Positif Champions: Fifty Years of Cinema
December 5, 2002–January 30, 2003
Positif, a French film monthly founded
in Lyon in 1952 by Bernard Chardère, is celebrating its golden
anniversary and 500th issue. In the magazine's ardor for the new
filmmakers it champions, the maverick intelligence that informs
its ideas about the work of these artists, and the poetic, surprising,
and illuminating writing itself, Positif both sustains
and nourishes the culture of cinema.
The Department of Film and Media presents a fifty-film
exhibition of works championed by Positif when first released
in France. The films selected reflect the essays in an accompanying
book, Positif 50 Years: Selected Writings from the French Film
Journal, coedited by Michel Ciment and Laurence Kardish, and
published by The Museum of Modern Art.
Organized by Michel Ciment, veteran Positif
editor, celebrated author, and noted film critic, and Laurence Kardish,
Senior Curator, Department of Film and Media. The Museum of Modern
Art thanks the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Unifrance
Film, and agnès b. for helping make this exhibition possible;
and Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, New Yorker Films, and Wellspring
Media for their generous loan of prints.
1951. USA. Directed by John Huston. Screenplay by James Agee, Huston.
With Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Morley. Huston called
The African Queen "a nice little adventure film."
Positif found it "amazing," although "it
did have Africa as a setting, [but was] completely stripped of its
'wild splendor'...with only the mosquitoes and leeches retaining
their vicious reputation." 103 min.
2002. France. Directed
by Michel Deville. Screenplay by Rosalinde Deville. With Simon Abkarian,
Zabou Breitman, Denis Podalydès. Veteran filmmaker Deville
fashions a bittersweet chamber piece about Jews in a 1946 Parisian
tailor shop quietly trying to adjust to normalcy after catastrophe.
In French with English subtitles. 85 min.
1971. USA. Written and directed by Leonard Kastle. With Shirley
Stoler, Tony LoBianco, Mary Jane Higby. Critic Michel Perez compared
Kastle's only film to Italian "verismo" opera. The film,
he wrote, "does not fall into the trap of black humor, nor
does it fall prey to the grotesque.... It could well be the best
modern tragedy that the cinema has given us in a long time."
107 min.
1961. USA. Directed by Jerry Lewis. Screenplay by Lewis, Bill Richmond.
With Lewis, Brian Donlevy, Howard McNear. Jerry Lewis has been a
bone of contention between Anglo-Saxon and French critics for years.
In The Errand Boy the filmmaker/actor turns a Hollywood
studio into a site of surrealistic riot. Please note that due
to illness, Jerry Lewis will not be introducing this film on Friday,
December 6, as originally scheduled. 92 min.
1961. USA. Written and directed by Jerry Lewis. With Lewis, Helen
Traubel, Pat Stanley. "By building an enormous dollhouse seen
in cross section to give an entomological overview of a matriarchal
anthill, Jerry allowed him[self] in a single shot to show us the
secret of his set, to place his cards on the table, demonstrate
how he was going to run his show, and surprise us over and over
again" (Robert Benayoun, Positif). 100 min.
Panelists include: Michel Ciment, Positif editor; Jean-Loup
Bourget and Michael Henry (Wilson), Positif contributors;
Gavin Smith, editor of Film Comment; and Dave Kehr, film
critic. Moderated by Laurence Kardish.
1972. USA. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington,
John William Corrington. With Barbara Hershey, David Carradine,
John Carradine. In Positif, Michael Henry (Wilson) notes
that with Mean Streets "Scorsese managed to escape
the Church and the 'Family,'" and asks how Scorsese was "going
to integrate into the 'other America.'" Scorsese's response
was his second film, Boxcar Bertha, set in Depression-era
Arkansas. 92 min.
1975. Germany. Written and directed
by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Margit Carstensen, Ulrich Faulhaber,
Brigitte Mira. "The title means anxiety of anxiety.... We have
here a woman who becomes almost crazy because she is afraid of becoming
crazy" (Jean-Loup Bourget, Positif). 88 min.
1989. Taiwan. Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Screenplay by Wu Nianzhen, Zhu Tianwen. With Li Tianlu, Chen Songyong,
Gao Gie. "The overworked term 'masterpiece' to designate an
artistic triumph...can be applied here without reservation.... Here
the destiny of old Father Lin and his four sons begins to resemble
a fable...of a country (Taiwan) shaken by History" (Yann Tobin,
Positif). In Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, and indigenous
dialect with English subtitles. 155 min.
