The Screengrab : jacques rivette

Jean Martin, 1922 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The French actor Jean Martin, who died on February 2 at the age of 86, had a distinguished career in the theater, where he appeared in the original productions of two of Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot (as Lucky) and Endgame (as Clov). He also served with the French Resistance during World War II. In movies, though, he was one of those people who achieved immortality largely through his performance in a single role, that of Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's great political film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Martin was the only professional actor in that movie's cast. Compared to the actors playing Algerian revolutionaries, his role was stylized and trickily conceived: he represented the face of the oppressive French colonial government, yet he was also the director's mouthpiece, explaining the film's view of guerrilla insurrection to the audience in speeches that made it clear that, however the action of the film migh turn out, he knew that he was playing a losing game. Eventually "the people" would emerge victorious; all he could do was postpone the inevitable. Martin delivered a remarkable performance, supplying a theatrical, instructional element to the movie without violating its documentary-style texture. (He might have been hired as much for his politics as for his talent; the actor was a commmitted leftist who, despite his heroic military background with the Resistance as an paratrooper in Indochina, was blackballed as punishment for having signed a petition protesting the French presence in Algeria.)

Martin would remain better known for his stage work than his movies, but The Battle of Algiers assured him of continued employment in European TV and films, often typecast as a villain. His most notable credits include Jacques Rivette's The Nun (1966), Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn (1970), Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973), the Sergio Leone-produced Western My Name Is Nobody (1974), Otto Preminger's Rosebud, and Roberto Rossellini's Jesus movie Il Messia (1975), in which he played Pontius Pilate. Legend has it that when he and Pontecorvo argued on the set of Algiers, the director was known to complain, "Just because he was in Godot doesn't mean he's a good actor." He was, though.

Guillaume Depardieu, 1971-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Guillaume Depardieu has died, tragically and most unexpectedly, at 37, after being hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia. Although he was probably best known as the son of Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume had established a name for himself as a film actor and leading man, as well as a provider of fodder for tabloids and gossip columnists. He made his film debut in 1974, playing the three-year-old son of the hero, played by his father, of Claude Goretta's international success The Wonderful Crook. He gave his first mature film performance seventeen years later in Alain Corneau's Tout les matins du monde ("All the Mornings of the World"), in which he played the musician Marin Marais as a young man, with his father handling the role of the older Marais. Guillaume and Gerard would repeat this doubling up act, with each appearing in two French miniseries, The Count of Monte Cristo (1998) and Les Miserables (2000), in which they took turns playing the heroes of classic works of French literature at different ends of their lives. They also appeared together, as father and son, in the 2002 Aime ton Pere (known in English as both Honor They Father and A Loving Father), as well as the French-English TV miniseries Napoleon (2002), in which neither one of them played Napoleon, thank God.

In projects independent of his father, Guillaume Deparidieu established an image as a smoldering, not always likable romantic figure, with a tendency towards brooding and fiery sexual passions. In that mold, he will probably be best remembered as the star of Pola X, Leos Carax's controversial, wild-eyed adaptation of Herman Melville's Pierre, and his most recent film to reach the United States, Jacques Rivette's period drama The Duchess of Langeais, in which, looking more than ever like an alternate-universe version of his father who had managed to control himself around the buffet table, he did his banked-fires thing with the actress Jeanne Balibar. Offscreen, it often seemed that his diet was the only thing that Depardieu was able to control. After injuring his knee in a motorcycle accident in 1995, he suffered an infection that left him in such constant pain that, in 2003, he consented to have his leg amputated. He got in trouble with the law over DUI arrests and assorted drug-related offenses, and in 2003 he was slapped with a nine-month suspended sentence and a $9,000 fine after he reportedly pulled a gun on a man in a bar who, badly misjudging his temperament, had decided to get off a couple of zingers insulting his taste in clothes. It was the business with the boom stick in the bar that caused his father to publicly disown him in an interview with Paris Match, saying of his son, ""He's a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult, incorrigible. At the moment, we have no ties. I cut things off because I no longer want to be the wall, or the trash bin where one dumps anything one wants. He has tried to contact me but I don't reply because I think that it's better for his mental health. We'll see." Guillaume was in Romania working on a new movie when he was taken ill with the virus that killed him.

