Why Quentin Tarantino Will Only Make 10 Movies

in Film | October 19th, 2022

Time and again in inter­views, Quentin Taran­ti­no has straight-faced­ly declared that he will retire from film­mak­ing after his tenth fea­ture. He may already have reached that num­ber with 2019’s Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood, depend­ing on whether each part of Kill Bill counts as a sep­a­rate film. If not, we have one more Taran­ti­no pic­ture to look for­ward to. His dec­la­ra­tion of immi­nent retire­ment is unusu­al and even dispir­it­ing giv­en that he’s still in his late fifties, an age that has found many auteurs at the peak of their pow­ers. What lies behind it is the sub­ject of the short video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

“I like the idea that there is an umbil­i­cal cord con­nect­ed to my first film, all the way to my last, and that is my body of work,” says Taran­ti­no in one of the inter­view clips includ­ed. “A bad film on the fil­mog­ra­phy affects good films.” Being known not just as a promi­nent direc­tor but an obses­sive cinephile, Taran­ti­no can sure­ly name off the top of his head dozens of mas­ter film­mak­ers who allowed their own bod­ies of work to be blem­ished.

“Artists don’t always notice when their skills are flag­ging,” as Puschak puts it. “Taran­ti­no is leav­ing ear­ly to pre­vent cross­ing that line unwit­ting­ly.” Though spec­u­la­tive, this notion has hard­ly been con­tra­dict­ed by the direc­tor’s own words.

Puschak writes about the pow­er of the oeu­vre — an artist’s body of work tak­en as a whole, even as an art­work in itself — in his new book Escape into Mean­ing. The con­tent of this video reflects only the first sec­tion of that essay, a med­i­ta­tion on what it means to con­sid­er every­thing a cre­ator has made as a piece of an inter­con­nect­ed whole. The tech­niques, ref­er­ences, themes, and obses­sions that recur promi­nent­ly in Taran­ti­no’s movies make his fil­mog­ra­phy prac­ti­cal­ly invite such an analy­sis, as well the ques­tion asked by Puschak: “Can a well-designed fil­mog­ra­phy bestow greater mean­ing onto the films that make it up?” No mat­ter how many more works Taran­ti­no will make, and what­ev­er form they take, the whole of his exist­ing oeu­vre assures us that all of them will be thor­ough­ly Taran­tin­ian.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Shoots a Film at 3 Dif­fer­ent Bud­get Lev­els: Reser­voir Dogs ($1 Mil­lion), Pulp Fic­tion ($8 Mil­lion), and Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood ($95 Mil­lion)

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Remix­es His­to­ry: A Brief Study of Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood

Quentin Taran­ti­no Releas­es His First Nov­el: A Pulpy Nov­el­iza­tion of Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Vintage Videos Capturing Life in Japan from the 1960s Through Today

in Film, History, Travel | October 12th, 2022

Just yes­ter­day, Japan ful­ly re-opened its bor­ders to tourism after a long peri­od of COVID-19-moti­vat­ed clo­sure. This should prove eco­nom­i­cal­ly invig­o­rat­ing, given how much demand to vis­it the Land of the Ris­ing Sun has built up over the past cou­ple of years. Even before the pan­dem­ic, Japan had been a coun­try of great inter­est among world trav­el­ers, and for more than half a cen­tu­ry at that. Much of that attrac­tive­ness has, of course, to do with its dis­tinc­tive nature, which man­i­fests both deep tra­di­tion and hyper-moder­ni­ty at once.

But some of it also has to do with the fact that, since ris­ing from the dev­as­ta­tion of the Sec­ond World War, Japan has hard­ly shied away from self-pro­mo­tion. “A Day in Tokyo,” the short film at the top of the post, was pro­duced by the Japan Nation­al Tourism Orga­ni­za­tion in 1968.

Its vivid col­or footage of Japan’s great metrop­o­lis, “the world’s largest and liveli­est,” cap­tures every­day life as it was then lived in Toky­o’s depart­ment stores, stock exchanges, con­struc­tion sites, and zoos.

