Waning One-Time Art House Titans

[rrenault]

Maybe I'm veering slightly off-topic here, but when it comes to slogging off supposedly "middlebrow arthouse fare", I've often wondered why the 'arthouse crowd' and OG Sarris-style auteurists 'can't just get along', since, at the end of the day, both camps care deeply about film as an art form rather than merely as entertainment.

[MichaelB]

In a fair number of cases "arthouse" is shorthand for "being in foreign" - a great many of these films wouldn't be considered "arthouse" in their home countries, and there'd be general bafflement there as to why they might be. Thinking of a very recent UK release, a Czech would be genuinely bemused as to why a thoroughly mainstream comedy like Who Wants to Kill Jessie? was considered "arthouse".

Come to think of it, this also works when British films that were 100% made as ordinary commercial releases are rebadged as "arthouse" in the US, but I daresay they've similarly become weird and foreign as a by-product of the Atlantic crossing. For instance, I've never considered Ken Loach to be remotely "arthouse" - he's alternated between massively popular TV productions like Cathy Come Home and Days of Hope with cinema films that, while they inevitably attract smaller audiences, are nonetheless also considered to be thoroughly mainstream. But in the US, they're pretty much invariably labelled "arthouse" and sometimes even subtitled.

(In fact, Sweet Sixteen was even subtitled in the UK, at least south of the Scottish border, although in a rather interesting way - only the first reel was subtitled, the idea being that by then you should have clicked with the Glasgow accents.)

[The Curious Sofa]

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.

After The American Friend, I'm not a big fan of Wim Wenders' work, and I regard Kings of the Road as his best film. Wings of Desire becomes a bit of a mess after the first act, I never understood what Columbo was doing in it, and the female lead is a cypher. The characters and their actions in Paris, Texas never made much sense to me either. However, I do think he's far superior ton the three directors you mentioned. He has a distinctive aesthetic and voice, which I can respect, even if I'm no fan of the sentimentality that increasingly crept into his work.

[domino harvey]

In a fair number of cases "arthouse" is shorthand for "being in foreign" - a great many of these films wouldn't be considered "arthouse" in their home countries, and there'd be general bafflement there as to why they might be. Thinking of a very recent UK release, a Czech would be genuinely bemused as to why a thoroughly mainstream comedy like Who Wants to Kill Jessie? was considered "arthouse".

When he introduced En liberte! as the opening film of the annual French film festival in NYC, Pio Marmai offended the entire audience of blue hairs and snobs by (rightly) telling us that the movie isn’t really a gala film festival movie but the kind of thing you pay $5 to see at a local movie theatre back home. I was in fact the only one in the audience to laugh at his comment, perhaps because everyone there paid like six times that amount to hear him say that!

[MichaelB]

See also Patrice Leconte, who's the "arthouse" director of Monsieur Hire and The Hairdresser's Husband in the English-speaking world, but who had already been firmly established in France as the man behind such raucously crowd-pleasing fare as Les Bronzés font du ski (aka French Fried Vacation 2).

Although, in fairness, Leconte's more "arthouse" films do at least merit that label, but I'm vividly reminded of my friend Anne Billson's experience when she was listed as one of the twenty most promising up-and-coming British novelists in 1993 - much to her alarm, because her novel Suckers wasn't remotely intended as chin-stroking literary fiction; it was a very funny and (as a recent re-read swiftly established) really startlingly prescient horror novel about vampires taking over London's Docklands following the region's extensive refurbishment as a financial and technology hub. And because she was one of the few women on the list and the only genre fiction author, the spotlight turned on her in ways that she found decidedly unhelpful and uncomfortable - although it wasn't remotely her fault that she'd been shortlisted, she seemed to have been regarded as some kind of interloper.

(Interestingly, she's not in the group photo attached to this article - not the only omission, granted, but I wonder if there's a story behind that?)

[rrenault]

Speaking of Ken Loach, he’s won the Palme d’Or more than once, so he clearly has “auteur cred” in France, as well, whether merited or not.

That said, I’m not sure the concept of calling something an “arthouse film” really exists outside the Anglosphere, since in continental European countries there’s a larger tendency in the cultural mainstream to “museumify” film culture in general, which encompasses Haneke, Wenders, or Antonioni as much as it does Nolan and Tarantino.

[The Curious Sofa]

Here in Germany there definitely is a difference between between mainstream and art house and art house movies will almost exclusively play in art house theatres. One difference here is that all non-German language films get dubbed, which puts, say, Italian or French movies more on an even keel with German and English language ones. But rather than arthouse movies getting more mainstream, that means commercial European movies play here which you wouldn't get released in the US or the U.K., because in those countries, subtitles are synonymous with art house films. But art house doesn't exclusively apply to foreign language films anyway, many independent movies by auteur US filmmakers also get counted as such.

[Michael Kerpan]

>> all non-German language films get dubbed

Even "art house" ones? If so, is only the dubbed version screened?

[MichaelB]

I've seen Ran in dubbed Italian, which was quite an experience!

