Soderbergh Ranked

• The bulk of Soderbergh's 21st-century work falls into a few types of perverse experiments: the structural (HAYWIRE), the visual/formal (THE GOOD GERMAN, UNSANE, NO SUDDEN MOVE, PRESENCE), and wildly counterintuitive and trollish uses of performers—ranging from movie stars to non-actors—with varying degrees of outside baggage (HAYWIRE, OCEAN'S TWELVE). THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE sits alongside FULL FRONTAL (among others) as a film that's as experimental as Soderbergh ever got in all three modes at once, and so it's no wonder that it has a middling-to-negative reputation from which it's never been reclaimed.

• Soderbergh is playing a fascinating game here vis-à-vis artifice. The whole ensemble (not just Grey and Santos!) is cast for their total lack of affect and made to stumble their way through scenes in which they've clearly been given a couple of character beats to improvise around at length. They're shot using the Red One in ways that vaguely resemble certain 'documentary' visual linguistics (i.e., crummy early-days digital image quality, available light, production audio that sounds either totally raw or the next-closest thing) but from conspicuous angles in which Soderbergh is doing all he can to call attention to the act of composing each frame—particularly the perverse ways in which he's withholding information and performances (especially Grey's) from the audience.

This isn't idle play, though: for all of Grey and Santos' obvious lack of technical acting skills, there's a David-Byrne-theory-of-singing honesty to their performances. The artlessness is a route to authenticity, as it feels like nobody has pretensions of constructing a conventional fictional performance in the meta-textual sense. Meanwhile, every mechanism of the camera direction is dedicated to expressing the various ways in which Chelsea builds and maintains emotional walls between herself and those around her: Grey might not be engaging in overt artifice, but Chelsea—within the diegesis—is. This approach toward both central characters, in which the contrast between conspicuous artlessness in performance and conspicuous authorship in visual form, is counterintuitive Soderbergh in full flight, and it allows him to render both achingly human and relatable amidst all that sense of icy distance.

• Lots of interesting quirks here, and I wonder how many of them were wholly intentional and how many were simply considered acceptable byproducts of this film's extremely compressed and run-and-gun shooting methodology. There are in-shot aperture racks left in, blatant continuity errors (Chelsea changes shirts mid-sentence at one point), and production audio quirks that wouldn't have made it through any professional sound editor's first in almost any other mainstream film. Fascinating.

• Chris's very specific personality type—or performance of a personality type that he's internalized—is so incredibly familiar to me. Terrific portrayal of this specific type of all-positivity-all-the-time-until-it-snaps hustle bro.

• Hooted and hollered when I realized the Erotic Connoisseur was Glenn Kenny.

• What a flick to watch on the eve of the biggest stock market crash in half a decade.

• Anja immediately declared "this is a romantic comedy! Add it to the list!" upon the end credits, so on it goes! Y'all can't blame me for this one.

• I was told about the George Smiley thing, but I wasn't quite prepared for just how much this is specifically indebted to le Carré (he's named George fer chrissakes) and in particular very specific elements of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This whole project really feels like Koepp and Soderbergh saw the parallels between the novel* and the works of Agatha Christie and went "what if we did le Carré but with way more dinner parties!"

• If I take any significant issues with any of this it's in the fact that Koepp - unlike le Carré - lacks the sufficient guts to consistently obfuscate important plot information and leave key beats to implication. The film's weakest moments come when we're given information - emotional beats in particular - that le Carré would have made us work for.

• Now see here: I'm 100% onboard for Soderbergh's trollish digital experimentation period. He could spend the rest of his days making movies about Meryl Streep on various boats shot on progressively smaller digital sensors and I'd be there for all of it. But I can't lie: when that opening shot wandered through the streets of London before descending into a bloomed-out softening filter hell of a nightclub I did have a "we are so back" moment. It's nice to know that Soderbergh can still make a whole movie where he's (mostly**) not doing a visual bit in one form or another.

• So help me, I am such a mark for the Soderbergh school of softening filters and blown-out practicals. Disastrous in lesser hands: chock-full of visual tension here because he's genuinely thoughtful about where he places his characters in his wildly underlit frames and moreover how those frames fit into the geographical and graphical whole of each scene. It's a great study in why blaming techniques (why are movies so dim / backlit / blown out / fuzzy) in and of themselves is foolhardy: Soderbergh is engaging in virtually trend that it has become trendy to grouse about here, and it's virtually all to the film's benefit.

• It's a great testament to Soderbergh's resilience to the push and pull of the studio system that this sixty-million-dollar movie doesn't feel like - locations aside - it's playing up its own production value significantly more (certainly not 10-30 times more) than, say, KIMI or MAGIC MIKE.

• This is eighty-eight minutes before credits!!! I love this man.

• Why yes I am typing this entry while ively rewatching Alfredson's TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY for the eight thousandth time. Who among us???

° [Edit] Here's a reference that only came to mind an hour later: this is totally THE THIN MAN in its depiction of a mystery-solving married couple that are still viscerally hot for one another.

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*Though - and I am marginally less confident in this on of my general overfamiliarity towards the Alfredson adaptation - there are enough scenes that echo his 2011 version in particular that I can't help but suspect that it was a major reference point here in and of itself.

**This still, by any reasonable standard, has no shortage of trollish little decisions, but that's just the thing: they're all little decisions, and he's mostly on good behavior here.

This review may contain spoilers.

• The thing about Chabrol's thrillers is that he's got the guts to take the darkest possible path available to its logical - and often 'predictable' in that sense - conclusion while not flinching at all, and yet he always manages to finesse the details such that everything feels genuinely weird and misshapen in ways that render everything terrifically unnerving.

• Pretty brilliant generic structure: the opening of the film sets us up for a thriller, but the ensuing hour presents us with what is by all appearances a light-yet-melancholy drama about unrequited romance. We know something's going to happen, but the nearly comical gap between that metatextual gut feeling and the anodyne conflicts happening onscreen creates its own sort of counterintuitive tension.

All this really works gangbusters in making the inevitable descent into something resembling slasher horror far more terrifying and sinister than it might otherwise have been, but Chabrol is up to even more clever games in the romantic structure: just as the first two thirds of the film take place within Helene's concept of romance, the last third sees her enter the world of Paul's (far more broken and sadistic) sense of romance. Of course it's in this incredibly fucked-up context that she's finally won over by the guy, and that's why we love Chabrol!

• Some notably "why-does-this-ostensibly-low-key-nighttime-interior-look-like-a-Costco-warehouse" interiors from Rabier here, but.. not all, but most is forgiven in the final third when he and Chabrol suddenly swerve in the exact opposite direction to great effect. While the tiresome lighting instructor in me does perhaps wish that the in-hindsight-deliberate overlighting of the schoolhouse interiors had been accomplished with a little less lead-footed camera-side hard sourcing, the contrast in tones is very effective.

• There's an impressively long tracking shot early on involving two characters walking down a street that feels like the entire blueprint for Linklater's camera direction idiom for the entirety* of the BEFORE series.

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*Well, really only a third of BEFORE MIDNIGHT to which I give Linklater a because he spends the other two thirds deliberately withholding the goods from us.

• One could describe this film as both "a character study about a woman who is such a complete non-entity that others continuously trip themselves up by projecting onto this blank slate of a person" and "a dark meditation on the ways in which class represents an unbridgeable gap between us" and one would not be wrong, but both miss the point: this is the Isabelle Huppert show, and everything that is remarkable about this movie pretty much stems from her very specific execution of this performance.

Anyways: she's great, but the sky was also blue today. It's an unusual performance for her insofar as she's playing a character totally cocooned by her ivity, but she pushes it to such extremity that she loops back around to an intensity that is readily comparable to her more overtly intense later work. It's a performance of subtraction which prefigures THE PIANO TEACHER in interesting ways.

• Goretta really only trips up in the last twenty minutes or so in which he seems in quite a rush to spell out a fair amount of subtext that wasn't exactly cryptic to begin with.

• The best available circulating copy of this - a crappy HDTV tape - is not flattering to Boffety's work here. Curious to see it with a proper transfer. Also: he shot THIEVES LIKE US? And AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE?!?

