that Oppy was a show-off
and trickster. He has to be a ruined saint to
justify their wounded sensibility about ‘the
state of the world’. So he kept the Bhaga-
vadgita as an offshore island retreat where
he could regret the impact of his brilliant
managerial job – an impact he foresaw in
every detail and which he knew he would
have to lie about in press conferences. It’s
the essence of political intelligence that it
commands such lies, and a mechanism of
self-forgiveness. Thus Kane sighs “Rose-
bud” to establish an aura of pathos. I sus-
pect Oppy was content to lose his security
clearance; he needed to feel wronged.
The war was an immense machine, close
FILMS OF THE YEAR
Nazi attitude to the Jews was not dissimi-
lar to the Allied view of its own people or
what it could call mass society. It was evi-
dent in 1939 or 1941 that vast numbers of
people would have to die, so that it was
sentimentality to take their individuality
(‘their’ being so many Private Ryans) seri-
ously. The degrees of callousness in these
situations may seem unkind, but that is in
our emotional colouring of what has hap-
pened to us.
So the deepest subject of the film – and
its coldest lesson – is the irresistible force
of the technologies that were expressed
in the war. And in the logic of world war.
Heroism had to yield to management,
and so the crucial human narrative in the
Manhattan Project is to see Oppenheimer
as its inspiring, too-busy-to-pause ring-
master – or, if this is clearer, as a kind of
movie producer.
Oppy was himself radiantly charismatic,
or feverishly ‘versatile’. He had so many
interests or attributes – like knowing more
on any subjects than anyone else; more arts
to pursue; many more women than the
movie’s sad pair; an entourage of admirers
he turned into the competing crew who got
the job done. He was the epitome of this
type: if you want something done in a crisis,
ask a very busy person. That’s a champion
one meets in movie-making. It could be
isn’t that a way of describing Charles Foster Heroism had
Kane, shaping our thoughts but with time
to whisper secrets to us? to yield to
One technology involved the reassess- management,
ment of matter: the ways in which several and so the crucial
theoretical physicists had described the
vulnerability of the atom and the pros- human narrative
pects for fission and fusion; the other was in the Manhattan
the realism ( the cynicism, or the abandon- Project is to see
ment of humanism) in seeing how great
numbers of people would be sacrificed or Oppenheimer
treated like dots on the ground (remember as its inspiring,
what Harry Lime says in The Third Man). too-busy-to-pause
The melodrama of history – and the coin-
cidence that prompts this movie – is in the ring-master –
‘sweetness’ with which the two constructs or a kind of
collided in the biblical splendour of the movie producer
New Mexico desert in the mid-1940s.
Oppenheimer was not a Nobel-level
theorist, but he had a loving grasp of what
the better theorists were seeing. There is
a moment in the 1980 miniseries where
Oppy talks to Teller. These two were far
from friends (Teller is ragingly hot or awk-
ward; Oppenheimer is so cool and beguil-
ing), and Oppenheimer disapproved of
Teller’s dream of a ‘Super’ bomb. But when
Teller describes the breakthrough that has
made the Super possible (and thus cer-
tain), Waterston revels in the sweetness
of the solution. That helps us see how, at
their best, these scientists were brilliant
and stupid at the same time. They are

the Monroe Stahr who Scott Fitzgerald

to indifferent over the role of individuals.
As such it embodied the cultural changes
that determined the 20th century. This
may be hard to take, but it means that the
adored in The Last Tycoon – a character
based on the Irving Thalberg who had
hired and fired Fitzgerald. You can even see
such unstoppable geniuses in our movies:
obliged to separate the elegance from the
catastrophe. Equal praise goes to David
Suchet in this scene, for he understood the
mania for explosion that animated Teller.
BELOW
Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss
in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

The two geniuses are like gleeful and reck-
less children. And that’s something Nolan
never concedes.
But this is a film about manipulative
and opportunistic intelligence, enough
to remind us how hard it is in movies to
establish that devious insight in a person –
effectiveness for its own sake. What Oppy
did for the US and the world ( the world
had no way of declining the gift) was to be
a magician who could overawe and recon-
cile the egos of all the children. He is the
icon of managerial romance, while recog-
nising that he was subservient to the blunt
transactional intelligence of his Louis B.
Mayer – I mean General Leslie Groves.
That military commander has to have
charisma, too – nothing less than the star
appeal of power – and the capacity for
minimising (or isolating) everyone. He
has a word and a glance to warn every
lonely scientist to face an unprecedented
and implacable project in which their indi-
vidualism does not matter. Anyone can
be replaced; the Bomb needs no father or
author when it has such momentum. But
it is in the self-adoring nature of the movie
process that Nolan settles for the gruff
half-amused, half-frustrated stubbornness
of Matt Damon as Groves – as if that actor
is forever admitting, “Well, maybe I’m not
a big star, not a Super. But don’t take me
for granted.”
The vanity of the scientists is hot for
doing it – like kids building a new toy. But
Groves was always the dad who was going
to win because the command structure
kept him the point of delivery in a chain
that reached back to Roosevelt. There’s a
moment in the miniseries where the news
comes in that FDR has died. The drama
of the moment plays on Waterston’s face
and a feeling. That’s a white lie. FDR
IMAGE: BBC
knew all about the Manhattan Project; he
had approved it in every detail; and he had
no doubts about the mortality it would
involve. He may have worried or agonised,
but he was monopolised by the technology
of being in charge. He knew that if he died
the machine would roll on.
He was no better than his succes-
sor Harry Truman, who is played well
enough in Nolan’s film by Gary Oldman,
with an actorly panache that would have
clicked in place in a 1945 picture. And
which has increasingly possessed the
sad trail of presidents labouring with an
impossible job. You see, presidents do not
matter. Their gallows humour would be
to ask, “Why does the daft public believe
in us? One day a pres is coming who will
throw out the rules of the archaic game.”
Is he here now?
There’s good reason for placing the char-
ismatic and elitist Oppy in history. Don’t
forget that the siting of the project at Los
Alamos came about because Oppy and his
brother had property there, a retreat they
loved, where they could ride horses, watch
the sunset and idealise the Indigenous
people they ignored and who suffered
from test-site radiation. Oppy was a rich
man, a soulful atheist who would call the
test site ‘Trinity’, just as he had lines from
the Bhagavadgita to quote when the light
came on.
He was brilliant or intimidating enough
to read several languages – and not the
obvious ones – and it’s not far-fetched for
the film to have him reading bleak Sanskrit
wisdom to Jean Tatlock as he fucks her
(or does she have to fuck him?). Though
maybe his lofty air helped depress Jean.
Such empty versatility asks a lot of any
actor. We do not often talk about this, but
showing palpable intelligence in a screen
character is very tricky. How do they look,
Murphy and Waterston? Are we allowed
to ask that? But if we’re not, can we watch
them without living with the question?
OPPENHEIMER 63
For decades the cinema was founded
on the myth that some women were more
beautiful, or more attractive than others.
(Florence Pugh looks a good deal “sexier”
than the real Jean Tatlock.) Isn’t there a
similar prejudicial legend when it comes
to watching men? So the quiet, reason-
ing Juror 8 in 12 Angry Men (1957) is Henry
Fonda, and not Jerry Lewis. Which of
Murphy and Waterston dropped out of
college after one year, and which got a
BA at Yale? Does that distinction matter?
Is the question impolite? Can Murphy’s
Oppenheimer persuade us that he under-
stands the rigour of quantum mechanics,
or the swift ways of manipulating other
people? Actors try to convince us that their
characters are in love, brave or true – but
can they do the deadly math?
Murphy plays Oppenheimer in a Celtic
daze, part anguish, part helplessness. He
is ‘sincere’ and working hard, yet he lacks
the restless dynamic in Oppy. He can’t
match the arrogance or the impatience in
Waterston’s awareness. He misses how
Oppy was a self-dramatist, always playing
parts. He was a narcissist and an author –
“I am become death” – imagining a future
film. He had an instinct that the tragedy
(and farce) in being a leader was to be left
Don’t forget that pretending to play an impossible part.
Here’s an irony. The energy in Oppen-
the siting of the heimer, the arrogant faith in intelligence
FILMS OF THE YEAR
project at Los and decision – the lethal quickness – does
Alamos came fit with another actor, and one who is in
the film already. Downey Jr might have
about because been enthralling as Oppy, amused and
Oppy and his tormented by his hopeless situation,
brother had but so thrilled by ideas and power. In a
downcast mood, he finds those things in
property there, Strauss. That quickness is in his eyes and
where they could every gesture.
ride horses,
MASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
watch the sunset Anyone interested can go back to the 1980
and idealise the Oppenheimer and its daunting clarity. Its
Indigenous people director, Barry Davis, did a great amount
of television, and died in 1990. Maybe
they ignored more credit for authorship is due to Peter
Prince, still alive at 82. He was a novelist,
a playwright and a screenwriter – he wrote
The Hit (1984) for Stephen Frears, an inter-
esting study of competing atoms. But per-
haps the faith in documentary texture in
the 1980 series has to do with the respect
for research and history that existed then
at the BBC.
By contrast, the 2023 movie seems to me
one more revelation of the incoherence and
the masking pretension in Nolan. There
are those who regard this film as one of the
greatest or most important of this century.
But there’s equal reason for seeing it as
reflective of how we no longer believe we
can make movies that describe us properly.
The bitter insight is that movies are less
important now than at any time in their
history. We are desperately hoping to
ride the frantic atom, praying for stories
where we matter. It is a medium so full
of presence, it hopes to hide its failure to
ABOVE
convey intelligence.
Peter Whitman as Robert Serber,
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is on
Sam Waterston as J. Robert
Oppenheimer in the 1980 major platforms now. The 1980 BBC
BBC drama series miniseries Oppenheimer is on iPlayer
 =5
64
BARBIE
GRETA GERWIG, US
With fifth place in our poll, Barbie is definitively
established as a critical as well as a box-office
triumph. Here, in excerpts from a Screen Talk
she gave at the BFI London Film Festival in
FILMS OF THE YEAR
October, Greta Gerwig discusses writing, dream
ballets and embroidering Barbie with Proust
ON WRITING
Writing is the thing I most enjoy, but it
feels painful while I’m doing it. You’re
by yourself, and it’s quiet, and every
voice you’ve ever had in your head telling
you “You’re not very good” is extremely
loud. And then you’re like, “No no, just
wait!” And then you write something,
and it’s not so good, and the voices are
like, “Well?” It’s like this negotiation.
I kind of collect things over
time – little moments or lines or things
that feel interesting to me. This
is whether I’m adapting something
or writing from scratch. And that
pile will grow and start to feel like
it has some shape underneath it.
I like working in public, but at some
point it felt like I was doing performance
art. I always liked writing in libraries,
because I liked people’s energy there.
But they don’t like it when you fall
asleep in a library, and I often fall asleep
while I’m writing. I write for a while,
and part of me gets very tired, and I put
my head on the desk, and I nap for like
ten minutes, and then I jolt awake.
I feel like I always have to sneak up
on writing: if I approach it head-on
it’s too scary. I’m always creating
these strategies, like waking up and
doing it first thing, before the voices
have woken up. They get up later!
There’s a wonderful moment when
you’ve got enough stuff and the thing
seems to want to exist – it’s not there
yet, but it’s shimmering in front of
you and you can kind of feel what the
ABOVE
Greta Gerwig
whole thing is. Then it feels like it’s all
coming extremely fast. But everything
ABOVE RIGHT
Margot Robbie in the
leading up to that moment is like, “Try
title role of Barbie to saw off your toe with this laptop.”
ON THE INFLUENCE OF HER
TRAINING AS A DANCER
I loved dancing; choreographing
groups of people came naturally to me
because of that. And seeing the camera
as another person that was dancing in
a space. With Lady Bird [2017], I made
rules for myself on how I was going to
move or not move the camera. I wanted
Lady Bird to almost be like stained-glass
windows in churches, where each scene
was a presentation within a frame. I gave
myself that rule because I was scared and
it was overwhelming. So I didn’t move
the camera much, because it felt wrong.
But when I got to Little Women [2019],
I had the opposite feeling – I felt like
I wanted the camera to be alive, and
curious, and like a dancer; almost like I
wanted the camera to start young and
get older, like the girls did. So there
was a lot more movement. I tend to
like cameras that move on a dolly or a
track more than Steadicam, because
I get confused about where we’re
meant to be. I like composing shots
that move on wheels. I love wheels!

When we got to Barbie, I again
wanted it to be presentational [like
Lady Bird], but drawing from a different
aesthetic: soundstage musicals. How
the camera is breathing, interacting or
not interacting, moving back or coming
in – it’s as important as blocking with
actors. And it’s not just about the image
on screen, it’s about the philosophy of
the movement of the camera. Coming at
it from dancing helps me think about it;
it’s less a machine and more a person.
ON BARBIE’S ‘I’M JUST KEN’
DANCE SEQUENCE
That sequence in particular is filled with
choices that thrilled me and made me so
happy, but then driving home at the end
of the day, I’d think, “Oh no…” When
they arrived on the beach, I had every
one of those Kens pretend to move
in slow motion. We weren’t shooting
it in slow motion! And it occurred
to me that that could be the most
dreadful choice, and no one would
understand it, and it was going to
be embarrassing for everyone.
There were so many things [like
that]. For the dream ballet, the script
just said, “And then it becomes a dream
ballet, and they work it out through
dance!” And there was a big meeting
to ask: “Do you need this?” And I was
like, “Everything in me needs this.”
[The studio] were like, “What do you
even mean? What is a dream ballet?”
The greatest dream ballet of all time
is in Singin’ in the Rain [1952], which
has a dream ballet inside of a dream
ballet: Gene Kelly says, “I’m gonna
pitch this thing to you,” and then you
kind of go into his mind, which is a
dream ballet, and then inside that, he
sees Cyd Charisse on the stairs, and
then they go into another one! And I
was like, “If people could follow that in
Singin’ in the Rain, I think we’ll be fine.”
ON THE POP-CULTURE
REFERENCES IN BARBIE
The callout of the BBC’s Pride and
Prejudice [1995] was entirely for me.
I was very honoured that [the BBC]
said yes to [including a clip from
65
FILMS OF THE YEAR
‘How the camera the series in Barbie] – it was a big
deal, they don’t always say yes.
is breathing, The embroidering of Barbie with
interacting or things that were really specific was
not interacting, part of the fun. In all my films, but
particularly this one because it’s Barbie,
moving back it felt naughty – in a good way – that we
or coming in – were putting in references. On opening
it’s as important weekend I would go into different
theatres and stand at the back. In one
as blocking screening, at the line, “Remember
with actors… Proust Barbie? That did not sell,” one
Coming at it woman literally screamed. And I was
like, “That joke was for you!” There’s
from dancing also a joke about the band Pavement.
helps me think I do enjoy having things that feel
specific and strange. You know those
about it’
Al Hirschfeld drawings for the New
Yorker, where he used to hide his
daughter’s name, Nina, in each one?
Doing extremely specific jokes feels
like hiding Nina in a drawing.
The full Screen Talk between Jesse Armstrong and
Greta Gerwig is available now on the BFI YouTube
channel. Visit youtube.com/@britishfilminstitute
Barbie is on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google
Play and other digital platforms now

66
POOR THINGS
FILMS OF THE YEAR
YORGOS LANTHIMOS, IRELAND/UK/US
Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, a Frankenstein story full of sex and humour – and even hope –
won the Golden Lion at Venice. It is on a larger scale than anything he has made, but loses
none of his strangeness and wit, writes Nicole Flattery. Photography by Yorgos Lanthimos
There’s an assessment uttered by Bella
Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film
Poor Things as she nears the end of her
Grand Tour, after her time in Lisbon,
her sojourn in Paris: “I’ve adventured and
found nothing but sugar and violence.”
‘Sugar and violence’ is a neat summation
of Poor Things – the delectable, near-edible
set design; Bella’s puffy, girlish costumes;
the mesmerising dance sequence; all of it
barely masking the brutality at its centre.
Lanthimos has been making strange con-
coctions for nearly two decades now. His
breakthrough, in 2009, was the Greek
drama Dogtooth, an unsettling drama
about a family fenced off from the world.
His English-language debut was 2015’s
The Lobster, a satire of our cultural obses-
sion with coupledom. However it was The
Favourite, his film about ambition, sexual
competition and rabbits in Queen Anne’s
court, which catapulted him to something
like the mainstream in 2019. The Favourite,
a darkly comic story about shame and
humiliation, smuggled in under the guise
of a period drama, proved Lanthimos a
singular filmmaker with an uncompro-
mised vision; and won the Grand Jury
Prize at Venice, seven Baftas and a slew
of Oscar nominations. It also showed that
audiences would follow him, with box-
office of close to $100 million on a $15 mil-
lion budget.
Now, Lanthimos has reunited with one
of the stars of The Favourite, Emma Stone,
for Poor Things – a film made on a larger
scale than anything he has done before,
without sacrificing any of his strangeness
or wit. Along with Ari Aster (the recent
Beau Is Afraid), and Robert Eggers (The
Northman, 2022), Lanthimos is a film-
maker committed to being both funny
and frightening, unconstrained by tradi-
tional Hollywood narratives – and very
willing to put his own ideas, and neurosis,
on screen.
Poor Things is based on a 1992 novel by
the late Alasdair Gray. It follows Bella
Baxter, a creation of her doctor father
Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), as she
figures out the idiosyncrasies of the world.
Bella has the body of a woman and the
mind of a child – a large part of the comedy
comes, as it always does with Lanthimos,
from seeing social conventions disrupted.
The doctor’s student Max McCandless
(Ramy Youssef ) falls in love with Bella,
but she abandons him for sexual escapades
4
with the cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark The film maps
Ruffalo). The film maps out Bella’s voyage
from isolation to excitement and fun by out Bella’s voyage
moving from black and white to bursts of from isolation to
colour. Even with this vibrant palette, and excitement and
using more locations than his previous
work, Lanthimos retains his unique sense fun by moving
of claustrophobia. And his timing is impec- from black
cable: Barbie has already demonstrated this and white to
year that filmgoers will come out in force to
watch a naïve young woman discover the bursts of colour.
real world. Even with this
I called Lanthimos at his home in vibrant palette,
Athens this summer, when wildfires were
ravaging several of the Greek islands. Even Lanthimos retains
as people were being evacuated, holiday- his unique sense
makers were still arriving. This could easily of claustrophobia
be a scene from Poor Things – tourists reclin-
ing on sun loungers as the world burns
around them. It raises an issue Poor Things
is concerned with: “If we’re all cruel beasts,
born that way, die that way.” I’m interested
in what first attracted the director to Gray’s
novel. “I have a Scottish friend who’s a big
fan of his,” he tells me, “so I read quite a bit
of his stuff. When I read Poor Things, I was
immediately taken by it. I went to Scot-
land to meet Gray, actually. He was very, OPPOSITE
very generous and energetic. He showed Emma Stone as Bella Baxter
FILMS OF THE YEAR
 POOR THINGS 69

me all the places in Scotland he imagined
the story taking place. When we got back
home, he gave me his blessing.”
A feature of Lanthimos’s films is the
extraordinary performances he gets from
his actors; their willingness to go to
uncomfortable places with him; his talent
for spotting their underutilised qualities.
Colin Farrell broke away from his heart-
throb status to play David, a man nobody
wants to date in The Lobster; the director
was one of the first to capitalise on Barry
Keoghan’s unnerving charm, in The Killing
of a Sacred Deer (2017); Olivia Colman was
both playful and petty, mean and pitiful, as
Queen Anne in The Favourite – a more emo-
tional performance than her work on TV in
Peep Show (2003-15) and Fleabag (2016-19),
and one that won her an Oscar.
Poor Things is Emma Stone and Lanthi-
mos’s third collaboration, after The Favour-
ite and the short film Bleat in 2022. Almost
as soon as Stone heard about the script
she stepped on board as a producer. Her
performance is integral to the unity of Poor
Things. Not only does she appear in nearly
every frame, but she has to transition from
infant to critical, thoughtful adult. How
did they handle this physical transforma-
tion? “Creatively, there’s a synchronicity
between us,” Lanthimos says. “I suggested
a number of films for her to watch, includ-
ing Herzog’s [1974 The Enigma of] Kaspar
There’s been Bella,” Lanthimos explains, “she absorbs
the knowledge, the experience, then she
a morally moves on. She’s very particular in that way.
conservative As she grows, she discovers the limits of
debate lately it too.”
The moral centre of Poor Things is the
about the point conflict within Bella. Her free-spirited,
of sex scenes impulsive nature faces a reckoning; maybe
on our screens. life isn’t all about dancing, sex, grasping
fleeting pleasure. When she first meets
Poor Things is a Duncan, he tells her, “You, like me, are a
good illustration creature of feeling and moments,” but as
of why they Bella gradually becomes aware of the lives
around her, and the role she wants to play,
should exist her simplistic worldview falls apart. So
does her relationship with Duncan. This
is a recurring theme of Lanthimos’s – how
to stay in a relationship as tastes and per-
spectives evolve, how every relationship
is a battle of wills with eternally shifting
OPPOSITE
Willem Dafoe as Godwin Baxter
power dynamics. At one point, Duncan
says to Bella, “You’re always reading now,
BELOW
Yorgos Lanthimos with star –
you’re losing some of your adorable way
and producer – Emma Stone of speaking.” In fact, as Bella becomes
more educated and socially conscious, it’s
Duncan, feeling his control slipping away,
who becomes childlike, prone to tantrums,
unprovoked bursts of rage at this uncon-
ventional woman whose behaviour is so
inexplicable to him.
CONTROLLED FREAKS
When I think of Lanthimos’s work, the
word ‘control’ occurs to me again and
again: the control exerted by the family
unit in Dogtooth; the controlling and inhib-
iting effects of heteronormative relation-
ships in The Lobster; even the numbing, dis-
figuring effects extreme power and control
can have on your personality and behav-
iour in The Favourite. His 2011 film Alps is
also about that: actors who perform as the
deceased to grieving parties, people who
are trying to gain control over even death.
To your average person, Bella Baxter rep-
resents a problem. To a control freak, she
is a nightmare. “In a certain sense,” Lan-
thimos says, “everyone is trying to mould

FILMS OF THE YEAR

Hauser and Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s
Ball [1967]. There was a long thinking pro-
cess. We identified the stages she would
be in – in terms of how she walks, how
she speaks throughout her journey. The
rest of it is her instinct, her presence.” On
the topic of his actors’ remarkable perfor-
mances, he is modest – “I don’t do it. They
do.” But he stresses that an understand-
ing relationship is beneficial to all. “When
we’re rehearsing I try to make it light. We’re
just making films and we should enjoy it,
be creative, have a good time.”
One piece of evidence that Lanthimos
truly values collaboration with actors is
his welcoming of intimacy coordinators
– he speaks highly of Elle McAlpine, who
was on set for Poor Things. There was a lot
of intimacy for her to coordinate: Bella’s
most marvellous discovery is the orgasm.
She romps her way through Europe with
the dubious solicitor Duncan Wedder-
burn before ending up, with her singular
lack of shame, at a French brothel. Every
scenario is treated with a sort of curios-
ity and a liberating lack of prudishness.
There’s been a morally conservative debate
lately about the point of sex scenes on our
screens. Poor Things is a good illustration
of why they should exist: because they’re
filthy, joyous and occasionally funny, and
they illuminate something strange and
sad about human experience. Lanthimos
LANTHIMOS AND STONE PORTRAIT: ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA

has always made sex strange – memorably

disquieting in Dogtooth, a manipulative
tool in The Favourite – but in Poor Things I
found his approach notably fresh and sex-
positive, a respite from the trauma narra-
tives that have dominated the last decade.
Bella has no interest in feminine self-sacri-
fice: like a greedy kid in a candy shop, she
wants to try it all. “As with everything with
 70
FILMS OF THE YEAR
Bella and own her, or be with her, be part
of her life. Because she is so unique, and
her behaviour is so unexpected, people
don’t know to react to it and they don’t
have the tools to deal with her. I think this
was the interesting part of having a char-
acter that could basically drive everyone
mad, because she’s not conventional and
isn’t complying with whatever is expected
of her.”
“What she has,” he continues, “is this
power of freedom. And that is scary to
people at times.”
Bella doesn’t understand the distorting
relationship men often have with power
and control. In one memorable scene,
the brothel madam (Kathryn Hunter)
explains to Bella, as she expresses confu-
sion at how the brothel is run, that “Some
men enjoy that you don’t like it.” Every
man in Bella’s life tries to have a certain
amount of agency over her, except her
inventor, whom she refers to as God. At
the beginning of the film, he sees Bella
as an experiment, which he does want
to control. But he never stops her from
going on her emotional journey, doesn’t
attempt to stop her adventuring. “I think
he just realises that she has to experience
the world, and that’s what she is there for.
He becomes a loving father figure with
a lot of faults. I don’t think I could ever
have anyone in my films, any person who
doesn’t have any faults and made some
mistakes like he does.”
Lanthimos’s characters are rarely
defined by tragedy; he allows his female
characters, in particular, to be nasty, cruel,
dangerous. They are whole, rather than
types. Queen Anne in The Favourite has
suffered several miscarriages, but is also
manipulative, childish; Bella has known
tragedy, but it doesn’t quench her appe-
tite. “I love exploring that,” Lanthimos
tells me, “the ambiguity of someone’s
actions or beliefs. I just find it fascinating
that people can be so unexpected.”
Something Bella and Queen Anne in
The Favourite have in common is the way
they lash out at their opulent surround-
ings, their misbehaviour showing the
inherent ridiculousness of wealth and
polite society. In one scene, a frustrated
Duncan rails against Bella’s foolishness
in front of his rich friends and gives her
three correct phrases to repeat, which she
does at all the wrong moments (at times
Poor Things reminded me of Hal Ashby’s
1979 film Being There, the simple, child-like
character shattering the performances of
adults). What really begins Bella’s intellec-
tual journey is encountering Harry Astley,
played by Jerrod Carmichael, on a cruise.
“Money,” he tells her, “is its own form of
sickness.” He shows Bella the inequality
that has been hidden from her, the labour
and poverty that allow her lifestyle, what
is happening beneath the surface. For that
reason, Poor Things feels more decidedly
anti-capitalist than any of Lanthimos’s
previous work. The novel it’s based on is
also committedly socialist. “Alasdair Gray
goes way more into it,” Lanthimos says:
“There’s a large part of the novel that’s
about it. I think our version was always
going to be more focused on her journey.
But we were conscious of trying to make
her journey complete, so she obviously
comes up against all these structures in
society, whether political, emotional,
financial. Period films can and should be
very modern.”
Lanthimos’s settings are always hard to
pin down. The Favourite takes place mostly
in Queen Anne’s palace, but the language
is modern; the hotel in The Lobster is in
the Irish countryside but specifically
nowhere; Poor Things is set in the 19th cen-
tury, but the interiors and Bella’s coquet-
tish costumes feel explicitly modern,
futuristic even. Lanthimos’s landscapes
are all his own, boundaryless, imaginative
spaces. He is clear on this point: “It’s not
like because you’ve made a period film,
you’re not allowed make it relevant to cur-
rent issues. We created this world which
was period, but also non-period, with
futuristic elements, but that doesn’t stop
you from being contemporary.”
On the topic of capitalism and the
deadening effects the accumulation of
wealth can have on the human psyche,
it’s worth mentioning that Stone was
supposed to be part of this conversation,
but because of the recent actors’ strike
her publicity duties have ceased. Lanthi-
mos is visibly disappointed when he talks
about this. “It’s just bad timing for us. It’s
unfortunate because we were so looking
forward to being together and celebrat-
ing. Especially Emma after being so
involved for so many years. It breaks her
heart not to be able to be with the film. It
had to happen though. I’m very support-
ive of what they’re doing.”
I ask Lanthimos about another novel
adaptation he was rumoured to be work-
ing on – Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year
of Rest and Relaxation, only published in
2018 but already generation-defining. At
a basic level, it’s about a woman, recently
orphaned, who decides to fix her life
by sleeping for a year. I can see what
Still life
The director as
photographer
“I love photography and I’ve
been immersing myself in it
more and more. I’ve built a
dark room in my apartment.
There’s something in
photography that feels more
free and open in how you tell
a story. And people aren’t so
judgemental, of the story.
Like, in film there’s a lot of
pressure, because it’s often
expensive and complicated.
And there’s always a need
for it to be more accessible
and specific and saying
something and relating to
something. And I feel like
other arts, like painting,
photography and music, are
much freer from that.
I do love that kind
of freedom and trying
to transpose it on to
filmmaking. Cinema seems
to be stuck in a particular
kind of form… I shot a lot
of pictures while we were
filming Poor Things [several
of which accompany this
article]. While we were in
Budapest Emma and I built
this little dark room in the
bathroom of our apartment.
Almost every day we finished
filming, we would go and
process the film together.
It was like something in a
different form, appearing in
front of us kind of magically.
So it was meditative.”
 POOR THINGS 71

attracted him to the material: the dreamy
inner world of the narrator, the sly critique
of modern society. Why wake up? What
has the world got to offer you? Lanthimos
is open about where they are now in the
process: “It’s a great book, but a challeng-
ing and complicated one. I love it, but in
order to transform it into a film it takes a lot
of trial and error, there are things you have
to reinvent for it to work on screen. And we
just need to arrive at the point where we
feel it can be done, basically. So we’re work-
ing on it with Ottessa, and it’s a project I’m
very excited about developing.”
Lanthimos has already wrapped
another film which he describes as a “con-
temporary story, a very different kind of
film” to Poor Things. “The same actors play
different characters in different stories and
it’s a lot of actors we’ve worked with before.
Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret
Qualley, Joe Alwyn from The Favourite. And
they already knew each other. So it was like
creating this travelling troupe.”
The willingness of these actors to work
with Lanthimos again and again speaks to
the level of trust he fosters in his creative
relationships. He cultivates a similar trust
with his audience. He’s a filmmaker who
is never holding the viewer’s hand, never
leading their emotions in one direction; he
operates in mood, style, weird feeling. He’s
an enigmatic artist at a time when ambi-
‘I enjoy questioning Lanthimos makes up his own rules; his
worlds are enclosed – perhaps because
the state of he finds the structures and inflexibility
things, and the of this one so limiting. “I enjoy question-
rules we all live ing the state of things, and the rules we
all live by. It’s something I’m preoccupied
by… Why is it with. Why is it so rigid? And how could
so rigid? How it be different? And what would happen if
could it be it was different? If one person was differ-
ent? I think that’s what drew me to Bella,
different? What as well.
would happen if “It’s always a quest to figure out why
it was different? structures are the way they are. Although
we see a lot of the time they don’t work, we
If one person still insist upon them. It perplexes me. So
was different?’ I’m trying to ask these questions, no matter
what the characters or story are.”
OPPOSITE There’s a line Bella says in Poor Things
Margaret Qualley as Felicity,
Willem Dafoe as Godwin Baxter
that I love and I repeat it back to Lanthi-
and Ramy Youssef as mos: “In some ways it would be a relief to
Max McCandless
be rid of my questing self.” I’d never quite
BELOW heard it articulated like that before. We’re
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter,
Mark Ruffalo as Duncan
all supposed to be searching, on a quest for
Wedderburn freedom and knowledge, but none of us
ever want to admit how painful and lonely
that quest can be. It’s difficult to capture
both sides. “Bella acknowledges it,” Lan-
thimos tells me, “but it doesn’t stop her.
She acknowledges that she will get tired,
she will be hurt, but she goes on. She just
goes on with the next thing. I think Poor
Things is my most positive film, my most
hopeful film.”
I have to ask, since the idea of control
features so heavily in his work, does he find
it hard to let go? He laughs, and I clarify –
does he find it hard to let go of his films?
“I don’t really watch my films again after
I’ve finished them. Only a decade later I
might watch something. In that time you
have some distance, and see certain things.
But really we make them and just let them
go. Let the world experience them.” You
have to let your wild and errant children –
like Bella – be free.
Poor Things is released in UK cinemas on
12 January and is reviewed on page 127

FILMS OF THE YEAR

guity is dismissed or even treated with
suspicion (take the sheer number of near-
conspiracy theories that followed Todd
Field’s open-ended Tár, 2022). When I ask
him about this he explains that it simply
follows his own taste. “It’s personal. When
I watch something and I’m being told too
many things and being told to feel a certain
way, I have a bad reaction. I’ve nothing to
gain from watching this very thin, narrow
version of life.
“It’s natural for me to want to take away
things in order to have something to give.
You’re taking out things in order to allow
people to engage and enjoy it more. And
be more energetic too instead of saying,
‘It’s this and only this.’”

SPACE MAKER
Although his work is frequently described
as deadpan, I find it laugh-out-loud funny.
One of the pleasures of watching a Lanthi-
mos film with an audience is hearing the
audience’s laughter and then the silence of
disbelief that often follows: what exactly
are we laughing at? Is comedy something
he thinks about intentionally or does it
come naturally? And how does he cope
with the varying reactions to his work?
“It has a lot to do with the specific expe-
rience of every individual that watches my
films. There are all these different layers in
my films, and they are funny but they’re also
quite dark. The tricky thing about them is
that there isn’t a scientific method. Espe-
cially if you’re trying to create something
which is complex and complicated, which
I think we’re always striving to. You must
allow the space for each person to come in
with their own personality to experience
the film, in a different way. It’s the best you
can hope for.”
 3 PAST LIVES
72

CELINE SONG, US

In its wistfulness, its evenhandedness and its acknowledgement that instant

chemistry is not the be-all and end-all of love, Celine Song’s first film quietly,
brilliantly subverts the conventions of romantic comedy. By Molly Haskell

In romantic comedies, people who look
alike generally wind up together – same
colour, same ethnicity, similar background.
According to tradition, or perhaps the
gravitational pull of the tribe, opposites
may attract but likes fare better over the
long haul. The movie audience is part
FILMS OF THE YEAR
of the equation: something in us yearns
for those two magnetic faces to become
one, all resistances and obstacles over-
come. Celine Song, a Korean American
playwright, subverts this algorithm in
her magical first film, teasing and testing
our sympathies along the way. In the first
scene of Past Lives, a flash forward (we will
discover), three people are having a drink
at the bar while across from them and
unseen, a man’s and woman’s voices specu-
late as to who belongs to whom. “Which
one is the couple?” they wonder as they
gaze at a devilishly handsome Asian man,

an attractive Asian woman, and the third
of the trio, a somewhat scruffy, obviously
American male. They hypothesise various
combinations. As do we.
Then we are taken 20 years back and
thousands of miles away to Seoul, where
we meet Na Young (Moon Seung-ah)
and Jung Hae Sung (Yim Seung-min)
as 12-year-olds, playmates attending a
school where Na Young invariably gets A
grades and cries the one time Hae Sung
bests her. They’re inseparable. When
they play together in the park, even their
mothers think they look “right” together.
And then Na Young is yanked from home
and environment when her artist par-
ents relocate to Canada. Now 12 years
later, she and her sister adopt American
names and Nora (Greta Lee) winds up in
New York, in a playwriting programme.
Nora, precociously ambitious and obvi-
ously gifted, isn’t sorry: “Koreans don’t
win Nobel prizes,” she has said in leaving
her homeland.
Then she and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo)
reconnect via Skype. On her computer
while talking to her mother, she sees her
childhood friend has been looking for her,
and responds. Across distance and time
(it’s midnight for Nora, while Hae Sung
has to go to school) they catch up haltingly.
They’ve sought this connection but don’t
know quite what to say or who they are in
relation to each other. There’s some kind
of attraction, an urge to see one another in
the flesh, grasp their new lives. But when
they begin researching New York to Seoul
flights Nora knows this is not what she
wants to be doing and decides to cut it off,
at least for now.
Relatively new in movies is the strong-
minded woman who puts her career first
(think Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall), and
Song understands her very well. What
might marriage be like with the charm-
ingly familiar and virile but less ambitious
Hae Sung? Could he tolerate her profes-
sional success or intellectual superiority?
In the final third of the triptych, again
12 years later, she is married to Arthur,
a Jewish writer (John Magaro, from the
first scene) whom she met at a residency
in Montauk. Here the attraction is at
first more mysterious but – it turns out –
more practical. She needed a green card,
living together they could save money
73
We feel their on rent in a small Village apartment. But
also, they’ve read the same books, loved
longing, inhabit the same movies, he can offer sugges-
their desire, tions on her latest play. These are elective
without having affinities as powerful as instant sexual
attraction. Indeed, as the two lie in bed
to take sides. dissecting their marriage, these staples,
The sadness is enumerated ruefully by Arthur, feel both
that choices are erotic and durable.
Remarkable is the sympathy Song
made, feelings extends to all three characters. The spectre
hurt, but love – of the driven woman still unsettles us, espe-
in this case an cially if men are sacrificed along the way.
Even more unusual is the balanced treat-
unembittered ment of the two men, the gallantry allowed
love – lingers them. They both desperately want the
same woman, but are ready to give her up
if that’s what she wants. As a consequence,
we feel their longing, inhabit their desire,
without having to take sides. The sadness
is that choices are made, feelings hurt,
but love – in this case an unembittered
love – lingers.
The occasion for the anatomy of a mar-
riage is a visit by Hae Sung, who has come
BELOW to New York to see Nora. Locations are
Teo Yoo as Hae Sung,
Greta Lee as Nora and
supremely important to Song – the view
John Magaro as Arthur of New York as seen by its inhabitants and
the quite different one seen by tourists (the
Statue of Liberty); Seoul before and after.
Her visual strategy accords with the mel-
ancholy tone. With long takes, and a warm
palette of burnished yellows and browns,
FILMS OF THE YEAR
she embraces the characters, emphasising
rapport rather than conflict. I was occa-
sionally reminded of Janet Planet, another
recent first film by a woman playwright,
Annie Baker. Despite their grounding in
dialogue, both intuitively understand how
much can be conveyed without words,
with lingering takes that allow a character’s
feelings and ours to gradually emerge.
In Past Lives, language too plays a major
role. Nora seems utterly at home in Eng-
lish – although, Arthur says, she talks in
Korean in her dreams. Does this mean that
her heart belongs to Hae Sung? “You have
made my life so much larger,” he tells her,
“but I don’t think I have done that to yours.”
“You have,” she says, quite simply. And “I
love you.” Period.
The title refers to the literal pasts of both
characters but also to the Buddhist belief,
cited by Nora, that encounters between
two people are destined to be repeated
over many lifetimes. Nora cites the saying
twice, once seriously and later ironically.
And perhaps both are true, just as Nora
has been pried by force or fate from one life,
but has chosen and shaped her new iden-
tity. You might say that supernatural forces
(the internet) have brought two souls
together, but has also allowed them space
to figure out what they mean to each other.
It’s never an either/or. Nothing is quite
over if it remains within us as a possibility
unfulfilled. What’s extraordinary in Past
Lives is the mixed tone, the feeling transmit-
ted by music and wistful performances that
we are always saying goodbye and hello at
the same time, mourning and remember-
ing the past while opening ourselves to the
new tomorrow.
On Curzon Home Cinema and other platforms now
 2
74

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

JONATHAN GLAZER, UK/POLAND/ US

Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel tell Jonathan Romney about their remarkable performances
in this stark, mesmerising portrait of a German commandant and his family at Auschwitz
FILMS OF THE YEAR
 75

The official one-line synopsis for Jonathan

Glazer’s The Zone of Interest talks about a
couple who “strive to build a dream life for
their family”. But the couple are Rudolf
Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and
his wife Hedwig. The grass is green, the
roses red, there are parties for the children,
and there’s a pretty garden wall which
blocks out the horrific sights and sounds of
industrialised slaughter on the other side.
The Zone of Interest shares its title with
Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, but Glazer’s
script pares everything down to a detailed
depiction of the home life of the Höss
family, as opposed to Amis’s picaresque
multi-strand narrative. This stark, for-
mally innovative film won the Grand Prix
and a Fipresci critics’ prize in Cannes (and
was many critics’ favourite for the Palme
d’Or). Confronting us with the unimagi-
nable, the film at the same time rigorously

FILMS OF THE YEAR

explores the perennial ethical dilemma of
what can and what should not be depicted
of the atrocities of the Holocaust. It fea-
tures two remarkable and entirely uncon-
ventional lead performances by Sandra
Hüller (who also starred in Justine Triet’s
Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall) and
Christian Friedel (Michael Haneke’s The
White Ribbon, 2009; Jessica Hausner’s
Amour fou, 2014).
Visiting London recently, the pair dis-
cussed the challenges and discomfort
faced by German actors in depicting such
characters. Hüller says she was initially
disturbed by Glazer’s suggestion that she
play Hedwig, given her aversion to tradi-
tional representations of the era – to the
use of period regalia and Nazi uniforms
that encourage the actors to take on a con-
ventional stiff deportment (“The uniforms
wear you,” Friedel says).
“I had already refused some offers to
play these sort of characters,” Hüller says.
“I always wondered if it’s possible to say
something about the Holocaust or Fas-
cism, without all the insignia, without all
the clothing. I always wondered if you can
do it without it – or what if people would
put on the uniforms but slouch?”
Decades of lazy over-use have taken the
paradoxical sting out of Hannah Arendt’s
notion of the ‘banality of evil’, but the term
acquires a new critical charge in Glazer’s
film. Taking its name from the drably
euphemistic Nazi term designating Aus-
chwitz and its environs, The Zone of Interest
is very much about the daily mundanity
of the Höss household – the domesticity
of evil. Portrayed by Hüller and Friedel
as people engaged automatically, almost
blindly, in the daily mechanics of bourgeois
life, the couple come across not so much
as soulless, but as lacking character, with a
The grass is capital C, in the sense of embodying a total
green, the roses absence of ethical substance.
red, there are That, says Hüller, “is something that
goes against the natural impulse of an
parties for the actor. Of course we don’t want to play
children, and boring people, we want to play interesting
there’s a pretty people and make ourselves more interest-
ing through playing them. It’s a very vain
garden wall thing that we normally do, and it didn’t
which blocks work here. It would have been a fatal deci-
out the horrific sion to put any sort of interesting character
development that people usually look for.
sights and They’re just boring and evil. I would say
sounds of that’s what I found about them – they really
industrialised don’t care about anything.”
The forensic depiction of the Hösses’
slaughter on lives derives its especially unsettling power
the other side from Glazer’s decision to shoot on a set
depicting the family home – created by
production designer Chris Oddy – which
was equipped with a system of multiple
concealed cameras. This meant that the
actors would perform the characters’ activ-
ities in separate rooms simultaneously,
often repeating scenes in a loop, without
the obtrusive presence of a visible camera
crew – a system that Glazer has compared
to reality shows like Big Brother.
The method adds a significant layer of
dark irony to the film – not least in that
these people, ruling their small world
OPPOSITE through a pitiless observation system (the
Sandra Hüller as
Hedwig Höss
guard towers are always visible over the
garden wall), are themselves under sur-
ABOVE
Christian Friedel as
veillance, down to the smallest detail of
Rudolf Höss their daily gestures. A prime example is
the sequence in which Rudolf Höss walks
through the labyrinthine enclosure of the
house’s corridors, locking up the doors last
thing at night, like a responsible paterfa-
milias protecting the family home.
“It says so much,” Hüller says. “What
are they fearing, actually? They act like
the kings of the world and at the same
time they lock their house in this particu-
lar very slow way. Its tells so much of the
unconsciousness of what’s going on – like
something that happens automatically and
he doesn’t even know why.”
Friedel adds, “You see him compart-
mentalise all these atrocities, compart-
mentalise and protect something. Jona-
than told me this is one of his favourite
scenes of my character in the movie – you
see this daily ritual and it is stronger than
any words I say.”
The Hösses appear to be blind and deaf
to the horror that is happening at just one
remove from their home; indeed, Hedwig
Höss would insist that she was completely
unaware of what actually went on in her
husband’s workplace. But Friedel has vis-
ited the couple’s house, which still stands
overlooking the Auschwitz site. “If you
stand in the children’s room of the original
house, you’re looking directly at gas cham-
ber one. You cannot ignore that and you
cannot say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’
You look into the camp, and you see and
feel and smell the atrocities.”
The Zone of Interest is released in UK cinemas
on 2 February and is reviewed on page 120
 76

AND THE WINNER IS...

