You could say that Jared and Jerusha Hess got lucky. When first the hus­band-and-wife team got the chance to make a fea­ture, it turned out to be Napoleon Dyna­mite, the movie that launched a mil­lion “VOTE FOR PEDRO” shirts. But that visu­al­ly, nar­ra­tive­ly, and cul­tur­al­ly askew tale did­n’t emerge ful­ly formed into the the­aters. Nor did its title char­ac­ter, an extrav­a­gant­ly nerdy and sav­age­ly defen­sive high-school stu­dent in small-town Ida­ho. Napoleon Dyna­mite has a pre­de­ces­sor in Pelu­ca, the short film Jared Hess made for an assign­ment at Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty’s film school. Napoleon Dyna­mite him­self has a pre­de­ces­sor in Seth, whose curly hair, enor­mous spec­ta­cles, severe awk­ward­ness, and pen­chant for thrift­ing and faux curs­ing will look famil­iar indeed.

Pelu­ca appears to have much the same to rela­tion­ship to Napoleon Dyna­mite as Wes Ander­son­’s Bot­tle Rock­et short has to the fea­ture ver­sion. Both were shot in black-and-white in locales their film­mak­ers clear­ly know well, both are mem­o­rably scored (Ander­son uses jazz, Hess uses Burt Bacharach), and both tell in a basic form sto­ries that would lat­er unfold to their full cin­e­mat­ic length.

Just as Bot­tle Rock­et, the short, stars Owen and Luke Wil­son, who would go on to reprise their roles and gain fame there­after, Jon Hed­er played Seth in Pelu­ca before play­ing Napoleon Dyna­mite. And just as there’s lit­tle obvi­ous dif­fer­ence between the two ver­sions of the char­ac­ter besides their names, the dis­tinc­tive­ness of Hess’ cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty shows through in Pelu­ca just as it would, to a much wider audi­ence, in Napoleon Dyna­mite.

The Hess­es once drew fre­quent com­par­isons to Ander­son, though the past decade and a half has exposed their cin­e­mat­ic enter­pris­es as entire­ly dif­fer­ent. Their sec­ond fea­ture Nacho Libre, a Mex­i­can wrestling com­e­dy star­ring Jack Black, fit com­fort­ably enough into the Hol­ly­wood zone of ado­les­cent goofi­ness. But New York­er film crit­ic Richard Brody saw some­thing deep­er, call­ing it “the strangest Amer­i­can reli­gious film since The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ,” one that “presents a case for noth­ing less than Catholic-Protes­tant rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.” The Hess­es’ third fea­ture Gen­tle­men Bron­cos, the sto­ry of a young aspir­ing sci­ence-fic­tion writer in north­ern Utah, went almost com­plete­ly ignored, but Brody deemed it an “even more ecsta­t­ic and per­son­al explo­ration — in loopy, gross-out com­ic form — of the essence of faith in cos­mic reli­gious vision itself, and the ease with which those visions can be per­vert­ed to world­ly ends.”

Brody con­tin­ues to speak for the cinephiles who’ve paid to the work of Jared and Jerusha Hess ever more atten­tion, not less, since Napoleon Dyna­mite. 2015’s Don Verdean, about a crooked Bib­li­cal archae­ol­o­gist, is “a pur­er, stranger, and more dan­ger­ous reli­gious vision than the three films that pre­ced­ed it.” 2016’s Mas­ter­minds, a Hes­s­ian treat­ment of a real-life North Car­oli­na heist gone wrong due to sheer incom­pe­tence, “has the reli­gious inten­si­ty and spir­i­tu­al res­o­nance that marks all of Hess’s oth­er films” and “extends his vision into dark­er cor­ners of exis­tence than he had for­mer­ly con­tem­plat­ed.” Con­sid­er­ing that pic­ture, Brody sees “a wide-eyed frontal­i­ty to Hess’s film­mak­ing, includ­ing face-to-face set pieces and action scenes done in wide and sta­t­ic tableaux that sug­gest a kin­ship with the tran­scen­den­tal cin­e­ma of Robert Bres­son and Carl Theodor Drey­er.” And from the right crit­i­cal per­spec­tive, we can see it in Pelu­ca as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

The First Films of Great Direc­tors: Kubrick, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Taran­ti­no & Truf­faut

Doo­dle­bug, Christo­pher Nolan’s First Short: What Came Before The Dark Night, Memen­to & Incep­tion (1997)

