When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland

in Film, Literature | December 8th, 2014

alice hux

Many film­mak­ers have tried to adapt Lewis Car­rol­l’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, but none, in the esti­ma­tion of most enthu­si­asts of either Alice or ani­ma­tion, have ful­ly suc­ceed­ed. Maybe the episod­ic nature of the book gives them trou­ble, maybe the humor and unex­pect­ed log­ic of its much-cel­e­brat­ed “non­sense” don’t real­ly trans­late from the print­ed word to the spo­ken, or maybe Car­roll knew how to han­dle the bound­ary between the real and the unre­al in a way no oth­er cre­ator can imi­tate. Nobody knows how many Alice adap­ta­tions have, con­se­quent­ly, implod­ed before even begin­ning. But when Walt Dis­ney, not a man of small ambi­tions, set about to bring Car­rol­l’s world to the sil­ver screen, he pressed on until it became 1951’s Alice in Won­der­land — about 20 years after the idea came to him in the first place.

“No sto­ry in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture has intrigued me more than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won­der­land,” Dis­ney told the Amer­i­can Week­ly in 1946. “It fas­ci­nat­ed me the first time I read it as a school­boy and as soon as I pos­si­bly could after I start­ed mak­ing ani­mat­ed car­toons, I acquired the film rights to it.” The ani­ma­tor found spe­cial per­son­al res­o­nance in the fact that “peo­ple in his peri­od had no time to waste on triv­i­al­i­ty, yet Car­roll with his non­sense and fan­ta­sy fur­nished a bal­ance between seri­ous­ness and enjoy­ment which every­body need­ed then and still needs today.”

Oth­ers attempt­ed to bring Car­rol­l’s non­sense and fan­ta­sy up to date on film in 1903, 1910, and 1915, and Dis­ney him­self had begun plan­ning an abort­ed Alice movie with silent-era icon Mary Pick­ford in the ear­ly 1930s, but by the end of the Sec­ond World War, a defin­i­tive Dis­ney adap­ta­tion had yet to appear. Enter, in the fall of 1945, Aldous Hux­ley: author of Brave New World, scriptwriter on pre­vi­ous film projects like a life of Marie Curie as well as adap­ta­tions of Pride and Prej­u­dice and Jane Eyre, habitué of the bor­der­lands between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy, and, in Dis­ney’s words, “Alice in Won­der­land fiend.” Dis­ney need­ed such a fiend, hav­ing start­ed to fear that his desired mod­ern­iza­tion of the mate­r­i­al might upset the Car­roll faith­ful.

Hux­ley’s script, a com­bi­na­tion of live action and ani­ma­tion, deals with the friend­ship between the Oxford don Charles Dodg­son (known, of course, by the pen name Lewis Car­roll), held back from attain­ing his dreamed-of life as a librar­i­an by the uni­ver­si­ty’s stern vice chan­cel­lor, and Alice (based upon Alice Lid­dell, the real-life inspi­ra­tion for Car­rol­l’s fic­tion­al Alice), held back from all things imprac­ti­cal by her even stern­er gov­erness. Though Hux­ley enjoyed doing the work, Dis­ney found it “too lit­er­ary,” and noth­ing of it made it into the 1951 movie. Even then, the final prod­uct dis­pleased the exact­ing ani­ma­tion vision­ary, as it still does quite a few Dis­ney fans.

While the full text of Hux­ley’s screen­play has­n’t sur­vived, and much of what Hux­ley wrote to pro­duce it burnt up in a 1961 house fire, you can read a thor­ough syn­op­sis of it and more of the back­sto­ry on the project at Mouse­plan­et. For even greater detail, see also “Hux­ley’s ‘Deep Jam’ and the Adap­ta­tion of Alice in Won­der­land,” an essay by David Leon Hig­don and Phill Lerhman in the Hux­ley vol­ume of Harold Bloom’s Mod­ern Crit­i­cal Views series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See The Orig­i­nal Alice In Won­der­land Man­u­script, Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed By Lewis Car­roll (1864)

See Sal­vador Dali’s Illus­tra­tions for the 1969 Edi­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land