KILLERS OF THE
FLOWER MOON
MARTIN SCORSESE, US
At the top of this year’s poll stands Scorsese’s late masterpiece, an epic story
told in intimate terms about the systematic robbing and murder of the Osage
FILMS OF THE YEAR

of Oklahoma in the 1920s. Here, the director (pictured opposite on the set
of Killers of the Flower Moon with Lily Gladstone) responds to his win

“I’ve been so heartened by the response to Killers of the Flower

Moon. To have been able to make this picture, at this time
in my life, and to see it so appreciated by so many, and by
the Osage community in particular… for me, it’s grace.
When I was told that it had topped the critics’ poll at
Sight and Sound, I have to say that I was moved. The magazine
has been so important to me, for such a long time.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve seen the cinema
ridiculed in so many different ways. Over the last few years,
the ridicule has reached a new level. The cinema has been
culturally devalued, from all sides and at a constant pace.
Anyone who loves the cinema needs to stand up for it.
What I don’t mean is the idea of movies as a kind of cultural
messaging delivery service, which can actually play a part in
the devaluation. What I do mean is the art of cinema. Period.
I’ve been subscribing to Sight and Sound for 60 years.
And when I look through the pages of the latest
issue, it always lifts my spirits. Why? Because it’s
made and maintained by people who care.
People who love our artform. Please keep it that way.
Thank you for your recognition of Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Martin Scorsese
Killers of the Flower Moon is in UK cinemas now. Read our latest Scorsese interview at bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound
FILMS OF THE YEAR
FILMS OF THE YEAR

Talking about Killers of the Flower Moon in our October issue, Martin Scorsese periodically recalled
westerns that were important to him – some famous, some less well-known. Here he discusses
the mixed, vexed heritage of the genre, which Killers profoundly questions, and recalls his

MARTIN SCORSESE’S
childhood obsession with westerns and the parallel genre of noir. Interview by Philip Horne

WESTERNS
MASTERCLASS
 H
ow was I attracted to
this material [Killers of
the Flower Moon]? It’s
rather complicated.
But, primarily, through
growing up in the first
seven or eight years of my
life in Corona, Queens,
which was like a little
village in the borough of
Queens... It had trees,
and it had little, two-family houses.
It was nice, but then my father got
into trouble with the landlord,
there was a fight, and we were
pushed back to Elizabeth Street,
to the dead-end kids and organised
crime. The only peace and quiet I
got then was in the Catholic church
around the corner, St Patrick’s,
and in the movie theatres. Add to
that severe asthma where I wasn’t
allowed to play, I wasn’t allowed
to run, I wasn’t allowed to laugh,
overly, because of spasms.
So with all of this, my fantasies
were allowed to gestate, so to
speak, in the movie theatres,
particularly in westerns, and it
had to do with landscape, and it
had to do with wild horses. Good
guys, bad guys? Mmm, possibly.
Technicolor westerns? Somewhat.
Martin scorsese
OPPOSITE
Robert Mitchum in Blood on the Moon (1948)
BELOW
Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck
in Duel in the Sun (1948)
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (2)
Duel in the Sun
KING VIDOR, 1946
Scorsese has often spoken about
his formative experience of the
lurid David O. Selznick-produced
western melodrama known as
‘Lust in the Dust’ for its twisted
sexuality and banned by the
church. In A Personal Journey
Through American Movies (1997),
he comments, “It seemed that
the two protagonists could only
consummate their passion by
killing each other,” and says,
“I covered my eyes through most of it.”
Ms: Aspects of the montages of the
open spaces, were extraordinary,
and kind of frightening in a
way; the sense of conflict, the
melodrama, which was just
oozing out of the edges of the
screen in dripping Technicolor,
nitrate Technicolor, was so
crazy, I was terrified. And I was
fascinated by the quote romantic
unquote nature of the cowboy,
but also this strange thing
about the Native Americans in
the film, and the mixture of the
races, and the anger of Lionel
Barrymore towards the squaw.
Shane
GEORGE STEVENS, 1953
A major western on a grand scale,
Stevens’s powerful Shane both
represents the child’s-eye view of
Western heroism in the gunfighter
Shane (Alan Ladd), and the
darker sides of Western life, the
violence of the range wars and
the troubles of adult sexuality.
Ms: Shane was a remarkable film,
a great emotional experience and
a beautiful artistic [one]... I don’t
want to use the word ‘artistic’, but
it was made by somebody who
knew how to make a picture, how
to paint. And the behaviour of
those characters, Alan Ladd and
Van Heflin and Ben Johnson and
Jack Palance and the others… and
the conflict between the settlers
and the ranchers... that state
of being was very influential.
‘The sense of conflict,
the melodrama, which
was just oozing out of
the edges of the screen
in dripping Technicolor,
nitrate Technicolor, was
so crazy, I was terrified’
79
The Big Heat
FRITZ LANG, 1953
Lang’s potent, dynamic, horrifying
The Big Heat, which follows an
obsessive honest cop seeking
revenge for his wife’s murder,
is the definitive film noir about
systematic urban corruption in
the wake of the 1951 Kefauver
Commission on organised crime.
Ms: I was also exposed to western
noirs without realising. Because
in those days you just went to the
movies… We didn’t know. It wasn’t
called ‘film noir’. They were movies,
and you went there and suddenly
The Big Heat is on – and there’s
Gloria Grahame, you know, in that
incredible scene [where Lee Marvin
throws a jug of scalding coffee
in her face], and then she has a
bandage... Bannion [the Glenn Ford
character] is so horrible, but he is
justified by his revenge, which is
almost like Greek tragedy, and yet…
I think he falls in love with Gloria
with that bandage on her face.
It was such an extraordinary
movie, I followed it from theatre
FILMS OF THE YEAR
to theatre. It’s also so stripped
down, that it makes its impact
from the very first image: the desk
and the gun, then he [the corrupt
policeman] writes a note, and takes
the gun... he shoots himself...
 80

Blood on the Moon Wichita

ROBERT WISE, 1948 JACQUES TOURNEUR, 1955

Robert Wise, probably best known I’m always kind of surprised by what ‘Usually it was codified The legendary lawman Wyatt Earp
for The Haunting (1963) and The happens – and its atmosphere and (in reality a more dubious figure)
Sound of Music (1965), began as tone. The impact is really strong, violence [in B movie had been played by Randolph Scott
Orson Welles’s editor on Citizen Kane and owes a great deal, naturally, westerns], and my mother in Allan Dwan’s Frontier Marshal
(1941) and – controversially – The to the performances of Robert used to complain, (1939), then by Henry Fonda in
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), then Mitchum and Robert Preston and, Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946);
began directing under Val Lewton she was great in it, Barbara Bel “Look at what they’re but Scorsese picks out a less-known,
with Curse of the Cat People (1944) Geddes… and Phyllis Thaxter. doing and their hats don’t subtle film by one of his favourite
and The Body Snatcher (1945). His But in any event, their costumes, fall off!” And she was directors, Jacques Tourneur, like
“first A picture”, as he called it, was their coats, their hats, the height of Robert Wise a graduate of Val
this dark, violent, wintry western of the ceiling in the saloons… There’s right, the hats never fell Lewton’s RKO group, and best
treachery and redemption, whose a struggle amongst the tables off. First film criticism’ known for I Walked with a Zombie
complications centre on a luckless in this kind of a bar between, I (1942) and the great noir Out of the
drifter who “always had a conscience think, Preston and Mitchum that “Look at what they’re doing and Past (1947), with Robert Mitchum
breathing down [his] neck”. was one of the first film memories their hats don’t fall off!” And she and Kirk Douglas. Tourneur’s
to me, because I never saw that was right, the hats never fell off. strange, melancholy Wichita, starring
Ms: I must have been six or seven. kind of violence before. It was a [Laughs] First film criticism. the underrated Joel McCrea, already
My parents took me to see it. We physical struggle, almost like sumo So. I would get little a wise and weary 50, as a fictionalised
were living in Queens at the time. wrestlers in a way. It wasn’t clean. stagecoaches made of plastic young Wyatt Earp starting out as a
It was on a double bill, and they Up to that point I’d seen a lot and little figures of cowboys and reluctant lawman before he began
took me to see it because of One of American B westerns on TV. dollhouse furniture so that they to earn a name for himself in Dodge
Touch of Venus [William A. Seiter We had a little TV, a little 16-inch could fight and knock over the City and at the gunfight at the OK
& Gregory La Cava, 1948], which screen, and there were, like, The furniture. And then we moved to Corral, offers a subdued but chilling
was the main film. It’s a very sweet Three Mesquiteers [1936-43, a series New York and I didn’t have to see analysis of the logic of capitalism, as
film – it’s basically Pygmalion…Then of 51 B movies from Republic], and the violence on the screen; it was opposed to law and order, which has
this western comes up, and I’d never there was Hoot Gibson [a former around me all the time. Blood on the a bearing on Killers of the Flower Moon.
seen anything quite like it. Dark and rodeo rider who became a stunt Moon was a very strong influence.
brooding… underplayed. To this day, man and minor western star] and, Ms: There is no law there.
FILMS OF THE YEAR

The tone and the mood, and the

I think, I’m not quite sure what the you know, all wonderful stuff, but loneliness, too, Mitchum’s essence, I understood, too, seeing the
story’s about – or what the story is, I usually it was codified violence, somehow... It’s the first time I’d westerns and people saying, “We’re
should say. I watch it very often and and my mother used to complain, seen that, the way he behaved. going to bring law and order to

IMAGE: ALAMY

ABOVE Debra Paget, a white actress playing the Apache woman Sonseeahray, with James Stewart in Broken Arrow (1950)

this town.” I get it. [Laughs]
In any event, in Wichita, set in
Kansas, Joel McCrea plays Wyatt
Earp. It’s a very well-done film…
it’s deceptively simple, visually,
and quiet. And you don’t feel
the pressure the same way you
do in My Darling Clementine or
some other films about Wyatt
Earp... There Henry Fonda
[as Earp] is just trying to get a
shave, and the guy is shooting
up the saloon, nobody’s doing
anything about it, you know.
Here, there’s something else
going on: gangs of cowboys
coming in from the trail and
wanting to shoot off some steam,
blazing guns, six-shooters, and
having fun with the women, and
causing fights and trouble. And
it was tolerated because the
businessmen in town needed the
cowboys to come to town to bring
in beef. But the only thing is, it’s a
small town and there’s also other
people who are not cowboys, who
want to live there and not get shot,
especially their children. [Laughs]
So, Wyatt Earp goes in, one of
the first things he does – people
always used to make jokes about
it – but he said, “Check your
guns.” And of course we don’t
even do that now. But here, even
he knew: you’re coming into the
saloon, there’s liquor, you’ve been
on the road for three months,
you’re looking for a good time, you
have guns, you’re going to start
drinking. There are women… there
are tinhorn gamblers here. Cheats,
we don’t know who they are, but
when we do, there’s going to be
trouble… OK. What’s interesting
in the Jacques Tourneur film is
that the townspeople make him
marshal or sheriff or whatever.
But at a certain point they say,
“People don’t want to come to
the town now. What are we going
to do? We’re going to lose the
business of the cowboys, and the
beef has to come through here.
Let’s talk to him.” So, somebody
suggests, “Let’s invite him for
dinner.” There’s a dinner scene with
the heads of the town, the mayor
and everybody, and Joel McCrea.
They have a terrific time, and at
the end of the dinner they just say,
“Maybe these measures of yours
have been a little too drastic...”
[Laughs] Well, take a look at it…
There was something about the
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
nature of civilising a place… And
one of the key things you want
to do is get all the Indigenous
people out of there, because
they’re not ‘civilised’. [Laughs]
ABOVE Sessue Hayakawa and Joe Goodboy in The Last of the Line (1914)
1950s liberal revisionist Westerns
In the 1950s Hollywood re-examined
the history of the West and tried
to shape a more sympathetic
understanding of Native Americans;
these films are mostly forgotten now,
and often complicated for us by
the casting of white stars as Native
American characters. An early
example was Broken Arrow (Delmer
Daves, 1950), with James Stewart,
in which there is more sympathetic
ethnographic detail and some Native
American casting, though (as was
standard in Hollywood system then)
a white star, Jeff Chandler, plays
Cochise. Robert Aldrich’s Apache
[1954], with Burt Lancaster as the
rebellious Massai, who continues
to fight after his leader Geronimo
surrenders, only finally to cease
when he has grown a field of corn
and become a father, is surprisingly
even-handed in its treatment of
injustice and resistance. After a
cycle of noirs and dark historical
dramas, Anthony Mann made his
grim and neglected western Devil’s
Doorway at MGM in 1950, dealing
with the mistreatment of Native
Americans (Robert Taylor plays a
Shoshone veteran of the Civil War
trying to make a living as a rancher),
before being much more successful
at Universal with the acclaimed
cycle of James Stewart westerns that
began with Winchester ’73 (1950).
Daves followed up Broken Arrow
with Drum Beat (1954), starring
Alan Ladd as a reluctant peace
commissioner in 1870s California
facing renegade Modocs led by
‘Captain Jack’ (Charles Bronson).
All these films were more or less
loosely based on historical fact.
‘Any of these films are
an issue because of the
natives being played by
white actors. But, you
know, with Hollywood
at that period, we have to
try to figure out how we
talk about films within
the context of their time’
Ms: Broken Arrow is a really good
one. But any of these [1950s
westerns] are an issue because
of the natives being played by
white actors. But, you know, with
Hollywood at that period, we have
to try to figure out how we talk
about films within the context of
their time, even if they’re offensive
now. Broken Arrow was one of the
few films, and I was very young
when I saw it, I must’ve been ten
years old. But the colour and the
behaviour, the characters, the
wedding scenes, you really saw
culture. Or Delmer Daves tried to
make the culture. There was that.
There was Apache, which is a big
favourite of Park Chan-wook, who
saw it and realised that you can fight
against the white man, not fight,
but react against, so to speak. He
used to see it on TV when he was a
kid in Korea. It’s a pretty good film,
especially the ending. But there is
Devil’s Doorway, Anthony Mann,
which I only saw later on. There’s
Drumbeat, again, Delmer Daves.
And there’s Broken Arrow. These
films, they were trying to do that
[to ‘make’ Native American culture].
MARTIN SCORSESE 81
The Last of the Line
THOMAS INCE, 1914
‘The white supremacist
thing, we always thought,
was more purely connected
to the concept of the
Aryan race… Now it’s
just that you’re white.
We are complicit’
Scorsese ended our conversation
by looking back to the first
Hollywood westerns, in which
Native Americans often played
‘Indians’. Ince’s film shows Gray
Otter, a Sioux chief (Lakota actor
Joe Goodboy), welcoming back
his beloved son (the Japanese
American actor Sessue Hayakawa)
from a white school, only to find
him drunken and corrupt. When
the son is involved in a payroll
robbery the chief kills him and the
other robbers, then makes it look
as if his son gave his life defending
the payroll. Ince contrasts the
chief ’s tragic nobility with the
son’s Westernised alcoholism,
FILMS OF THE YEAR
womanising and criminality.
Ms: Don’t forget that so many
native actors, so many Native
Americans, were in the turn-
of-the-century films, in 1910,
1911: the Thomas Ince films,
the one I love that influences
this picture a lot, The Last of the
Line… I like it very much. Though
they have Sessue Hayakawa
playing one of the Indigenous
characters … It is complicated.
[In Killers of the Flower Moon]
Pitts Beatty [Mollie’s guardian]
is KKK. And when she walks out
of his office I even put the mat,
which I got from [historian of
silent film] Kevin Brownlow.
In an interview, he said Thomas
Ince had... “K.I.G.Y.” – “Klansman,
I greet you” – the initials, on
doormats, in his building in LA
and on the lampposts outside.
And people kept saying to
me, “Well, can’t you translate?”
“No, let it be. This is the
atmosphere…” But I didn’t want
it out there. You see him dressed
in the hood later, you know?
Anyway, so the white
supremacist thing, we always
thought, was more purely
connected to the concept of
the Aryan race and national
socialism…Now it’s just that
you’re white. We are complicit…
The European white comes in,
Western civilisation comes in.
We are the killers, and we have
to understand that. We have
to confront it in ourselves.
82

THE BEST TV OF 2023

In 2023, the TV industry showed it was keener on making unnecessary drama-documentaries
about abusers than on cleaning up its act. But it was also a year in which several much-
loved shows bowed out graciously and genres were creatively teased. By Andrew Male

It was a year of departures, exits and
farewells. Many of the best TV experi-
ences of 2023, such as Succession, Top Boy,
Happy Valley, Barry, Endeavour and Ghosts,
were valedictory seasons. But while these
shows were allowed to go out on a high,
with finely crafted final episodes, other
programmes weren’t so lucky. Promising
series just getting into their stride, such
as Amanda Peet’s campus comedy The
Chair (Netflix), Armando Ianucci’s sci-fi
comedy Avenue 5 (Sky) and Joe Cornish’s
supernatural fantasy drama Lockwood &
Co. (Netflix), all got it in the neck this year
after just one or two seasons.
Similarly, pre-existing original series
started vanishing from their US stream-
ing platforms, shelved as cost-saving
exercises by an industry gradually waking
up to the realisation that streaming is an
awful business model. On HBO alone,
this included such well-regarded series
as Love Life (available in the UK on BBC
iPlayer), Mrs. Fletcher and Westworld (both
on Sky Go).
The knock-on problem, of course, is
that when a streaming platform starts
deep-sixing its own shows, especially the
more adventurous and daring ones, view-
ers lose even more faith in the brand. Such
platform loyalty wasn’t helped in 2023 by
the WGA and Sag-Aftra strikes, in which
Hollywood writers and actors demanded,
among other things, redress for the paltry
payments and residuals handed out to
them for working on streaming content.
Distrust of the TV industry was com-
pounded by the release of Maureen Ryan’s
book Burn It Down, which attempted to
expose the toxic culture of abuse at the
heart of modern Hollywood. In inter- BEST TV OF 2023
views, Ryan stressed that her book only 1. SUCCESSION
just scratches the surface of the industry, The end of an empire.
saying “We didn’t fix it. Please let’s not The end of an era
all pat ourselves on the back.” It would
have been helpful to affix Ryan’s quote 2. I THINK YOU SHOULD
to the year’s glut of documentaries on LEAVE WITH TIM
ROBINSON
such industry abusers as Bill Cosby, Rolf “I don’t know what any of this
Harris and Jimmy Savile. Neil McKay’s shit is, and I’m scared”
ill-judged Savile drama The Reckoning
(BBC1) was at least a drama devoid of 3. THE DIPLOMAT
self-congratulation, instead infused with a Intelligent political drama
played as screwball comedy
despairing air of cultural redundancy in its
after-the-fact attempt to seek retribution. 4. DREAMING
That was certainly preferable to George WHILST BLACK
Kay’s seven-part Peter Sutcliffe drama The Comedy is political
Long Shadow (ITV; see page 24), which 5. ONCE UPON A TIME IN
purported to focus on the female victims NORTHERN IRELAND
but gradually morphed into a standard The best TV series ever made
70s detective drama; or Joe Murtagh’s about the Troubles

misguided six-part drama The Woman in
the Wall (BBC1), which used the scandal
of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries as the
backdrop to an increasingly silly gothic
procedural centred around yet another
male detective.
You were left thinking that male dram-
atists shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near
such subjects, or that they should be tack-
led only in documentaries. Certainly, two
of the finest nonfiction programmes of
the year, Nic Young’s hour-long film How
the Holocaust Began and James Bluemel’s
five-part Once upon a Time in Northern Ire-
land (both BBC2) took vast, complicated
subjects and unpacked them with intel-
ligence, sensitivity and humanity, while
Todd Austin’s The Gold: the Inside Story
quietly and methodically questioned
the sillier speculative aspects of Neil
Forsyth’s six-part drama The Gold, about
the 1983 Brinks-Mat bullion robbery
(both BBC1).
In fact, it was left to Russell T. Davies
to show how best to blend fact and drama
in his three-part miniseries Nolly (ITV),
about the rise and fall of Noele Gordon,
star of the TV soap Crossroads (1964-81).
Blessed with a lead performance by
Helena Bonham Carter that was simul-
taneously defiant and vulnerable, Davies
gave us a series that was both a wry social
history of 70s Britain and a melancholy
rumination on fame and loneliness. Arriv-
ing back in March, the same month that
Steven Knight’s didactic and intermina-
ble adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great
Expectations (BBC1) hit our screens, it
offered some reassurance that subtlety
and subtext are not a dying art. That
was also the month of the final season of
Russell Lewis’s Morse prequel Endeavour
(ITV), a series that – in contrast to The
An inherent Woman in the Wall – took the nostalgic Brit-
ish police procedural and transformed it
sense of kindness into a quietly complex disquisition on male
and gentleness loneliness, duty and friendship.
seemed to be the Shows that played with genre expecta-
tions were a highlight of 2023. Take The
secret weapon Diplomat (Netflix), in which former West
of many of 2023’s Wing writer Debora Cahn repurposed
best shows the high-stakes geopolitical thriller into
a witty, screwball-fast show about rela-
tionships – the political, the personal and
the crossover between the two. Similarly,
ABOVE
Adjani Salmon’s sitcom Dreaming Whilst
Once upon a Time in Northern Ireland Black (BBC3) took the formula of the Brit-
OPPOSITE
ish workplace comedy and transformed it
Nicholas Braun as Greg Hirsch into a timely satire on race, diversity and
and Matthew Macfadyen as
Tom Wambsgans in Succession
the British media industry, while Lee
Sung-jin’s Beef (Netflix) was both a zany
BELOW
Dani Mosley as Amy, Adjani Salmon
road-rage comedy and a painful drama
as Kwabena in Dreaming Whilst Black about self-worth, mental health and the
83
debilitating expectations of modern life in
the Asian American community.
The finest example of genre remodelling
was arguably Lee Eisenberg and Gene
Stupnitsky’s Jury Duty (Amazon Freevee).
Set inside a fake courtroom, the show fol-
lowed a young man, 30-year-old solar-panel
installer Ronald Gladden, who believes
he’s taking part in a documentary about the
US legal system. However, everyone else
in the ‘documentary’ is an actor whose job
it is to enlist Gladden in ever more absurd
scenarios. In the wrong hands this could
be excruciating, but Jury Duty succeeds
because its goal is not to mock or deride
but to seek out a person’s better nature and
in Gladden they seemed to have found the
nicest person in America, resulting in a
kind-hearted cross between Parks and Rec-
reation and The Truman Show.
An inherent sense of kindness and gen-
tleness seemed to be the secret weapon of
many of 2023’s best shows, from the bond
of trust that grew between Joel (Pedro
Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in Craig
Mazin’s post-apocalyptic quest narrative
The Last Of Us (HBO/Sky) to the tender
friendship between the 13ft-tall Cootie
(Jharrel Jerome) and his normal-sized
girlfriend Flora (Olivia Washington) in
Boots Riley’s messy but well-meaning
political coming-of-age parable I’m a Virgo
(Amazon Prime).
Yet, in the end, the shows that perhaps
resonated most this year were those that
best captured our age’s political and cul-
tural lunacies. Tim Robinson and Zach
Kanin’s sketch show I Think You Should
Leave (Netflix) felt like the only show that
perfectly grasped the mania and disloca-
tion that come from being online for too
long, but also the horrible social awkward-
ness that can ensue when we then attempt
to navigate the pitfalls of the real world.
And finally, the victory of Tom Wambs-
gans in the final season of Succession (HBO/
Sky) was, perhaps, the perfect feel-bad
ending for the year, an image of faceless
corporate victory that perfectly summed
up the privilege, the hubris and the self-
deceit at the heart of our toxic media
empires. Merry Christmas.
84

DISCS
FOOLISH WIVES FLICKER ALLEY KIRA MURATOVA STUDIO CANAL MOMENT OF ROMANCE RADIANCE

Erich von Russian director Relatively new

OF
Stroheim’s Kira Muratova outfit Radiance
legendary 1921 made more than has already been
epic, the first 20 features but making waves
million-dollar it’s only relatively with the quality
film, endured recently that of its selection
savage cuts she’s become and of the discs,

THE
at the hands
of the studio
and censors. Numerous efforts to
reconstruct it over the years have
ultimately led to this restored version,
recognised as
one of the most
important directors of her generation.
These two magnificent films, Brief
Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell
several of which
we’ve reviewed,
although Benny Chan’s excellent,
seminal Hong Kong thriller of 1990
starring Andy Lau and produced by

YEAR
released by Flicker Alley and reviewed (1971), have been beautifully restored Johnnie To was one that didn’t make the
ecstatically in our October issue by and will only enhance her burgeoning cut (we will review the standard edition
Pamela Hutchinson. “The film bursts reputation in the UK. in our next issue).
with beauty, energy and arch humour.
The details… are delicious, in the
immense set design, opulent costumes, MAGIC, MYTH AND MUTILATION: CINEMATIC SORCERESS: THE
gorgeous lighting effects and nuances
MICHAEL J MURPHY FILMS OF NINA MENKES ARBELOS
of performance. Maude George, in
The commercial strains particular, is wonderful as Karamzin’s POWERHOUSE/INDICATOR
A wonderful
accomplice, and Stroheim himself
facing many labels don’t every inch the ‘man you love to hate’
A phenomenal two-disc release
(and monumental) by Arbelos for
show in the quality as the vainglorious villain, both vain
labour of love one of the leading
and glorious.”
of discs coming out, from the estimable lights of American
Powerhouse/ experimental
writes Kieron Corless Indicator label cinema, whose
TWILIGHT SECOND RUN means the long, potent, elliptical,
productive career deeply feminist
It’s been another strong year for György Fehér’s of the home-video narratives have
DVD/Blu-ray releases and the top mesmerising 1990 auteur of Portsmouth can now finally been bewitching
ten list that follows could easily masterpiece about receive proper assessment. As Kim and challenging audiences in equal
have been a top 50 or more without an investigation Newman put it in our Summer issue, measure since the early 80s, in films
into a child murder such as Queen of Diamonds (1991) and the
any loss in quality, attractiveness “Posthumously, Murphy is a superstar
in rural Hungary, in his field, and perhaps the envy of hallucinatory The Bloody Child (1996),
or curatorial savvy; so it’s best
an acknowledged many as-yet undiscovered home-video
regarded as a doomed attempt influence on Béla Hitchcocks or back garden Boettichers
to offer a sense of the sector’s Tarr, has long been WHEEL OF ASHES REVOIR
from Basildon or Dumfries or
variety (only one film allowed per difficult to see other than on murky Llandudno or Berwick-on-Tweed.”
distributor, including a sprinkling VHS, but is now restored and released This was American
of the most niche and specialised by Second Run in the UK and Arbelos underground
in the States. Michael Brooke was filmmaker
outlets), as well as a recap of WESTERN APPROACHES BFI
a few of the releases that Sight deeply impressed in our June issue. Peter Emanuel
“Second Run has wanted to release A British Goldman’s final
and Sound’s contributors have
Twilight since the label’s inception back propaganda feature, starring
been most excited by this year. in 2005, and has given the film the Pierre Clémenti
If there’s a sense of buoyancy in film from 1944,
deluxe treatment here… Tarr fans will starring a and made in Paris
the industry in terms of continued doubtless snap this up without any in 1968 before the
group of non-
quality of output, that’s not to say hesitation… but so should anyone else professionals eruptions of that
there aren’t problems and issues curious to sample the work of a clearly and directed May; it’s a sombre exploration of one
I often hear raised. The cost of major talent who has been neglected for by Pat Jackson, man’s spiritual quest, now beautifully
living crisis has inevitably hit sales, far too long.” was given a remastered to allow an appreciation
resounding thumbs-up by Robert of the connections it forges between
while at the same time production
Hanks in our September issue. American underground cinema and the
costs have risen – in particular,
WANDA CRITERION “Most impressive is Jack Cardiff ’s French New Wave.
the burdensome fees charged per
cinematography, the palette of intense
minute for BBFC certification, As many blues and greens more restrained
which make a significant dent in predicted, than he created for Black Narcissus Nina Menkes’s potent,
the profit margins of, especially, Barbara Loden’s (1947) or The Red Shoes (1948) but still elliptical, deeply
the smaller, more risk-taking only film, Wanda otherworldly, magical.”
distributors. It was ten years (1970), was one of feminist narratives have
ago – August 2013 – that Sight the most upwardly been bewitching and
mobile in last EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE
and Sound first published a piece year’s Greatest challenging audiences
bemoaning the prohibitive AGAIN ALIVE BLACK ZERO
Films of All Time in equal measure
impact of those charges, but poll, with a long overdue Criterion
Keith Lock’s
there appears to have been little release following shortly after. In our
visual diary
since the early 80s
improvement in the situation. May issue Hannah McGill described
pastoral film
That’s a shame, because more it as “a haunting, original film… and its
from 1975 was
than any other the home media maker an extraordinary figure”.
one of the first
sector connects us to fascinating, releases from
sometimes overlooked areas ‘Tarr fans will doubtless artist filmmaker
of the archive and film history Stephen
and to other cinemas across the snap Twilight up without Broomer’s new
physical media label, which has the
globe, nourishing an excitement hesitation… but so aim of exploring the rich diversity of
in rediscovery. Year end is should anyone curious Canada’s experimental film heritage.
an apt moment to salute the Our reviewer Ben Nicholson was
dedicated labels making this to sample the work of a stirred by “the film’s connection to the
happen, in challenging and often major neglected talent’ land and some deep, atavistic past”.
precarious circumstances.
 85

BOOKS
TIME TELLS (VOL 1) BOGIE AND BACALL: A WALTER HILL FILM
Masha Tupitsyn THE SURPRISING TRUE Walter Chaw
Hard Wait Press STORY OF HOLLYWOOD’S MZS Press

OF
GREATEST LOVE AFFAIR
It’s almost William J. Mann A timely
impossible to reassessment and
HarperCollins
describe Masha celebration of a
Tupitsyn’s book. What’s better than director whose

THE
A meditation on a biography of a work from western
film and television, Hollywood legend? to sci-fi, comedy to
an examination of A biography of two rock musical has
time, readings in Hollywood legends. had a huge impact
philosophy and Here Bogie and on American cinema

YEAR
The past year has been
a great one for film
YouTube comments, all supplemented Bacall get a joint – name a buddy cop movie better than
with over 100 photographs to make biography that shows 48 Hrs. (1982). Chaw sings the unsung
a book that is not simply about film them warts and all, hero in this handsome volume.
but begins to take on the quality of but also puts them in the context of
film itself. Every page offers a nugget their times.
of wisdom or wit to stop you in your THE QUEER FILM GUIDE:
tracks and whether it’s the timestamps 100 GREAT MOVIES THAT
in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) or the TELL LGBTQIA+ STORIES
OPPENHEIMER: THE
alternative ending to Broadcast News
OFFICIAL SCREENPLAY Kyle Turner
(1987) and Holly Hunter’s devastation,
her observations are always original Christopher Nolan Smith Street Books

books, a terrible one
for anybody trying to
pick out the best ones,
writes John Bleasdale
As the host of the Writers on Film
podcast, I read about one film
book a week. Initially I thought the
task would become onerous and
only planned a ten-episode stretch.
More than 100 episodes later, I
can confidently say the film book is
having a renaissance. Every week
there are new books exploring the
history of cinema from its earliest
days to its most recent innovations,
biographies of the people behind
and in front of the camera, critical
studies of blockbusters and
arthouse obscurities. I’ve tried to
include a taste of that variety in
this list, while necessarily leaving
out some great books. Choosing
one BFI Classic should practically
be illegal – I highly recommend
Melanie Williams on A Taste of
Honey and Demetrios Matheou on
Mean Streets. There was no space
for Stuart Klawans’s Crooked, but
Never Common: The Films of Preston
Sturges, a fascinating introduction
to one of the most brilliant masters
of American cinematic comedy.
Among the memoirs, Harvard,
Hollywood, Hitmen, and Holy Men,
by the writer/director/producer/
actor Paul Williams, stands
out as one of the most esoteric
autobiographies ever. Although I
normally avoid ‘How to…’ books,
Carol Baum – whose producing
credits include David Cronenberg’s
Deadringers (1988) and Father of
the Bride (1991) – wrote Creative
Producing: A Pitch-to-Picture Guide
to Movie Development, which was
really a memoir in disguise. There
can be no better proof of the
range and quality of film books
out there than that choosing only
ten proved such a difficult task.
and acute. With Tupitsyn’s own family Faber and Faber
Enough of all those
history and her experience of life in
New York during Covid folded in, she There was a time 100 great films lists
when people read written by straight
convinces us of the importance film and
screenplays avidly; white men. Here
TV can have as they speak with their
mixture of poetry and serendipity. this book could bring we get a refreshing
it back. Nolan is a collection of must-
beautiful writer. His see queer films,
curated to show off
THE LAST ACTION HEROES: THE stage directions and
the expansiveness
TRIUMPHS, FLOPS, AND FEUDS OF scene setting are
of queer cinema and to challenge
scintillating and the
HOLLYWOOD’S KINGS OF CARNAGE notions of straight greatness.
use of the first person throughout gives
Nick de Semlyen
the screenplay a novelistic feel.
Pan MacMillan
THE WARNER BROTHERS
Following his wildly THE RED SHOES
entertaining history Chris Yogerst
Pamela Hutchinson University Press of Kentucky
of 1980s cinematic
comedy Wild and
Bloomsbury
Crazy Guys (2019), de Long before studios
Fans of Powell and buried entire films
Semlyen has turned
Pressburger’s tale unseen for tax
his attention to the
of artistic obsession reasons, a family
testosterone-soaked
will pirouette their
world of action of brothers had a
way through Pamela
cinema. Bulging with anecdotes, dream: to make
Hutchinson’s money and – if
the book delivers a thrilling series
wonderful essay in possible – make
of portraits of the tough guys with
fragile egos who dominated the 80s
one sitting. The entertainment in
pocket-sized book the process. The rise of the Warner
and early 90s with their impossible
is packed with history, anecdotes and Brothers – the original film bros – is
bodies. Schwarzenegger – “a brown
a view of the film so en pointe it’ll have told in all its Shakespearean drama and
condom filled with walnuts”, in Clive
you jeté-ing back to the screen with intricacy by one of our best chroniclers
James’s perfect summation – Stallone,
fresh eyes.
Van Damme, et al, emerge as far more of Hollywood history.
complex characters than the personas
they try to project on and off screen.
UNLIKEABLE FEMALE CHARACTERS COLORS OF FILM: THE STORY
This storytelling debunks myths with
a far more entertaining series of true Anna Bogutskaya OF CINEMA IN 50 PALETTES
tales, and places the explosions in their Sourcebooks Charles Bramesco
social and political context. Frances Lincoln
Anna Bogutskaya
sides with the The term ‘coffee-
Bulging with anecdotes, monsters and femmes table book’ can feel
fatales who didn’t like a slap as much
the book delivers care about being as a description,
a thrilling series of accepted and liked, easily translated
from Bette Davis’s as ‘something
portraits of the tough Mildred in Of Human pretty that no one
guys with fragile egos Bondage (1934) to Shiv actually reads’.
Roy in Succession (2018-23). Now their But Bramesco has
who dominated the 80s time has come and she is here for it, in landed on a great idea that weds beauty
and early 90s with their a celebration that takes in television, with meaning: 5o films, from A Trip to
cinema and wider societal changes. the Moon (1902) to Steve McQueen’s
impossible bodies Lovers Rock (2020), analysed in terms of
the range of colours they use. There are
also fascinating dips into colour theory
and the technological innovations that
change the way we see film.

LEFT
A rendering of the palace in
pink as taken from Jane Giles’s
book about the cinema;
the King Kong-esque tabby
cat, Roy, ruled the box office
It’s been 30 years since the demise of London’s legendary Scala cinema – a haven for mavens
of arthouse obscurities, films maudits, demi-monde double bills and simply gloriously scuzzy
cinema. To celebrate the release of Scala!!!, a new documentary about the raucous picture
palace, directed by Ali Catterall and former Scala programmer Jane Giles, Sight and Sound asked
writers, critics and filmmakers – including John Waters, Bette Gordon, Peter Strickland and
Edgar Wright – for the post-Scala flicks they’d put on the bill were the cinema still open today
INTRODUCTION BY ALI CAT TERALL
S ca l a ! ! ! The very
name has become
synonymous with
post-punk trans-
gression and sub-
version. This most infamous of sex, drugs
and rock ’n’ roll picturehouses, in the heart
of King’s Cross in London, was a beacon
for weirdos and misfits during the tumul-
tuous Thatcher years.
But the Scala was more than just a lode-
star – its repertory fare galvanised a gen-
eration of filmmakers, artists, musicians
and more. Not coincidentally, it was ulti-
mately programmed by that audience. If
a film performed well, it was shown again
– and again. Take Thundercrack! (1975): the
legend is that there existed just one print
of Curt McDowell’s notorious art-porn
oddity, and it was fed through the cinema’s
barnacled 16mm projector so often that it
eventually fell apart.
A crucial part of this ecosystem was the
Scala Selection Box. Punters would post
their dream triple bills through the slot,
often the most extreme material: Café Flesh
(1982), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975),
Supervixens (1975), Pink Flamingos (1972).
The programme promised: “The film with
the most votes gets screened. Fun, huh?!!”
As former Scala programmer Jane Giles
wryly asked in her 2018 book Scala Cinema
1978-1993, “What could possibly go wrong?”
The scrawled suggestions for the box, she
recalled, “ranged from the mundane to the
ridiculous and the inspired – often includ-
ing titles which had never even made
it into production. One Saliva Bubble by
David Lynch, anyone?” One has to admire
the chutzpah of the Scala member who
requested “Valley of the Dolls. Beyond the
Valley of the Dolls. And Valley Girl.”
Sometimes it was wiser to ignore cer-
tain things that flopped through the let-
terbox, especially requests to screen A
Clockwork Orange (1971), as the Scala found
to its immense cost: the cinema became
embroiled in a year-long court case
brought by the Federation Against Copy-
right Theft (Fact) after an illicit screening
of Kubrick’s film in 1992.
It’s tantalising to wonder what films
might have played had it not closed the
2023
next year. Over the following pages you’ll
find examples of films from the last 30 years
that might have ended up in the box, and
on the bill, had the cinema survived.
The Scala certainly functioned as an
unofficial film school for dozens of film-
makers, including Peter Strickland,
Mary Harron, Ben Wheatley and Martin
McDonagh (proud winner of a Scala
programme caption competition in April
1992); it’s no surprise to find so many of
their movies suffused with that ol’ ‘Scala
Spirit’, a most intoxicating liquor.
Strickland credits a single programme
in particular: February 1990, the month he
first encountered the Scala (and London:
his mum insisted he took his name and
address on a piece of paper “in case I got
lost”) with influencing his entire filmog-
raphy. You can see what he means: on
that month was Kenneth Anger’s Magick
Lantern Cycle (1947-81); Dario Argento’s
Opera (1987); Eraserhead (1977); Peeping Tom
(1960); and, courtesy of a ‘Bitches, Whips
and Heels’ all-nighter from BDSM maga-
zine Skin Two, Venus in Furs (1969), Maîtresse
(1976) and Mano destra (1986)… Strickland’s
own catalogue slides into such stuff like a
lubricated fist.
Similarly possessed by the Scala spirit,
one can easily imagine Matthew Barney or
Darren Aronofsky competing for attention
on the Scala’s monthlies, alongside Lucile
Hadžihalilović, Gaspar Noé, Harmony
Korine, Gregg Araki and Todds Haynes
and Solondz – or ageing enfants terribles like
Larry Clark and Lars von Trier. Plus all-
nighters from Kevin Smith, Edgar Wright,
Roberto Rodriguez, the Wachowskis, the
later works of Miyazaki Hayao and Studio
Ghibli, as well as films by former Scala
regular Christopher Nolan.
The cinema was also instrumental
in introducing East Asian filmmakers
such as John Woo and Jackie Chan to
broader audiences; it’s pleasing to fanta-
sise about an alternative history in which
not just Park Chanwook, Bong Joon Ho
and Miike Takashi but the likes of Yeon
Sangho and Nishimura Yoshihiro have
found an ecstatic reception in the UK
thanks to the Scala. Of the younger crop
of directors, the cinema would surely have
SCALA!!! 89
embraced Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Prano
Bailey-Bond (Censor, 2021), Luna Car-
moon (Hoard), Nia DaCosta (the superb
2021 Candyman reboot) and Julia Ducour-
nau, whose chewy coming-of-age debut
Raw (2016) and its high-octane follow-up
Titane (2021) would have been a shoo-in for
a classic body-horror double bill.
It’s worth noting that there is one major
difference between the era that the Scala
operated in and the present day: the renais-
sance in documentaries. The cinema
showed very few docs, but documentary-
making has come into its own in recent
decades and one can well imagine Werner
Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) doubled-
billed with Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear,
or Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed (2022) showing with Bette Gor-
don’s Variety (1983).
Of course, one name above all has been
conspicuously absent so far. It feels sym-
bolic that Reservoir Dogs (1992) screened
at the cinema not long before it closed
its doors forever. The prelapsarian, curi-
ously innocent Scala didn’t live to wit-
ness the rise of ‘Indiewood’ or the com-
modification of ‘cult’, or accommodate a
new breed of filmmakers with access to
increasingly affordable digital technology
and a myriad of alternative distribution
channels and platforms.
Over the decade that followed its clo-
sure, the mainstream would soon become
used to knocking back liberal measures of
the bad-taste, the ironic – and, yes, gener-
ous shots of that ol’ Scala spirit. Quentin
Tarantino and other gunslingers would
take what the Scala had unselfconsciously
provided and repackage it with postmod-
ern ribbons and bows. Vintage threads on
new coat hangers. Counterculture, coiffed.
By June 1993, the cinema was shot full
of arrows like Sebastiane, beset by the
court case, which was lost, and a rapidly
expiring lease. But, like Jack Arnold’s The
Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), the Scala
and its immortal, indomitable spirit didn’t
so much fade away as get subsumed, at a
subatomic level, into the cinematic uni-
verse. The legacy of the ultimate outsiders’
cinema is all around us: it just took the rest
of the world a while to catch up.
90 SCALA!!!

SISSY-BOY SLAP-PARTY GUY MADDIN, 1994 (REMADE IN 2004)

Guy Maddin’s flagellation fantasia is a tight, hot package too dangerous to
display in public – this orgy of beautiful boys using one another’s bare buttocks
as bongos is so exhilarating that any participatory red-cheeked revelry could
erupt into a thwack-happy riot in the aisles. Dreamy homoeroticism, wild
action, quotable dialogue: you’d only need to re-open the Scala for six short
minutes to bring back everything that made it great.
DAVID COX Programmer

A GUN FOR JENNIFER THE WORK OF

TODD MORRIS, 1997
With its mixture of explicit gore, social
commentary and punk aesthetics, A Gun
for Jennifer would have been destined for
Scala audiences. Its vendetta narrative
focuses on a group of women vigilantes
who stalk New York’s sexual predators.
The film was based on co-writer/
producer Deborah Twiss’s experiences
of working as a stripper to fund her
acting career.
X AVIER MENDIK Academic;
director, That’s La Morte
The Scala got to show
Superstar: The Karen
Carpenter Story when
it was illegal to do so
BERTRAND MANDICO
BERTRAND MANDICO, 1998-
What I know of the Scala is the image
of a cinema with a deviant soul that
gave pride of place to midnight movies,
queer cinema, the fringe, the avant
garde, genres and ill-bred films. So
when I’m asked to imagine which
films could have been screened there,
I reply egocentrically: my films. Boro
in the Box (2011), Living Still Life (2012)
and Apocalypse After (2018) in a special
programme for a night of exhilaration.
Then I would show my first feature The
Wild Boys (2017, pictured above), which
I think would have been right at home
at the Scala.
BERTRAND MANDICO
Director, She Is Conann

VELVET GOLDMINE TODD HAYNES, 1998 BEAU TRAVAIL

I’d programme Velvet Goldmine alongside original music films such as Born CLAIRE DENIS, 1999
to Boogie (Ringo Starr, 1972), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (D.A. Beau travail certainly would have
Pennebaker, 1973) and Blank Generation (Ulli Lommel, 1980), which cover that played. A woman filmmaker looking
glam-into-punk era. The Scala got to show Todd Haynes’s short film Superstar: with her camera at a group of male
The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) at a time when it was illegal to do so, as well as legionnaires in the middle of an
his first feature, Poison (1991), based on Jean Genet’
G s stories; it would definitely exercise that feels more meditative
havee cont
hav ccontinued
ontinu
inued
ed to fol
follow
low his ffilmmaking.
hi s film
ilmmak
making
ing. than military. The blue water, the
STEPHEN WOOLLEY Producer,
r, Living
L
Living;; former owner,
ow Scala cinema sun, the men naked from the waist
up, the camera moving over their
bodies. Denis was the first filmmaker
to film men like this. Capturing
bodies on film, their physicality,
intimacy, close-ups with long lenses.
She pushes visual language in a way
that I adore.
BET TE GORDON Director, Variety

THE WAR ZONE TIM ROTH, 1999

I watched this by mistake aged 15. Perhaps no film has cut through me with such
brutality as this cruel tale of family secrets; it will stay with me for infinity. The
performances are told with such innocence, which makes it all the more horrifying
that true horror and human extremity lie in the family and the mundane.
LUNA CARMOON Director, Hoard
 WILD ZERO
TAKEUCHI TETSURO, 1999
I moved to London the year after
the Scala closed, so it’s with regret
that I never had the chance to
experience this beautiful trash palace.
Nevertheless, based on all I’ve
learned about this legendary venue,
the 1999 Japanese rock zombie film
Wild Zero seems like a perfect fit. In
this raucous B movie, real-life band
Guitar Wolf, renowned for their
ear-splittingly loud performances,
take on the crucial role of defending
earth against both an extraterrestrial
threat and an army of zombies.
Mass slaughter set to a deafening
psychobilly score – what more could
you want from a 2am showing?
EDGAR WRIGHT
Director, Last Night in Soho

I moved to London
after the Scala closed,
so I never had a chance
to experience this
beautiful trash palace

HEDWIG AND
THE ANGRY INCH
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL , 2001
The film I choose is Hedwig and
the Angry Inch. It’s directed and
written by John Cameron Mitchell,
who stars as a genderqueer punk
rock singer from East Berlin
touring the US with her band after
undergoing a botched gender-
reassignment surgery. Her life
story is equally tragic and hilarious
and comes with killer songs. A cult
classic alt-musical.
MARK MOORE
Music producer and DJ

BAISE-MOI 24 HOUR RUBBER JOHNNY

VIRGINIE DESPENTES &
CORALIE TRINH TRI, 2000
PARTY PEOPLE
MICHAEL WINTERBOT TOM, 2002
Raw, angry and ugly, Baise-moi is about
what it really means to not be a victim. For many, Manchester’s Factory is
Written and co-directed by the femme synonymous with Tony Wilson, the
terrible of French literature Virginie Scala with Stephen Woolley. Audrey
Despentes, it follows the sex-and- Golden’s recent book I Thought I Heard
murder road trip of two disaffected You Speak: Women at Factory Records
women on the run. Fuelled by a shows how much of the key work
desperate punk energy, it is an essential at the Factory’s Haçienda nightclub
shock to the system. was done by women, just as Jane Giles
and Ali Catterall’s film highlights
VIRGINIE SÉLAV Y Critic and scholar
the young women responsible for
programming at the Scala. Both their
Raw, angry and ugly, movie and Winterbottom’s are gleeful
Baise-moi is about what tragicomedies about enthusiasm,
barely controlled chaos, post-punk
it really means to not kinetics, light and noise, discordant
bodies, bolshy Brits, avant-populism,
be a victim… fuelled the politics and possibilities of space –
by a desperate punk the other 1980s. Whether or not
you actually went to either place,
energy, it is an essential both make you feel intensely
shock to the system (productively?) nostalgic.
SUKHDEV SANDHU Critic
CHRIS CUNNINGHAM, 2005
A short film that cries out to be part of
this line-up. It might seem an obvious
choice, but imagine if the Scala had
screened this six-minute masterpiece
on its release. Some unfortunate
punter would have stumbled in from a
night out as they tried to shake off an
unwanted acid trip. The look of horror
on their face when little Johnny appears
on the big screen would have been
priceless. His contorted, bony body
straddling a wheelchair, his abnormally
large head slumped to one side. The
eerie chimes of Aphex Twin droning
as the night-vision camera illuminates
this groundbreaking imagery in all its
disgusting, humorous glory. Maybe no
one would get away with it today. I have
never had the chance to see it on the big
screen. But I’m sure it would be a great
watch in a packed cinema. Especially
sitting next to the bloke tripping.
LEO LEIGH Director, Sweet Sue
92 SCALA!!!