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 29-March 2

Paul Clark — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As I predicted in last week's column, arthouse audiences turned out in droves to catch The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), Stefan Ruzowitzky's recent Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film. Currently in its second week of release, The Counterfeiters tops this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup with in an average of $10,295 per screen in 18 venues, following a strong second-place finish in its opening weekend.

The weekend's top new release was Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (Koch Lorber), bringing in $8,745 on a single screen, followed by last week's champ, Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which kept on rockin' at $7,059 per screen after expanding its release to three locations. Rounding out the top five were (stop me if you've heard this before) Sony Pictures Classics' The Band's Visit and Focus Features' In Bruges, the latter expanding to 232 screens nationwide.

Also of note was the release of Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), the highest-ranking documentary of the weekend at #6. And let's not overlook the Oscar bump for Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, which found its way back into the top 10 after a nearly three-month absence following an expansion to more than 2,000 screens. Take that, Juno! ¿Quien es mas macho?

Top 10, Weekend of February 29-March 2:
1. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,295 per screen)
2. Chop Shop [Koch Lorber Films] ($8,745)
3. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($7,059)
4. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,553)
5. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($3,342)
6. Chicago 10 [Roadside Attractions] ($3,052)
7. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($2,496)
8. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($2,300)
9. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,121)
10. No Country For Old Men [Miramax] ($2,020)

Source: IndieWire.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 22-24, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of the pleasures of doing the weekly Indie Box-Office Roundup is that there are more surprises to be had with this top ten than with the top-grossing films overall. For example, I never thought I'd live to type the following six words: "Jacques Rivette, domestic box-office champ." Naturally, we're talking per-screen average rather than overall gross, but still — wow. Rivette's latest film, The Duchess of Langeais (IFC Films), took in a per-screen average of $11,126 on two screens over the past weekend. What makes this weekend's haul even more of a surprise is that Rivette's last film, L'Histoire de Marie et Julien was snubbed altogether by American distributors as being "too uncommercial." As a long-standing Rivette fan, I'm happy to see that others are responding as positively to his new work as I did. I don't expect it to stay on top, but I'll enjoy its reign while it lasts.

Coming in a strong second was Sunday night's Best Foreign-Language Film winner, Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics). In its first weekend in American theatres, the film brought in an average of $10,939 per screen on eight screens. Expect the film's totals to soar next weekend, as Oscar-watchers turn out to see what all the fuss is about.

Sitting at #3 and #4 were last week's top two, The Band's Visit (Sony Pictures Classics) and In Bruges (Focus Features), followed by the weekend's top documentary, A Man Named Pearl (Shadow Distribution). Also worth mentioning is 9th-place film La Traviata (Emerging Pictures), a limited-engagement performance of Verdi's opera. It's hard to gauge how the opera's attendance compares to the other titles in this week's top ten, since although many cities are showing the movie fewer times than their other titles, tickets generally sell for upwards of $20.

Next weekend should see a bump for the Oscar-winners still in release, not just The Counterfeiters but also Best Documentary Feature winner Taxi to the Dark Side, and to a certain extent No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.

Top 10, Weekend of February 22-24:
1. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($11,126 per screen)
2. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,939)
3. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,908)
4. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($4,530)
5. A Man Named Pearl [Shadow Distribution] ($3,308)
6. Still Life [New Yorker] ($2,933)
7. Undoing [Indican Pictures] ($2,897)
8. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($2,540)
9. La Traviata [Emerging Pictures] ($2,503)
10. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,485)

Source: IndieWire.

Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

Nobody understood the maddening allure of the almost attainable better than Balzac, and Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.) He also makes much more effective and perverse use of textual intertitles than did Patrice Chéreau in Gabrielle, a film that now looks even more overwrought and mannered by comparison. Balibar's wily, impassioned performance was a given — her best work to date was as the star of Rivette's 2001 effort La Savoir — but I hadn't expected such muted volcanic ardor from Depardieu fils, who practically broods a hole in the floor of every room he enters. And while I'm weary of the structural device in which we open with the penultimate scene and then flash back to see the events that led to this crisis/impasse, here the device is absolutely crucial, tainting every bit of gamesmanship that follows/precedes it. Indeed, I desperately hoped that the film would end without returning to the convent, and was somewhat disappointed when there turned out to be an epilogue of sorts. But even that perfunctory flourish slices clean. — Mike D'Angelo