Alice in Won­der­land: The Orig­i­nal 1903 Film Adap­ta­tion

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Future Shock: Orson Welles Narrates a 1972 Film About the Perils of Technological Change

in Film | December 5th, 2014

The begin­ning of the 1972 doc­u­men­tary Future Shock, direct­ed by Alex Grasshof, shows Orson Welles, beard­ed and chomp­ing on a cig­ar, stand­ing on an air­port peo­ple mover. He turns to the cam­era and deliv­ers a mono­logue in his trade­mark silken bari­tone. “In the course of my work, which has tak­en me to just about every cor­ner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phe­nom­e­non which I’m just begin­ning to under­stand. Our mod­ern tech­nolo­gies have changed the degree of sophis­ti­ca­tion beyond our wildest dreams. But this tech­nol­o­gy has exact­ed a pret­ty heavy price. We live in an age of anx­i­ety and time of stress. And with all our sophis­ti­ca­tion, we are in fact the vic­tims of our own tech­no­log­i­cal strengths –- we are the vic­tims of shock… a future shock.”

The doc­u­men­tary itself is won­der­ful­ly dat­ed. From its bizarre open­ing mon­tage; to its sound­track, which lurch­es from ear­ly elec­tron­ic music to jazz funk; to some endear­ing video spe­cial effects, which, for what­ev­er rea­son, most­ly cen­ters around Orson Welles’s head, the film feels thor­ough­ly root­ed in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Yet many of the ideas dis­cussed in the movie are, if any­thing, more rel­e­vant now than in the 1970s.

The term “future shock” was invent­ed in Alvin Tof­fler’s huge­ly best­selling book of the same name to describe the con­stant, bewil­der­ing bar­rage of new tech­nolo­gies and all the result­ing soci­etal changes those tech­nolo­gies bring about. Any­one who has strug­gled to com­pre­hend a new, baf­fling and sup­pos­ed­ly essen­tial social media plat­form, any­one who has been dri­ven to paral­y­sis over the num­ber of choic­es on Net­flix, any­one who found their liveli­hood dec­i­mat­ed because of a hot new app knows what “future shock” is.

Tof­fler (along with his wife and uncred­it­ed co-writer Hei­di Tof­fler) argued that we are in the midst of a mas­sive struc­tur­al change from an indus­tri­al soci­ety to a post-indus­tri­al one – a soci­ety that bog­gles the mind with an over­load of infor­ma­tion and an over­load of con­sumer choic­es. “Change,” as they wrote, “is the only con­stant.”

Along the way, the Tof­flers man­aged to pre­dict the col­lapse of Amer­i­ca’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, along with things like Prozac, temp jobs, the inter­net and the mete­oric rise and fall of ins­ta-celebs (Alex from Tar­get, we hard­ly knew you.) Oth­er pre­dic­tions – under­wa­ter cities, paper clothes and being able to choose your own skin col­or – haven’t yet come to pass. Still, they had a sur­pris­ing­ly good track record con­sid­er­ing these pre­dic­tions were writ­ten over four decades ago.

The video ends with a plea from not Welles, but Tof­fler him­self, who is seen address­ing col­lege stu­dents.

If we can rec­og­nize that indus­tri­al­ism is not the only pos­si­ble form of tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, if we can begin to think more imag­i­na­tive­ly about the future, then we can pre­vent future shock and we can use tech­nol­o­gy itself to build a decent, demo­c­ra­t­ic and humane soci­ety. […] We can no longer allow tech­nol­o­gy just to come roar­ing down at us. We must begin to say “No” to cer­tain kinds of tech­nol­o­gy and begin to con­trol tech­no­log­i­cal change, because we have now reached the point at which tech­nol­o­gy is so pow­er­ful and so rapid that it may destroy us, unless we con­trol it. But what is the most impor­tant is we sim­ply do not accept every­thing; that we begin to make crit­i­cal deci­sions about what kind of world we want and what kind of tech­nol­o­gy we want.