• The platonic ideal of (to loosely borrow a term from Barry Sonnenfeld) a "handsome" movie. Entirely shot on medium-long lenses, every lighting position finessed within an inch of its life to maximize conventional beauty or otherwise a massively refined and polished patina of "grit", balanced compositions only, impeccable tailoring, Italian hill towns, and a cast exclusively comprised of hot* people.

Corbijn's major failing here is that this is exactly where he stops in of building his aesthetic approach into something either expressive or dense with meaning, and this is a film that plainly wants to be more than it is. Corbijn is content to adopt the pose of an arthouse director, but there is virtually never anything significant going on under the hood of the engine driving these decisions other than "this is what an arthouse movie would do in these circumstances". Occasionally this manifests in ways painfully literal such as when he recreates that shot from PERSONA at a moment that doesn't at all call for the things that such a composition would imply, or at a moment when ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST pops up seemingly so that we can be reminded about other, better Italy-related arthouse genre flicks shot in 2.39:1 using spherical lenses.

• Speaking of things that perhaps undermine the ostensible serious-mindedness of this enterprise: for a film so assured of its own artistic credentials, it certainly seems eager to leverage those credentials to launder a gaze as shamelessly male as any of the straightforward genre fare it is so desperate to elevate itself above.

• At certain points this requires the streets of various large towns in Abruzzo to be comically empty for the plot to work, but it's rare to see such things pushed quite so far. "MMORPG private server" vibes.

• This is kind of a petty small-beans complaint, but the whole plot makes no sense.

• Brave of Clooney to do a scene involving him shouting "who do you work for!" at someone lying on the ground - and play it straight - a mere two years after BURN AFTER READING.

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*With the sole exception of the clergy, of course: they're allowed to be not-hot, as is written.

Criterion 2k Master | BD

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• MCCABE & MRS. MILLER might very well be impossible to unseat as my favourite Altman on of the fact that I've now spent the better part of a decade relentlessly attempting to rip it off, but I find it tough to argue against NASHVILLE as Altman's most accomplished work. As much as this type of ensemble film was neither wholly unprecedented* nor without great antecedents**, nobody - not even Altman - has pushed the concept to such radical extremes as this. Inter-scene parallel structure is just the starting point: the bulk of this film is comprised not of 'scenes' in the conventional sense but of big soupy setpieces in which we jump between dozens of individual named characters on very nearly a line-by-line basis***. Most ensemble cinema is a quilt in which each block is distinc; here, it's the individual fibres. It's as dense as cinema has ever gotten, and it's no wonder that Altman and his imitators have never really repeated it: it's an absolutely exhausting assault that should not work nearly as well as it does. Altman can't afford to put a foot wrong here, and the fact that he doesn't is one of the great high-wire acts in cinema.

• Letting the cast write the bulk of their own songs results in an interesting rift between the outright parody songs (largely thanks to Henry Gibbons, who deeply understood the assignment) and the numbers that muster as believable country/folk hits. Blakley and Carrdine's songs are bundles of cliches, though not appreciably moreso than a great deal of '70s mainstream country and folk: they resemble the genuine article. On the other hand, you've got goofy shit like For The Sake of the Children - high in the running for the most sanctimonious song ever written - which would feel right at home in A MIGHTY WIND or WALK HARD****. Both somehow coexist: I'm not sure how.

• This is an astonishingly ugly film: Paul Lohmann's lighting oscillates between baldly functional and outright anti-aesthetic, the operation is rough-and-tumble even by 70s Altman standards, and the pictorial quality of moment-to-moment compositions are wholly subservient to Altman's multi-camera coverage working methods. It's quite the contrast to Zsigmond's work in MCCABE, IMAGES, and THE LONG GOODBYE: not one of those films is 'pretty', but they're ugly in very specific, compartmentalized ways designed to contribute to a sort of counterintuitively beautiful whole.

And yet: my early "what the hell is this?" response to my very first viewings of Altman's work aside, it's somehow never a problem. Sure, one could justifiably point to Zsigmond's rather deliberative methods being likely unworkable in the context of a work this structurally ambitious, but I think that Lohmann's work here is a good fit for the material on its own merits. This feels artless and unadorned in a way that serves the brittle bleakness of everything we're seeing: a sort of mashup between the most ascetic of direct cinema and the most functionalist of TV news coverage.

And yet Lohmann's lighting is thoughtful and considered where it counts. Take the I'm Easy scene: of the three women whose reaction to the song we're most focused upon, two - Chaplin and Raines - are given catchlights in their eyes. The effect is distinct for each, but the commonality here is that both hope the song is about them but suspect it's about the other. Both are mistaken, of course: the song is really about Tomlin, staged in the deep background of the scene (even within her own close-up, which buries here between about four layers of background performers). She doesn't merely hope it's about her: she knows it's (for the moment) about her, and the lighting makes this unmistakeable. She, like Carradine, is given no catchlight: she's lit from above, a sort of dingy spotlight, pale as a ghost. There's a grave inevitability to her expression that the lighting perfectly compliments: she knows she's being manipulated, but has resigned herself to the night.

• I should note here that the I'm Easy scene is - lighting aside - one of the great triumphs in all of Altman's career elsewise. The man in the spotlight***** uses his talent to craft a song that manipulatively casts himself as the spurned idealistic lover, a fantasy that everyone else wants to believe in. We're simultaneously watching the scene in the usual Altman way from afar as anthropologists might and yet completely present in the heat of the emotional moment: it's the point at which the absurd structural gambits of NASHVILLE converge to the greatest effect.

[EDIT: You know what, I neglected to mention: the way that the scene is unmistakeable in its arc and meaning at all times despite the fact that the four performers in question stay essentially static for its entire three-minute duration is indicative of downright Leone-level use of basic camera direction and editing to give human faces meaning, and that's not to mention the flawless attention to performance.]

• It's downright miraculous that Albuquerque works as well as she does: if the film had underlined the fact that we're conspicuously being denied hearing her sing any more than it does, the final reveal of her abilities would have seen a foregone conclusion. Any less, and the gag wouldn't play at all.

• Rewatch provoked by curiosity about the four-track surround mix. It's seemingly unavailable in unadulterated form, but the 5.1 mix on the Criterion release (I suspect the Paramount Presents 4k-mastered release is similar) sure sounds like the four-track mix panned out to five channels and therefore might well be fairly representative. It's a fascinating mix all the same: assuming the worldizing is period-accurate, it's clearly building upon Murch's work in AMERICAN GRAFFITI and prefiguring his later multichannel work on the later stereo mix of the same film.

• The 2k master used in the Criterion BD is still far more watchable than the horrendously clipped/crushed/oversaturated Paramount Presents 4k master.

• This is an effusive entry and yet it feels not nearly effusive enough. This is touching-the-holy-relic level stuff. As good as art gets.

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*Even within the New Hollywood era, AMERICAN GRAFFITI arguably beat him to the punch in a few ways.
**DO THE RIGHT THING being my favourite subsequent work in this tradition.
***And that's if we're lucky enough to hear anything clearly amidst the overlapping dialogue.
****It might be unsurprising to hear that For The Sake of the Children is my favourite number in the whole film.
*****The scene is also as brutal a takedown of every pensive-guy-with-a-guitar as there ever was.

• This is one of those rare films that is undeniably and self-evidently a masterpiece upon first viewing, and I am not sure I can formulate anything worthwhile to say about it until further viewings.

Cineworks screening

• If anyone wants a screener of this, have I got a form for you.

• There's like 30 seconds of (I think?) super 8mm footage (could also be 16mm Bolex or something) that Spielberg shot of Verna Fields that is so absurdly dynamic. It's not fair.

