Three by Truffaut

In my introduction to "Reading the Movies," I noted the titles I was reading at the moment. Among the Kael, Sarris, and sundry I declined to mention The Films of My Life by François Truffaut, which I've been reading off and on since April. I already transcribed the marvellous introduction; as for the rest of the book, I'm cool on some of Truffaut's criticism. At times he becomes too absorbed by plot descriptions (which, possibly due to translation, become cumbersome and hard to follow), at others his epigrams seem too obscure (I know, I know, I'm one to talk...). But unlike Truffaut's films, which I can only enjoy from a distance like Moses viewing the promised land, there are passages in his writing which leap from the page and hit me where it hurts - in a good way. Following are three wonderful essays which I've reproduced here for your enjoyment. So making their online debut (to my knowledge):

"Citizen Kane: The Fragile Giant" - Fantastic tribute to one of the greatest movies of all time, not from a perspective of technical admiration but of zealous, totally enraptured enthusiasm (and with a focus on the characters and story, which is also how I first knew and loved Kane - and in some ways, still do).

"Muriel" - Slightly bewildered appreciation of the Resnais film, with a great Hitchcock anecdote. Hitch's punchline, Truffaut's closing paragraph, and the film in question are all somewhat mystifying though I like the first two more than the third.

"Roberto Rossellini Prefers Real Life" - Tip of the hat to a very unique filmmaker, a man Truffaut worked for (much of the essay is devoted to personal reminisces). Years later, he still seems to be astonished by Rossellini's distractible intensity; Truffaut's tone is simultaneously admiring and disbelieving.

Stromboli

(Though already written before I was aware of the series, I am now submitting this as an entry in the For the Love of Films: Film Preservation Blog-a-Thon of Ferdy on Films & Self-Styled Siren. A full-fledged entry will be appearing on the Dancing Image on Sunday, the last day of the blog-a-thon. Stay tuned.)

Despite seeing many of his films, I've never really responded to Rossellini the way many cinephiles do. His holy simplicity has occasionally struck me as, well, just plain simple. Flowers of St. Francis (a blind buy on my part, and a satisfying one) is charming and Voyage in Italy compelling - though I wonder if Antonioni didn't eventually pick up Rossellini's ball and run further with it a few years later. Europa 51 I found embarrassing and remain rather mystified as to how its obviousness is supposed to be transcendent. Open City and Germany Year Zero are effective and absorbing but they're films I respected without being enthralled by. Neither one seemed to capture the lingering, simple, pure power of Bicycle Thieves (though both are overripe for revisiting, especially in the wake of the recent Criterion releases). Paisan was compelling in the abstract but I found its actuality too messy. Unlike Rossellini's acolytes (one recalls the zealous cineaste in Before the Revolution who admonishes the protagonist, "Remember, Rossellini is a god!") I was always unable to take the raggedness of his work in stride, to embrace it as not just a necessary evil but somehow fundamental to the work's appeal.

The Criterion-Hulu Marathon (live-blogging)

In which the author watches as many Criterion uploads on Hulu (free for the last day) as possible in twelve hours, and logs his viewing as he goes. Read more here.

6am. It begins. After each film, I will upload a screen cap and compose a quick capsule at this spot. I will update this post accordingly, and retitle it each time until at the end of the day it assumes its final form. I'll also be tweeting. First up...

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. V

If you're looking for further details on the Maya Deren video I just posted on YouTube, here is the blog post mentioned at the end.

Short thoughts on: Fists in the Pocket • Michael Medved • Goodbye, Mr. Chips • Russian Ark • My Night at Maud's • Claire's Knee • Paris Belongs to Us • 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her • Jean-Luc Godard • Europa '51

I've become a broken record on this subject, but I swear that within a few weeks I will have a huge backlog of Monday posts, more than I know what to do with - including a video that relates to the above picture. January is going to be very busy (although the work is mostly done, I'm waiting for other sites to cross-post). Unfortunately at this moment an interview, a guest post, at least four videos, and a podcast appearance are all waiting in the wings rather than in the bag. (That said, I did finally upload the "Cinepoem" video I blogged about back in November.) So I'm turning to one of my old standbys today, the archival of my old IMDb comments, where my online film commentary began. I've done this four times before, each time moving a bit further into the past. Some of these comments are actually almost a decade old, so be advised that they may no longer reflect my opinions (hell, I even left in some of the typos!). In many cases they represent my first engagement with the work in question, as a 23-year-old hungry for as many cinematic experiences as he could devour.