Tim Burton’s Ear­ly Stu­dent Films: King and Octo­pus & Stalk of the Cel­ery Mon­ster

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

If the French New Wave had­n’t crashed over cin­e­ma in the 1950s and 60s, could any of the film move­ments since have come about? With­out auteurs like François Truf­faut, Agnès Var­da, and most of all Jean-Luc Godard, could the French New Wave itself have hap­pened? And with­out Anna Kari­na, would Jean-Luc Godard have become Jean-Luc Godard? Though he did make Breath­less, his first and most endur­ing fea­ture, with­out Kari­na, it was­n’t for lack of desire: when he tried to bring the still-teenaged Dan­ish actress onboard the project after spot­ting her in a soap com­mer­cial, she turned down his offer because it would involve a nude scene. But she made less of an objec­tion to polit­i­cal themes, demon­strat­ed by her agree­ment to par­tic­i­pate in Godard­’s next movie, the con­tro­ver­sial Le Petit Sol­dat.

In total, Kari­na would appear in eight of Godard­’s films, includ­ing A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Band of Out­siders, Alphav­ille, and Pier­rot le Fou — more than enough to make her the nouvelle vague’s most cap­ti­vat­ing screen pres­ence. This sta­tus has tran­scend­ed cul­ture and time, as evi­denced by “Anna Kari­na’s Guide to Being Mes­mer­iz­ing,” the short trib­ute video by the British Film Insti­tute at the top of the post.

To Godard she was first an actress, then a muse; soon she became his wife, and then near­ly the moth­er of his child. Godard, l’amour, la poésie, the above doc­u­men­tary on Godard and Kari­na’s pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al rela­tion­ship, argues that her mis­car­riage became the implic­it sub­ject of My Life to Live. From then on their rela­tion­ship, always described as “tumul­tuous,” dete­ri­o­rat­ed; they divorced in 1965, the year before their final col­lab­o­ra­tion, Made in USA.

“I can’t speak bad­ly of him,” Kari­na says of Godard in a clip of an inter­view record­ed much lat­er. “He was my teacher, my love, my hus­band, my Pyg­malion.” In her work with Godard, writes New York­er film crit­ic and Godard biog­ra­ph­er Richard Brody, “Kari­na iden­ti­fied not with char­ac­ters but with her­self, per­haps even more ful­ly on cam­era than in pri­vate life — to cre­ate an endur­ing idea of her­self. Kari­na didn’t become the char­ac­ters she played; they became her.” Through­out her career, she was thus “marked by the dis­tinc­tive­ness of those ear­ly per­for­mances, by their dif­fer­ence from all oth­er per­for­mances, and she became a liv­ing emblem not only of her­self but of the French New Wave and of the spir­it of the nine­teen-six­ties over all.” As Brody notes, Kari­na went on to work with such cin­e­mat­ic lumi­nar­ies as Luchi­no Vis­con­ti, Jacques Riv­ette, Rain­er Wern­er Fass­binder, Raúl Ruiz, and Jonathan Demme.

She also became a film­mak­er her­self, direct­ing Liv­ing Togeth­er in 1973 and the French-Cana­di­an musi­cal road movie Vic­to­ria in 2006, and in that same span of time pub­lished four nov­els as well. But since her death last month at the age of 79, it is Kari­na’s work with Godard in the ear­ly 1960s to which cinephiles have instinc­tive­ly returned and most lov­ing­ly cel­e­brat­ed. Both she and he, each in their dis­tinc­tive artis­tic fash­ion, embod­ied a short time in cin­e­ma when all rules seemed bro­ken and all pos­si­bil­i­ties open. In Godard, l’amour, la poésie, the crit­ic Jean Douchet, a col­league of Godard­’s at Cahiers du ciné­ma, puts it dif­fer­ent­ly: “They met, they fell in love, they broke up. End of sto­ry. They were a cou­ple like many oth­ers, but it’s true that Anna Kari­na is mag­nif­i­cent in that peri­od with Godard.” And as the French New Wave recedes far­ther into the dis­tance, that mag­nif­i­cence will only inten­si­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Agnès Varda’s Les Fiancés Du Pont Mac­don­ald: A Silent Com­ic Short Star­ring Jean-Luc Godard & Anna Kari­na

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How Jean-Luc Godard Lib­er­at­ed Cin­e­ma: A Video Essay on How the Great­est Rule-Break­er in Film Made His Name