• Get the thing so you can open the thing to get the thing to give to the guy who has the thing so he can open the thing to get the thing to give to the other guy who needs the thing to open the thing to find the thing that goes in the thing so you can get the thing from the thing and take the thing to the place with the thing to use the thing on the thing so the thing does the thing and gives you the thing so you can carry the thing to the thing and press the thing to open the thing and find the thing behind the thing, under the thing, near the thing, next to the thing that holds the thing you need for the thing, so the guy can take the thing and do the thing with the thing so you get the thing and use the thing to unlock the thing with the thing inside the thing that does the thing when you give it the thing, and then you get the thing from the thing and take the thing to the guy with the thing who needs the thing to get the thing so he can give you the thing that starts the thing with the thing

• This is crushingly anonymous gray slop, which means that it is not meaningfully better nor worse than any feature-length narrative content the Russo brothers have directed to date.

• It's an interesting play to structure every single one of a film's action scenes entirely out of total non-sequiturs. Causal linkage is for dorks.

• Every single live action human in this looks like an attempt at cosplaying a dystopian character by someone who has neither the resources to convincingly pull it off nor the willingness to get their hair mussed.

• It is telling just how much the Big Robot Battle climax resembles every single tiresome MCU action climax, right down to the gaudily fetishistic way the camera roves around the action.

• The utter gall of this thing to drown itself in unearned maudlin sentimentality at the last moment after nearly two hours of relentless Russo snark.

• They didn't even spring for the quadrophonic mix of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1?????? What the hell was $350 million US dollars for?!?!?

• I don't judge the Russos for directing crushingly anonymous gray slop for money, but I do judge them for not being able to tell the difference between their slop and cinema with actual artistic impulses.

• One of the rare moments when the Herzogian imperative has led me to an experience that is entirely devoid of interest. Trash cinema can be one of life's great pleasures, but there is nothing here.

161min International Cut - 2021 Kino Lorber UHD - VIFF Centre

• After a couple of years without a proper viewing that didn't involve some form of QC work for a certain home video release, I'm more struck than ever by the degree to which this is the work of a man who - just two years in - has lost patience with the genre he was so instrumental in popularizing.

The film's first hour is - in the moment - exactly the film we might expect from the director of FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE when granted greater resources: a deeply sardonic story of two outlaws relentlessly betraying one another and a third who betrays everyone else. The American civil war doesn't intrude upon the plot* until forty-four minutes in, and it does so in the form of a dark joke: cannon-fire as a thunderstorm as deus-ex-machina.

In hindsight we realize that this is all an absurdly protracted set-up for the actual story whose inciting incident occurs almost exactly an hour in. It's not coincidentally the moment at which the horrors of the war begin to dominate not only the movie's plot but its tone: as the plot's causal linkages begin to unwind in lieu of one of the most naked (and successful!) "and then..." plotlines in the mainstream cinema canon**, the film's tone turns away from the cynical and towards the melancholy. Not a single subsequent scene goes by in which the abject misery and human waste of the war aren't deeply felt in ways mournful (the Mission of San Antonio), horrifying (the prison camp, the onscreen firing squad execution), or darkly comic (Captain Clinton and the hated bridge).

Only after our heroes - having created a space temporarily useless to the cause of the combatants - can be briefly free of the war are they able to resolve their petty concerns. Leone (ironist that he is) sets this resolution in a makeshift wartime cemetery, but it is a promised land of sorts all the same: the cemetery is beautiful and symmetrical, surrounded by what is (by the standards of the deserts of Leone's west) a verdant place full of greenery and life. It's a place where the unjust might get their comeuppance, the filthy get what they need - even if it's not what they want - and those with the capacity of being righteous might find an opportunity to better themselves.

Though Leone would more formally eulogize the genre that made him famous a couple of years later, this is a document of his process of abandonment: he first playacts the part of someone fulfilling his generic expectations before revealing a far more melancholy and thoughtful set of tonal and thematic concerns before transcending all of that entirely.

Anyways: this is all by way of an explanation for why I tend to find myself an emotional wreck for the entire last twenty-five minutes of this film.

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*It's part of why the cuts made to the International cut are so effective: the early scene with Angel Eyes at the ruined fort rather badly jumps the gun on the slow integration of pathos.
**It should be noted that this is the rare case - in the context of popular narrative cinema, at least - in which such a non-sequitur structure actively serves the film's wider narrative idiom. It's essential to the film's surrealist sensibility.

• As much as I lean towards the "Leisen innocent" side when it comes to Wilder and Sturges' respective beefs* with how he handled their screenplays, I'm a little amazed at how much he resembles an empty chair here. Most of what goes wrong here does so because of a palpable sense of indecision in production : the screenplay calls for a tone that dynamically shifts between a comedy of manners, low-key horror and gothic drama, but Leisen basically flattens it all into a sort an inert lump of a thing.

• Lang's lighting is by a wide margin the most expressive element here; there are a few breathtaking moments of nighttime (studio) exterior mood-setting.

• Leisen's coverage choices are occasionally so astonishingly messy and counterintuitive that they (I think by accident?) cross over into "this is interesting, actually" territory. In particular, he has a habit of cutting between multiple angles of Frederic March that are so graphically similar they they very nearly as match cuts.

• It's telling that by far the two most self-assured moments of March's performance occur when he's not saddled with that outrageous accent.

• It's silly to judge a film as unduly uptight simply because it was made prior to July 1934, but this is most definitely a film that could have profited from a little more naughtiness.

• This is exactly 100 minutes shorter than MEET JOE BLACK.

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*Nonetheless: "You take a picture like HOLD BACK TOMORROW..." from SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS remains one of the great petty jabs in cinematic history, of course.

• That was some weird shit

• That bed, the MINUTE I saw that bed incongruously placed in the darn pool room I knew they'd stage a sex scene there. I was pissed that I was right about this.

• This is insane. Why is this three hours long. This is so goddamn endless. The movie goes on and on and on and on and on and never stops until it ends. Every scene repeats its dramatic and emotional beats at least twice and parodically overstays its welcome. I don't get it. Was there a script editor strike on at the time? This is the only explanation.

• Brad Pitt plays death in this as a cross between Jeff Bridges in STAR MAN and Dougie Jones but in the same as Chad from BURN AFTER READING, which means he's doing the goofy "fish-out-of-water alien" side of his character to the absolute hilt but everyone around him needs to act like he's not for the plot to work. It's wild.

• Claire Forlani has exactly two notes she can hit as an actress and those are "look at the ground and then look up" and "blue steel."

• Anthony Hopkins is a fucking genius who could make the unabomber's manifesto sound dramaturgically coherent.

• Thomas Newman's score sounds like John Williams if John Williams was prone to hackishly recycling stuff within a movie to mash the exact same "Hey you! In the audience! Feel unearned things now!" button over and over.

• Typical 90s Lubezki, which means that it's unabashedly gorgeous but a tad bit anonymous compared to his post-Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN work when he discovered extreme wide lenses on handheld cameras again.

• I feel drunk but I'm not

• Zsigmond had a notably bad time on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS not only because of Julia Philips' cocaine-fueled terror campaign aimed at him specifically, but because at that point Spielberg had become far more self-assured visually and less actively collaborative in the way that Vilmos was used to. He later cited THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS as a more rewarding experience, and one can easily see why: Zsigmond's soft-focus texture-forward style, full of secondary tones and oftentimes oppressively thick and atmospheric lighting, is the defining visual feature here in a way it only intermittently is in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

If anything, this feels more formally unified than CLOSE ENCOUNTERS* as a result: while the latter film is an odd fusion in which Zsigmond's murky idling state feels at odds with Spielberg's ever-increasing focus on punchy compositions and snappy movements, SUGARLAND is New Hollywood scrappiness through-and-through. Hell, there are even a few jump cuts!

• Spielberg's first 'scope work and boy does he ever take to the format like the kid in a candy store that he is. JAWS is more consistently bravura in its blocking, but this is an unbelievably auspicious debut in the format.

• This might very well be a "second viewing means I'll see the light" situation, but the screenplay's handle on characters seems shaky in many key ways. Lou Jean (possibly by dint of Hawn's terrific performance) and Tanner are well-drawn, but Clovis feels purely reactive and fairly vague and Slide lacks distinctive qualities other than "decent guy, pretty patient" which becomes a greater liability as the film goes on and he becomes our point of identification.