EVIL ALIENS
JAKE WEST, 2005
As an avid cinemagoer at the Scala,
which midwifed my alternative film
education, I’m going to nominate my
own film, splatter horror/comedy Evil
Aliens, exactly the kind of movie that
would have found an adoring audience
there. It played many festivals… but in
particular, it was picked for Midnight
Madness in Toronto, which has very
few programming slots. That audience
is the Scala audience! Fifteen-hundred
people loved my batshit-crazy flick,
which was birthed at the altar of the
Scala. It’s my love letter to wild cinema.
For its UK release, critics sure weren’t
as enthusiastic as the audiences! But
who do we really care about?
JAKE WEST Director, Mancunian Man:
The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow
AMER HÉLÈNE CAT TET AND
BRUNO FORZANI, 2009
A feverishly modernist take on giallo
cinema, with any extraneous exposition
or narrative foundation amounting
only to mere residue in a heightened
distillation of the anxiety, desire and
nightmare logic that is hardwired into
the genre. Amer conjures what I imagine
I would’ve succumbed to if I had been
to an Argento all-nighter at the Scala
and fallen asleep there.
PETER STRICKLAND Director,
Flux Gourmet
Amer is a distillation of
the anxiety, desire and
nightmare logic that is
hardwired into giallo
ENTER THE VOID
GASPAR NOÉ, 2009
I stand (almost) alone in adoring
everything about this thrilling
film, particularly the director’s cut.
The opening credit sequence with
its stunning montage of graphic
styles, the theme of the dead
observing the living, its explicit
and extreme images, the darkness
and hallucinations. The Scala has
its own Void, a secret place above
the very top of the building, and
this film would’ve resonated with
the very soul of the cinema even
when there were only three people
in its cavernous auditorium, the
programmer being one of them.
JANE GILES Writer; former
Scala cinema programmer
ENTHIRAN +
THE MERMAID
S. SHANK AR, 2010
STEPHEN CHOW, 2016
Given that it’s the Scala, it has to
be a double bill. Both films display
a bonkers-level imagination when
it comes to action set pieces that
make Hollywood action films seem
pedestrian. Enthiran (pictured)
was the most expensive Indian
film ever made, while The Mermaid
was China’s highest-grossing film
at the time. Yet in spite of all the
dollars, both feel like Scala-worthy
B movies that satisfy in the way
only trash can. Wonderful.
KIRK HENDRY Director,
Kensuke’s Kingdom

THE WAYWARD CLOUD + DESTRICTED The Scala audience

TSAI MINGLIANG, 2005 / VARIOUS DIRECTORS, 2006 was as special as the
The Scala audience was as special as the programme, constantly subverting and appropriating what would now be programme, subverting
called the ‘heteronormative’. It particularly relished the perverse (Russ Meyer; Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, 1985), so I nominate
Tsai Mingliang’s ode to the watermelon, The Wayward Cloud – perhaps in a double bill with the sex-positive anthology of
and appropriating what
artists’ films, Destricted (pictured below), to remind us of cinema’s key interest in representations of the body. would now be called
RICHARD KWIETNIOWSKI Teacher; director, Love and Death on Long Island the ‘heteronormative’
THE ACT OF KILLING: OBJECTS ATTACK!
DIRECTOR’S CUT RONA MARK, 2013
If made in 1984, Rona Mark’s oddity
JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER, 2012
Objects Attack! might have been a
Maybe as a sing-along… Scala staple. Narrator-heroine Lovey
JAMES MARSH Chambers (Meritt Latimore) searches
Director, Dance First for her missing boyfriend while being
persecuted by malign inanimate objects
– including a car driven by a pair of
white gloves. Its air of no-budget
invention evokes early John Waters, and
there’s a terrific surf/lounge rock score
from the Flooz.
KIM NEWMAN Writer and critic

THE MAN WHOSE

MIND EXPLODED
TOBY AMIES, 2012
Gloriously Scala-esque, The Man Whose
Mind Exploded gleefully throws away
the supposed rules of documentary
filmmaking and leans into its subject
closely and compassionately. The
relationship between director Toby
Amies and subject Drako Oho Zarhazar
is an important meditation on love and
loss, reminding us of the importance
of a life well-lived. Perhaps we should
all embrace Drako’s elegant philosophy
– “trust, absolute, unconditional”. Oh,
how we wish we could have watched it
from the holy pews of the Scala.
IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD
Directors, 20,000 Days on Earth
UNDER THE SKIN
JONATHAN GLAZER, 2013
This film haunts you with its unnerving
brilliance. It lures you into a supposed
narrative pattern and then takes you to
a place you would never expect. It hosts
unique uses of sound, score and colour.
A searing feature that takes on modern
themes of power, sexuality and consent;
it’s a film which I believe would be
more than at home on a bill at the Scala.
CONRAD KHAN Actor
THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY PETER STRICKLAND, 2014
The Scala was an education in all sorts of cinema and an inspiration to try to make
it. When I first met Peter we talked about doing a remake of Jesús Franco’s Lorna the
Exorcist (1974). Peter, quite rightly, thought that a bad idea and came back with Duke
but I’ve always thought of the film as being something like The Truman Show (1998),
where the protagonist is ‘trapped’ in a Franco theme park… how I felt at some of the
all-nighters at the Scala. I’d still very happily buy a ticket for that theme park now.
ANDY STARKE Producer, Scala!!!
The Scala was an education in all sorts of
cinema and an inspiration to try to make it

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE +
LOST SOUL:
THE DOOMED JOURNEY
OF RICHARD STANLEY’S
ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
FRANK PAVICH, 2013
DAVID GREGORY, 2014
A mesmerising doc about a film that
never was but whose visionary ideas
would infect Hollywood like a cosmic
virus. A trickster-shaman, Jodorowsky
was one of the Scala’s spiritual grandees
and this story of how outsider art can
metastasise into strange and wonderful
creations, from Star Wars (1977) to Alien
(1979) and Flash Gordon (1980), would
have found the perfect home. Double-
bill it with David Gregory’s hugely
entertaining film (pictured). Hell, while
we’re here, triple-bill it with another
little documentary called Scala!!!…
ALI CAT TERALL Co-director, Scala!!!

HARDKOR DISKO KRZYSZTOF SKONIECZNY, 2014
From its decidedly Scala-esque title to its arthouse-meets-grindhouse premise
(essentially, Pasolini’s Theorem, 1968, but with the equivalent of Terence Stamp’s
mysterious stranger bent on murderous revenge instead of quasi-divine intervention),
Hardkor Disko, Krzysztof Skonieczny’s only feature to date, would have fitted the
Scala schedule like a giallo killer’s black leather glove.
MICHAEL BROOKE Critic
This film would have fitted the Scala schedule
like a giallo killer’s black leather glove
WE ARE THE FLESH +
BAD BOY BUBBY
EMILIANO ROCHA MINTER, 2016
ROLF DE HEER, 1993
We Are the Flesh (pictured) is a film
that will turn your brain into messy,
visceral scrambled egg; it’s a perverse
and demented descent into madness
that transforms into a fleshy hell. I was
torn between this and Bad Boy Bubby
– so maybe a double bill for a truly
extraordinary cinema experience that
will mess with our minds.
PRANO BAILEY-BOND Director, Censor
THE GHOST OF
PETER SELLERS
PETER MEDAK, 2018
The Scala was a place to revel
in the best and worst of cinema,
democratically displayed. So, as an
unapologetic aficionado of films great
and awful, I’d show Peter Medak’s
excellent doc examining his own
appalling Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974),
a self-indulgent Goon grotesquerie that
starred Spike Milligan as Bill Bombay
up against Peter Sellers’s nattily named
Dick Scratcher.
VIC PRAT T Writer and curator
MANDY
PANOS COSMATOS, 2018
0
018
Mandy has a number of ingredients
that could have seen it appear on the
Scala menu: graphic violence, full-
frontal male nudity, a plucky female
eborough, left)
heroine (Andrea Riseborough,
a tremendous Jóhann n Jóhannson
o
oorboards
score to make the floorboards rumble
and a performance byy Nicolas
Cage that channels hish inner Bruce
Campbell. It begins with a pastoral
shot set to a track byy King Crimson,
n
now
but very soon you know there will
be blood. The midnighti
ight Scala
crowd would have gone o apeshit
one
crazy. And rightly so..
JASON WOOD Executive i director
ive
of public programmess
and audiences, BFI
DOGS DON’T
WEAR PANTS
J.-P. VALKEAPÄ Ä, 2019
A film so perfectly Scala: hard to watch,
but impossible to forget. A hardcore
BDSM movie with a tender love story
at its heart, and a final scene that could
have been shot at a Scala all-nighter.
The most joyful celebration of life
emerging again after grief you’ll ever
see, set to an incredible soundtrack.
CAROLINE CATZ Actor; director,
Delia Derbyshire: The Myths
and the Legendary Tapes
BUTT BOY
TYLER CORNACK, 2020
The entire last third of the movie takes
place up inside the title character’s
rectum. It’s a regular laff riot!!
JOHN WATERS Director, Pink Flamingos
ROTTING IN
THE SUN
SEBASTIÁN SILVA
Silva’s energetic 2023 film Rotting
in the Sun would’ve been the
perfect film to show at the Scala.
It’s laced with both misanthropic
and flamboyant characters laying
the foundations on which the
most nonsensical scenarios
comically make sense. Packed
with charmingly unwarranted
nudity and gratuitous drug
use, scattered with short and
erratic online videos, it’s a
would-be a 21st-century Scala
fever dream.
DANIELLA ALCONABA Critic
KING ROCKER
MICHAEL CUMMING, 2020
I’ve made one film, King Rocker,
with Michael Cumming,
who directed Brass Eye (1997)
on television. It’s an anti-
rockumentary about the singer
Robert Lloyd which weaves
the story of Birmingham’s
undervalued underdog autodidact
into that of the city’s forgotten
public sculpture of King Kong,
eschewing the celebrity interview
and archive-raid approach for
a free-associating bricolage of
Indian food, bewildered chefs,
vegetable gardening, prescription
medicines, pop stardom and pop
art. I’d like to think it would be
the sort of thing that could’ve
played at the Scala because that
would mean more to me than it
being on BBC4.
STEWART LEE Comedian and
writer; screenwriter, King Rocker
The film is an anti-
rockumentary, a free-
associating bricolage
of Indian food,
bewildered chefs,
vegetable gardening,
prescription
medicines, pop
stardom and pop art
Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and
Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and
How It Influenced
nflu
f a Mixed-up
d upp Generation off
Weirdos and Misf its is in UK cinemas from
Misfits
5 January and is reviewed on page 121.
An accompanying season of films, ‘Scala:
Sex, drugs and rock and roll cinema’, runs
at BFI Southbank, London, from 2-31
January. ‘Sight and Soundd presents:
Scala spirit, 1993-2023’, a panel
discussion about shifting critical
and commercial boundaries,
including clips from many
of the films mentioned in
this article, is on 11 January.
whatson.bf i.org.uk
SCHOOL’S OUT
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, a comic tale of a misfit student left in the
care of a misanthropic teacher at a Massachusetts prep school for Christmas
in 1970, is a glorious return to form. Here he discusses his debt to early 70s
cinema, his favourite Christmas movies and his love of Paul Giamatti
BY PHILIP HORNE
I
t’s been a long wait for follow-
ers of Alexander Payne since the
extraordinarily dark eco-satirical
science-fiction epic Downsizing in
2017. That film sharply divided
critics and viewers (though
many still responded warmly to
its satirical wit and its unsenti-
mental humanity). This much-
loved director works within the
Hollywood system – indeed four
of his first six films were Oscar-
nominated (Election 1999; Side-
ways, 2004; The Descendants, 2011;
Nebraska, 2013) and he has won twice,
for Best Adapted Screenplay – but with
great independence of spirit and an
uncompromising attitude to casting and
the perfecting of the screenplay. This
has meant painful delays between films,
but also means that each comes with
its own richly developed world and set
of concerns.
His new film, The Holdovers, is a mag-
nificent return to audience-pleasing form.
It stars Paul Giamatti, Payne’s lead in Side-
ways, and takes place in December 1970 at
Barton, a Massachusetts prep school (the
equivalent of a British public school),
over the Christmas break. The three main
characters are all damaged, marooned,
loveless; and the desolate institutional
settings – all real locations – promise a
deeply cheerless Yuletide.
One master, Paul Hunham (Giamatti),
a sourly witty but stalled and rage-filled
loser with no life outside the school,
is chosen to oversee the little group of
boarders who for various reasons can’t
go home to their families; he’s helped by
the cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Ran-
dolph), still grieving her son Curtis, a stu-
dent at Barton who, because Black and
poor, has been drafted and killed in Viet-
nam. The most difficult of the students
is the clever, troubled, disruptive misfit
Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, an extraor-
dinary discovery): the film focuses on the
complicated antagonism between the
bitter, twisted young man and his bitter,
twisted teacher, mediated by the bereft
mother who is stuck with them.
Payne has often adapted novels, relish-
ing the access they give to a quite specific
social and emotional and geographical
world beyond his personal experience –
which he then explores intensively, spend-
ing time in a locality, getting to know
people and absorbing an atmosphere. But
as with Nebraska this is an original screen-
play with an autobiographical authentic-
ity that is the basis for the elaboration
of a world; though as Payne reveals in
the following interview, the experienced
television writer and showrunner David
Hemingson’s initial script, based on his
own youth and difficult experiences at a
prep school, was only the starting point
for a joint exploration.
In a way the storytelling is unobtrusive,
fluent, beautifully and wittily observed,
with delightful touches of physical
comedy (the lame way Giamatti throws a
football he finds in the snow is one small
majestic moment of characterful expres-
siveness). And the dialogue is intensely
97
The film crystallises pleasurable, full of comic barbs. The
wounded, unhappy, cynical Hunham is
Payne’s long- in class, as the rebellious Tully calls him,
held feeling that a “sadistic fuck” – but we can enjoy the
the American abuse anyway, partly because it’s directed
at spoilt rich kids. When one complains
cinematic mode about his fail mark, “I can’t fail this class:
of the early 70s, I’m supposed to go to Cornell,” Hunham
an intelligent, answers lightly, “Oh, don’t sell yourself
short, Mr Koontz; I truly believe that
grown-up cinema you can.” And Tully can match him, com-
questioning menting on one Hunham punishment,
social values and “I thought all the Nazis were hiding in
Argentina.” Genuine warmth emerges
struggling for gradually, but also a sense that things are
moral clarity, still changing in a threatening way, so that
has appeal today for Hunham, “The world doesn’t make
sense any more. The world’s on fire.” Even
if a real affection develops, in a complex,
moving way, the prickly edge is never lost.
What is experimental, even radical
in the film is its attempt to recreate – a
joyous, ironic f iction – the cinematic
toolbox of 1970, with zooms, dissolves, a
wintry palette like those of The Last Detail
(Hal Ashby, 1973) or The King of Marvin
Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972), and music
from, or attuned to, the period. It is per-
haps the crystallisation of Payne’s long-
held feeling that the American cinematic
mode of the early 70s, an intelligent,
thoughtful, grown-up cinema question-
ing social values and struggling for moral
OPPOSITE clarity, still has remarkable appeal today –
Dominic Sessa and
Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers
as The Holdovers gloriously demonstrates.
I interviewed Payne over lunch in his
BELOW
Sessa, Giamatti and
hotel during the BFI London Film Fes-
Da’Vine Joy Randolph tival in October.
98 ALEX ANDER PAYNE
When I first saw The Holdovers my imme- cause I have an idea that takes place in that ‘Paul Giamatti
diate rather crude thought was that it was world, but I don’t have any life experience
like A Christmas Carol crossed with The of that world. Would you consider writ- is really sui
Last Detail. But then I found out about ing this, getting it up on its feet? And then generis. He’s
Marcel Pagnol’s Merlusse [a 1935 comedy I’ll jump in later to rewrite it in such a way just so infinitely
drama that also revolves around a teacher that it’s directable by me”… And he agreed.
overseeing a group of boys during the It turned out he was a fan of my films and watchable, and
Christmas break at a boarding school]. agreed to write it on spec, that is to say he does comic
Yeah. That’s just where I got the premise with no pay. And I felt very respectful and things with
from. It’s an interesting film. I remember honoured by that. And so it went. He took
I mentioned it to Bertrand Tavernier – the premise and then he ran, I don’t know, drama, and
[adopting a French accent] “Oh, that is a won- three, four, five different possible storylines dramatic things
derful film! I love this film!” He was always by me, and then we finally settled on this sto- with comic flair
very generous to films. But I thought it had ryline in the film. He came up with the cook
a wonderful premise. I actually have seen character. I hadn’t thought of her. And then and panache’
the film only once, at a festival screening – I it was just a matter of showing me drafts,
don’t even really remember the story. I just or portions of drafts, and my saying yea or
recalled its premise. And retained it for ten nay, and saying, “Less of this”... You know, it
years until I found a writer to get it up on was my first experience in let’s say directing a
its feet. writer, and it was a rich experience for both
of us. I readily can speak for him because
And you found that writer when you saw a he has told me the same. And we’re going
script by David Hemingson set in an East to do it again.
Coast private boarding school?
It was a TV pilot. I don’t remember it be- Like a lot of your films, The Holdovers has
cause it’s a good five years ago, but I remem- a subtle but powerful movement, so that
ABOVE
ber liking it enough to ring him up out of it creeps up on you and you don’t quite see Alexander Payne
the blue and say, “I like your pilot, it’s very where it’s going to go. Even now I’m not
OPPOSITE
well-written. I don’t want to make it, but I quite sure what I would say it was about… Jack Nicholson in
like that you wrote about that world, be- I’m glad you can’t say what it’s about. I The Last Detail (1970)
mean, we know it’s about something, or
some things, ideally.
I suppose I might pick out the idea that
‘Barton men don’t lie’, and then the fact
that two of the great, humane things
people do in it, two moments of great gen-
erosity, are Barton men telling lies…
Never say never! [Laughs] Well, look, I
don’t want to spell it out for you, but since
The Descendants I have found, I won’t say it’s
a conscious urge, before making the film,
but in hindsight I observe that Descendants,
Downsizing, Nebraska to some degree, and
this one, concern a climax of sacrifice. Even
About Schmidt [2002] has it – I saw that again
for the first time after many, many years – of
sacrifice for others. Choosing to love when
it’s a difficult choice, you know, and doing
that. A climax that, rather than an act of vio-
lence, is an act of love. I like that.
Would you be happy if The Holdovers
became a sort of regular Christmas movie?
Of course! Who wouldn’t want that in life?
When one makes films, one of the most sur-
prising, astonishing things is when people
continue to watch that old movie. I’ve had
that with Election, and with Sideways, par-
ticularly Sideways. Probably because of how
wine connoisseurship has grown in these
intervening 20 years. I just can’t believe it.
I predict people will realise what a master-
piece Downsizing is in about 800 years, when
people really are small. But if this one could
also be seen beyond its shelf date…! Plus I
could use the residuals.
Are there Christmas movies you particu-
larly like?
The towering masterpiece is It’s a Wonderful
Life [Frank Capra, 1946]. We almost take it
for granted now, but I really think It’s a Won-
derful Life stands shoulder to shoulder with
Casablanca [Michael Curtiz, 1942], Citizen
Kane [Orson Welles, 1941], The Best Years of
Our Lives [William Wyler, 1946], The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre [John Huston, 1948] as
one of the top American films of the 1940s. It
really does. We take it for granted because of
its popularity, but as with a lot of Capra, in
general, I have to say, you’ve seen it so many
times, but every time you see it, it’s to some
degree the first time. You didn’t remember
that it’s that good, or that dark. Ameliorated
a little bit by that Clarence the Angel, that
corny stuff. Still, you forgive that. It’s the one
I watch for sure every Christmas.
And Billy Wilder’s The Apartment [1960]?
It’s funny you would call that a Christmas
film. But I guess it counts... That’s a master-
PAYNE PORTRAIT: PAUL GRANDSARD/INSTITUT LUMIÈRE/CONTOUR BY GET TY IMAGES
piece, and every time I see it I need to take a
shower afterwards.
Yes, when you think about it, it’s even more
squalid than it appears. It’s probably very
Viennese.
[Laughs] Yeah. Decay. And Fred MacMur-
ray is so good in it. Or, perfectly cast.
Had you talked to Paul Giamatti about
working together again after Sideways?
Constantly. It’s been probably my main
goal. I’ve always believed in him as a leading
 99

man, as a character lead – with really little

precedent. Different from Paul Muni: I’m
a big Paul Muni fan. I mean, De Niro to
bulletproof, they might be. And I’ve never
done what they call chemistry reads,
where you bring two people in to see how
but, family, as this makeshift, temporary
family. That they have to deal with that. Go West
some degree... he had leading-man looks, they [interact], they do that in TV a lot. There are various films of the 1970s, and How Payne’s
but he could be a character lead. Meryl I’ve never done that. I think if I like this three actually from 1970 when the film is passion for
Streep could be a character lead. Those one, and I like this one, they can make it set, that you obviously value and which westerns fed
two could inhabit other people, they’re not work. I mean those two guys in Sideways seem to be reference points for The Hold-
just Cary Grant. Marcello Mastroianni to had never met before the first day of re- overs. Most notably, when your heroes go his next film
some degree. You even believe him as a hearsal. But – this was all over Zoom to Boston, they watch Arthur Penn’s Little
It’s thrilling to think
gay man [in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, – I did ask Paul Giamatti to read with Big Man. of Alexander Payne
1977], you believe him as a union organ- Dominic. And they even met up and read As a kid one of my favourite westerns venturing into the
iser [in Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer, together before reading with me, because was Little Big Man, which got to make an western. When I
1963]... But Giamatti is really sui generis, I Paul very much liked him. I was sharing appearance in this film, because we had a interviewed him in
think. He’s just so infinitely watchable, and these auditions with Paul to get his input. scene in the movie theatre. I simply looked 2013 and asked about
he does comic things with drama, and dra- And finally when I saw them reading to- up what the December releases were in the bleak widescreen
matic things with comic flair and panache. gether and that Dominic would indeed 1970, and lo and behold, there was Little Big landscapes of Nebraska,
he revealed his passion
I just adore his acting and adore him as a be bulletproof, I pulled the trigger. We Man. Which I saw maybe six times – I lived
for the weather on film:
human being. were maybe three, four weeks from start- right down the street from the movie thea- “I wanted gloom for this
ing production and I put out a text which tre. I think that’s kind of a forgotten movie, film. I wanted leafless
We should talk about Dominic Sessa, was simply Habemus papam [‘We have a unfairly forgotten. trees and stubble on
who’s a really amazing find. Pope’]. [Laughs] the cornfields. That
Yeah. I had had actors previously earlier Let’s hope he doesn’t screw it up. And Is there anything about the particular was very much on
in their careers, even in their teens: Reese then Da’Vine I had seen in Dolemite Is My scene in Little Big Man they watch, of the purpose... It’s nice to
Witherspoon [in Election], Shailene Wood- Name [Craig Brewer, 2019]. Did you see Cheyenne chief and Dustin Hoffman and get weather on film,
it’s nice to get wind,
ley [in The Descendants] – but this is really the that movie? It’s so good. And she’s very their bond, that you wanted to get in?
it would be lovely to
first time that someone who had really zero good in it. I was positively predisposed to Well yes, inasmuch as there’s a thematic get an electrical storm
film experience, or television experience, her, and she didn’t disappoint. undercurrent in The Holdovers of fathers, one day, as John Ford
plays a lead. Chris Klein, the jock in Elec- and lost fathers and lost sons... Chief Dan did in She Wore a Yellow
tion, he was also plucked from high school, Yes, she’s terrific at combining vulnerabil- George says, “I declare that Little Big Man Ribbon [1949].” He also
but I wouldn’t call him a lead character. To ity with a kind of moral authority… has returned, my son, my spiritual son” – named Sam Peckinpah’s
have someone play a lead [without experi- And she played grief well, and loss, and that’s just in the moment when the boy, The Wild Bunch (1968)
as one of his favourite
ence] is really something. but you never doubt that she’ll get Angus, goes to see his father.
films. At this meeting,
through it. I talked about the wave
How did you know it would work? And The Last Detail goes to Boston, as of liberal, pro-Native
Just as an insurance policy, I had to do And it’s nice the way the three of them does The Holdovers. American westerns of
what I’ll often do with non-actors, even sort of help each other, and in a way, the Yes. The scene that seems genuinely some- the early 1950s, and
with one-or-two-line parts, which is bring two men, when she’s in the kitchen at the how inspired by The Last Detail is when mentioned a fine one
them back again multiple times to see if party having a meltdown, they come to- the three characters make cherries jubilee with Robert Taylor,
there’s some degree of consistency from gether to help her… And that takes them [a flambé-ed dish] outside... There are two embarrassingly playing
a Native American –
audition to audition to audition. And out of themselves. things like that in The Last Detail: where
and Payne immediately
it gets them used to that process, and I Yeah, that brings all three together. That Jack Nicholson insists that the boy [played knew it: “That’s
can begin to discern how, my word is really seals them as this, hackneyed word by Randy Quaid] has the hamburger just  Anthony Mann’s The
Devil’s Doorway [1950].
You have to forgive
it because of John
Alton’s photography…
We can’t really judge
it with today’s eyes. I
mean, you can, but it’s
a great little movie.”
Non-Native casting
doesn’t work for us now,
but: “How about Rock
Hudson as an Indian in
Winchester ’73 [1950],” he
says with a laugh. “It’s
still a great movie. I’m
a big Anthony Mann
fan.” He mentioned too
that he had recently
revisited Arthur Penn’s
The Missouri Breaks
(1976), with Marlon
Brando and Jack
Nicholson. “Call it an
absolutely fascinating,
riveting failure, but
with the emphasis on
fascinating and riveting.
It’s really something,”
he says. Payne’s next
film is to be based on
the history of his home
state, Nebraska, which
hasn’t featured in many
westerns. How his droll,
deadpan comic style will
fit with the genre will
be fascinating to see.
100 ALEX ANDER PAYNE

‘I don’t like a the way he likes it, and also that they drink And among the 1970s techniques you use passing, and one realises towards the end
beer in a parking-lot and later try to have a in the film, didn’t you use 70s lenses? how much has changed, very subtly, and
lot of period hot-dog picnic in the snow. They’re trying Yeah, we do, but in fact so many filmmak- how far one’s come from the beginning.
films because to do something: it’s in the wrong context, ers now, even ones who make contempo- Do you think that the dissolve itself con-
of how blatant but it’s endearing because of that. So yes, rary films, are vying to use those old lenses tributes to that?
that’s kind of influenced by The Last Detail. – because things in digital are so sharp that Yeah, I don’t think I can be very articulate
their attempted you want a little human feeling. Where is about it, but good dissolves, long dissolves,
period is. That’s And I couldn’t help thinking of Five Easy God in there? Where is man? So old lenses give you something… I think about the dis-
not how life is. Pieces [Bob Rafelson, 1970], and the ‘hold can help. solves towards the end of Godfather II, the
the chicken’ scene, when they’re trying to dissolve to that memory, that flashback
We were not get the cherries jubilee for Angus in the And were there other movies that you were where Michael just enlisted and then the
trying to make fancy restaurant, the waitress decrees it’s thinking of? dissolve from that too in his solitude, and
a period film, not an “age-appropriate dessert” for a sev- I can’t say that any of them had a direct how much time has passed. I mean that’s
enteen-year-old, and Giamatti denounces influence. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance about his life and almost about our entire
but rather a the place as a “fascist hash-factory”. Runner [Tony Richardson, 1962] maybe a experience watching Godfathers I and II
contemporary Also. Also, also. little bit, the miscreant in an institution… [Francis Ford Coppola, 1972/1974]. Dis-
film set in 1970’ I was hoping that it would have echoes solves are beautiful. And of course we
I’ve always been struck going to houses perhaps that would reverberate from The know that they have a history that predates
on the East Coast, how they still look like Graduate [Mike Nichols, 1967] on, about cinema, from magic lanterns; so you’ve
the 1940s or 1950s… the homes and the the young person, the knee-jerk anti- always had that, one thing blending into
clothes too. There’s quite a tradition that authoritarianism of that period. And I very the next.
they haven’t relinquished. So I guess it’s much like – I don’t want to emphasise the
good for period filming. Hal Ashby thing too much because it’s Oh, one other 70s touch – I was thrilled by
It made it less hard to shoot a period film too obvious and it’s both flattering and hearing the crackle and pop at the begin-
in New England, specifically in Massa- irritating, but in his first film The Landlord ning… It took me back.
chusetts. The production designer [Ryan [1970], perhaps because it’s shot so well by It’s even a little too much. I should have
Warren Smith] and I, and the chief loca- Gordon Willis, there’s a wonderful sense of removed some. I overdid it. As though it’s
tion scout [Kai Quinlan], were constantly time in a bottle. The story itself [of a naive from a print that’s been strung up a few
astonished at how locations needed rich white boy, played by Beau Bridges, times already. But I got Thierry Frémaux
very little modification to pass as 1970. buying a Harlem apartment building] has [the festival director] of Cannes! I showed
Which was helpful – I don’t like a lot of nothing to do with my own experience, but him the film in February when I was still
period films because of how blatant their there’s a feeling in that film… It’s an uneven working on it, and he was in LA, and it
attempted period is. That’s not how life film, but it really hits and I’m really trans- began, and he heard the crackle, and he
is. We were not trying to make a period ported. It’s lovely. turned around to the booth to see if we
film, but rather a contemporary film set in were running film… Gotcha! [Laughs]
1970. [Laughs] It’s as lived-in, and found, as You’ve often talked about your feeling for
BELOW
Dominic Sessa and
if we were just making a low-budget film, dissolves. There’s a great way in which The Holdovers is released in UK cinemas on
Da’Vine Joy Randolph made then. your films give a really strong sense of time 19 January and is reviewed on page 128
 CITIZEN
CHICANE
Michael Mann’s high-octane tale of the personal and professional crises faced by racing legend
Enzo Ferrari in the mid-1950s is as much an emotional family drama as it is a car-racing movie. He tells
Nick James about life in the driving seat on set and why the drama feels operatic in its intensity
Michael Mann is talking about cars and
engines and it’s my fault. He knows a lot
of technical stuff that I’m loving to hear,
but I’m already worrying about how
much interest in mechanisms readers of
this magazine can muster. While prob-
ing for a psychological reason why Mann
has chosen Enzo Ferrari as the subject for
his 12th feature film, I had suggested that
owning and driving a Ferrari might be part
of it. The question gets good-humouredly
batted away, but typically not without a
full explanation.
“You can own and drive a car,” Mann
says, “you don’t have to make a movie about
it. But when you get good enough to drive
a Ferrari half correctly, you understand
what’s there. Maybe three per cent of the
people who own Ferraris are really thriving
on getting what’s there because it really is
cutting edge technology from racing that’s
feeding back into passenger cars, with not
that many years in between, so that the
opposed piston V12 engine from Formula
One in the 1970s is there in the Testarossa
of 1984, the kinetic energy recovery system
from F1 is there in the LaFerrari, so if you
get good enough to drive one half-well,
IMAGE: ART STREIBER/AUGUST
driving anything else, like a Lamborghini,
feels like a pickup truck.”
Mann and I are talking in the Corinthia
OPPOSITE
Hotel just before his appearance at the
Michael Mann BFI London Film Festival, where Ferrari
is to be the surprise film. He’s in a relaxed
and indulgent mood, talking generously
at his usual high speed. Petrol-head
enthusiasm might not be your thing, but
bear with us, because Mann’s portrait of
Enzo Ferrari, the great power behind the
famous prancing horse marque and the
vivid red racing cars and sports models his
engineering teams created at his instiga-
tion, is as much, if not more, an emotional
Italian family drama as it is a car-racing
movie. Ferrari bucks the genre tradition
of putting the drivers and the cars centre-
stage, focusing instead on entangled adult
relationships. It’s about as far away from
the Fast & Furious franchise as you could
get while staying in a racing world.
As forcefully embodied by Adam
Driver, Enzo Ferrari, in the first few
months of 1957 when the film is mostly set,
is a beleaguered boss, called commendatore
by his obedient team (in honour of the
knighthood he was given in the 1920s).
Having abandoned his brief career as a
driver – memorialised by the film in a daz-
zling monochrome opening sequence that
inserts Driver’s G-force distorted face into
archive footage from the 1920s and 30s –
Ferrari painstakingly built the contacts
and the contexts for the creation of his
stable of racing cars, a thriving company
that, by the mid-50s, had run into trouble.
Financed by sales of the road models built
103
for rich customers, such as Jordan’s King
Hussein, Ferrari needs extra investment
to up those sales. Add to that the fact that
Ferrari’s main rival, Maserati, based in the
same auto-engineering-obsessed town of
Modena, has begun to win races against
Ferraris and has just beaten a track record
that’s precious to the Ferrari reputation,
and the burden on the shoulders of the
ultra-competitive Enzo is unbearable.
Yet these bitter business worries remain
secondary to the rending grief suffered by
this cold-seeming individual following the
death of his 24-year-old son Dino from
muscular dystrophy – the grief of a man
already said to have built a wall around
himself after some beloved drivers died
in crashes. Enzo’s wife Laura (Penélope
Cruz), who has a controlling interest in
the Ferrari company, blames her husband
for failing to fulfil his promise to find a cure
for Dino, claiming he prioritised racing
instead. If that were not enough, one fur-
ther disaster is in the offing – the prospect
of Laura finding out about his mistress
Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), their son
Piero and the large house he has given her
where they regularly spend time together.
At the same time, Enzo is ruthlessly
pushing his daredevil drivers and cars to
the limit in a way that can only lead to the
kind of tragedy that was not uncommon in
20th-century car racing.
 F
104
errari has all that richness of subject matter
to justify Mann’s choice, but I’m still dig-
ging into why this particular project has
proved so captivating for the director,
whose unrealised projects are many, espe-
cially given its curiously long gestation. It
was originated in the mid-1990s by Mann
alongside the legendary director and pro-
ducer Sydney Pollack, who died in 2008.
The co-screenwriter credit goes to Troy
Kennedy Martin, the writer of The Italian
Job (1969) and the great television series
Edge of Darkness (1985), who died in 2009.
It turns out that the screenplay itself –
drawn from Brock Yates’s 1991 biography
Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine – was
the crucial factor.
“We couldn’t get it going initially,” Mann
tells me. “It was idle for years and then
picked up again. So it kept evolving. Then
I think I have to option the book again,
[so] I should abandon it, but I open the
screenplay and it gets me there, first page.
The characters are coming alive, the sar-
casm and the flowery, strafing wit. Enzo’s
wild relationship with Laura… and all
these dynamics of this very operatic story.
It all comes together in those three months
culminating with the crash at Guidizzolo
[during a road race in which driver Alfonso
de Portago, his navigator and nine specta-
tors were killed], so by the time it gets to
page 17 or 18, I’m optioning the book again.
In the case of Enzo, Laura and Lina, what
was terrific about the screenplay was that
the story has a resolution but their lives
do not. Enzo agrees not to give Piero the
name Ferrari until Laura’s death because
he has an indebtedness to her and they are
bonded in all kinds of ways. At the same
time, he fully embraces Piero as his son and
says, ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you to your
brother Dino. He would have taken you
with him everywhere.’”
What Mann means here is that Enzo
eventually takes the sweetly curious Piero
to the mausoleum dedicated to Dino,
where Enzo regularly talks to his dead
elder son. “That had particular signifi-
cance to Adam and myself,” Mann contin-
ues, “because Enzo’s older brother took
him everywhere. Enzo lost both his father
and brother in 1917. He was very much an
orphan, turned down by Fiat for a job, sit-
ting on a park bench in the rain and asking
himself, ‘Who should I be in this world?’
– which is a crazy question when you’re in
Italy in that year. The first thing he decided
was that he wanted to be an opera singer,
then he wanted to be a sports writer, then
he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he
became one.”
For aficionados of Mann’s work, the
choice of Ferrari as a subject is particularly
piquant because he is the polar opposite of
the kind of lead often examined in Mann’s

‘I remember seeing Grand Prix
and being blown away but there’s
no story. Le Mans doesn’t have a
story either. What was so powerful
about Ferrari was that the story’s
so strong and purely personal.
The racing is the fake machine’
groundbreaking earlier films. Probably
the most famous speech in the director’s
canon comes from Robert De Niro, play-
ing professional thief Neil McCauley, in
the coffee shop scene in Heat (1995) that
he shares with Al Pacino’s cop Vincent
Hanna. “A guy told me one time, ‘Don’t let
yourself get attached to anything you are
not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat
if you feel the heat around the corner.’” The
‘guy’ McCauley is referring to might easily
have been Frank, the criminal loner played
by James Caan in Mann’s Thief (1981), who
lives by exactly the same code of walkaway
self-preservation. Ferrari has the reverse
attitude: he grasps control of and respon-
sibility for everything related to the Ferrari
name and keeps it to himself alone – and he
doesn’t want to go anywhere.
“Enzo’s life is very different from most
people’s,” Mann says. “ This hermetic
Modenese [motor] culture is so unusual.
Nobody ever leaves and everything is right
next door to everything else. Three-quar-
ters of Modena is totally unchanged. The
streets are cobblestone. So there’s some
signage we had to change and that’s about
it. What we characterise as the exterior of
the Ferrari house, that’s the Ferrari house.
The mausoleum is the real family mauso-
leum, the cemetery is the cemetery. The
barber shop is unchanged since 1957. The
barber today is the son of the barber who
used to shave Enzo.
“In the 1950s Enzo stops going to races.
He wouldn’t go outside of the country
because, from his point of view, it’s all filled
with foreigners. He’d watch it on televi-
sion or listen to it on the radio and they’d
have a glass of wine and they’d be cook-
ing a chicken and there’d be a 50-gallon oil
drum with a fire in it. This is how he made
people come to him. There was nothing
in his life that was not strategic and every-
thing had a duality to it. No matter how
good things were, something bad was lurk-
ing right around the corner. That’s why he
calls his autobiography My Terrible Joys.”
Adam Driver adopts silvered hair and a
small paunch to play Enzo, who in 1957 was
a couple of decades older than the actor is
now. Some have criticised Driver’s use of
an Italian accent, saying it’s a reprise of the
one he used exuberantly in House of Gucci
(2021), but it didn’t distract me from the
intensity he brings to incarnating this quin-
tessential Italian paterfamilias. It can’t be
easy to depict someone grieving who has
decided that any public show of emotion
is a sign of weakness. Consequently, it’s a
very internalised performance.
When asked about Driver’s approach
to the part, Mann talks about it more
in terms of what he and Driver have in
common. “With every actor of Adam’s
quality, commitment, artistic integrity and
determination to kill it, there are moments
of self-doubt. Adam prepares thoroughly.
When he has all the details captured and
determined, that’s when he’s liberated and
it gets very poetic. He works very hard;
doesn’t socialise, which is always a good
sign. He and I had a great time working
together. We found out that if something’s
wrong, we operate in similar ways. I’m
MICHAEL MANN 105
pretty tough on myself, and he’s pretty
tough on himself.
“Penélope approaches things differently.
She started as a dancer, so movement is
very important. We both had the same
idea, independently, to put orthopaedic
devices in her shoes to affect her walk. I
was constantly messing up her hair. Every
time I turned around the hairdressers are
making her look beautiful again. But the
profound acquisition comes from deep
understanding of who Laura is and it’s
native to Penélope. Laura comes to an
intuitive decision and doesn’t question
her own judgement. There’s not going
to be any negotiation. We enriched that
with perceptions from these very moving
letters that Laura wrote Enzo later in
life, and then Enzo would write back to
her and they’re just filled with operatic
emotionality, a sense of longing, of miss-
ing each other. Then, at a moment when
he was repelled by her, somebody called
to say, ‘Laura fell in a canal and I saved
her,’ and Enzo said, ‘Why did you pull her
out?’ Yet, in the same year, the staff of the
factory told him, ‘You have to keep Laura
away from the factory, she’s making us all
crazy,’ and he fires his entire engineering
staff. These famous engineers were gone
and it really hit the racing programme
big time. He didn’t care. So he has total
solidarity with her and these two attitudes
are coexisting.”
But if the real lure of Ferrari for Mann
was this confluence of poignant dynastic
emotions, you only have to look at the
sidebar overleaf to see how much the direc-
tor threw himself into getting the driving
scenes right. His practice has always
required total immersion in every aspect
of a film. Alongside the schoolchild excite-
ment of seeing cars from long ago back
racing on the road, there’s an authenticity
to the scenes that you don’t often find in
other racetrack movies – the cars vie side
by side, pushing for the moment where
bravado either wins or causes accidents.
There’s no magic overtaking from drivers
finding some mythical extra gear.
Asked whether he found any existing
car-racing movies inspirational, Mann
makes this stark observation: “My father’s
second cousin, Saul Bass, did all the
race car sequences in Grand Prix [1966].
I remember seeing it and being blown
away but there’s no story. Le Mans [1971]
doesn’t have a story either. So I was wary
when Sydney Pollack first brought up the
subject because why do these movies not
work? It’s not about the mechanical way
the studios think, they try to type things
using descriptive language and then think
they’ve done a pseudo-scientific analysis of
genre types. That’s just bullshit. It’s simpler
than that: there’s no fucking story. What
was so powerful about Ferrari was that the
story’s so strong and purely personal. The
racing is the fake machine.”
It’s a fake machine that – however much
he might resist the pattern recognition
of auteurism – Mann has been drawn to
before. His feature film career began with
The Jericho Mile (1979), in which a murderer
in prison is discovered to be a fast runner
106
who is set up for potential Olympic trials.
In 2012 Mann shot the pilot episode of
the short-lived TV series Luck, set in the
horse-racing world, in which Dustin Hoff-
man plays an ex-con who uses the race-
track for an elaborate scheme of revenge.
Clearly, dramas built around the circular
business of racing have the potential
to encompass grand themes. After the
appalling accident at Guidizzolo, Ferrari
gets the blame for killing off Italy’s one-
time most popular road race, the Mille
Miglia, adding extra bitterness to his
existing grief and remorse.
“The genius of Enzo is what struck me,”
Mann says. “He said Italy will forgive a
murderer, an adulterer, a thief, but it won’t
forgive a success. No matter what you do,
they’re gonna come after you. He’s carrying
that grief around with him that both he
and Laura are dealing with in separate silos
and there is no such goofy notion as heal-
ing. They’re not going to help each other;
they’re totally isolated. Like what happens
in life. That’s the powerful thing for me. If
you can get a drama to be powerful and
your characters have this verisimilitude
of our experiences, that to me is why you
make a film like this and it’s not that differ-
ent from the way opera works. Because as
operatic and artificial as La traviata is, that
story [of love and self-sacrifice] is actually
very common. We come to a realisation too
late. By the time we figured out the way it
really is, we’re not gonna go live in Paris
happily ever after. You’re gonna die.”
Of course, that’s the finish line that must
haunt all the surviving directors of Mann’s
‘If you can get a drama to be powerful
and your characters have this
verisimilitude of our experiences,
that to me is why you make a film
like this and it’s not that different
from the way opera works’
generation (he’s 80 years old). It’s enough ABOVE
Penélope Cruz as
of a psychological need to explain his inter- Laura Ferrari
est in such a death-haunted movie as Fer-
BELOW
rari. Yet the Michael Mann in front of me Adam Driver as
seems as teemingly alive with ideas and Enzo Ferrari
fascination with the world as ever, with
at least another several thousand miles to
go. With the writers’ strike over he can get
on with his screenplay for Heat 2, a story
already published in crime novel form,
co-written with Meg Gardiner, including
“prequel and sequel”, as Mann assures me
– the prequel dwelling on the origins of
Neil McCauley’s Heat gang and the sequel
following the fate of gang survivor Chris
Shiherlis. I, for one, can’t wait.
Ferrari is released in UK cinemas on
26 December and is reviewed on page 124