Find oth­er short films nar­rat­ed by Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

in Film, Music | December 4th, 2014

In 1967, Stan­ley Kubrick com­mis­sioned Spar­ta­cus com­pos­er Alex North to com­pose a score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, while at the edit­ing bay, he fell in love with the movie’s tem­po­rary sound­track con­sist­ing of a bunch of exist­ing works of clas­si­cal music. So in an unprece­dent­ed move, he chose those works in favor of North’s com­po­si­tion. He didn’t even re-record the tracks, as was the cus­tom at the time. He just slot­ted the exist­ing works right into the mix. And, for the pieces by Hun­gar­i­an com­pos­er Györ­gy Ligeti, he didn’t even both­er to get the rights, result­ing in a law­suit.

As you might expect, this was huge­ly con­tro­ver­sial in some cir­cles. The great com­pos­er Bernard Her­rmann, who scored every­thing from Cit­i­zen Kane to Taxi Dri­ver, was appalled. “It shows vul­gar­i­ty, when a direc­tor uses music pre­vi­ous­ly com­posed! I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the height of vul­gar­i­ty in our time. To have out­er space accom­pa­nied by The Blue Danube, and the piece not even record­ed anew!”

Yet any­one who’s ever seen 2001 knows that Kubrick made the right call. Who doesn’t think of bone-wield­ing mon­key men when they hear the open­ing notes of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra? Or who doesn’t asso­ciate The Blue Danube with a zero‑G dance between space­craft and space sta­tion?

2001 might be con­sid­ered the most expen­sive (and most prof­itable) exper­i­men­tal movie ever made. It lacks a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive. It is large­ly word­less. The most mem­o­rable char­ac­ter in the movie is not a human being but a socio­path­ic com­put­er. It ends with an awe­some­ly trip­py med­i­ta­tion on humanity’s next evo­lu­tion­ary iter­a­tion. It’s not an ordi­nary movie and so music was used in an entire­ly unor­di­nary way.

Think of those mono­liths that always appear with that oth­er­world­ly ora­to­rio by Ligeti. It’s ambigu­ous whether those alien mar­ble slabs are emit­ting the music or the music is lay­ered over top the image. Yet the music is not used to tell the audi­ence how to feel. Instead, it is like a voice from the cho­rus in an ancient Greek play, announc­ing from with­out a key moment in the film.

As Roger Ebert puts it: “North’s score … would have been wrong for ‘2001’ because, like all scores, it attempts to under­line the action— to give us emo­tion­al cues. The clas­si­cal music cho­sen by Kubrick exists out­side the action.”

Tony Palmer, direc­tor of Stan­ley Kubrick: A Life in Pic­tures, put it anoth­er way. “Before Stan­ley Kubrick, music tend­ed to be used in film as either dec­o­ra­tive or as height­en­ing emo­tions. After Stan­ley Kubrick, because of his use of clas­si­cal music in par­tic­u­lar, it became absolute­ly an essen­tial part of the nar­ra­tive, intel­lec­tu­al dri­ve of the film.”

Per­haps this is the rea­son why some com­plain that Kubrick’s movies are chilly and cere­bral. It also might explain why his use of music tends to linger in the mind.

Thanks to Spo­ti­fy, you can lis­ten to over four hours of clas­si­cal music that Kubrick used in his movies. Find the playlist above, and a list of the clas­si­cal music in Kubrick films here. The playlist fea­tures every­thing from Beethoven (A Clock­work Orange) to Schu­bert (Bar­ry Lyn­don) to Bartók (The Shin­ing). If you need to down­load Spo­ti­fy, grab the soft­ware on this site.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Clas­si­cal Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

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Scenes from Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Philosophical, Feature-Length Animated Film (2001)

in Animation, Film, Philosophy | December 4th, 2014

Richard Lin­klater’s lat­est film Boy­hood has earned quite a lot of press by accom­plish­ing the unprece­dent­ed cin­e­mat­ic feat of telling a sto­ry over a decade long with a pro­duc­tion over a decade long, fol­low­ing the same char­ac­ters, played by the same grow­ing and aging actors, the whole time through. View­ers have under­stand­ably found it a strik­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence, but most of Lin­klater’s projects do some­thing no oth­er film has done before. His 1990s “Indiewood” break­out Slack­er (watch it online), for instance, offered not just the por­trait of the so-called Generation‑X, and not just a por­trait of the then-ris­ing Amer­i­can coun­ter­cul­tur­al Mec­ca of Austin, Texas, but a form of sto­ry­telling that seemed to drift freely from one char­ac­ter to the next, cross­ing town on the winds of idle, every­day, intense, and even non­sen­si­cal con­ver­sa­tion.