The film puts a good deal of empha­sis on the cap­i­tal’s still-ongo­ing post­war trans­for­ma­tion: “In a con­stant meta­bol­ic cycle of destruc­tion and cre­ation, Tokyo pro­gress­es at a dizzy­ing pace,” declares the film’s nar­ra­tor. “Peo­ple who haven’t seen Tokyo for ten years, or even five, would scarce­ly rec­og­nize it today.” And if Tokyo was dizzy­ing in the late nine­teen-six­ties, it became pos­i­tive­ly dis­ori­ent­ing in the eight­ies. On the back of that era’s eco­nom­ic bub­ble, Japan looked about to become the wealth­i­est coun­try in the world, and Toky­oites both worked and played accord­ing­ly hard.

This two-part com­pi­la­tion of scenes from Japan in the eight­ies con­veys that time with footage drawn from a vari­ety of sources, includ­ing fea­ture films (not least Ita­mi Jūzō’s beloved 1985 ramen com­e­dy Tam­popo.) “It was a mag­i­cal place at a mag­i­cal time,” remem­bers one Amer­i­can com­menter who lived in Japan back then. “Every­thing seemed pos­si­ble. Every­body was pros­per­ing. Almost every crazy busi­ness idea seemed to suc­ceed. Peo­ple were hap­py and shared their hap­pi­ness and good for­tune with oth­ers. It was like no oth­er place on earth.”

As dra­mat­i­cal­ly as the bub­ble burst at the end of the eight­ies, Japan­ese life in the sub­se­quent “lost decades” has also pos­sessed a rich­ness of its own. You can see it in this com­pi­la­tion of footage of Japan in the nineties and two-thou­sands from the same chan­nel, TRNGL. Though it no longer seemed able to buy up the rest of the world, the coun­try had by that era built up a glob­al con­scious­ness of its cul­ture by export­ing its films, its ani­ma­tion, its music, its video games, and much more besides. Even if you haven’t seen this Japan in per­son, you’ve come to know it through its art and media.

If you’re con­sid­er­ing mak­ing the trip, this video of “Japan nowa­days” will give you a sense of what you’ve been miss­ing. The Tokyo of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry shown in its clips cer­tain­ly isn’t the same city it was in 1968. Yet it remains “an inter­min­gling of Ori­ent and Occi­dent, seem­ing­ly new, but actu­al­ly old,” as the nar­ra­tor of “A Day in Tokyo” puts it. “Beneath its mod­ern exte­ri­or, there still lingers an atmos­phere of past glo­ries. The cit­i­zens remain unal­ter­ably Japan­ese, and yet this great city is able to accom­mo­date and under­stand peo­ple of all races, lan­guages, and beliefs” — peo­ple now arriv­ing by the thou­sands once again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Col­or Pho­tos: See the Stereo­scop­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of T. Ena­mi

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

An Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Kabu­ki The­atre, Fea­tur­ing 20th-Cen­tu­ry Mas­ters of the Form (1964)

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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When a Modern Director Makes a Fake Old Movie: A Video Essay on David Fincher’s Mank

in Film | October 6th, 2022

As of this writ­ing, Mank is David Fincher’s newest movie — but also, in a sense, his old­est. With Net­flix mon­ey behind him, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors spared seem­ing­ly no expense in re-cre­at­ing the look and feel of a nine­teen-for­ties film using the advanced dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies of the twen­ty-twen­ties. The idea was not just to tell the sto­ry of Cit­i­zen Kane scriptwriter Her­man J. Mankiewicz, but to make the two pic­tures seem like con­tem­po­raries. As Fincher’s pro­duc­tion design­er Don­ald Gra­ham Burt once put it, the direc­tor “want­ed the movie to be like you were in a vault and came across Cit­i­zen Kane and next to it was Mank.”

Cin­e­maS­tix cre­ator Dan­ny Boyd quotes Burt’s remarks in the video essay above, “When a Mod­ern Direc­tor Makes a Fake Old Movie.” After estab­lish­ing Fincher’s sig­na­ture use of com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery to cre­ate not large-scale spec­ta­cles but rel­a­tive­ly sub­tle and often peri­od-accu­rate details, Boyd explains the exten­sive dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion involved in “aging” Mank.

Fincher’s artists added clouds, dust, “the gleam of vin­tage lamps,” grain and scratch­es, “lat­er­al wob­bling,” and much else besides. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy itself pays con­stant homage to Cit­i­zen Kane’s then-ground­break­ing angles and cam­era moves, even employ­ing “old-school tech­niques that dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and a decent film bud­get have made increas­ing­ly obso­lete” such as shoot­ing day-for-night.