• Not sure the tonal dynamics totally work here: the goofy stuff and wacky turns feel just a little too broad, and the tragic turn feels a little maudlin.

• Even with the whole "everyone was doing this type of movie post BONNIE & CLYDE" disclaimer, it is kind of wild that BADLANDS, THIEVES LIKE US, and this came out within five months of one another. (Malick victorious.)
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*Which isn't to say CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is any worse visually; it's just more idiosyncratic, and probably more interesting for it.

1.66:1 Arrow BD

• I feel at this point a little confident in saying that Rohmer had a real penchant for frustrating the stereotypical postcard beauty of seaside vacation spots in particular.

Part of this is by dint of location: he shot such scenes on the northern (Normandy in particular) and occasionally western coasts of , and never ventured into the Riviera. As such, his beach* scenes rarely feel particularly warm. A TALE OF WINTER's Brittany-set prologue ostensibly serves as a summery contrast to main body of the film, and yet the image that lingers is of Véry going out to sea at extreme low-tide during an overcast day on a beach covered in muck and seaweed and shot in a way that's far more anthropological than it is sensual. THE GREEN RAY is a particularly extreme case: as shot by Sophie Maintigneux on 16mm film stock, Rivière's odyssey down the western coast of feels downright anti-aesthetic, full of uncomfortably cramped frames of people looking like they're shivering in the wind half the time.

PAULINE - thanks in no small part to Almendros' penchant for beautification - is on the more romanticized end of the Rohmer-beach spectrum (similar to A SUMMER'S TALE, though that story is absolutely frigid in other ways), but Rohmer still leans into the typical English Channel weather germane to this Norman setting: storm clouds consistently peek into his frames of beautiful people interacting on the beach. One does not get a sense that this place is warm and sunny, but that our six central characters are doing their best to act like it is to better fit the narrative of summer romance each intends to live out.

• I only noticed this now on of finally watching it via a technically advanced enough transfer to suss out such things, but the penultimate scene (or first half of the final scene, depending on how one slices it) looks noticeably different than the rest of the film: it's desaturated (particularly the foliage) with crunchy shadows and a harsh contrast curve. I'm curious as to whether this was a conscious decision on the part of Rohmer and Almendros (perhaps they used a different film stock?), a patched-in higher-generation source to cover for film damage later on, or some developmental quirk. Either way, it fits the moment perfectly.

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*CLAIRE'S KNEE might be the sole outlier here, but you see: I've successfully moved that particular goalpost with the word "seaside", and Annecy is a lake! Ha! Ha!

• I'm somehow over a decade and a half into being totally in the bag for Soderbergh and yet I've only now gotten round to this. A great reminder that there's a damn good reason I remain in said bag after years and years of formal experiments that pan out as often as they don't: underneath all the trollish tomfoolery* is a guy who is an absolute genius of the form. I cannot believe a 25-year-old made this. Boggles the mind. And he didn't even have Gregg Toland to help him.

• I'm going to say something extremely obvious by pointing out that I am absolutely enthralled by how effectively the central conceit of videotape-as-deviancy-as-distancing-mechanism-as-intimacy-as-humanism is iterated upon and interrogated throughout this. Such wholesome perversion.

• The intercutting between the climactic interview with Gallagher's viewing of said interview is one of the most thrilling bits of montage I've seen in a while. One of the few sequences I've seen in the past few months to successfully break through my current geopolitics-induced mental fog.

• I've had a run of bad luck when it comes to ellipses-heavy narratives recently, so it's nice to be reminded what actual narrative economy looks like: Soderbergh is absurdly assured in his methodical control over what we know and when, what we see firsthand and what we discover in hindsight.

• I've never been overly anti-MacDowell, but I had no idea she was capable of what she does here.

• [delete this] lmao, go to hell Sam Mendes [delete this]

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*Which isn't to say that the trollish tomfoolery isn't also its own reward, which it is.

4k Vinegar Syndrome BD

• This 4k transfer is remarkably good given that this is a wildly obscure 1984 documentary* from Vancouver, but it features one of the most bizarre restoration decisions I've ever seen: it appears that, perhaps in an attempt to negate the rather strong 16mm gate weave inherent in the footage, they've slapped an unbelievably strong digital perspective stabilizer over the whole thing. Unfortunately, as digital stabilizers tend to do, it seems to have locked on not to the edges of the frame but to the subjects of the interviews, and so the locked-off interview shots here - the majority of the film - now bob and weave along with the motions of each interview subject in a way that is palpably uncanny. Very, very weird to see this in a release that is otherwise lovingly-tended to.

• Dale & Cole have a terrific handle on the ways in which structure and character intersect here. This is clearly structured in a subject-to-subject sense: we've got the "dangers of the job" segment, the "economics of sex work" segment, the "family history" segment, et cetera. And yet each segment is just as well-leveraged as a springboard for gradually deepening our understanding of the handful of central subjects: the way in which each of them respond to the prompts surrounding these topics gradually etches them out as distinct personalities, and I never felt like we lost track of any of the central gang.

• The form of this isn't earth-shattering stuff in of '80s Canadian talking-heads documentaries, but the textural elements here feel both evocative and well-suited to the material. In between the available-light nighttime exteriors that push the signal-to-noise legibility of a 16mm image, unadorned hotel-room interviews featuring hard sources, and hidden-camera and nervous handheld photography we get a palpable sense of the marginalized community we're diving into: any level of conventional 'polish' would have been counterproductive.

• Michelle's use of the word "Severe!" as a catch-all term feels at least thirty-five years ahead of its time.

• As good as it gets in of West End location-spotting. Up there with RUSSIAN ROULETTE. Essential viewing if you have even a ing interest in the area.

---
*The fact that "I have complaints about the 4k physical release of this 1984 underground documentary about mostly trans sex workers in Vancouver with 625 views on Letterboxd" is a phrase that can be reasonably uttered here is, ittedly, a victory in and of itself.

UHD BD synced to Laserdisc mono

• I have questions about this transfer. Severely oversharpened at points (it smacks of "dated scan with a new coat of paint"), heavily degrained and then regrained, and what looks like some rather blunt tinkering with skintones at points. Not great, bob!

• My only substantative... not complaint, but Spielberg-curve-graded criticism, is that Bill Butler's lighting here does not set the world on fire. It's never less than totally adequate - and I wouldn't envy anyone the task of lighting those damn fishing boat daytime exteriors - but his habit of washing scenes with rather functionalist hard white sources is significantly less evocative than the work that Zsigmond was doing with Spielberg in his two adjacent films and Slocombe would shortly do.

• Flawless use of 'Scope by Spielberg here. No notes. So many incredible moments in which he stuffs an extra face into the corner of a frame otherwise designed for a standard OTS or frustrates our sense of focus with some wildly unconventional and ambitious framing in depth.

• Tiresome pedantry alert: the whole "we don't see the shark until 81 minutes in" talking point is, I think, a little inaccurate. We see fins for at least 40 minutes before that, and we clearly see it underwater at 62 minutes in. I guess "we get a clear shot of the shark popping out of the water at 81 minutes" doesn't have the same ring to it, but it's really more of a case of Spielberg letting the audience get clearer and clearer glimpses of the shark over the course of the last two thirds of the film: it feels a little arbitrary to point to the 81-minute point and declare that as the moment we 'see' Bruce.

• Soderbergh is the only one among us brave enough to look at real estate videography techniques and ask "what if this but horror."

• Bless Steven Soderbergh for spending his mid-late career almost exclusively on goofy formal experiments without giving two shits about whether or not he risks looking "amateurish" or whatever the kids call this stuff these days while doing so, and bless him even more for being okay if said experiments don't really work. Because this one doesn't really work! And that's okay! The next one's coming out in like six days anyways!

• https://youtu.be/X4RuB3gT8t0?si=ku49urzbBsNhlW6f&t=11

• Right in the overlap of the venn diagram of ONE FROM THE HEART and DANCER IN THE DARK, and it's every bit as cynical as that comparison sounds.