Michael Mann:
How We
Shot Ferrari
The Ferrari director illuminates the
painstaking attention to detail involved in
capturing the world of 1950s racing
SCHEDULE
“We had a 56-day schedule and I shot
it in 58 days. Everything you saw in the
Gran Sasso mountains was one day.
That was like, ‘Quick, the cars are over
here, get the drone up in the air, get the
helicopter over there. OK, roll the cars
down the hill.’ It was pretty wild.”
LOCATIONS
“The first grand prix we did at Imola.
Everything else is in and around
Modena, like a minute-and-a-half walk
from Enzo’s front door. The Teatro
Comunale, where Pavarotti began, we
used for Ravenna. And then on the other
side of Via Emilia, is Piazza Grande,
which we used for Rome.”
CARS
“We got access to real 315s and 330s
and did very elaborate Lidar 3D scans
of real cars so that we could recreate
them. We put those in a CAD computer
programme, then determined which
powertrain and chassis would support
that shape. We hand-built them, mostly
done by Luigi Campana, once the
lead Maserati restorer in Modena. But
younger people [in the city also] know
how to do this. They could take a square
sheet of aluminium and a wooden block
and a wooden hand mallet and make a
fender. Yeah, pretty spectacular.”
ABOVE
Michael Mann (top left)
shooting Ferrari
LEFT
Some of the replica Ferraris
built for the film at the
Campana factory in Modena
MICHAEL MANN 107
RACES
“It’s based on my own experience and
on the question, what do I want the
sequence to do? It’s like an actor in
a dialogue scene saying, ‘What’s my
action?’ I want it to put you, the viewer,
into the experience of it, not to be a
removed observer. The way we do the
[Eugenio] Castellotti crash is exactly
what happened. He ended up 90 metres
from the car down the road. He wasn’t
dead. He was in a terrible condition,
and he died later. With the Guidizzolo
crash, we got our hands on the actual
forensic report.”
SOUND
“We went back and got access to [classic
car collector] Lord Bamford’s 250 GTO.
It had to be a full-on competition V12.
Sounds came from nine microphones
all over the car, recorded in different
environments, including a brick railway
tunnel that went for about a mile.
We were able to get the right kind of
reverberation. The Maserati at the
beginning is [Pink Floyd drummer]
Nick Mason’s. That one’s real, it’s not a
replica. He races it in historical races.
The howl of those engines, the way they
really sound. It’s powerful, it’s scary,
it’s beautiful.”
BOY MEETS WORLD
Miyazaki Hayao’s constantly surprising new feature The Boy and the Heron, which follows
a young boy in mourning for his mother who discovers a series of portals into other
worlds, blends animated fantasy with the director’s own memories of growing up in
post-war Japan to create another triumphant exploration of life, loss and death
BY N I C K B R A D S H AW
There is no denying gravity in The Boy
and the Heron, animation magus Miyazaki
Hayao’s first film in a decade. Sure, there is
the winged companion of the title, indeed
a pandemonium of birdlife – but they
find little cause to soar. There are men
making their flying machines, but mostly
off screen. We know them by the bombs
they drop. And there are untrammelled
mystery and adventure, marvellous other
worlds populated with dazzling creatures
and spirits, feats of ingenuity and courage
and the forging of vital companionships…
but there is also a young heart in winter,
a protagonist carrying grief and chasing
ghosts, who rarely looks up. The plot
motor is not dreams nor peril but trauma.
There are no feats of aeronautics; no lum-
bering battleships of the air or castles in
the sky; no soaring forest sprites; no flying
witches or wizards, pigs, fish or dragons.
At 82, Miyazaki has turned his concerns to
the shifting ground beneath our feet.
It opens with an air-raid siren. The city
is burning. Our 12-year-old hero Mahito
wakes up to voices summoning rescuers
to the hospital where his mother works;
he dresses to join them but is powerless.
Miyazaki’s last film, The Wind Rises (2013),
set in 1930s Japan, was pregnant with
incipient warfare; The Boy and the Heron
begins where that film was heading – in the
eye of a firestorm. It also seems we’re back
in the same historical-realist mode of that
film, a mature outlier in Miyazaki’s canon
of fantastical works. But while the director,
who has his own memories of firebomb-
ings in World War II, has addressed war
before – from Porco Rosso (1992), set against
a backdrop of Italian Fascism, to the post-
Iraq invasion Howl’s Moving Castle (2004),
with its carpet-bombing wraiths wreaking
terror at the whim of palace war-gamers –
here he swiftly cuts away. “Three years into
the war my mother died,” says a first-ever
Miyazaki voiceover. “Four years in, I left
Tokyo with my father.”
And so we escape to the countryside,
like Satsuki and Mei in My Neighbour Totoro
(1988), or Chihiro in Spirited Away (2001).
But the comparison with Totoro, especially,
only highlights the severity of The Boy and
the Heron’s exposition. Mahito has no sib-
ling to explore with or share his feelings;
his mother is not hospitalised but dead;
his father, Shoichi, is not a sympathetic
ally but a brusque hothead and show-off
who is now going to marry his late wife’s
younger sister, Natsuko – he has brought
Mahito to their childhood country home.
Picking them up from the local train sta-
tion in a rickshaw, she has the presumption
to grab Mahito’s hand and press it to her
pregnant belly: he’s going to have a sibling,
this unfamiliar surrogate coos. You can feel
Mahito’s hidden recoil.
In the house we meet a posse of seven
ancient maidservants – shades of Snow
White’s dwarves – all stout as Toby jugs
or babushka dolls, who welcome Mahito
and crow over Shoichi’s suitcase of canned
fish and meat treats, rare delicacies in war-
time. Outside comes another greeting – a
grey heron almost dive-bombs Mahito as
he walks down a corridor; Natsuko is sur-
prised by his proximity.
The plot motor
is not dreams nor
peril but trauma.
There are no
castles in the
sky; no soaring
forest sprites or
wizards, pigs,
fish or dragons.
At 82, Miyazaki
has turned his
concerns to the
ground beneath
our feet
OPPOSITE, TOP
Mahito, the young hero of
The Boy and the Heron
ABOVE
Mahito with Lady Himi,
who leads him out of the
underworld during his journey
When the film opened in Japan in July, a
poster of a heron hand-drawn by Miyazaki
was Studio Ghibli’s only marketing. There
were no shared clips, no press screenings:
audiences were invited blind. (The studio
had taken a similar tack with Howl’s Moving
Castle, proving to itself then that the pros-
pect of a new Miyazaki film was advertise-
ment enough.) The film is such a mazy,
disorienting ride, switching and surpris-
ing as it builds worlds and pace, that you
may want to gain the pleasures of that too
before reading much more.
But its first act is a slow build, in eerie
gothic-pastoral register, as Mahito prowls
his new world and collects its secrets, while
the heron makes repeated raids on Mahito
in his solitude, whether outside his bed-
room window or down at a sylvan pond
on the edge of the forest. Mahito is carry-
ing inside him feelings he does not like. In
a wordless montage, his first day at school
culminates in a fight with the surly local
field-labouring boys, after which Mahito
takes a rock and clubs open the side of
his own head – an offence that summons
a bombastically protective response from
his father. Inside the so-elegant heron, too,
there are uglier depths. First he talks –
mocking Mahito as the “chosen one”, come
at last, while insisting he will guide him
to his mother. Then from inside his beak
emerge teeth; a bulbous nose; a bald little
man, reminiscent of Jiko, the mercenary
monk who accompanies Ashitaka west in
Princess Mononoke (1997).
Their pas de deux through this first act
includes an attempted kidnap of Mahito
by means of an enchanted surge of fish and
frogs – dispelled by a fearsome Natsuko
with bow and arrow; then, after Natsuko
herself disappears into the forest, Mahito
ventures through it to the heron’s hideout
in the forbidden ruins of a tower. Here his
grand-uncle is said to have gone mad from
reading too many books and disappeared;
or perhaps the tower hides a meteor full
of mazes and other magic. And indeed,
inside Mahito finds a decoy of his sleeping
mother, forged by the heron-man; and high
above them a wizened mage who com-
mands the heron to serve Mahito before
opening up the floor and sending them
tumbling down to an underworld… where
things get more oblique and cryptic.
HERON ADDICT
Miyazaki began The Boy and the Heron in
2016, a year after coming out of retire-
etire
ment to make Boro the Caterpillar, the most
recent of several shorts he has madee for
screening at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo.
okyo.
Miyazaki’s proposal for the film, reprinted
inted
in the press notes, describes his worries
ies at
starting work on a feature production n that
might outlast him (he feared it could take
three years, but survived seven), then turns
to the question of what shape it should ould
take to anticipate the world it will arrive
in. “Isn’t the world as a whole in a state
ate of
flux?” he asks, anticipating “war or disas-
isas-
ter, or perhaps even both”, and resolving
ng
to make a film “emphatically peaceful… l…
Totoro II perhaps”, though set during ng
wartime. It “must not pander to its era”,
ra”,
he concludes.
The title soon announced, which the
film still bears in Japanese, Kimitachi wa Dō
Much of the second
Ikiruka, translates as ‘How Do You Live?’ act plays out as
or ‘How Will You Young People Live?’ brooding, world-
and is taken from a 1937 novel of the same
name by Yoshino Genzaburō, a Miyazaki
building mystery –
favourite. The film, which Ghibli calls a strangeness is
semi-autobiographical fantasy, is hardly foregrounded,
an adaptation. Yoshino’s book narrates a
series of incidents in the life of a fatherless
motive and meaning
11-year-old contemporary schoolboy nick- trail behind
named Copper, in which he develops a
circle of friends from across the class divide
through acts of courage and kindness –
each chapter punctuated by a journaled
response from his benevolent uncle, who
presses Copper to a deeper ethical under-
standing of his choices. The climax of the
book turns on Copper finding his way
through a moral stumble – first betraying
a promise to stand with his friends against
school bullies, then hiding in shame.
In a June 2006 article about the book
‘Memo-
in Ghibli’s Neppūū magazine, titled ‘Memo-
ries of Lost Landscapes’ (and reprinted
in the 2008 collection Turn-
ing Point),
t Miyazaki
ruminate d on
how the book
distilled and
preserved an era even as it was hastening
towards catastrophe under the militaristic
early Shōwa era government. He presses
himself to understand the book’s lessons:
not only how swiftly the world can unravel,
but how our response can only be “to keep
living without giving up our humanity.
Genzaburō Yoshino-san knew that was
all he could do.” Miyazaki recalls strug-
gling as an idealistic youth to comprehend
how his father could have lived seemingly
carefree amid so much calamity; now he
has more sympathy. “Recently, I try not to
think about things too far removed from
me or too far off in the future,” he writes.
“Instead, I try to do my best in a radius of
five metres around me, for I feel ever more
certain that what I discover there is real. It
is better to make three children happy than
to create a film for five million. It may not
be good business, but to me this seems to
be the real truth.”
JOURNEY TO THE UNDERWORLD
Mahito falls into an eerie, half-lit under-
world. The wind buffets the shore and
sweeps sun rays, clouds and a spectral host
of ships on the horizon past like dreams; a
pod of starving pelicans heaves past him to
enter a shining gated temple. A lone sailor
runs to Mahito’s rescue
and shows him the
ropes: how to gut
a swamp thrasher
and trade it with
wraiths in black
Panama hats, who
cannot catch their
own; how to save the guts for the wara-
wara, white balloon creatures who when
fed float skywards to be born above as
human babies – unless the pelicans eat
them first. A pelican explains they can eat
nothing else in this “hellscape” they’ve been
banished to. As in the earlier battle of wits
with the heron, much of this second act
plays out as brooding, world-building mys-
tery – strangeness is foregrounded, motive
and meaning trail behind.
The sailor has a scar on her temple to
match Mahito’s – though hers came hon-
estly, in a fight with a swamp thrasher. After
she lays six granny-maid dolls to guard the
sleeping boy, he guesses that she’s Kiriko,
the younger incarnation of the seventh
maidservant, who had followed him in to
the tower. In her self-sufficiency and gener-
osity she’s also reminiscent of Ursula, the
forest artist who recuperates the fallen Kiki
in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), though she
also has skills like the heroine of Nausicäa of
the Valley of the Wind (1984), and lives on a
promontory that recalls Gia’s island sanc-
tuary in Porco Rosso.
For Miyazaki, supposedly, the charac-
ters Mahito encounters are referents of
real people he has known (see interview
with producer Suzuki Toshio overleaf );
for Ghibli fans, they conjure past studio
characters. Miyazaki’s out-of-time magical
mystery tour is all of ours. Lady Himi, a
young ball of fire who says she is Natsuko’s
big sister – ie, Mahito’s mother – and takes
Mahito onwards in the story, out of the
underworld to seek Natsuko in the grand-
uncle’s tower, is another in the studio’s run
of gung-ho damsels, from Fio in Porco Rosso
to the heroine of Arrietty (2010).
Whereas the grand-uncle, when we
reach him, might be the ultimate incar-
nation of Miyazaki’s male recluses and
cosmic string-pullers, juggling abstruse
world-shaping forces in his nook at the end
of the universe. No wonder he sees in his
withdrawn grand-nephew a potential suc-
cessor. “Build your own tower,” he says,
handing him 13 stacking stones. “You can
build a world of beauty, peace and bounty.”
But Mahito sees them as burial stones –
perhaps a sign he has not lost his appetite
for life. If Miyazaki’s grand-uncle bears
any trace of the uncle in How Do You Live?,
writing his moral instruction for young
Copper, it’s oblique – and we can only read
him in snatches. But Mahito himself, while
a closed book interpersonally, is a boy of
determined compass and action.
Like Howl, another lost traveller in the
night, the grand-uncle controls a tower of
many door-portals, letting out on to mul-
tiple worlds and times. Other children’s
multiverse fantasies also relate, of course –
the film sits in a lineage of WWII evacuees’
magical country-house fantasias reaching
back to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
with Miyazaki evidently alert to that herit-
age in the house’s notes of Western architec-
ture and decoration and Mahito’s father’s
dress style, reflecting Western influences
on his own family and literary interests.
Echoing the grand-uncle’s building-
block juggling, though, Miyazaki uses
the possibilities of these portals for crea-
tive plate-spinning. (There’s yet another
domain surrounding the tower – a fascist
The film sits in a kingdom of parakeets, drawn as a mass of
lineage of World cartoonishly sinister buffoons, reminiscent
War II evacuees’ of the realm of craven felines in Ghibli’s
The Cat Returns, 2002.) Art styles are in
magical country- flux too, whether by experimental design
house fantasias – Miyazaki handed supervising animation
reaching back to duties to Honda Takeshi, a key animator on
Miyazaki Gorō’s Tales of Earthsea (2006) and
The Lion, the Witch From up on Poppy Hill (2011) – or by dint of
and the Wardrobe numerous collaborators.
In the firebombing prologue there’s an
unusual blurred effect on the crowd of
faces Mahito finds himself in, underscored
by low-pass sound, that speaks of his
sudden detachment. In the underworld,
the hungry wraiths are formed of super-
imposed layers of translucent grey, half-
blurred, half-substantial in this land where
living and dead coexist. The film spins,
non-delineated in its meanings: we’re a
long way from the prime clarity of Kiki’s
Delivery Service, with its metaphor of a girl
who can fly until she loses her confidence.
Joe Hisaishi’s minimalist chamber music
works minor-key loops around Mahito’s
encounters, which feel more glancing than
in most Miyazaki – Mahito is a tough nut
to crack; he must ultimately help himself.
His grief, trauma and withdrawal are a lot
OPPOSITE, TOP
to stack so much film on: so much imag-
Mahito with the heron-man ining, so much negation. It’s testament to
OPPOSITE
Miyazaki’s ambition and enduring powers
One of the pelicans that inhabit that he can mix grizzled ambivalence and
the underworld in the film
a ravishing sense of possibility.
ABOVE
The mysterious grand-uncle,
who Mahito finds at the The Boy and the Heron is released in UK cinemas
end of his quest on 26 December and is reviewed on page 119

‘MIYAZAKI
WANTED TO
LOOK BACK’
Studio Ghibli co-founder and president
Suzuki Toshio outlines Miyazaki Hayao’s
painstaking working methods and
explains the autobiographical origins
of much of The Boy and the Heron
INTERVIEW BY NICK BRADSHAW
nick bradshaw You and Miyazaki have
spoken before about wanting each new
film to betray audience expectations of
Studio Ghibli, and while The Boy and
the Heron has many familiar notes and
even characters, it also involves a lot
of strange twists and changes of tone.
And while it may not be so surprising
for Miyazaki to make a new film when
he said he wouldn’t, it is unusual to
suggest you’re adapting a book and then
not really do so. How did the film start
and how did it arrive in its final shape?
When he was going to
s u zu ki t o s hio
make this film, Miyazaki told me he
wanted to change his environment: no
TV, no newspaper. He wanted to isolate
himself from all outside information,
to not know what was happening in
the world. I was to inform him only if
something big happened. So while he
was working on the film, he wasn’t
really aware of the Covid pandemic,
nor the Ukraine-Russia war. I had to tell
him about these huge, awful topics.
He also tried very hard to forget his
past films. He really wanted to start from
scratch, from a blank canvas. He told me
that was very important. By doing so, he
felt, he would come to understand what he
truly wanted to make in a film. So he and
I would meet twice a week in the morning
and chat for two hours. And through
those meetings he said he would like
to tell his own story in a way that
he’d never done before.
He also told me
that with many
of his past works,
the protagonists are
girls. And it’s easy for him
PORTRAIT: NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
to write stories about female
characters because he is not
female – so there is a mysteriousness
that comes with the protagonist.
Whereas a male protagonist, because
Miyazaki is also a male, it makes it
harder for him. The only way he could
do it is to make it autobiographical.
So in writing a story about a boy
– and it’s essentially about himself –
not everything that you tell can be all
bright and good. You have to show the
darker side of yourself too. The original
novel, How Do You Live?, is about a
child facing not only positives but also
the negatives in the world. And in the
film there is a scene where Mahito hits
himself with a rock – self-harm, basically.
So Miyazaki was trying to capture
that element inside himself where he
was trying to overcome his darker
emotions. That was a big thing for him.
What’s interesting in what came out
of that is that some of the film has some
similarities with his past work, and it’s
not because it was a culmination or
reflection of all his past work. Miyazaki
was able to forget everything he had
done, but he was doing what he was
good at, so naturally you see some
similarities with some of his past works.
In his proposal notes he writes about
OPPOSITE wanting to make a film that could
Suzuki Toshio
anticipate changes in the world. It’s
BELOW also his second film in a row that
The heron-man
in the film
takes us back to his own childhood
and a time of war. Was there a sense
he was distilling his memories and
experience for future generations?
The film isn’t about conveying a legacy so
much as about introspection. Miyazaki
wanted to look back at his life and his
journey: to tell the story of him from child
to adult and who he met, the people who
made an impact on him.
Obviously he wanted to make an
entertaining film too, but every time
he makes a film, every character is
based on a real-life person. When
I look at them I can tell where the
inspiration for the characters comes
from. For instance, the mysterious
grand-uncle in the film is based on
Takahata Isao [the late co-founder
of Studio Ghibli with Miyazaki and
Suzuki], who was Miyazaki’s senior,
and a huge inspiration to him as
an animation director. Are
you too in this one?
I’m the heron. Every
time Miyazaki makes a
film, he writes these
storyboards and
will show them
to me and
ask me
what I
think.
THE BOY AND THE HERON 1 13
This time I was going through the
storyboards and saw the grey heron,
a key character and an interesting one,
so I said that and asked who it was
based on. Miyazaki’s response was:
“No, no, no, it’s not based on anyone.”
But it’s quite obvious. I’ve known him
for 45 years; he cannot deceive me.
How did Miyazaki and his team
find the style of the film, especially
with its profusion of birdlife? Were
there particular collaborators you
needed to bring in to achieve that?
Miyazaki would come up with the
storyboards, and he already has
finished animation in his mind when
he comes up with them. Usually
he would serve as the supervising
animator too, but on this film he had
Honda Takeshi [a key animator on
Miyazaki Gorō’s Tales of Earthsea, 2006,
and From up on Poppy Hill, 2011] in that
role. So he didn’t have to animate all
the storyboards himself but in a way
went further and drew some things
he wouldn’t have animated himself.
It was obvious from the storyboards
that this film was going to take time
to produce, with all of the birds and
everything. I had a conversation with
Honda about it so that he knew he had
plenty of time, no deadline: he could
move forward based on Miyazaki’s
storyboards. Apart from Honda, a
lot of the animators were people who
worked on Ghibli films in the past. So
Honda would direct them, then take
the results back to Miyazaki, and there
would be some animation Miyazaki
would like, some he wouldn’t: it was
based on his taste. But because he
had Honda, Miyazaki just went full
on with his vision in his storyboards.
He was interested in seeing what
Honda would come up with, and
that was quite interesting to watch.
Joe Hisaishi’s score is
unusually minimalistic.
That came from Joe Hisaishi himself:
he wanted to do a score based on
minimalist music. As you know,
minimalist music is based on loops
and repetition, so it’s not very dramatic.
It’s rare an epic film would have a
minimalistic score. I personally wasn’t
sure we should go in that direction,
and felt maybe in some scenes
we should make it more dramatic.
But Joe was pretty adamant, so we
said, “OK, let’s try it.” And as a result
we came up with a score of entirely
minimalist music, which I think might
be the first time for an animation film.
Do you have a favourite scene?
There’s a lot of character animation in
this film, but my favourite scene is where
the middle-aged guy comes out of the
bird. You couldn’t really create that with
CG, so that had a big impact on me.
 R E
V
116
FILMS
00
LOREM
All of Us Strangers, Priscilla, Lorem Ipsum
The Boy and the Heron,
The Zone of Interest, Scala!!!,
Ferrari, Poor Things, The Holdovers,
Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer,
Sweet Sue, Trenque Lauquen,
Maestro, Samsara, Napoleon
and more

I E
W S
136 144
WIDER SCREEN
DVD & BLU-RAY
Selected works by Ben Rivers; Ian Christie on a new generation
early Skolimowski; Blackhat; of XR technologies, and
Black God, White Devil; Ivor the a report from a Beagles
Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss; & Ramsay exhibition
The Last Picture Show, The Hot Spot,
Bluebeard’s Castle and more

146
BOOKS
A tribute to Francis
Ford Coppola and a
biography of Kubrick
and his monolith movies
1 16
All of Us they walk with nonchalant purpose in the
same direction, crossing woodland, con-
Strangers verging on a shop to buy booze and fags.
“Shall we go?” the man asks. “Where?”
USA/UNITED KINGDOM 2023
Adam replies. “Home,” comes the answer.
Home is not just where the man lives.
DIRECTOR ANDREW HAIGH It is where Adam spent his childhood.
PRODUCED BY GRAHAM BROADBENT
PETER CZERNIN
The man is his father. But not his father
SARAH HARVEY as an old man – as a young man, younger
WRIT TEN BY ANDREW HAIGH than Adam is now, still living in the 1980s
BASED ON THE NOVEL BY YAMADA TAICHI
CINEMATOGRAPHY JAMIE D. RAMSAY house and mindset familiar from Adam’s
EDITOR JONATHAN ALBERTS
PRODUCTION DESIGN SARAH FINLAY
youth, yet somehow now available, with
MUSIC EMILIE LEVIENAISE- Adam’s mum (Claire Foy), for social
FARROUCH encounters, reminiscences and account-
COSTUME DESIGN SARAH BLENKINSOP
CAST ANDREW SCOT T ings. This is not a hook-up, then. Rather,
PAUL MESCAL Adam is cruising the past, seeking mean-
JAMIE BELL
CLAIRE FOY ing and connection, an unlocking, a
release, a path. He is a blocked writer but
SYNOPSIS also a traumatised queer person reckon-
London, the present. Fortysomething ing with the intimate and profound con-
screenwriter Adam is struggling to write sequences of structural homophobia and
about his late parents. He begins seeing his parents’ deaths. He wants to go home
Harry, a younger man living in the same
and to find a home and needs to learn the
tower block. Meanwhile, he returns to his
suburban childhood home, mysteriously
difference between the two.
finding his parents living as he remembers Written and directed by Andrew
them then. He starts getting to know Haigh, the film is based on a 1987 Tokyo-
them again. set novel by Yamada Taichi. Haigh
adapted it himself, shifting the protago-
REVIEWED BY BEN WALTERS nist’s sexuality and placing the story in
contemporary London. Adam lives in a
In an early scene in All of Us Strangers, new tower like those found in Nine Elms
Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay man enter- and Stratford, the most Ballardian spots
ing middle age, leaves his London flat to in the city these days. His psychological
visit the suburban area where he grew alienation is accentuated by seemingly
up. Across a field he spots a handsome being one of only two residents: the
man (Jamie Bell), who returns his gaze. other, Harry (Paul Mescal), is younger,
FILMS
Keeping some distance between them, also gay, also struggling. The two begin
to connect, tentative and hungry, com-
plementary and chafing. There are strik-
Like Céline
ing levels of intentionality, vulnerability
and desire in their dynamic – superbly
Sciamma’s Petite
Maman, which
realised by Scott, rueful and pensive, uses a similar
and Mescal, puppyish and volatile. By
contrast, Foy and Bell, also excellent, timeslip concept,
depict a couple who appear to be driven Haigh’s film is
by convention more than intention. They engaged with
are loving and decent but not inclined to
question or reshape their world, let alone generational
recognise its capacity to harm their son. patterning and
The story’s magic-realist approach ena- the impact of grief
bles an almost dreamlike dramatisation of
the unconscious turmoil such conditions
have generated for generations of queer
children like Adam: children left with the
thought that these people, my straight
parents, are my best hope of love and
support, and also apparently incapable
of understanding and nurturing me as I
actually am. Like Céline Sciamma’s Petite
Maman (2021), which uses a similar time-
slip concept, Haigh’s film is engaged with
generational patterning and the impact of
grief; but it is more invested in exploring
the possibility of ultimately irreducible
difference. Adam’s parents remain at once
comforting and apart. When, dressed in
childhood pyjamas that don’t reach his
wrists or ankles, he cuddles up in their
bed, we feel the cosy warmth. But they
are not given names.
Their everyday inadequacies are
understood structurally, their homo-
BLOCK PARTY
phobia motivated less by hatred than by Paul Mescal as Harry,
heedless, fearful ignorance. The dismissal Andrew Scott as Adam

of emotional expression as “poofy shit”,
the supposition that coming out heralds
“a very lonely kind of life”, the reflexive
notion that “[no] parent wants to think
that about their child”, much less take
any steps to mitigate its consequences –
such notes convincingly evoke the banal
and crushing mainstream understand-
ings of the time. Meanwhile, the film’s
soundtrack pays glorious tribute to the
queer sensibility then hiding in plain
sight in the charts: Erasure and Alison
Moyet pop up while lyrics to Frankie
Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys
hits are woven into the screenplay to
poignant, devastating effect. The period
production design is spot-on too. The
film here brings to mind Blue Jean (2022),
Georgia Oakley’s powerful feature about
Thatcher-era homophobia, which takes
its title from a 1984 Bowie song.
All of Us Strangers isn’t a work of
horror or science fiction but its fantasti-
cal elements spur comparison with the
queer uses of such genres. There’s a par-
ticularly rich seam of horror with more or
less overt LGBTQ+ resonance. Frank-
enstein’s monster and his bride, the cat
people, hosts of vampires, werewolves
and a certain sort of serial killer: all have
proven useful vessels for exploring the
disturbing potency of difference, the
queerly monstrous and the monstrously
queer. If All of Us Strangers has genre con-
nections, though, they are not to mon-
sters but to ghosts and time travel, super-
natural concepts linked by their capacity
to enable intercourse with the past.
Encounters across time are of particu-
lar value to queer people, long encour-
aged by mainstream norms to understand
themselves as people with no collective,
nourishing past and no realistic or hope-
ful future. Yet while LGBTQ+ film-
makers have increasingly leaned into
horror (particularly of the slashing and/
or shapeshifting kind), ghosts and time
travel have been less popular. There are
examples, though. Marc Moody’s Almost
Normal (2005) offered a curious, belated
twist on the Back to the Future/Peggy Sue Got
Married concept, with a middle-aged gay
man cast back to a high-school setting
in which homosexuality was the norm.
Lloyd Eyre-Morgan’s short Closets (2015)
used a bedroom wardrobe as a portal
enabling solidarity between isolated
teens across decades. In Monica Zanetti’s
Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) (2020),
a lesbian relative returns from the grave
to shed intergenerational light on hidden
history. On the small screen, shows like
American Horror Story (2011-) and the
Netflix film trilogy Fear Street (2021) find
queer fellow feeling across centuries.
Haigh’s film retains a naturalistic plausi-
bility absent from all these works, while
sharing their implicit suggestion that the
terms of engagement available in normal
everyday life just aren’t enough to reckon
with or account for queer experience.
All of Us Strangers chimes too with
Haigh’s own earlier work: 45 Years (2015)
was built around the discombobulating
return of the past, while Greek Pete (2009)
and the HBO series Looking (2014-16)
followed gay men in search of meaning
and belonging. Most resonant is Week-
end (2011), Haigh’s comparably thought-
ful and incrementally intense portrait of
gay men connecting across difference and
trauma. Those characters are still young,
not yet thinking of parents as peers, but
still thinking of them. At one point in
Weekend, one of them pretends to be the
other’s absent father in hopes of under-
standing and healing, a gambit writ large
in All of Us Strangers. “Everything’s differ-
ent now,” Adam tells his mother across
the decades. Yet queer alienation persists.
In UK cinemas from 26 January
1 17
Q&A
Andrew Haigh
DIRECTOR
BY ARJUN SAJIP
How did you feel this project
stretching you creatively?
Well, I think almost everything I’ve
done has been very grounded in the
natural and the real, but [All of Us
Strangers] isn’t. And I knew that this
film, if I wasn’t careful, would slip into
a more traditional genre film; it could
end up being a ghost story or a horror
film. And I didn’t want it to be any
of those things; I wanted it to exist
within the cracks of different genres.
As I was writing, I tried to think of
all the other films that have done this
[sort of thing] before… but I couldn’t
really find much that felt like it existed
in the same space. Which was both
terrifying and a little bit exciting.
You tend to work with different
actors on each project.
FLASHBACKS OF A YULE Is there a reason for that?
Jamie Bell as Dad,
Claire Foy as Mum
I think it’s about allowing myself to
be vulnerable again with people who
don’t know me, and how that can then
inform the work and their process as an
actor. That’s what I’m trying to do: I’m
trying to connect with people I don’t
FILMS
know, and then express something
together about our vulnerability. Or
maybe it’s the reverse: maybe when
I’ve worked with people, I feel they
know me too well, and I need to
shut that down, which could be an
interesting psychological [quirk].
You’ve said that casting was a lengthy
process, particularly for the roles
of Adam’s parents. When did you
realise that Jamie Bell and Claire
Foy were right for the roles?
We [landed on] Claire quite quickly –
I think she looks like Andrew [Scott].
Lots of Claire’s family is Irish, I
don’t know if that’s part of it. I knew
that Claire was aching to work with
Andrew, which was really important.
For the role of Adam’s dad, we were
really stuck for a while. But Jamie
absolutely loved the script, and
completely understood it. He saw it
as some kind of bookend to his role
in Billy Elliott [2000]: he now gets to
play a father to a son who’s
struggling, rather than a
boy who’s struggling
with his dad. I think
he loved that idea.
And he’s a parent.
1 18

Priscilla sense of self and a relationship with the

most iconic public figure of the time.
The feet belong to Priscilla Beaulieu
CERTIFICATE 15 112M 49S
(Cailee Spaeny, who invests her callow
DIRECTOR SOFIA COPPOLA character with a few feathery strands
PRODUCED BY SOFIA COPPOLA of steel), a bored 14-year-old schoolgirl
LORENZO MIELI
YOUREE HENLEY living on a US Army base in West Ger-
WRIT TEN BY SOFIA COPPOLA many, where Elvis (Jacob Elordi), already
BASED ON THE BOOK
ELVIS AND ME BY PRISCILLA PRESLEY world-famous, happens to be stationed.
SANDRA HARMON Then, sitting alone in a diner, Priscilla
CINEMATOGRAPHY PHILIPPE LE SOURD
FILM EDITOR SARAH FLACK is approached by a member of Elvis’s
PRODUCTION DESIGN TAMARA DEVERELL entourage – a gaggle of young men who
MUSIC PHOENIX
COSTUME DESIGN STACEY BAT TAT physically dominate Priscilla in a manner
CAST CAILEE SPAENY that exactly inverts cinematographer
JACOB ELORDI
RODRIGO FERNANDEZ- Philippe Le Sourd’s compositions in
STOLL The Beguiled (2017), in which Colin Far-
rell’s soldier was buried in the lace and
SYNOPSIS
pastels of a girl’s boarding school. Pris-
The late 1950s: 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu cilla’s invited to a party at Elvis’s house,
is living with her family on a US military and pulls out every trick in the book to
base in Germany where Elvis – already a get her reluctant parents to allow her to
rock ’n’ roll star – is stationed. Elvis pursues
go. Eventually they relent.
what is at first a non-sexual relationship
with Priscilla and moves her to Graceland,
Like everything in Priscilla, Coppola
where he controls most aspects of her life, presents this pivotal event without fur-
down to the colour of her hair. ther commentary. Instead, the direc-
tor’s luscious craft swathes the movie as
REVIEWED BY JESSICA KIANG though in ruched fabric, deceiving the
eye as to the lumps and bumps beneath.
If you didn’t know who made Priscilla, Priscilla often wonders, amazed, why
the very first shot would set you right. me? It’s the biggest question that Priscilla
Girlish bare feet, sporting a bright coral doesn’t answer. Because once she’s there,
pedicure, pad across a bedroom, every at that party, a daisy among gilded lilies,
step sinking deeper into the pink carpet’s it’s less difficult to account for why she
impossibly fluffy pile. It could almost be caught Elvis’s eye, leading to an intense
the start of a 90s teen comedy, but there’s if non-sexual courtship, and her removal
a sincerity to its sherbety palette that gives to Graceland to finish her schooling and
FILMS
lives, who she talks to, even the colour
of her hair. While she passes idle, lonely
weeks in the plush but homestead-y clois-
ter of Graceland, Elvis is out in the world,
making music and movies and headlines,
linked to a succession of glamorous star-
lets in tabloid headlines that torture his
secret, pining girlfriend.
It’s strange that at a moment of puri-
tanical discourse around unnecessary
sex scenes, along comes Priscilla, a per-
fect example of a film that really needs a
sex scene and doesn’t have one. A point
is made of Elvis’s repeated deferral of
the relationship’s consummation, and
it’s hardly prurient to wonder when he
stopped deferring, especially given Pris-
cilla’s age. Perhaps we can infer that he
finally loves her tender during a montage
of several days’ worth of dinner plates
being piled high outside their bedroom
once Priscilla graduates from high school.
But Sarah Flack’s editing includes many
such montages – of Elvis encouraging
Priscilla to pop downers and uppers and
LSD, of a hedonistic trip to Vegas, of the
pair snapping sexy photos of each other
– and it always feels like they conceal as
much as they reveal.
The movie canters by in episodes and
interludes set, cleverly, not to Elvis songs
but to loosely period-appropriate tracks,
like a perfectly deployed ‘Crimson and
Clover’. The 70s arrive, and across one
swift cut, with infant Lisa Marie in her
arms, Priscilla’s beehive collapses into

it away. This could only be a Sofia Cop-
pola movie; she is our foremost auteur
of a youthful, frilled femininity that is so
invested in obvious signifiers it becomes
borderline subversive; so full of love for
the way things look that it becomes an
examination of the way things are.
This talent for creating substance out
of surface make her maybe the perfect
filmmaker for this adaptation of Priscilla
Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me, the very
point of which is the inside-outside dis-
connect between a gradually developing
thereafter become his wife. Elvis loves
her (because it is a kind of love, however
wildly unbalanced its power dynamic)
not despite her naivety, but because of it.
“Stay the way you are,” he tells her.
The lure of Priscilla, for Elvis, is the
blankness of her slate, and how willing
she is to be nothing for anyone else, and
everything only for him. It must seem like
such a small price to pay for the sublima-
tion of every teenage fangirl’s dream. The
irony is that Elvis will make her change
everything about herself – where she
waves hanging loose around her shoul-
ders. Free your hair and your mind will
follow: the days are numbered for the
marriage, just as the clock runs down on
the movie – Coppola is far more inter-
ested in captivity than release. And so
the whole of the gently heartsore Priscilla
plays like a letter of drawn-out, loving
goodbye, written in painstaking cur-
sive on scented paper and sealed with a
chaste, cherry lip-gloss kiss.
In UK cinemas from 5 January

latest, non-valedictory fable. Its Japanese
The Boy and title is taken from a 1937 novel by Yoshino
the Heron Genzaburo: How Do You Live? was aimed
at school children as a kind of humanist
philosophical tract, and makes a crucial
MIYAZAKI HAYAO
DIRECTOR
PRODUCER SUZUKI TOSHIO cameo here; while Miyazaki’s screenplay
WRIT TEN BY MIYAZAKI HAYAO retains nothing of its source material’s
BASED ON THE NOVEL
HOW DO YOU LIVE? BY YOSHINO GENZABURO original narrative – and in fact piles on a
CINEMATOGRAPHY OKUI ATSUSHI swaying heap of mystic/mythic compli-
EDITORS MATSUBARA RIE
SEYAMA TAKESHI cations to rival anything in Spirited Away
SHIRAISHI AK ANE (2001) or Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) – its
ART DIRECTION TAKESHIGE YŌJI
CHARACTER DESIGN HONDA TAKESHI gentle didacticism is very much of a piece.
MUSIC JOE HISAISHI Distilled down to its essence, The Boy and
ANIMATION DIRECTOR HONDA TAKESHI
VOICE CAST SANTOKI SŌMA the Heron is a story about the necessity of
SUDA MASAKI recognising and accepting one’s respon-
SHIBASAKI KO
AIMYON sibilities – about the interior journey from
innocence to experience, which gets thrill-
SYNOPSIS ingly externalised through a series of sur-
1943: after the death of his mother in a fire, real and epically scaled landscapes that
12-year-old Mahito moves from Tokyo to are only familiar by the standard and ico-
the countryside, where he’s plagued by a nography of Miyazaki’s own body of work.
strange, anthropomorphic heron. Together, At first, it seems that self-referentiality
they travel through a tower into an is the name of the game: the opening pas-
alternative dimension whose wizened ruler sages – describing the relocation of ten-
may control the fate of the universe.
year-old Mahito from Tokyo in the wake
REVIEWED BY ADAM NAYMAN of the hospital bombing that claimed his
mother’s life in 1943 to a new home in the
countryside – evoke both the emotional
Don’t call it a comeback – or a swansong, narrative and painterly visual style of My
as it turns out. No sooner did The Boy and Neighbour Totoro (1988), right down to a
the Heron premiere at the Toronto Inter- wizened caregiver figure who’s a dead
national Film Festival earlier this year ringer for a character in the earlier film.
than a Studio Ghibli executive assured But where Totoro was ultimately a mini-
the sold-out audience that its maker was, malist sort of fantasy with little narrative
quite literally, going back to the drawing incident and extremely modest stakes, The
board; cue the clicking sound of a thou- Boy and the Heron’s similarly gentle sense
sand on-deadline critics deleting their of enchantment gradually opens up into
ledes about Miyazaki Hayao’s 12th feature something massive, and even apocalyp-
as a director (and first in ten years) also tic. It’s a shift that begins around the time
being his last. that the bird of the title, at first rendered
The apparent non-retirement of one realistically by the animators, reveals itself
of the world’s greatest living filmmakers as an impostor and an extra-dimensional
is, of course, cause for celebration, and emissary from a realm where Mahito and
so for the most part is the quality of his his tragic family history loom large.
1 19
As much as it may seem like a cop-out WINGS AND TURNABOUTS
to avoid talking about the plot of The The Boy and the Heron
Boy and the Heron, its non-synopsisability
is part of the pleasure; one reason we
identify with Mahito as he navigates the
FILMS
world beyond his own is because we’re
just as confused as he is about what’s
going on. The best fairytales often pro-
ject the quality of being made up as
they’re going along, exquisite-corpse
style. The causal relationship between
the various episodes and characters mat-
ters less than their individual and collec-
tive vividness, whether it’s an extended
seafaring adventure culminating in the
gruesome slaughter of a massive fish,
human-sized parakeets, or an encounter
with an ancient wizard whose collec-
tion of toy blocks represents nothing less
than the teetering equilibrium of the uni-
verse itself.
To return to the idea of The Boy and
the Heron as, at least in part, a summative
work, these latter passages can easily be
read as a gesture of melancholy reflec-
tion on behalf of an ageing artist. Or,
more specifically, as Miyazaki’s riff on
The Tempest, with the sorcerer manifest-
ing as his own Prospero-like self-portrait,
and contemplating, with fetching direct-
ness, such stuff as dreams are made on
– and also the idea that in dreams begin
responsibilities.
It may be that the film is finally a bit
too busy and frenetic for these heavy
themes to fully or finely crystallise. But
it’s also curmudgeonly to begrudge an
octogenarian who’s still bursting with
ideas and energy for not wanting to kill
too many of his darlings. Instead, and as
only he can, he makes them live.
In UK cinemas from
26 December
120

The Zone of prisoners who were spared to keep the

crematorium working efficiently.
does not choose to represent resistance
or struggle within the camp. Instead, The
EVIL UNDER THE SUN
The Zone of Interest

Interest In rigorous contrast, Glazer sticks to

one distant and clinical viewpoint, that of
Zone of Interest is pitilessly focused on the
Höss family home and their bucolic trips
CERTIFICATE 12A 104M 36S the commandant and his family outside to the river and meadows nearby.
the camp, portrayed in a slightly leeched, The commandant’s wife Hedwig is
DIRECTOR JONATHAN GLAZER metallic colour grading. A couple of played with stringent hauteur by Sandra
PRODUCERS JAMES WILSON
EWA PUSZCZYNSK A sequences use thermal cameras at night Hüller (another great performance to
BUGS HARTLEY allowing us to see one of the Jewish add to Toni Erdmann, 2016, and the recent
JONATHAN GLAZER
FILMS

SCREENPLAY
BASED ON THE NOVEL BY MARTIN AMIS
CINEMATOGRAPHY ŁUCASZ ŻAL
EDITOR PAUL WAT TS
PRODUCTION DESIGN CHRIS ODDY
MUSIC MICA LEVI
COSTUME DESIGN MALGORZATA K ARPIUK
CAST CHRISTIAN FRIEDEL
SANDRA HÜLLER
MEDUSA KNOPF
SYNOPSIS
Commandant of the Auschwitz
concentration camp Rudolf Höss spends
time bathing in the nearby river and taking
boring work meetings, while his wife
fusses about their beautiful garden and her
husband’s career prospects. The backdrop of
this domestic drama is the wall of the camp,
over which drift ominous sounds.
REVIEWED BY ROGER LUCKHURST
Like his last film, Under the Skin (2013),
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an
adaptation of a novel that, over its years
of gestation, has transformed its source
material to create an austere experimen-
tal film that is at once abstract yet imme-
diately accessible.
The Zone of Interest (2014) was a novel
by Martin Amis focused on a mid-
ranking SS officer at Auschwitz, lust-
ing after the commandant’s wife with
a banal desire that entirely brackets all
the horror around him, a mass-murder
machine evaded through indifference
and linguistic euphemism. Amis’s heavy-
handed satire makes the commandant’s
own narration that of a deluded monster,
dogged at his grim tasks inside the camp.
Amis also inserted a counter-voice, one
of the Sonderkommando, those few Jewish
house-servants feverishly hiding food for
the slave labourers who work digging
pits, perhaps for the planned factory but
more likely for the overflow of bodies.
The camera never goes inside the
camp, but the wall is ever present: it
makes up one side of the commandant’s
garden, which is fussed over by his wife,
a place for parties and the children to
play. The sound designer, Johnnie Burn,
has created a soundtrack of distant gun-
shots, occasional screams sometimes
rising to group crescendos – from the gas
chambers, one presumes – and grinding
machines starting up as chimneys belch
smoke. These noises leak into the garden,
and are echoed and extended in Mica
Levi’s spare musique concrète score.
Glazer used the actual wall of the Aus-
chwitz camp, reconstructing the house
of its creator and main commandant,
Rudolf Höss, close to its original posi-
tion. This gives added weight to the deci-
sion to stay outside. The plot sticks very
closely to Höss’s career at Auschwitz,
including the threat to his Edenic garden
when he was temporarily recalled to
Berlin. The film conforms to the posi-
tion of Claude Lanzmann (the director
of Shoah, 1985), who held that the ethics of
Holocaust representation demanded that
there could be no fictional version of the
unimaginable zone inside the camps. So,
unlike László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015)
or Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone
(2001), both of which focus on the same
period in 1944 when Höss was ordered
to execute over 400,000 Hungarian Jews
in two months at Auschwitz, Glazer
Anatomy of a Fall). She tries on furs taken
from those selected for the gas chambers,
casually threatens her servants with being
sent back over the wall, or hisses about
office politics with her husband when his
post and her idyll are threatened. Höss,
played by Christian Friedel, is more of
a cipher, less the ideologue and passion-
ate Nazi of his professional career, more
of a dispassionate strategist focused on
improving the efficiency of the camp,
meeting with engineers from IG Farben
(who designed the crematoria and made
the Zyklon B pesticide), or back in
Berlin, with his bosses demanding more
efficiency from the camp system.
There is a risk in choosing to maintain
this coldly amoral stance, but the glassy
surface of this existence is troubled at the
edges by sleepwalking children, a mother-
in-law’s distress and sudden departure,
bad things floating in the river that we
do not see, and the dry heaves that afflict
Höss in later moments in the film.
In Berlin, Höss gazes down from a bal-
cony at a lavish party, considering only
the amount of gas it would take to kill
everyone. On the stairs, alone, he stops
at a landing and peers into the dark, an
engulfing void. What does he see? He
looks directly at us, as if he finally grasps
the notion that he can be observed as
well as be the imperious observer. Does
he hear the wrenching noises around him
for the first time, and understand that the
judgement of history is coming soon, out
of that dark?
In UK cinemas from 2 February
 121

