Media reviews/film commentary/interviews

[pabs]

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[greennui]

That Slant list is really, really interesting! Thanks greennui.

It bears posting out in full, so here it is:

Here's the letterboxd version:

https://letterboxd.com/ephender/list/sl ... s-of-2020/

[...]

Man, I don't know how I'm going to amuse myself at the end of every year if I can't bitch about how US-centric and shallow the annual best of lists are. That Slant one is actually pretty interesting and at least avoids the usual dimwitted pitfalls of the type.

I'm in the middle of I Was Home but... and it's well worth seeing, referencing Ozu, channeling a bit of Roy Andersson, and yet still something of its own in its more bitter quality. Looks like I'll have a lot more to watch, if I ever manage to get around to more 2020 stuff.

[therouxxx]

list of Sight & Sound ballots - The best films of 2020

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/ ... -all-votes

[greennui]

Cahiers du Cinéma’s top 10 of 2020:

City Hall (Frederick Wiseman)
The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo)
Uncut Gems (Ben Safdie and Joshua Safdie)
Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu)
The Things We Say, the Things We Do (Emmanuel Mouret)
Hotel by the River (Hong Sang-soo)
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu Xiaogang)
The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel)
Enormous (Sophie Letourneur)
The August Virgin (Jonás Trueba)

[Holdrüholoheuho]

The Best Experimental Moving Image Works of 2020
https://ultradogme.com/2020/12/09/best- ... d43qHUpEXc

[john ryan]

am i the only one who thought da 5 bloods was terrible

I wouldn't call it terrible, but I just don't see what people love about it.

[pabs]

From: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/202 ... french-sun

[Holymanm]

...not a disturbing headline and blurb and picture at all wasn't the internet's all up in arms about that movie with the little girls a year or so ago?

[MrCarmady]

really, that disturbs you? you must have a low threshold for what's disturbing...
that said, some of the characters do over-sexualise pauline in a weird way, luckily rohmer doesn't overstep that boundary but bits of the film certainly haven't aged amazingly well

[---]

What is remotely disturbing about that picture. Even remotely. It's two teenagers in swimsuits talking

[---]

Also Pauline is good, that's the Rohmer I employed to convert flabrezu, now he is a huge Rohmer fan

[Holymanm]

[Foreign Film Title]: Sex . . . Under the Hot French Sun

[Picture of 15-year-old in a bikini]



...am I literally a cantankerous old coot for thinking this looks exactly like the headline+blurb+picture they would use for a Brigitte Bardot film review, but with a 15-year-old here instead? Err

[---]

Well, I don't think so no

They look fairly sweet and almost nervous in the picture

15 year olds have sex. I mean, I didn't. But Kool Kidz do. Look at that pair. Style!

I don't even agree with MrC that the film has aged poorly at all. If anything the complete opposite. Blonde bro would've had Elliott Rogers manuscript in his satchel if this film were made in 2021

Rohmer depicts all the adults in the film as selfish, ignorant, unworldly and obnoxious, in a time when their sentiments were (more than now) widely held by actual adults...not sure what there is to age poorly tbh

[MrCarmady]

Oh I totally agree that Rohmer pulls no punches when depicting the adults, but Arielle Dombasle's character suggesting to the annoying guy that he should go sleep with her 15-year-old cousin, whether it was a widely held sentiment at the time or not (I really doubt it but hey, clearly the French, especially the French 40 years ago, view the sexuality of adolescent women differently from me), just took me out of the film on a recent re-watch. It's still good stuff, if not top notch Rohmer.

[pabs]

From: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the- ... eview-2020

[rischka]

what about interviews???

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/bud ... ood-rebel/

[greennui]

Budd Boetticher (pronounced “bettiker”)

I've def been pronouncing it the way it's spelled.

[Holymanm]

you boettcher ass it's pronounced like that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLuntJo2KyQ

[greennui]

https://twitter.com/THR/status/1359870542665416705

[pabs]

The reclusive Shelley Duvall sat down for a conversation with THR about her legacy and the trauma of making 'The Shining.'

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/featu ... ce=twitter

[pabs]

I liked this little film when I saw it last year. It's about to be released in American theatres, so I hope some of you check it out.






from: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-f ... s-theatres

[pabs]

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From: The New Yorker, April 12, 2021

[Lencho of the Apes]

the-male-gaze-in-the-arab-cinema-youssef-chahine-between-voyeuristic-pleasure-and-male-exhibitionism

https://cinemafemme.com/2020/07/17/the- ... uXUp5ETJl0

[...]

Since it's in front of the paywall for the day, here's an article on Kafka and the movies from TLS:

Kafka Goes to the Movies
by Hanns Zischler, translated by Susan Gillespie.
Chicago, 143 pp., £21, January 2003, 0 226 98671 3
His name was Franz Kafka, and he quite often went to the movies. Some such statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up the hill. According to Max Brod, his lifelong friend and first editor and biographer, Kafka loved the movies; at times, Brod reported, he would talk about little else. For the most part, however, Kafka abstained from written commentary on the cinema. To be sure, there are scattered remarks in diaries and letters from the period 1908-13. But that’s about it. The challenge, for Hanns Zischler, is how to say no more than that Kafka quite often went to the movies, and make it worth saying.

Zischler seems to have decided to pin his hopes on biography. That Kafka quite often went to the movies is of interest if movie-going can be shown to have extended significantly the repertoire of behaviour and reflection available to a young would-be author in Prague in the years before the First World War. It might, for example, alter our sense of the state of the family romance to know that Kafka’s youngest sister, Ottla, was, as Zischler puts it, his ‘real cinematic companion and secret “movie queen”’. But Zischler’s primary hypothesis is that Kafka’s cinema-going helped to maintain the intricate system of displacements and mediations which was his courtship of Felice Bauer.