• Shocked I don't hear this - even in retrospect - brought up more often in the context of Gordon Willis's career. This is just about as showy as he ever got: one minute he's lovingly crafting 1:1 facsimiles of Edward Hopper paintings (and they are incredible facsimiles), the next he and Ross are not only perfectly recreating a scene from FOLLOW THE FLEET but building upon it with absolutely brilliant new compositions and gestures. He pulls new formal gestures out of his hat on what feels like a shot-by-shot basis: unexpected camera moves, washes of coloured lighting, self-consciously stagey lighting intercut with his more typically dogmatic approach to sourcing... it's absolutely miraculous what the guy does when what was by a wide margin the biggest budget of his career up to this point.

• Forgive me while I harp on the ant's truth, but: It is ittedly a little odd for a movie emphatically set in 1934 that the two most prominently-featured movies here (FOLLOW THE FLEET and LOVE BEFORE BREAKFAST) are 1936 releases.

Tech test viewing for our screening at Cineworks (Vancouver) on March 18th.

• Also worth noting here that VIFF's podcast on the subject of this movie - featuring yours truly - dropped today and is viewable here.

• Between the soprano-with-impending-heart-attack subject matter and Lachman's riff on Idziak's orange-filters-and-green-lights framework, Larrain really is doing all he can to draw comparisons between this film and THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE. In fact, I'm actively kind of surprised that it's not the first thing folks are jumping to discuss whenever they mention Lachman's cinematography here.

• Has enough time ed that Brian Eno's An Ending (Ascent) is no longer totally played-out for use as a melancholic profundity signifier in movies? Asking for a friend.

• If I had a nickel for every time a director of a 2024 biopic about a major figure in 20th century music featured the subject of one of their prior biopics as a ing character hovering around the periphery, yadda yadda yadda.

• Letterboxd is just the latest in the long line of sites that bravely ask "how would I numerically rate this barely-curated reel of performance footage against APUR SANSAR"

• I do not think I will ever warm up to With God On Our Side, and the three separate performances here do not at all mount a convincing argument otherwise.

• Chimes of Freedom and It's All Over Now Baby Blue are my favourite full performances here. I particularly love how Dylan is, unlike all his previous performances which are rather well-lit, illuminated only by a single stark spotlight during the latter: it perfectly matches the funereal "this is it, losers" sentiment of the moment.

• Engaging in music criticism about Dylan's electric set at Newport is like going at the cinematography of the moon landing, but nonetheless: it's striking just how unsure of himself Dylan seems here -both musically and in his stage presence - in comparison to both the surrounding acoustic material* and the subsequent footage that exists of him and the Hawks in '66. He hadn't developed his sneering rock persona yet, and Like a Rolling Stone kind of plods along here.

• Nobody has ever looked as quite so frazzled as Peter Yarrow does here when pleading for Bob to come back and play an acoustic song before the crowd riots.

---
*My take so hot that I'll bury it down here is that the two acoustic performances that follow are better and more interesting to watch than the electric set.

• This is workable direct* cinema, but the gap in dynamism and expressivity between what Lerner & co. are doing in how they film the musical performances - i.e. fairly conservative 1-3 camera coverage - and the gonzo things that Albert Maysles and the Pennebakers were doing at around this time is fascinating. There's an inflexibility here that makes sense if one's goal is to capture performances with the utmost clarity, but the cost is that there are very few moments where the camera is doing something that feels like it expresses the energy of any given moment.

• I'm not familiar enough with Lerner to confidently suss out authorial intent from sixty years of my own hindsight and baggage here, but I was taken with how ambivalent this feels about the whole folk scene. As depicted by Lerner, the movement is as square, white, and full of self-important posturing and smarm as one might expect: it's also full of good humor and a general respect for the musicians and cultures they're either furthering the traditions of or cribbing (if one wants to be unforgiving) from. Not quite the untroubled softball I had expected.

• I'm unsure as to what to make of the last third in particular: after the Son House/Butterfield interviews we're presented with a string of performance snippets that aren't complete enough to really stand alone and yet not aren't structured in a way that encourages any sort of deeper reading other than "this festival sure features a mix of performers with different ideas about what folk is, huh."

• Those improvised foam microphone wind covers are doing an unbelievable job under these conditions.

• I say this as someone who always has been and remains observably a complete nerd, but: it remains the case that the amount of times I felt the urge to bellow a certain Dan Castellaneta line delivery at the screen was not low.

• The fact that we get like thirty seconds of Mississippi John Hurt alongside endless interminable Peter, Paul & Mary performances is either a damn problem or hilarious depending on how one looks at it.

---

*I should note here that this isn't totally dogmatic as a piece of direct cinema: there are enough didactic voice-overs here to meaningfully delineate it from the more 'pure' examples.

Autobiographical order. Some of these speak poorly of my judgment, both as a youth and now.

Sister list.

• Manhattan

  49th Street Bridge, MOMA, Central Park (Manhattan, US)
  (2006)

• Band of Brothers

  Normandy, FR (2009)

• Saving Private Ryan

  Normandy, FR (2009)

• Before Sunset

  Paris, FR (2009)

• To the Wonder

  Mont St Michel, FR (Visited 2009, will return)

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

  Santo Domingo de Silos, Burgos, ES (2014)

• Dekalog

  Warsaw-Adjacent Soviet housing block, PL (2016)

• Wings of Desire

  Berlin, DE (visited 2022)

• One, Two, Three

  Brandenberg gate, Berlin, DE (visited 2022)

• Ocean's Twelve

  Amsterdam, NL (Visited 2022)

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sister list to this one.

• The Sound of Music

  Salzburg, AT (Soon)

• The Quiet Man

  Kong, County Mayo, IE (Soon)

• Local Hero

  Pennan, GB-SCT (Soon)

• Chungking Express

  Kowloon Walled City, HK (In Spirit) (RIP)

• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

  Galapagos Islands, EC (Soon)

• Right Now, Wrong Then

  Suwon, SK (Soon)

• Claire's Knee

  Annecy, FR (Soon)

• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

  NZ (Soon)

• My Neighbor Totoro

  Saitama Prefecture, JP (Soon)

• Russian Ark

  Hermitage, St. Petersburg, RU (When Vladimir Putin is dead in the ground)

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Bond ranking; including only films I've seen in the past half-decade.

AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY included as control variable.

1. Casino Royale
2. Goldfinger
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
4. Skyfall
5. The Living Daylights
6. GoldenEye
7. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
8. The Spy Who Loved Me
9. The Man with the Golden Gun
10. You Only Live Twice

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not including films I've not seen in at least 15 years.

1. No Country for Old Men
2. The Big Lebowski
3. A Serious Man
4. Miller's Crossing
5. Fargo
6. Raising Arizona
7. Burn After Reading
8. Inside Llewyn Davis
9. The Hudsucker Proxy
10. The Tragedy of Macbeth

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My take on the Hollywood Reporter list, rebalanced somewhat. Partially a watchlist, featuring several films that I have not seen; arranged chronologically. Suggestions welcome.

• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
• Duck Soup
• Confessions of a Nazi Spy
• The Mortal Storm
• The Great Dictator
• 49th Parallel
• Hoch der Lambeth Valk
• To Be or Not to Be
• Casablanca
• A Good Lad

...plus 62 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It's time.

List based on my own affection, not necessarily objective quality.

(Leaving off Solaris and Traffic as it's been too long since I saw them.)

• sex, lies, and videotape
• Ocean's Twelve
• Out of Sight
• Ocean's Eleven
• The Girlfriend Experience
• Side Effects
• The Limey
• Haywire
• Contagion
• Erin Brockovich

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Good Scope (defined as anything 2.2:1 or wider.)

Please note that this is not intended as a comprehensive list. There are more than 66 good 'Scope movies. Probably at least 67.

List is arranged chronologically, but if you must ask: yes, Leone was the best at this.

• A Star Is Born
• The Long Gray Line
• Bigger Than Life
• The Bridge on the River Kwai
• The Big Country
• The Hidden Fortress
• Sleeping Beauty
• Ben-Hur
• Sons and Lovers
• Yojimbo

...plus 60 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. The Royal Tenenbaums
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
4. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
5. Asteroid City
6. Rushmore
7. Bottle Rocket
8. Hotel Chevalier
9. Poison
10. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Romantic comedies with conspicuously good and/or interesting cinematography.