Scala!!! all,” she says. “I mean, I don’t go out of here wanting to

chainsaw somebody.”
THREE SCALA
CINEMA STAPLES
Scala!!! is on firmer footing when Giles and Catter-
UK 2023 CERTIFICATE 19 96M 14S BY PHILIP CONCANNON
all manage to place the cinema within a wider social
DIRECTORS JANE GILES
context. They open with Margaret Thatcher’s “Where
ALI CAT TERALL there is discord, may we bring harmony” speech, which
PRODUCERS ALAN MARKE she gave on the eve of one of the most politically and
JIM REID
ANDY STARKE socially fractious decades in British history, and during
BASED ON THE BOOK
SCALA CINEMA 1978-1993 BY JANE GILES
this era the Scala was an inviting place for anyone who
CINEMATOGRAPHY SARAH APPLETON felt unwelcome elsewhere. It was a particularly impor-
EDITORS ANDY STARKE tant hub for the gay community in the era of Aids and
EDWARD MILLS
Section 28. It is notable just how many of the outsiders KING KONG (MERIAN
MUSIC BARRY ADAMSON
who found their place at the Scala would impact British C. COOPER, 1933)
Before the Scala moved in,
SYNOPSIS culture in the subsequent decades, with filmmakers like
the old King’s Cross Cinema
A documentary about the Scala cinema in King’s Cross, John Akomfrah crediting the Scala with helping them was briefly an interactive
London, which established a cult audience for its eclectic find their artistic voice. jungle exhibit called the
programming. Through interviews with dozens of the cinema’s It is suggested in the film that the Scala had become Primatarium. The Scala
former members and staff, it explores the Scala’s transgressive a marked venue some time before its closure, with the programmers paid homage
history and its cultural legacy since its closure in 1993. authorities looking for a reason to shut it down, and it’s not to their predecessors in
hard to see why. The cinema’s culture of drug-taking and July 1981, with an opening
REVIEWED BY PHILIP CONCANNON night screening of King
sex is cheerfully discussed, as is the lack of any age restric-
Kong. Twelve years later,
tions on its clientele. Two customer deaths during screen-
when the cinema was forced
The seats were uncomfortable, the floor was sticky, it ings are mentioned by interviewees; the second of these, to close, they brought the
smelled weird, there was often illicit behaviour occurring recounted by an emotional Mark Valen, is the film’s most programme full circle with a
in the dark, and the whole building rumbled every time a affecting moment. final showing of Merian C.
Northern Line train passed underneath. The Scala cinema The Scala ran into trouble in 1993, when Giles was pros- Cooper’s iconic film.
in King’s Cross offered a filmgoing experience like no ecuted for a screening of A Clockwork Orange (1971), a film
other, and 30 years after its closure, mention of the venue that is now a staple of the repertory cinema circuit, not least
still inspires misty-eyed reveries in cinephiles of a certain at the Scala’s spiritual heir, the Prince Charles Cinema, off
age. Some will recall the epiphany they experienced watch- Leicester Square. Curiously, despite John Waters playfully
ing Eraserhead (1977), or a sexual awakening sparked by questioning Giles, there is no interrogation of the decision
films like Sebastiane (1976) and Un chant d’amour (1950), but to screen the film or the consequences of it, beyond Giles
many will be just as likely to reminisce about the venue telling us it was “a big deal”. THUNDERCRACK! (CURT
itself. Being part of the chaotic atmosphere in the audi- This isn’t a documentary in the business of interroga- MCDOWELL, 1975)
ence appeared to be as much of a draw as the images on tion, however. Scala!!! is unashamedly a celebration and an The primate theme
the screen. exercise in nostalgia. On those terms it must be regarded as continued in Thundercrack!,

FILMS
Former Scala programmer Jane Giles (who also pro- a success, and anyone who attended the Scala in its heyday with an escaped gorilla
joining the film’s
duced a 2018 book on the cinema’s history) and journalist is likely to enjoy a vicarious thrill from the anecdotes, the
orgiastic escapades. Few
Ali Catterall have assembled many of the Scala’s habitual trashy film clips, and the distinctive printed programmes. pornographic films could
attendees for their feature documentary Scala!!! – perhaps For those who didn’t, Scala!!! may be most evocative as an sustain a 160-minute
a few too many, in truth. There are more than 40 inter- enticing portrait of life in a pre-gentrified London, where running time (including
viewees in this snappily edited 96-minute film, and a more a night at the cinema cost you £2 and came with an added an intermission), but Curt
judicious edit may have lost such contributions as Ralph frisson of excitement and danger, a sense that anything McDowell’s epic, scripted
Brown remembering serving Boy George a cup of tea could happen. As Stewart Lee notes, after recalling an old by George Kuchar, is packed
or Paul Putner’s account of watching Laurel and Hardy man berating the audience during the porn epic Thunder- with crazy plot twists and
raucous humour. Once
with an enthusiastic crowd. A more memorable soundbite crack! (1975) before sitting down to watch the rest of it, “You
seen, Thundercrack! is never
comes from an archive clip of a prim middle-aged woman don’t get that in a multiplex.” forgotten, and a single
named Mrs Reeve talking about her love of the Scala’s increasingly degraded print
horror programme. “I don’t see there’s any harm in it at In UK cinemas from 5 January ran frequently through the
Scala’s projectors.

CAFÉ FLESH (STEPHEN

SAYADIAN AKA RINSE
DREAM, 1982)
A 20p annual membership
scheme allowed the Scala
to circumvent licensing
laws and screen a variety
of sex films. One of its
biggest hits was Café Flesh,
which is set in a post-
nuclear wasteland where
99 per cent of humanity
is incapable of sex. With
its sexual performances
elaborately staged and
choreographed like music
videos, this inventive sci-fi
satire encapsulated the
glossy, neon-lit aesthetic of
the 1980s.
Exhibition

Jonathas de Andrade
Themed Programme

After Hours:
Clubbing on Film
Retrospective

Tsai Ming-Liang
Collective

Los Ingrávidos
Batalha Film Centre Find out more about our programme
Porto, Portugal batalhacentrodecinema.pt

Every Body The prologue of Julie Cohen’s new docu-
mentary goes a long way towards render-
ing American culture’s obsession with the
CERTIFICATE 12 92M 6S gender binary anthropologically strange. It’s
a montage of ‘gender reveal’ celebrations, in
DIRECTOR JULIE COHEN
PRODUCERS MOLLY O’BRIEN which expectant parents receive with hys-
TOMMY NGUYEN teria the news of their inchoate offspring’s
CINEMATOGRAPHY LEAH ANOVA
K ATE PHELAN genitalia, coded in pink or blue symbols:
EDITOR KELLY KENDRICK confetti from popped balloons, powder
MUSIC AMANDA YAMATE
from exploded objects, fireworks.
SYNOPSIS It’s an inspired opening for a film about
A documentary about the intersex community (the ‘I’ in
people born outside this gender binary, spe-
LGBTQIA) which explores the lives of three extraordinary cifically those born intersex – with male and
intersex individuals who have moved through erasure, female biological traits. The rest of Every
subjectification, trauma, shame and isolation to find Body unfolds expertly (if conventionally)
self-acceptance, community and visibility as activists. The towards their de-marginalisation and insist-
film follows the trio as they fight the practice of medically ence on their right to consensual health care.
unnecessary paediatric surgeries to ‘correct’ intersex In early intertitles, Cohen dispenses with
anatomy accompanied by arbitrary gender assignment.
basics: some 1.7 per cent of the population
REVIEWED BY MEGAN FEENEY are born intersex. “If that’s higher than you
thought,” it’s because they’re “often told to
keep quiet about their bodies”. This cues
introduction of the film’s unquiet stars: Saifa
Wall (he/him, assigned female at birth, had
intersex anatomy surgically ‘corrected’ as a
baby); Alicia Weigel (she/them, ditto Saifa’s
treatment); and River Gallo (they/them,
assigned male despite intersex traits).
These three are sympathetic guides
through their own stories and, by exten-
sion, those of their terrified parents, coun-
selled by doctors that their newborns’ ana-
tomical ‘errors’ could be solved by ‘surgical
There is also the question of – why? Why this story in this style?
THE PEASANTS
With Loving Vincent (2017), Hugh and DK
The Peasants Welchman pioneered the first fully painted
animated feature film, making use of an
POLAND/SERBIA/LITHUANIA/FRANCE 2023 almost absurdly labour-intensive process:
they filmed scenes using actors, and then
DIRECTORS DK WELCHMAN
[IE, DOROTA KOBIELA] more than a hundred artists reproduced
HUGH WELCHMAN 65,000 frames as oil paintings, in pastiche
PRODUCED BY SEAN BOBBIT T
HUGH WELCHMAN Van Gogh style, to tell the story of a young
WRIT TEN BY DK WELCHMAN man delivering the artist’s last letter to his
HUGH WELCHMAN
BASED ON THE NOVEL CHŁOPI BY WLADYSLAW REYMONT brother Theo. The directors have used
CINEMATOGRAPHY RADOSŁAW ŁADCZUK the same technique in their adaptation of
K AMIL POLAK
SZYMON KURIATA the Nobel Prize-winning Polish author
HEAD EDITOR DK WELCHMAN Władysław Reymont’s 1904 novel The Peas-
PRODUCTION DESIGN ELWIRA PLUTA
MUSIC ŁUK ASZ ‘L .U.C.’ ROSTKOWSKI ants – a film that is similarly audacious but
COSTUME DESIGN K ATARZYNA LEWIŃSK A struggles to articulate the reasoning behind
DIRECTOR OF ANIMATION PIOTR DOMINIAK
CAST K AMILA URZĘDOWSK A its own high-concept efforts.
ROBERT GULACZYK The script streamlines Reymont’s 900-
MIROSŁAW BAK A
page text into the coming-of-age of the
SYNOPSIS beautiful Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska).
A rural Polish village, the beginning of the 20th century:
Jagna begins an affair with the rugged,
thful, sensuous Jagna starts an affair with a married man.
youthful, embittered
embit farmhand Antek (Robert Gulac-
hough pressured into marrying her lover’s wealthy father,
Although zyk) – only to then marry Antek’s elderly
she maintains her sexual freedom – a move that threatens to widowed
wido father Maciej (Mirosław Baka)
undoo the village’s entire social fabric.. in exchange
exc for six acres of his finest land.
It’s a brutal contract – brutal in the clarity
REVIEWED
EWED BY ANNABEL BAI JACKSON
of Boryna’
Bo s purchase of his young wife, in
knowing
know that the peasant Jagna could only
say ye
yes to such an offer – and Jagna breaks it
almost
almos immediately by sleeping with Antek
again.
again The villagers turn on Jagna, labelling
her promiscuous,
pr saying that she will bring
a bad harvest, and treating her like a cancer
– a malignant
m thing that needs to be cut out
for the
th health of the whole.
123
corrections’ and decisive sexual assignment
along with gender-specific ‘rearing’ and hor-
mone therapy in the teen years.
That treatment paradigm has been influ-
enced by a case study conducted by mid-
century psychologist Dr John Money: when
he was an infant, David Reimer’s penis was
removed following a botched circumcision;
Dr Money’s direction to remove Reimer’s
testes and raise the child as ‘Brenda’ was
designed to confirm his theories. But Dr
Money was wrong: Reimer, who always felt
male and wasn’t informed of the experiment
until age 14, was traumatised. In the 1990s,
his case and Dr Money’s misrepresentations
were publicly exposed, including in an epi-
sode of the US current affairs programme
Dateline that Cohen stumbled on.
Nonetheless, Dr Money’s paradigm still
informs the practice of surgery on intersex
babies, including on Saifa, Alicia, and River:
they are shown ruefully watching Reimer’s
story, which ended in suicide. But a strength
of Every Body is that it leads not with trauma,
but with this trio’s self-accepting empower-
ment and the intersex movement’s progress
towards ending early surgeries, so that
doctors wait until, as one intersex special-
ist explains, “a child is old enough to tell us
who they are and participate in the decision.”
Some might even choose no surgery at all.
In UK cinemas from 15 December
FILMS
It’s a familiar parable of the tension
between private desire and public moralis-
ing, told through enjoyable but conventional
melodramatic gestures. The real artistry, of
course, is meant to lie in the experimental
animation. At first the effect is indeed
beguiling, especially in the film’s arresting
folk-dance set pieces: each moment initially
seems to modify and re-reveal itself, pre-
senting a mesmerising world in constant
flux. But the spell breaks as soon as your
eyes adjust to the actual style of painting on
show. While the impasto-heavy scenes of
Loving Vincent often felt truly strange and
hallucinatory, The Peasants adopts a vexing
photorealism – one that thins its painterly
quality, compromising the pleasurable tex-
tures of modernist painting upon which the
Welchmans’ entire strategy depends.
There is also the question of – why?
Why this story in this style? You could
argue that the Welchmans are intervening
in Reymont’s project: that the film is draw-
ing attention to the pretence inherent in the
‘realist’ literary tradition by amping up the
artificiality. But it seems more likely that
a nebulous sense of creating something
‘immersive’ is what is most valued here – a
factor that’s significant in filmmaking, but
perhaps not in and of itself an argument for
a process that’s dangerously close to becom-
ing a gimmick.
In UK cinemas now
124
Ferrari and potent. Such scenes are few and far
between in Michael Mann’s Ferrari, but
when they do arrive, Mann’s film comes
USA/UK/ITALY 2023 alive with the spectacle of death. But
what happens in between those ter-
DIRECTOR MICHAEL MANN
PRODUCED BY MICHAEL MANN rifying moments is a melodrama that
P.J. VAN SANDWIJK smacks more of the humdrum reliabil-
MARIE SAVARE
JOHN LESHER ity of another great name in Italian car
THOMAS HAYSLIP manufacture, Fiat. This is a family runa-
JOHN FRIEDBERG
ANDREA IERVOLINO round of a film, rather than the hoped-for
MONIK A BACARDI Formula One racing machine.
GARETH WEST
LARS SYLVEST Adam Driver – with his pun-ready
THORSTEN SCHUMACHER name – stars as Enzo Ferrari, a man
LAURA RISTER
WRIT TEN BY TROY KENNEDY MARTIN whose sexy racing days are over. His car
BASED ON THE BOOK factory is on the verge of bankruptcy and
ENZO FERRARI: THE MAN,
THE CARS, THE RACES, his racing team is losing out to arch-rival
THE MACHINE BY BROCK YATES Maserati. Ferrari is a grey-haired cold
CINEMATOGRAPHY ERIK MESSERSCHMIDT
EDITED BY PIETRO SCALIA fish, closer to Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey
PRODUCTION DESIGN MARIA DJURKOVIC Wigand in The Insider (1999) than the
MUSIC DANIEL PEMBERTON
COSTUME DESIGN MASSIMO CANTINI heroes of Mann films like Last of the Mohi-
PARRINI cans (1992) and Heat (1995). He mourns
CAST ADAM DRIVER
PENÉLOPE CRUZ his son, visiting the family tomb for long
SHAILENE WOODLEY conversations with him – something we
witness in a scene reminiscent of the 1976
SYNOPSIS
disaster movie spoof The Big Bus when a
Italy, 1957. Italian car manufacturer Enzo cemetery fills up with the bereaved com-
Ferrari is dealing with the death of his son
muning with their loved ones.
Dino and his deteriorating marriage. In an
attempt to revive the fortunes of his ailing
He argues with his wife Laura
business, he enters a car team into the (Penélope Cruz), who has control of the
Mille Miglia cross-country race. However, company and lives in simmering conflict
a tragedy occurs that will overshadow the with Ferrari’s diminutive mother, played
outcome of the event and reveal a darker by Daniela Piperno. The family is bound
side to Enzo’s ambition. by mutual recrimination over the death
of the son – in keeping with the biopic
REVIEWED BY JOHN BLEASDALE
stodginess of these scenes, someone actu-
ally says “The wrong boy died,” à la Walk
FILMS
Motor sports always hold the potential Hard (2007). Ferrari has another family
for tragedy, and this was never truer than out in the country with Lina (Shailene
in the early years of the sport, when driv- Woodley winning the Least Italian com-
ers and onlookers died every year. As petition), and a son who he is in a quan-
spectators, especially watching safely dary about recognising as his own. She’s
on a screen, it’s hard to shake the feel- relatively relaxed about the situation – the
ing that we’re all, essentially, waiting for real drama is situated in whether Laura
a crash. These are the moments when finds out, seeing as she holds both the
slick success gives way to sudden horrific purse strings and a loaded gun she keeps
failure: failure at speeds that reveal how on a bedside table.
brutal metal and stone can be when in Adapted by Mann and Troy Kennedy
contact with flesh and bone. That’s what Martin from a book by Brock Yates,
makes the daredevil drivers so intriguing the film is reportedly a dream project
of Mann’s – a phrase that never fails to
make me flinch, redolent as it is of Terry
RACY STORY
Adam Driver as
Enzo Ferrari
Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
(2018). Mann’s interest is piqued when
engines are roaring, or being discussed
or taken apart. The most convivial Enzo
gets is when around the table with his
drivers; it’s also the angriest, when he
senses a lack of the cut-throat determina-
tion necessary to win.
It’s baffling that Mann chooses to
spend the lion’s share of the running time
on the relatively dull domestics, and it
doesn’t help that, despite her best efforts,
the sparks just don’t fly between Cruz and
her miscast co-star. Driver is too young
to play Ferrari and the hair and paunch
are as unconvincing as his Italian accent,
which he only got away with in Ridley
Scott’s House of Gucci (2021) because we
all thought it was a joke. There are cer-
tain touches – the camera placed close to
the protagonist’s brow, the set-up of the
racing scenes – but these Mann-erisms,
if you will, aren’t enough to maintain a
consistent thrust.
Even the set-piece race, the Mille
Miglia, a gruelling and dangerous mara-
thon road race, is poorly explained and
unclear. It’s difficult to tell who is driving
which car, which car belongs to which
team and where they are headed (the race
is a circuit from Brescia south to Rome
and back). The aftermath of the 1957 race
is likewise sped past as we head for the
kind of ending common in these films of
corporate biography. We’re met with a list
of dubious accomplishments in which
financial success and brand recognition
seem to be given more importance than
human lives. When one of the drivers
on a phone call with Ferrari wants to say
something about the tragic Mille Miglia
crash – which resulted in the deaths of
11 people, including four children – Fer-
rari congratulates him on his victory and
hangs up. The film does likewise.
In UK cinemas from 26 December
 125

The Book of The movie announces its influences

straight out of the gate – it borrows its
for Jerusalem, costume designer Antoi-
nette Messam has made luxuriant use
ANOTHER FINE MESSIAH
LaKeith Stanfield

Clarence
as Clarence
embossed gold opening titles and its first of the local tailoring talent – and it’s fun
action sequence, a pell-mell chariot race, to notice Samuel dropping calling cards
DIRECTOR JEYMES SAMUEL
from William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959) – for his own faithful flock: a lithe dancer,
PRODUCED BY JEYMES SAMUEL and in typical Samuel style begins to painted all in deep blue, sidewinding
SHAWN CARTER wreak merry havoc with history. In one her way around a den of iniquity is also a
JAMES LASSITER
TENDO NAGENDA chariot, careering through the streets motif in The Harder They Fall.
WRIT TEN BY JEYMES SAMUEL of Jerusalem, ride Clarence and his pal But what appears at first to be impres-
CINEMATOGRAPHY ROB HARDY
EDITOR TOM EAGLES Elijah (LaKeith Stanfield and Cyler, both sive stylistic confidence – Samuel’s trade-
PETER WALPOLE

PRODUCTION DESIGN
MUSIC JEYMES SAMUEL
COSTUME DESIGN ANTOINET TE MESSAM
CAST LAKEITH STANFIELD
OMAR SY
RJ CYLER
ANNA DIOP
SYNOPSIS
Jerusalem, 33AD. Affable gadabout
Clarence finds himself in debt to the local
crime lord, and is given a month to pay it
off, or he dies. As word of the doings of
Jesus Christ begin to spread, Clarence
realises he can make the money he needs
by faking miracles.
REVIEWED BY ARJUN SAJIP
Halfway through writer/director Jeymes
Samuel’s 2021 spaghetti western The
Harder They Fall, there’s a seemingly
throwaway bit of dialogue: Jim Beck-
wourth (RJ Cyler), who fancies himself
as the fastest gun in the West, brags,
“Like they say in the Book of Clarence,
‘Can’t no man outspeed me.’”
This slightly incongruous line was,
it turns out, a carefully laid Easter egg
for Samuel’s new film, The Book of Clar-
ence, which transforms the director’s
apocrypha into big-screen gospel. The
Samuel Cinematic Universe seems
to run on one basic rule: construct a
time-honoured genre framework and
populate it with an all-Black principal
cast. But while The Harder They Fall was,
structurally speaking, a largely conven-
tional spaghetti western, The Book of
Clarence takes an unruly approach to a
decidedly unfashionable kind of film:
the Biblical epic.
returning from The Harder They Fall); in
the other sits none other than Mary Mag-
dalene (Teyana Taylor). Much is riding
on this race: a victory for Clarence would
help him claw his way out of the pit of
debt he owes the ruthless local crime
lord, Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi-
Abrefa). But unsurprisingly, Mary whups
him, and our luckless, sweet-natured hero
finds himself with even less time to come
up with the goods.
Meanwhile, Jesus of Nazareth, now
33 years old, has been performing mira-
cles and gaining acolytes across the land.
Clarence, however, has never seen him,
and remains not only sceptical but down-
right irreligious: he is, to quote one of the
script’s several old-world descriptions of
occupations both age-old and current, a
“seller of ungodly herbs”, and frequents
the local ‘lingonweed’ bar. In one of the
film’s cleverest inversions of Biblical
canon, Clarence is the twin brother of
Thomas (sometimes referred to in the
Bible as Didymus, Greek for ‘twin’, and
also played beautifully by Stanfield), who,
far from being the ‘doubting Thomas’ of
lore, is a deeply worshipful, sanctimoni-
ous apostle. It’s Thomas’s snubbing of his
brother that catalyses the film’s second
act: Clarence’s cynical efforts to make
money off the credulous masses by per-
forming fake miracles.
Samuel, too, is in the miracle busi-
ness: he is attempting to transubstantiate
disparate genre elements into a convinc-
ing, breathtaking whole. The film is gor-
geous, particularly the costumery – with
the Italian city of Matera standing in
FILMS
mark use of hip-hop, reggae and soul
music, much of which he wrote and
performed himself, proves every bit as
valid as the blaring orchestral scores of
Hollywood’s mid-century swords-and-
sandals epics – soon veers into complete
tonal incoherence. The most obvious
misstep is the finale, which, after more
than 90 minutes of stoner comedy, action
sequences and romance (Clarence is in
love with Jedediah’s sister Varinia), sud-
denly finds itself possessed by the blood-
soaked sincerity of Mel Gibson’s The Pas-
sion of the Christ (2004). But even before
that, some of its humour hovers around
the level of Meet the Spartans (2008), while
several running gags – namely two that
revolve around mispronunciation –
simply don’t stand up.
A bigger disappointment is the film’s
treatment of political subtext. Samuel’s
writing of Judas (Micheal Ward), as an
existentially tortured secret agent for
the Romans (who are all white), feels
like an afterthought, particularly after
Shaka King’s potent transposition of
the Bible’s central betrayal myth to race-
war-torn 1960s Chicago in Judas and the
Black Messiah (2021). As in that film, the
state-sponsored murder of Black heroes
is presented here as a blunt political
weapon. But as The Book of Clarence builds
to its denouement, the theme of faith –
not treated with the rigour it deserves
– drowns out Samuel’s sharper commen-
tary, and the film’s vaulting genre-blend-
ing ambitions collapse into mess.
In UK cinemas from 19 January
126

Tchaikovsky’s Wife Antonina Tchaikovskaya, née Miliukova,

spent the last 20 years of her life in an
a letter which he later rejects. If Serebren-
nikov believes that Onegin contains the key
asylum. The medical reasons for her to understanding Antonina’s love, to omit it
CERTIFICATE 15 144M 5S ‘insanity’, as with much of her biography, is to strip the narrative bare.
are largely unknown. According to Kirill Tchaikovsky’s Wife demands comparison
DIRECTOR KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV
PRODUCED BY ILYA STEWART Serebrennikov’s biopic, there is no doubt with Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1970).
KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV that she was driven mad by her husband’s That film too shows the impact of Tchai-
MURAD OSMANN
PAVEL BURYA refusal to satisfy her sexual passions while kovsky’s sexuality and Antonina’s obsessions
SCREENPLAY KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV indulging his own with young men. His film and sexual appetite on their marriage, but
CINEMATOGRAPHY VLADISLAV OPELYANTS
EDITOR YURIY K ARIKH shows there to have been no light in Antoni- through a sequence of fantasias and dream
ART DIRECTION VLADISLAV OGAY na’s life, no humour or happiness. No music. ballets set to Tchaikovsky’s works. Serebren-
MUSIC DANIIL ORLOV
COSTUME DESIGN DMITRIY ANDREEV Beyond a smattering of piano works, nikov appears to be rallying against the rich
CAST ALYONA MIKHAILOVA much of the soundtrack comes from the mini- beauty of Russell’s film by making his version
ODIN LUND BIRON
PHILIPP AVDEEV malist tinkering of composer Daniil Orlov. as barren as possible, with cinematographer
Aside from a bunch of revellers in the street Vladislav Opelyants shallowly emulating
SYNOPSIS singing a theme from Swan Lake, there’s little Tarkovsky through desolate green hues dap-
When Antonina Miliukova declares her love for Pyotr to remind viewers that Serebrennikov ’s pled with candlelight.
Ilyich Tchaikovsky, he warns her that he will be a most Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a composer. The aesthetic is well-suited to Mikhailo-
disappointing husband. Yet she persists and he relents, only The most musical sequence sees Antonina va’s drab characterisation of Antonina.
for Antonina’s passions to be unrequited, because of his confront her husband after a concert. When Thankfully she reminds us who she is by
homosexuality. When Tchaikovsky demands a divorce to be
they met, she says, he was writing Eugene declaring “I am Tchaikovsky’s wife!” in every
rid of her, she refuses.
Onegin – “Your best opera. It’s about us, about other scene. Even though her personality is
REVIEWED BY LILLIAN CRAWFORD love” – but everything he has written since is largely confined to her libido, there is noth-
“cold and disjointed”. ing sensual about her encounters, which
It is a remarkable condemnation. Ser- lean into the grotesqueries of vaginal blood
ebrennikov makes no attempt to conjure on piano keys, disease-ridden masturba-
up the musical texture of their lives, leaving tion and a corpse’s flaccid cock. Serebren-
Alyona Mikhailova’s Antonina to whine and nikov indulges in these nauseating tableaux
pine without any thematic meat to chew. without the faintest interest in the nature of
We never hear a single note of Eugene Onegin, Antonina’s love. It is less a revisionist look at
or get to experience anything close to the Tchaikovsky than a duff note.
sheer overwhelm of the scene in which
OFF KEY Odin Lund Biron as Tchaikovsky, Alyona Mikhailova as Antonina Tatiana pours out her love for Onegin into In UK cinemas from 29 December
FILMS

Even though her personality is largely confined to her libido, there is nothing sensual about her encounters
TCHAIKOVSKY’S WIFE

One Life More than 41 million views have been

logged of just one of the YouTube clips
older, more reflective Winton – but the dry,
declamatory script does little to challenge
of the BBC1 magazine show That’s Life’s either the characters or the viewers.
DIRECTOR JAMES HAWES famous 1998 episode featuring Sir Nicholas That the film overcomes this and fre-
PRODUCED BY JOANNA LAURIE
IAIN CANNING Winton, with its emotionally overwhelming quently engages is largely due to its cast.
EMILE SHERMAN reveal of his mission to save Jewish children Garai, Sharp and Johnny Flynn as the
GUY HEELEY
WRIT TEN BY LUCINDA COXON just before World War II and its legacy. And younger Winton all have that appealing
NICK DRAKE One Life has been reverse-engineered with British keep-calm-and-carry-on front, while
BASED ON IF IT’S NOT
IMPOSSIBLE… THE LIFE OF one goal in mind – to end with this guaran- subtly evincing desperation when the mis-
SIR NICHOLAS WINTON BY BARBARA WINTON teed tear-gusher. sion falters. Meanwhile, Helena Bonham
CINEMATOGRAPHY ZAC NICHOLSON
EDITOR LUCIA ZUCCHET TI The film’s neatly multifaceted title nods Carter brazenly steals scenes back home
PRODUCTION DESIGN CHRISTINA MOORE at Winton’s own modest avowal that he was as Winton’s bustling, chivvying, heavily
MUSIC VOLKER BERTELMANN
COSTUME DESIGN JOANNA EAT WELL just one cog in a small team who reshaped accented German-Jewish mother.
CAST ANTHONY HOPKINS and expedited British refugee policy It’s Anthony Hopkins, though, who
JOHNNY FLYNN
LENA OLIN through doggedness and simple decency, takes centre stage, with another master-
ROMOLA GARAI bringing 669 Jewish children to safety. But class in understatement. His ability to play
its insistent focus on Winton across two the silences, to allow audiences to perceive
SYNOPSIS
timeframes and 50 years is inevitably at the him try – and nobly fail – to conceal his emo-
In 1938, broker Nicholas Winton realises a desperate expense of his colleagues Doreen Warriner tions is the film’s secret weapon. While the
plan to rescue hundreds of Jewish refugee children in
(Romola Garai) and Trevor Chadwick story celebrates Winton’s success, Hopkins’s
Czechoslovakia from the impending Nazi threat, bringing
them by train to England. Fifty years later, Winton reckons (Alex Sharp), who actually ran ground reserve suggests his guilt over his failure to
with his actions, never really publicised, until the popular operations in late-30s Prague, at consider- save more children – particularly those on
TVV programme That’s
That s Life learns of his deeds. able personal risk.
ab the final, ill-fated train – and helps compli-
This isn’t to minimise Winton’s achieve- cate the narrative’s otherwise telegraphed
REVIEWED
IEWED BY LEIGH SINGER ment; but it is an indication of how the
m eliciting of designated responses.
filmmakers see their basic mission: to reit-
fil Winton’s story, then, eventually pulls into
erate a reassuring message through a fairly
er its intended, effective cathartic destination.
conventional biopic structure. There’s more
co It feels as though it’s destined for a Sunday
filmmaking craft here than casual observers
fil evening home-comfort-viewing television
might notice – the director, TV veteran James
m slot – the sort of slot once occupied by the
PLIGHT
GHT SAVIOUR
Hawes (Black Mirror, 2011-; Slow Horses, 2022-)
H programme that resurrected this story to
Anthony
thony shoots the pre-war Prague location scenes
sh begin with. I guess that’s One Life.
Hopkins
pkins as
Sir Nicholas
with a vibrant, handheld urgency, contrasted
w
Winton
nton with a more muted, measured style for the
w In UK cinemas from 5 January
 127

Poor Things
On the verge of discovering body, mind It is impossible not to be on a similar CAD INFLUENCE
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter,
and world, Bella Baxter (an extraordi- journey to Bella’s when every scene is so Mark Ruffalo as
nary, physically ingenious Emma Stone) crammed with inventive, baroque detail Duncan Wedderburn
DIRECTOR YORGOS LANTHIMOS lives in an eccentric London mansion to discover. Lanthimos’s luscious visual
PRODUCED BY ED GUINEY with her adoptive father Godwin Baxter imagination give us so much to feast on;
ANDREW LOWE
YORGOS LANTHIMOS (Willem Dafoe), a famous surgeon with it makes one feel practically gluttonous.
EMMA STONE a scarred, misshapen face. His medical Striking black and white gives way to
SCREENPLAY TONY MCNAMARA
BASED UPON THE students – except Max McCandless vivid colour and, captured in pinholes,
NOVEL BY ALASDAIR GRAY (Ramy Youssef ), whom Baxter takes on vignettes and warping wides alike – The
CINEMATOGRAPHY ROBBIE RYAN
EDITOR YORGOS MAVROPSARIDIS as an assistant – call him ‘Monster’. Bella Favourite (2018), also shot by cinematog-

PRODUCTION DESIGN JAMES PRICE
SHONA HEATH
MUSIC JERSKIN FENDRIX
COSTUME DESIGN HOLLY WADDINGTON
CAST EMMA STONE
MARK RUFFALO
WILLEM DAFOE
SYNOPSIS
Godwin Baxter, a famous, unconventional
anatomist, reanimates the body of a young
woman in a secret experiment at his bizarre
London mansion, and names her Bella
Baxter. Bella quickly develops a questing
curiosity, keen to absorb all the knowledge
and pleasure the world has to offer. After
meeting philandering lawyer Duncan
Wedderburn, she runs away with him in
pursuit of “grand adventure”.
REVIEWED BY JESSICA KIANG
Faraway a bell is ringing, maybe a cruise-
ship bell or a cathedral chime or a corner-
shop ding, because there’s a new, lovely
thing alive in the world and it is Yorgos
Lanthimos’s Poor Things. A film (based on
the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray) that gives
pleasure in every fantastical frame – pleas-
ure to the eye, pleasure to the soul – this
dazzling suite of dirty-minded delights
is set in not-quite-reality during an era of
never-quite-was. But its accuracy about
the here-and-now gives its macaroon swirls
an acidic sting – in both senses: formalde-
hyde and LSD. Few films make you think
and feel and laugh this much; even fewer
send you skidding out with your whole
demeanour reset as you remember just
what a splendid, absurd thing it is to have
a body and a mind, and a big, dumb, glori-
ous world on which to set them loose.
calls him ‘God’.
Bella is God’s beloved experiment.
Unbeknownst to her, she is the brain of a
baby put into the body of its mother, the
crowning achievement in God’s maca-
bre menagerie. God hires McCandless
to observe her development; McCand-
less, like most of the men she meets, is
instantly entranced. Bella punches him
on the nose, and giggles.
But Bella is learning fast. Her stagger-
ing, coltish walk, the gait of a puppet sud-
denly made real, becomes steadier. Her
language skills improve. Then one day
she discovers how good it feels to rub her-
self down there, and McCandless has to
explain that in ‘polite society’ such behav-
iour is not appropriate. In almost the same
moment, Bella has discovered sex and
shame, and decided instinctively to get as
much as she can of the one, and never to
bother with the other. Though she’s been
confined her whole life to God’s rambling
architectural mish-mash of a home, now
her questing, curious mind and newly vora-
cious sexual appetite compel her to escape.
Escape comes in the puffed, pomaded
form of Duncan Wedderburn (a fantastic
Mark Ruffalo, giving some marvellously
meme-able reactions), a caddish lawyer
who intends to spirit Bella away, shag
her senseless then cast her aside once
he’s tired of her. But somewhere on their
grand adventure, under the dangling
tramcars of Lisbon, or on the steamship
to Alexandria, or beneath a purple Paris-
ian sky in the bordello where Bella goes
to work, Wedderburn falls in love. Bella’s
lack of reciprocity drives him mad.
FILMS
rapher Robbie Ryan, made it clear that
Lanthimos is the foremost filmmaker of
the fisheye – the photography alone stuns
and soothes, caresses and cracks jokes.
And what material it has to frame:
Backdropped by pungent electronic
skies, surrounded by hyperreal CG
seas, the set-built imaginary cities are
places both tangibly real and deliber-
ately artificial.
And not that you’d ever want to, but if
you shut your eyes, the score – the first by
experimental musician Jerskin Fendrix
– tells the story all on its own. Scraping,
naive single instruments initially strug-
gle to stay in tune, before combining into
a swelling, symphonic whole at the end,
mapping on to Bella’s rapid-order experi-
ence of: kippers (disgusting), masturba-
tion, manners, fucking (aka ‘furious jump-
ing’), Portuguese custard tarts, dancing,
oysters, reading, booze, class injustice,
companionship, socialism, cruelty, kip-
pers (delicious), forgiveness, grief, ambi-
tion and revenge – the best kind, the kind
kind, the life-lived-well kind.
Wedderburn and Godwin are very dif-
ferent men, and they love Bella in very dif-
ferent ways, but they share a desire to keep
her dependent and childlike, full of poten-
tial that will never be realised except on
terms they dictate and control. But Bella
has other ideas, even when she barely
knows what an idea is or how to have one,
and bursts out of their cages the way Poor
Things bursts out of the screen: with raven-
ous, ravishing, furious-jumping joy.
In UK cinemas from 12 January
128

The Holdovers Paul Hunham, who teaches ancient his-

tory at Barton Academy, a posh boarding
school near Boston. His caustic wit burns
USA 2023
from the start. When a pupil protests over
DIRECTOR ALEX ANDER PAYNE
a low grade, “Sir, I can’t fail this class!”,
PRODUCED BY MARK JOHNSON Paul responds with a cruel grin: “Oh,
BILL BLOCK don’t sell yourself short, Mr Kountze. I
DAVID HEMINGSON
WRIT TEN BY DAVID HEMINGSON truly believe that you can.”
CINEMATOGRAPHY EIGIL BRYLD Having alienated the principal, along
EDITOR KEVIN TENT
PRODUCTION DESIGN RYAN WARREN SMITH with almost everyone else at the school,
MUSIC MARK ORTON staff and pupils alike, Paul gets landed
COSTUME DESIGN WENDY CHUCK
CAST PAUL GIAMAT TI with the task of looking after the ‘holdo-
DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH vers’ – those pupils whose parents can’t
DOMINIC SESSA
take them home for the two-week Christ-
SYNOPSIS mas break. As it turns out, this will eventu-
In the final weeks of 1970, elite ally be narrowed down to a single pupil,
Massachusetts boarding-school Barton the bright but troubled 15-year-old Angus
Academy is breaking up for Christmas. A (Dominic Sessa in his first-ever screen
few students have to stay on – among them role). Angus’s mother, recently remarried
Angus, whose mother has just remarried. To to a man who dislikes his stepson, has
look after these ‘holdovers’ is Paul Hunham, phoned to tell him they don’t want him
an irascible professor disliked by staff and home for the break; they’ve chosen this
students. Also staying on is head cook Mary.
Tensions between Angus and Paul soon
fortnight to take their delayed honeymoon
break out. trip. The third ‘holdover’ is Mary Lamb,
the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Ran-
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP dolph). Her only child won a scholarship
to Barton; but as she couldn’t afford to
send him to college he was drafted, and
After the disappointment of the high- died in Vietnam.
concept, futuristic Downsizing (2017), The A clash between Paul and Angus is
Holdovers finds director Alexander Payne inevitable – but for all its virulence, it
gloriously back on prime form. The film, opens up a channel of communication
which for once he didn’t script – that job between them. This unlooked-for mutual
he entrusted to experienced TV writer sympathy deepens, with Paul confessing
David Hemingson (Kitchen Confidential, to Angus “I find the world a bitter and
2005-06; Whiskey Cavalier, 2019), working complicated place and it seems to feel the
FILMS
convincing. Giamatti’s performance even
outclasses the one he gave in Sideways.
ONCE UPON A TOME
Paul Giamatti as Paul,
Dominic Sessa as Angus
Despite his lack of experience, Dominic
Sessa matches his co-star in every scene
they share, his blend of forthrightness
and quirky defiance suggesting he’s set for
potential stardom. Randolph appears in
fewer scenes, but on every occasion she’s
well up there with them both.
The Holdovers isn’t just set in the early 70s
– in many ways it looks and feels, in terms
of camera angles and the texture of the
photography and set design, like a movie
from that era. Payne himself has noted as
much, saying: “To a certain degree, I’ve
been trying to make 70s movies my whole
career.” And as if to remind us, when Paul
and Angus visit a movie-house together,
we see a brief clip from Arthur Penn’s
Little Big Man (1970). The choice of music
– Andy Williams’s ‘It’s the Most Won-
derful Time of the Year’, Cat Stevens’s
‘The Wind’, Artie Shaw’s ‘When Winter
Comes’, and a melancholy score by Mark
Orton (who also scored Payne’s Nebraska,
2013) – skilfully evokes the period.
As in Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970)
and Harold and Maude (1971), as well as
Elaine May’s A New Leaf (1970), the over-
all mood is humorous and sombre, warm
yet bittersweet.
The visual structure of The Holdovers,
too, right from its vintage studio idents
in the opening credits to the slow zooms,
the painterly wide shots of the snow-
bound Massachusetts landscape and the

on the big screen for the first time – reu-
nites him with Paul Giamatti, star of his
earlier gem Sideways (2004). Here, as with
Miles in Sideways, Giamatti plays a man
who at first seems largely unlikeable – but
who, as we gradually come to realise, dis-
likes himself more than anyone else could
and, for all his sarcasm and bile, deserves
our sympathy.
The story, as Payne readily admits, was
lifted from a little-known film by Marcel
Pagnol, Merlusse (1935). Giamatti plays
same way about me. I think you and I have
this in common.”
Any risk of life-lesson clichés is read-
ily tossed aside by the humour in Payne’s
treatment of these characters, and by
the situations – inventive but never far-
fetched – that he and Hemingson create
for them. So much so that the climax of
the action, involving an act of self-sacri-
fice on Paul’s part we could never have
dreamed of when we first encountered
him, becomes not only moving but wholly
transitions affected with fades and wipes,
unmistakably link us back to that same
era. Payne even creates a simulated 35mm
feel to the lensing, shooting on digital but
adding in the wear and tear of a film print.
Nostalgic, funny, moving and thought-
provoking, this may well qualify, in a
career not short of outstanding achieve-
ments, as its director’s finest and most
immersive film yet.
In UK cinemas from 19 January

There is no shortage of entry points into
Werner Herzog: the wild world of Werner Herzog. He was
Radical Dreamer a canny self-marketer at least as far back as
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), with a
GERMANY/UK/CANADA 2022 CERTIFICATE 15 90M 2S
biography that reads almost like a reposi-
tory of memes, from his clashes with Klaus
DIRECTOR THOMAS VON STEINAECKER Kinski to his hypnosis of the cast of Heart of
PRODUCERS ANDRÉ SINGER Glass (1976), to being shot with an air-rifle
MARIA WILLER
BERNHARD VON HÜLSEN mid-interview, to rescuing Joaquin Phoe-
WRIT TEN BY THOMAS VON STEINAECKER nix from a car wreck. The Herzog brand is
CINEMATOGRAPHY HENNING BRÜMMER
EDITOR VOLKER SCHANER good copy, repackaged in profiles and ref-
MUSIC PHILIP STEGERS erenced in acting roles drawing on his well-
established penchant for dark Teutonic
SYNOPSIS
pronouncements. His aura of extremity
A documentary portrait of Werner Herzog, recounting his has lured countless viewers into exploring
career as a leading director of the New German Cinema
his work – and is an apt frame of refer-
and a documentarian drawn to extreme subjects that match
his own appetite for adventure. Herzog, family members, ence for his cinema of wild-eyed seeking,
collaborators and admirers share stories and insights amidst populated by eccentrics and pilgrims and
plentiful archival clips and new footage of the filmmaker often made under ostentatiously difficult
revisiting sites from his past. circumstances. Few, if any, arthouse and
documentary directors are more widely
REVIEWED BY MARK ASCH known and appreciated.
But why do we need another documen-
tary about him? Werner Herzog: Radical
Dreamer does not provide a satisfying answer.
The 12 minutes it spends on the making of
Fitzcarraldo (1982), juxtaposing behind-the-
scenes footage from the Amazon jungle
with a present-day Herzog reflecting that
the shoot presented “one difficulty after
another”, simply cannot compete with Les
Bank’s feature film about the production,
DIRECTOR MARKETING Werner Herzog Burden of Dreams (1982).
There’s poignancy in Marvin’s deft, even tender negotiation of her grandparents’ daily micro-aggressions
QUEENDOM
Queendom Built atop a former Soviet gulag in Rus-
sia’s far east, the permafrosted port town
of Magadan wasn’t really built to accom-
USA/UK/NORWAY 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 95M 52S modate personalities like Gena Marvin: a
pointedly un-Russian adopted moniker for
DIRECTOR AGNIIA GALDANOVA
PRODUCED BY IGOR MYAKOTIN a queer transgender performance artist who
AGNIIA GALDANOVA fashions her own body as an act of protest.
CINEMATOGRAPHY RUSLAN FEDOTOV
EDITED BY VLAD FISHEZ Agniia Galdanova’s immensely sympathetic
MUSIC DAMIEN VANDESANDE documentary portrait Queendom introduces
TOKE BRORSON ODIN
Marvin – swaddled in white furs, lace and
SYNOPSIS face-paint extending across her shaven scalp
Queer transgender performance artist Gena Marvin makes
– against the snowily bleached landscape of
her way from her remote Russian hometown of Magadan a hometown that has never felt like home.
to Moscow, where she attracts attention for her flamboyant Equal parts extra-terrestrial priestess and
costuming and brazen pro-queer, anti-war activism. Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago (1965), she
Defiant in the face of everyday prejudice and authoritarian sticks out like a parrot in a pigeon coop even
oppression by Putin’s government, she must eventually flee when colour-matched to her surroundings.
the country. That’s the point.
REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
“What kind of man dresses like that?”
shouts an older woman from her flat
window, as Marvin passes by in one of her
typically head-turning homemade get-ups
– constructed from recycled materials, held
together with duct tape. Only 21 at the time
of filming and preternaturally thick-skinned,
Marvin is used to such responses, and more
violent ones besides, in the hostile anti-
LGBTQ+ environment of Vladimir Putin’s
Russia. More often than not, she responds
calmly, specifying and asserting her identity
with a matter-of-factness that stands in sharp
contrast to the community hysteria that, in
one memorable scene, sees her turfed out of
TRANS SIBERIAN EXPRESSION Gena Marvin a local supermarket for indecency.
129
Director Thomas von Steinaecker plays
the hits, running through Herzog’s life via
plentiful archival interviews, new footage
of Herzog delivering masterclasses at his
Rogue Film School, and clips of notorious
moments from his filmography: the suicidal
penguin from Encounters at the End of the
World (2007); his 2015 cameo on Rick and
Morty. The film is largely content to jog view-
ers’ memories with well-worn anecdotes and
celebrity exegesis from talking heads who
rarely go deeper than Herzog’s The Man-
dalorian co-star Carl Weathers, expressing
incredulity about “that crazy documentary
about the man with the bears”, a reaction I
remember well from college kids discover-
ing Grizzly Man on DVD circa 2006.
The film comes at a valedictory moment
for the octogenarian Herzog, who in his new
memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against
All paints a more colourful self-portrait than
he manages here, with his rather desultory
philosophising on dreams and the “ecstatic
truth”. (Though von Steinaecker has Herzog
retrace his childhood steps, and prompts
him to speak about memory, the film scarcely
delves into the frequent myth-making of
Herzog’s life story and films.) Under the
weight of hagiography, the reflective and
low-key Herzog of Radical Dreamer seems,
well, sleepy.
In UK cinemas from 19 January
FILMS
Galdanova and cinematographer Ruslan
Fedotov stick closely by their subject at
her most intrepid, as when she takes to the
streets of Moscow, bound in barbed wire in
protest against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The capital is scarcely more hospitable than
Magadan; arrest beckons, followed eventu-
ally by sanctuary in Paris. While intimately
observing Marvin throughout, Queendom
also conjures some sense of her own per-
spective on these social frontlines, forged by
a lifetime of isolation and difference.
Though Marvin sees herself as something
of a political symbol, Galdanova takes care
not to do the same, consistently foreground-
ing the idiosyncratic character and wit
beneath the startling exterior. Much of the
most compelling material here documents
Marvin’s family life – whether at home or via
heated phone calls – with the grandparents
who raised her, both loving and uncompre-
hending to the point that they think joining
the army might straighten her out. There’s
great poignancy in Marvin’s deft, even tender
negotiation of their daily micro-aggressions
and outright homophobic jabs, a domestic
practice run for what she’ll face in the wider
world. Avoiding empty ‘yas queen’ cheer-
leading and sloganeering, Queendom makes
little attempt to editorialise or advocate on
its subject’s behalf, soberly trusting in the
power of her presence.
In UK cinemas now and on Dogwoof on Demand
130

Sweet Sue
UK 2022 CERTIFICATE 15 99M 26S

DIRECTOR LEO LEIGH

WRIT TEN BY LEO LEIGH
PRODUCED BY SCOT T O’DONNELL
ANDY BRUNSKILL
TIM NASH
CINEMATOGRAPHY SIMONA SUSNEA
EDITOR PACO SWEETMAN
PRODUCTION DESIGN LUCIE RED
MUSIC ESK A
COSTUME DESIGN VERITY MAY LANE
CAST MAGGIE O’NEILL
TONY PIT TS
HARRY TREVALDW YN

SYNOPSIS

After a humiliating break-up, newly single

fiftysomething Sue picks up taciturn
biker Ronald at her brother’s funeral.
The new couple tentatively get to know
each other but their fledging relationship
is complicated by the sudden arrival of
Ronald’s son Anthony, an aspiring dancer
and social media influencer with a big
personality.