And what does Wak­ing Life do? Released in 2001, Lin­klater’s first ani­mat­ed film (he would make a sec­ond, the Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, in 2006) not only fur­ther devel­ops the neglect­ed branch of ani­ma­tion known as roto­scop­ing, which involves draw­ing over live-action footage, but puts it to work for the cause of the philo­soph­i­cal film. But rather than approach­ing that enter­prise straight on, the movie inter­prets the phi­los­o­phy with which it deals through a vast cast of char­ac­ters both eccen­tric and mun­dane — intel­lec­tu­als, often, but also crack­pots, gad­flies, and just plain slack­ers. When they speak their thoughts aloud, as they do in the short clips fea­tured here, they speak on themes as var­ied, but as intrigu­ing­ly inter­con­nect­ed, as real­i­ty, free will, anar­chy, sui­cide, and cin­e­ma, all of which the ani­ma­tion vivid­ly illus­trates.

“Wak­ing Life could not come at a bet­ter time,” wrote Roger Ebert when the movie opened, less than a month after 9/11. “It cel­e­brates a series of artic­u­late, intel­li­gent char­ac­ters who seek out the mean­ing of their exis­tence and do not have the answers. At a time when mad­men think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an after­life, which is by def­i­n­i­tion unknow­able, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones ask­ing sane ques­tions. True believ­ers owe it to the rest of us to seek solu­tions that are rea­son­able in the vis­i­ble world.” Some view­ers will no doubt write off Wak­ing Life’s dia­logue — whether spo­ken by actors, pro­fes­sors, Lin­klater reg­u­lars, or utter ran­doms — as mere “dorm room con­ver­sa­tion,” but the film seems to ask an impor­tant ques­tion on that very point: are you real­ly hav­ing more inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions now than you did in the dorms?

If you have a sub­scrip­tion to Ama­zon Prime, you can watch Wak­ing Life for free right now. A ver­sion appears on Youtube for $2.99.

It’s also worth not­ing that Wak­ing Life appears on the list we recent­ly explored, 44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tion of Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Art of Making Blade Runner: See the Original Sketchbook, Storyboards, On-Set Polaroids & More

in Film, Sci Fi | December 2nd, 2014

There’s nev­er been a bad time to revis­it Blade Run­ner, but now, with all the news about the in-devel­op­ment Blade Run­ner 2 break­ing even as you read this, it seems like an espe­cial­ly appro­pri­ate time to go deep­er into Rid­ley Scot­t’s piece of ground­break­ing, Philip K. Dick-adapt­ing cyber­punk cin­e­ma. What­ev­er you think of the prospect of a sequel, if you call your­self a Blade Run­ner fan, you’ll nev­er turn down a chance for anoth­er look behind the scenes of the orig­i­nal.

Hence our offer­ing today of BBC crit­ic Mark Ker­mod­e’s doc­u­men­tary above, On the Edge of Blade Run­ner, and, via Fla­vor­wire, a selec­tion of orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards from the film. Few sci­ence-fic­tion movies hold up so well aes­thet­i­cal­ly after 32 years, but only because few sci­ence-fction movies had so much sheer work put into their design — we are still, I imag­ine, assured a steady stream of pro­duc­tion mate­ri­als to gaze upon for a long time to come.

blade runner storyboard

In recent years, for instance, Sean Young, who played the repli­cant Rachel, released her Polaroid pho­tos from the film’s set. And if you missed it the first time around, you’ll want to cir­cle back to our post fea­tur­ing a freely read­able online ver­sion of Blade Run­ner Sketch­book, a col­lec­tion of over 100 pro­duc­tion draw­ings and pieces of art­work that orig­i­nal­ly came out along­side the film. (See it above.)