World Film Beat: "The Duchess of Langeais"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The legendary French director Jacques Rivette is almost eighty now, but age seems to be speeding up his internal clock; his newest film, The Duchess of Langeais is two hours and seventeen minutes long, which, coming from the man who made Out 1 (773 minutes in its "restored" version), La Belle noiseuse (236 minutes), L'Amour fou (252 minutes), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (193 minutes), is kind of like Martin Scorsese reading the Bible in ten minutes while on crack. Rivette's 2001 romantic comedy Va Savoir actually set off concerned muttering among long-time fans who were worried about him because he'd only managed to get 154 minutes of movie into theaters; everybody was greatly relieved when word got out that there was also a 220-minute director's cut that he'd love to show you. (The concept of the director's cut might have been invented with Rivette in mind; he recut the four-hour La Belle noiseuse into a two-hour-five-minute film that was released to theaters as Divertimento, though it was not explained why anyone would want a shorter version of a movie that largely consisted of Emmanuelle Béart standing around buck naked.) Speaking as someone who has sometimes emerged from a Rivette movie feeling as if both my ass and my eyeballs were in need of a vigorous massage and possibly a chemical skin peel, I've always admired his willingness to test the boundaries of an acceptable running time for narrative films. It was as if he were saying to the audience for art movies, "Hey, you care about cinema, huh? You believe in the personal expression of the filmmaker? You're here because you think you might get something different than what you get from mainstream movies, is that right? That's great. So sit down, shut up, and prepare to pay the babysitter overtime!" Except that it would sound a lot better if Rivette said that, since everything sounds better in French. Although The Duchess of Langeais is much shorter than the frisky Va Savoir, I doubt that it will strike anyone as ominously lightweight. The good news for veteran Rivette fans is that while it's only a little more than two and a quarter hours, it feels at least twice that long.

The movie is based on a Balzac novel whose original title, which is also the movie's title in France, is "Touch Not the Axe," words that might be Rivette's motto in the editing room. It is not so much a love story as an exploration of the deranging possibilities of thwarted expectations and unrequited desire. Set mostly in Paris in the 1820s, the movie stars Guillaume Depardieu as a general who has become a fashionable celebrity because of his adventures, and Jeanne Balibar as the Duchess, who invites him to visit her at home in the evenings. Talking to his imaginary friend while he stands outside the Duchess's home, the general boasts of his intention to "make her my mistress." But once he gets indoors, the Duchess, who has carefully laid herself out for his delectation, asks him to tell her stories of his heroism, then, having gotten him all worked up, sends him homr frustrated night after night. Finally he cracks and declares that he can't take it anymore and will never visit nor have anything to do with her again — which, naturally, causes her to snap and begin moaning about how she can't bear to be without him. At one point she scandalizes the neighborhood by sending her coach to stay outside the general's house all night and into the morning, so that people will at least think that she's his fallen woman. It's a little like Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that instead of using the rules of love and seduction to wage cold-blooded war on others, the characters are flaunting how desperately they're at the mercy of their passions. At the same time, nobody's actually getting any. Most of the movie is a flashback from a scene where the general finds the Duchess, who has disappeared from Paris and his life, holed up in a convent on a Spanish island, serving as a Carmelite nun. They converse for a while in French, while chaperoned by a nun who doesn't speak the language, who thinks that the general is the Duchess's brother — though from all the heavy panting that he does when in his "sister's" presence, she must think the poor guy is about to drop dead of asthma. Finally, the Duchess can't take it anymore and cries out, "Sister, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" When I saw the movie, that line brought down the house. A lot of people in the theater burst out laughing, though it isn't supposed to be funny, and I don't think it was mocking laughter, either. It was obvious that we were about to see what had gone on between these two now, and it felt like people were laughing at relief and eager anticipation that now we were getting to the good stuff. Little did we know...