Kafka first met Bauer, who worked for a Berlin manufacturer of dictaphones, at Max Brod’s on 13 August 1912. His first impressions, recorded a week later, were nothing if not severe. ‘Bony, empty face, which wore its emptiness openly ... Almost broken nose. Blonde, rather stiff, unalluring hair, strong chin.’ Kafka’s writerliness is evident, here, both in the unflinching adherence to physical fact, and in the recognition that even the most physical of facts cannot escape meaning (the empty face that intends its emptiness), and may contain or hint at a virtual existence (the unscathed nose which bears witness to the possibility of accident or assault). But the act of severity which announces writerliness is also its dissolution. Its double edge folds neatly up into the choice of a mate. ‘While I was sitting down, I saw her at close quarters for the first time, when I sat, I had already reached an unshakeable judgment’ (‘ein unerschütterliches Urteil’).

If the judgment itself remained unshakeable, at least for a while, everything around it immediately began to shake from the recoil. Productively, at first. An entry for 23 September 1912 records the completion the previous night of a story entitled ‘The Judgment’; and the author’s ‘trembling entrance’ (‘zitternde Eintreten’) into his sisters’ room the next morning to read it to them. Literature’s double edge keeps it in a tremble, forever awaiting confirmation (however fast the author might have sat down at his desk the evening before). At this point, Kafka evidently hoped that his new commitment to Felice would strengthen his old commitment to literature; that both would prove unshakeable, and the cause of much shaking. He trembles with ‘intolerable excitement’ while expecting letters from Felice, and then with joy once they have arrived. A long letter makes him wonder what he has done to deserve such bounty. ‘There is no choice but to tremble and read it over and over again.’ The very thought of communication by phone – of waiting to be put through, of eventually being summoned and rushing ‘all of a tremble’ (‘dass alles zittert’) to the apparatus – is enough to rule out such immediacy.

Agitation has a tendency to overspread its source. Kafka began to worry that Felice herself might recoil from so much recoiling: ‘it is objectionable to keep laying myself bare before you without knowing whether or not you tremble inside from it in horror, impatience or boredom.’ His desperate pleas for calm (‘das Gefühl der Ruhe’) make it clear that he had lost faith in the proposed reconciliation of literature with marriage. The correspondence with Felice had begun at the end of September 1912. Two months later, he turned down an invitation to spend Christmas with her in Berlin. The first thing to get shaken in this relationship, it seems, was one party’s desire to see the other again. The ‘madness of so many letters’ (more than 500, over a period of five years) became the relationship.

A reference to cinema in a letter written at the end of September 1912 beautifully renders the physical and moral sensation of being moved, not to the very depths, but pervasively, by a force which suffuses rather than penetrates because it rests at a certain distance. ‘Only I am trembling all over [‘nur zittere ich überall’], the way the light made the screen tremble [‘zum Zittern brachte’] in the earliest days of cinematography, if you remember that.’ In those (already mythical) earliest days of cinematography, the spectacle on offer was as much that of the machine itself as of the images projected. Advertisements for the first shows invariably depict a shaft of light flung over darkened heads at a distant screen, suffusing it with image, with visibility. The force Kafka had in mind, in this instance, was that represented by his commitment both to literature and to Felice. It is as though he wanted to draw the vocabulary of creative astonishment across from writing, where it had long been active, into courtship. There was, however, a problem with this euphoria. The time it took was a good deal longer than the time between sitting and being seated. Kafka did not send the note written in September 1912 until May 1913, and then only as an enclosure. The note had to be reclassified as a found object before he could bring himself to despatch it. ‘Today I came across this old letter of mine, from happier, unhappier days. What do you think of it? Answer as you would have answered then.’

Zischler quotes the remark about the screen without comment. He is more forthcoming on the subject of the ‘random example’ that Kafka flourished in a letter of 4/5 March 1913 to illustrate the effect his depression had on his ‘judgment of people and of the world in general’. The example turns on a difference between cinema and theatre. In 1910, in Berlin, Kafka had seen Albert Bassermann as Hamlet. He was so gripped by the performance, he told Brod, that he almost became for its duration another person. Now, in March 1913, he tells Felice that he has been similarly moved by the sight of Bassermann’s face on a poster advertising a film. ‘Well, I said to myself, B. has lent himself, at any rate in this film, to something unworthy of him. Nevertheless, he has lived through the film, carried the excitements of the plot in his heart from beginning to end, and whatever a man of such calibre has experienced is unconditionally lovable.’

Cinema, however, does not lend itself, as the Bassermann Hamlet had done, to the mutual confirmation, face to face, of performer and audience. In the cinema, unlike the theatre, performer and audience never coincide; for one party to be present, the other must be absent. The medium’s founding principle was a missed encounter. So Kafka has another thought about Bassermann:

This is how I imagine the situation: the satisfaction of acting is over; the film is made; B. himself can no longer influence it in any way; he need not even realise that he had allowed himself to be taken advantage of, and yet, when watching himself in the film, he may become aware of the utter futility of exerting all his considerable powers and – I am not exaggerating my sense of compassion – he grows older, weaker, gets pushed aside in his armchair and vanishes somewhere into the mists of time.

Kafka quickly dismisses the thought as the product of his own sense of futility. ‘Even after the completion of the film Bassermann goes home as Bassermann, and no one else.’ Dismissal, however, scarcely diminishes its force. It is a thought about the difference between cinema and theatre, and a thought about the way relationships sometimes go wrong. Kafka became a virtuoso of the missed encounter, and its most persevering and most incisive literary exponent. Film may have been in some sense too close to the bone.

On 6 November 1913, Kafka told Felice that he thought they should meet soon, even though a meeting would accomplish little. He enclosed in the letter a note written while on holiday at Desenzano, on Lake Garda, in September: ‘I don’t keep a diary at all, I wouldn’t know what for; nothing happens to me to stir my inmost self. This applies even if I weep, as I did yesterday in a cinematographic theatre in Verona. I am capable of enjoying human relationships, but not of experiencing them.’ Again, the note cannot be sent until it has been reclassified as a found object. Its function, like that of the Bassermann example, is to explore the relationship between performer and audience. In cinema, the viewer is to a compelling degree both present at, and absent from, the scene which stirs her or his ‘inmost self’. A film can offer coexistence without encounter. To that extent, it resembles a letter. ‘Presence is irrefutable,’ Kafka once told Felice, in anticipation of a meeting. Letters, he had already acknowledged, ‘can’t create a presence’: only a mixture of presence and absence which ‘becomes unbearable’. By the time he got round to posting the note about Verona, he had met Grete Bloch, Felice’s emissary to Prague. Soon he was to begin the ‘madness of so many letters’ with her, too. The notes about cinema in the letters to Felice are intriguing on account of their content, and of their peculiar status: as interruption, random example, or found object. They are one of the ways Kafka found to evade Felice in approaching her.