1955. USA. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Screenplay by A. I. Bezzerides,
based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. With Ralph Meeker, Maxine
Cooper, Cloris Leachman. "As an American filmmaker Aldrich
works within well-defined genres, this time the thriller. But Aldrich
being who he is, his film is only seventy percent thriller, twenty
percent horror film, with a touch (ten percent) of science fiction"
(Roger Tailleur, Positif). 105 min.
1996. USA. Directed by Joel Coen. Screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen.
With William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand. The combination
of rigor and fantasy, which is so characteristic of the Coen brothers'
work, is particularly evident in Fargo where, as Alain
Masson writes in Positif, "the world is frozen solid.
All of it.... The spirit of comedy counterbalances the violence
of the gangster film and trumps it hands down." 98 min.
1959. France/Japan. Directed by Alain Resnais. Screenplay
by Marguerite Duras. With Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson.
Positif critic Bernard Pingaud wrote, "Resnais wishes
to give the audience a specific problem having to do with time...and
not simply tell us a story...." A French actress in Hiroshima
"remembers" a youthful affair in Nevers. In French with
English subtitles. 91 min.
1962. France/Italy.
Written and directed by Agnès Varda. With Corinne Marchand,
Antoine Bourseiller, Dorothée Black. One of the key works
of French cinema in the early sixties, a work whose narrative may
be constrained by the eponymous two-hour period, but whose style,
breezy and percussive, is liberating. A young and beautiful woman,
believing she may be dying, walks through Paris while awaiting the
results of a medical test. In French with English subtitles. 90
min.
1991. France. Written and directed by Maurice Pialat. With Jacques
Dutronc, Alexandra London, Gérard Sety. "[Van Gogh]
is a far cry from a standard film biography. Pialat makes van Gogh
an ordinary person, not center stage at all times but nonetheless
at the very core of the film" (Oliver Kohn, Positif).
In French with English subtitles. 155 min.
1949. Great Britain. Directed by Robert Hamer. Screenplay by Hamer,
John Dighton. With Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Alec Guinness.
Bernard Chardère, one of Positif's founders, described
the story as "that of a young man, the last in line to inherit
a dukedom, who, by various means, does in seven descendants in the
line above him, one by one. And he does so with considerable elegance...."
106 min.
1974. USA. Directed by Robert Altman. Screenplay by Joseph Walsh.
With George Segal, Elliott Gould, Ann Prentiss. "There is nothing
surprising about the fact that Robert Altman, who makes films for
the fun of it, should use California Split as a long-overdue
opportunity for him to engage, whether in person or by proxy, but
always euphorically, in his passion for gambling" (Michael
Henry [Wilson], Positif). 108 min.
1965.
France. Directed by Roman Polanski. Screenplay by Polanski, Gerard
Brach. With Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser. "From
Polanski, we sense the pleasure that we all share to some degree
on our continent in the specifically Anglo-Saxon art of telling
scary tales" (Michel Perez, Positif). Here the idea
of the victim is disturbingly subverted. 104 min.
1981. USA. Directed by John Boorman. Screenplay by Boorman, Rospo
Pallenberg. With Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson. Boorman,
a British filmmaker whose works are much admired by Positif,
robustly interprets the legends of King Arthur. 140 min.
1982. Sweden. Written and
directed by Ingmar Bergman. With Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Anna
Bergman. "The Bergman of Fanny and Alexander is a
different Bergman, a Bergman from another age, or shall we say two
other ages: childhood and old age, which he says melt into one another"
(Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Positif). In Swedish with English
subtitles. 189 min.
1971. Great Britain. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by
Kubrick. With Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, based
on the novel by Anthony Burgess. Kubrick's films have always divided
critics, but Positif has remained a steadfast advocate.
It saw A Clockwork Orange as both satiric and violent,
whose subject, although set in the near future, was its audience.
137 min.
1967. France/Italy. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Screenplay by
Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. With Catherine Deneuve,
Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page. "The adventure
of the young wife of a surgeon, who seeks in the forbidden territory
of a brothel the thrills she has not found in her married life,
consists of six daydreams and two evocations of the past, sandwiched
between seven episodes of real life" (Louis Seguin, Positif).
In French with English subtitles. 100 min.
1973. USA. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Screenplay by Gary Michael
White. With Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan. Scarecrow,
crowned with a Palme d'Or at Cannes, subverts the idea of an American
road movie by imagining two men drifting cross-country but traveling
nowhere. 115 min.