REVIEWED BY RACHEL PRONGER

When children of well-known filmmak-

ers enter the industry themselves, they
are faced with a choice. Do they seek to
create work so obviously different from
their famous parent that comparisons are
rendered obsolete (the Sofia Coppola
approach)? Or do they acknowledge the
inevitable influence of growing up within
a body of work, and make films that exist
FILMS

in direct dialogue with that family history
(à la Brandon Cronenberg)?
Leo Leigh seems to have chosen the
latter route for his fiction feature debut,
a good-natured low-budget tragicom-
edy which appears to consciously refer-
ence the collaborative work made by his
parents: director Mike Leigh and actor
Alison Steadman. Like many of their
best-known f ilms, Sweet Sue is a wry
slice-of-life portrait, an East London-set
character study revolving around three
lonely people who are pulled together by
circumstance into a temporary dysfunc-
tional family unit.
A stylish pre-titles sequence intro-
duces Sue (Maggie O’Neill), a middle-
aged blonde bombshell who sits in a
genteel Italian restaurant glugging red
wine and crunching breadsticks, having
just been stood up by her feckless boy-
friend. A slow zoom followed by some
tight handheld camerawork – perhaps a
throwback to the director’s background
in documentary (Leigh began his career
working on gritty docs for Vice, such as
Swansea Love Story, 2010, about young
people affected by heroin addiction) –
conceals Sue’s face for several minutes,
so she appears at first depersonalised, an
emblem of a certain kind of hard-edged
Cockney broad, all brassy hair and red
pleather jacket. As the alcohol sinks in,
Sue begins to cause low-key chaos, dis-
rupting the suburban couple at the next
table (“No, no it’s our London night!”),
but an eventual glimpse of her face – girl-
ish, soft, wounded – complicates the pic-
ture of drunken menace. O’Neill brings
THE SHOE MUST GO ON an appealing mix of vulnerability and
Tony Pitts as Ron
naivety to the role, which keeps the viewer
onside even when Sue’s lack of impulse
control leads to bad behaviour.
In the opening scenes, Leigh focuses
on establishing the details of Sue’s iso-
lated life, juggling her dispiriting work at
a tacky party supply shop with a terminally
ill brother and an ailing mother (Anna
Calder-Marshall) who prefers her stuck
up daughter-in-law (Hannah Walters) to
her own daughter. At her brother’s funeral,
Sue strikes up a conversation with a biker
Ron (Tony Pitts) and, much to her family’s
disapproval, is soon riding away on the
back of his motorbike. A tentative court-
ship begins, with the two lonely souls
heading to the seaside and getting cheer-
fully stoned, but their budding romance
is derailed by the arrival of Ron’s twenty-
something son Anthony (Harry Trevald-
wyn, scene stealing), an aspiring dancer/
influencer with a sugar daddy and a flair for
drama. Initially thrilled that “my Ronald”
has found a girlfriend, Anthony’s love-
bombing of Sue quickly goes sour, and the
escalating tension threatens to derail all
three relationships.
Even without immediately knowing the
filmmaker’s lineage, Sweet Sue’s immediate
reference points are clearly bittersweet
realist comedy dramas such as Happy
Go Lucky (2008) and Nuts in May (1976),
alongside, perhaps, the affectionately
observed working-class stories of Clio
Barnard and Shane Meadows. Drawing
on techniques closely associated with his
father’s filmmaking, Leigh co-devised the
script with his cast, starting with a story
outline and then working collaboratively to
improvise dialogue. This approach yields
some lovely moments – a funny, believably
awkward “getting to know you” Thai
takeaway dinner, a cringeworthy dance
sequence worthy of Napoleon Dynamite
– but between these sequences the story
meanders, and there’s an overall sense of
narrative aimlessness.
Leigh has described how he wanted the
film to feel as if it is crashed by Anthony,
and certainly the arrival of Trevaldwyn at
the 20-minute mark signals a change of
direction. From this point onwards, Sweet
Sue loses sight of its heroine, shifting focus
to the tense interplay between the repressed
father and his flamboyant son. That
dynamic unfolds convincingly, with Pitts
tentatively revealing the history nerd that
lies beneath Ronald’s tough guy exterior,
and Trevaldwyn leaning gleefully into his
character’s self-styled himbo persona. But
despite the well-observed performances
and abundance of good lines, particularly
from Trevaldwyn – “I would hate to go to
prison. That’s like peak toxic masculinity
isn’t it?” Anthony declares – there’s a sense
that the film doesn’t quite go far enough, in
terms of either humour or emotional depth.
After those promising opening scenes,
we never quite get inside the mind of
the title character. Despite a likeable
performance by O’Neill, Sweet Sue her-
self remains something of a mystery, an
enigma wrapped in red pleather, red wine
and vape in hand, trying and failing to find
her people.
In UK cinemas from 22 December

Trenque Lauquen
ARGENTINA/GERMANY/THE NETHERLANDS/FRANCE 2022
DIRECTOR LAURA CITARELLA
PRODUCERS INGRID POKROPEK
EZEQUIEL PIERRI
SCREENPLAY LAURA CITARELLA
LAURA PAREDES
SCREENPLAY COLLABORATION MARIANO LLINÁS
CINEMATOGRAPHY AGUSTÍN MENDILAHARZU
INÉS DUACASTELLA
YARARA RODRÍGUEZ
EDITING MIGUEL DE ZUVIRÍA
ALEJO MOGUILLANSKY
ART DIRECTION LAURA CALIGIURI
MUSIC GABRIEL CHWOJNIK
COSTUME DESIGN FLORA CALIGIURI
CAST LAURA PAREDES
EZEQUIEL PIERRI
RAFAEL SPREGELBURD
SYNOPSIS
JULIANA MURAS
Laura, who works in the small Argentinian town of
Trenque Lauquen, finds herself pulled into the area’s
mysteries, both historical (a secret 1960s love affair
expressed through passionate letters) and ongoing
(something, or someone, has been discovered in the
local lake). When Laura disappears, her two lovers
attempt to track her down.
REVIEWED BY ARJUN SAJIP
If you don’t hear the phrase ‘New Argentine Cinema’
much these days, perhaps that’s because the ‘new’
feels redundant. For decades, it has seemed that even
to be an Argentine indie film is to be bracingly differ-
ent, determined to bend, twist or shatter storytelling
conventions in pursuit of some grace or truth.
More than any single auteur, it is the filmmaking
collective El Pampero Cine that has been stretching
Argentine narrative experimentation – and project
gestation times – to the limit. Its co-founder, writer/
director Mariano Llinás, won global attention with
Extraordinary Stories (2008), a four-hour labyrinth of
splintered stories and mysteries within mysteries
that played like an impish cinematic homage to his
compatriot Jorge Luis Borges; he followed it up
with La Flor (2018), ten years in the making, clock-
ing in at over 13 hours and comprising a cornucopia
of genres, from romance to B-horror to musicals.
Now we have Trenque Lauquen – another epic
hymn to the unclassifiable, directed and co-written
by Llinás’s fellow Pampero progenitor Laura Cita-
rella. Though it’s similar to Llinás’s work in certain
respects – it’s four hours long, it took six years to
make, it’s interested in the tension between pre-
senting a narrative problem and resolving it – its
sensibilities are different. The mysteries are fewer
and more focused; genre elements are present but
muted; the whole thing breathes more slowly.
We begin in medias res: two middle-aged men,
Rafael and Ezequiel, are scouring the Argentine
RHETORICAL QUEST’S ON Laura Citarella as Carmen
backwater of Trenque Lauquen for Laura, who
has gone missing. Rafael is Laura’s boyfriend; unbe-
knownst to him, Ezequiel is her lover. Each succes-
sive chapter – there are 12 in total – both clarifies
and deepens the mystery: you think Laura, a bota-
nist, was tracking down a new plant species; then
you learn that what was really obsessing her was a
steamy tryst that took place decades ago, discovered
through letters hidden in books in the local library.
As the first half draws to a close, hints emerge of
a strange development: a taxonomically indistinct
creature has been discovered in the local lake, setting
the scene for a deliciously unexpected genre twist.
That such rabbit holes and rug-pulls never seem
absurd or over-engineered is testament to the pre-
cision of the plotting – more surprising when you
know that the complex non-chronological struc-
ture coalesced as the film was being shot. In spite of
its painstaking assemblage, the whole thing feels so
playful, and so porous. The line between diegetic
and extra-diegetic music is repeatedly blurred; the
sci-fi subplot feels oddly congruous with the realist
aesthetic; and the main characters are all played by
their namesakes: Ezequiel Pierri, Rafael Spregel-
burd, Laura Paredes (who co-wrote it).
The film is upfront about its puzzle-box nature:
the first chapter, ‘La Aventura’, is a nod to Anton-
ioni’s 1960 feature – also about the fruitless search
for a missing woman. But there’s a paradox here:
the delight of the plot’s mysteries is countervailed
by the suggestion that solving mysteries is a fool’s
errand. Anything too closely scrutinised is bound
to disappoint or disappear: Laura’s attempts to see
the creature only keep her from getting close to it,
and she may be lost to Rafael and Ezequiel forever
precisely because of their rational approach to ‘solv-
ing’ her. This is quite a contradiction for a mystery
film, and it’s only thanks to Citarella’s command of
pacing, and the balance she strikes between doling
out information and withholding it, that the final
act emerges as a reflexive critique of the urge to
crack human conundrums rather than a cop-out.
Perhaps there’s a way out of the paradox: the
recognition that investigations, even if doomed,
are intoxicating in themselves. Gabriel Chwojnik’s
score does much to bring home this headiness, at
one point stealing the show entirely. Around the time
the creature in the lagoon is mentioned, a solitary
theremin begins to warble; but as Rafael gets into his
car and begins to drive, this staple sound of B-movie
sci-fi finds itself accompanied by a loping acoustic
guitar rhythm – making the theremin sound for all
the world like Alessandro Alessandroni’s whistling in
Sergio Leone westerns. More than any visual in the
film, it gets at how blithely, how mischievously, how
masterfully Citarella toys with genre to redraw filmic
boundaries and confound expectations.
In UK cinemas now
131
Q&A
Laura Citarella
DIRECTOR
BY K ATIE MCCABE
Q For a mystery like this, how do
you decide what to give away
and what to leave uncertain?
A The film is mutating all the time:
the style, the genres, the mysteries.
I knew from the beginning that I
didn’t want to arrive to one thing,
to one truth... When I watch a film
which has a very literal and closed
conclusion, I feel frustrated. If you
open [up] the sense of a film, when it
is finished, then you will have two or
three days with the film living in your
head. And it’s a way of keeping the
FILMS
film alive... In a way it was trying to
copy the experience of reading novels.
Q You outline the film in chapters
and the first is titled ‘L’Aventura’.
Was that a very literal nod
to the Antonioni film?
A Yes. I really liked the moment [in
L’avventura] with Monica Vitti,
where they go to Noto – I think
it’s the name of the town – which
is all closed. So they arrived there,
looking for someone, and they
got a little bit lost. And I really
liked that image. I was wondering
how to portray a woman escaping
nowadays... I wanted to tell a story
of a woman that leaves because she
wants to, not because she has to.
Q Could you tell me a little bit about
the collective El Pampero Cine,
and where this film sits within it?
A We’ve been making independent films
for many years, not with the objective
of arriving on Amazon in the end, but
to keep independent... The traditional
way of making films is closing your
life for I don’t know, six weeks, for
example. With El Pampero Cine, we
live shooting, we are making films all
the time.... When you see us shooting,
we are like a group of people with all
of our children, and the grandmothers
going to take care of them, it’s like
an Italian way of making films.
[Laughs] So I think the result in the
end is different because the system of
producing those images is different.
132

Maestro his future wife Felicia (a marvellous,

grave but spirited Carey Mulligan, who
Yet to need is as human as to be
needed, and it is only after Felicia’s lung
KNOWING THE SCORE
Bradley Cooper as
Leonard Bernstein
gets this garrulous film’s few funny lines) cancer diagnosis – which she rages
DIRECTOR BRADLEY COOPER through to her deeply affecting death, it against in a heartbreakingly candid por-
PRODUCED BY MARTIN SCORSESE
BRADLEY COOPER is not one in which sexual fidelity plays trayal of the cruelty of terminal disease
STEVEN SPIELBERG much part. All through their decades of – that Lenny turns down public engage-
FRED BERNER
AMY DURNING marriage and the raising of their three ments and devotes himself to her.
KRISTIE MACOSKO children, whether cinematographer Mat- Cooper’s directorial style, right until
KRIEGER
WRIT TEN BY BRADLEY COOPER thew Libatique’s swooning imagery is in the graceful slowdown of the concluding
JOSH SINGER striking black and white or saturated, oily chapters, is to drop us mid-sentence into
CINEMATOGRAPHY MAT THEW LIBATIQUE
EDITED BY MICHELLE TESORO Kodachrome-style colour, Bernstein is conversations and in-jokes, all go-go-go,
FILMS

PRODUCTION DESIGN KEVIN THOMPSON
COSTUME DESIGN MARK BRIDGES
CAST CAREY MULLIGAN
BRADLEY COOPER
MAT T BOMER
SYNOPSIS
A kaleidoscopic biopic of charismatic
conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein
that focuses on his complex relationship
with actress Felicia Montealegre, from their
swooning early romance and marriage,
though their family life – destabilised by
Bernstein’s affairs with other men – to their
reconciliation and Felicia’s cancer diagnosis.
REVIEWED BY JESSICA KIANG
Some of the crackliest moments in
A Star Is Born (2018), Bradley Cooper’s
directorial debut, were specifically about
the act of creating music. A few bars of
a new tune are coaxed into the shape
of a hit, enlivened by the electricity of a
crowd, and a song is born – a thing of
beauty but with labour pains and stretch
marks that prove it’s earned.
The director-star returns to the arena
of the charismatic musician for his second
feature, but maybe Leonard Bernstein’s
genius was such that to imagine a similar
process for him would have felt presump-
tuous. At any rate, the handsomely shot,
superbly acted biopic Maestro is good on
the man, great on his marriage, but dis-
appointingly vague about his music, as
though all that wondrous work just hap-
pened while Bernstein was busy doing
other things. And other people.
Although Maestro is a love story that
plays out from Bernstein’s meeting with
having affairs with men. Felicia tolerates
them, right until she realises the toll her
forbearance has taken, in a show-stopper
domestic argument scene, set on Thanks-
giving, made all the more incredible by
the giant floating Snoopy bobbing past
the windows of the couple’s apartment.
But back to bar one: in a gorgeously
percussive monochrome sequence,
Cooper’s Bernstein receives the life-
changing phone call informing him that
he is to conduct the New York Philhar-
monic that night. He is tangled in bed-
sheets with his clarinettist lover (Matt
Bomer) but now dashes in pyjamas
through Carnegie Hall from his upstairs
apartment and on to the stage, tuxedoed,
like some swift Clark-Kent-to-Superman-
style transformation. Now flung out of
fame’s catapult, by the time of his meet-
ing Felicia, a Broadway actress, Lenny is
already the centre of any room’s attention.
This meeting is a giggly romantic delir-
ium, cleverly written to deliver both their
backstories in the form of a flirtation.
Their syncopation is already so genuine
that it makes sense of the way Felicia will
avert her eyes from Lenny’s later affairs:
who wouldn’t make certain sacrifices to
be one half of such an irresistible double
act? But no one can exist under condi-
tions of absolute selflessness forever. In
one of the film’s most perceptive scenes
Felicia confesses ruefully that she used to
look down on those – even her own chil-
dren – who craved Lenny’s time, when
she herself held on to him by issuing no
claim on him, by being the only one who
“didn’t need.”
chatter and sparkle. Maybe that’s what
it’s like to be this famous: you have licence
to leap over formalities because you can
assume everyone wants to be closer to
you, to be flattered by the fleeting interest
you show. Cooper’s performance dazzles
(even if his animation never quite extends
to the tip of his controversially enhanced
nose), but the approach allows Bernstein
little depth, as though the man, who was
reportedly so much the extrovert that he’d
leave the door open while using the toilet,
only existed within sight of others.
This does a disservice to Bernstein’s
musical achievements, which came from
some place inside him that the movie
never accesses, and included myriad
compositions, the revolutionising of
the contemporary classical music scene
and, with West Side Story especially, the
establishment of a blazing new standard
in musical theatre. Key artistic collabora-
tors get barely a look-in: choreographer
Jerome Robbins (Michael Urie) is pre-
sent in the background of a scene or two
as ‘Jerry’; Stephen Sondheim gets one
scanty shout-out from Felicia as ‘Stevie’.
Bernstein states and restates his love
for music, how it saves his life, and how,
paraphrasing Edna St Vincent Millay, it
is the summer that sings in him. But aside
from one powerful sequence, which soar-
ingly recreates in Ely Cathedral his iconic
performance of Mahler’s Resurrection
Symphony, Maestro is all about the singer,
and not enough about the song.
In UK cinemas now and on
Netflix from 22 December

Samsara In Buddhist philosophy, the word ‘sam-
sara’ refers to the nature of life as a cycle of
deaths and rebirths. It is this process that
SPAIN/SOUTH KOREA 2023 CERTIFICATE U 114M 16S Lois Patiño evokes to breathtaking effect
in Samsara, a film with a triptych structure
DIRECTOR LOIS PATIÑO
PRODUCED BY LEIRE APELLANIZ that follows a soul from the body of Mon
SCREENPLAY LOIS PATIÑO (Simone Milavanh), an elderly woman in
GARBIÑE ORTEGA
CINEMATOGRAPHY LAOS MAURO HERCE Laos, and later into the form of a baby goat
CINEMATOGRAPHY ZANZIBAR JESSICA SARAH RINLAND in Zanzibar. It is a voyage that probes spir-
EDITOR LOIS PATIÑO
ART DIRECTOR GARBIÑE ORTEGA itual and cinematic boundaries to create
MUSIC X ABIER ERKIZIA a deeply moving meditation on what hap-
CAST AMID KEOMANY
TOUMOR XIONG pens after we die and is, at times, a trans-
SIMONE MILAVANH cendent experience.
Around the halfway point of Samsara,
SYNOPSIS
onscreen text explains that we will now
Laos, present day. Against the backdrop of a Buddhist follow the soul of Mon into the bardo, the
temple, an elderly woman named Mon is approaching her
liminal state between bodies – a 15-minute
death. A local boy helps her prepare for her soul’s journey
into the next life by reading her the Tibetan Book of the
sequence that served as the film’s genesis for
Dead. Meanwhile, in Zanzibar, a baby goat is born. Patiño. We must close our eyes for this sec-
tion of the film, and the effect of the sensory
REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON symphony that unfolds is contemplative and
genuinely transformational. Audio land-
scapes meld into one another, suggestive of
shifting earthly environs and those far more
ineffable. The light show – a combination of
flashes and glowing colour fields, all viewed
through closed eyelids – evokes the dappled
sunlight of deep forest as easily as the heav-
enly grandeur of the beyond. The sequence
is among the most enrapturing cinematic
gambits of recent years.
Of course, the majority of Samsara’s
LEAPS OF FAITH Samsara runtime occurs in the mortal realm. Patiño
It is a deeply moving meditation on what happens after we die and, at times, a transcendent experience
SAMSARA
Freaks vs the Reich Films that intermingle the events and
details of World War II with fantastical
imaginings inevitably stray into question-
DIRECTOR GABRIELE MAINET TI able terrain. And yet, the risk of trivialising
PRODUCED BY GABRIELE MAINET TI
ANDREA OCCHIPINTI the era’s real-life horrors is not so daunting
SCREENPLAY GABRIELE MAINET TI to the many filmmakers who believe there’s
NICOLA GUAGLIANONE
STORY NICOLA GUAGLIANONE an endless appetite for the sight of Nazi sol-
CINEMATOGRAPHY MICHELE D’AT TANASIO diers getting blown to pieces.
EDITOR FRANCESCO DI STEFANO
PRODUCTION DESIGN MASSIMILIANO STURIALE With Freaks vs the Reich – which premiered
MUSIC MICHELE BRAGA under the English title of Freaks Out at the
GABRIELE MAINET TI
COSTUME DESIGN MARY MONTALTO Venice festival in 2021 – director Gabriele
CAST CLAUDIO SANTAMARIA Mainetti obliges with several satisfactorily
PIETRO CASTELLIT TO
FRANZ ROGOWSKI grisly set pieces. They punctuate his tale of
four super-powered circus performers – the
SYNOPSIS insect-controlling Cencio (Pietro Castel-
Italy, 1943. After their travelling circus is destroyed during litto), the ‘man-beast’ Fulvio (Claudio San-
an aerial bombing, four performers with very special tamaria), the magnetic Mario (Giancarlo
abilities attempt to leave for America with their kindly Martini) and the electrically charged Mat-
impresario. Instead, they must evade the leader of a Nazi ilde (Aurora Giovinazzo) – who are eagerly
circus, a six-fingered pianist whose ether-induced visions sought by Franz (Franz Rogowski), a sadis-
of the future suggest the unusual foursome are the key to tic, six-fingered seer who believes they could
Germany’s victory. be a deciding factor in the war’s outcome.
REVIEWED BY JASON ANDERSON
In spite of its own bloodlust, Mainetti’s
film shares less with payback fantasies like
Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Sisu (2022)
than it does with A Very Long Engagement
(2004), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s World War I
set-effort to situate whimsical magic realism
and earnest sentimentality alongside lavishly
orchestrated carnage. The circus theme and
broad, bawdy Italian humour add a Fell-
iniesque flavour, though when a character
refers to our heroes as the ‘fantastic four’ it
A PLIGHT AT THE CIRCUS Freaks vs the Reich underlines that the material is essentially a
133
worked with different cinematographers
for each section – both filmmakers in their
own right – and the result is two distinct
chapters representing these different incar-
nations. The scenes in Laos were shot by
Mauro Herce and have their own other-
worldly quality. Centring on the occupants
of a Buddhist temple, this segment is
focused on the achievement of enlighten-
ment and Herce’s luminous cinematogra-
phy emphasises its dreamlike aspects. Here
novices dream of elephants in the forest and
reflect on becoming monks, while Mon
approaches the end of one life by preparing
to voyage to the next.
Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Zanzibar foot-
age is far more tactile. Rinland’s own films
have often focused on the labour of the
hands, which reappears here. A young girl,
Juwairiya (Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu), cares
for the family’s pet goat, Neema – the rein-
carnated Mon – while the women of the
community farm seaweed. This section con-
structs a more concrete, corporeal world.
The juxtaposition of the two halves – the
philosophical and political, the metaphysi-
cal and the material – seems to celebrate the
breadth of lived experience. The passage
between them allows us to marvel at cin-
ema’s miraculous capacity for the transpor-
tive and sublime.
In UK cinemas from 26 January
FILMS
comic-book fable about a group of misfits
who must realise their collective potential
if they hope to survive the wrath of a world-
threatening baddie. Thankfully, the film’s
energy is usually enough to compensate for
lapses into incoherence and bathos, though
some viewers may feel less forgiving of
scenes of Jewish civilians being packed into
trains and the attempted rape of Matilde by
German soldiers.
As much as the production design may
share with the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet,
Marc Caro and Guillermo del Toro, Freaks
vs the Reich still has its own vivid and peculiar
details, especially amid the queasy opulence
and steampunk menace of the villain’s circus
lair. As charismatic here as in Ira Sachs’s
recent Passages, Rogowski lends an under-
current of wounded poignancy to Franz,
himself an outcast due to the additional
finger that makes him such a proficient
pianist. In one clever touch, his repertoire
includes songs by Radiohead and Guns N’
Roses, Franz having plundered their melo-
dies from his premonitions.
But even Rogowski’s gusto has nearly
been exhausted before the final fiery con-
flagration, Mainetti having stuffed his film
with too much of everything. Then again,
when it comes to making action-fantasy
spectaculars full of circus freaks and Nazi
occultists, there’s no reward for restraint.
In UK cinemas from 12 January
134

Napoleon I am not subject to petty insecurity,” he tells his wife Jose-

phine, despite having just returned from Egypt in a jealous
THREE MORE
NAPOLEON EPICS
rage. For all his brilliance and bravery, he is an anxious sol-
CERTIFICATE 15 157M 28S
dier from the start: at Toulon, besieging Royalist rebels, he BY ELLIS LAMAI

DIRECTOR RIDLEY SCOT T

mutters under his breath, then makes little nervous grunts
PRODUCED BY RIDLEY SCOT T as he climbs a ladder into battle. Later, before the coup d’état
MARK HUFFAM establishes him in power, he flees an angry crowd, gasping,
KEVIN J. WALSH
WRIT TEN BY DAVID SCARPA “They’re going to kill me!” (very nearly this film’s ‘Infamy!
CINEMATOGRAPHY DARIUSZ WOLSKI Infamy!’ moment).
EDITORS CLAIRE SIMPSON
SAM RESTIVO Counterpointing Napoleon’s conquest is a faintly raunchy
PRODUCTION DESIGN ARTHUR MA X account of Josephine’s conquest of him. First seen released
MUSIC MARTIN PHIPPS
COSTUME DESIGN JANTY YATES from imprisonment under the Terror, she catches Bona- NAPOLÉON (1927)
CAST JOAQUIN PHOENIX parte’s eye at the aforementioned ball with her proto-punk A triumph of the silent era,
VANESSA KIRBY
LUDIVINE SAGNIER crop and décolletage, then imperiously asserts her sexual Napoléon is a rich historical
RUPERT EVERET T domination over this shy, awkward soldier, parting her thighs epic set over five hours and
four acts, from Bonaparte’s
in a knowing act of possession. Later, frantic at learning that
SYNOPSIS childhood to his rise through
Josephine has a lover, Napoleon returns from Egypt to con- the ranks after the French
Following the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte becomes front her, initiating a new closeness in their relationship:
First Consul of France in a coup d’état. Crowned Emperor, he Revolution and his meeting
divorces the Empress Josephine because she has not borne him
clumsy and insensitive in his lovemaking, he nevertheless with Josephine. Abel
an heir. After defeat in Russia, Bonaparte is exiled to Elba; he seems to impress her with his gauche enthusiasm and sheer Gance’s unparalleled vision
returns to power but is finally defeated at Waterloo. appetite (at one point, even dragging her under the imperial and technical innovation
dinner table). But, until he divorces her, the power balance is in Napoleon – from fast
REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY in her favour: she tells Napoleon, “Without me, you’re noth- cutting to handheld cameras
and his pioneering use of
ing,” and at the very end of the film, she suggests to him in the ‘Polyvision’ widescreen
At the very least, Ridley Scott’s latest film can be considered voiceover that in another life, she will be Emperor. format – had a lasting
a display of Napoleonic confidence – at once carrying off the Phoenix never quite brings Bonaparte to life as a know- impact on cinema.
feat that Stanley Kubrick never managed and blithely risking able being – an all but impossible task, surely – but he does
comparison with a milestone of silent cinema, Abel Gance’s flesh him out in interesting ways. He gives him the heavy,
epic of 1927. leggy stride of a seasoned horseman; emphasises his languid
Gance’s Napoléon was highly traditional, with its debt to heavy-lidded gaze. At the start, Phoenix’s American-accented
19th-century history painting, but it was also radically mod- delivery has a light, Malkovichian airiness, becoming more
ernist, its climactic three-screen projection the granddaddy harshly forceful as the film progresses. As Josephine, the silky
of blockbuster immersiveness. By contrast, Scott’s film is voiced Vanessa Kirby doesn’t quite go through comparable
academic, archaic, yet eminently watchable – a biopic with changes but overall, offers a richer, more intriguing perfor- WAR AND PEACE (1956)
spectacular set pieces, a hefty load of educational content and mance as a woman who has learned to use her sexuality to Hollywood’s first stab
an alluring streak of bedchamber melodrama. survive the Terror, and who seems startled by the complex at Tolstoy’s Napoleonic
FILMS

Nothing if not grandiose, Napoleon confirms Scott’s own feelings she develops as the adored and abused spouse of era novel – and its first
status as a cinematic general, commanding legions of actors a self-made legend: an extreme prototype of the modern adaptation in the sound era
trophy wife. – King Vidor’s splendorous
and technicians: in the battle recreations, aerial shots and
War and Peace stars Audrey
widescreen convey a precise sense of military formations David Scarpa’s script is generally confident, but not with- Hepburn as Natasha
and their deployment. Kinetically taking us into the thick of out salient oddities: Napoleon hisses at a British ambassador, opposite a miscast Henry
battle, the film is anything but euphemistic about the carnage “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” The two Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov.
behind the fabled place names. At Austerlitz, men and horses leads apart, the film rarely allows anyone else to impose their The 208-minute runtime and
plummet through icy blood-streaked water; at the siege of presence – a notable exception being a featured Rupert Ever- impressive set-piece battles
Toulon, Bonaparte’s face is spattered with blood after his ett, ripely lofty as the Duke of Wellington. The other star, of pale next to the gargantuan
horse dies in a shower of entrails. course, is the iconic hat, which Bonaparte initially wears at a seven-hour adaptation by
the Russian director Sergei
Scott and his star Joaquin Phoenix appear to take some rakish diagonal, before straightening it for battle at Toulon,
Bondarchuk that came along
prompts from the 1927 film – notably, the supercilious in a determined ‘Let’s rock’ gesture. This is shortly after an in 1965.
detachment with which Bonaparte surveys the shenani- English soldier has yelled at him, “Oi shitbag!” – not that the
gans at a post-Terror Bal des victimes echoes the frowning film emphasises it, but you might well imagine this as the
solemnity of Gance’s lead Albert Dieudonné. But Scott’s primal moment that sparked a whole career and the formida-
film follows its own direction in humanising its subject: this ble battlefield death-toll chronicled in the end credits.
Bonaparte avidly subscribes to his own myth, as blindly in
thrall to it as anyone else. “I am not built like other men and In UK cinemas now

WATERLOO (1970)
After War and Peace, Sergei
Bondarchuk tried another
mammoth Napoleonic
epic. This Italian-Soviet
co-production depicts
Napoleon Bonaparte (Rod
Steiger) in a frantic bid for
power post-abdication,
building to the Battle of
Waterloo – which gets a
full hour of screen time
and involves 15,000 extras
in authentic uniform. The
reception was lukewarm
at the time, with Monthly
Film Bulletin saying that its
attention-grabbing effects
made the spectator feel like
“the victim of a conspiracy
on the director’s part to keep
KID WITH A BICORN Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte him awake at all costs”.
Screenwriters
Advice
By Andrew Zinnes and Genevieve
Jolliffe, Bloomsbury Academic, 376pp,
paperback, £24.99, 9781501363276
This book looks at the most important
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classical Narration Cinematography
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A concise and comprehensive
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With dozens of cases studies and
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production milieus in the 1990s, the
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From Lars von Trier's Europa (1991)
to Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead
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consciousness.
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Camera, Lighting, and Other Production
Aspects for Multiple Camera Image Capture
By David Landau and Bruce Finn,
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in multi-camera productions. The
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Global Film Cultures in the Era of Online
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World Cinema on DemandEULQJV
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 136
DVD & BLU-RAY

At the beginning of Ben Rivers’s 2019 Many of the films in this collection

Worlds: film Ghost Strata, the artist records a

tarot reading conducted while he was
working in São Paulo and seeking some
incorporate elements of genre – par-
ticularly science fiction – though Riv-
ers’s work is ambiguous enough to defy

Selected works direction for his film. “I would say this

movie is about you… but all your movies
are about you,” the tarot reader remarks
simple classification. Rather than the
conventions of such cinematic categories
being allowed to define his films, instead

by Ben Rivers before continuing to offer him further

In films that invite the viewer to play
detective, examining traces of vanished
societies in the present, of our own vanished
society in imagined futures, of individuals
in the spaces they inhabit, perhaps we will
stumble on clues to the director himself
REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON
THE RIVERS WILD
Cherry the sloth in
Now, at Last! (2019, above);
scenes from Slow Action
(2010, opposite)
guidance. The moment turned out to
be the genesis of the film, prompting a
year-long diaristic travelogue composed
of chapters that feel at once discrete and,
somehow, associated. The comment
also alludes to the broader intercon-
nectedness of Rivers’s oeuvre – some-
thing that is not necessarily overt within
each film but is cast into sharp relief in
Second Run’s new Blu-ray box-set of his
work, Worlds.
Curated by the artist himself, the
collection brings together 24 f ilms
made across nearly two decades. In an
interview in this publication (Sight and
Sound, May 2012), Rivers, discussing his
feature Two Years at Sea (2011), said that
the things that one accumulates can
be seen as “a language built up to
portray the person”. Taken together with
the tarot reader’s canny observation,
this suggests that a dive into the short
and medium-length films assembled
here – and the diverse subjects they
cast their eye across – can provide a
revealing portrait of the artist as well as
his various preoccupations.
their presence feels nebulous and elusive,
in service of more fundamental lines of
enquiry. Something similar is true of
Rivers’s approach to the mode of his
films. He has referred to himself in the
past as an ‘accidental anthropologist’ and
has spoken about not wishing the non-
fiction nature of much of his work to lead
to it being characterised solely as ‘docu-
mentary, given the contrivances inher-
ent in its construction. The genres and
modes Rivers works in – much like the
16mm celluloid upon which he prefers
to record – are not restrictions but mal-
leable tools deployed in service of ideas.
Perhaps Rivers’s most prominent use
of sci-fi elements comes in the form of
the Urthworks films – Slow Action (2010),
Urth (2016) and Look Then Below (2019).
This ‘speculative trilogy’, as Rivers
refers to them, was made in collabora-
tion with the American science fiction
writer Mark von Schlegell, who wrote
the narrations. All three films use their
audio – in each case the account or nota-
tions of a future scientist or observer –
to reframe analogue, often documentary
imagery. Slow Action purports to take

THE HYRCYNIUM WOOD place after a rise in sea levels has created
OLD DARK HOUSE secluded island societies and the voiceo-
WE THE PEOPLE ver describes the divergent utopias that
HOUSE have emerged in isolation. In Urth, shot
in Biosphere 2, a research facility in Ari-
THE COMING RACE
zona conceived as a closed ecological
ASTIKA system, the narrator is the sole surviving
THIS IS MY LAND scientist locked inside, reflecting on the
ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES experiment in her final log entries. Look
AH, LIBERTY! Then Below recontextualises Wookey
A WORLD RATTLED OF HABIT Hole Caves in Somerset as the habitat
I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING of a subterranean species, newly evolved
SLOW ACTION after environmental disaster, which is
SACK BARROW being encountered for the first time.
PHANTOMS OF A LIBERTINE Each of these science-nonfiction films
exists somewhere on an ethnographic
THINGS
spectrum, imagining and investigating
THERE IS A HAPPY LAND
forms of endurance detached from con-
FURTHER AWAAY temporary human society.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS This is, in fact, a broader refrain of
URTH Rivers’s work. A number of his best-
TREES DOWN HERE known short films involve portraits of
LOOK THEN BELOW individuals who live beyond the stric-
NOW, AT LAST! tures of recognisable communities – or
GHOST STRATA they explore places that strangely lack
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET habitation though they do bear its ves-
IJEN / LONDON tigial hallmarks or are peopled by almost
spectral presences. Some of these are
more familiar in their documentary
Ben Rivers; 2003-22; Second
Run; region-free Blu-ray, 2 sensibility. This Is My Land (2006) is a
discs; b&w and colour; English monochrome portrait of Jake Williams
SDH; 415 minutes; 1.33:1 / 1.78:1 /
2.60:1 / 2.85:1. Extras: booklet. – who would later be the focus of Two
Years at Sea – in his Aberdeenshire home,
surrounded by miles of woodland; the
eponymous subject of Astika, made the
same year, is a resident of a Danish
island who is being forced to leave the
farm he’s lived on for 15 years because his
efforts to rewild the land are unpopular
with neighbours. In both these films,
the central figures seem displaced from
time – crafting personal utopias on their
own verdant islands, they could, leav-
ing aside the odd incursion of the real
world, be occupants of a hypothetical
Ben Rivers future.
In I Know Where I’m Going (2009),
an uncanny road trip along some of
Britain’s less travelled highways, the
geologist Jan Zalasiewicz’s descriptions
on the soundtrack of a potential post-
human world lend the visuals of unpop-
ulated landscapes an eerie quality. Once
again, observational footage takes on a
nebulous and intriguing meaning. In
Ijen / London (2022), footage from the
crater of a volcano in East Java is hurled
into the far future to become the putrid
swamp where the English capital once
stood; the soundtrack is the critic (and
co-founder of the ICA) Herbert Read
reading his poem ‘The Autumn of the
World’, but it evokes Richard Jefferies’
1885 novel After London. Time is frac-
tured in its most explicit and fanciful
form in Now, at Last! (2019) a portrait of
137
Cherry, a sloth living in a Costa Rican
jungle sanctuary. Attempting to con-
jure the essence of Cherry’s experience
of time, Rivers punctuates long takes
of patient black-and-white observation
with eruptions of three-colour separa-
tion, which places multiple sloths on
screen, in different stages of movement,
accompanied by the Righteous Broth-
ers’ ‘Unchained Melody’. Across these
films Rivers is able to be fascinated by
timescales beyond Homo sapiens, craft-
ing intellectually curious future echoes
of disappeared societies while making
deeply philosophical and humane work.
In Phantoms of a Libertine (2012), he
films the unoccupied apartment of a
friend, imagining himself a stranger,
endeavouring to unravel the enigma
of the person through the things that
they had accumulated. In Things (2014)
he attempts to do the same for himself,
though his booklet notes suggest he got
lost on the way. Perhaps revisiting his
filmography on pristine Blu-ray would
have done the trick.
The discs themselves have no addi-
tional features. Accompanying them is a
32-page booklet which includes Rivers’s
own short notes on each film as well as
a wide-ranging essay by Erika Balsom
which pulls at numerous threads that
run throughout Rivers’s work.
DVD & BLU-RAY
 138

BLACKHAT THE SPANISH DANCER

Michael Mann; US 2015; Arrow; 4K Ultra HD Herbert Brenon; US 1923; Milestone;
or Region B Blu-ray, 2 discs; English SDH; region-free Blu-ray; tinted b&w; silent,
Certificate 15; 133 minutes; 2.39:1. Extras: with English intertitles; 106 minutes; 1.33:1.
alternative international version; director’s Extras: audio commentary by Scott Eyman,
cut; new audio commentary; interviews Naima Prevots; interview with composer
with cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, Bill Ware;restoration demo; score.
production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas;
making-of featurettes; image gallery; booklet.
REVIEWED BY PAMELA HUTCHINSON
Early Skolimowski REVIEWED BY HENRY K. MILLER
How do you make a Rudolph
Valentino picture without Valentino?
WALKOVER “Open your eyes,” Chen Lien (Tang
This film, a lavish adaptation of a
BARRIER Wei) tells ace hacker Nick Hathaway
mid 19th-century French comedy, Don
(Chris Hemsworth), his mind still
DIALOG 20-40-60 César de Bazan, was developed as a star
stuck in the prison he has just got
vehicle for the heart-throb, before he
Jerzy Skolimowski; Poland/Czechoslovakia 1965-68; Second Run; region-free Blu-ray,
out of, “get your thinking to where
walked out of Famous Players-Lasky
3 discs; in Polish/Czech with English subtitles; Certificate 12; 71/81/80 minutes; you are.” “What, Koreatown? This
1.66:1. Extras: four short films; audio commentaries by Michael Brooke; booklets.
on ‘strike’. Trouble was, at United
restaurant, this table?” Michael Mann’s
Artists, Mary Pickford had hired one
only film of the 2010s sets out to be
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP Ernst Lubitsch to make his Hollywood
about the theoretically placeless,
debut directing her in a version of
weightless world of ‘cyber’ (its original
A poet, jazz drummer, boxer and student of ethnography, Jerzy the same tale. The studio scrambled
title) but is always drawn back to the
Skolimowski wasn’t drawn to filmmaking until, aged 19, he attended to rewrite the film for a female lead,
tangible: this restaurant, this table. An
a Writers’ Union summer school where Andrzej Wajda was preparing casting Pola Negri – a German star
unkempt Dr Mabuse, Blackhat’s villain
the screenplay for his next film, Innocent Sorcerers (1960). Invited who had made her name with Lubitsch
Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen) farms
to contribute suggestions, he wound up co-writing the script and – to carry The Spanish Dancer.
out his ‘sub-symbolic’ (ie, physical)
appeared in the movie as a young boxer. Encouraged by Wajda, he With Negri’s captivating style, broad
work (ie, violence) to hired goons.
entered the State Film College at Łódź and collaborated with Polanski smile and expressive movement, the
DVD & BLU-RAY

Hathaway proudly does his own.

on the script of the latter’s first feature, Knife in the Water (1962). film bounces along as a frisky romp,
Hathaway has been furloughed to
At Łódź Skolimowski collected footage from his technical exercises, set in a picturesque Hollywood
assist a joint US-Chinese mission to
assembling them into his debut feature, Identification Marks: None treatment of the Spanish countryside
take down Sadak after he hacks into
(1964). Already he had shot eight short films, four featuring on this (actually the Players-Lasky Ranch).
the Chicago Stock Exchange and
set: Little Hamlet, The Menacing Eye (both 1960), Erotyk and Your Money Negri’s glittering performance sparks
spikes the price of soy; but as so often
or Your Life (both 1961) – two of them without dialogue, the longest off her co-stars: Wallace Beery,
in Mann, the massive resources of the
running eight minutes. All four display the wry, cynical humour and positively growling as the villainous
state fall short, and Hathaway and
disregard for narrative logic characteristic of Skolimowski’s early work, King, and Adolphe Menjou, both
Chen Lien are thrown back on their
while exploring the visual effects of mirrors and shadows. of whom have more than enough
own to survive. The hunt will take
In Identification Marks: None Skolimowski himself had played the lead oomph to keep up. Antonio Moreno,
them from Chicago to Los Angeles to
role, Leszczyc, a young man trying to delay his call-up into the army. as her handsome love interest, is
Hong Kong and finally Jakarta, with
Walkover (1965, pictured above), released slightly earlier, provides a inevitably rather overshadowed.
an interlude in Malaysia.
sequel. Leszczyc is now an amateur boxer; as he arrives at a provincial But the Negri show is well worth
Mann has professed himself
town, a young woman throws herself under his train, setting the film’s viewing, especially the close-ups and
fascinated by the online world, but
grim, downbeat mood. Tempted back into the ring, Leszczyc scores her dances, choreographed by an
his revealed preference is for the
an undeserved victory which soon turns sour. Pleading ignorance of uncredited Ernest Belcher. Herbert
real location – for teeming cities,
editing, Skolimowski shot Walkover in a series of long continuous Brenon directs with a pictorial style,
for infrastructure, and for the motor
takes, some 35 in all. When the film was shown at the New York Film though a rather static camera, and
vehicles, aircraft and boats his
Festival, Jean-Luc Godard hailed Skolimowski as one of the two best cinematography by James Wong Howe
characters move around in. He buries
directors in the world (the other, of course, being himself ). adds yet more sun-kissed glamour.
himself in research but will ultimately
Godard’s influence was evident in Skolimowski’s next feature, Barrier The Spanish Dancer was a hit, much
find himself – to echo Chen Lien’s
(1966), shot in a snow-laden Warsaw in high-contrast monochrome. more of a crowd-pleaser than Rosita,
warning to Hathaway – “in the rapid
Surrealist in technique, with scant regard for narrative coherence, the Pickford-Lubitsch collaboration,
stream of decision-making”, and his
it features a nameless student (Jan Novicki) resentful that fast cars, and launched Negri in Hollywood.
image-making feels spontaneous,
luxury flats and attractive women are reserved for the older generation However, it was long considered all
a response to the fleeting and the
– the ‘barrier’ of the title is what prevents him grasping these but lost, available only in chopped-
contingent. The aggressively ‘digital’
desirables. He also falls in love with an attractive young tram-driver up, abridged prints. This epic Eye
look of 2000s Mann is pushed even
(Joanna Szczerbic, Skolimowski’s second wife). Filmmuseum restoration combines
further in Blackhat, which has a
Skolimowski went on to make his first film outside Poland – Le Départ several incomplete sources to create a
thrillingly raw quality that marks it out
(1967), shot in Belgium and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. Back in Poland version that more closely replicates the
from the over-choreographed rut into
his next feature was Hands Up! (1967), “a violent scream” against the glories of its 1923 release.
which so much contemporary action
Stalinist regime. Withdrawn by the government from the Venice Film cinema has fallen.
Festival, it was banned until 1981 (the BFI Blu-ray release, coupled Disc: The film now benefits from a
with Identification Marks: None, was reviewed in S&S in June). In modern jazz score by composer Bill
Discs: The director’s cut, which
Czechoslovakia Skolimowski contributed the first of three parts of a Ware, who explains his process in a
Arrow delayed this release to include,
portmanteau film, Dialog 20-40-60 (1968), again starring Léaud (dubbed short interview. Another supplement
is a significant improvement on the
into Czech). In each segment (the other two directed by Peter Solan demonstrates the restoration, while
studio’s version, which mangled
and Zbynek Brynych), a man comes home to find another couple in his the audio commentary is a game of two
Mann’s clean, linear narrative.
apartment playing out a sex fantasy. The characters’ ages differ according very informative halves: Hollywood
to each 20/40/60 age-group, but each segment shares the same dialogue. historian Scott Eyman contributes an
By now Skolimowski preferred self-exile to the cultural and political expansive run-down of the personnel
constrictions of Communist Poland. Not for nearly 40 years would he involved, especially but not exclusively
make another film in his native country. Negri, Brenon and Howe, before dance
scholar Naima Prevots takes over to
Discs: The scrupulous restorations show up the grainy imperfections of tell us all about the choreographer
the original stock. But it doesn’t detract. Ernest Belcher and his contribution.