Zischler’s method throughout Kafka Goes to the Movies is to develop his argument by means of extensive quotation both from the diaries and letters and from a wide range of additional material, some of it fascinating. He has shown remarkable enterprise and tenacity in tracking down prints of the films Kafka saw, or, where these are no longer extant, written descriptions. The illustrations he has assembled are in themselves something to treasure. Enthusiasts for Kafka and for early cinema alike will remain in his debt. He has little to offer, however, by way of sustained analysis.

He is at his most effective when the material is relatively abundant, and more or less self-explanatory. He provides a gripping account of the last bachelor journey Kafka and Brod took together, through Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, in the summer of 1911 (Brod became engaged to Else Taussig the following year). The material, in this case, is abundant: two journals, essays by Brod and the draft of a collaborative novel to be called Richard and Samuel. Zischler shows that cinema had become, for these two young men at least, an important part of what it meant to experience the wider world. Experiencing the wider world involved the ambiguous pursuit of a young woman they had met on a train. Brod’s insistence that during a stopover in Munich the young woman should accompany them on a tour of the city reminded Kafka of a recent Danish film, The White Slave Girl, in which, ‘just outside the railway station, in the dark, the innocent heroine is hustled into an automobile by strange men and taken away.’ Zischler has seen The White Slave Girl, and is able to report that Kafka misremembered the scene.

That Kafka wept at the movies does not mean, of course, that he took them seriously. Zischler believes that he did not. In early 1911, on business in the northern Bohemian cities of Friedland and Reichenberg, Kafka derived some entertainment from an apparatus known as the Kaiser Panorama. In the Panorama, one got to see photographs of scenes of varying exoticism through stereoscopic glasses. ‘The scenes more alive than in the cinematograph,’ he noted in his journal, ‘because they allow the eye the stillness of reality. The cinematograph lends the observed objects the agitation of their movement, the stillness of the gaze seems more important.’ Kafka later expanded on this objection to Gustav Janouch. ‘The cinema,’ he told Janouch, ‘disturbs perception [‘das Schauen’]. The rapidity of movements and the rapid change of images compels the viewer to engage in a constant surfeit of viewing [‘Überschauen’].’ Zischler regards the thoughts provoked by Kafka’s experience in the Kaiser Panorama as an ‘Archimedean point’ in his ‘rejection of cinematography’.

They weren’t, evidently, Archimedean enough to stop him going to the movies. It could be that what we have in the diaries is not a rejection of cinema, but the establishment of a new and idiosyncratic method of viewing. Kafka appears to have viewed film against rather than with the plot. Concentration on a particular scene or effect enabled him to avoid surfeit, to reinstate the stillness of the gaze. A white horse and puffs of smoke were what he remembered from a pulsating celebration of the life and glorious death of the German nationalist hero Theodor Körner. Similarly, his account of Slaves of Gold, a Gaumont western featuring a millionaire on a mission, remains oblivious to plot, but seeks out gesture. ‘Mustn’t forget him. The calmness, the slow movement, conscious of its goal, a faster step when necessary, a shrug of the shoulder. Rich, spoiled, lulled to sleep, but how he springs up like a servant and searches the room into which he was locked in the forest tavern.’

All this matters, or might matter, because cinema as a medium was in transition at the time when Kafka attended most assiduously, in the years between 1908 and 1913. The aim of early films such as the ‘actualities’ produced by the Lumière brothers from 1895 was to show rather than to tell. These actualities comprised the totality of whatever took place in front of a camera which did not move, in the fifty seconds or so before the film ran out. Visibility itself was the point, regardless of the narrative or dramatic interest of that which had been made visible. Writing to his family from Rome in September 1907, Freud reported himself ‘spellbound’ by the open-air projection of films on the Piazza Colonna. He didn’t say what the films were about, and his indifference to their content has usually been understood as proof that as late as 1907 the point of cinema still lay in the exhibition of movement.

Kafka did want to know what films were about. On 13 March 1913, he could not get started on a letter to Felice because he had to debrief Ottla. ‘My sister reported on the showing or rather I asked her about it, for, even if I myself seldom go to the cintematograph theatre, nevertheless I usually know almost all the weekly programmes of the cinematographs by heart.’ Cinema was by that time well advanced in the process of remaking itself as a narrative art: the precondition, it was felt, for its emergence as a mass medium. Between 1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith made around 450 films for Biograph, patiently refining the techniques which were to sustain the first American epics, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). In the Biograph films, one can already see the faint outline of the classical Hollywood continuity system. At first, the term ‘continuity’ designated any kind of effort to smooth the flow of the narrative. It came to refer to a specific set of guidelines for cutting shots together, whether by scene dissection or by montage. The years between 1908 and 1913 were also immensely productive for European (though not for British) cinema; the films Kafka saw were French, German, Italian and Danish. Some film historians argue that prewar European cinema, with its reliance on long takes and staging in depth, should be understood as an alternative to Hollywood’s increasingly rapid-fire cut-and-paste. It would be nice to think that one of the films Kafka saw on 20 November 1913 was, as Zischler proposes, Léonce Perret’s L’Enfant de Paris (1913), which made intricate use of staging in depth; unfortunately, the evidence he himself has supplied (a poster advertising the programme, a substantial review) demonstrates that the film shown was not in fact L’Enfant de Paris, but a subsequent vehicle for its child-star, Suzanne Privat. What one can say is that films like L’Enfant de Paris sought to incorporate the stillness of the gaze into narrative art, rather than to dismember and reconfigure it.

