James Cameron’s Titanic appeared in 1997 as the most expensive film ever made. Werner Klingler and Herbert Selpin’s Titanic appeared in 1943 as the most expensive German film ever made. And the two share even more than their budgets’ record-breaking status, their famously “unsinkable” subject, and their title in common: both endured troubled productions, both feature a late scene where their male hero convinces his lover to just get on a lifeboat already, and both set out to make strong statements indeed. The later, American Titanic has much to say about the cinematic triumph of late-20th-century visual effects, whereas the earlier, German Titanic takes a more negative tack, mounting an indictment of the supposedly savage avarice and thorough corruption of that country’s bitter wartime enemy, Great Britain. In its ill-fated titular ship, the huge-scale propaganda film found what must have seemed like the perfectly opulent illustration of its argument.
But things worked out no better for this Titanic than for the actual Titanic — and indeed, for Germany in the Second World War. “Never shown in Nazi Germany, its director was found hanged by his own braces and is suspected of having been murdered by the Gestapo,” writes David Gerrie in the Daily Mail. “And the ship that took the role of the Titanic, the Cap Arcona, was later sunk with 5,000 concentration camp prisoners on board, a vastly greater loss of life than the 1,517 who died in the Titanic disaster.” For all the time, energy, and money the regime piled into it, the film turned out “far from the masterpiece [Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph] Goebbels had waited two years to see. Fearing Nazi citizens under attack by Allied bombers would be frightened by the sinking, he banned its release in Germany.” Just as Cameron’s Titanic shocked the industry-watchers who had solemnly predicted a megaflop by creating one of the most successful movies of all time, Klingler and Selpin’s Titanic must have given the Nazis quite a start when it emerged as a testament not to Britain’s hubris, but, inadvertently, to their own.
Wes Anderson’s movies always trigger a healthy buzz in the pop culture world, and his recently released Grand Budapest Hotel is no different. Already, the film has won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, and if IMDB ratings are anything to go by, it’s well on its way to becoming another Anderson classic.
Above, we bring you yet another visual essay on Anderson’s filmmaking, courtesy of the Criterion Collection. This time, however, the focus is Anderson’s sole animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox. The clip, entitledThe Fox & Mr. Anderson, is a split-screen short, which matches Mr. Fox to Anderson’s other films, shot for perfect shot. Here we see the Mr. Fox protagonists marching in step with the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited, and Steve Zissou, of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissoufame, mirroring the scowl of Mr. Fox himself; here is Rat, Fox’s mortal enemy, lying wounded, opposite Rushmore’s injured Max Fischer. While brief, the collection is a beautiful anthology of Anderson’s work and some of the visuals that make encore performances.
Before he directed Citizen Kane, Orson Welles was already famous. He was an enfant terrible of that new medium radio — one of his plays, an adaptation of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, famously terrified the nation in 1938. He was also known as a wunderkind of the stage.
During the late 1930s, Welles and his producing partner John Houseman (yes, that John Houseman) were the toast of Broadway, thanks to a string of audacious classical revivals. The most famous of these productions was a 1937 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which gave the play an unexpected relevance. Welles dressed the cast in modern attire; soldiers were outfitted to look like Nazi black shirts. And the show was lit in a manner meant to recall a Nuremberg rally. Presented at a time when Hitler’s power was growing, the production jolted American audiences and made Welles famous. Time Magazine even put him on its cover.
Being a trailblazer in both radio and the stage, Welles adapted many of his stage productions for the wireless. The Internet Archive has posted many of these recordings online, which you can listen to for free. The selection includes performances of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Macbeth and, of course, Julius Caesar, among others. In most cases, these recordings — along with a few set photos — are the only documents left of Welles’s groundbreaking productions.
But if you want to get a sense of what Welles’s Julius Caesar actually looked like, you can check out Richard Linklater’s little-seen, critically-praised comedy Me and Orson Welles (2008). The movie stars Zac Efron as a young actor who lands a small part in the production only to find himself competing with the great director for the affections of a girl. The movie might be a trifle but experts have marveled at how close the film is to Welles’s vision. Check out the trailer below.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
“Cinema saved my life,” confided François Truffaut. He certainly returned the favor, breathing new life into a French cinema that was gasping for air by the late 50s, plagued as it was by academism and Big Studios’ formulaic scripts. From his breakthrough first feature 400 Blows in 1959–to this day one of the best movies on childhood ever made–to his untimely death in 1984, Truffaut wrote and directed more than twenty-one movies, including such cinematic landmarks as Jules and Jim, The Story of Adele H., The Last Metro and the tender, bitter-sweet Antoine Doinel series, a semi-autobiographical account of his own life and loves. What is more, along with a wild bunch of young film critics turned directors—his New Wave friends Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and Resnais—Truffaut revolutionized the way we think, make and watch films today. (We will see how in my upcoming Stanford Continuing Studies course, When theFrench Reinvented Cinema: The New Wave Studies, which starts on March 31. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join us.)
