Waning One-Time Art House Titans

[Zot!]

That’s true, yes, although I tend to think of Army of Shadows as being in that inner circle of “cinephile favorites” more so than Diva, which evens things out I suppose.

Diva does seem to be a staple of high school French classes though, which I’m sure gives it recognition.

Huge Diva apologist here, it's really one of my favorite movies ever, and think people undersell it with the Cinema Du Look slur....that said I have no idea what the US fanbase for this is, I have never met a real life Diva fan, and have never heard it being used for educational purposes. For that matter a high school French class would not own a 4k player...for shame.

[Lowry_Sam]

( from best UHD discussion)

....that said I have no idea what the US fanbase for this is, I have never met a real life Diva fan, and have never heard it being used for educational purposes.

As an American high school student when it was released, I can say that it was very popular among the college-bound and "hipsters" of the day (ie. those into new wave music or the art scene). Most foreign language films only appealed to adults, but Diva & Das Boot broke box office records for foreign-language films in the US because their appeal broadened to younger audiences (and Siskel & Ebert's reviews helped with that). French & German classes went to see them for an extracurricular field trip. The visual style of Diva influenced the way kids decorated their rooms. Everyone old enough to move out on their own wanted an open-air warehouse style apartment in NYC so they could do their art or music.

It also briefly popularized listening to opera among the same demographic & the soundtrack sold very well. Too bad they're not releasing the soundtrack with it in a limited edition.

[Lowry_Sam]

Huge Diva apologist here, it's really one of my favorite movies ever, and think people undersell it with the Cinema Du Look slur....that said I have no idea what the US fanbase for this is, I have never met a real life Diva fan, and have never heard it being used for educational purposes.

It was more successful in the US than in France upon release & discussion of that continued here

[domino harvey]

Yeah, it’s why all of the other cinema du look movies got released here. The reason it feels like it fell out of fashion is that at the height of the home disc movement, it was MIA for a while and then only finally released on a short lived label

[Lowry_Sam]

I seem to recall some kind of rights issue holding up Diva on dvd (initial or re-release?) & speculation on whether Criterion would get it back (blu-ray). With all the earlier titles Criterion has been bringing back, I'm surprised that this isn't one. While it was the most successful international film at the time of its release (supplanting earlier French hits The Tall Blonde Man With One Black Shoe & La Cage Aux Folles), I would be surprised that after the rise of Miramax & the wider distribution of international films in the US, it would still be able to command such a high asking price that Criterion couldn't afford it, as its biggest appeal is among GenX & Boomers, but maybe someone at Kino was a fan & willing to pay anything for the rights back in 2020 for the blu-ray with an eye on a 4k upgrade at some point before they expired. Rialto only has a handful of screenings to promote the 4k restoration, so it doesn't seem like much is being done to win over new audiences, at least in the US.

[domino harvey]

The Tall Blonde Man With One Black Shoe

Another once popular French film completely left behind from the cultural convo after not being on DVD during the prime years of the format

[MichaelB]

Diva was massive on the London repertory scene throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s. Even by the mid-90s it was one of the most reliable cash cows that we had, and we milked it for all it was worth.

In fact, when I put together a top ten most frequently booked films for the Everyman Cinema's 60th anniversary in 1993, I wasn't at all surprised to find out what the very comfortable winner was, and I doubt anyone else was either. If I remember rightly, it notched up more than thirty bookings, and doubtless a few more thereafter.

[rrenault]

It’s interesting to learn all this since one doesn’t typically hear about Diva being an Anglophone arthouse sensation the way one does with Wings of Desire or The Three Colors Trilogy.

I suppose, similarly to Un Homme et Une Femme, it’s one of those arthouse hits that eventually fell by the wayside in cinephile discourse.

[Zot!]

( from best UHD discussion)

....that said I have no idea what the US fanbase for this is, I have never met a real life Diva fan, and have never heard it being used for educational purposes.

As an American high school student when it was released, I can say that it was very popular among the college-bound and "hipsters" of the day (ie. those into new wave music or the art scene). Most foreign language films only appealed to adults, but Diva & Das Boot broke box office records for foreign-language films in the US because their appeal broadened to younger audiences (and Siskel & Ebert's reviews helped with that). French & German classes went to see them for an extracurricular field trip. The visual style of Diva influenced the way kids decorated their rooms. Everyone old enough to move out on their own wanted an open-air warehouse style apartment in NYC so they could do their art or music.

It also briefly popularized listening to opera among the same demographic & the soundtrack sold very well. Too bad they're not releasing the soundtrack with it in a limited edition.

I was a kindergartener in 1982, so apparently I missed the fad phase of it, and caught it on VHS, and later the Criterion laserdisc, before it sort of fell into limbo. By that time it was something of a pre-internet relic already. I definitely had immediate feelings about how incredibly cool everybody in the film was. The hero-Jules, his friend, but also the gangsters, the girls, the music, and the head guru, who owned not only a gigantic loft painted all black, but also a lighthouse, and several vintage Citroens. I'm sure the moped hipsters of today are probably fans, but otherwise it never seemed to fully recover its audience, but maybe I'm just out of touch. Anyways, for me a standout of the 80's, and am overjoyed we have not one but two 4k's incoming.