If Zischler’s interest in the history of cinema is minimal, it nonetheless overshadows his interest in the history of literature. He has little but contempt for those, beginning with Max Brod, who have regarded Kafka’s fiction as in some measure ‘cinematic’. Comparison with particular films, or styles of film-making, is indeed tempting. Karl Rossman, in The Man who Disappeared, escaping from the police, skids on one leg round a corner in a way that seems thoroughly Chaplinesque, and could just conceivably have been meant as such. Kafka had six chapters of the novel in draft by December 1912, and resumed work on it in autumn 1914; Chaplin’s tramp took shape in Kid Auto Races at Venice, a Keystone comedy released on 7 February 1914. The Man who Disappeared would bear comparison, as a dream of America, with the wildly inventive one and two-reelers Chaplin shot during and immediately after the war (before he, too, conceded that film had become a narrative art). But Kafka, as Zischler is correct to insist, did not want to write like the movies.

All this needs to be kept in proportion. When a Yiddish theatrical group from the Ukraine visited Prague in 1910 and 1911, Kafka was often in the audience; indeed, he made friends, much to his father’s irritation, with one of the actors, Yitzhak Löwy. Accounts of the performances the group gave and synopses of the plays performed account for more than 100 pages in the diaries. His name was Franz Kafka, and he often went to the theatre (and quite often, for that matter, to concerts, exhibitions, lectures). The visual art which looms largest both in the correspondence with Felice and in The Man who Disappeared is photography, not cinema. Zischler has moved his rock more than a few feet up the hill. But it remains a pretty small rock.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ha, i see there is a related film called "Kafka Goes to the Movies" (Hanns Zischler, 2002)
https://letterboxd.com/film/kafka-va-au-cinema/

and i see it is included in a giant 4 DVD set that contains...

Jízda Prahou otevřenou tramvají (A Tram Ride through Prague) - Czech 1908 - Directed, written, photographed and produced by: Jan Kříenecký - Restored by: Národní Filmový Archiv, Prague

Peschiera / Lago Maggiore e lago di Como / Liguria / Il corse de Mirafiori (Italian travelogues) - Italy 1907-1913 - Produced by: Società Anonima Ambrosio, Torino / Società italiana Cines, Rome - Restored by: La cineteca del Friuli, Gemona

Primo Circuito Aereo Internazionale di Aeroplane in Brescia (First International Competition for Airplanes in Brescia) - Italy 1909 - Produced by: Manifatture Cinematografiche Adolfo Croce, Milano - Restored by: Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna

Den hvide slavehandels sidste offer (The White Slave Girl) - Denmark 1911 - Directed by: August Blom Written by: Peter Christensen - Cinematography by: Axel Graatkjær - Cast: Clara Wieth, Lauritz Olsen, Thora Meincke, Otto Lagoni, Frederik Jacobsen, Peter Nielsen - Produced by: Nordisk Film, Kopenhagen - Restored by: Det Danske Filminstut, Kopenhagen / Filmmuseum München

Nick Winter et le vol de la joconde (Nick Winter and the Theft of the Mona Lisa) - France 1911 - Directed by: Paul Garbagni - Cast: Georges Vinter - Produced by: Pathé Frères, Paris -Restored by: Gaumont Pathé archives, Paris

Der Andere (The Other) - Germany 1912 - Directed by: Max Mack - Written by: Paul Lind - Kamera: Hermann Böttger - Cast: Albert Bassermann, Emmerich Hanus, Nelly Ridou, Hanni Weisse, Léon Resemann, Otto Collot - Produced by: Vitascope GmbH, Berlin - Restored by: Filmmuseum München

Theodor Körner - Germany 1912 - Directed and written by: Gerhard Dammann, Franz Porten - Photographed by: Werner Brandes - Cast: Friedrich Feher, Hermann Seldeneck, Thea Sandten - Produced by: Deutsche Mutoskop- and Biograph GmbH, Berlin - Restored by: Filmmuseum München

La broyeuse de coeurs (The Heart Breaker) - France 1913 - Directed and written by: Camille de Morlhon - Cast: Léontine Massart, Pierre Magnier, Camille Licenay, Jeanne Brindeau - Produced by: Films Valetta, Paris - Restored by: La Cinémathèque Française, Paris

Prazdnovanie 300-letija Doma Romanovych (Celebrating 300 Years of the Romanov Dynasty) - Russia 1913 - Produced by: Pathé Frères, Moscow - Restored by: Russian States Archives for film and photo documents, Krasnogorsk

Daddy-Long-Legs - USA 1919 - Directed by: Marshall A. Neilan - Written by: Agnes Johnson, based on the novel by Jean Webster - Kamera: Charles Rosher - Cast: Mary Pickford, Milla Davenport, Percy Haswell, Fay Lemport, Mahlon Hamilton, Lillian Langdon, Marshall Neilan - Produced by: Mary Pickford Company, Los Angeles - Restored by: The Library of Congress, Culpepper / Filmmuseum München

Shiwat Zion (Return to Zion) - Palestine 1921 - Directed, written, photographed and produced by: Ya'acov Ben-Dov - Restored by: Národní Filmový Archiv, Prague

Kafka va au cinéma (Kafka geht ins Kino) - France 2002 - Directed and written by: Hanns Zischler - Cinematography by: Hanns Zischler, Ute Adamczewski, Miriam Fassbender - Produced by: Movimento Production, Paris

[pabs]

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2021, Section ST, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘La Piscine’ Floats Into the Fall.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/styl ... forum.html

[pabs]

On October 2nd, Wes Anderson’s new movie, “The French Dispatch,” will make its American début at the fifty-ninth New York Film Festival. It’s an anthology film, portraying the goings on at a fictional weekly magazine that looks an awful lot like—and was, in fact, inspired by—The New Yorker. The staff of the fictional weekly, and the stories it publishes—four of which are dramatized in the film—are also inspired by The New Yorker. To portray these characters, American expatriates in a made-up French city, Ennui-sur-Blasé, Anderson has drawn from his regular posse—Bill Murray (who plays a vinegary character based on The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross), Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Frances McDormand—and on some first-timers, including Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Benicio del Toro, and Jeffrey Wright. Anderson is something of a New Yorker nut, having discovered the magazine in his high-school library, in Texas, and later collecting hundreds of bound copies and gaining a deep familiarity with many of its writers. In conjunction with the film’s release, the director—a seven-time Oscar nominee, for movies including “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Moonrise Kingdom”—has published “An Editor’s Burial,” an anthology of writings that inspired the movie, many originally published in The New Yorker. For the book’s introduction, he spoke to me about his longtime relationship with The New Yorker and how it influenced the new film. “The French Dispatch” will open to the general public on October 22nd.