And yet, as most of the com­ments below Boy­d’s video point out, the result of these con­sid­er­able efforts falls short of con­vinc­ing. Maybe it’s all the shades of gray between its blacks and whites; maybe it’s the smooth­ness of every­thing, includ­ing the cam­era moves; maybe it’s all the mod­ern act­ing. (As the New York­er’s Richard Brody puts it, “Our actors are of their time, and can hard­ly rep­re­sent the past with­out invest­ing it with the atti­tudes of our own day, which is why most new peri­od pieces seem either thin or unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic.”) If any film­mak­er could over­come all these chal­lenges, it would sure­ly be one with Fincher’s back­ground in visu­al effects, fas­ci­na­tion with Old Hol­ly­wood, and noto­ri­ous per­fec­tion­ism. For all its suc­cess in oth­er respects, Mank proves that one can no more make old movies than old friends.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Cit­i­zen Kane a Great Film: 4 Video Essays Revis­it Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­piece on the 80th Anniver­sary of Its Pre­miere

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Fight Club Came Out 20 Years Ago Today: Watch Five Video Essays on the Film’s Phi­los­o­phy and Last­ing Influ­ence

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why Predator — A Discussion of the Film Franchise on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #133

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 29th, 2022

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Thanks to the new film Prey by Dan Tra­cht­en­berg and Patrick Aison, we now have six films (start­ing with 1987’s Preda­tor) fea­tur­ing the dread­locked, cam­ou­flaged, infrared-see­ing race of alien hunters who have appar­ent­ly been fly­ing around col­lect­ing our skulls for 300 years.

Thank­ful­ly, the new film is good, and adds to the recent spate of Indige­nous-cen­tered media, with its young, female Comanche pro­tag­o­nist tak­ing on evil French bison-killers, her sex­ist peers, and a moun­tain lion, in addi­tion to a rel­a­tive­ly low-tech ver­sion of what many com­ic books have called a Yaut­ja.

We talk about what makes for a good Preda­tor film, the appeal of the mon­ster (and when in the films it gets revealed), the pac­ing of the films, the music, direc­tion, effects, humor, social com­men­tary, and more.

A few of the arti­cles we con­sult­ed includ­ed:

This marks the first episode of Pret­ty Much Pop sea­son three, where Mark Lin­sen­may­er’s recur­ring co-hosts will by default ten­ta­tive­ly be those you will hear today: Phi­los­o­phy prof/entertainment writer Lawrence Ware, novelist/writing prof Sarahlyn Bruck, and ex-musi­cian, ex-phi­los­o­phy grad stu­dent, and now ex-research man­ag­er Al Bak­er. The var­i­ous con­vo­ca­tions of musi­cians, come­di­ans, et al, will still hap­pen too, but will at least alter­nate with some per­mu­ta­tion of that core group.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Revisit Louise Brooks’ Most Iconic Role in the Too-Sexy-for-Weimar Silent Film Pandora’s Box (1928)

in Film | September 22nd, 2022

“There is no Gar­bo, there is no Diet­rich, there is only Louise Brooks.” — Hen­ri Lan­glois

On this side of the 20th cen­tu­ry, it’s hard to imag­ine a time in cin­e­ma his­to­ry when Louise Brooks was­n’t an inter­na­tion­al silent icon, as revered as Diet­rich or Gar­bo. But the actress with the unmis­tak­able black hel­met of hair near­ly end­ed her career for­got­ten. She gave up the indus­try in 1938, after refus­ing the sex­u­al advances of Colum­bia Pic­tures boss, Har­ry Cohn. “Brooks left Hol­ly­wood for good in 1940,” Geof­frey Mac­nab writes at The Inde­pen­dent, “drift­ed back to Kansas where, as a fall­en Hol­ly­wood star, she was both envied for her suc­cess and despised for her fail­ure.”

She would move to New York, work briefly as a press agent, then on the sales floor at Saks Fifth Avenue, after which, as she wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy Lulu in Hol­ly­wood, her New York friends “cut her off for­ev­er.”

Her two most leg­endary films, made in Berlin with Ger­man direc­tor G.W. Pab­st, were crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial fail­ures only screened in heav­i­ly-edit­ed ver­sions upon release. Most of her silent Hol­ly­wood “flap­per” come­dies were deemed (even by Brooks her­self) hard­ly wor­thy of preser­va­tion. It would take lat­er crit­ics and cinephiles like Ken­neth Tynan and Hen­ri Lan­glois, famed direc­tor of the Ciné­math­èque Française in 1950’s Paris, to res­ur­rect her.