In fact 2006-07 was in many ways a peak viewing period for me; I was falling back into cinephilia after many years of caring more about music than movies. Most of the topics below relate to mid-century European films, particularly French filmmakers like Rohmer, Rivette, and Godard. Some of these films I loved, some I did not, but all of them seemed to me worthy of discussion - and still do. I would like to hear your thoughts as well, if you've seen these films (and if you haven't, I hope this serves as encouragement). Did Fists in the Pocket surprise you? Is Europa '51 too didactic? Does Goodbye Mr. Chips need a stronger narrative throughline? Is Rohmer subtly encouraging us to criticize the protagonist of Claire's Knee? Is Godard an incredibly consistent genius, an emperor with no clothes, or a hit-and-miss experimenter? Let me know what you think, and I'll let you know where I do and don't agree with the old me.

(I originally used a different image, culled from a Wonders in the Dark post several years earlier, but I replaced it with this one in 2017 when I cross-posted that Wonders piece on this site.)

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. VI

Short thoughts on: Stanley Kramer • Howard Hawks • Vivre sa vie • Anatomy of a Murder • John Ford • The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Mouchette • Young Mr. Lincoln • Ordet • Jules and Jim

Here we are with another collection of IMDb comments, my sixth in about as many years (albeit my second in two months, so maybe you can expect more in the near future). As we move back in time, here we reach the period where I was really posting on those board prolifically, watching many movies and eager to share my thoughts in the primary forum I used at the time. While the previous (or should I say, chronologically, next?) round-up featured a lot of European films, here I seem to be at least as much focused on American classics. What do you think of these movies? Do you agree/disagree with my judgments? Since this was almost a decade ago, I'm not sure how frequently I concur with my conclusions, but it is interesting to revisit these earlier opinions.

Recommended Cinema: Hulu, Criterion & Beyond

Many of you know (and the rest of you should know) that The Criterion Collection has offered all of its content for free on HuluPlus between Valentine's and President's Day. This treasure trove of films includes many not available in their DVD catalog. With only two days left, choices must be made.

I add my voice to the cacophony of recommendations, with the proviso that I've chosen films a tad more overlooked than, say, Breathless, Modern Times, or Seventh Seal (that said, some of my picks are hardly obscure). Needless to say, I hope this guide remains useful long after the Hulu promotion has ended.

As for myself, I've flirted with the notion of a 12-hour marathon on Monday (I don't work until evening, my sad equivalent to a day off), exploring films that I haven't seen yet and live-tweeting screen-caps from each movie I view, perhaps with brief comments. Would anyone be interested in following this exercise? I have other tasks I should prioritize, but I hope you'll encourage me to be irresponsible. ;)

Anyway, on with my dozen recommendations for Hulu/Criterion bliss. I've included excerpts from previous reviews or fresh thoughts on films I haven't discussed before. It's up to you, of course, which ones you want to watch.

Except for Paris Belongs to Us.

That one's mandatory.

Sarah Palmer (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #24)

*A revised entry will be published separately in 2024 or 2025 for an updated character series (which will be collected here). This is the original entry written before The Return.

The TWIN PEAKS Character Series surveys eighty-two characters from the series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) as well as The Missing Pieces (2014), a collection of deleted scenes from that film. A new character study will appear every weekday morning until the premiere of Showtime's new season of Twin Peaks on May 21, 2017. There will be spoilers for the original series and film.

As a wise man once said, "The home is a place where things can go wrong," and Sarah stays close to hers.

The Sunday Matinee: Before the Revolution

This is an entry in The Sunday Matinee series.

Before the Revolution, Italy, 1964, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, starring Adriana Asti, Francesco Barilli

Story: In Parma, a young Communist feels torn between his romantic hunger for life, the security of his bourgeois background, and his ideological duty to the cause. Meanwhile, he carries on an affair with his emotionally unstable aunt.

The opening scene of Before the Revolution, or Prima della rivoluzione as it’s more poetically known in Italy, stands among the most elating passages in cinema. You can’t quite pinpoint how this works; trying to relate the alchemy of these moments in typed prose, my fingers tie themselves in knots. Bertolucci, only twenty-two when he shot the movie, would go on to direct more lush, illustrious sequences especially once he began to use color. But somehow here we feel we are getting closest to the pulsating consciousness powering his vision - a sensitivity and sensibility swooning with the pregnant possibilities and numinous actualities of the moment. What exactly do we see? Close-ups of Fabrizio (Frencesco Barilli), our hero, which loom like wall-sized portraits, even on a small screen; soaring overhead shots of Parma as if Bertolucci began to run through his hometown and in his enthusiasm sprouted wings and began to fly. What do we hear? Fabirizo’s neurotic narration, a mixture of lush language and furious, uneasy denunciation, underpinned by Ennio Morricone’s lush, heart-bursting score – fully invested in its sense of operatic intensity, and as unashamed of it as Fabrizio is wary. This film then is a sensuous experience, maybe even first and foremost, but it is also a film of ideas, and a dialectic exists between Fabrizio’s notions and his feelings (as well as amongst the various feelings themselves).