Your movie “The French Dispatch” is a series of stories that are meant to be the articles in one issue of a magazine published by an American in France. When you were dreaming up the film, did you start with the character of Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor, or did you start with the stories?

I read an interview with Tom Stoppard once where he said he began to realize—as people asked him over the years where the idea for one play or another came from—that it seems to have always been two different ideas for two different plays that he sort of smooshed together. It’s never one idea. It’s two. “The French Dispatch” might be three.

The first idea: I wanted to do an anthology movie. Just in general, an omnibus-type collection, without any specific stories in mind. (The two I love maybe the most: “The Gold of Naples,” by De Sica, and “Le Plaisir,” by Max Ophüls.)

The second idea: I always wanted to make a movie about The New Yorker. The French magazine in the film obviously is not The New Yorker—but it was, I think, totally inspired by it. When I was in eleventh grade, my homeroom was in the school library, and I sat in a chair where I had my back to everybody else, and I faced a wooden rack of what they labelled “periodicals.” One had drawings on the cover. That was unusual. I think the first story I read was by Ved Mehta, a “Letter from [New] Delhi.” I thought, I have no idea what this is, but I’m interested. But what I was most interested in were the short stories, because back then I thought that was what I wanted to do—fiction. Write stories and novels and so on. When I went to the University of Texas in Austin, I used to look at old bound volumes of The New Yorker in the library, because you could find things like a J. D. Salinger story that had never been collected. Then I somehow managed to find out that U.C. Berkeley was getting rid of a set, forty years of bound New Yorkers, and I bought them for six hundred dollars. I would also have my own new subscription copies bound (which is actually not a good way to preserve them). When the magazine put the whole archive online, I stopped paying to bind mine. But I still keep them. I have almost every issue, starting in the nineteen-forties. Later, I found myself reading various writers’ accounts of life at The New Yorker—Brendan Gill, James Thurber, Ben Yagoda—and I got caught up in the whole aura of the thing. I also met Lillian Ross (with you), who, as we know, wrote about Truffaut and Hemingway and Chaplin for the magazine and was very close to Salinger, and so on and so forth.

The third idea: a French movie. I want to do one of those. An anthology, The New Yorker, and French. Three very broad notions. I think it sort of turned into a movie about what my friend and co-writer Hugo Guinness calls reverse emigration. He thinks Americans who go to Europe are reverse-emigrating.

When I saw the movie, I told you how much Lillian Ross, who died a few years ago, would have liked it. You said that Lillian’s first reaction would have been to demand, “Why France?”

Well, I’ve had an apartment in Paris for I don’t know how many years. I’ve reverse-emigrated. And, in Paris, anytime I walk down a street I don’t know well, it’s like going to the movies. It’s just entertaining. There’s also a sort of isolation living abroad, which can be good, or it can be bad. It can be lonely, certainly. But you’re also always on a kind of adventure, which can be inspiring.

Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founding editor, was famous for saying that the history of New York is always written by out-of-towners. When you’re out of your element, or in another country, you have a different perspective. It’s as if a pilot light is always on.

Yes! The pilot light is always on.

In a foreign country, even just going into a hardware store can be like going to a museum.

Buying a light bulb.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor played by Bill Murray, gathers the best writers of his generation to staff his magazine, in France. They’re all expatriates, like you. In this book, you’ve gathered the best New Yorker writers, many of whom lived as expatriates in Paris. There is a line in the movie: “He received an editor’s burial,” and several of the pieces in this book are obituaries of Harold Ross.

Howitzer is based on Harold Ross, with a little bit of William Shawn, the magazine’s second editor, thrown in. Although they don’t really go together particularly. Ross had a great feeling for writers. It isn’t exactly respect. He values them, but he also thinks they’re lunatic children who have to be sort of manipulated or coddled, whereas Shawn seems to have been the most gentle, respectful, encouraging master you could ever wish to have. We tried to mix in some of that.

Ross was from Colorado and Shawn came from the Midwest; Howitzer is from Liberty, Kansas, right in the middle of America. He moves to France to find himself, in a way, and he ends up creating a magazine that brings the world to Kansas.

Originally, we were calling the editor character Liebling, not Howitzer, because the face I always pictured was A. J. Liebling’s. We tried to make Bill Murray sort of look like him, I think. Remember, he says he tricked his father into paying for his early sojourn in Paris by telling him he was thinking of marrying a good woman who was ten years older than he, although “Mother might think she is a bit fast.”

There are lots of similarities between your Howitzer and Ross. Howitzer has a sign in his office that says “No crying.” Ross made sure that there was no humming or singing or whistling in the office.

They share a general grumpiness. What Thurber called Ross’s “God, how I pity me!” moods.

But you see a little bit of Shawn in Howitzer, as you mentioned. Shawn was formal and decorous, in contrast to Ross’s bluster. In the movie, when Howitzer tells the writer Herbsaint Sazerac, whom Owen Wilson plays, that his article is “almost too seedy this time for decent people,” that’s very Shawn.

I think that might be Ross, too! He was a prude, they say. For someone who could be extremely vulgar.

In Thurber’s book “The Years with Ross,” which is excerpted in “An Editor’s Burial,” there’s a funny part where Ross complains about almost accidentally publishing the phrase “falling off the roof,” a coded reference to menstruation. I’d never heard that euphemism! I had to look it up.