(There would be a couple more Rohmers on here but I've limited myself to my two favourites.)

• The Merry Widow
• Ball of Fire
• The Quiet Man
• The Band Wagon
• The Apartment
• How to Steal a Million
• The Young Girls of Rochefort
• The Graduate
• Manhattan
• Boyfriends and Girlfriends

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
3. Jaws
4. Schindler's List
5. Catch Me If You Can
6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
7. Duel
8. Lincoln
9. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
10. Minority Report

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

An extremely provisional ranking of Eric Rohmer's movies.

1. Perceval
2. A Tale of Autumn
3. A Summer's Tale
4. My Night at Maud's
5. Boyfriends and Girlfriends
6. Pauline at the Beach
7. Claire's Knee
8. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
9. The Aviator's Wife
10. Rendezvous in Paris

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Good bios

Need to see:

Ivan the Terrible
The Gospel According to St Matthew
Sin & Nancy
Jacquot de Nantes
Edvard Munch
Van Gogh
Dersu Uzala
The Puppetmaster
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
Basquait

• Napoleon
• The ion of Joan of Arc
• The Scarlet Empress
• Young Mr. Lincoln
• My Darling Clementine
• The Long Gray Line
• Lawrence of Arabia
• The Sound of Music
• Andrei Rublev
• The Color of Pomegranates

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Watchlist / " this movie" list for research purposes.

Notes are not 100% fact-checked but will be gradually ironed out.

• Hell's Angels

  2-Channel Stereo

• Portrait of Jennie

  2-Channel Surround (Front-Rear)

• Fantasia

  4-Channel Stereo

• The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

  7-Channel Cinerama

• Cinerama Holiday

  7-Channel Cinerama

• How the West Was Won

  7-Channel Cinerama

• This Is Cinerama

  7-Channel Cinerama

• The Barefoot Contessa

  Perspecta

• High and Low

  Perspecta

• Yojimbo

  Perspecta

...plus 38 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranking of every concert film I've seen when regarded as an object of the cinematic arts.

TV broadcasts never officially released discounted.

1. Stop Making Sense
2. Gimme Shelter
3. Monterey Pop
4. Neil Young Trunk Show
5. The Last Waltz
6. U2: Rattle and Hum
7. Jazz on a Summer's Day
8. Woodstock
9. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
10. Storefront Hitchcock

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A companion list to my main FIPR 101 list - other films that were considered for our in-class screenings, or would have been if not for length reasons.

• I Don't Want to Be a Man

  Weimar cinema

• The Doll

  Weimar Cinema

• M

  Weimar cinema

• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

  German Expressionism

• Battleship Potemkin

  Soviet Montage

• Mother

  Soviet montage

• Napoleon

  French Impressionism

• Trouble in Paradise

  Pre-Code

• Design for Living

  Pre-Code

• The Scarlet Empress

  Pre-Code

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films I selected for my first edition of FIPR 101 (UBC) in 2024

Entries 12-21 are part of a short programme shown on Dec. 5th

1. A Trip to the Moon
2. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
3. Man with a Movie Camera
4. Love Me Tonight
5. To Be or Not to Be
6. Rashomon
7. Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment
8. Le Bonheur
9. Blood of the Condor
10. Badlands

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies that use digital sensor-based cameras in actual interesting ways.

Not appearing on this list: DOCUMENTARY NOW, which leverages digital cameras to emulate everything from 16mm to MiniDV to broadcast cameras, and does it better than anyone else.

• Love & Pop

  MiniDV + Anno's absolutely unhinged camera placement strategies.

• The Celebration

  Perhaps the most influential Dogme 95 film among cinematographers. Dod Mantle's gonzo camera placement is a major step in the lineage of unchained cameras.

• The Gleaners and I

  Agnes Varda discovers consumer camcorders and reinvents the documentary.

  Key moment: lens cap.

• Dancer in the Dark

  Obligatory Von Trier entry. Notable for offhanded genre play.

• Bamboozled

  Spike Lee and Ellen Kuras shoot $10,000,000 motion picture on a $3500 camcorder from 1995.

• Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

  The Sony HDW-F900 is finally ready for Lucas, and so he dives right in. Perhaps the most consequential film on this list, and also one of the worst-looking.

• Russian Ark

  Aleksandr Sokurov uses digital image capture to transcend the temporal boundaries of film which is a needlessly silly way of saying that a reel of film is 10-12 minutes and this film is 99.

• 24 Hour Party People

  Muller and Winterbottom use a Sony PD150, 16mm film stock, rephotography, and a bunch of other methods to evoke the vibe of Factory Records. It works!

• 28 Days Later

  In which Danny Boyle watches Festen after shooting the disastrous The Beach and goes "I want that" and literally poaches that film's cinematographer to shoot a zombie movie on consumer electronics.

• Collateral

  Mann dabbled with digital image capture in Ali, but here's where he built those experiments into a totally coherent and novel language to capture a cityscape utilizing noisy high-ISO images and an open shutter.

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A directory of the currently-available episodes of the How Would Lubitsch Do It? podcast.

1. Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönha Allee to Hollywood

   • How Would Lubitsch Do It Season 1 Episode 0 - A History of Modern with Lauren Faulkner Rossi.

2. Where Is My Treasure?

   • How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E01 - When I Was Dead aka Where Is My Treasure / Willa Ross

   • We begin at a film that doesn’t actually represent much of a beginning: Lubitsch’s first shorts remain lost, which leaves us with WHEN I WAS DEAD, also known as WHERE IS MY TREASURE. Film Formally co-host Willa Ross s us as we discuss Lubitsch’s early life, the state of film comedy circa 1916, “door stuff”, tinting in silent films, 3-D, and more.

3. Pinkus's Shoe Palace

   • How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E02 - Shoe Palace Pinkus with Dara Jaffe

   • Our journey through Lubitsch’s catalogue continues with SHOE PALACE PINKUS, a short comedy about Sally Pinkus (Lubitsch), a gregarious footwear entrepreneur. Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Assistant Curator Dara Jaffe s us to discuss the controversy that surrounds the character of Sally Pinkus and Jewish representation, margins of safety in comedy, the influence of Ernst’s father on his work, Ernst’s skills as an onscreen comic actor, and much more.

4. The Merry Jail

   How Would Lubitsch Do It? S1E03: The Merry Jail [1917] with Matt Severson

   Margaret Herrick Library Director Matt Severson s us to discuss THE MERRY JAIL, Lubitsch’s first operetta adaptation. It’s a big step forward towards the recognizable comedy of manners that would become Lubitsch’s trademark, and a great jumping off point to discuss the beginnings of his stylistic trademarks.

5. I Don't Want to Be a Man

   How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E04 - I Don't Want To Be a Man with Peter Labuza

   International Cinematographer’s Guild Researcher, academic, and former guest Peter Labuza s us to discuss I DON’T WANT TO BE A MAN, Lubitsch’s 1918 gender-defying farce featuring the great Ossi Oswalda as a young woman who decides to spend a day as a man. Hijinks, transgressions, public drunkenness, and romance ensue!

6. The Eyes of the Mummy

   • How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E05: The Eyes of the Mummy Ma [1918] with Tim Brayton

   Film critic, podcaster, PHD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and former guest Tim Brayton s us to discuss THE EYES OF THE MUMMY MA, Lubitsch’s oldest surviving drama. In this episode, we discuss the momentous arrival of Emil Jannings and Pola Negri to the stock company, the rather troubling orientalist aspects of the film, and the ethics and economics of film preservation.

7. Carmen

   • How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E06: Carmen [1918] with Jose Arroyo

   Warwick University associate professor Jose Arroyo s us to discuss Lubitsch’s 1918 adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s CARMEN. A drastic scaling-up in production scale and ambition, the film serves as a jumping-off point for our discussions about the source material, Lubitsch’s growing stature in German cinema, the American rerelease of the film, Pola Negri’s movie star charisma, Lubitsch’s sense of morality, and much more!