Remembering the Movies, Dec. 3 - 9

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

This week, "Remembering the Movies" takes a walk on the wild side - surrealism, fantasy, and passionate affairs are all in the offing, as are deserted islands and dilapidated attics, exotic adventures and anthropomorphic westerns, the birth pangs of the "Felliniesque," the adolescent angst of Tim Burton, and the death rattle of the sixties counterculture. There are two personal recollections for films I saw in their initial run, two collections of screen-caps for short cartoons, and a fresh review of Flash Gordon, which I watched for the first time tonight. I have also excerpted a contentious contemporary argument between my favorite critic and my favorite documentary filmmakers (Point: filmmakers) about the hypnotic, hallucinatory and disturbing Gimme Shelter. See The Documentary Blog for the full back-and-forth. As always the black words are my own, the red, quotations.

Mad Men - "Souvenir" (season 3, episode 8)

Welcome to my viewing diary for Mad Men. Every Monday I will review another episode of season three. Later seasons will be covered at another time. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (aired on October 4, 2009/written by Lisa Albert, Matthew Weiner; directed by Phil Abraham): Now that a contract binds Don to his Manhattan office, he's hardly spending any time there. Connie is sending him across the country to visit what Pete dismisses as "every armpit [Hilton] has." The next destination is a bit ritzier, however; after initially declining, Betty accepts Don's invitation to accompany him to Rome. There they enjoy their spectacular view of the city and especially the romantic allure of their bed. Betty arrives early for their meeting with Connie in a glamorous beehive, black dress, and flashy jewelry, ogled by two eager young men (Federico Dordei and Giuseppe Rausch) who dismiss Don, once he arrives, as a "millionaire American," old and ugly. Treating Don as a stranger but accepting his overtures, Betty invites him to her table and feigns surprise that his hotel room is "so close to mine," causing the locals to leave their outdoor table in despair. The two grin and continue to play this game; there's something sexy about their flirtation for both of them, especially the pretense that it's a purely physical and perhaps even illicit attraction. "I'm in town for two nights," Don chuckles, "I won't get my heart broken."

Back in New York, Pete pursues a more genuine infidelity, kindly offering to help a bashful German au pair (Nina Rausch) by taking care of a dress she's stained. He keeps his promise, discovering to his surprise that Joan has taken a job at the department store where he exchanges the outfit. Only then does the girl discover that his overtures are not so friendly - or perhaps too friendly. Initially accepting her polite demurral (she has a boyfriend, she says), he returns to her apartment and cajoles his way in, pressing himself on her and accepting her weary submission as confirmation she wants him, or simply as a free pass for someone who doesn't really care either way. His later guilt is provoked less by Gudrun's tears than by her employer's (Ned Vaughn's) self-assured tone as he advises Pete to look elsewhere when scratching his seven-year itch, as if he's initiating the younger man into the club of perpetually philandering husbands. When Trudy returns from the Jersey shore, realizing vaguely that something has gone wrong, Pete asks her never to leave him behind again.

For the moment at least, the discontent that settles over the Draper home mostly belongs to Betty. Don offers her a coliseum-shaped trinket soon after their return, but she is not satisfied. "I hate this place," she insists. "I hate our friends. I hate this town." She's not simply missing the worldly glamor of Rome. Betty kissed Henry a day before flying out, when he assisted her community group at a town meeting. No one was around, and he closed the door to her car immediately after leaning in for the kiss, but their spark of connection is now overt. Later, counseling her daughter (who fought with Bobby after he caught her kissing a neighborhood boy), Betty observes, "You're going to have a lot of first kisses. You're going to want it to be special, so you remember. It's where you go from being a stranger to knowing someone, and every kiss with him after that is a shadow of that first kiss." Don's small souvenir is not her only reminder of a strong attraction.

My Response:

The rest of 90 Years of Cinema: my "alternate Oscars", 1923 - 2012

My picks for best supporting actor and actress, score, cinematography, screenplay, editing, and other miscellaneous categories year-by-year (plus honorable mentions, runners-up, and close calls) based on my choices in the Wonders in the Dark weekly poll

Read the introduction for background & further explanation

Part of the fun in voting each week was not just choosing the big dogs, but being reminded of a brief but classic supporting performance, finding ways to reward films that hadn't made any of the top categories (or inventing new categories yourself to do so), or even running down the massive list of honorable mentions and close calls. Below are all the remaining categories I voted in, some of which I made up just for fun and only stuck with for a couple decades (those I was most enthusiastic about). There's even a category I only used once, though the winner was certainly deserving.

Originally I planned to link every title that had been featured elsewhere on my blog, but it didn't look good and the task was extraordinarily tedious. I trust if a title interests you, you can find your way to my directory or movie timeline and discover what else I think about them. Images have been used more sparingly as well, one for each decade of the supporting picks, and then only above the categories from there down. Putting together this series of posts was stupefyingly complicated and laborious, so much so that I probably wouldn't have done it had I known what was in store. But I'm glad I didn't - aren't you?