I can't speak for Germans, but for many decades Italians dubbed everything - I gather this is a legacy of a 1930s decree whereby Mussolini wanted to eliminate the possibility of subversive anti-Fascist messages slipping through in foreign-language dialogue. I remember an Italian friend of mine being absolutely astounded when I took her to Il Postino in London, as she fully expected it to be in dubbed English, and I'm not sure she'd ever seen subtitles before (certainly not in a cinema).

And because Italians are so acculturated to dubbing, they've never been that fussed about lip-sync, hence a long-established convention that actors should speak English on set whenever viable, as English speakers are fussy about lip-sync.

France is different, as they have enough heavy-duty film buffs to make original-language releases commercially viable - in major cities you almost always get a choice, although out in the sticks it's usually French dubbing only (but those cinemas tend not to show "arthouse" type films anyway).

[The Curious Sofa]

>> all non-German language films get dubbed

Even "art house" ones? If so, is only the dubbed version screened?

Big cities which have enough English speakers, have cinemas which screen subtitled and original versions. But most Germans still watch everything dubbed, even art house releases. When I grew up it seemed perfectly normal to me, but then I spent over three decades in the UK and the US before moving back and now its really weird to me that nobody minds that for the lip movements don't match, the acting is really bad and everything sounds like it was recorded in a studio. How can you assess a performance when you don't hear the original actor?

I saw an interesting documentary about dubbing which pointed out that the European countries where dubbing is most common, Germany, France and Spain, all had fascist regimes, which objected to their citizens listening to dialogue other then their own language.

[The Curious Sofa]

I've seen Ran in dubbed Italian, which was quite an experience!

I can't speak for Germans, but for many decades Italians dubbed everything - I gather this is a legacy of a 1930s decree whereby Mussolini wanted to eliminate the possibility of subversive anti-Fascist messages slipping through in foreign-language dialogue. I remember an Italian friend of mine being absolutely astounded when I took her to Il Postino in London, as she fully expected it to be in dubbed English, and I'm not sure she'd ever seen subtitles before (certainly not in a cinema).

Spoiler

And because Italians are so acculturated to dubbing, they've never been that fussed about lip-sync, hence a long-established convention that actors should speak English on set whenever viable, as English speakers are fussy about lip-sync.

France is different, as they have enough heavy-duty film buffs to make original-language releases commercially viable - in major cities you almost always get a choice, although out in the sticks it's usually French dubbing only (but those cinemas tend not to show "arthouse" type films anyway).

There are some interesting cases in German dubs, in Hitchcock's Notorious for example the Nazis were changed to drug smugglers and the film was titled Weißes Gift/White Poison. I don't think it was released in Germany till the early 50s but the country was not ready yet to have Hollwood deal with Hitler, in fact it wasn't really ready till the mini-series Holocaust came out and kicked off film and TV seriously starting deal with the Nazi legacy. The Sound of Music ended after the wedding, everything with the von Trapps fleeing the Nazis was lopped off and Germany was the only country where the movie flopped (it also is a remake of a popular German film, in which the Nazi threat is more marginal).

Most German film and TV didn't record dialogue till the 80s or so, but its somewhat less noticable because in most cases the actors spoke German. I think all or most of Fassbinder's films were shot that way, though he would have appreciated the artificiality that came with post-synchronization.

[JSC]

I think one of the most incredible I heard was the German dub for Do the Right Thing.

[The Curious Sofa]

I bet. Just wait till you hear the "jive" scene from Airplane! in German!

[DarkImbecile]

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.

Actually, I just checked and I responded to your PM in March 2023 and said I’d work on getting a thread started, and you replied with (direct quote) “no rush”, which I just took extremely literally.

[MichaelB]

His centenary falls in 2039, so that might be a good target to aim for.

[hearthesilence]

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.

After The American Friend, I'm not a big fan of Wim Wenders' work, and I regard Kings of the Road as his best film. Wings of Desire becomes a bit of a mess after the first act, I never understood what Columbo was doing in it, and the female lead is a cypher. The characters and their actions in Paris, Texas never made much sense to me either. However, I do think he's far superior ton the three directors you mentioned. He has a distinctive aesthetic and voice, which I can respect, even if I'm no fan of the sentimentality that increasingly crept into his work.

Wenders's narrative films are pretty hit-or-miss for me, but the "Road" trilogy, The State of Things with Hammett, Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas are ones I like quite a bit and would revisit again. To be less charitable, I probably have a few reservations about many of these, but not enough to overshadow what's best about them. (Alice in the Cities is easily my favorite.) I think his documentaries are generally strong, but there may be quite a few I haven't seen.

I've heard the same about Kieslowski, and given the nature of, say, The Decalogue and Three Colors it's possible the conceptual framework suggests something more simple and schematic than they really are, but I don't buy into it, I think his films come off better and richer as I revisit them.

[beamish14]

I think one of the most incredible I heard was the German dub for Do the Right Thing.