“We can’t have that in the magazine.”

Thurber also compared him to “a sleepless, apprehensive sea captain pacing the bridge, expecting any minute to run aground, collide with something nameless in a sudden fog.” Publishing a collection of stories as a companion piece to a movie feels like a literary version of a soundtrack. You can read “An Editor’s Burial” the way you might read E. M. Forster before taking a trip to Florence. What made you decide to put this together?

Two reasons. One: our movie draws on the work and lives of specific writers. Even though it’s not an adaptation, the inspirations are specific and crucial to it. So I wanted a way to say, “Here’s where it comes from.” I want to announce what it is. This book is almost a great big footnote.

Two: it’s an excuse to do a book that I thought would be really entertaining. These are writers I love and pieces I love. A person who is interested in the movie can read Mavis Gallant’s article about the student protests of 1968 in here and discover there’s much more in it than in the movie. There’s a depth, in part because it’s much longer. It’s different, of course. Movies have their own thing. Frances McDormand’s character, Krementz, comes from Mavis Gallant, but Lillian Ross also gets mixed into that character, too—and, I think, a bit of Frances herself. I once heard her say to a very snooty French waiter, “Kindly leave me my dignity.”

I remember reading Pauline Kael on John Huston’s movie of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” She said Joyce’s story is a perfect masterpiece, but so is the movie. It has strengths that the story can’t have, simply because: actors. Great actors. There they are. Plus, they sing!

Wouldn’t it be cool if every movie came with a suggested reading list?

There are so many things we’re borrowing from. It’s nice to be able to introduce people to some of them.

“The French Dispatch” is full of references to classic French cinema. There are lots of schoolboys in capes skittering around, like the ones in Truffaut and Jean Vigo movies.

Yes! We wanted the movie to be full of all of the things we’ve loved in French movies. France, more or less, is where the cinema starts. Other than America, the country whose movies have meant the most to me is France. There are so many directors and so many stars and so many styles of French cinema. We sort of steal from Godard, Vigo, Truffaut, Tati, Clouzot, Duvivier, Jacques Becker. French noir movies, like “Le Trou” and “Grisbi” and “The Murderer Lives at Number 21.” We were stealing things very openly, so you really can kind of pinpoint something and find out exactly where it came from.

When is the movie set? Some of it is 1965.

I love Mavis Gallant’s piece about the events of May, 1968, her journal. I knew that at least part of the movie had to take place around that time. I’m not entirely sure when the other parts happen! The magazine went from 1925 to 1975, so it is all during those fifty years, anyway.

I see. I’d wondered if you have a particular affinity for the mid-sixties. You were born in 1969. There’s a psychological theory that says what we tend to be most nostalgic for is a period in time that is several years before our own birth—when our parents’ romance might have been at its peak. The technical term for the phenomenon is “cascading reminiscence bump.”

I like that! I came across a good jargon-type phrase after we had made the movie. We do this thing where sometimes we have one person speak French, with subtitles, and the other person answers in English. I kept wondering, “Is this going to work?” Of course, we do it in real life all the time. The term I came across is “non-accommodating bilingualism”: when people speak to one another but don’t switch to the other person’s language. They stay in their own language, but they understand. They’re just completely non-accommodating.

The Mavis Gallant story feels like the heart of the movie. Francine Prose, the novelist, is a big Gallant fan. She has described her as “at once scathing and endlessly tolerant and forgiving.”

There’s nobody to lump her in with. Writing about May, 1968, she has a totally independent point of view. It’s a foreigner’s perspective, but she’s very clear-sighted about all of it. Clarity and empathy. She went out every day, alone, in the middle of the chaos.

Gallant was Canadian, which I think gave her a kind of double remove from America. Canadians in the United States have the pilot light, too. I think it’s why there are so many comedians from Canada. They have an outsider’s take. The great fiction writers from the American South also have it.

She lived to be ninety-one. In Paris. She lived in my neighborhood, less than a block away from our apartment, but I never met her. She died five years ago. I do feel like I almost knew her. I just missed her. It would have been very natural to me (at least in my imagination) to say, “We have dinner with Mavis on Thursday.” So forceful and formidable a personality, and a very engaging person.

This book includes a beautiful piece by Janet Flanner, about Edith Wharton living in Europe. She writes about how Wharton kept “repeatedly redomiciling herself.” Is there a trace of Flanner in Krementz?

Yes, there is some Janet Flanner in there. Flanner wrote so many pieces, sometimes topical in the most miniature ways. The smallest things happening in Paris in any given week. She wrote about May, 1968, too. Her piece on it is good, and not so different from Mavis Gallant’s, but Flanner wasn’t standing out there with the kids in the streets so much. She was seventy-six then, and maybe a bit less sympathetic to the young people.

Gallant is also sympathetic to their poor, worried parents. But there’s a toughness to her as well. You can tell that the Krementz character in the movie has sacrificed a lot in order to pursue her writing life. Her emotions only seem to surface as a result of tear gas.

I have the sense that Gallant was one of those people who could be quite prickly. From what I’ve read about her, she seems like she was a wonderful person to have dinner with, unless somebody said something stupid or ungenerous, in which case things might turn dark. I think she might have been someone who, in certain situations, could not stop herself from eviscerating a person who had offended her principles. She was not going to stand for nonsense.

You mention Lillian Ross, too.

Yes, as you know, Lillian had a way of poking right through something, needling, with a deceptively curious look on her face. I first met her when Anjelica Huston brought her to the set of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” You were there with her.

Yes, at that glass house designed by Paul Rudolph, in the East Fifties. Ben Stiller’s character lived there in the movie.

I said to Anjelica, “Lillian Ross is going to come visit? That’s incredible.” She said, “Yes. Be careful.” Anjelica has so much family history with Lillian, starting, obviously, when she wrote “Picture.” Anjelica and Lillian were great friends.

In your movie, the showdown between Krementz and Juliet, one of the revolutionary teen-agers, is intense.