blade runner polaroid

And what­ev­er direc­tion Blade Run­ner 2 takes, promis­ing or less so, we’ll all hear a lot about it in the com­ing months. So to bal­ance out the com­ing wave of pro­mo­tion for the sec­ond one, why not watch a lit­tle of the pro­mo­tion of the first one in the form of the con­ven­tion reel below (pro­duced not least to counter all the bad press the pro­duc­tion had drawn at the time), which con­tains inter­views with some of those respon­si­ble for Blade Run­ner’s most endur­ing qual­i­ties: Rid­ley Scott, “visu­al futur­ist” Syd Mead, and visu­al effects design­er Dou­glas Trum­bull. If all three of those guys work on the sequel, well, maybe I’ll start get­ting excit­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Blade Run­ner Pro­mo­tion­al Film

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunting Vision of the Future

in Film | December 1st, 2014

A friend recent­ly told me about a screen­ing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris he attend­ed in a state of, er, expand­ed per­cep­tion. The vivid sci-fi trip he’d expect­ed turned into the most har­row­ing emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence of his life. 2001: A Space Odyssey has proven a reli­able favorite of the con­scious­ness-alter­ing crowd since it came out in 1968, almost to the point where you’d think Kubrick made the film just for them. But Tarkovsky’s 1972 sto­ry of a sen­tient plan­et and the hal­lu­ci­na­tions with which it tempts and tor­ments a near­by space sta­tion has an entire­ly dif­fer­ent exis­ten­tial con­cep­tion of mankind’s ven­ture into the unknown realms of space and time. What­ev­er your own state of mind, you can watch Solaris free online. (Watch below and make sure click “cc” at the bot­tom of the videos to launch the sub­ti­tles.) If you don’t feel sure about tak­ing the plunge, have a look first at the updat­ed trail­er above.


Rework­ing Stanis­law Lem’s orig­i­nal nov­el toward his own artis­tic ends, Tarkovsky real­ized his vision of the future with a num­ber of unusu­al tech­niques. View­ers often take spe­cial, bemused notice of the scene above, a five-minute dri­ve down an urban high­way which comes just before the pro­tag­o­nist, psy­chol­o­gist Kris Kelvin, departs for his space mis­sion. (Tarkovsky liked to say he put it there to dis­cour­age impa­tient film­go­ers.) The clip includes com­men­tary from film schol­ars Vida John­son and Gra­ham Petrie. As John­son explains, “Tarkovsky knew that in order to sit­u­ate the sto­ry in a for­eign place and a dis­tant time, both to ful­fill genre require­ments and deflect poten­tial cen­sors, he need­ed to con­trast his nos­tal­gia for nature and the past with a city of the future.” And so, unable to build such a thing on his lim­it­ed bud­get, Tarkovsky went to Tokyo: “The Japan­ese road signs, the for­eign cars, long tun­nels, and mul­ti-lane high­ways with wind­ing bridges and over­pass­es might have rep­re­sent­ed a city of the future for ear­ly-1970s Sovi­et audi­ences used to sim­ple two-lane roads and domes­tic tin-box cars, if they were lucky enough to have a car at all.”

akasaka_08Petrie ref­er­ences an entry from Tarkovsky’s diaries “where he wor­ries that if the Japan­ese visa does­n’t come through in time, they will miss the end of the exhi­bi­tion” — prob­a­bly Osaka’s thor­ough­ly future-ori­ent­ed Expo ’70 World’s Fair. (Inci­den­tal­ly, next time you swing by Osa­ka, I do rec­om­mend tak­ing a walk around the still-fas­ci­nat­ing Expo ’70 grounds.) Tarkovsky did end up miss­ing the Osa­ka exhi­bi­tion, and so he shot in Tokyo instead. At Tarkovsky fan site nostalghia.com, Yuji Kiku­take has gone through mod­ern-day Tokyo and found the sur­viv­ing land­marks of the Akasa­ka and Iiku­ra neigh­bor­hoods over which the sequence pass­es — reveal­ing the future, in oth­er words, of the city of the future. What­ev­er you think of the result­ing five min­utes, the fact that Tarkovsky man­aged to go shoot them and that the offi­cials in charge fund­ed it demon­strates, as Petrie puts it, not just “the inge­nu­ity of film­mak­ers try­ing to pen­e­trate the Iron Cur­tain,” but “the high esteem in which [Tarkovsky] was held by the same film-indus­try bureau­crats who made his life mis­er­able by cut­ting his bud­gets and try­ing to cen­sor his films.”