Almost as interesting as Truffaut’s rich legacy is the narrative that led to it: How Truffaut became Truffaut against all odds. And how his unlikely background as an illegitimate child, petty thief, runaway teen and deserter built the foundations for the ruthless film critic and gifted director he would become.
Les 400 Coups, we see a fictionalized version of the defining moments in the young François’ life through the character of Antoine Doinel: the discovery that he was born from an unknown father, the contentious relationship with a mother who considered him a burden and condescended to take him with her only when he was ten, the friendship with classmate Robert Lachenay and the endless wanderings in the streets of Paris that ensued. The film offers a glimpse of the dearth of emotional as well as material comfort at home and how Antoine makes do with it, mostly by pinching money, time and dreams of love elsewhere: Antoine “borrows” bills and objects (Truffaut, too, took and sold a typewriter from his dad’s office), steals moments of freedom in the streets, and loves vicariously through the movie theaters (in the trailer above, Antoine and his friend catch a showing of Ingmar Bergman’s Monika).
If anything, the real Truffaut did far worse than his cinematic alter ego. Like Antoine, the young François skipped schools, stole, told lies, ran away and went to the movies on the sly. He ran up debts so high—mostly to pay for his first ciné-club endeavors—that he was sent to a juvenile detention center by his father. Later, having enlisted in the Army, Truffaut deserted upon realizing he would be sent to Indochina to fight: prison was again his lot. In his cell, he received letters from the great prisoner of French letters, Jean Genêt: it was only fitting that the young Truffaut would become friends with the author of The Journal of a Thief.
But had he been a better kid, Truffaut might never have been such a great director. His so-called moral shortcomings foreshadow what would make his genius: an impulsive need to bend the rules, a talent for working at the margins and invent new spaces to free himself from formal limitations, and a fundamental urge to be true to his own vision, at the risk of infuriating the older generation. His years of truancy roaming the streets and movie theaters of Paris and his repeated experience of prison led him naturally to revolt against the confinement of the studio sets where movies were at the time entirely made. Instead, he took his camera out of the studios and into the streets. On location shooting, natural light, improvised dialogues, vivacious tracking shots of the pulse of the city — all traits that made the New Wave look refreshingly new and modern — befitted the temperament of an independent young man who had already spent too many days behind bars.
Having gotten in so much trouble for lack of money, Truffaut also ensured that financial independence would be the cornerstone of his film-making: one of the smartest moves he made as a young director was to found his own production company, the Films du Carrosse. Money meant freedom, this much he had long learnt.
But it is Truffaut’s innate sense of fiction and story telling that his younger years reveal most. Like the fictional Antoine in this clip, Truffaut seemed to have displayed a disarming mix of innocence and deception, or rather an unabashed admission that he had to invent other rules to get by and succeed, and a precocious realization that telling stories would get him further than telling the truth. “Des fois je leur dirais des choses qui seraient la vérité ils me croiraient pas alors je préfère dire des mensonges” tells Antoine in his grammatically incorrect French to the psychologist—“Sometimes if I were to tell things that would be true they would not believe me so I prefer to tell lies.” Each survival trick, each prank implied new lies to forge, and a keen understanding of his public was paramount for their success: contrary to Godard and his avant-garde deconstruction of narrative lines and meaning, Truffaut always wanted to tell good, believable stories: one could say he practiced his narrative skill by telling the tales his first audience (mother, father, teachers) wanted to hear.
One of the most memorable lines of 400 Blows is a lie so outrageous that it has to be believed. Asked by his teacher why he was not able to turn in the punitive homework he was assigned, Antoine blurts out: “It was my mother, sir.” – “Your mother, your mother… What about her?” –“She’s dead.” The teacher quickly apologizes. But this blatant lie tells another kind of truth, an emotional one that the audience is painfully aware of: Antoine’s, or should we say Truffaut’s mother is indeed “dead” to him, unable to show motherly affection. The mother’s death is less a lie than a metaphor, the subjective point of view of the child. Truffaut the director is able to allude to this deeper mourning but also to save the mother from her deadly coldness by the sheer magic of fiction. Antoine’s votive candle has almost burnt down the house, his parents are fighting, his dad threatens to send him to military school, when suddenly the mother suggests they all go… to the movies. Unexpectedly, magically, they emerge from the theater cheerful and united, in a scene of family happiness that can exist only in films. For a moment, cinema saved them all.
To learn more about Truffaut’s life and work, we recommend Stanford Continuing Studies Spring course “The French New Wave.” Laura Truffaut, François Truffaut’s daughter, will come and speak about her father’s work.
Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. She writes regularly for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.
Nearly thirty years after his death, Andrei Tarkovsky (many of whose films you can watch free online) continues to win devoted fans by what some describe as his still-unparalleled mastery of aesthetics. Not only do all his pictures — and especially his later works like Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker — present images of the deepest richness in a manner of the highest refinement, but in so doing they come out looking and feeling like no other films created before or since. So many cinephiles claim that one can identify their favorite director’s work by only a single shot, but for Tarkovsky this boast actually seems to hold true (especially in the case of the nine-minute candle-carrying shot from Nostalghia). When we talk about Tarkovsky, we talk about aesthetics, whether we talk about his films, his Polaroid photos, or his posters.