Rivette has made a terrific show of being faithful to his source. Most of the movie consists of carefully composed scenes where the actors speak their dialogue, and much of what narrative information can't be conveyed through these means is simply given to us written out on title cards. The movie is...well, it's kind of boring, but in a kind of fascinating way. The actors are up there smoldering away in these tight, frozen frames, and the emotions are over the top yet seem to be contained under glass. Balibar's performance, which has to run the gamut from cruel, controlling minx to helpless victim of love, is phenomenal; Depardieu's isn't as sturdy, but he's still hard to take your eyes off, if only because he looks enough like his father that watching him is like seeing a vision of what Gerard Depardieu might have looked like in his late thirties if he'd had his stomach stapled. Still, there's a sequence towards the end when the general is on a ship with some mates of his who want to help him abduct his beloved from the nunnery. The men in his posse don't have much to do, but just from the way they pull together on their mission and they way they grin while drawing straws to see which of them has to dress up in a habit and go undercover, they seem like a fun bunch of guys, and it's amazing what a relief it is to spend some time with them after two hours trapped inside with two neurotic, self-denying romantic masochists. The Duchess of Langeais goes into U.S. theatrical release next week, but tonight it begins its run at Walter Reade Theater in New York as part of the "Film Comments Selects" series. Some of the people seeing it tonight sure did pick a hell of a date movie for Valentine's Day.

The Rep Report (February 14-21)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable annual treat, the "Film Comment Selects" series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (February 14-28) gives the writers and editors of that magazine a chance to decorate the screen of the Walter Reade Theater with a wide-ranging selection of films, new and old, that they love a lot more than the U.S. distribution business does. There are new films by George A. Romero (the opening night selection, Diary of the Dead), Jacques Rivette (The Duchess of Langeais, to be shown with the actress Jeanne Balibar in attendance), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate), Lukas Moodyson (Container), and Alex Cox (The Searchers 2.0). The weird revivals include Cox's 1987 Walker, Crispin Glover's 1992 Rubin and Ed, and a couple of Richard Fleischer movies, the 1971 English true crime story 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough, and the mind-boggling 1975 Southern slave-owners' potboiler Mandingo.

"Milos Forman: A Retrospective" (February 14-28) at the Museum of Modern Art covers the expatriate director's career from his early, attention-getting work (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), traces his American work from the 1971 Taking Off to his finding a groove as a respected Hollywood pro (from the Academy Award-winning smash One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt); it also includes some items from off the beaten tracks, such as his contributions to the omnibus films Visions of 8 and I Miss Sonja Henie.

CHICAGO: For one week starting February 15, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of youth culture, revolutionary leftist politics, and bright, shiny primary colors, La Chinoise (1967). This is an important film in the career of a major director and a unique experience on its own terms, and it's never been available on home video in this country, and it doesn't get out to play very often, so I'd advise the curious to brave whatever disaster-movie weather you have to brave to make it to the theater.

The Rep Report (January 15 - January 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to the actor who, with no small degree of justice, can claim to be the face of the French New Wave with "Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After" (January 18 - February 29). Leaud made his film debut at fifteen when Francois Truffaut cast him as Antoine Doinel, his youthful alter ago in the 1959 The 400 Blows. That would turn out to be a pretty steady gig, as he went on to reprise the character in three more features made between 1968's Stolen Kisses to the 1979 Love on the Run. All of them are included here, along with Truffaut's Day for Night and Two English Girls and Leaud's work for Godard (La Chinoise, Masculine Feminine, and Weekend, in which he has a cameo), Jacques Rivette (Out 1: Spectre), and Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore). The more recent films include Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, which finds Leaud once again involved in making a movie within a movie, and another cameo appearance in La Vie de Boheme, arguably the funniest movie by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.

Also at PFA: "Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries" (January 15 - February 26) will include evenings devoted to the work of James Benning, Maryam Kashani, Rene Daalder, and the radical media collective Paper Tiger TV. On February 5, the program will also incorporate a presentation and booksigning by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, authors of the news study F Is for Phony.

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art spends the weekend trying to get to the bottom of that sweet mystery of life that is David Lynch. Friday night, the museum screens Lynch's short films, while Saturday it celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Eraserhead with a showing of a restored print of the film, a bad dream we never get tired of hearing recounted. On both nights, they're showing the strange new documentary Lynch, in which our hero can be seen directing Inland Empire, explaining to Laura Dern why she should be flattered when he calls her "tidbit", talking about the bad old days in Philadelphia, and letting the cigarette butts pile up on the concrete floor of his office. Maybe if enough people show up, the museum will have a heart and buy the guy an ashtray.