1978. USA. Written and directed by Terrence Malick. With Brooke
Adams, Richard Gere, Sam Shepard. A turn-of-the-century love story
that travels from Chicago to the wheat fields of the Midwest. "It
is living nature that is filmed, a nature that expresses the feelings
of the characters and their ties to the world in the purest romantic
tradition. In addition, there is loss, without any hope of returning
to a garden of Eden that was only glimpsed in all its magnificence"
(Michel Ciment, Positif). 95 min.
1956. Poland. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. Screenplay by Jerzy Stefan
Stawinski, based on his novel. With Tadeusz Janczar, Wienczyslaw
Glinski. Wajda's gritty yet tender portrait of a group of World
War II resistance fighters in the sewers of Warsaw "is neither
bathed in blissful optimism nor false pessimism, because it sees
both cruelty and the absurd, because it draws from this an immense
joie de vivre" (Ado Kyrou, Positif). In Polish with
English subtitles. 95 min.
1977. West Germany.
Directed by Wim Wenders. Screenplay by Wenders, based on the novel
Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith. With Bruno Ganz, Dennis
Hopper, Nicholas Ray. A mild-mannered picture framer from Hamburg
is severely tested when an American "friend"–the
mysterious and obsessive Mr. Ripley–involves him in murder.
In German and English with English subtitles. 123 min.
1998. Taiwan. Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. Screenplay by Tsai, Yang
Pi-ying. With Yang Kuei-Mei, Lee Kang-sheng, Miao Tien. Tsai was
asked to contribute to an international film series that was to
imagine a new millenium, 2000 As Seen By.... He responded
with this curious musical set in post-Armageddon Taipei, about a
boy whose floor is the deteriorating ceiling of a girl living in
the apartment below. 95 min.
1971. France/Germany/Switzerland.
Directed by Marcel Ophuls. Written by Ophuls, André Harris.
Ophuls used archival footage from the 1940s to frame his resonant
interviews with French citizens and German soldiers in this transcendent
documentary about memory, guilt, collaboration, and valor during
the Nazi occupation of the small French city Clermont-Ferrand. In
French and German with English subtitles. 260 min.
1957. Great Britain. Directed by Joseph Losey. Screenplay by Ben
Barzman. With Michael Redgrave, Ann Todd, Leo McKern. A father has
twenty-four hours to save his son from execution. "From the
very first sequence...we know that we are about to see a film directed
by someone who has taken his ideas to the limit," wrote a young
Bertrand Tavernier in his first review for Positif. 90
min.
1970. France/Italy/West Germany. Directed by Federico Fellini. Screenplay
by Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi. With Fellini, Riccardo Billi, Annie
Fratellini. "The Clowns is clearly a bit of an accident.
It is a small sponsored film with a (relatively) small budget, made
for television really. But [it] is one of [Fellini's] greatest films.
The apparently modest message paradoxically represents a deepening
and enrichment of the artist's personality" (Frédéric
Vitoux, Positif). In Italian with English subtitles. 92
min.
1995. France/Italy/Germany.
Directed by Claude Sautet. Written by Sautet, Jacques Fieschi, Yves
Ulmann. With Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Serrault, Jean-Hugues
Anglade, Claire Nadeau. Claude Sautet (1924-2000), an important
French filmmaker whose works have long been admired by Positif,
has had but a handful of films released in the U.S. Nelly and
Monsieur Arnaud was one of the most recent. A retired magistrate,
Mr. Arnaud, hires a young woman, Nelly, to transcribe his memoirs.
An emotional intimacy grows between the two, hardly acknowledged
but threatened when Nelly becomes involved with Mr. Arnaud's publisher.
In French with English subtitles. 105 min. (This film replaces
Sautet's Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others, which
has been dropped from the program.)
1993. Australia. Written and directed by Jane Campion. With Holly
Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin. "How is it possible
to simultaneously espouse the primacy of reason and depict the desire
to live and love, the mystery of creation? Jane Campion holds that
man believes himself to be a creature of reason although he is not"
(Thomas Bourguignon, Positif).120 min.
1972. Italy. Written and directed
by Francesco Rosi. With Gian Maria Volonté, Luigi Squarzina,
Peter Baldwin. "Death dominates Rosi's film just as it dominates
American detective films, his original source of inspiration,"
writes Michel Ciment in Positif. The true story of Mattei,
a poor Sicilian policeman's son who became the head of Italy's largest
oil company and whose wildly successful life mirrored Italy's postwar
economic boom. When Mattei dies in a suspicious plane crash, the
"accident" prompts an investigation. In Italian with English
subtitles. 115 min.