Not that Tarkovsky’s perfectionism had him exercising total control over the one-sheets that advertise his films, nor did he actually command every visual detail of every frame of the films themselves. I would submit, however, that all who worked in the orbit of a Tarkovsky production, from cinematographers to set builders, right down to the graphic designers, entered his thoroughly realized and affecting aesthetic reality. “Tarkovsky is one filmmaker for whom I’d gladly have posters that simply feature gorgeous images from his films (of which there are an unlimited supply)” writes Adrian Curry at MUBI, “but there are so many terrific illustrated posters that I thought I’d just feature my favorite for each film.” His selections include the French one for Stalker, the Polish one for Mirror(because you can never ignore Polish movie poster design), and the Russian one for The Sacrifice. It pays Tarkovsky one of the highest possible compliments: he created not only beauty, but works that inspire others to create beauty.
A collection of the international movie posters for each of Tarkovsky’s major films can be found at Nostalghia.com.
For his latest essay, Kogonada takes on perhaps film’s most famous formalist working today – Wes Anderson. As you can see from the video above, Anderson loves to compose his shots with perfect symmetry. From his breakout hit Rushmore,to his stop-motion animated movie The Fantastic Mr. Fox, to his most recent movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson consistently organizes the elements in his frame so that the most important thing is smack in the middle.
Directors are taught in film school to avoid symmetry as it feels stagey. An asymmetrically framed shot has a natural visual dynamism to it. It also makes for a more seamless edit to the next shot, especially if that shot is another asymmetrically framed shot. But if you’ve watched anything by Anderson, you know that seeming stagey has never been one of his concerns. Instead, Anderson has developed his own quirky, immediately identifiable visual style.
When critics complained about Ozu’s proclivity for essentially making the same movie over and over again, he famously responded by saying, “I only know how to make tofu. I can make fried tofu, boiled tofu, stuffed tofu. Cutlets and other fancy stuff, that’s for other directors.” Anderson would probably not consider himself a tofu maker, but he would most likely appreciate Ozu’s sentiment.
Check out another Kogonada essay below about Anderson’s tendency for composing shots from directly overhead.
For their annual Lifetime Achievement Awards, the folks over at the Society of Camera Operators put together a lovely, surprisingly rousing video about the evolution of the movie camera over the course of the past century or so of cinema. And, as you can see above, it has changed quite a bit.
Then in the ‘80s, things started to change with the release of analog video. Suddenly, you could capture movement in a manner that didn’t involve exposing frame by frame an unspooling reel of light-sensitive celluloid. And with the digital revolution that started in the ‘90s, cameras, and the very nature of cinema, changed. Dazzling spectacles like Avatarand Gravity could be created almost entirely within a computer, while at the same time the cameras themselves grew smaller and more portable.
To underscore just how democratized the technology of movie making has become, the end of the video shows Hollywood cameramen shooting movies with iPhones. The piece ends with what could only be seen as an ominous technological development for the Society of Camera Operators: Google Glass, which has the potential to turn every single person into a perpetual camera operator.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
A film that began its life as a script called Who Killed Bambi?, written by Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (trailer below) became a farcical caper starring the Sex Pistols minus their lead singer. Johnny Rotten had quit the band at this point and appears only in archival footage. Mostly The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was a vehicle for Malcolm McLaren to sell himself as the guru of punk and the driving force behind the band. Directed by Julien Temple (who also made the far superior Sex Pistols doc, The Filth and the Fury), Swindle is also notable for almost launching a Sid Vicious solo career, and it might have worked, were it not for his epically destructive flame-out in 1978.
The film saw release two years later, and produced a soundtrack album, which I remember finding in a used record bin—pre-Google—and thinking I’d discovered some long lost Sex Pistols album. One listen disabused me of the notion. Some of album is a snapshot of the band’s shambolic final days, but most of it is devoted to “jokey material” from the movie and most of that is pretty terrible. The sole exception is Sid’s version of Paul Anka’s “My Way” (top), a sneering piss take on the song Sinatra made famous. After some obnoxious faux-crooning, Sid tears through song with punk aplomb. Allmusic aptly describes the performance as “inarguably remarkable” yet showing that Sid was “incapable of comprehending the irony of his situation.”
The moment of the performance itself is bathed in sad irony. I’ve always thought it showed that—had he just a little more instinct for self-preservation—we might have someday seen Sid Vicious recording an album’s worth of bratty takes on the American Songbook, but probably at McLaren’s behest. What more he might have had in him is anyone’s guess; in life he seemed unable to rise above the role McLaren assigned him in the film “Gimmick.” But he made it look good. Those familiar with Alex Cox’s definitive portrait Sid and Nancy will of course remember Gary Oldman’s recreation of Sid’s “My Way” (above). Convincing stuff, but no substitute for the real thing.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
