Wes Ander­son has been mak­ing fea­ture films for 27 years now, and in that time his work has grown more tem­po­ral­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly spe­cif­ic. Though shot in his native Texas in the late nine­teen-nineties, his break­out pic­ture Rush­more seemed to take place in no one part of the Unit­ed States — and even more strik­ing­ly, no one iden­ti­fi­able era. Few film­go­ers had seen any­thing like Ander­son­’s clean-edged retro sen­si­bil­i­ty before, and in sub­se­quent projects like The Roy­al Tenen­baums and The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou, it inten­si­fied con­sid­er­ably. Then, in 2012, came Moon­rise King­dom, which took the Ander­son­ian aes­thet­ic to a par­tic­u­lar time and place: New Eng­land in the fall of 1965.

Since then, Ander­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have told sto­ries in their dis­tinc­tive visions of East­ern Europe, Japan, and France — but always, explic­it­ly or implic­it­ly, in one peri­od or anoth­er of the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Judg­ing by its new­ly released trail­er, the events of Ander­son­’s next film Aster­oid City occur in per­haps the most mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry year imag­in­able, 1955, and in small-town Amer­i­ca at that.

Or rather, very small-town Amer­i­ca: Aster­oid City itself appears to be locat­ed in the mid­dle of the Ari­zona desert (though shot in Spain, in keep­ing with Ander­son­’s increas­ing­ly Europe-ori­ent­ed pro­duc­tion habits), and with noth­ing more excit­ing going on — apart from the occa­sion­al dis­tant nuclear-weapons test — than an annu­al “junior stargaz­er com­pe­ti­tion.”

The film “tells the sto­ry of a belea­guered wid­ow­er (Jason Schwartz­man) who’s busy schlep­ping his four chil­dren across the coun­try to see their grand­fa­ther (Tom Han­ks) when their car sud­den­ly breaks down,” writes The Verge’s Charles Pul­liam-More. This strands the fam­i­ly in the tit­u­lar town, with its “strange earth­quakes that no one knows the true cause of, fears about whether aliens might be lurk­ing among the humans liv­ing in Aster­oid City, and mul­ti­ple sight­ings of a celebri­ty (Scar­lett Johans­son).” As fans can already guess from this sum­ma­ry, the ensem­ble cast includes more than a few Ander­son reg­u­lars, also includ­ing Edward Nor­ton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Gold­blum, and Bob Bal­a­ban. A case of COVID-19 kept Bill Mur­ray from par­tic­i­pat­ing, but even so, nobody who sees the trail­er can doubt that the view­ing expe­ri­ence of Aster­oid City will be high­ly Ander­son­ian indeed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

Why Do Wes Ander­son Movies Look Like That?

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Com­mer­cials: A Playlist of 8 Short Ander­son­ian Works

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

Wes Anderson’s Break­through Film, Rush­more, Revis­it­ed in Five Video Essays: It Came Out 20 Years Ago Today

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

No French film of this cen­tu­ry is more beloved than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Or rather, no pro­tag­o­nist of a French film in this cen­tu­ry is more beloved than Audrey Tautou’s epony­mous Amélie. Hence, no doubt, why the movie is best known by that short ver­sion of its title rather than by the long ver­sion, Le fab­uleux des­tin d’Amélie Poulain. Now, more than twen­ty years after the release of Le fab­uleux des­tin d’Amélie Poulain, Jeunet has fol­lowed it up with La véri­ta­ble his­toire d’Amélie Poulain, which you can watch (with option­al French or Eng­lish sub­ti­tles) just above.

“After all this time,” Jeunet says in a brief intro­duc­tion, “I felt the moment was right to tell you, at long last, the real sto­ry of Amélie Poulain.” She turns out, accord­ing to his voice-over nar­ra­tion that fol­lows, not to be a sim­ple Mont­martre wait­ress who ded­i­cates her­self to sur­rep­ti­tious­ly enrich­ing the lives of those around her.

In fact she works as a spy for the KGB, hav­ing first been recruit­ed in child­hood with the promise of can­dy bars. That may sound far-fetched, but Jeunet sup­ports every detail of Amélie’s dou­ble life, and of the sto­ry of her re-entry into espi­onage after the fall of the Berlin Wall, using the very same scenes and involv­ing the very same char­ac­ters we remem­ber from Amélie.