1997. USA. Directed by David Lynch. Screenplay by Lynch, Barry Gifford.
With Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty. "The
codes of film noir, not to mention neo-film noir, have progressed
to the 'shaker' of Lynchian fantasy to redefine the outlines of
an America that exorcises its puritanical tendencies through sex
and violence" (Philippe Rouyer, Positif). 135 min.
1998. France. Written and directed by Eric Rohmer. With Marie Rivière,
Béatrice Romand, Alain Libolt. In Autumn Tale, the
final installment in Rohmer's quartet Tales of the Four Seasons,
Magali, a widow with grown children, confides to her friend Isabelle
that it would be easier to find buried treasure than a man. Without
Magali's knowledge, Isabelle tries to find her a lover. In French
with English subtitles. 112 min.
1974-75. Greece. Written and directed
by Theo Angelopoulos. With Eva Kotamanidou, Aliki Georgouli, Stratos
Pahis. An epic history of Greece, beginning in 1939 and lasting
through the civil war. The story is told through a wandering band
of provincial actors performing a shepherd's play in Greek villages.
In Greek with English subtitles. 230 min.
1961. Italy. Directed by
Pietro Germi. Written by Germi, Ennio de Concini, Alfred Gianetti.
With Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli. Positif
championed many of the Italian comedies of the Sixties, of which
Divorce, Italian Style is among the most well-known. In
Italy, where divorce was impossible, a Sicilian husband, in love
with his young cousin, plans a scheme in which honor would demand
his otherwise faithful wife's murder. In addition to Academy Award
nominations for Best Director and Best Actor, the film took home
the award for Best Screenplay—a rare feat for a film produced
outside the U.S. In Italian with English subtitles. 104 min. (This
film replaces Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso, which is not
available at this time.)
1994. France/Poland/Switzerland.
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Screenplay by Kieslowski, Krzysztof
Piesiewicz. With Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frédérique
Feder. Part three of Kieslowski's trilogy about contemporary Europe
tells of a growing relationship between an intelligent young woman,
a fashion model, and a lonely retired judge, now cloistered in his
home. In French with English subtitles. 95 min.
1958. Great Britain. Directed by Terence Fisher. Screenplay by Jimmy
Sangster. With Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Melissa Stribling.
"The Horror of Dracula is no doubt the best vampire
film since Nosferatu, the only one to appeal consciously
to eroticism. With sets as meticulous as those described in gothic
novels, no expense spared in the direction (with a predilection
for bloody details), and...an abundance of pretty women" (Jean-Paul
Török, Positif). 82 min.
1973. Great Britain. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Screenplay
by Anthony Shaffer, based on his play. With Laurence Olivier, Michael
Caine, Margo Channing. Mankiewicz was a filmmaker particularly favored
by Positif, which considered his film Sleuth a
suspenseful masterwork about betrayal and game playing. 138 min.
1990. Iran. Written, directed, and edited by Abbas Kiarostami. With
Hosein Sabzian, Hassan Frazmand, Abolfazl Ahankhah. Stéphane
Goudet writes in Positif that "Kiarostami's cinema
likes to play with contradictions, inconsistencies, and temporal
paradoxes. In Close-Up, he tries to make all the protagonists'
dreams come true" (which includes giving amateurs and con men
who want to act and direct the opportunity to do so... ). In Farsi
with English subtitles. 94 min.
1976. France/Japan.
Written and directed by Nagisa Oshima.With Eiko Matsuda, Tatsuya
Fuji, Taiji Tonoyama. "Never has open and natural eroticism
been so pure. So high is [Oshima's] regard for the sex act that
we view the film with the same distance as his earlier, on the surface,
more political works" (Robert Benayoun, Positif).
In Japanese with English subtitles. 115 min.
1994. USA. Directed by Tim Burton. Screenplay by Scott Alexander,
Larry Karaszewski. With Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Patricia Arquette.
"Burton's Ed Wood is an innocent blessed with eternal optimism,
who obstinately refuses to allow himself to be affected by adversity,
hard knocks, or lack of understanding in a hostile world. His main
quality (which also causes his downfall) is absolute self-confidence"
(Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Positif). 127 min.
1994. USA. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Screenplay by Tarantino,
Roger Avary. With John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman,
Harvey Keitel. Tarantino grabbed Positif's attention with
his first feature Reservoir Dogs, and reaffirmed his promise
with the astonishingly successful Pulp Fiction, a work
that refers to the history of American gangster movies while being
entirely original and fiercely engaging. 154 min.