REDISCOVERY
Glauber Rocha; Brazil 1964;
Mawu Films; region-free Blu-
ray; b&w; in Portuguese with
English subtitles; Certificate
12; 120 minutes; 1.37:1. Extras:
commentary by restoration
supervisor Lino Meireles;
visual essay by Manuela Lazic
and Alessandro Luchetti;
2003 documentary on Rocha;
2016 documentary on cinema
novo; trailer; booklet.
BY BEN NICHOLSON
CITIZENS BANDIT
Othon Bastos as Corisco
Black God, White Devil
To depict the desperation of poverty-stricken
Brazilian farmers, the young Glauber Rocha
stepped away from neorealism, creating a feverish
story of apocalyptic religion and violent revolt
The cinema novo movement of the 1960s
was envisioned as a challenge to the con-
ventions that had been imported into
Brazilian filmmaking through the influ-
ence of Hollywood. In his manifesto of
1965, ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’, one of
the foremost practitioners of the move-
ment, Glauber Rocha, described the
artistic landscape of his country as being
laden with “a formal exoticism that vul-
garises social problems”. The intention
was to act as a prophylactic against such
depictions and, particularly in its early
years (or ‘First Phase’, 1960-64), cinema
novo strove to bring light to the strug-
gles of the downtrodden and exploited.
When Rocha’s second feature film, Black
God, White Devil, premiered in 1964, it
was not only the most prominent of the
films to date – it was selected for competi-
tion at Cannes and became the Brazilian
submission for the Academy Awards –
but it has subsequently been held up as
a work that typifies the values espoused
during the period and has endured as one
of the greatest Brazilian films ever made.
After a painstaking recent restoration, the
film is being rereleased by Janus Films in
the US and on a resplendent new Blu-ray
by Mawu Films in the UK.
The plot of Black God, White Devil fol-
lows a cowherd named Manuel (Ger-
aldo Del Rey) and his wife Rosa (Yoná
Magalhães) as they struggle through
difficult times in the arid sertão of north-
eastern Brazil. They live a hardscrabble
life in thrall to a callous landowner, who
Manuel attacks and kills in a fit of rage
at particularly unjust treatment. The
couple is forced to go on the lam, and
they fall in with a nascent religious cult
led by the self-proclaimed saint Sebastião
(Lídio Silva), who prophesies a cleansing
fire and primes his flock for apocalyp-
tic insurrection. A gruff bounty-hunter
named Antônio das Mortes (Maurício do
Valle) – who would go on to be the central
figure of a 1969 Rocha film, is despatched
by local authorities to remedy the situa-
tion. After an intense gun battle at the
cult’s hilltop retreat, the central duo leave
Sebastião dead and find themselves on
the run again, this time joining the ranks
of rebellious bandit Corisco (Othon
Bastos), who has his own bloody war to
wage. The film’s narrative, though, is just
part of what’s going on.
There was great variation among the
styles of films and filmmakers regarded
as part of cinema novo, but the first work
produced owed much to Italian neoreal-
ism. However, rather than a somewhat
naturalistic depiction of poverty, Rocha
conceived of his aesthetics of hunger
as a febrile, interconnected evocation
which “narrated, described, poeticised,
discoursed, analysed, [and] aroused
the themes of hunger”. Rocha was argu-
ably more enamoured of the spirit of the
French New Wave and, keen to move
beyond the frameworks of traditional
cinema, he folded various creative ele-
ments into Black God, White Devil that
imbue it with its own pyretic energy.
Those elements range from the use of
a musical narration – in lyrical descriptive
ballads written by Rocha and scored by
Heitor Villa-Lobos and Sérgio Ricardo
– stilted performances and sometimes
glacial pacing to intrusive, stylised sound
design and handheld camerawork that
bristles with nervous vitality. Rocha was
only in his mid-twenties when he made
the film, and an audience might see in
some of these things the rough edges
of a young filmmaker working on a con-
strained budget. However, he intention-
ally jostles the components to create a
work that coarsely combines the allegori-
cal and the visceral, reality and myth, the
frenzy of religious enthusiasm and the
deliberate devilry of violent revolt.
The f ilm’s f irst half sees Manuel
become an ardent disciple of Saint
Sebastião, despite Rosa’s consterna-
tion. In this section, the filmmaking
language is that of urgency; time is fre-
quently elided, the camera often adopts
positions that create intimate close-ups,
and Eisensteinian montage creates dra-
matic sequences of ferocity and suffer-
ing, while the story unfurls some of its
most shocking moments. Even when
a scene is drawn out, the soundtrack is
often loud, intense and discordant. The
effect is almost palpable. The torment,
139
desperation and zeal are felt as much as
they are observed. Here, violence seems
to become the only possible response
DVD & BLU-RAY
from those in such straits. The film’s
composition mimics its protagonists’
situation: when Manuel and Rosa find
themselves aligned with Corisco, the
mechanics change. Shot durations are far
longer, pacing more deliberate, the loca-
tion sparse and depopulated, the action
a shifting moral dialogue rather than the
staccato study of faith seen previously.
The sound continues to be somewhat
over-produced, but the effect now is not
wild immersion but of a creeping unreal-
ity, creating a folkloric milieu.
The formally divergent nature of the
film’s two halves complicates the way audi-
ences receive the film and forces them to
consider its thematic concerns from mul-
tiple perspectives. Speaking to Cineaste
magazine in 1970, Rocha stated: “To make
film is to make a contribution to the revo-
lution, to stoke it, in order to make people
in Brazil conscious of their condition.”
While some of the takeaways may initially
seem incontrovertible and explicit, in
Black God, White Devil the politics are far
from didactic. They’re complicated and
contradictory in such a way as to dislodge
preconceptions and – in theory – force
the viewer to grapple with the questions
that have been raised and to confront a
previously unseen truth. For the Brazilian
audience of 1964, this meant reckoning
with the despairing situation of the poor.
To a modern audience, the film demands
a level of engagement that undermines
the simplistic devotion to or validation of
existing beliefs – whether they be politi-
cal, religious, or cinematic. It’s just one of
the many ways the film continues to feel
vital and relevant even as it approaches its
50th anniversary.
 140
ARCHIVE TV
IVOR THE ENGINE
Peter Firmin, Oliver Postgate;
UK 1959-64, 1975-77; Fabulous
Films; Region B Blu-ray, Region
2 DVD; 3 discs; b&w/colour;
English SDH for some episodes;
Certificate U; 516 minutes; 1.33:1.
Extras: featurette, speech by
Firmin from 2014 Bafta Children’s
Awards; The Story of Smallfilms
(2005).
CLANGERS
Peter Firmin, Oliver Postgate;
UK 1969-72; Fabulous Films;
Region B Blu-ray, Region 2 DVD;
English SDH; Certificate U;
249 minutes. Extras: featurette,
speech by Firmin from 2014 Bafta
Children’s Awards; The Story of
Smallfilms (2005); 1974 general
election special ‘Vote for Froglet’.
BAGPUSS
DVD & BLU-RAY
Peter Firmin, Oliver Postgate;
UK 1974; Fabulous Films;
Region B Blu-ray, Region 2
DVD; English SDH; Certificate
U; 189 minutes; 1.33:1. Extras:
Peter Firmin – At Home with
Bagpuss (2015); featurette,
speech by Firmin from 2014
Bafta Children’s Awards; The
Story of Smallfilms (2005).
REVIEWED BY ROBERT HANKS
MORE THAN A FELINE
Bagpuss, Professor Yaffle,
Gabriel the Toad in Bagpuss
Ivor the Engine
Clangers
Bagpuss
The idyllic worlds of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate
still exercise their charm – should we be worried?
A German friend of mine who’d lived in
England a long time once complained
that whenever he went out to dinner with
friends in London, sooner or later people
would start reminiscing about children’s
TV programmes he’d never seen: Blue
Peter (1958-), The Magic Roundabout (1965-
77), Mr Benn (1971), Paddington (1976-80) –
the list would go on. And, of course, Bag-
puss (1974) would crop up (this was about
the time it was voted the nation’s favourite
children’s programme, 1999). I’ve worried
since what this says about us, as a nation,
that we cling to this somewhat infantile
nostalgia, and whether there are con-
sequences in the grown-up world – the
political scene hasn’t been entirely free of
infantile nostalgia lately. Am I saying that
national affection for a saggy old cloth cat
made us collectively more susceptible to
the appeal of Boris Johnson? Not exactly;
but I’m not exactly not saying it, either.
There’s nothing new in political read-
ings of Smallfilms, the animation studio
that Oliver Postgate (1925-2008) and
Peter Firmin (1928-2018) ran from the
late 1950s to the mid-80s – Postgate
wrote and narrated the stories, Firmin
drew or made the characters and scenery,
and they animated the short episodes
together. Postgate’s background makes
politics hard to avoid: he was the grand-
son of George Lansbury, Labour party
leader in the 30s, and the son of Raymond
Postgate, a founder of the Communist
Party of Great Britain and left-wing jour-
nalist. But Postgate’s own politics weren’t
straightforwardly leftist – more an idealis-
tic anti-politics: it’s significant that he was
a conscientious objector in World War II.
He fits snugly into an English tradition of
progressive nostalgia, on the side of ‘ordi-
nary people’ and distrustful of authority
but with a soft spot for aristocrats, admir-
ing of folk art but rather down on what’s
popular, keener on the country than the
city – it’s the tradition of G.K. Chester-
ton, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ealing comedies.
Ivor the Engine (1959-64 /1975-77)
is a pastoral idyll, tinged with Dylan
Thomas, set on a small privately owned
railway line in “the top left-hand corner
of Wales”, where everyone is friendly
and troubles arise from accident or mis-
understanding. The first series, in 1959,
revolved around Ivor, the small, sentient
steam-engine, wanting to sing with the
local choir but having only a monotone
toot; his driver, Jones the Steam, locates
pipes from a redundant fairground
steam-organ to replace his whistle and
Ivor becomes first bass. Jones and Dai
Station, the station-master, fret about
railway regulations and what the Board
will say, but don’t contemplate defiance.
When the line is threatened with nation-
alisation – Ivor will be sent to shunt
freight in the sidings at Pontypool Roads!
– rich Mrs Porty buys it to keep it the way
it is: noblesse oblige can always be relied on.
Clangers (1969-72) is also a pastoral, if
disguised as science fiction: the Clangers
– do I need to explain that they are small,
plump pink creatures with long pro-
boscises and tufts of hair between their
pointed ears? – want for nothing on their
small, rocky planetoid, feasting on soup
from the soup wells and blue string pud-
ding, plucking melody from the music
trees, fishing from music-propelled boats
among the stars. Every now and then,
Earth, a distant blue ball, intrudes: a
probe, an astronaut, a rogue space-borne
TV set which assails the Clangers’ senses
with its busy, aggressive noise and pic-
tures. In ‘Vote for Froglet’, a one-off story
produced for the October 1974 general
election, Postgate’s narrator persuades
the inhabitants of the Clangers’ planet,
baffled by the election hubbub emanat-
ing from here, to try political parties and
voting. Things soon turn slightly nasty:
the Soup Dragon, who controls the soup
wells, adopts a platform of refusing soup
to the froglets (small springy creatures
with bulbous eyes), and wins; but he
instantly changes his mind and says they
can have soup: kindness beats politics.
In pop music terms Clangers was
Smallfilms’ prog-rock phase: Bagpuss is
folk-rock. Despite Postgate’s joke that
Bagpuss himself was a Meowist, it
resists political analysis. In a sense, Bag-
puss is a despot: it is his awakening that
animates the other toys in the Victorian
lost-property shop, so that they can exam-
ine and speculate about a new lost object,
providing an excuse for the extraordi-
nary compendium of folk-based stories,
rhymes and songs that is the meat of each
episode. All Smallfilms productions had
extraordinary sound-worlds: in Ivor, the
pretty, tootling melodies composed by
the bassoonist Vernon Elliott; in Clang-
ers, more music by Elliott, but with a tin-
kling, spacey air, and many strange, echo-
ing noises. In Bagpuss, it’s the marvellous
singing and inventive playing of Sandra
Kerr – a serious folkie, formerly of The
Critics Group – and John Faulkner.
All three programmes remain deeply
charming and affecting – just nostalgia,
or something deeper? The restorations
on these Blu-rays are excellent, with clear
sound and vivid colours, even too vivid:
Ivor’s green and Bagpuss’s pink stripes
are at times more acidic than I remember.
Ivor the Engine is the pick: it includes the
earlier, black-and-white episodes, made
for the ITV franchise Associated Redif-
fusion and unseen for decades. Firmin’s
painted backgrounds are if anything
lovelier in monochrome, with gentle
washes of grey on the hillsides; and the
longer episodes – around ten minutes –
allow more plot development and pleas-
ing digression. The sound is uneven; only
some episodes with particularly poor
quality can be watched with subtitles (the
later colour episodes, which are available
separately, are fully subtitled). All three
programmes come with the same fea-
turette and Bafta ceremony extras, but
Clangers also has ‘Vote for Froglet’ and
Bagpuss has a sweet short feature with
Firmin reminiscing.

THE HOT SPOT
Dennis Hopper; US 1990; Radiance; Region
B Blu-ray; English SDH; Certificate 18; 130
minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: archive interview with
Hopper (including footage of John Lee Hooker);
interviews with actors Virginia Madsen, William
Sadler; Nick Dawson on Hopper; Duane
Swierczynski on writer Charles Williams; trailer.
REVIEWED BY PAMELA HUTCHINSON
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Dennis Hopper’s sultry 1990 southern
Peter Bogdanovich; US 1971; Criterion; 4K UHD and/or Region
B Blu-ray; b&w; English SDH; Certificate 15; 126 minutes; 1.85:1.
noir, set in small-town Texas, is
Extras: two audio commentaries, both featuring Bogdanovich plus cast surprisingly classical, despite its
members; two making-of documentaries (three with UHD); Q&A with sun-baked colour photography and
Bogdanovich; screen tests; location footage; excerpts from 1972 interview
with François Truffaut about New Hollywood; trailer; booklet.
steamily explicit sex scenes. The Hot
Spot, adapted from a 1953 novel by
REVIEWED BY ARJUN SAJIP Charles Williams called Hell Hath No
Fury, concerns plausible drifter Harry,
He may have delighted in westerns, screwball comedies and played by Don Johnson, rolling into
period pieces, but Peter Bogdanovich was no nostalgic: his town in summer to make some easy
best work always had cracks in its rear-view mirror. On the money selling cars, and perhaps some
face of it, the early 1950s setting and classical Hollywood faster, less legal cash too. His eye is
style of his first masterpiece, The Last Picture Show, call back caught by teenage Gloria (Jennifer
to a bygone era, but this clear-eyed piece of social portraiture Connelly), a girl with a sorrowful
is shot through with the sexual frankness and desolate secret and some fetishistic Carmen
melancholy of the New Hollywood. Miranda shoes, while femme fatale
The windswept north Texas town of Anarene is dying, Dolly (Virginia Madsen), the wife of
that’s for certain, but a few of its citizens are still learning Harry’s boss, takes hold of him more
to live. There’s Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff bodily, coming on like an R-rated
Bridges), two shiftless high-schoolers in love with Jacy (a Phyllis Dietrichson, cruising main
luminous Cybill Shepherd), who has her eye on wealthier street in a candy-pink convertible.
suitors; there’s Jacy’s mom (Ellen Burstyn) and Ruth At one point The Hot Spot was a
Popper (Cloris Leachman), middle-aged women whose heist movie that Mike Figgis was
husbands are never home. These very different characters going to direct, but Hopper took
all have one thing in common: they desperately want to get over, bringing with him an updated
laid. There’s nothing better to do in Anarene – not even version of Williams’s adaptation of
going to the movies. his own novel, written in the early
It’s curious that a film in which films are ostensibly 60s with Robert Mitchum in mind.
important – trips to the cinema more or less bookend the Johnson may be no Mitchum, but
narrative, and the elegiac title gestures at the significance he has presence enough to anchor
of picturehouses – has little to say, or is at the very least this provocative retro thriller,
pessimistic, about the social role of movies. Bogdanovich dubbed ‘Last Tango in Texas’ by
was already known as a cinephile, and perhaps he was wary the director. It’s a languorous film,
of being pigeonholed: in The Last Picture Show, the movies comprising luscious surfaces, lustful
are no better a distraction than a game of pool, and both gazes and elliptical dialogue. The
turn out to merely provide pretexts for sex. high prevalence of nudity is surely
Still, this is clearly the work of a filmmaker intimately gratuitous, if inevitable, given
familiar with past masters. Robert Surtees’s black-and-white the film’s themes of temptation,
cinematography, crisply restored for this release, seems to obsession and greed. Ueli Steiger’s
consciously channel Gregg Toland’s deep-focus work for cinematography lingers on the
Welles and Wyler, picking out every detail in Polly Platt’s story’s erotic glamour, and creates a
production design, which is marvellously grubby – the stifling atmosphere in Dolly’s marital
streets, bars and homes of Anarene seem not so much lived home, a siren’s lair crowded with her
in as lived out. husband’s hunting trophies, while
The uniformly brilliant performances struck a chord with Jack Nitzsche’s bluesy score, played
audiences, and though this chord was soon outsounded by luminaries including Miles Davis,
by more straightforwardly backward-gazing coming-of- John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal,
agers like American Graffiti (1973), The Last Picture Show provides welcome momentum and a
remains the richest of the crop – empathetic, insightful touch of authentic earthiness.
and heartbreaking.
Disc: This Radiance Blu-ray features
DISC: It’s a pity Bogdanovich’s documentary Directed by a 2K restoration, approved by Steiger,
John Ford, also released in 1971, is missing. The extras are which truly does gleam. There are also
otherwise generous. interviews with two of the actors and
with Hopper. New for this release:
informative, engaging talking-head
pieces with Hopper expert Nick
Dawson, and crime writer Duane
Swierczynski to fill us in on Williams.
141
TYPHOON CLUB
Somai Shinji; Japan 1985; Third Window;
region-free Blu-ray; in Japanese with English
subtitles; Certificate 18; 115 minutes; 16:9. Extras:
audio commentary by Tom Mes; presentation
by Hamaguchi Ryusuke at Berlin Film Festival;
interview with assistant director Enokido Koji;
visual essay by Josh Slater-Williams; trailer.
REVIEWED BY TONY RAYNS
Somai Shinji (1948-2001) has
long been a troublesome case for
Western observers of Japanese
cinema. Loudly championed – even
revered – by his peers and critics in
Japan, he never really broke through
internationally. This fine release of
his most famous film (premiered in
the inaugural Tokyo International
Film Festival, where a jury headed
by Bertolucci gave it the Grand
Prix for young cinema) highlights
both his exceptional strengths and
his weaknesses. The film chronicles
five days in and around a junior high
school in a small rural town within
striking distance of Tokyo. A typhoon
DVD & BLU-RAY
hits the town over the weekend and
brings to the surface the frustrations,
anxieties and barely formed pubescent
feelings of the schoolkids, especially
the handful who see out the storm
on the school premises. The film
opens with a near-drowning incident
in the school’s swimming pool, and
climaxes with the considered suicide
of another boy.
Somai picked the script from a
pile submitted to the Directors’
Company (it was by a first-time
writer, a student at an art university)
and by all accounts changed very
little. All the kids are seen as lacking
adult guidance: parents are virtually
absent, and the class teacher is an
emotionally immature guy with a
messy private life who is largely
indifferent to their problems.
Performances from the young cast
are committed and sharp, but the
film doesn’t handle its ‘collective
protagonist’ particularly well: there
are awkward discontinuities between
scenes, and the long-take/long-shot
treatment is less analytic than random
and emotionally null. Nonetheless, it’s
strikingly different in subject and tone
from other Japanese films of the 1980s.
Disc: Flawless transfer, solid extras.
 142

BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE Ghost Stories

Michael Powell; West Germany 1963; BFI;
for Christmas Vol. 2
Region B Blu-ray; in German, with English
subtitles; Certificate PG; 63 minutes; 1.37:1.
Extras: English audio track; 1978 version with
THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS
partial subtitles; interview with film historian Ian THE ASH TREE
Christie; short doc Picture Business: Michael Powell
at Dartmouth (1980); image gallery; booklet.
THE SIGNALMAN
STIGMA
REVIEWED BY ROBERT HANKS THE ICE HOUSE
23 SECONDS TO ETERNITY
Bartók’s only opera – a ripe one- Laurence Gordon Clark, Derek Lister; UK
1974-78; BFI; Region B Blu-ray, 3 discs; Bill Butt; UK 2023; BFI; region-free Blu-ray & DVD dual
act psychosexual symbolist drama English SDH; Certificate 15; 174 minutes; format; Certificate 15; 121 minutes; . Extras: interview with Bill
featuring two characters, the wife- 1.33:1. Extras: new audio commentaries; Butt; making-of films; trailers; image gallery; booklet.
murdering aristocrat Bluebeard 2012 introductions by Laurence Gordon
Clark; video essays; short films; booklet REVIEWED BY SOPHIA SATCHELL-BAEZA
and his latest bride, Judith – seems
an obvious fit for Michael Powell,
REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL The UK doesn’t have much of a reputation for road movies,
a natural extension of both his
fascination with the operatic and the aside from a few rogue operators: there’s Chris Petit’s Radio
This second collection from the On (1979), Andrew Kötting’s Gallivant (1996), Iain Sinclair’s
interest in darker sides of sexuality
BBC’s beloved 1970s strand of spooky peregrinations around the M25. Maybe it’s because we lack the
he displayed in Peeping Tom (1960)
shorts grants Blu-ray debuts to five glamour – and we certainly lack the established mythos – of
and elsewhere. In fact, when he was
of the original titles, remastered from America’s lost highways: we can’t make art from our cornucopia
approached by Norman Foster, an
the original 16mm. It’s not hard to see of concrete and Little Chefs. But surely the UFO that is Bill
American bass-baritone and producer,
why their cult status endures: with Butt’s The White Room (1989) belongs in that minor canon – or
to direct it for German television, he
their austere aesthetics, commanding would, if it had ever been finished.
didn’t know the work at all.
performances, understated wit and As it stands, this ‘ambient road movie’ is closer to something
Filming took place in a studio in
cool engagement with the irrational, you might see in a gallery than a traditional narrative film,
Salzburg, with Foster as Bluebeard
they are highly sophisticated examples
DVD & BLU-RAY

and the Uruguayan mezzo Ana though there is a story, and it certainly is cinematic. Packed with
of storytelling and atmosphere back-to-back musical bangers, The White Room takes viewers
Raquel Satre as Judith. Foster is
creation for the small screen. through a trance-scored series of landscapes, on a Lynchian
commanding, but the tender, yearning,
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974) existential quest in search of the room of the title. Along the way,
sensuous Satre – aided by a smitten
and The Ash Tree (1975, pictured the band – musicians Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, those
Powell – is the dominant presence.
above) originated with M.R. James; anarchic shapeshifters variously known as The JAMS, The KLF
Both are rather overshadowed
The Signalman (1976), with its and The Timelords – navigate London’s concrete arteries in an
by Hein Heckroth’s glittering
extraordinary lead performance by American police car, headed towards sunshine. Footage from the
expressionist sets and costumes (he
Denholm Elliot, is based on a Dickens uncompleted film crops up in other work that music director Bill
was production designer on all the
tale, adapted by Andrew Davies. Butt shot with the band, including the video to the peculiar 1989
Archers’ films from The Red Shoes in
Other notable performances include track ‘Kylie Said to Jason’. Both that video and The White Room are
1948 to Oh…Rosalinda!! in 1955). It
that of Kate Binchy as a housewife included in the floor-stomping compilation 23 Seconds to Eternity,
strikes the eye at first as garish and
experiencing a sexual and religious a hectic collection of newly remastered music videos and short
dated – there’s a generic resemblance
meltdown in Stigma (1977), written by features that Butt made with the band. Some of these, like Krash
to the kitsch East German nightmare
Clive Exton, and Elizabeth Romilly (1992), have never been released, others have long been out of
The Singing, Ringing Tree (1957) – but
and Geoffrey Burridge as seductive circulation.
when the shock wears off, what
vampire siblings in John Bowen’s story I was too young to experience the KLF first-hand – at least,
remains is an impression of the
The Ice House (1978) (the only one of I don’t think they were letting toddlers into house nights at
conviction of everyone involved.
the series not directed by Laurence Heaven – so 23 Seconds to Eternity really feels like a portal to the
Gordon Clark – it was helmed by
DISC: Colours and sound are very 90s, a decade that has now become so TikToked that it’s easy to
Derek Lister). forget that bucket hats are not a Gen Z invention. These music
rich in a superb restoration. Powell’s
Repressed and forbidden feelings videos may feel light years away from the glossy, pre-packaged
preference was for the opera to be
and urges are often at the heart of media product of today, but the short film The Rites of Mu (1991),
presented without subtitles; for the
these supernatural manifestations narrated by Martin Sheen, does have a more contemporary feel,
first English screening in 1978 he
– but it’s not all bad news for not least in appearing to predict the current appetite for folk
relented and had a version prepared
stereotypical Englishness. These films horror. The band hijack their own press junket and turn it into a
with some explanatory captions.
engage lovingly with English history, Saturnalian ritual sacrifice that is strongly indebted to The Wicker
This disc offers that version as an
traditions, architecture and landscape, Man (1973), though you can also file it next to Derek Jarman’s
option, as well as full subtitles with
creating a strange, enriching mix of wanderings through the ancient landscape in A Journey to Avebury
the original German version. In
soothing nostalgia and subversiveness. (1971). The supposed lost continent of Mu was actually filmed
addition, Foster and Satre recorded
The charm is in their duality: “As on the Scottish island of Jura, where in 1994 the band burned a
an English-language track which was
much as they’re exercises in terror,” million pounds – one of the great art pranks-cum-performance art
never released. It is included here
Simon Farqhuar says in one of the pieces of the 20th century.
as an audio option, dubbed over the
excellent new commentary tracks, The story of the KLF, and their dense, art-school-influenced
1963 version; but the absolute lack
“they’re also celebrations of the mythology, is brilliant captured in John Higgs’s definitive book
of synchronisation between sound
English countryside.” The Ghost Stories The KLF, recently re-released in a tenth anniversary edition by
and picture makes this the least
for Christmas series, vital to any history Orion Books. KLF fans are likely to be the biggest audience for
satisfactory way of experiencing it. An
of British folk horror, stands as a this release, but I call on other curious parties to come through
intriguing short doc shows Powell,
unique marriage of primetime quality and join the church of the KLF.
as artist-in-residence at Dartmouth
and arthouse imagination, attractive
College in New Hampshire, preparing
context and unsettling content, the DISC: Given that much of this material has either never been
with students a short film version of
bucolic and the bleak. released, or long been out of circulation, this disc offers a
Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy.
welcome opportunity to see new, and newly remastered material.
DISC: All remastered from their Kudos to the Butt/BFI collab.
original 16mm, the films look great.

LOST AND FOUND
Lana Gogoberidze, USSR 1978
BY CARMEN GRAY
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
Sofiko Chiaureli as Sofiko,
Gia Badridze as Archili
© LANA GOGOBERIDZE; SOURCE: ARSENAL – INSTITUT FÜR FILM UND VIDEOKUNST E.V.
Some Interviews
on Personal Matters
In her 1978 portrait of a woman journalist under pressure
from an unfaithful husband and a patriarchal society,
Lana Gogoberidze made one of the first feminist Soviet
films – and a daughter’s memorial to her filmmaker mother
Over her six-decade career, the Georgian
director Lana Gogoberidze has always,
directly or indirectly, made films about
her mother. Her best-known feature,
Some Interviews on Personal Matters (1978),
is often described as one of the first
feminist films of Soviet cinema. It is an
offbeat, multilayered portrait of Sofiko,
a passionately committed journalist and
a mother to two children in 70s Tbilisi,
whose marriage is breaking down. Amid
the film’s vivid exploration of what con-
stitutes a life well lived, two darker flash-
backs insistently recur. The first: an omi-
nous knock at the apartment door, as the
child Sofiko stands stock still in a night-
gown. The second: her exiled mother
returns, in a reunion both restrained and
surreal, the intervening decade having
made them strangers.
The intrusive memories of Some Inter-
views have a clear autobiographical echo.
After Gogoberidze’s father Levan, a high-
ranking official in Georgia’s Communist
party, was shot in Stalin’s Great Purge
in 1937, her mother Nutsa, Georgia’s
first female film director, was arrested as
‘family of an enemy of the people’ and sent
to Siberia. Lana was sent to an orphan-
age, then raised by relatives. Initially
blocked from film school in Moscow,
she took up directing after Stalin’s death
as a way of being closer to her mother.
Cinema became a shared language, and
a means of reckoning with traumatic loss
(Lana’s daughter Salomé Alexi, carrying
on this family thread for a third genera-
tion, is also a film director).
The women in Lana’s films, which
include Day Is Longer than Night (1984)
and The Waltz on the Petschora (1992), are
typically resilient and defiant, finding
purpose and voice amid family rupture,
existential crisis and political tumult.
Some Interviews, a film of freewheeling
dynamism and expressive emotion, is
imbued with a deep respect for women’s
labour. It combines a documentary feel,
in the interviews conducted by Sofiko
and the focus on the multi-tasking reality
of her domestic chores, with vivid, poetic
sequences that portray memory’s hold
and reveal an intense beauty in the minu-
tiae of everyday interactions.
Self-possessed, chic and bespectacled,
Sofiko is played by the famous actress
Sofiko Chiaureli, star of several Sergei
Parajanov films, including The Colour of
Pomegranates (1968). The journalist chan-
nels her talent and energy into interview-
ing Georgian women about their daily
problems, living conditions and aspira-
tions. Such attentive curiosity is rare (one
ageing visitor claims even death has for-
gotten her). But Sofiko’s trips away and
hours spent traversing a bustling city-
scape with photographer and devoted
colleague Irakli (Janri Lolashvili) in tow
do not sit comfortably in a patriarchal
society that demands she maximise time
at home with her family. Her less driven
husband Archili (Gia Badridze) is having
an affair, and she is under pressure both
at work and from him to give up writing
for a less taxing role. Sofiko’s love for her
family is boundless – but she feels a wider
calling to fight for society’s future, which
she knows is never assured. When Sofiko
declares to Archili that she loves her job,
he counters that her work is false. This
carries a greater sting of betrayal than
his infidelity, since it amounts to a total
denial of her identity, and seems a typical
gesture of complicity in a society where
powerful men decide what matters.
Lana has said that the flashback to
the return of Sofiko’s mother is, for her,
the main episode of Some Interviews – an
143
attribution of weight that shows how
much Nutsa’s exile defined her own life.
Sofiko’s mother is played by a nonpro-
fessional actress, Ketusa Orakhelashvili,
whose parents and husband were exe-
cuted in the Purge, and who had become
friends with Nutsa in the Gulag. Shots
repeat within the flashback, replicat-
ing the way that the events that jolt us
the most return to haunt us obsessively,
imprinting themselves on time. Sofiko’s
memories remind us that the potential for
devastation always grows hand in hand
with love, and that all meetings inevitably
entail separations.
Lana’s most recent film is a documen-
tary, Mother and Daughter, or The Night
Is Never Complete (2023) – the subtitle is
from a poem by Paul Éluard, which says
there is always an open window and life
to share after grief. The film, which Lana
DVD & BLU-RAY
narrates herself, is the most direct telling
yet of the story of the women in her family
and the crucial role played by cinema in
their lives. It contains excerpts from her
own past films, including Some Interviews,
and recollections of their making, along
with scenes from the banned, once-lost
works of Nutsa, Buba (1930) and Uzh-
muri (1934), which she recently located in
archives and rescued from oblivion. The
documentary is set to screen at festivals
around the world in the coming months,
after Lana – who is now 95 years old, and
working on a new book – presented it
in October at the Kutaisi International
Short Film Festival in Georgia. The new
insights it offers into her life and career
make this an ideal time to revisit Some
Interviews, as well as the rest of her oeuvre.
It is through the lens of Lana’s own
devotion to cinema, her faith in it as a
means to overcome or transmute her per-
sonal pain into something of collective
value, that Sofiko’s intense connection to
her work and her fervent need to write in
Some Interviews can best be understood.
Artistic labour is a way for her to connect
with the universe around her and order
it on her own terms; she lives in a world
of high stakes, in which attachments are
always at risk and ardent conviction is fre-
quently punished, but resistance is alive
and must be publicly safeguarded. The
collection and dissemination of women’s
stories operates in Some Interviews, and
in the Gogoberidze family, as a spirited
defence against the brutal vicissitudes of
history, preventing it from condemning
loved ones to the realm of the forgotten.
Available to stream at klassiki.online
 144

Immerse
yourself
A new generation of
technologies – grouped
under the heading XR –
promises to take us beyond
3D cinema into ‘immersive
experiences’. The potential
for new kinds of art is
there – but we need some
Eisensteins to exploit it
BY IAN CHRISTIE

Immersion, in case you hadn’t noticed,

is all around us at present. Everywhere
advertisements for theatres, restaurants,
exhibitions are promising an ‘immersive
experience’. And ‘experience’ is the name
of the game. Not what you see and hear,
but what you feel. From Mamma Mia and
Fawlty Towers, both currently on offer as
immersive ‘dining experiences’, via the
Trojan War in the theatre company’s
Punchdrunk’s recent The Burnt City, to
WIDER SCREEN

a plethora of art exhibitions inviting us

into the worlds of Salvador Dalí, Claude
Monet, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera,
David Hockney, and a swathe of modern
painting at Frameless, under Marble
Arch in London. Secret Cinema has long
been producing environmental shows
based on classic films, including a won-
derfully seedy Third Man and an opulent
Grand Budapest Hotel.
Recently, I’ve been sampling many of
these new entrants to discover what they
offer. I’ve done this despite largely dis-
missive reviews, especially by art critics.
‘Who needs tawdry digital renditions of
popular motifs from over-familiar paint-
ers?’ is the common cry on both sides of
the Atlantic. Yet there’s no denying the
shows are popular, attracting an unusu- In 1948, Meanwhile, the Musée d’Orsay in 4DX ‘sensory’ cinema. After all, who
ally diverse public. “Why don’t they just Paris currently offers an interactive VR would think of Sergei Eisenstein as
go to a museum and see the real thing?” Eisenstein extension to its exhibition ‘Van Gogh the prophet of 3D cinema? Yet in 1948,
lamented a New York critic, while admit- proclaimed that in Auvers-sur-Oise’, which allows visi- Eisenstein proclaimed that the future of
ting that there must be something to the future of tors to manipulate the painter’s ‘pictorial cinema “must be stereoscopic”, inspired
attract such crowds. material’, scrupulously captured by high- by seeing the USSR’s first stereo film,
One explanation is surely that these cinema ‘must definition photogrammetry. Compared Robinson Crusoe (Alexander Andriyevsky,
shows ‘remediate’ familiar cultural icons be stereoscopic’, with the fairground raffishness of art- 1947), in a glasses-free format, and also by
in terms of novel new technologies. As inspired by based shows recently touring the UK, theatre’s long history of trying to demol-
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin showed in the Orsay’s ‘Van Gogh in VR’ may prove a ish the separation between spectator and
their 1999 book Remediation, new media seeing the game-changer, demanding more serious performance. And just as he snapped
have always traded on re-presenting pop- USSR’s first appreciation than, say, ‘Mexican Geni- up a captured German colour process
ular material – from magic lanterns and stereo film, uses’, the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to include at the end of his Ivan the Ter-
stereoscopes to phonographs and cinema show, which offered 300 digital projec- rible (1944), he would surely have relished
itself. So add holograms to Abba’s vast Robinson Crusoe, tions “that envelop the walls around you”. experimenting with 3D, especially if he
and seemingly enduring appeal, and you in a glasses- But my ‘immersion’ in immersives could have seen a thrilling example of its
have the Voyage show, now running in a free format was to discover if we’re going to see XR use such as Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder
specially built concert bowl in the Olym- media – a catch-all for Augmented Real- (1954) – newly available to us thanks to
pic Park and attracting up to 3,000 visi- ity (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed digital presentation.
tors every night for over a year. A show, Reality (MR) and associated digital So when are we going to see an XR
IMAGE: ANAGRAM

incidentally, that includes impressive 180-
degree animation as well as holographic
renditions of the band members.
ABOVE
Wispy presences conjured by
the Ghosts of Solid Air app
gadgetry – deliver work that’s genuinely masterpiece, a work as convincing
new and exciting; something that will as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) or
go beyond current 3D and Cineworld’s Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) are in 3D?