Although I dithered, I eventually included some stats at the end of this post, basically noting which directors, actors, and genres I most favored. On the other hand, I did not follow through on the idea of linking to individual ballots in the Wonders poll so that readers could check out all my votes for a given year in one place, as well as reading my occasional comments on said choices (check out this category tag to track them down, if you must). However, I will link my 1973 ballot, by far my longest in which I wax rhapsodic about one of my favorite years in cinema history. After all the lists, stats, and classifications in the world, that's really what it comes back to.

This concludes a week in which I posted my top feature films, short films, actors, actresses, and directors for 1923 - 2012

From now on, all of my winners can be found on a single "90 Years of Cinema" page as well.

90 Years of Directors: my "alternate Oscars", 1923 - 2012

My picks for best feature year-by-year, based on my choices in the Wonders in the Dark weekly poll

Read the introduction for background & further explanation

Though their role lies at the center of filmmaking, my "Directors" list may comprise the most idiosyncratic category. Unlike the Academy and other award-bestowers, I mostly gave my "Picture" and "Director" honors to different films each year; in fact, less than a quarter of my selections match up. Why? Sometimes I misfired in the name of diversity, missing perfect opportunities to reward Vidor, Lean, Fellini, Melville, Bertolucci, Rohmer, and Jia among all-time personal favorites, not to mention the legendary Renoir, Bunuel, Rossellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Chaplin, or (gulp) Ford so that I could spread the riches among multiple films in a given year. None of these deserving auteurs ever won, while others (no less deserving, mind you) racked up two or three awards each (Bergman won only once, for one of his most obscure movies; I skipped numerous chances to reward both him and Ford, thinking they'd have plenty of other opportunities and then somehow they got lost in the shuffle). Doing it again, I'd probably impose a limitation on myself: let each director win only once. After all, the ranking is arbitrary to begin with; might as well maximize diversity. Ah well...too late now.

With those mea culpas pronounced, there are also some good reasons for the frequent mismatches between picture and director. For one, while I voted for best feature (or short) based mostly on personal passion - I judged the directing category more coolly. I'd hesitate to employ that bugaboo "objectivity" but I did generally choose films with pronounced styles, directed with bold and often highly controlled formal choices - films where I could assess in concrete terms what the director had done, while admiring his or her discipline (even if that discipline was shot through with improvisation). Occasionally these films are far from being favorites, but I respect their vision nonetheless. To put it in an elusive phrase, I voted based on "mise en scene." To me that means four essential elements: composition, camera movement, movement within the frame, and editing (less in terms of dodging mistakes and trimming fat than planning and shaping a rhythm). Yes, many directors oversee all elements and details of a production but it is in these areas they earn the right to sign their name. Performances are essential too, of course (though one never quite knows where the director ends and the actor begins) but for my purposes here I was more concerned with how they were shaped into a larger pattern than the elicitation of individual moments.

The results are surprisingly different from my own sensibility, which favors spontaneity and visceral, kinetic energy to meticulous precision and execution (well, maybe I favor the latter when it comes to blogging if not filmmaking or film appreciation), but then we're often drawn to our opposites, aren't we?

As with the actors and actresses, I've included the director's lifespan so you can glean their age. I've also noted the winner of a given year, so you can see where my choices for film and director part ways. And of course I've illustrated every selection; in this case, choosing images of the director from that particular time - in most cases, on the set of that particular movie (surprisingly available in most cases). By the way, did you know that Terrence Malick's face doesn't appear once in the 1-hour documentary on The New World disc? Interesting...

So far this week I've posted my top feature films, short films, actors, and actresses for 1923 - 2012

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

If you don't want to know anything about Twin Peaks, particularly the big secret, stop reading now.

For weeks I've been absorbed in "Twin Peaks," the 1990 television series, masterminded by David Lynch, which kept viewers tuning in week after week to find out "who killed Laura Palmer?" "Twin Peaks" was many things. It was often funny, but not in any one, easily identifiable way. It could be goofy, knowingly ironic, sweetly silly, absurd. It was also suspenseful, with new twists and turns leading us down a convoluted path to discover who the murderer was. It was frightening, in fact genuinely terrifying, though always just for moments, with comic relief usually coming to the rescue before long. And, of course, it was bizarre. Dancing dwarfs in red rooms, a psychic FBI agent, a woman who carried a log around with her at all times, a black lodge, a white lodge - all cryptic messages alluding to some hidden mystery, a mystery much deeper than the question of who stabbed the teenage beauty queen and threw her body in the river.

And, also, "Twin Peaks" was sad. Seldom acutely sad, the way it could be acutely frightening, although the scene in which Laura's parents find out she's been murdered dwells on their grief. Rather, there was an undertone of sadness, often so diluted it just seemed part of the pulpy overtones of the show, a mock-emotion that Lynch used to get at that eerie, ethereal flavor he was seeking. But every now and then the sadness seemed genuine, and when each episode closed with the picture of Laura Palmer, so perfect, so beautiful, and now so dead, that sadness lingered.