1939. USA. Directed by Orson Welles and William Vance. With Welles
and Virginia Nicholson. This fiction short was completed before
Welles made Citizen Kane. Silent. 5 min.
Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report). 1955. Spain/France/Switzerland.
Written and directed by Orson Welles. With Welles, Michael Redgrave,
Patricia Medina, Akim Tamiroff, Mischa Auer, Katina Paxinou. This
flamboyant, virtually hysterical mystery about a very powerful man
in search of his past is compelling not only for its idiosyncratic
style but in its vivid illustration of the filmmaker's passion for
the trickster, the charlatan, and the manipulator. 95 min.
(This program replaces Welles' Vérités et
mensonges (F for Fake), which is not available at this time.)
1999. France/Italy.
Directed by Raoul Ruiz. Screenplay by Gilles Taurand, based on Remembrance
of Things Past by Marcel Proust. With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle
Béart, Vincent Perez, John Malkovich. "A Proustian sentence
is long, sinewy, off-center, packed with incidents, expansions,
overlapping subplots. Yet Ruiz, with astounding skill, has found
the right balance of this sentence through the camera's own movements....
Time Regained is more than a film adaptation of Proust,
it is a cinematographically Proustian film" (Guy Scarpetta,
Positif). In French with English subtitles. 158 min.
1970. Great Britain. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Screenplay by
Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza. With Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown. In
a London bathhouse, a fifteen-year old boy falls in love with an
older woman. "For Skolimowski the action is in Poland, meaning
everywhere that he finds the special sensibility that has become
his inner homeland.... This is Skolimowski's finest film on adolescence"
(Michel Sineux, Positif). 88 min.
1992. Taiwan.
Directed by Edward Yang. Screenplay by Yang, Yan Hongya, Yang Shunqing,
Lai Mingtang. With Zhang Guozhu, Elaine Jin, Zhang Zhen. "The
film is primarily a story about gangs, a microcosm of civil war
and war between nations, marked by extreme violence in spite of
the age of the protagonists, from 14 to 25" (Thomas Bourguignon,
Positif). In Mandarin with English subtitles. 240 min.
1975. France. Directed
by Bertrand Tavernier. Screenplay by Tavernier, Jean Aurenche. With
Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Jean-Pierre Marielle. "For
his second feature film, Bertrand Tavernier offers us the chance
to rediscover the Regency. The adventures begin on Palm Sunday of
1719 on the coast of Brittany" (Jacques Demeure, Positif).
In French with English subtitles. 119 min.
1988. Great Britain. Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. With
Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, Joely Richardson. "A little
girl jumping rope counts up to 100. It is night and her counting
is also for the stars coming out to which she assigns invented names....
Greenaway's style sets in motion a sensitivity to the formal structures
that govern the perception of the world" (Alain Masson, Positif).
114 min.
1972. USSR. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Screenplay by Tarkovsky,
Fridrikh Gorenshtein. With Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis.
"Solaris is a faraway planet completely covered by
a foaming mutable ocean that exerts a dangerous fascination on the
scientists posted at the space station. The hero of the film discovers
to his cost that the ocean is a kind of immense subconscious in
which the thoughts, memories, and dreams of men come to haunt them
in life. It also resuscitates the dead" (Emmanuel Carrère,
Positif). In Russian with English subtitles. 165 min.
1968. France. Directed by Alain Resnais. Screenplay by Resnais,
Jacques Sternberg. With Olga Georges-Picot, Claude Rich, Anouk Ferjac.
Screened at the 2002 Cannes International Film Festival in tribute
to Positif's 50th anniversary, Resnais's rarely seen and
recently restored science-fiction love story is about a suicidal
young man who is enlisted for a timetravel experiment but whose
memories corrupt the machinery. In French with English subtitles.
91 min.
1996. Great Britain. Written and directed by Mike Leigh. With Timothy
Spall, Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste. A young woman seeks
out an unlikely mother; a single mother is in conflict with her
daughter; a portrait photographer and his wife are having marital
problems. Noël Herpe observes in Positif that although
Secrets and Lies seems on the surface to be "nothing
more than a series of disconnected fragments," it is about
"people with pasts, sufferings, things to say." 141 min.
1967. Hungary.
Directed by Miklós Jancsó. Screenplay by Gyula Hernádi.
Set in Russia during its 1918-1920 civil war, the film describes
in rhapsodic shots the violent encounter between a unit of the Red
Army populated with Hungarian Internationalists and a contingent
of White Guards. In Hungarian and Russian with English subtitles.
92 min.
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