By 1991, Brooks was famous enough (again) to war­rant a hit New Wave anthem by Orches­tral Maneu­vers in the Dark, who intro­duced a new, young audi­ence to Pan­do­ra’s Box in their video (top) cut togeth­er from scenes of Pab­st’s film. Pan­do­ra’s Box (see the trail­er above) com­bines two plays by Frank Wedekind in a con­tem­po­rary sto­ry about Berlin’s sex­u­al­ly free atmos­phere dur­ing the Weimar era. Brooks plays Lulu, a seduc­tress who lures men, and even­tu­al­ly her­self, to ruin. “In her Hol­ly­wood films,” writes Mac­nab, “Brooks had been used (in her own words) as a ‘pret­ty flib­ber­ti­gib­bet.’ With Pab­st as her direc­tor, she became an actress.”

As Brooks was redis­cov­ered (learn more about her in the doc­u­men­tary below) and achieved a sec­ond round of fame as an essay­ist and mem­oirist — so too were the films of Pab­st, who also direct­ed Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl. Both films had been shown in trun­cat­ed ver­sions. Pan­do­ra’s Box, espe­cial­ly, caused a stir on its release, upset­ting even Weimar cen­sors. Ger­man crit­ics were unim­pressed and audi­ences object­ed to the cast­ing of the Amer­i­can Brooks. (Its Amer­i­can release sub­sti­tut­ed a hap­py end­ing for the film’s down­beat con­clu­sion, Mac­nab notes, “one of the strangest death sequences in cin­e­ma: creepy, erot­ic and with a per­verse ten­der­ness.”)

Accord­ing to Charles Sil­ver, film cura­tor at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, “audi­ences of 1928 were not ready for the film’s bold­ness and frank­ness, even in few-holds-barred Weimar Berlin,” a city Brooks described with her usu­al can­dor:

… the café bar was lined with the high­er-priced trol­lops. The econ­o­my girls walked the street out­side. On the cor­ner stood the girls in boots, adver­tis­ing fla­gel­la­tion. Actor’s agents pimped for the ladies in lux­u­ry apart­ments in the Bavar­i­an Quar­ter. Race-track touts at the Hoppe­garten arranged orgies for groups of sports­men. The night­club Eldo­ra­do dis­played an entic­ing line of homo­sex­u­als dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of fem­i­nine or col­lar-and-tie les­bians. Col­lec­tive lust roared unashamed at the the­atre. In the revue Choco­late Kid­dies, when Josephine Bak­er appeared naked except for a gir­dle of bananas, it was pre­cise­ly as Lulu’s stage entrance was described by Wedekind: ‘They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.’

Despite the film’s ini­tial fail­ure, in Berlin and in the char­ac­ter of Lulu, Brooks had found her­self. “It was clever of Pab­st to know,” she wrote, “that I pos­sessed the tramp essence of Lulu.” A fierce­ly inde­pen­dent artist to the end, she reject­ed the opin­ions of crit­ics and audi­ences, and heaped praise upon Pab­st and “his truth­ful pic­ture of this world of plea­sure… when Berlin reject­ed its real­i­ty… and sex was the busi­ness of the town.”

You can pur­chase a copy of Pan­do­ra’s Box on DVD, cour­tesy of Cri­te­ri­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Extreme­ly Rare Tech­ni­col­or Film Footage from the 1920s Dis­cov­ered: Fea­tures Louise Brooks Danc­ing in Her First Fea­ture Film

10 Clas­sic Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Enjoy the Great­est Silent Films Ever Made in Our Col­lec­tion of 101 Free Silent Films Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Invented Psychological Horror Film & Brought Expressionism to the Screen (1920)

in Film, History | September 14th, 2022

Even if you’ve nev­er actu­al­ly watched The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen it through­out the cen­tu­ry of cin­e­ma his­to­ry since the film first came out, dur­ing which its influ­ence has man­i­fest­ed again and again: in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, Dario Argen­to’s Sus­piria, Ter­ry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and Guiller­mo del Toro’s Night­mare Alley — not to men­tion much of the fil­mo­gra­phies of auteurs like David Lynch and Tim Bur­ton. These are just some of the films ref­er­enced by Tyler Knud­sen, bet­ter known as Cin­e­maTyler, in the video essay above, “Dr. Cali­gari Did More Than Just Invent Hor­ror Movies.”