In addi­tion to Solaris (watch here or above) you can find oth­er major films by the Russ­ian auteur in our col­lec­tion of Free Tarkovsky Films, or our larg­er col­lec­tion: 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revis­it­ed

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

in Film | November 27th, 2014

Criterion

Some of us get our edu­ca­tion at film school. More of us get it from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, that for­mi­da­bly cinephilic restor­er, cura­tor, and pack­ager of clas­sic motion pic­tures from every era. In addi­tion to their ele­gant, sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­i­al-rich home video releas­es — they’ve put them out on Laserdisc, on DVD, on Blu-ray, stream­ing over the inter­net, and will pre­sum­ably con­tin­ue to do so on whichev­er for­mats come next — they also do intrigu­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions with the var­i­ous cul­tur­al fig­ures with whom they’ve worked, such as ask­ing them to name their ten favorite Cri­te­ri­on releas­es. You may recall that, back in June, we fea­tured actor, direc­tor, and 1990s “Indiewood” icon Steve Buscemi’s Cri­te­ri­on top ten list, which includ­ed such choice pieces of film his­to­ry as Gus Van San­t’s My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho, Fran­co-Dutch hor­ror clas­sic The Van­ish­ing, and long-unre­leased “faux-doc­u­men­tary” Sym­biopsy­chotax­i­plasm.

Of the many more lists criterion.com offers, you can find this sur­pris­ing­ly clas­sic-ori­ent­ed one from Richard Lin­klater, mak­er of films like Slack­er, the Before Sun­rise/Before Sun­set/Before Mid­night tril­o­gy, and this year’s Boy­hood (and anoth­er archi­tect of Indiewood):

  1. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)
  2. Au hasard Balt­haz­ar (Robert Bres­son)
  3. The Flow­ers of St. Fran­cis (Rober­to Rosselli­ni)
  4. Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Drey­er)
  5. Tokyo Sto­ry (Yasu­jiro Ozu)
  6. The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ (Mar­tin Scors­ese)
  7. Unfaith­ful­ly Yours (Pre­ston Sturges)
  8. Fan­ny and Alexan­der — The Tele­vi­sion Ver­sion (Ing­mar Bergman)
  9. Pick­pock­et (Robert Bres­son)
  10. I Know Where I’m Going! (Michael Pow­ell and Emer­ic Press­burg­er)

Or this one by four mem­bers of the New York no-wave rock band Son­ic Youth, who turned the whole top-ten list con­cept up to twelve, giv­ing their props to Ozu like Linkater and The Van­ish­ing like Busce­mi (“It gets veeer­rry weird,” adds gui­tarist Thurston Moore):

  1. Float­ing Weeds (Yasu­jiro Ozu)
  2. Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles (Chan­tal Aker­man)
  3. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainier Wern­er Fass­binder)
  4. Mas­culin féminin (Jean-Luc Godard)
  5. Dou­ble Sui­cide (Masahi­ro Shin­o­da)
  6. The Van­ish­ing (George Sluiz­er)
  7. Mam­ma Roma (Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni)
  8. Black Orpheus (Mar­cel Camus)
  9. Ace in the Hole (Bil­ly Wilder)
  10. Night on Earth (Jim Jar­musch)
  11. Fat Girl (Cather­ine Breil­lat)
  12. Days of Heav­en (Ter­rence Mal­ick)