The movie, a prequel which details the last days of Laura, knows that it doesn't have any new secrets to reveal. Laura's murderer was exposed halfway through the second season and though the show tried to move on, it never recovered. Pauline Kael wrote that Marlon Brando's unseen presence pervaded and gave weight to the second Godfather film, even though he wasn't in it. The same is true of Laura Palmer in "Twin Peaks" and so what the film offers, far more valuable than the facts or the "secrets" of her last days, is their texture. We're drawn into the film to see Laura as she really was. I was immensely excited to see Fire Walk With Me and about halfway through I was convinced that it was a movie of rare power and accomplishment. Now that I've seen all of it, I still think so and yet I can't say for certain how I feel about it.

First things first, Fire Walk With Me is a movie drenched in pain. The jokiness of the series, the purposefully saccharine emotions, the overplayed performances and score are, after the possibly unnecessary first act, out. Laura Palmer's story is not a movie-of-the-week; it doesn't tease and then soothe our emotions, titillating us with the promise of catharsis and keeping us far enough away to avoid getting hurt. It's actually one of the most upsetting works of art I've ever seen.

Wild at Heart & L'Amour Fou (Lynch/Rivette Retrospective #3)

This is the fourth entry - but, technically, the third double feature - in a series covering the Lynch/Rivette retrospective at Lincoln Center, running from December 10 - 22. I attended individual screenings of Wild at Heart (1990) on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 15, and L'Amour Fou (1969) on the afternoon of Thursday, December 17.

If the pairing of Paris Belongs to Us and Eraserhead suggests a contrast between Rivette's ambitious sprawl and Lynch's intense claustrophobia, the Wild at Heart/L'Amour Fou double feature places the shoes on the other feet. Rivette turns his characters inward, locating most of L'Amour Fou within two interiors: the cavernous rehearsal space where Sebastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) directs the play Andromachas, and the distinctive apartment (as much a creepy character as Henry's room in Eraserhead) where Sebastien and his wife Claire enact ritualistic abuse, empathy, and engagement. Wild at Heart, on the other hand, blows the Lynchverse's doors wide open, rocketing Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) cross-country to experience wacky adventures with a wild cast of characters. Fifteen years after Eraserhead, Lynch's Palme d'Or-winning work is the polar opposite of his debut in almost every conceivable way.

If the clear contrast between L'Amour Fou and Wild at Heart lies in their settings, the obvious similarity is their subject: these are the directors' foremost "couples films," depicting the raw power and fragility of passionate, confused, possibly somewhat crazy men and women. But the strongest link between these movies is the role they play in the careers of their respective auteurs. Both are stylistic breakthroughs, stumbling across a form better-suited to express Lynch's and Rivette's visions than anything they had worked with before. This is generally understood in the case of L'Amour Fou, far less so with Wild at Heart.

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet is a strange, strange movie. Well, of course...this is David Lynch, right? But no, it isn't strange like his other movies. Those are unique and uncanny and surreal, but they connect on a dream level, appealing to subconscious tics you didn't even know you had. Not Blue Velvet, at least not for me. I first saw it five years ago, shortly after Mulholland Drive and I couldn't figure out why it was considered the superior film. Its dark-side-of-suburbia theme seemed trite and old-hat, and its surrealism paled in comparison to Mulholland Drive's ethereal atmosphere, which you could sink into and lose yourself. What redeemed its classic status was Dennis Hopper's madcap performance, lurching out of the screen and shocking in ways timeless and indestructible. Other than that, why was Blue Velvet David Lynch's masterpiece?

Now, on my second viewing, new thoughts emerge. One: this is Lynch's Breathless; it's the film for people who don't like the rest of the director's oeuvre. Blue Velvet is what you'll find on critics' top 100 lists; it's the token Lynch, or the token surrealism, or even the token avant-garde (just as Breathless frequently appears on the same lists, in lieu of stronger Godard works like Masculin Feminin, Alphaville, or Week End). Yet I think that Blue Velvet, like Breathless, may be a great film after all - you just have to leave the accumulated baggage at the door. Breathless is constantly praised for its "groundbreaking" qualities (if I have to read about those stupid jump cuts one more time, I'll throw my computer out the window) when in fact those very elements were improved and developed in later Godard films. But if you throw out all the "influential" garbage talk (a film is primarily "influential" when there's nothing else interesting to say about it), what remains is a uniquely charming, idiosyncratic, and enjoyable film. Go with the flow instead of trying to take it apart, or seeing it as part of some great pantheon, standing for something. Only then will it yield its charms. So with Blue Velvet, though "charms" hardly seems the appropriate word.

LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #35: Season 3 Part 6 (The Return - "Don't Die") podcasts & illustrated companion

All episodes & show notes for my podcast coverage of Twin Peaks season 3 part 6

June 11 - 17, 2022

(illustrations for storylines, character rankings, TIME cover & all categories)

Sheryl Lee: illustrated filmography

Introduction

Compiled several years ago as part of an abandoned project, this filmography represents almost every film and TV appearance made by Sheryl Lee, alongside brief contextual notes. Sheryl Lee is, far and away, most famous for her role as Laura Palmer, "the dead girl" in the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91). More importantly, when the murder victim was resurrected for the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lee gave a performance that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with acclaimed David Lynch heroines Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive), Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet) or Laura Dern (Inland Empire).

But what of Lee's non-Laura roles? Probably due in part to the dismal critical and box-office reception of Fire Walk With Me, Lee's career never went in the direction of, say, a Lara Flynn Boyle (who notably snubbed Lynch's request to appear in the Twin Peaks prequel). Sticking to offbeat independent films rather than major studio productions may have reflected her own interests as well. At times this is an obscure filmography - many of these movies never got the distribution they deserved - but it's often more interesting than a conventional Hollywood career. Lee's work is regularly committed, brave, and subtle; she remains one of the film industry's most underrated actresses and hopefully her appearance in the renewed Twin Peaks can elevate her profile even more.

In the meantime, here is (most of) her film/TV work since the eighties. Further context for this post follows the lineup. The descriptions may be a tad spoiler-y here and there; I wanted to point out connections to Laura Palmer which sometimes entail plot twists. Avoiding any big plot giveaways except where noted, I'd still advise you to peruse the text at your own (slight) risk. Personally I think her most interesting work is in Backbeat, Homage, Bliss, and especially Mother Night (for more on that film, check out this fantastic episode of the Projection Booth podcast). In truth, however, she's consistently dedicated to all of her roles, sometimes more than the material deserves,other times ensuring that it lives up to its promise.

Lured in by Lynch & Rivette: a retrospective at Lincoln Center (+ status update for the coming weeks)

Over the coming two weeks, I will be reviewing every double feature in the Lynch/Rivette retrospective at Lincoln Center. Reviews will be going up as soon as I am able to write them, alongside my usual Monday-Wednesday-Friday at 7am routine. To kick off the retrospective, I am sharing the intro & a link to an essay I wrote for Fandor Keyframe (where my videos will resume in the new year). By coincidence, Fandor's head video essayist, Kevin B. Lee, also produced a new video related to the retrospective which premiered tonight at Lincoln Center, alongside a talk by Dennis Lim, who programmed the series with Dan Sullivan, and Melissa Anderson.

In addition to my pieces on each Lynch/Rivette screening, the coming weeks will feature interviews with two authors of recent Lynch/Twin Peaks literature: Dennis Lim - who, in addition to programming the retrospective, also just published David Lynch: The Man From Another Place - and Andreas Halskov, whose new book TV Peaks covers the influence, innovation, and fan culture of Twin Peaks. And before I give way to the Fandor piece, I also want to point you to James Cooray Smith's thoughtful, nuanced article on the Star Wars prequels for the New Statesman (despite the provocative title, his perspective is more exploratory than polemical). Not only is it a great read, he very generously shouted out my Journey Through Twin Peaks videos!

Ok, on with the show...

• • •

David & Jacques Go Boating:

The Lynch/Rivette Dual Retrospective at Lincoln Center

by Joel Bocko

For thirteen days in December, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will trade its screening room for a rabbit hole. American auteur David Lynch and French filmmaker Jacques Rivette are the subjects of a fifteen-film retrospective marked by split narratives, double characters, and entangled locations. The surrealist directors are themselves defined by duality, with some viewers celebrating them as truthtellers while others dismiss (or appreciate) them as tricksters. Their films thrive on this uncertainty, projecting an aura of dreamlike mystery punctuated by playful interludes and violent epiphanies.

It isn’t hard to see why Dan Sullivan and Dennis Lim, author of the brand new Lynch book The Man From Another Place, programmed Lynch and Rivette side by side in a series of double features (although tickets are available for each film individually, the heart of the retrospective’s approach is in these pairings). The program notes feature many convergences between the cowboy and the Frenchman: “secrets, conspiracies, and paranoia; women in trouble; the supernatural manifesting itself within the everyday; the nature of performance and the stage as an arena for transformation; the uncanny sense of narrative as a puzzle without a solution, a force with a life of its own.”

Rivette evokes that uncanny sensation by mixing casual fly-on-the-wall photography with heightened theatricality, while Lynch prefers to decorate his cinematic canvases with subverted Hollywood fantasies. Both directors discover the bizarre in the everyday, but Rivette tends toward mesmeric daydream whereas Lynch creates more convulsive nightmares. Indeed, the Lynch/Rivette retrospective is defined by harmony and dissonance, with each similarity exposing a subtle difference. The dance orchestrated by Sullivan and Lim may be a tense tango rather than a smooth waltz.