“A case can be made that Cali­gari was the first true hor­ror film,” writes Roger Ebert. In ear­li­er cin­e­mat­ic scary sto­ries, “char­ac­ters were inhab­it­ing a rec­og­niz­able world. Cali­gari cre­ates a mind­scape, a sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy. In this world, unspeak­able hor­ror becomes pos­si­ble.”

The tech­niques employed to that end have also con­vinced cer­tain his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um to call the pic­ture “the first exam­ple in cin­e­ma of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, a visu­al style in which not only the char­ac­ters but the world itself is out of joint.” Knud­sen places this style in his­tor­i­cal con­text, specif­i­cal­ly that of Ger­many’s Weimar Repub­lic, which was estab­lished after World War I and last­ed until the rise of the Nazis.

Polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble but artis­ti­cal­ly fruit­ful, the Weimar peri­od gave rise to a vari­ety of new artis­tic atti­tudes, at once enthu­si­as­tic and over­whelmed. “Where­as impres­sion­ism tries to depict the real world, but only from a first glance or impres­sion instead of focus­ing on details,” Knud­sen says, “expres­sion­ism tries to get at the artist’s inner feel­ings rather than the actu­al appear­ance of the sub­ject mat­ter.” Hence the bizarre sets of Cali­gari, whose every angle looks designed to be max­i­mal­ly uncon­vinc­ing. And yet the film is entire­ly faith­ful to its par­tic­u­lar real­i­ty: not the one occu­pied by Weimar-era Ger­mans or any­one else, but the one it con­jures up in a man­ner only motion pic­tures can. 102 years lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a haunt­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence — and one expres­sive of the sheer poten­tial of cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

What Is Ger­man Expres­sion­ism? A Crash Course on the Cin­e­mat­ic Tra­di­tion That Gave Us Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Watch­es The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari & Writes “The Cin­e­ma,” a Sem­i­nal Attempt to Under­stand the Pow­er of Movies (1926)

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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RIP Jean-Luc Godard: Watch the French New Wave Icon Explain His Contrarian Worldview Back in the 1960s

in Film, History | September 14th, 2022

For almost forty years, we’ve been los­ing the French New Wave. François Truf­faut and Jacques Demy died young, back in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; Hen­ri Colpi, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol fol­lowed in the ear­ly years of the twen­ty-first. The last decade alone saw the pass­ings of Chris Mark­er, Alain Resnais, Jacques Riv­ette, and Agnès Var­da. But not until yes­ter­day did la Nou­velle Vague’s hardi­est sur­vivor, and indeed its defin­ing fig­ure, step off this mor­tal coil at the age of 91. Jean-Luc Godard did­n’t launch the move­ment — that dis­tinc­tion belongs to Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows, from 1959 — but in 1960 his first fea­ture Breath­less made film­go­ers the world over under­stand at once that the old rules no longer applied.

Yet for all his will­ing­ness to vio­late its con­ven­tions, Godard pos­sessed a thor­ough­go­ing respect for cin­e­ma. This per­haps came from his pre-auteur­hood years he spent as a film crit­ic in Paris, writ­ing for the estimable Cahiers du ciné­ma (an insti­tu­tion to which Truf­faut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Riv­ette also con­tributed). “It made me love every­thing,” he says of his expe­ri­ence with crit­i­cism in the 1963 inter­view just above.

“It taught me not to be nar­row-mind­ed, not to ignore Renoir in favor of Bil­ly Wilder.” A con­trar­i­an from the begin­ning, the young Godard dis­dained what he saw as the for­mal­ized and intel­lec­tu­al­ized prod­ucts of the French film indus­try in favor of vis­cer­al­ly crowd-pleas­ing pic­tures made in the U.S.A.