[Zot!]

It’s interesting to learn all this since one doesn’t typically hear about Diva being an Anglophone arthouse sensation the way one does with Wings of Desire or The Three Colors Trilogy.

I suppose, similarly to Un Homme et Une Femme, it’s one of those arthouse hits that eventually fell by the wayside in cinephile discourse.

I'm US based, but I suspect Diva was also hampered because it predated the home video proliferation, where people could watch these things regardless of their location, and not just reparatory cinemas in major cities. See also something like Jodorowsky, who I think was a huge sensation in NYC in the 70's...but unheard of and unviewable anywhere else in the US until the next millenium.

[MichaelB]

I'm US based, but I suspect Diva was also hampered because it predated the home video proliferation, where people could watch these things regardless of their location, and not just reparatory cinemas in major cities. See also something like Jodorowsky, who I think was a huge sensation in NYC in the 70's...but unheard of and unviewable anywhere else in the US until the next millenium.

Conversely, Diva was arguably the first big subtitled arthouse home video hit in the UK, and one of the very few subtitled films that was available on home video throughout that decade, as it wasn't until the 1990s that foreign-language home video releases really became a thing in Britain. Although I think home video became a genuine mass medium in Britain somewhat earlier than in many other countries, and Diva was perfectly timed to cash in.

[The Curious Sofa]

It’s interesting to learn all this since one doesn’t typically hear about Diva being an Anglophone arthouse sensation the way one does with Wings of Desire or The Three Colors Trilogy.

I suppose, similarly to Un Homme et Une Femme, it’s one of those arthouse hits that eventually fell by the wayside in cinephile discourse.

I too remember when Diva was the art house movie to see. Un Homme et Une Femme is a good comparison and there are good reasons why both fell by the wayside.

My once-hot-now-not art house movie of choice would be Verhoeven's The Fourth Man but that genuinely is down to it not being available.

[MichaelB]

In Britain, it also had a particularly effective marketing campaign - I remember going to see it specifically because of this poster:



...and note the "Now On Video" bar at the bottom; I think this was released near-simultaneously in cinemas and on video, which was very unusual at the time.

Palace Pictures - i.e. Steve Woolley's outfit, which also ran the Scala Cinema - was behind it.

[Zot!]

Hmmm, thanks MichaelB, that is indeed a contrast. They should get somebody to speak on the history of it's popularity overseas as an extra for the 8 K release . I remember A Man and a Woman showing sporadically on PBS (US public television), along with John Jost's All the Vermeers in New York (yet another victim of shifting trends.)

[beamish14]

I really do think that Beineix’s post-Betty Blue works deserve a major reappraisal. Roselynne and the Lions has some absolutely astounding imagery; there is one moment with a camera seemingly gliding across a circus tent that is unforgettable

It’s a shame that he wasted years working on an Amelia Earhart biopic in Hollywood. I’m sure the money was great, but he was booted and they started over with Mira Nair, and her film was a bomb

[MichaelB]

I tried to muster interest in the Beineix films that weren't Diva and Betty Blue by double-billing The Moon in the Gutter and Roselyne and the Lions a couple of times, but the audience reaction was pretty much a collective shrug. Although at least I got to see them both on the big screen, so there was that.

(Diva was the clear winner in terms of booking frequency, but I'm pretty sure Betty Blue ended up in the top five and possibly higher.)

[therewillbeblus]

Roselyne and the Lions didn't do much for me, but Moon in the Gutter succeeds at building a film around pure style. I really wish the scrapped extra footage was found, as it could've been an operatic masterpiece with a bit more material filling in the margins

[beamish14]

I tried to muster interest in the Beineix films that weren't Diva and Betty Blue by double-billing The Moon in the Gutter and Roselyne and the Lions a couple of times, but the audience reaction was pretty much a collective shrug. Although at least I got to see them both on the big screen, so there was that.

(Diva was the clear winner in terms of booking frequency, but I'm pretty sure Betty Blue ended up in the top five and possibly higher.)

I think Roselynne only received a dubbed release in Britain. He learned his lesson from Moon in the Gutter and retained the ability to create a significantly longer television/home video cut

[MichaelB]

I think Roselynne only received a dubbed release in Britain.

What I booked and played was definitely in French. I also don't recall being offered a choice, which suggests that it was only available in French - and a quick check of the relevant Monthly Film Bulletin (December 1989) confirms that it was subtitled.

That said, it might conceivably have been dubbed on video, since this was just before subtitled VHS releases really took off.

[tolbs1010]

This is an interesting new thread title that makes me wonder about other potential candidates that could fall under its banner. Volker Schlöndorff maybe? Massive success with The Tin Drum and generally acclaimed throughout his prime. Now? Rarely even gets mentioned when people discuss famous German filmmakers and many of his best films have no hi-def physical release. I am partial to Circle Of Deceit (by far the best of the many 'journos in a war zone' films that came out in the 80's, imo) and Homo Faber (Voyager) as his best films. I have been hoping that Criterion somehow got the rights to the former from Kino and are eventually going to give it a proper release. They have already released lesser films of his.