Rivette has praised Lynch’s work, declaring Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) “the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground.” Lynch’s thoughts on Rivette are unknown (perhaps he’s never been asked). Did Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) influence Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)? Or do great minds simply think alike? Perhaps these directors share the same wavelength but operate on different frequencies.

Unscrambling these signals, Sullivan and Lim have posed pairings both obvious and inventive, relying on character, chronology, theme, or something more intangible to concoct these double features. “I was particularly interested in performance in their films,” Lim has noted, “and the way both filmmakers work with narrative.”

FRIDAY, December 11

Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais (2007), 137 minutes, at 3:30pm & 9:00pm

Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), 120 minutes, at 8:30pm (followed by reception for ticket-holders)

Narrative provides the glue for the opening selection, pairing Lynch’s groundbreaking Blue Velvet with Rivette’s late work The Duchess of Langeais (based on Balzac’s History of the Thirteen). The first exists in an all-American small town mixing fifties sunshine with eighties anxiety, while the second encloses itself in the ornate drawing rooms and boudoirs of Restoration France. Both center on enigmatic woman who bewitch a young man, Blue Velvet’s Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) seducing Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) through violence and sexuality, Balzac’s titular Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) preferring coquetry to fornication as she toys with a youthful general (Guillaume Depardieu).

Corruption and conspiracy (most notably via Dennis Hopper’s terrifying Frank Booth) characterize the communities surrounding these private psychodramas, social spheres determined to impose order in the wake of unrest. The tension in Rivette’s film may arise in the contradiction of the director’s own freewheeling sensibilities with Balzac’s royalist sympathies, whereas the tension in Lynch’s film arises from within himself. The much-protested, much-celebrated American subversive was also an avid supporter of Ronald Reagan at the time, fascinated in equal measure by picket fences and the dirt underneath.

SATURDAY, December 12

Rivette’s Joan the Maid: The Battles (1994), 160 minutes, at 2:00pm

Rivette’s Joan the Maid: The Prisons (1994), 176 minutes, at 5:30pm

Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), 134 minutes, at 9:15pm

The next double feature (or, technically, triple feature) focuses on single characters: Joan of Arc (Sandrine Bonnaire), whom Rivette depicted in Joan the Maid: The Battles and Joan the Maid: The Prisons and Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whom Lynch invented as a murder victim on the mystery show Twin Peaks (1990-91) before finally granting her onscreen life in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Gifted and damned young woman, inclined toward spiritual insight while tormented by powerful, worldly men, both were more familiar to audiences as myths than flesh-and-blood human beings.

In Joan the Maid and Fire Walk With Me, these heroines are resurrected through intense, committed performances by two brilliant actresses. Rather than relegating them to passive martyrdom, both Laura and Joan are characterized as defiant in the face of death, strong, resilient, and also deeply human. Laura’s spiritual victory may not be obvious as Joan’s, but it is there for those who want to look. Both Joan and Fire depict the fiery humanist heart concealed behind Lynch’s and Rivette’s playful public personas.

SUNDAY, December 13

Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (1969), 250 minutes, at 3:00pm

Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), 124 minutes, at 8:15pm

The first weekend of the series concludes with back-to-back romances characterized as much by violence as sex; their very titles proclaim that love leads to madness (or vice-versa). Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (1969), depicting the breakup/breakdown of a marriage between an actress (Bulle Ogier) and director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), and Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), coupling Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as tender-hearted fugitives from a bizarre criminal empire, are fueled by the passionate energy of two different freedom-loving zeitgeists, and both represent major turning points in their directors’ careers.

Shot during the social tumult unleashed by May ’68, Rivette’s four-hour intimate epic introduced improvisation-based narrative to his work, paving the way for the thirteen-hour experiment Out 1 (1971). Produced at the end of the Cold War, Lynch’s road movie ignited a new impressionistic style for the director, pushing him toward his increasingly avant-garde episodes of Twin Peaks. Acclaim greeted both films (Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at Cannes) but they remain controversial, alternately described as audacious or self-indulgent.

TUESDAY, December 15

Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (1961), 140 minutes, at 6:30pm

Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), 89 minutes, at 9:15pm

The retrospective resumes, following a one-day break, with Lynch’s first feature Eraserhead (1979) and Rivette’s directorial debut Paris Belongs to Us (1961). Both breakthroughs took years to produce, held together only by the young directors’ visions and the passion of their collaborators despite long pauses and funding crises. Conveying apocalyptic energies through paranoid protagonists and hilarious (if unnerving) communication breakdowns, Eraserhead and Paris Belong to Us trace a similar path…and yet these may be the two most different films that the retrospective placed together.

No Lynch film exists more purely within an imaginary headspace than Eraserhead, confronting Henry (Jack Nance) with bizarre characters like his mutant baby, his animalistic in-laws, and the Lady and the Radiator. Few Rivette works are as explicit as Paris Belongs to Us about links to current or recent events, with Anne (Betty Schneider) uncovering the possibility of a worldwide fascist plot behind her friend’s apparent suicide. Eraserhead is solitary and fantastical, while Paris Belongs to Us is communitarian and worldly. This yin/yang dynamic clearly establishes where the Venn diagram of Lynch and Rivette aligns…and where it diverges.

