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.

No art form is as sub­ject to trend and fash­ion as the Hol­ly­wood film — except, per­haps, the Hol­ly­wood trail­er. If you came of age as a movie­go­er in the nine­teen-nineties, as I did, you’ll remem­ber hear­ing hun­dreds of grav­el­ly-voiced promis­es of trans­porta­tion to “a world where the sun burns cold, and the wind blows cold­er”; to “a world where great risks can bring extra­or­di­nary rewards”; to “a world where dream­ers and believ­ers are mirac­u­lous­ly trans­formed into heav­en­ly crea­tures.” Prac­ti­cal­ly all of these  lines were deliv­ered by voice-over artist Don LaFontaine; when he died in 2008, the “in a world…” trail­er went with him.

LaFontaine gets his due in the Vox video at the top of the post, which exam­ines the art of the movie trail­er through the eyes of edi­tor Bill Neil. Neil’s own résumé includes the trail­ers for mod­ern entries in var­i­ous hor­ror fran­chis­es, like remakes of The Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre and The Ami­tyville Hor­ror, as well as the 2018 Hal­loween.

This placed him well to cut one togeth­er for Nope by Jor­dan Peele, an auteur keen on putting old tropes of genre film to new ends. The project gave Neil a chance to exer­cise his own retro-repur­pos­ing instinct, and here he lays out a few of the sources — Car­pen­ter’s The Fog, Steven Spiel­berg’s Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind — to which he paid homage while fill­ing the trail­er with intrigue.

With Nope, as with most every film, Neil made its trail­er with­out see­ing the fin­ished prod­uct. Rather, he had to work with raw footage as it was being shot, which results in vis­i­ble dif­fer­ences between the images in the trail­er and those in the actu­al movie. (In some cas­es, scenes excerpt­ed in a trail­er end up cut out entire­ly.) Such restric­tions have a way of inspir­ing edi­tors to come up with new tech­niques, some of which become high­ly influ­en­tial: in the video, Neil high­lights the fea­tures of clas­sic trail­ers for pic­tures like Dr. Strangelove, Car­rie, and Alien, iden­ti­fy­ing the most endur­ing ele­ments of their lega­cy in his craft.

When those movies came out in the nine­teen-six­ties, sev­en­ties, and ear­ly eight­ies, most trail­ers were seen in one place: the movie the­ater. (And in those days, as Neil notes, trail­ers were made not by spe­cial­ized pro­duc­tion hous­es, but employ­ees in the stu­dio or even the film­mak­ers them­selves.) Then came the home-video era, which chal­lenged edi­tors with defeat­ing the view­er’s instinct to hit fast-for­ward. Today, trail­ers reflect the dom­i­nance of what Neil calls the “bumper,” a flash of max­i­mum excite­ment in the first few sec­onds that sug­gests “it’s gonna get crazy by the end” — on the the­o­ry that, because you’re prob­a­bly watch­ing on Youtube, you won’t hes­i­tate to click that skip but­ton oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

Com­pare the Orig­i­nal Trail­ers of Clas­sic Films with Their Mod­ern Updates: Casablan­ca, Dog Day After­noon & The Exor­cist

Watch 25 Alfred Hitch­cock Trail­ers, Excit­ing Films in Their Own Right

Watch the 7 Hour Trail­er for the 720 Hour Film, Ambiancé, the Longest Movie in His­to­ry

The Creepy 13th-Cen­tu­ry Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Intro­duc­tion to “Dies Irae”

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.