I even suggested a Schlöndorff page for the Filmmakers section on this site a while back. It was ignored or rebuffed, which is cool. Maybe the mods determined there simply isn't enough interest in old Volker to justify it. There is no Beineix page either, though there is one for Lelouch.

With regard to the title of this thread, I may be overestimating how much The Tin Drum actually put butts in seats in art house theaters. If that is the real criteria of this thread, a few names that come to mind from my theater-going life would be Jeunet, Tykwer, and Tornatore. Or did they just make popular entertainments that happened to be in a foreign language that Americans came out to see?

This thread title has multiple avenues of consideration.

[beamish14]

Schlöndorff is a really interesting one. He made a handful of really prestigious American television films with A-list actors, but his Hollywood studio fare like The Handmaid’s Tale and the truly execrable Palmetto sent him back to Deutschland.

I like his small scale, clearly limited budget films from recent years like Calm at Sea and Diplomacy, both of which deal with his frequent subject of Nazism

[tolbs1010]

the truly execrable Palmetto sent him back to Deutschland.

Still haven't seen it but a descriptor like 'truly execrable' actually moves it up in my Kanopy queue. Hoping for so bad it's kind of interesting.

[The Curious Sofa]

Of the main directors of the New German Cinema I always found Schlöndorff by far the least interesting. His dutiful, didactic adaptations of literary works are mostly rather dull. For comparison, watch Fassbinder's Effi Briest to see what can be done with a literary adaption in German cinema at the time. Even The Tin Drum could have done with a more visionary, imaginative filmmaker at the helm. I think The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is his one good film and that's because it caught the Zeitgeist and it has Angela Winkler's compelling performance at its centre. But mostly his films remind me of TV movies. Mind, his former collaborator Margarete von Trotta took everything that was bad about Schlöndorff's movies and amplified it, churning out one dour, well-intentioned history lesson after another, displaying zero wit or style.

[rrenault]

It's interesting that while Wim Wenders does have detractors who slight him as an "overrated middlebrow arthouse favorite", his most popular films like Wings of Desire have stood the test of time in cinephile circles in a way Beineix, Volker, and Lelouch have not.

The same applies to Kieslowski. He often gets dismissed as 'middlebrow' in certain circles but has nonetheless endured.

For what it's worth, Wings of Desire never really made much of an impression on me until I watched the 4K restoration.

[MichaelB]

I suspect that the certain circles that dismiss Kieślowski as "middlebrow" haven't seen anything pre-Dekalog and possibly not even pre-The Double Life of Véronique! Because there's nothing middlebrow about what he made in his first two creative decades.

Two other candidates for this thread, both of whom had incredibly prolific careers spanning the 1950s to the 2010s with no significant gaps in output - Andrzej Wajda and Miklós Jancsó. At various points in their careers (Wajda in the 1950s and the turn of the 1970s/80s, Jancsó from the mid-60s to the mid-70s), they were ranked right up there with the absolute giants of European cinema (and with good reason), but the vast majority of their output is far less well known internationally, and for the most part was never distributed in English-friendly form at the time.

Take a random film buff and ask them to name a Wajda film between Danton (1982) and Katyń (2007) and if you get anything at all it'll be Korczak (1990) - but he made loads of others, most of which barely got seen outside Poland, and despite a cast that included Isabelle Huppert and Omar Sharif, I'm not sure that The Possessed (1988) got seen much outside France. And with Jancsó the challenge is to name any film that he made after Private Vices, Public Virtues (1976) - even though his output remained similarly prolific right up to 2010.

Of course, part of the problem is that they didn't just churn out endless clones of the films that made them internationally famous, and the ones that weren't about WWII or Solidarity (in Wajda's case) or which featured ten-minute takes with incredible choreography of hundreds of men and horses (in Jancsó's) were deemed to have far less appeal.

Sometimes rightly - Wajda's 1990s films are a fascinating case study in an artist struggling to be relevant after a major national upheaval, while Jancsó's sextet of raucous, extremely colloquial comedies about the gravediggers Pepe and Kapa from the turn of the 2000s are pretty much incomprehensible to non-Hungarians - but there's still quite a bit of superb stuff that to all intents and purposes is unknown outside their native countries. I'd love to work on a special edition of Wajda's The Wedding (1972) - an absolutely astonishing film, with notably hallucinatory cinematography by the great Witold Sobociński (which he shot between The Third Part of the Night and The Hourglass Sanatorium), but so intensely Polish that I'm not surprised that it's all but unknown elsewhere.

(And of course mentioning those titles is a reminder that Andrzej Żuławski and Wojciech Jerzy Has are in a very similar situation! Most of Has's films are low-key chamber pieces far removed from the baroque extravagance of The Saragossa Manuscript and The Hourglass Sanatorium, but presumably that's precisely why they're comparatively unseen.)