One obvious problem is the complexity
and variety of the apparatus needed, and
its unpredictability at the point of con-
sumption. This year’s BFI London Film
Festival included an Expanded section
with a programme of ticketed XR offer-
ings, plus free “drop-in immersive expe-
riences” and “augmented reality (AR)
walks”. Of these, I managed to take an
AR walk, Ghosts of Solid Air, with some
help from its creators.
Tech troubles unfortunately bedevil
much work in this sector: apps that will
only work on specific gadgets, and fickle
changes by the main providers of operat-
ing systems, Apple and Google. Ghosts
was developed by Anagram, which spe-
cialises in “interactive and immersive
experiences”, initially to work on Android
devices – but not on my newish phone, as
I discovered in Trafalgar Square. How-
ever, Anagram came to my rescue, and I
was able to spend an hour in the company
of some rebellious heroes from history,
walking from Trafalgar Square via Horse
Guards Parade to Parliament Square.
My ghostly companions included
Olaudah Equiano, the African slave who
became a prominent abolitionist in 18th-
century London; an Indian revolutionary,
Udham Singh, who witnessed the 1919
Amritsar massacre and eventually assassi-
nated the British colonial official respon-
sible; and Josie McGowan, a member of
the Irish republican women’s organisa-
tion Cumann na mBan, active in the 1916
Dublin Easter Rising, before dying in a
battle with police in 1918. So not exactly
a walk in the park: in fact, more like a
mobile history lesson, poking into some
dark corners of British imperial history.
Frankly, I wasn’t so impressed by the
wispy ghosts that swirled up through a
mist on my screen, but walking this ter-
rain, listening and occasionally interact-
ing to learn more, was genuinely informa-
tive. Asked at the end what I would take
away, my answer had to be wanting to
discover more about some of these sto-
ries, as well as the experience of visiting
parts of ‘tourist London’ for the first time.
This odd combination of new tech and
forgotten histories also reminded me of
an eerie story by Rudyard Kipling from
the era when another ‘new medium’ was
taking tentative shape: ‘Wireless’ (1902)
dates from when Guglielmo Marconi was
experimenting with radio transmission
off Cornwall, focusing on a TB victim,
who in his half-drugged state seems to
be taking dictation from the long-dead
poet Keats. Kipling was always alert to
the power of modern technology – his
‘Mrs Bathurst’ (1904) is an early evoca-
tion of film’s psychological impact. The
‘augmented reality’ of Ghosts of Solid Air
did seem to realise some of the ‘spectral’
potential of XR, along the lines of what
pioneers like Robert Paul and Georges
Méliès did in film. Would Eisenstein have
approved? – I think he’d have loved to get
IMAGE: BEAGLES & RAMSAY
his hands on its subversive potential.
Further information on the AR
walk at ghostsofsolidair.com
Workwear of the world, unite
With pretend workers clad in fake brands in a show run by pseudo-
corporations, Beagles & Ramsay cock a snook at capitalist realism
BY SUSANNAH THOMPSON
Known for their subversive, comic range of exhibi-
tions and projects in video, performance and instal-
lation, Glasgow-based artists John Beagles and
Graham Ramsay have worked collaboratively since
1996, often under their joint alter egos New Heads
on the Block (NHOTB) and Rope-a-Dope (RAD)
productions. These pseudo-corporate entities give
a title and a conceptual framework to the artists’
major exhibition at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern
Art, which takes the form of a showcase for new
fashion lines.
Three collections, rendered in sculpture and
moving-image works, are modelled by 80 life-size
mannequin sculptures composed of recycled office
furniture and reclaimed display materials. This
uncanny mob of what the artists call “battered,
flatpack bodies” suggests Beagles & Ramsay have
returned to earlier preoccupations. In their 2003
adaptation of the Michael Redgrave segment of the
1945 anthology chiller Dead of Night, for instance – in
which a ventriloquist is driven insane by a malevo-
lent dummy – they created ventriloquist’s dummy
self-portraits for installation and video. In other
works, they have posed as corpses, elderly sages,
burger restaurant workers and others. Here, in a
17th-century Palladian building that was once a
merchant’s opulent mansion, the artists’ army of
abstracted figurative sculptures could be the resur-
rected, reanimated silent companions of the former
owner, an acquisitive tobacco lord, intent on launch-
ing an athleisure collection for his workers.
The moving-image works that span the exhibi-
tion are embedded within pop-up boutiques that
mimic shop floor subdivisions, as though to usher
consumers from franchise to franchise. Beyond
the flat screens that house them, the five films take
on further architectural and sculptural qualities,
flanking and bookending the central ‘catwalk’ and
functioning as intermittent sources of light in the
enveloping darkness of the gallery. The five works
unfold in sequence. The first is a formal introduc-
tion to the brand. The second and third assume the
form of slick fashion-show footage. In the last two
films, the artists hint at an unravelling or disman-
tling of the corporate or consumerist veneer they
have constructed. In the fourth work, the bodies are
ABOVE A still from a video piece in the Beagles & Ramsay exhibition
145
both mechanised and primordial as they perform
rituals around a central ball-gowned figure in a kind
of austere, choreographed rebellion.
Each film is populated by digital doppelgängers
of the ‘real life’ sculptures. Some of these figures
echo the uncanny absurdity of surrealist design, in
which everyday objects, reduced to their absolute
minimum, become strangely anthropomorphised:
wheeled office chairs become the legs or torsos of
the figures, for example, with the effect of empha-
sising a recurrent theme in the artists’ work: what
happens when the established order begins to frac-
ture. If modular systems are mismatched and canni-
balised, do things literally fall apart? In an economy
that demands emotional as well as physical and
intellectual labour from its workers, what happens
when formerly smiling, compliant employees dis-
sent? What might unfold if the utilitarian cloth-
ing and ‘street’ sportswear now adopted by elite
brands took on the rituals and mores of their origin
demographic? Through the moving-image works,
Beagles & Ramsay have fun with these speculative
scenarios: with each film the figures become more
colourful, unruly and energised. In the final film the
models are no longer passive objects on which view-
WIDER SCREEN
ers might project fashion fantasies: almost faceless
and reduced to their signifying essentials as human-
oid figures, they break the fourth wall and stare back
at the viewer.
In the world of work and beyond, the artists’ con-
tinual return to class politics, hierarchies and agency
through the activation of dead or inanimate objects
explores how dehumanisation and managerial cul-
ture creep into every aspect of our lives. They resist
the logic of capitalism by revolting against it (as seen
in the works ‘Cipher Hoodie’ and ‘Null Sweat’), using
the trope of the hoodie- and tracksuit-wearing looter,
vandal or working-class agitator. Through their
movements, soundtracks and behind-the-scenes
disarray, the artists suggest that beneath the models’
immaculate clothing and synchronised movement is
a growing unrest and refusal to perform.
‘Beagles & Ramsay – NHOTB & RAD’ is at Glasgow
Gallery of Modern Art until 28 April. Details at
glasgowlife.org.uk/event/1/beagles-ramsay-nhotb-rad
146

The Path
to Paradise:
A Francis Ford
Coppola Story
AUTHOR SAM WASSON
PUBLISHER FABER & FABER
PAGES 384
ISBN 978057 1379842

REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL

The oeuvre of Francis Ford Coppola is

a wildly varied one in terms not only of
tone and subject matter, but of esteem.
Few other filmmakers have experienced
such a gulf in reaction between their
most- and least-lauded works. The near-
universal acclaim afforded to The Godfa-
ther (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974),
The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now
(1979) only intensified the attacks on later,
weaker works, since according to domi-
nant critical perception, Coppola was
not only making poor films, but betray-
ing the memory of one of the most auspi-
cious early careers anyone has ever had.
“The past twenty years have been hard
on those of us who once expected of him
a great and distinguished career,” John
Patterson wrote in the Guardian upon the
release of the recut and extended Apoca-
lypse Now Redux. That was in 2001. A fur-
ther 20 years, in which Coppola has inter-
BOOKS

spersed tinkered-with reissues of his old

films with largely derided new ones like
Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009)
and Twixt (2011), have not eased the pain.
It was also back in 2001 that Coppola
began all-star table reads for a new film
called Megalopolis, which he described as
“a major work utilising all I have learned
during my long career”. Coppola aban-
doned the project after 9/11, feeling that
its New York setting now appeared
insensitive. He recommenced work on
it in 2019, with Adam Driver in the lead;
and after multiple hold-ups that eventu-
ally saw him using his own fortune to
fund the project, filming wrapped in
March. This new biography by Sam
Wasson seems positioned as pre-pub-
licity for this new work, with an evident
and insistent agenda to buff up Coppola’s
reputation as a master and reframe criti-
cism of his latter career as the ungenerous
stifling of an original. Coppola’s career
here becomes “a colossal, lifelong project
of experimental self-creation”, and his
production company American Zoetrope
something akin to a religious vocation.
“Creating the experience. The experience
that recreates the self. The recreated self
that creates the work. These are the life
revolutions of Zoetrope,” writes Wasson.
“They are what this book is about. How
Francis Ford Coppola, leader, driving
force of Zoetrope, sacrificed more than
Zoetrope with reports from the making
of that most reported-on of movies,
Apocalypse Now. Wasson has conducted
hundreds of new interviews and neither
the scale nor the diligence of his under-
taking is in doubt. It’s strange, though,
to see Apocalypse Now’s notorious odyssey
of excess and risk – already chronicled
in Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary
Hearts of Darkness, Peter Cowie’s 2001 The
Apocalypse Now Book, every tome about the
New American Cinema and every article
ever written about having a tough time
The hybrid on set – romanticised all over again, in an
age when a chaotic set is regarded more
form blends as a workers’ rights issue than a manifes-
what Wasson tation of artistic derring-do.
has been told Rather than observe Coppola’s cha-
otic creative heyday from the perspec-
into what he tive of today, Wasson returns us to the
is assuming. moments in which key encounters and
The effect is decisions occurred, by flitting between
the subjective recollections of different
novelistic, characters. Where a straight history priv-
with feelings ileges the historian’s own research and
at the fore interpretation, and an oral history gives
participants subjective, possibly contra-
dictory voices, this hybrid form blends
perhaps finding, or losing, her story in
his” – but according to whom? Attempts
to ventriloquise the Coppola of 50 years
ago, meanwhile, result in some odd hum-
blebragging by proxy: “He didn’t know
what he was doing. He knew what he
was doing. Five Oscars. He’d won them,
hadn’t he?” Wasson’s book on Bob Fosse
became the 2019 F/X series Fosse/Verdon.
Maybe this dramatic, character-led style
indicates hopes of Coppola/Coppola.
Wasson’s worshipful attitude to his
subject is presumably in part a reaction
against the fashion for automatically
dethroning eminent ‘old white men’
on the grounds of privilege and over-
representation. Fair enough: automati-
cally rejecting certain filmmakers is no
smarter than automatically revering
them. But must we overcorrect to this
obsequious extent? “They say you only
live once,” Wasson writes. “But most
of us don’t live even once. Francis Ford
Coppola has lived over and over again.”
In what way do most of us fail to live
even once? By not winning Oscars and
owning vineyards? Someone’s got to
watch the movies, and drink the wine,
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

the normal man’s share to improve the
world, the lives of the people in it.”
This breathy tone does not abate
as Wasson goes on to alternate anec-
dotes from the tempestuous history of
what Wasson has been told into what he
is assuming. The effect is novelistic, with
feelings at the fore. Eleanor Coppola, for
ABOVE
instance, “had always dreamed of mar-
Francis Ford Coppola rying a man of overpowering talent and
surely. Someone’s got to look after the
children. Wasn’t it one of the messages of
Apocalypse Now itself, that little sense or
benefit results from positioning flawed
and mortal men as gods?

Kubrick:
An Odyssey
WRITERS ROBERT P. KOLKER
NATHAN ABRAMS
PUBLISHER FABER
PAGES 626
ISBN 978057 1370368
REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN
Writing a biography of Stanley Kubrick
– Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams
respectfully acknowledge predecessors
– is obviously becoming a Jack Torrance
type gig. Many an Overlook Hotel care-
taker will find themselves typing ‘all work
and no play makes Stanley a dull boy’ infi-
nite times, while the architecture shifts
along with ever-changing assessments of
the monolith movies Kubrick left behind.
A risk of monumental biographies of
artistic titans – at random, say, Picasso,
Hitchcock, Woolf, Ozu or Mozart – is
that delving into personal foibles and
getting to the bottom of legends leads to
the conclusion that there was something
profoundly wrong with these people.
By accepting them as masters and find-
ing ourselves reflected in their work we
reveal there’s something profoundly
wrong with us. Why else would monsters
like Alex from A Clockwork Orange (1971),
Barry Lyndon or Jack Torrance – mostly
observed from a chilly distance, though
Alex talks to us directly – be characters
audiences (male audiences, at least) iden-
tify with, even shamefully or with regret?
Kubrick found the characters in books
and made them over (in his own image?)
in adapting the books into scripts.
Having cast his pick of star actors/avatars
in the roles, he put his casts through the
kind of gladiator training seen in Sparta-
cus (1960) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) to
create unforgettable beasts. Kolker and
Abrams write about how much Jack
Nicholson’s Torrance came to resemble
the director over the course of the shoot
for The Shining. Flawed creators may be
best suited to exploring our flawed psy-
ches or societies, but that still leaves col-
lateral damage to sort through and a lot
of nonfictional injured parties to listen to.
A particular strength of Kubrick: An
Odyssey is that it takes into account the
lives and stories Kubrick wound into
his own or edited out of the picture: the
wives and daughters; the pets; the trusted
associates and assistants; the underpaid
writers of source materials and many,
many drafts of films made and unmade,
summoned to the Kubrick estate like
Jonathan Harker to Castle Dracula and
then trapped by demands and contracts
and quixotic bonhomie (the only author
to emerge unscathed from working with
Stanley Kubrick had been safely dead for
a century, William Makepeace Thack-
eray); the actors compelled to play and
replay scenes for weeks on end on shoots
that ran on longer than the Discovery’s
trip to Jupiter; the key collaborators in
all departments (Kubrick began as a still
photographer and remained a techie all
his life); the publicists and suits he almost
uniquely bent to his will; and maybe the
only creator he was willing to defer to –
acknowledging an ability to connect with
mass audiences, which always eluded
him – Steven Spielberg. Maybe Spiel-
berg and the cats were his only peers
147
– after meticulous filing and storage, the
Kubrick Archives still smell of cat pee.
In Kubrickian style, this book assem-
bles the research materials – on each
project, Kubrick would direct hordes of
minions to research what food characters
ate, what the weather was like that day
(even if the day was in the future) and
the kind of dirt that would be walked on
– then lets us make up our minds about
the man of many contradictions. Myths
are dismissed if obviously bonkers –
that Kubrick faked the moon landings
Kolker and then quietly bragged about it by giving
Danny an Apollo jumper in The Shin-
Abrams write ing – but given sustained examination if
about how there’s documentation to be considered.
much Jack In the #MeToo era, Kubrick’s treatment
of Shelley Duvall during the making of
Nicholson’s The Shining has become emblematic of a
Jack Torrance particular type of on-set director abuse. A
came to paradox is that the primary evidence for
this is a making-of film shot by Kubrick’s
resemble the daughter Vivian – as odd a peripheral
director over presence in this book as Vivian Dark-
the course of bloom is in Lolita (though she was born
and named before Kubrick filmed the
the shoot for novel) – which Kubrick himself edited
The Shining and approved, essentially enshrining
his own ogre image (we might think of
Charles Foster Kane typing the review
Jed Leland would have written). The
actors and extras of Full Metal Jacket,
spending months crawling through toxic
waste in the Beckton gasworks where it
was shot, undoubtedly suffered as much,
BOOKS
if not more than Duvall; Kolker and
Abrams even conclude this lack of inter-
est in health and safety contributed to the
BELOW
director’s early death in the last stages of
Stanley Kubrick post-production on Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
It came as a surprise that this final film
– presold as a Tom Cruise-Nicole
Kidman erotic thriller – should be a
macabre comic suspense shaggy dog
story based (closely) on Arthur Schnit-
zler’s Dream Story (1926). Where had that
come from? Kubrick: An Odyssey reveals
that it was a bone the director got hold of
early and would not let go – obsessing
over its theme (marital jealousy) even
after everyone around him (including his
long-term third wife Christiane) told him
to drop it. Other filmmakers have had
odd enthusiasms – a studio once hired
Hitchcock to make any project he wanted
except J.M. Barrie’s Mary Rose – but
Kubrick carried his (almost) to term. It
seems to have presented an opportunity
to explore ambiguous feelings about his
own Jewishness – a big theme in Kubrick:
An Odyssey – as well as to confront his over-
whelming fear that any power he gained
over his own circumstances through
financial independence and a unique
status in the film industry could be taken
away, either by malign or unknowable
higher forces – the Bomb, the monolith
aliens, the State, the masked elite, the UK
tax authorities – or thanks to his own
inability to leave any small dangling
thread alone. Others are going to wander
into this hedge maze, hoping for a revela-
tion at the moment of freezing. This book
puts up some useful signposts.
 FROM THE ARCHIVE 149

HOLLYWOOD
ROYALTY

K
A career that successfully straddled both silent and sound eras over seven decades was still in train
when King Vidor, legendary director of classics of the 1920s and 30s, spoke to the magazine in 1968

SIGHT AND SOUND, AUTUMN 1968, INTERVIEW BY JOEL GREENBERG

ing Vidor was born in Galveston, Texas, Q What was your first job
in 1894. He began filming almost as
a child, and by the time he was 18 had
already made two two-reel slapstick
comedies, two or three documentaries,
and some newsreels. (“We had a camera,
a laboratory and a stage: this was the
time when you could simply build an
open stage with telegraph poles and
some cloth over the top…”) In 1915 he
reached Hollywood with his wife, the
actress Florence Vidor. (“I tried to get
the Ford Motor Company to finance
our trip by selling them material for
their newsreel, for which they would
pay 60 cents a foot. I don’t think we sold
more than 60 dollars’ worth, but we
ALL IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
in Hollywood?
A Well, a little bit of everything.
I would do anything to get in a
studio, just to get inside and watch
the directors working. I worked as
an extra in a picture, had a ‘bit’ as a
chauffeur, and then I had a job as a
script clerk. It was a little different
from today’s script girl: you almost
had to keep accounts. Finally I got
a job in the story department at
Universal. Then, having learned
how to operate a camera, I met a
man named George Brown who
got me to go out as a cameraman
for two or three days on some
for which I must have made ten,
fifteen or twenty half-hour films
about juvenile delinquency. Then
I tried to get a job as a director of
features by putting three of these
films together, to make them look as
if they were one picture. I couldn’t
do it that way, so I wrote a scenario
and got the same people interested
that had made those short films
– they were doctors, they weren’t
really motion picture men – and they
financed this one picture. It cost
$9,000 and was called The Turn in the
Road [1919]. It was a metaphysical
type of film about a man hit by a
tragedy – his wife dying in childbirth

got together enough to make our first
payment on a Ford, which sold for about
$500, and we got out here that way,
landing here with about 20 cents.”) Vidor
directed his first feature in 1918; his last
feature was Solomon and Sheba, in 1959.
things he was doing. When he
saw that I knew about camera and
writing – I hadn’t directed, but I
told him I had – he gave me the job
of directing. Soon after that he left
Universal and founded a company
– who runs away from his friends
and family only to find ‘the truth
within us’ at his own fireside.
It was an immediate success.
We only had one print, which ran
in Los Angeles for eleven weeks
150 FROM THE ARCHIVE
– which was unusual for that time
– and then they took it to New
York. All the stars and companies
made me offers, but out of loyalty
to these nine doctors who had
put up $1,000 each for The Turn
in the Road I stayed with them for
a year. We had no budget to buy
stories, so I had to write them from
original ideas and things that had
happened to me and that I had seen.
A story that I was very excited
about was Three Wise Fools. It was
intensely human. Someone once
told me I had a general theme
running through all my pictures.
I wasn’t too aware of it at any time
but probably what interested me
was exploring the deeply human
feelings of people. Three Wise Fools,
about three older men and a young
girl, was a chance to explore those
deep feelings which seemed to me
to be important. This was my first
film at Metro, released in 1922 or ’23.
Q How long did your contract
at Metro go for?
A I never signed for long contracts;
I might sign for two or three
years. I missed out on the pension
plan at MGM. I was there over
twenty years but didn’t ever
have overlapping contracts.
Q What were some of the more
important pictures you first
worked on at the studio?
A On Joseph Hergesheimer’s Wild
Oranges [1924] we went all the way to
Florida to capture the atmosphere:
this was one of the first films
I know of where a company went
that far on location. We got a real
tropical mood; the picture was
made by the atmosphere. It seemed
a milestone from the reviews, this
breakaway from the studio. That’s
what the title of my book is about
[A Tree Is a Tree, based on something
a budget-minded producer once
told him]: “A tree is a tree, a rock
is a rock, shoot it in Griffith Park.”
If you talked atmosphere, if you
talked the importance of ambiance
to a film, they’d say, “Go on, what’s
wrong with Griffith Park? Why do
you want to go all the way across
the country?” But now we go all the
way around the world for them.
Q How did you land the assignment
of The Big Parade [1925]?
A I had an idea that I wanted to
make films that would not just
come to town for a few days and
be forgotten. We put all this effort
into a film and it would just come
for a few days and be gone and
that was it; it would just be in one
theatre in Los Angeles. I had the
idea I’d like to make the kind of
film Griffith had made, The Birth of
a Nation [1915] and so forth. Irving
Thalberg was there and I told him
about three themes I had: war and
‘I never signed for wheat and steel. So he said, “What
would you like to do first?” and I
long contracts; said, “Well, I want to read some war
I might sign for synopses.” So we read war stories
two or three years. and he went to New York and there
was a play running, What Price
I missed out on Glory by Laurence Stallings, and
the pension plan he said, “I talked to the author, if
at MGM. I was you’d like to have him,” and he called
me up, and I said, “Sounds fine.”
there over twenty I wanted to make an honest war
years but didn’t ever picture. They had all been very
have overlapping phoney until then, all glorifying
the officer and the war, and they
contracts’ never had had one with soldiers
and privates, they’d never had a
single picture with some feeling of
anti-war, of realistic war. Stallings
arrived with a five-page story.
I spent a lot of time with him, and
then we went back to New York
together and worked out the plot.
It was not planned as a big film
by the studio, although that’s the
sort of film I had in mind. I finished
it at $205,000. Some of the battle
scenes I shot in the park near here
called Legion Park right next to
Griffith Park, and one of them in
Santa Monica, at an airfield called
Clover Field. I shot some of the
scenes of the US Army involving
four or five thousand people and
200 trucks at San Antonio, Texas,
OPPOSITE
Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten
and the scene of the girl clinging to
in Beyond the Forest (1949) the truck was done at Griffith Park
BELOW
near Glendale with about three
James Murray in The Crowd (1928) trucks which we kept going around

the camera. Renée Adorée was
wonderful, I was mad about her.
She was actually French, you know.
Q What about the casting
of John Gilbert?
A He was a star and in order to get
him to do it they had presold the
picture as one of a series of his ‘star
films’. I won’t say I didn’t object
to him, but that was part of the
deal. Then when the picture was
finished and they saw what a big
success it was they had to go around
and cancel and buy out on those
contracts where they had sold it as
a starring picture. It became a big
‘special’ film, sort of put Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer on the map.
Q Did your attack on war
arouse any criticism?
A No. We were afraid that we
would have trouble showing
it, but strangely enough one of
the Duponts – I’ll never forget
it – said, “I’ll get you a big tent if
you can’t show it.” Now Dupont
was supposed to be a big war
manufacturer, but I’d met this man
and he said, “If you get in trouble
with the film we’ll supply a tent to
show it in.” He was just a visitor
on the set. But the minute it was
shown – I think the first showing
we had was in San Diego, a sneak
preview – it was just acknowledged
right away that it was a big
commercial success. This really
put me on the map. There was no
Academy Award at that time. Had
we had Academy Awards I probably
would have swept the whole field.
But it was a tremendous thing
and as I said it also put MGM
on the map. They wanted to sign
me up, which they did. I signed
up with them for a series of films,
staying on there quite a while.
Q How did you come to cast
James Murray in The Crowd?
A The Crowd [1928] was an original
story. I had a picture in mind,
working on the story, of exactly the
type of man it should be: sort of
nondescript, not negative, but some
place in between. I saw him as a
fellow that you could like and with
whom you’d be sympathetic, but
not too aggressive, not too active.
One day I was standing talking to
a man on the MGM studio lot and
a bunch of extras was going by, and
one fellow – the others were passing
around us – but one fellow said,
“Excuse me,” and walked between
us, and I just saw the face and I
said, “This is the fellow.” He went
on and I had to chase him and catch
up with him just as he was getting
on a bus, and I said, “What’s your
name?” and he told me – which I
forgot quickly – and I said, “Will you
come out tomorrow? I want to talk
‘The Big Parade to you,” and he said, “What’s your
name?” He didn’t show up so we had
really put me on to go through the list of extras that
the map. There day, and finally when I saw the name
was no Academy Murray I realised that was the name
he’d told me – James Murray, maybe
Award at that he’d told me both names. We had to
time. Had we had call him and then he didn’t come, he
Academy Awards didn’t think it meant anything, and
then we made a test by paying him
I probably would as an extra. He had been a doorman
have swept the in New York and later made a few
whole field’ other movies. I saw him when I
made Our Daily Bread and I said,
“I might have a part for you like you
had,” and he said, “What doing?”
and I said, “Well you’ll have to sober
up first and get a lot of that beer fat
off.” And he said, “Oh, screw you,
the hell with you,” and that was it.
He became an alcoholic and fell in
the East River in New York, either
pushed or fell. I did get a letter a few
years ago saying that while clowning
he slipped and fell in, while being
drunk too, and that he was drowned.
Q How did you get the
idea for The Crowd?
A From the approach I had to
The Big Parade. My idea of The Big
Parade was a man observing all
these happenings with a subjective
viewpoint entirely, and after The Big
Parade was a success Thalberg said,
“What are you going to do next? Any
stories that can top this?” And I said,
“There must be other stories with a
man observing” and he said, “What,
for example?” and I said, “Life.” So
I had to go home and start writing
OPPOSITE
Renée Adorée as French farm
out a story of a man observing life.
girl Mélisande, John Gilbert as
American soldier Jim Apperson
in The Big Parade (1925)
Q Was it entirely shot on
location in New York?
BELOW
Jennifer Jones as Pearl Chavez
A Not entirely. But probably half of it.
in Duel in the Sun (1946) We shot all around New York, with
FROM THE ARCHIVE 153
hidden cameras too, which was way
ahead of its time. I think this was the
first time it was done. I even made
two or three shots with a camera in a
packing box. We shot most of them
out of a truck with a flap down and
a hole cut in the back, and nobody
knew. I was probably influenced by
the Germans on the sets, such films
as Variety [1925], Metropolis [1927]. We
had very good art directors, Cedric
Gibbons and Arnold Gillespie.
Q Was the film a tremendous
success or not?
A It was a tremendous critical success.
The problem was that at that time
the theatres were all very large. We
had no art circuits, and this would
have been an ideal arthouse film.
But not having big stars, and not
having the advertising facilities that
they do today, such as television,
it meant that the film played to
theatres half filled with a lot of very
enthusiastic people. It didn’t actually
lose money; I guess the budget
would have been around $325,000.
Q How did you achieve the
realistic deglamorised look
of Billy the Kid [1930]?
A I’ve always been interested in
exterior scenery and in photography;
I’ve always had the photographic
eye. And this was the first 70mm
film. So, knowing I had this wide
screen, I said, “I’m going to go to
the best places that you can find.”
I looked all over the West for
isolated shots and spent a day at
the Grand Canyon and Zion Park
trying to duplicate the feeling of
New Mexico, where it happened.
I had a lot of old photographs – it’s a
true story – and deliberately copied
them in the film. Most western
154 FROM THE ARCHIVE
pictures use existing streets, but we
didn’t use any. Because of the wide
screen, which seemed to accentuate
the photography, I tried to make
it unusual. But they withdrew the
wide-screen version because of
the extra expense: they were still
paying for sound equipment, and
the Fox and MGM executives
(Fox was making a wide-screen
picture about the same time)
got together and put it away.
I followed the character of Billy
the Kid as closely as I could. They
had this football player Johnny
Mack Brown under contract, and
after three years of trying to do
something with him they finally
said to me, “If you’ll use him in
the lead we’ll let you do the film.”
But it should have had a tough
young kid – Jimmy Dean, a young
Cagney or something. I more or
less stylised the clothes, put him
all in black, although the only
existing photographs of Billy the
Kid are of course rather funny-
looking old tin-types. But it wasn’t
good casting on my part: he wasn’t
incisive enough, wasn’t sharp
enough. Wallace Beery I didn’t
particularly want but he had enough
individuality, enough personality
to dominate the character of the
sheriff and that turned out well.
But generally speaking I wasn’t
too enthusiastic about the casting;
in fact I don’t have any desire even
to run it because the concessions
to the casting are too bad. I
haven’t seen it since it was made.
Q Our Daily Bread [1934] is a film
which must be very close to you?
A Yes. It was done in Depression
times. I read a little article on
co-operation and co-op living which
spurred me on to that. I also saw
it as the Wheat segment of the
Wheat and Steel and War trilogy
I spoke of at the time of The Big
Parade. I borrowed money on just
about everything I had in order to
do it. Thalberg said he liked it, but
he couldn’t do it in the studio, so I
ended up borrowing all the money
myself and just broke even. It was
shot out Sacramento Valley way.
It’s interesting that the earth is
a recurring theme in my films.
I do have an intense feeling for the
earth, for rural life. I used to have
a map of the United States and
I’d put in little marks or pins of
where I’d done pictures. I looked
at the US as one might look at the
world: you have African people
there, and you have Russian people
there, and I was always interested
in the way New England people
lived, Southern people lived,
Western people lived. The Wedding
Night [1935], for instance, is about
Connecticut tobacco farms,
The Stranger’s Return [1933] about ‘It’s interesting
Iowa. Originally I was interested
in the Middle West, Indiana,
that the earth is a
Illinois, all those states: the centre recurring theme
of America and American life. in my films. I do
Q An American Romance [1944]?
have an intense
A That’s the Steel, the metal feeling for the
segment of that trilogy. I actually earth, for rural life.
wrote that picture for Spencer
Tracy. At one time the studio
I used to have a
promised me Tracy, Ingrid map of the United
Bergman and Joe Cotten. But States and I’d put
someone else came in and took the
others over and I wasn’t enough
in little marks or
politician to be up front at the pins of where I’d
lunchroom and I got secondary done pictures’
casting. This project was a big
love of mine for many years. I
had many ideas: from the earth
up into the air – lift – and doing
it by colour, by the development
and use of colour. And then it was
the earth, the heavy earth, iron
ore, getting more refined, more
refined, until it finally flew into
the sky as an airplane, you see, and
only up, and it was all of America:
we started in New York and ended
in California and used most of
the states right across America. OPPOSITE
Johnny Mack Brown as Billy,
But the picture was spoiled for Wallace Beery as Pat Garrett,
me by Brian Donlevy and by the Kay Johnson as Claire in
Billy the Kid (1930)
girl [Ann Richards], who was not
very exciting, and by the cutting. BELOW
Barbara Stanwyck in the title
I took a lot out of it, and then the role, John Boles as her husband
studio cut it against my wishes, Stephen in Stella Dallas (1937)

taking out things that I didn’t think
should be cut and leaving in things
that could have been cut. Also, to
avoid re-dubbing and re-doing the
music, they cut by where the music
ended, and that was just ruinous.
The other thing was, I had it very
heavy on the documentary side, and
when I went out on the road with
it in the Middle West I discovered
that we should keep all the human
story and cut down more on the
documentary story. But in the
cutting they did the reverse: they
cut the human story and kept all the
documentary stuff. So that’s when
I left MGM and never went back.
Q Who were the other directors
who are said to have done work
on Duel in the Sun [1946]?
A William Dieterle did some, and
Otto Brower, and Sidney Franklin
did a couple of days, even William
Cameron Menzies did one or two
days. They were not with the cast
principally. This is normal, to have
second units, provided they talk
with the director who has planned
the scenes. Franklin was good
with animals, and another fellow
was good with action, so you let
them do it, but you got together
with them and drew a lot of little
diagrams of how it was going.
Selznick was a great one for second
units spread all over the place
because they could take more time
and wouldn’t hold up the cast.
At the end of the film, two days
before we finished, Selznick and
I had an argument and I quit.
That’s when I think he had
Menzies. Then the film turned out
bigger than he thought it was going
to be so he called in Dieterle for
additional scenes. They reshot a
few sequences and then we never
could tell which were his and which
were mine. Dieterle did shoot the
train wreck and the very opening,
the dance in a big Mexican saloon
with Tilly Losch. I opened with
a man in jail or something, right
afterwards. We didn’t have this big
spectacular opening in the original
script; it was Selznick’s idea to open
in a big way, to add all that bigness.
In fact I started the picture as an
intense, High Noon type of thing.
He got me to run Gone with the Wind
some time during the shooting
and said he conceived blowing this
picture up like Gone with the Wind.
Q What was your point of
difference with Selznick that
made you leave the picture?
A An argument over the film being
behind schedule. His production
man had given the camera and crew
to somebody else so we couldn’t do
the thing I’d rehearsed. He came
out and made a big scene: “What’s
the matter?” he said. “Why aren’t
you shooting, it’s horrible, etc.” I
told him to quit blowing off until he
found out what was causing it and
he persisted, so I said, “Apparently
you want to direct the picture,” and
I gave him the microphone. We
were out on location with, oh, we
had the cavalry, we had the railroad,
we had everything. I’d told him,
“If you do it three times I’m going
to leave.” So I left, and he said,
“Come back,” but I didn’t. I’d had
enough by then. It was two days
to the end and I was pretty tired.
Finally the Directors Guild had
a committee to adjudicate on credit
for the film. I sat with them and
so did the cutter and we ran the
picture and found other people had
done maybe five, eight, ten per cent.
It was hard to decide because we
had shot some scenes and they had
reshot them in the same identical
way with the same dialogue.
Q What did you think of
Beyond the Forest [1949]?
A Not too much. It has a certain
atmosphere about it but I don’t
think much of it, for some reason or
other. Still, I liked it a little better
than Lightning Strikes Twice [1951].
Q How much control did you have
over Bette Davis’s performance?
A I had one or two run-ins with her,
to the point where she tried to have
me taken off the picture. But she
didn’t succeed. They didn’t tell me
this until after the picture was over.
They were terribly minor things.
She’s a pro, and she usually came
and gave a good performance,
but you might say something that
affected her without knowing
it; she was terribly touchy.
Q War and Peace [1956] was a huge
project, a major project?
A Yes. I loved it, I thought we got
great results. I wish I’d had Peter
Ustinov playing Henry Fonda’s
part. I looked at Paul Scofield too.
Fonda was better than Scofield
would have been but I think
Ustinov would have been great.
I never considered anyone else for
Natasha but Audrey Hepburn.
The art director on War and Peace
is probably the best I’ve worked
with, the assistant director was as
good as I’ve had any place, and the
rest of the crew, mostly Italian – the
costume design, coordinated with
the art direction – was better than
I’ve ever experienced here, and I
really was inspired. Of course it’s a
great book, it’s easy to be inspired
by the book. I thought we got its
atmosphere. The new Russian
version is supposed to be eight
hours long, but with an unlimited
budget it’s a different story. My War
and Peace ran six months in Moscow,
so they must have liked it.
FROM THE ARCHIVE 157
‘I loved War and ‘IN HOLLYWOOD THE CAMERAMAN
LIGHTS THE STAR. IN EUROPE HE LIGHTS
Peace, I thought THE SET’: THE LIFE OF KING VIDOR
we got great King Vidor was born in Texas in 1894 to a
results. I wish well-off family of Hungarian descent. By the
early 1910s he was working on newsreels, and
I’d had Peter directed his first short in 1913 before moving
Ustinov playing to Hollywood in 1915, where he freelanced as
a scriptwriter and shorts director for the Boy
Henry Fonda’s City Film Company. He directed his first
part. I looked feature The Turn of the Road in 1919, followed
by several other formulaic films, some of them
at Paul Scofield vehicles for his then wife Florence Vidor. His
too. Fonda was first box-office success was Peg o’ My Heart
in 1922, produced by Louis B. Mayer, which
better than got him a contract with Goldwyn Pictures,
Scofield would soon to be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After a
run of literary adaptations, the 1925 anti-war
have been but romance The Big Parade, starring John Gilbert,
Ustinov would established Vidor as a humanist trailblazer
among American directors, with its unsparing
have been great’ depictions of the realities of trench warfare.
Vidor went on to direct La Bohème in
1926, also starring Gilbert alongside
Lilian Gish, but it was The Crowd in 1928,
a well-received tale of a couple’s struggles
with the impersonality of life in New York,
that secured him the first of five Oscar
nominations for best direction. Also in 1928
Vidor directed Marion Davies in a couple of
crowd-pleasing comedies before making a
successful transition to sound with Hallelujah
(1929), the first film from a studio to have
an all-Black cast. Like Billy the Kid (1930),
the film was not a commercial success, but
Street Scene and The Champ (both 1931) did
much better. Our Daily Bread (1934) was
another landmark Vidor film, an Eisenstein-
influenced tale about a Depression-era couple
who start a farm collective. Also notable was
Stella Dallas (1937), which starred Barbara
Stanwyck as a self-sacrificing working-class
mother ambitious for her daughter. There
were a couple of commercial successes in 1940
but Vidor’s long preparation on An American
Romance (1944) didn’t pay off at the box office,
which led him to leave MGM. He revived
his career with Duel in the Sun (1946), for
David O. Selznick, and Beyond the Forest (1949)
starring Bette Davis, but his career went
into decline in the 1950s. In 1979 he received
an honorary Oscar as a cinematic innovator.
King Vidor died on 1 November 1982.
THE ORIGINAL ISSUE
PUBLISHED IN
SIGHT AND SOUND, AUTUMN 1968
INTERVIEW BY
JOEL GREENBERG
OPPOSITE
Tom Keene as co-operative
farm founder John Sims,
Barbara Pepper as temptress
Sally in Our Daily Bread (1934)

THIS MONTH IN…
This has always
been the issue in
which Sight and
Sound staff and
contributors
look back over
the year and
produce their
best-of lists;
here, reflection
takes the form
of a fascinating
month-by-
month diary by
editor Penelope
Houston. The
best-of list (not
even placed in any kind of order of merit) is tucked
away in the corner of one page with surprising lack of
fanfare compared with today’s end-of-year listmania.
But what a list it is – and interesting to compare
with 2023’s best offerings in the front of this issue:
Last Year in Marienbad, La notte, Ugetsu Monogatari,
Viridiana, Le Caporal épinglé, Jules et Jim, Lolita,
The Manchurian Candidate, Knife in the Water, Early
Autumn, to name but a few. Not bad by any stretch.
COVER
The cover shows Richard Harris, an alumnus of Joan Littlewood’s theatre
workshop, as tormented rugby league star Frank Machin in This Sporting Life,
directed by Lindsay Anderson, the film that gave Harris his big break: he was
nominated for an Oscar, and though he didn’t win, he did receive the Best Actor
prize in Cannes. Thereafter Harris became one of the most recognised stars of his
era, in films such as Camelot (1967), Cromwell (1970) and later on Unforgiven (1992),
eventually rounding off his career by playing Albus Dumbledore in the first two
Harry Potter films before his death in 2002 at the age of 72.
INSIDE STORY
Giulio Cesare Castello’s piece on
the state of Italian cinema in 1962
interestingly singles out Salvatore
Giuliano rather than the obvious
candidate, Antonioni’s L’eclisse,
venturing a few insightful criticisms
of the latter film while being broadly
in favour.
“ The most mature film the Italian
cinema has produced in 1962, and also
I would say the most important, is
Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano,
in which the neorealist heritage still
powerfully survives. Rosi, who comes
from Naples, is cinematically speaking
a Southerner, who seeks out above
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
all a sense of the abnormalities which
undermine society and occasionally
explode into sudden, violent crises.”
LEFT
Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano
REVIEWS
HATARI
Peter John Dyer was deeply
unimpressed by Howard Hawks’s safari
romp, starring John Wayne.
“ The human material is as trite as it
was in Only Angels Have Wings (from
which, basically, it comes), only at
twice the length. It is as if the plot
hadn’t been so much scripted as inked
in on an elastic band, capable of being
stretched over any required running
time from 30 minutes to 3 hours. There
is something chronically vexatious in
the way this obviously sophisticated
director is prepared to go on and
on dispensing simplisms with such
seasoned guile, such consummate,
presumably shameless ease.”
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
Peter Harcourt identified self-
indulgence and portentousness in
Bergman’s latest, despite its apparent
austerity.
“If by the end of Through a Glass
Darkly, we feel with some regret
that Bergman has more asserted
the value of love than demonstrated
it dramatically within the film,
nevertheless, in the uniqueness of his
imagery and the intimacy with which
he observes some of the details of
these four people’s lives, he succeeds
in reminding us that he is still one of
the most distinctive and compelling
directors in the cinema today.”
ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO
For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Louis
Malle’s latest was a failure, although he
conceded there were some saving graces.
“It is not unrelieved French intellectual
pretentiousness. It is funny, most
of the time; it is always interesting;
and towards the end… it becomes
suddenly spine-chilling and genuinely
frightening.”
1962
159
VIVRE SA VIE
ABOVE Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie
The release of Godard’s third feature
film in the UK was marked by an
interview with the director by Tom
Milne, who nailed his own colours to
the mast.
“ To clear the ground, let me state at
once that I consider Vivre sa vie to
be not only Godard’s most mature
and most personal film, but also
something of a masterpiece. The full
range of the cinematic vocabulary
which he spread out in his earlier films
with the vivid and random excitement
of a child learning to talk is here
applied with a rigorous economy and
exactness which show his complete
and imaginative mastery of the
medium, together with a new element
of repose.”
Godard’s rigorous
economy and exactness
in Vivre sa vie show his
imaginative mastery
of the medium
ELSEWHERE IN THE ISSUE
· Reviews of The Manchurian Candidate,
The Trial of Joan of Arc, The L-Shaped
Room and How the West Was Won.
· An interview with ‘survivor’ Sir
Michael Balcon, head of Ealing
Studios from 1938-55.
· A defence of Jacques Rivette’s first
film Paris nous appartient, winner of
the Sutherland prize at that year’s
London Film Festival.
· A feature on the newly released The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,
starring Tom Courtenay and directed
by Tony Richardson.
· An analytical piece by Richard Roud
on the Left Bank trio of Agnès Varda,
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.
A 12-month subscription to Sight and Sound
includes full access to the 91-year archive
of the magazine. Visit bfi.org.uk/sight-
and-sound/magazine/subscriptions
 EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mike Williams

MANAGING EDITOR Isabel Stevens
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kieron Corless
REVIEWS EDITOR Katie McCabe
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BFI DIGITAL FEATURES EDITOR Sam Wigley
CHIEF SUB-EDITOR Jamie McLeish
SUB-EDITORS Robert Hanks
Liz Tray
CREDITS SUPERVISOR Patrick Fahy
CREDITS ASSOCIATES Kevin Lyons
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162
ENDINGS
Time of the Wolf (2003)
Michael Haneke’s drama plunges the audience
into an apocalypse that ends with neither a bang
nor a whimper, but a rumble and a whoosh and
a sudden, uncharacteristic surge of hope
BY CATHERINE WHEATLEY
The title Time of the Wolf is taken from
the old Norse poem ‘Song of the Seer-
ess’, also known as Völuspá, part of the
Poetic Edda, and references a time
before Ragnarök, otherwise known
as the Apocalypse. It suggests that the
whole film is an ending, that we are
watching the end of days. Certainly
the narrative bears that hypothesis out.
The film opens in medias res, as a family
of four arrive at their holiday cottage,
having fled an unnamed European city
for what they assume will be the relative
safety of the countryside. Within five
minutes, a shocking, bloody death has
occurred. As the survivors seek help,
we glean that something catastrophic
has happened. The nearest village is all
but deserted and the remaining locals
hostile. The water is poisoned, electric-
ity cut off. Herds of animals lie rotting
in fields.
Eventually Anne (Isabelle Huppert)
and her two children, teenage Eve
(Anaïs Demoustier) and her younger
brother Benny (Lucas Biscombe),
arrive at a railway station where a
motley group of refugees is waiting for
a train that may or may not be coming
at some point in the future. The atmos-
phere here is fractious. Tempers are
frayed, nerves stretched. Residents
trade limited resources (lighters, ciga-
rettes, batteries) and sexual favours for
food and water, fight for sleeping space.
Various alpha males jostle for power.
There are rumours about the existence
of “the Just”, a mysterious group of 36
men and women “who assure that God
will protect us”; and of a hero who will
save the world through a sacrifice of fire.
A child dies. A group of white suprema-
cists arrives. So does the family who
Anne and her children encountered in
the film’s opening moments.
As the tension in the camp grows, so
does the suspicion that we’re heading
towards a terrible denouement. Haneke
is, after all, a director who knows how
to stick a landing: the final shots of films
such as Funny Games (1997), The Piano
Teacher (2001) and Hidden (2005) are
all devastating blows that leave audi-
ences reeling. Sure enough, the closing
moments follow a bloody-nosed and
grave Benny, who has remained silent
for most of the film, as he slips away
from his sleeping mother and sister and
walks towards the crackling fire. The
whole film has seemed submerged in a
dim gloam: with the power out, the only
available light comes from the sun or
from flames. Here, director of photogra-
phy Jürgen Jürges’s extraordinary night
footage, already used to powerful effect
in an earlier sequence in which Eva acci-
dentally sets a hay barn alight, forces us
to screw up our eyes as we strain to read
the expression on Benny’s face, to make
out his movements as he undresses and
faces the flames, the image only briefly
illuminated as he wrestles another
branch on to the bonfire, which skitters
and sparks.
But just as it seems the worst will
happen, an unlikely saviour arrives in
the form of Jean (Thierry van Werveke),
one of the white supremacists, who first
attempts to talk to Benny and, when
this is unsuccessful, wrestles him to the
ground, where he cradles him and whis-
pers gentle consolations. “Have a good
cry. It will make you feel better,” he tells
the naked child weeping in his arms,
grieving – for the first time – everything
that has been lost. “You’re brave,” Jean
whispers, as he strokes Benny’s hair.
“You’d have done it for sure. And that’s
enough.” The camera pulls out and up,
as if to acknowledge the intimacy of this
moment, the fact that we should leave
these two to their privacy. “Everything
will work out,” Jean continues, “Maybe
tomorrow… maybe tomorrow a car will
come racing up and a guy will get out
and say everything’s fine. And we’ll eat
roast pigeon. And the dead will come
back to life…” And suddenly there is a
rumble and a whoosh, and the screen
is dark once again, with only flickers of
light and as our eyes adjust we realise
that now we are looking out at a forest,
racing past the windows of a train,
moving at high speed through a green
landscape. Blue sky f ills the screen,
before branches flicker once more across
the view. The train moves onwards. It is
still moving when the titles appear. This final shot, which the cinematographer
This final shot, which the cinema-
tographer Ari Wegner has called “per-
Ari Wegner has called ‘perfection… the
fection… the best last shot in any film”, best last shot in any film’, is as tender and
is as tender and haunting a moment haunting a moment as Haneke has created
as Haneke has created. Light dawns,
lungs fill with air, and here is the star-
tling revelation: that even at the end of
the world, hope can be found. ABOVE Lucas Biscombe as Benny, Thierry van Werveke as Jean
 SPAIN’S OFFICIAL SELECTION FOR
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE AT THE 96TH ACADEMY AWARDS®

“ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR.”

“SPECTACULAR.” “THRILLING.”

“EMOTIONAL.” “VISCERAL.”

“A REMARKABLE
ACHIEVEMENT
and J.A. Bayona’s
EHVWğOP.”