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

Those in search of non-stan­dard Christ­mas movies to watch this hol­i­day sea­son will have long since tired of hear­ing rec­om­men­da­tions of Die Hard. While the cop-ver­sus-ter­ror­ists hit that made Bruce Willis an action star does indeed fea­ture an unusu­al­ly high body count for a pic­ture set at Christ­mas­time, it adheres in oth­er respects to the usu­al Hol­ly­wood con­tours. For seri­ous Yule­tide cin­e­mat­ic sub­ver­sion you need the work of Stan­ley Kubrick, who made an entire career out of refus­ing to hon­or the expec­ta­tions of genre. Specif­i­cal­ly, you need the final work of Stan­ley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Shut, which adapts Arthur Schnit­zler’s Dream Sto­ry, a novel­la of fin-de-siè­cle Vien­na, into a vision of wealth, sex, and deca­dence — as well as secre­cy and pos­si­ble mur­der — in New York at the end of the mil­len­ni­um.

“The film was billed as an erot­ic thriller star­ring the two hottest — and, yes, mar­ried — actors, at the time,” says Wise­crack­’s Jared Bauer in the video above. But since its release 20 years ago, “what was ini­tial­ly dis­missed as a failed piece of erot­i­ca has proven, upon fur­ther inspec­tion, to be some­thing way deep­er: an explo­ration of soci­ol­o­gy, dreams, desire — and yes, sex — through the lens of New York City’s elite.”

It all begins when Tom Cruise’s well-to-do doc­tor Bill Har­ford hears his wife, played by Nicole Kid­man, con­fess a fan­ta­sy she once had about anoth­er man. This sends him into an all-night jour­ney into the sex­u­al under­world, one designed to be expe­ri­enced by the view­er, as Nerd­writer Evan Puc­schak has argued, like an immer­sive vir­tu­al-real­i­ty expe­ri­ence, and one whose cen­tral themes man­i­fest in every sin­gle scene.

Kubrick fills Eyes Wide Shut with pros­ti­tu­tion, of both the obvi­ous fur-coat-on-the-street-cor­ner vari­ety and its many sub­tler instan­ti­a­tions at every lev­el of soci­ety as well. “At its deeply cyn­i­cal core,” says Bauer, “the film asks the ques­tion: are we all some­body’s whore?” The video’s analy­sis draws heav­i­ly on “Intro­duc­ing Soci­ol­o­gy,” Tim Krei­der’s analy­sis in Film Quar­ter­ly. Krei­der writes that “almost every­one in this film pros­ti­tutes them­selves, for var­i­ous prices”: true on the sur­face lev­el of the women at the occult masked orgy at which the doc­tor finds him­self in the mid­dle of the night, but just as true on a deep­er lev­el of Mr. and Mrs. Har­ford them­selves. “The real pornog­ra­phy in this film,” accord­ing to Krei­der, “is in its lin­ger­ing depic­tion of the shame­less, naked wealth of Mil­len­ni­al Man­hat­tan, and of the obscene effect of that wealth on our soci­ety, and on the soul.”

It is in a toy store that the film, with what Bauer calls its “metaphor of Christ­mas as an orgy of con­sump­tion,” con­cludes. As their young daugh­ter looks for things to buy, the Har­fords dis­cuss what to do about the rev­e­la­to­ry expe­ri­ences of the past two days. Kid­man’s famous final line sug­gests that the cou­ple is “doomed to repeat the same pet­ty jeal­ousies again and again, while poten­tial­ly spend­ing beyond their means — you know, the Amer­i­can Dream.” It also “con­nects to the title of the film, which evokes a sense of enlight­ened false con­scious­ness. We may know that we’re being screwed over and con­trolled by the wealthy and pow­er­ful, but at least it’s Christ­mas and we can play with our toys, both com­mer­cial and sex­u­al. So our eyes are firm­ly, delib­er­ate­ly shut, because that’s the only way to tol­er­ate this world.” Kubrick has tak­en us a long way indeed from It’s a Won­der­ful Life, but per­haps we can con­sid­er the ever-greater res­o­nance and rel­e­vance of Eyes Wide Shut his final Christ­mas gift to us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Are Stan­ley Kubrick Films Like Immer­sive Video Games? The Case of Eyes Wide Shut

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made His Mas­ter­pieces: An Intro­duc­tion to His Obses­sive Approach to Film­mak­ing

Dis­cov­er the Life & Work of Stan­ley Kubrick in a Sweep­ing Three-Hour Video Essay

How Stan­ley Kubrick Became Stan­ley Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by the Film­mak­er

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.