8. Meyer from Berlin

   • How Would Lubitsch Do S1E07 - Meyer From Berlin [1919] with Fran Hoepfner

   • Writer and critic Fran Hoepfner s us to discuss MEYER FROM BERLIN, Ernst Lubitsch’s only certified Adam Sandler-style vacation comedy. This lightweight comedy of class is a jumping-off point for discussions about silent film form, comedic modes and traditions, the nature of hotels, and our ability to enjoy flawed works from a century ago.

9. The Oyster Princess

   How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E08 - The Oyster Princess with Bram Ruiter

   • Season One draws to a close in maximalist style as experimental filmmaker Bram Ruiter us for a particularly exuberant episode in which we discuss Lubitsch’s grand Ruritanian comic epic THE OYSTER PRINCESS. Our discussion is wide-ranging and a little giddy due to our excitement at discussing such a thrilling and hilarious mini-epic, so prepare for a slightly looser episode than usual! Lubitsch’s growth as an artist, Ossi Oswalda’s indomitability, and a self-indulgent digression about Berlin’s film museum are all on the table.

   Immense thanks to everyone that made this season possible:

   All of our guests: Lauren Faulker Rossi, Willa Ross, Dara Jaffe, Matt Severson, Peter Labuza, Tim Brayton, Jose Arroyo, Fran Hoepfner, and Bram Ruiter.

   Everyone who provided invaluable content, helped find guests, or otherwise graciously lent their valuable counsel and : Anna Citak-Scott, Dave Kehr, David Cairns, Kristin Thompson, Paul Cuff, Luci Marzola, Stefan Drössler, the MOMA, all of our soon-to-be-announced future guests, and many others.

   And, of course, to anyone who’s listened to our show and is reading this right now: thanks for surviving the most comically esoteric season of film podcasts imaginable.

10. Visions of Light

    How Would Lubitsch Do It S1E00 - Early Film Lighting with Luci Marzola

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I was invited to run a lecture series about colour in cinema as a part of VIFF Centre's grand "TOTAL CINEMA" reopening in August and September of 2024. This is a list of the prominently featured films as well as links, where applicable, to the recordings of my lectures or slides.

• Napoleon

  Creating Color, Pt. 1 - Photochemical Tinting and Toning, from Méliès to Brakhage

  Slideshow

  Also featured: THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE, LONESOME, CASANOVA, DANTE QUARTER, BLACK ICE.

  Color in cinema did not begin with color film stock but with techniques such as dye-bath tinting and toning and the hand-painting of individual film frames: tools which allowed filmmakers to impart color palettes onto monochromatic images. We’ll investigate how filmmakers such as Georges Méliès and F.W. Murnau used these techniques to develop codes of representation, and how later filmmakers like Stan Brakhage leveraged them for experimental purposes.

• Black Narcissus

  Creating Color Pt. 2 - Lighting & Mimetic Color

  Lecture Recording

  The use of gels to control the hue of film lights has been a key tool in every cinematographer’s toolkit since the advent of color film stocks. We’ll use Jack Cardiff’s work in the Technicolor masterpiece Black Narcissus as the jumping-off point for a discussion about the ways in which he paints with light to create moods, emotional cues and color rhythms. Additionally, we’ll cover how innovations in color film stock impacted these creative decisions as well as more recent developments in lighting technology.

• The Young Girls of Rochefort

  Creating Color, Pt. 3: Production Design & The Young Girls of Rochefort

  Lecture Recording

  The building blocks of a color palette begin with what’s in front of the camera: the set, the props, and the costumes. Our discussion of production design and art direction will cover all the ways in which filmmakers can control the look of the world of the film such as in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, in which he repainted large sections of the titular French city to bring alive his candy-colored Hollywood-inspired fantasia.

• The Double Life of Véronique

  Creating Color Pt. 4: Kieslowski, Idziak, & Filtration

  Lecture Recording

  Also featured: THREE COLOURS: BLUE.

  Directly filtering the image that comes into a camera’s lens allows cinematographers to vastly alter how a scene looks and feels. We’ll analyze the radical ways Kieslowski’s closet collaborator, cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, uses his complex system of filters to editorialize images, express the emotional state of characters, and establish place in such films as Three Colours: Blue, The Double Life of Veronique, and A Short Film About Killing.

• Amélie

  Creating Color Part 5: Digital Color & Amelie

  Lecture Recording

  Digital color grading tools have vastly expanded the possibilities in how directors and cinematographers manipulate color palettes, and over the past quarter century the look of films and video have changed rapidly as a result. In the concluding part of our Film Studies series, we’ll look at the early days of this technology with Amelie, in which Bruno Delbonnel and Jean-Pierre Jeunet pushed the possibilities of motion picture palettes to previously impossible extremes in their realization of a romanticized Paris.

Rankings based on quality of craft, not of hatefulness.

• 2016: Obama's America
• America: Imagine the World Without Her
• Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
• Death of a Nation
• Police State
• Trump Card
• 2000 Mules

• Portrait of Jennie
• This Is Cinerama
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture
• Apocalypse Now
• Das Boot
• Blade Runner
• The Last Temptation of Christ
• Heat
• Air Force One
• Ronin

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A personal ranking of Ernst Lubitsch movies, as featured in HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT.

7/10/2023: This list is complete!

1. To Be or Not to Be
2. The Merry Widow
3. The Shop Around the Corner
4. Trouble in Paradise
5. Cluny Brown
6. Ninotchka
7. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
8. The Doll
9. The Smiling Lieutenant
10. Lady Windermere's Fan

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not a comprehensive list

• The Merry Widow
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
• Nashville
• Stop Making Sense
• Gimme Shelter
• The Young Girls of Rochefort
• Fantasia
• The Band Wagon
• Singin' in the Rain
• Meet Me in St. Louis

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Napoleon
• The Merry Widow
• To Be or Not to Be
• The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall
• The Quiet Man
• North by Northwest
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• The Young Girls of Rochefort
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller
• Airplane!

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of films which would make good candidates for my fan-tinting hobby.
Useful attributes: overt expressionism, numerous intercut locations, temporal intercutting.

• The Oyster Princess

  I would bet money that this was intended to be tinted, but the current HD master lacks it.

• The Wildcat

  It's batshit insane as it is, and the current HD master lacks tinting.

• The Last Command

  Probably the most interestingly tintable of Sternberg's surviving silents.

• Dishonored

  Lots of locations, it's Sternberg - great candidate.

• Minnie the Moocher
• The Scarlet Empress

  Hugely expressionistic, but the lack of variety in locations might make it difficult.

• The Merry Widow

  *Done*

  Great candidate - structure really lends itself to some expressive tinting. Maxim's is a limited setpiece and distinct location that lends itself to big tinting flourishes, the contrast between Marshovia and Paris really works, and there's lots of variety in nighttime lighting movation.

• Young Mr. Lincoln

  Of all the monochrome Fords, I think this could really lend itself to it - it'd be fairly subtle, but there are enough moonlit nighttime scenes that it'd be an interesting tonal experiment.

• Citizen Kane

  Okay, hear me out, dye baths aren't *technically* crayolas...

• Hellzapoppin'

  C'mon. You want to see this.

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Someone asked me to make a list of favourite movies a while back; I thought this would be more interesting.

• Napoleon

  Maximalism

• Man with a Movie Camera

  Invention

• Trouble in Paradise
• The Scarlet Empress

  Momentum

• The Merry Widow

  Joy, inference

• The Shop Around the Corner

  Felix Bressart, Jimmy Stewart

• The Grapes of Wrath

  Candlelight, composition

• Fantasia

  Possibility

• The Lady Eve

  Praftfalls, Stanwyck

• Citizen Kane

  Composition, rhythm, structure.

...plus 76 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This turned out so darn consensus, jesus christ. Once in a while the conventional wisdom is kinda right.

North by Northwest isn't as good as Vertigo and probably isn't as good as Psycho, but it's #1 because I love it more.