FRIDAY, December 18

Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), 134 minutes, at 6:30pm

Rivette’s Duelle (1976), 120 minutes, at 9:15pm

Following several solo screenings throughout the week (listed at the end of this article), the double features return with these two moody, mythic noirs. Fond of cryptic puzzles and pulpish allusions, Lynch’s Lost Highway(1997) and Rivette’s Duelle (1976) stretch their makers’ reality-bending tendencies beyond their previous limits and watch them snap. These brazenly supernatural stories defy physics while embracing an intuitive logic drawn from the collective unconscious.

Rivette’s low-fi sci-fi fantasy features a literal battle between goddesses of sun (Bulle Ogier) and moon (Juliet Berto). Lynch’s fever-dream juxtaposes a jealous husband-turned-innocent patsy (Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty) and a meek wife-turned-femme fatale (Patricia Arquette) against the sunny suburbia of the Valley and the nightmarish darkness of Los Angeles. This match-up promises to be among the most invigorating double features on display this week, plunging us into metropolitan mindscapes that gleam with the cold, dazzling allure of Duelle’s diamond.

SATURDAY, December 19

Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), 192 minutes, at 4:45pm

Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), 147 minutes, at 9:00pm

MONDAY, December 21

Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), 147 minutes, at 4:00pm

Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), 192 minutes, at 7:00pm

Not only are Mulholland Drive and Celine and Julie Go Boating among the most closely-linked films of the two directors, they also became the signature creations of each. Mulholland’s Hollywood tone poem – the story of a naïve young actress (Naomi Watts) befriending a mysterious amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) (or so it begins) – now ranks as the most acclaimed American film of the century. Celine and Julie – in which the title characters (Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier) stumble across a haunted house/enchanted movie set/alternate-reality wormhole – remains Rivette’s most celebrated work by a long shot (even making an Entertainment Weekly all-time top 100 list).

Despite the dark themes of Mulholland Drive in particular, these are also among the most fun works in the Lynch-Rivette canon, mixing glamor, humor, and even action with a sense of endless possibility and experimentation. Each film unfolds in the cross-section of two very different narrative worlds, occasionally offering very alternate viewpoints of what appears to be the same fundamental story. In Mulholland Drive, these narratives occur back-to-back. Even more radically, Celine and Julie views them side-by-side. If you venture into Lynchland or Rivettropolis only once in December, this is probably the trip you will want to take.

SUNDAY, December 20

Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), 180 minutes, at 5:00pm

Rivette’s Story of Marie and Julien (2003), 151 minutes, at 9:00pm

For the most adventurous spirits, however, the best is yet to come. The final double feature (aside from the Mulholland/Celine Monday repeat) joins two of the directors’ later works, proving that they did not become more timid with age. Shot when Rivette was in his seventies, Story of Marie and Julien, starring Emmanuelle Beart and Jerzy Radziwilowicz, ends the retrospective where it began, with an erotic love story involving intrigue and deception. This time, however, the romance unfolds not within a realistic historical context but against an increasingly supernatural, irrational backdrop.

Lynch’s hallucinatory video experiment Inland Empire moves with the logic of channel-or-web surfing, mixing the digital world of the twenty-first century with a fascination with cinema’s – and particularly Hollywood’s – past. Loosely organized around the experience of an actress (Laura Dern) whose reality becomes entangled with the part she is playing, Inland Empire remains Lynch’s most radical work. Inland Empire and Story of Marie and Julien jumble together psychic synchronicity, ghost stories, and a quantum-infused timestamp. They open up new doors for the directors, but they also look back upon long, storied careers, referencing and reflecting the early works of Lynch and Rivette.

No less than Celine and Julie, Betty and Rita, Sailor and Lula, or Marie and Julien, the duo of Lynch and Rivette are as exciting as they are dangerous. Lincoln Center will briefly serve as a portal into their overlapping wonderlands, but unlike the Lynch/Rivette characters – who access these dream worlds via hard candies, blue boxes, magical diamonds, or ominous rings – we require only ordinary tickets. I have mine, and will be reporting on the retrospective while it unfolds (on Lost in the Movies [http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com]). Will it be real, or some strange and twisted dream? There’s only one way to find out. See you on the other side.

Additional screenings

TUESDAY, December 15: Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), 124 minutes, at 4:00pm

WEDNESDAY, December 16: Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), 120 minutes, at 2:30pm

THURSDAY, December 17: Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (1969), 250 minutes, at 2:00pm

FRIDAY, December 18: Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (1961), 140 minutes, at 3:30pm

SUNDAY, December 20: Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), 134 minutes, at 2:00pm

TUESDAY, December 22: Rivette’s Story of Marie and Julien (2003), 151 minutes, at 4:00pm