NEW YORK: For two weeks starting January 18, Film Forum brings back Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the icy, beautiful 1961 film that did its part to make European cinema seem like a stylish thing to puzzle over. A style-setter in the area of fashion as much as in filmmaking, it has the not inconsiderable distinction of being the only film to win both the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and inclusion in Harry and Michael Medved's The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 2

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

LITTLE DORRIT (1988) Running time: 360 mins.

Charles Dickens, who peaked at the time of the serialization craze in English fiction, got paid by the word, and it's easy to imagine that's the reason for the vast, sprawling length of his many novels. But when writer/director Christine Edzard created her ambitious movie version of his Little Dorrit, she was determined not to short-change the complex richness of the narrative simply to bring the production in at a tidy two hours. After all, if Dickens took the time to make his legions of characters and mountains of subplots all come together like clockwork, why shouldn't she extend him the same courtesy? Clocking in at around six hours, Little Dorrit isn't just long for length's sake: it's in service of a cleverly ambiguous plot, split into two often conflicting points of view. Everyone brings their best game to Little Dorrit, from the set designers to the cinematographer, but especially the actors: for those who have a low tolerance for Dickens' wicked excess, twisted excursions and talky supporting characters, it's the acting, featuring a veritable Who's Who of quality British actors of the 1980s, that keeps you in your seat. Edzard may have learned her lesson — she never directed anything as ambitious again after this — but she did what she set out to do: create the most intricate, essential, and faithful recreation of a Dickens novel ever made.

WAR AND PEACE (1967) Running time: 414 mins.

Due to the limited commercial prospects for extra-long movies, most of the films on this list are relatively low-budget. But this wasn't the case for actor/director Sergei Bondarchuk's epic adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's literary masterwork. Far from it, in fact — the film had what was referred to as an "open budget," which basically meant that the entire Soviet film industry shut down to work on it. Estimates in 1967 put the budget of War and Peace at about $100 million; forty years of inflation puts it at no less than seven times that amount. But as the saying goes, every cent is up there on the screen. If nothing else, War and Peace is the biggest, grandest epic of all, boasting tens of thousands of actual soldiers in the battle scenes, some of the most opulent sets ever committed to film, and an awe-inspiring re-creation of the siege and burning of Moscow by Napoleon's army. But Bondarchuk's epic vision didn't stop with the size of the production. Instead, every frame of War and Peace represents the director's tribute to the irrepressible spirit of the Russian people, which managed to survive even the threats posed to it by Napoleon. Each of the film's larger-than-life performers reflects this idea, none more so than the incandescent Ludmilla Savelyeva, a ballerina who turned out to be the most perfect choice imaginable for the film's pivotal role of Natasha. War and Peace is huge but not plodding, a thrilling, emotionally satisfying populist drama that just happens to be seven hours long. It is that rarest of cinematic creatures — a film that actually does credit to the literary masterpiece that inspired it while standing as a masterpiece in its own right.

HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (1978) Running time: 442 mins.

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour, twenty-two minute Hitler: A Film From Germany — or Our Hitler, as it was retitled for its American run — is a multi-part experimental feature consisting largely of monologues (performed by actors representing Hitler and others) meant to explore the meaning of Hitler's legacy and the sources of his appeal and fascination to the German people. Taking a page from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of the film's avenues of exploration is Nazism's banality, and Syberberg, a disciple of both Brecht and Richard Wagner — he followed this film up with a four-hour, fifteen-minute movie version of the opera Parsifal — has no fear of examining banality at a length and degree of detail that some might consider above and beyond the call of duty. Heralded by praise from Susan Sontag, and "presented" by Francis Ford Coppola, it arrived on these shores in 1980 as the official brainiac cinema experience of the year.

SATANTANGO (1994) Running time: 450 mins.