Or lists from vital cre­ators who have more recent­ly arrived on the scene, such as this one from Tiny Fur­ni­ture direc­tor and Girls cre­ator Lena Dun­ham, an invet­er­ate fan of Agnès Var­da (who “man­ages to be both deeply emo­tion­al and utter­ly in con­trol of the tech­ni­cal ele­ments of film­mak­ing [ … ] that had seemed to me to be an impos­si­ble line to strad­dle, and she does it so beau­ti­ful­ly”). She also makes room for Mal­ick­’s Days of Heav­en, (also a pick of Son­ic Youth’s Kim Gor­don), two from Fass­binder (also a direc­tor of choice for Son­ic Youth’s Lee Ranal­do), and one from Bergman (who should make every­one’s favorite-films lists, but also made Lin­klater’s):

  1. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
  2. Days of Heav­en (Ter­rence Mal­ick)
  3. Broad­cast News (James L. Brooks)
  4. Week­end (Andrew Haigh)
  5. La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, Le bon­heur, and Vagabond (Agnès Var­da)
  6. The Mar­riage of Maria Braun and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainier Wern­er Fass­binder)
  7. Pic­nic at Hang­ing Rock (Peter Weir)
  8. Straw Dogs (Sam Peck­in­pah) and Dead Ringers (David Cro­nen­berg)
  9. Through a Glass Dark­ly (Ing­mar Bergman)
  10. The War Room (Chris Hege­dus and D. A. Pen­nebak­er)

D.A. Pen­nebak­er, by the way, has his own Cri­te­ri­on top ten list, as do oth­er film­mak­ers named here, like Andrew Haigh and Mar­tin Scors­ese. But this leaves me with one burn­ing ques­tion: if direc­tors like Ozu and Fass­binder had lived to see The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, which vol­umes would they have put on their own DVD shelves?

Enter the com­plete col­lec­tion of Cri­te­ri­on Top Tens here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Steve Buscemi’s Top 10 Film Picks (from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion)

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best Amer­i­can Films Ever Made (1963)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Tim Burton Directs Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar” on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1986)

in Film, Television | November 25th, 2014

How do you fol­low up on mak­ing a children’s movie clas­sic? If you’re Tim Bur­ton, you spin a tale of sex, mur­der and con­cep­tu­al art.

On the heels of his fea­ture debut Pee-Wee’s Big Adven­ture, Tim Bur­ton adapt­ed Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar” (1944) for an episode of the ‘80s reboot of Alfred Hitch­cock Presents. In Bradbury’s sto­ry, a fail­ing farmer buys a jar with a curi­ous thing float­ing in it. It is described as “one of those pale things drift­ing in alco­hol plas­ma … with its peeled, dead eyes star­ing out at you and nev­er see­ing you.” This thing, how­ev­er, has a pecu­liar charis­ma. Peo­ple come for miles to gawk at it, strange­ly cap­ti­vat­ed by its uncan­ny charm. Well, almost every­one. The farmer’s cheat­ing wife, how­ev­er, loathes it to the pit of her mar­row and when she tries to get rid of it, things take a vio­lent turn.

Bur­ton gives the sto­ry a decid­ed­ly Rea­gan-era twist. Instead of being a down-and-out farmer, Knoll (played by Grif­fin Dunne) is a fad­ing star of the New York art scene. The episode opens with a crit­ic sav­aging Knoll’s new open­ing, which is filled with large, pre­pos­ter­ous con­cep­tu­al pieces. The artist flees the show and his belit­tling harpy of a wife in favor of the local junk­yard. There, he pries the tit­u­lar jar from the trunk of a 1938 Mer­cedes. Float­ing inside is what looks like a Dr. Seuss crea­ture drown in Windex. Knoll is both fas­ci­nat­ed and repulsed by it. So, nat­u­ral­ly, he places it at the cen­ter of his show. The results are mixed. Sure, Knoll starts to sell art again but his wife also starts to get stab­by with a kitchen knife.

The episode is deli­cious fun. From the eye-pop­ping col­or palette to the crisp, graph­ic direc­tion to the painful­ly ‘80s hair­styles, this work feels very much a part of the same world as Burton’s next movie, Beetle­juice. In fact, com­pos­er Dan­ny Elf­man and screen­writ­ers Michael McDow­ell and Lar­ry Wil­son worked on both. You can watch it above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tim Burton’s Ear­ly Stu­dent Films

Vin­cent, Tim Burton’s Ear­ly Ani­mat­ed Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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