Krementz scolds the kids, but she admires them. There are lines in Frances’s dialogue, as Krementz, that are taken directly from the Gallant piece: the “touching narcissism of the young.” There are some non sequiturs in the script, some things totally unrelated to the action, that I put in only because I wanted to use some of Mavis Gallant’s actual sentences. Timothée Chalamet’s character, the teen revolutionary, says, at one point, “I’ve never read my mother’s books.” In Gallant’s piece, she says [something similar to] that about the daughter of her friend. Also: “I wonder if she knows how brave her father was in the last war.” [Gallant writes, “I suddenly wonder if . . . she knows that her father was really quite remarkable in the last war.”] Just to call it “the last war”—our most recent world war—maybe we wouldn’t say it that way now. I mean, is there another one coming? We don’t know.

In the movie, the student protest begins because the boys want to be allowed into the girls’ dormitories. During the screening, I remember thinking, Oh, that’s such a Wes Anderson version of what would spark a student uprising! Then, when I read up on the history of the conflict, I saw that it actually was the original issue.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in Nanterre. That was one of his demands. Maybe the larger point was “We don’t want to be treated like children,” but literally calling for the right of free access to the girls’ dormitory for all male students? The sentence sounded so funny to me. And then the revolutionary spirit spreads through every part of French society and ends up having nothing to do with girls’ dormitories. By the end, no one can even say what the protests are about anymore. That’s what Mavis Gallant captures so well, that people can’t quite fully process what’s happening and why.

It’s a world turned upside down. There are workers on strike, professors who want a better deal, people angry about the Vietnam War.

And Gallant is trying to figure out: What can end this chaos, when the protesters can no longer clearly articulate what they’re fighting for? She asks the kids, and the answer seems to be: an honest life, a clean life, a clean and honest France.

It reminds me of something that William Maxwell, Gallant’s New Yorker editor, once said about her stories: “The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.” You know, the film captures an interesting aspect of the writer-editor relationship. When a writer turns in a new story, it’s like an offering to the editor. There’s something intimate about it. Howitzer and his magazine function as a family for all of these isolated expatriates. Krementz, in particular, seems to use the concept of “journalistic neutrality” as a cover for loneliness. What does the chef say at the end?

Yes, Nescafier, the cook played by the great Stephen Park, describes his life as a foreigner: “Seeking something missing, missing something left behind.”

That runs through all of the pieces in the book, and also through the lives of all of these writers. People have been calling the movie a love letter to journalists. That’s encouraging, given that we live in a time when journalists are being called the enemies of the people.

That’s what our colleagues at the studio call it. I might not use that exact turn of phrase, just because it’s not a love letter. It’s a movie. But it’s about journalists I have loved, journalists who have meant something to me. For the first half of my life, I thought of The New Yorker as primarily a place to read fiction, and the movie we made is all fiction. None of the journalists in the movie actually existed, and the stories are all made up. So I’ve made a fiction movie about reportage, which is odd.

The movie is like a big, otherworldly cocktail party where mashups of real people, like James Baldwin and Mavis Gallant and Janet Flanner and A. J. Liebling, are chatting with subjects of New Yorker articles, like Rosamond Bernier, the art lecturer, who was profiled by Calvin Tomkins. In the story about the artist in prison, Moses Rosenthaler, Bernier is the inspiration for the character that Tilda Swinton plays, J. K. L. Berenson. Or Joseph Duveen, the eccentric buccaneer art dealer played by Adrien Brody in the same story.

Duveen sold Old Masters and Renaissance paintings from Europe to American tycoons and robber barons. The painters were all dead, but we have a living painter, Rosenthaler. So that relationship comes from somewhere else. And so does the painter himself. Tilda’s character, inspired by Rosamond Bernier, ends up being sort of the voice of S. N. Behrman, the New Yorker writer who profiled Duveen. It’s a lot of mixing.

Duveen is such a modern character. He seems like somebody who works for Mike Ovitz.

Or he could’ve been a mentor to Ovitz. Or Larry Gagosian. We have a rich art-collecting lady from Kansas named Maw Clampette, who is played by Lois Smith. In the Duveen book, there is a woman, a wife of one of the tycoons, I can’t remember which one, who talks a bit like a hillbilly. We based Maw Clampette’s manner of speech on hers, maybe. But the character was actually inspired by Dominique de Menil, who lived in my home town of Houston. She’s the most refined kind of French Protestant woman, a fantastically interesting art collector, who came to Texas with her husband, and together they shared their art and their sort of vision. Her eye.

I guess “Clampette” is a reference to “The Beverly Hillbillies”?

I feel yes.

The character of Roebuck Wright, whom Jeffrey Wright plays in the last story, about the police commissioner’s chef, is another inspired composite. He is a gay, African American gourmand, and he seems to be one part A. J. Liebling and one part James Baldwin, who moved to Paris to get away from the racism of the United States. That’s a daring combination.

Hopefully people won’t consider it a daring, ill-advised combination. With every character in the movie there’s a mixture of inspirations. I always carry a little notebook with me to write down ideas. I don’t know what I am going to do with them or what they’re going to end up being. But sometimes I jot down names of actors who I want to work with. Jeffrey Wright and Benicio del Toro have been at the top of this list that I’ve been keeping for years. I wanted to write a part for Jeffrey and a part for Benicio. When we were thinking about the character of Roebuck Wright, we always had a bit of Baldwin in him. I’d read “Giovanni’s Room” and a few essays. But, when I saw Raoul Peck’s Baldwin movie, I was so moved and so interested in him. I watched the Cambridge Union debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., from 1965. It’s not just that Baldwin’s words are so spectacularly eloquent and insightful. It’s also him, his voice, his personality. So: we were thinking about the way he talked, and we also thought about the way Tennessee Williams talked, and Gore Vidal’s way of talking. We mixed in aspects of those writers, too. Plus Liebling. Why? I have no idea. They joined forces.