For years, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour Satantango has been one of the great rites of passage for the serious cinephile. But while a long-ass black-and-white movie about a Hungarian farming commune might lead the uninitiated to expect a massive slog, the truth is that Satantango isn't nearly the frightening behemoth its reputation would suggest. To begin with, Tarr's style is gorgeous, with masterful use of long takes and silky-smooth Steadicam that gives the film a surprising amount of momentum. Tarr rarely keeps his camera still, following his characters on their journeys through life. The results can be hilarious (as in the famous barroom scene), or unbearably sad (like a scene between an ill-fated girl and her cat), or just plain hypnotic (who can forget a follow shot of three men walking down a road while discarded newspapers blow all around them?) But Satantango isn't simply an empty exercise in bravura filmmaking. Tarr's film is nothing less than a postmortem for Communism in Eastern Europe, the story of an aimless band of farmers who are inspired by a charismatic local to follow him, only to be suddenly abandoned, separated and scattered to the four winds. Satantango has been described as "not so much a movie as a place you visit," and it's a destination every true lover of film should make a journey to at least once.

EMPIRE (1964) Running time: 484 mins.

Watch the YouTube clip that accompanies this entry. Then watch it eighty more times. That's a rough approximation of the experience of watching Andy Warhol's silent-film triumph, Empire, which consists of over eight hours of a single shot of the Empire State Building, taken from late one evening until early the next morning. Even more maddening, the film is meant to be screened at a slower speed than it was filmed — the actual footage is only about six hours long. The first question that springs to everyone's mind upon hearing about Empire for the first time is: "Why would anyone want to film a skyscraper for eight hours?" To which the answer is: "Why would anyone want to paint a bunch of soup cans?" And the answer to that is: "Why would anyone want to make a bunch of soup cans?" Part of Warhol's particular genius, and the reason that he is such an important figure in modern art, is that he forced us to look at the things we had made, to see them with new eyes. In a sense, of course, like much conceptual art, Empire is something you know about, not something you actually sit down and watch: but if you give it the chance, it's a film that can almost literally hypnotize you with its simple beauty and repetitiveness. Warhol was trying to establish, as Tom Vick writes, that "the camera is a machine capable of paying attention to anything for any length of time." Warhol throws down a gauntlet with Empire, as he quietly did so often in his career, and asks us to watch our creations doing what we made them capable of doing.

SHOAH (1985) Running time: 503 mins.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film about the Holocaust attempts to redefine the documentary form and the whole accepted approach to its subject, allowing its interview subjects long, long takes in which to discuss their experiences and observations. When released to theaters in this country, the movie seemed to consume all the cultural oxygen in places, inspiring tributes that spilled over from the arts sections to the op-ed pages. Since then, Lanzmann has expanded it by six minutes while tinkering with its outtakes: he's carved two subsequent interview films, A Visitor from the Living (1997) and Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M (2001) out of the mountain of footage from which Shoah was assembled. (And Lanzmann himself can be seen onscreen in Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a-half-hour documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a film that shows his influence.)

OUT 1 (1971) Running time: 773 mins.

When you're making a list of great long films, not including at least one selection by Jacques Rivette is unthinkable. After all, here's a guy who regularly makes movies that are more than three hours long. But Out 1 is mammoth even by Rivette standards, an eight-part, nearly thirteen-hour beast of a film that's catnip for Rivette fans and damn near indecipherable for just about everyone else. Taking as his starting point Balzac's History of the Thirteen, Rivette begins the film with two rival theatrical troupes (one of which is staging Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes despite the fact that it only has six members), plus a con-artist and layabout played by Juliet Berto, and Jean-Pierre Leaud as a deaf-mute who plays an off-key harmonica for people in the street until they get annoyed enough to give him money. The narrative, such as it is, involves a shadowy organization called "The Thirteen," with various characters that are either part of The Thirteen, wish to join The Thirteen, or want to probe the mysteries of The Thirteen. Given Out 1's running time, you might think Rivette would provide some closure, but you'd be sorely mistaken. In Out 1, the narrative digressions and dead-ends ARE the story, and there are some real corkers — a theatre rehearsal that degenerates into animalistic grunts, an interview with a pompous Balzac expert played by Rivette's fellow critic-turned-filmmaker Eric Rohmer, an extended search and fruitless search for a larcenous troupe member — leading up to a final shot that's a cross between a winking grace note and an extended middle finger. Frankly, Rivette's fans (masochists that we are) wouldn't have it any other way. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the ever-lovely Berto, who spends much of the film running around in a pair of super-foxy striped jeans.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) Running time: 939 mins.