1. North by Northwest
2. Vertigo
3. Psycho
4. Strangers on a Train
5. Rear Window
6. Notorious
7. The 39 Steps
8. The Lady Vanishes
9. The Wrong Man
10. Shadow of a Doubt

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Apartment
2. One, Two, Three
3. Double Indemnity
4. Some Like It Hot
5. Sunset Boulevard
6. Witness for the Prosecution
7. Ace in the Hole
8. Sabrina
9. Stalag 17
10. A Foreign Affair

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
2. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. For a Few Dollars More
4. Once Upon a Time in America
5. A Fistful of Dollars
6. Duck, You Sucker

1. Marie Antoinette
2. Somewhere
3. Lost in Translation
4. Priscilla
5. The Virgin Suicides
6. The Bling Ring
7. The Beguiled
8. On the Rocks

Haven't Seen:
The B-Side
First Person
My Psychedelic Love Story
The Dark Wind

Haven't Seen in Long Enough to Have a Fair Opinion:
Standard Operating Procedure

Disqualified:
Umbrella Man
They Were There

1. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
2. The Fog of War
3. The Thin Blue Line
4. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
5. A Brief History of Time
6. The Unknown Known
7. The Pigeon Tunnel
8. Gates of Heaven
9. American Dharma
10. Wormwood

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

There will be no further updates.

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark

A reference list for movies that I worked on in a significant capacity that have been added to this website.

• Paradiso

  Director
  Available on the TIFF Youtube Channel
  [Warning: Student film. Enter with caution.]

• We Three Heathens

  Director
  Availability: DM Me

  Co-Directed with Will Ross & Daniel Jeffery

• The Martyr

  Director
  Availability: DM Me

  Co-Directed with Will Ross

• Preface to a History

  Director
  Availability: DM Me

  Co-Directed with Will Ross

• Preface to a History
• Son In The Barbershop

  Cinematographer, Colourist

  Available here: https://vimeo.com/125170416

  Dir. Nathan Douglas

• Nine Behind

  Cinematographer, Colourist 
  Availability: Criterion Channel

  Dir. Sophy Romvari

• Cave of Sighs

  Cinematographer, Colourist
  Available here: https://vimeo.com/169274807

  Dir. Nathan Douglas

• It's Him

  Cinematographer, Colourist
  Availability: Criterion Channel

  Dir. Sophy Romvari

• Pumpkin Movie

  Cinematographer, Colourist
  Availability: Criterion Channel

  Dir. Sophy Romvari

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Star Wars
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Andor: A Disney+ Day Special Look
4. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
5. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
6. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
7. Return of the Jedi
8. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
9. The Star Wars Holiday Special
10. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A condensed list for folks who want a more accessible entry to Lubitsch than "watch literally all of them!": an attempt to strike a balance between historical relevance and art/entertainment value.

I've added notes for films of historical interest. If a film has no note, the reason for inclusion boils down to "it's terrific!"

If you'd like information on where to find these films, check out the How Would Lubitsch Do It resources page.

1. I Don't Want to Be a Man

   • Key work in queer cinema.

   • Quintessential transgressive pre-Weimer era work.

   • It's very funny.

2. The Oyster Princess
3. The Doll

   • Complete oddity, and unlike anything he'd attempt in Hollywood.

4. Romeo and Juliet in the Snow

   • Bavarian comic adaptation of Shakespeare.

5. The Wildcat

   • Formally absurd, nothing like it ever made.

6. The Loves of Pharaoh

   • His largest movie, and his first 'dark studio' production.

   • Emil Jannings at his hammiest.

7. Rosita

   • Lubitsch moves to Hollywood and is suddenly a master of tone.

8. Lady Windermere's Fan
9. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
10. The Smiling Lieutenant

    • Quintessential work of Lubitsch's comic operetta period.

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Still need to see OLD JOY and RIVER OF GRASS. Top 5 are all great.

1. Meek's Cutoff
2. First Cow
3. Certain Women
4. Showing Up
5. Wendy and Lucy
6. Night Moves

1. The Quiet Man
2. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
3. How Green Was My Valley
4. The Searchers
5. The Grapes of Wrath
6. Fort Apache
7. The Long Gray Line
8. My Darling Clementine
9. Stagecoach
10. Young Mr. Lincoln

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies shot or released in Cinemascope (2.35-2.40:1) but not composed for Cinemascope. Not comprehensive, I just add films as I stumble across them.

Danny Cohen count: 4

• Brigadoon
• Silk Stockings
• Return of the Jedi
• Fallen Angels
• Ballast
• The Incredible Hulk
• Adam
• When in Rome
• Crazy, Stupid, Love.
• Red Tails

...plus 68 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Secrets & Lies
• Career Girls
• Life Is Sweet
• Mr. Turner
• Topsy-Turvy
• Happy-Go-Lucky
• Another Year
• Naked
• A Sense of History

A list of films we've discussed in episodes of Film Formally Podcast. Please note that, due to certain episodes being a bit more generalized in their subject matter, we've limited this list to one example per episode.

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

   S3E10 - Rescuing The Good The Bad and the Ugly with Jordan Krug and Benji Heran

2. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

   S3E09 - Adapting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Tim Brayton

3. Mandy

   S3E08 - Colour Grading with Andrea Chlebak

4. The Bourne Supremacy

   
   S3E07 - The Bourne Series and Chaos Cinema

5. New Nightmare

   
   S3E06 - Wes Craven's Meta Horror with Mike Thorn

6. After Last Season

   
   S3E05 - After Last Season and Outsider Art with Bram Ruiter

7. Eighth Grade

   S3E04 - Eighth Grade and the Internet with Bronwyn Henderson and Brietta Stewart

8. Pumpkin Movie

   S3E03 - Documentary Verite with Sophy Romvari

9. Damsels in Distress

   S3E02 - Narrative Verite with Whit Stillman

10. The Exorcist III

    S3E01 - Film Preservation and Home Video with Blake Blasingame

...plus 29 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Treasure Planet
• The Young Girls of Rochefort
• Airplane!
• Speed Racer
• Stop Making Sense
• North by Northwest
• The Merry Widow
• Evil Dead II
• Street Fighter

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

OOPS

• Crossroads
• The Atomic Cafe
• Protect and Survive
• Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie
• The War Game
• Fail Safe
• The Fog of War
• Godzilla
• Shin Godzilla
• When the Wind Blows

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

2022 Viewing Challenge.
Rules:
1. One movie per year.
2. Must be a first viewing unless we've seen literally every movie made that year (stops being a real consideration roundabouts 1895).
***AMENDMENT TO THIS RULE: This rule may be broken if the following conditions are met:
a. Only one of us has seen it.
b. They have not seen it in least a decade.
c. The film is of the utmost historic interest.
3. Prioritize historically interesting films.
4. Otherwise, anything goes.

• age of Venus
• The Magic Rosette
• The Kiss
• L'Homme Machine
• Man Walking Around a Corner
• Roundhay Garden Scene
• Leisurely Pedestrians, Open Topped Buses and Hansom Cabs with Trotting Horses
• Monkeyshines, No. 1
• Two Fencers
• A Hand Shake

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
2. Talk to Her
3. Volver
4. All About My Mother
5. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
6. Pain and Glory
7. Broken Embraces
8. The Skin I Live In
9. Parallel Mothers
10. Bad Education

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A complete list of film historian David Kalat's commentary tracks and where they're available.

• Fantômas

  Kino

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka

• Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka

• Nosferatu

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka

• The Finances of the Grand Duke

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka + Kino

• Sherlock Jr.

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka + Kino

• Metropolis

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka

• Three's a Crowd

  Kino

• City Girl

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka

• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

  Masters of Cinema/Eureka + Criterion

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Only including films that I've seen recently enough to appraise.

I feel like Brewster McCloud is going to skyrocket on this at some point.

1. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
2. Nashville
3. The Long Goodbye
4. Short Cuts
5. M*A*S*H
6. The Player
7. California Split
8. Images
9. 3 Women
10. Thieves Like Us

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.