“We Euro­peans have movies in our head, and Amer­i­cans have movies in their blood,” says Godard in the 1965 British tele­vi­sion inter­view above. “We have cen­turies and cen­turies of cul­ture behind us. We have to think about things. We can’t just do things.” To “just do things” is per­haps the prime artis­tic desire dri­ving his oeu­vre, which spans sev­en decades and includes more than 40 fea­ture films as well as many projects of less eas­i­ly cat­e­go­riz­able form. But this went with a life­long immer­sion in clas­si­cal Euro­pean cul­ture, evi­denced by a fil­mog­ra­phy dense with ref­er­ences to its works. The weight of his for­ma­tion and ambi­tions took a cer­tain toll ear­ly on: “I’m already tired,” he says in a 1960 inter­view at Cannes, where Breath­less was screen­ing. Did the per­ma­nent rev­o­lu­tion­ary of cin­e­ma sus­pect, even then, how far he still had to go?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejec­tion of Breath­less in Stride in 1960 Inter­view

How Jean-Luc Godard Lib­er­at­ed Cin­e­ma: A Video Essay on How the Great­est Rule-Break­er in Film Made His Name

Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Film­mak­ing Mas­ter­class on Insta­gram

RIP Jean-Paul Bel­mon­do: The Actor Who Went from the French New Wave to Action Super­star­dom

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Two Women in Their 90s Recall Their Teenage Years in Victorian 1890s London

in Fashion, Film, History, Video - Politics/Society | September 6th, 2022


Mud everywhere…and where there wasn’t mud, there was fog, and in between was us, enjoy­ing our­selves. — Berta Ruck

Berta Ruck and Frances ‘Effy’ Jones were teenagers in the 1890s, and while their rec­ol­lec­tions of their for­ma­tive years in mud­dy old Lon­don are hard­ly a por­trait of Jazz Age wild­ness, nei­ther are they in keep­ing with mod­ern notions of stuffy Vic­to­ri­an mores.

Inter­viewed for the BBC doc­u­men­tary series Yesterday’s Wit­ness in 1970, these nona­ge­nar­i­ans are for­mi­da­ble per­son­ages, sharp­er than prover­bial tacks, and unlike­ly to elic­it the sort of agist pity embod­ied in the lyrics of a pop­u­lar dit­ty Ruck remem­bers the Cock­neys singing in the gut­ter after the pubs had closed for the night.

“Do you think I might dare to sing [it] now?” Ruck, then 91, asks (rhetor­i­cal­ly):

She may have known bet­ter days

When she was in her prime

She may have known bet­ter days

Once upon a time…

(Raise your hand if you sus­pect those lyrics are describ­ing a washed up spin­ster in her late 20s or ear­ly 30s.)

The 94-year-old Jones reach­es back more than 7 decades to tell about her first job, when she was paid 8 shillings a week to sit in a store­front win­dow, demon­strat­ing a new machine known as a type­writer.

Some of her earn­ings went toward the pur­chase a bicy­cle, which she rode back and forth to work and overnight hol­i­days in Brighton, scan­dalous­ly clad in bloomers, or as Jones and her friends referred to them, “ratio­nal dress”.

Ruck, pegged by her head­mistress as an “indo­lent and feck­less girl”, went on to study at the Slade School of Art, before achiev­ing promi­nence as a best­selling romance nov­el­ist, whose 90 some titles include His Offi­cial Fiancée, Miss Million’s Maid and In Anoth­er Girl’s Shoes.

We do hope at least one of these fea­tures a hero­ine resent­ful­ly brush­ing a skirt mud­died up to the knees by pass­ing han­som cabs, an impo­si­tion Ruck refus­es to sweet­en with the nos­tal­gia.

As the British Film Institute’s Patrick Rus­sell writes in 100 British Doc­u­men­taries, the Yesterday’s Wit­ness series, and Jones and Ruck’s episode, in par­tic­u­lar, pop­u­lar­ized the oral his­to­ry approach to doc­u­men­tary, in which the direc­tor-inter­view­er is an invis­i­ble pres­ence, cre­at­ing the impres­sion that the sub­ject is speak­ing direct­ly to the audi­ence, unprompt­ed:

The series’ mak­ers suc­cess­ful­ly resist­ed any temp­ta­tions to patron­ize or edi­to­ri­al­ize, and aimed at sym­pa­thet­ic curios­i­ty rather than nos­tal­gia. The two women tell their sto­ries flu­ent­ly, humor­ous­ly, intel­li­gent­ly — offer­ing con­sid­ered ret­ro­spec­tive com­ment on their generation’s assump­tions, nei­ther sim­ply accept­ing nor reject­ing them…Unlike text­books, and oth­er types of doc­u­men­tary, films like Two Vic­to­ri­an Girls gave the youth access to the mod­ern past as pri­vate­ly expe­ri­enced. 

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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