On one lev­el, La véri­ta­ble his­toire d’Amélie Poulain tes­ti­fies to the endur­ing play­ful­ness that keeps Jeunet from tak­ing his own work — even the work that became a glob­al phe­nom­e­non — too seri­ous­ly. (Indeed, that spir­it is on dis­play in the orig­i­nal movie’s exag­ger­a­tion of whim­si­cal-French-film tropes.) Much like the Hol­ly­wood­i­fied Kubrick trail­ers we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, this new short also con­sti­tutes a demon­stra­tion of how the mean­ing and impact of cin­e­ma are cre­at­ed not by the images them­selves, but rather by their con­text and jux­ta­po­si­tion. And so, with char­ac­ter­is­tic clev­er­ness, Jeunet has rein­vent­ed Amélie as a Sovi­et agent by employ­ing the prin­ci­ples of Sovi­et mon­tage.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Paris Through Pen­tax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens

Tui­leries: The Coen Broth­ers’ Short Film About Steve Buscemi’s Very Bad Day in the Paris Metro

A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Paris, As Seen Through the Lens of Leg­endary Film­mak­er Éric Rohmer: Watch Rohmer in Paris

How to Jump the Paris Metro: A Wit­ty, Rebel­lious Primer from New Wave Direc­tor Luc Moul­let (1984)

His­to­ry Declas­si­fied: New Archive Reveals Once-Secret Doc­u­ments from World Gov­ern­ments

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

In 2018, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The award itself came as less of a sur­prise than did the fact that Shoplifters was the first of Kore-eda’s films to win it, giv­en how long he’d been the most wide­ly acclaimed Japan­ese film­mak­er alive. And though it had been more than twen­ty years since the Palme last went to a Japan­ese movie — Shomei Ima­mu­ra’s The Eel, in 1997 — Japan had long since estab­lished itself at Cannes as the Asian coun­try to beat. Ima­mu­ra’s The Bal­lad of Naraya­ma had won the Palme in 1983, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Kage­musha in 1980, and Teinosuke Kin­u­gasa’s Gate of Hell in 1954, when West­ern cinephiles were only just start­ing to appre­ci­ate Japan­ese cin­e­ma.

Why has that appre­ci­a­tion proven so endur­ing? This is one ques­tion inves­ti­gat­ed by “The Essen­tial Japan­ese Cin­e­ma,” a video essay from The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy. Nar­ra­tor Luiza Liz Bond empha­sized the “height­ened aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty” of Japan­ese film­mak­ers, on dis­play in “the ten­der obser­va­tion of Ozu’s Tokyo Sto­ry, the poet­ic rhap­sody of Kuro­sawa’s Dreams, the har­row­ing fem­i­nine gaze of Video­pho­bia.” But one can find exam­ples just as rich and even more var­i­ous in less­er-known films from Japan such as Shūji Ter­aya­ma’s engagé exper­i­men­tal dra­ma Throw Away Your Books, Ral­ly in the Streets, Kaizō Hayashi’s oneir­ic silent-film pas­tiche To Sleep as to Dream, and Gakuryū Ishi­i’s sub­tly psy­che­del­ic and sci­ence-fic­tion­al com­ing-of-age tale August in the Water.

The video orga­nizes these films and many oth­ers under a rubric of philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts drawn from Japan­ese cul­ture. These include bushidō, the code of the samu­rai West­ern­ers came to know through the pic­tures of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Masa­ki Kobayashi; wabi-sabi, an ide­al of beau­ty cen­tered on imper­fect things; mono no aware, a sen­si­tiv­i­ty to the tran­sient and the ephemer­al; and guro, which push­es the unset­tling to its out­er lim­its. Their height­ened aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty “grants Japan­ese film­mak­ers the abil­i­ty to be fine-tuned to the grotesque and the grue­some,” Bond notes. They under­stand that we all enjoy beau­ty, but an appre­ci­a­tion of ugli­ness is nec­es­sary to mag­ni­fy this process. The beau­ty and the ugly are not oppo­sites, but dif­fer­ent aspects of the same thing.”

Of course, one need not be famil­iar with these ideas in order to enjoy Japan­ese cin­e­ma. The tex­ture-inten­sive eroti­cism of Hiroshi Teshi­ga­hara’s Woman in the Dunes, the junk­yard body hor­ror of Shinya Tsukamo­to’s Tet­suo: The Iron Man, the relent­less­ly bizarre inven­tive­ness of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House: these could only be deliv­ered by film­mak­ers who under­stand first that they work in a medi­um of vis­cer­al pow­er. Even the work of Yasu­jirō Ozu, famed for its imper­turbable restraint, res­onates more deeply than ever with us six decades after his death. “It is impos­si­ble to speak of the sub­lime with­out speak­ing of his por­tray­al of human fragili­ty,” says Bond. “Ozu is nev­er too sen­ti­men­tal, nev­er too orna­men­tal.” Would that more mod­ern-day film­mak­ers, from Japan or any­where else, looked to his exam­ple.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

How One Sim­ple Cut Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Genius of Yasu­jirō Ozu

Hayao Miyaza­ki Meets Aki­ra Kuro­sawa: Watch the Titans of Japan­ese Film in Con­ver­sa­tion (1993)

How Mas­ter Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Satoshi Kon Pushed the Bound­aries of Mak­ing Ani­me: A Video Essay

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

A Page of Mad­ness: The Lost Avant Garde Mas­ter­piece from Ear­ly Japan­ese Cin­e­ma (1926)

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