It's a bit unfair to call Ranier Werner Fassbinder's masterful adaptation of the Alfred Döblin novel the longest narrative film ever made, as some critics do. Berlin Alexanderplatz was conceived of and executed as a television mini-series (making tremendously long, ponderous TV movies was apparently all the rage in Germany around this time; Edgar Reitz's eleven-hour Heimat was made only four years later), and it's unlikely that even a provocateur like Fassbinder intended for anyone to sit through the whole thing at one go. Still, it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking regardless of your method of intake: marked by tremendous acting and incredibly inventive direction, Berlin Alexanderplatz is both a step away from Fassbinder's twisted takes on melodrama and a refinement of methods used in his previous films, most especially clever camera movements and long, discursive conversations. Following in the footsteps of Erich von Stroheim, Fassbinder attempted to make an absolutely faithful filmed version of his source novel, using a number of the book's interesting narrative techniques to create a digressive yet highly focused sense of place and time. This isn't the best place to start with Fassbinder, but it may be the best place to end: it was, in many ways, the movie he'd waited his whole life to make.

HONORABLE MENTION:

GREED (1924) Semi-Restored Running time: 239 mins; Original Running time: Long As Fuck

Anyone wondering why Erich von Stroheim became the model for the modern stereotype of the film director as demanding, egomaniacal slave-driver (complete with puffy pants, monocle, and thick Teutonic accent) need look no further than Greed. The first feature-length film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was meant to be of standard length — then, as now, around two hours — but von Stroheim would have none of it. So impressed was he by Frank Norris' novel of a love triangle destroyed after the sudden windfall of a lottery win, that he set out to recreate it, scene by scene and word for word: not as an adaptation, but literally as a visualization on screen of the entire novel. This necessitated, among other things, hiring a huge cast, defying the studio by shooting on location whenever possible, and spending a then-unheard-of half million dollars before turning in the completed product. And even then, MGM's troubles were just beginning: von Stroheim's initial cut of Greed was an astonishing ten hours long, likely the longest movie ever submitted to a major studio. The enraged executives demanded a new cut, and von Stroheim submitted an edit (which he considered a huge compromise) that was still over four hours long. The studio essentially banished him from the project after that, eventually releasing a two-hour cut that eliminated so many characters and subplots that it was nearly incomprehensible, and widely panned by the critics. Turner Entertainment released a 'restored' version of the second, four-hour cut of Greed a few years ago, using surviving footage, script, and still photographs, that suggests how good the original might have been. But we'll never really know — the vast majority of the reels from the ten-hour version were accidentally destroyed over fifty years ago by an MGM maintenance worker.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Movies We Missed: Va Savoir (Who Knows?) (2001)

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Va Savoir is the exact kind of film that I had in mind when I started writing this feature — the kind that, when you finally do find it, you feel like you’ve discovered a beautiful but rarely traveled island. These are the kind of films that inspire you to lead others to the hidden treasure, and tend to hold a more personal place in your viewing history.

Why we missed it: Although he was working consistently, it had been since 1991 with La Belle Noiseuse that people had paid attention to French master Jacques Rivette.

The cast may be familiar to foreign-film connoisseurs, but none of the actors would turn heads in the States.

Why we should have known: Was well-received at Cannes, with Rivette nominated for the Palme D'Or director’s award, and was also the New York Film Festival’s opening night selection in 2001. But other than that, there's no reason to feel guilty for missing this one.

Why we ended up kicking ourselves: What could very easily have looked like a Meg Ryan vehicle (French Kiss, anyone?) in the hands of a lesser director, is a perfect balance of comedy and drama with Rivette in charge.

The protagonists are all either actors, artists or intellectuals that take themselves inherently seriously, which makes it all the funnier when they find themselves repeatedly stuck in ridiculous situations.

It's light-hearted but not without weight; even at its most outrageous, the film always comes back to a measured story about love in real life.

Why we may have been better off without it: A little long at two-and-a-half hours, this should be viewed as a hard edit from a director whose Out 1 notoriously clocked in at thirteen.

Bound to make you wonder why gorgeous women aren’t working at your local library (it’s a movie!), and could possibly induce feelings of slight depression that your own love life isn’t written by an old-soul romantic out of the French New Wave. Again, it’s really just a movie. . .

— Bryan Whitefield