There’s a line from Baldwin’s piece “Equal in Paris” that reads like an epigraph for your movie. He writes that the French personality “had seemed from a distance to be so large and free,” but “if it was large, it was also inflexible, and, for the foreigner, full of strange, high, dusty rooms which could not be inhabited.”

If you’re an American in France for a period of time, you know that feeling. It’s kind of a complicated metaphor. When I read that, I do think, I know exactly what you mean.

One of the things Howitzer is always telling his writers is “Make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” That reminds me of what Calvin Trillin says about Joseph Mitchell’s style. He says that Mitchell was able to get the “marks of writing” off of his pieces. Where did you get your line?

I guess I was thinking about how there’s an almost infinite number of ways to write something well. Each writer has a completely different approach. How can you give the same advice to Joseph Mitchell that you would give to George Trow? Two people doing something so completely different. I was trying to come up with a funny way to say: please, attempt to accomplish your intention perfectly. I don’t know if that’s very useful advice to a writer.

It’s good. Basically, it’s just “Make it sound confident.”

When you’re making a movie, you want to feel like you can take it in any direction, you can experiment, as long as it in the end feels like this is what it’s meant to be, and it has some authority.

There’s an unnamed writer mentioned in the movie, described as “the best living writer in terms of sentences per minute.” Who is that a reference to?

Liebling said, of himself, “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” We shortened it so that it would work in the montage. There’s maybe a little bit of Ben Hecht, too. There are a few other writers mentioned in passing. We have the faintest reference to Ved Mehta, who I’ve always loved, especially “The Photographs of Chachaji.” The character in the movie has an amanuensis. I learned that word from him, I think!

And then the “cheery writer” who didn’t write anything for decades, played by Wally Wolodarsky? That’s Joe Mitchell, right?

That’s Mitchell, except Mitchell had an unforgettable body of work before he stopped writing. With our guy, that doesn’t appear to be the case. He never wrote anything in the first place.

That’s wonderfully Dada. I became friendly with Joe Mitchell late in his life. I was trying to get him to write something for me at the New York Observer. He hadn’t published in thirty years. He never turned anything in, but we talked on the phone every week, and he would sing sea chanteys to me.

The character that Owen Wilson plays, Sazerac, is meant to be a bit like Mitchell. He writes about the seamy side of the city. And Sazerac is on a bicycle the whole time, which is maybe a nod to Bill Cunningham, but also Owen is always on a bike in real life. It wouldn’t be unheard of, if you were in Berlin or Tokyo or someplace, to see Owen Wilson riding up on a bicycle. Sazerac also owes a major debt to Luc Sante, too, because we took so much atmosphere from his book “The Other Paris.” He is Mitchell and Luc Sante and Owen.

The Sazerac mashup is especially inventive. Joseph Mitchell was the original lowlife reporter. He went out to the docks and slums and wandered around talking to people. And Luc, whose books “Low Life,” about the historical slums of New York, and “The Other Paris,” about the Paris underworld of the nineteenth century, is more of a literary academic. He finds his gems in the library and the flea market.

Mitchell is more, like, “I talked to the man who was opening the oysters, and he told me this story.”

Mitchell is what we call a shoe-leather reporter. You’ve included Mitchell’s magnum opus on rats in this book. There’s a line in it, about a rat stealing an egg, that feels like it could be a sequence in one of your movies: “A small rat would straddle an egg and clutch it in his four paws. When he got a good grip on it, he’d roll over on his back. Then a bigger rat would grab him by the tail and drag him across the floor to a hole in the baseboard.”

Maybe Mitchell picked that up talking to an exterminator. I remember an image from the piece about how, when it starts to get cold in the fall, you could see the rats running across [Fifth Avenue] in hordes, into the basements of buildings, leaving the park for the summer. It was the first thing by Mitchell I ever read.

Have you been filing away these New Yorker pieces for years?

I don’t know. Not deliberately. I knew which writers I wanted to refer to. At the end of the movie, before the credits, there is a list of writers we dedicate the movie to. Some of the people on the list, like St. Clair McKelway and Wolcott Gibbs, or E. B. White and Katharine White, are there not because their stories are in the movie but because of their roles in making The New Yorker what it is. For defining the voice and tone of the magazine.

Usually, when New Yorker writers are depicted in movies, they’re portrayed as just a bunch of antic cutups rather than people who are devoted to their work.

It’s harder to do a movie about real people when you already know who each person is meant to be—like the members of the Algonquin Round Table—and each actor has to then embody somebody who already exists. There’s a little more freedom when you make the people up.

Have you ever made a movie before that drew on such a rich reservoir of material for inspiration?

Not this much stuff. This one’s been brewing for years and years and years. By the time I started working with Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, though, it sorted itself out pretty quickly.

What order did you write them in?

The last story we wrote was the Roebuck Wright one, and we wrote it fast. The story about the painter, I must’ve had something on paper about that for at least ten years. The Berenson character that Tilda Swinton plays wasn’t in it yet, though.

Talk about the names of the two cities: Liberty, Kansas, and Ennui-sur-Blasé.

I think Jason just said it out loud: “Ennui-sur-Blasé.” We wanted them to be sister cities. Liberty, well, that’s got an American ring to it.

What do you think the French will make of the movie?

I have no idea. We do have a lot of French actors. It’s kind of a confection, a fantasy, but it still needs to feel like the real version of a fantasy. It has to feel like its roots are believable. I think it’s pretty clear the movie is set in a foreigner’s idea of France. I always think of Wim Wenders’s version of America, which I love, “Paris, Texas,” and also the photographs that he used to take in the West. It’s just that one particular individual German’s view of America. People don’t necessarily like it when you invade their territory, even respectfully, but maybe they start to appreciate it when they see how much you love the place. But, then again, who knows?

This excerpt is drawn from “An Editor’s Burial,” out this September from Pushkin Press.

from: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-n ... h-dispatch

[Lencho of the Apes]

artforum.com/print/202110/best-films-of-2021-john-waters

https://www.artforum.com/print/202110/b ... aFj14Wu0q4

[pabs]

From: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arc ... tt/671665/