God, I’d love to hear the German Radio Raheem

[pistolwink]

In some sense almost every "art house" director meets the criteria for this thread because it's only the very lucky (and, sometimes, talented and productive) few that sustain international attention for the duration of their careers or even more than a few years. Peruse lists of films that played major festivals over the years and you're likely to respond with a lot of "Who?"s and "Oh, yeah that guy"s.

I guess what the thread brought to mind for me is directors who were once critically celebrated but whose films—even the once-celebrated ones—are seldom mentioned anymore. Aside from the ones already mentioned, Mike Figgis comes to mind (not that I ever thought much of his movies). Haven't heard his name in yonks. And the much more interesting Peter Greenaway, similarly, seems to be mentioned a lot less than his profile in the 1980s and 1990s would have led you to imagine.

[dda1996a]

Figgis isn't really that interesting to be honest - never liked Leaving Las Vegas, and his other most note-worthy film is the unwatchable Timecode.

Greenaway is an interesting choice, as he never went soft and played to the crowd, but rather crawled far up his ass (I enjoyed those post Vierny/90s films somewhat). I think people still hold his wonderful run until The Pillow Book in high esteem, but they're just too weird to really get latched on by the majority (and aren't as excessive as The Devils, for example).

To be honest, I think if one goes through the Academy Award nominees/winners for the best foreign film, will discover a lot of directors who were nominated and/or won multiple times and have been forgotten by history completely.

[MichaelB]

Many of the sometimes bizarre choices for Best Foreign Film were fleetingly famous only because of their surprise win. For instance, who remembers 1991's Journey of Hope, which I've just cited for the fourth time in these forums' entire history, all three previous cases merely featuring its inclusion on a list?

But that beat Cyrano de Bergerac, Ju Dou and The Nasty Girl.

[tolbs1010]

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.

Actually, I just checked and I responded to your PM in March 2023 and said I’d work on getting a thread started, and you replied with (direct quote) “no rush”, which I just took extremely literally.

His centenary falls in 2039, so that might be a good target to aim for.

Ha! No worries. It probably isn't necessary at this point. I mostly wanted to praise Circle Of Deceit, which I've already done on this thread in abbreviated form. beamish shat on Palmetto and praised a couple of the later films (I also liked Diplomacy; haven't seen Calm At Sea), and Curious Sofa made a couple of excellent points about Volker, particularly about how dull and didactic the films with von Trotta are. That's three posts that would have gone on Volker's thread, and I suspect it wouldn't have much action beyond that.

I guess what the thread brought to mind for me is directors who were once critically celebrated but whose films—even the once-celebrated ones—are seldom mentioned anymore.

This is what I was thinking as well and why Volker crossed my mind. Others mentioned Wenders, who is another good example. Lina Wertmüller is probably another good one. Then there are Directors who had an actual 'one-time' box office success under a supposed 'art house' label who were never as consistently critically praised. Discussion about Beineix kind of started this thread and he probably falls into that category with Diva (which holds up well; saw it again recently). Jeunet and Tykwer too, though I hated their hit films. Is Bong Joon Ho's Parasite an 'art house' film? I don't really think of any of those films that way, but in the States pretty much any non-English speaking film that doesn't feature martial arts and sells a decent amount of tickets gets labeled an 'art house hit'. Or at least it used to be that way. I haven't paid much attention to advertising and critical notices in recent years.

For instance, I've never considered Ken Loach to be remotely "arthouse" - he's alternated between massively popular TV productions like Cathy Come Home and Days of Hope with cinema films that, while they inevitably attract smaller audiences, are nonetheless also considered to be thoroughly mainstream. But in the US, they're pretty much invariably labelled "arthouse" and sometimes even subtitled.

I bought the Twilight Time Ken Loach twofer of Riff-Raff and Raining Stones. It didn't have subtitles and I was lost.

[domino harvey]

But that beat Cyrano de Bergerac, Ju Dou and The Nasty Girl.

Especially surprising since Cyrano had an ATL nom for Depardieu and a few other noms, and actually won an Oscar for the costumes

[rrenault]

France is different, as they have enough heavy-duty film buffs to make original-language releases commercially viable - in major cities you almost always get a choice, although out in the sticks it's usually French dubbing only (but those cinemas tend not to show "arthouse" type films anyway).

In Paris, subtitled releases (generally referred to as V.O. or 'version originale') are pretty common, but they seem to be virtually unheard of in certain provincial parts of the country where dubbing is very much the norm.

P.S. Sorry. I was only half paying attention, as you essentially said the same thing as me, but I meant to say that in Paris, at least, original-language releases almost seem more common than dubbed ones.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

But that beat Cyrano de Bergerac, Ju Dou and The Nasty Girl.

Especially surprising since Cyrano had an ATL nom for Depardieu and a few other noms, and actually won an Oscar for the costumes

The most striking example of this weirdness IMO is Black and White in Color winning the Foreign Language Oscar over Seven Beauties, which was also nominated in the Director, Actor, and Original Screenplay categories. And since that was the only time Italy ever submitted any of Wertmüller's work, none of her films ever won the foreign-language Oscar even though she was probably one of the hottest things going in the seventies U.S. arthouse scene. It's not entirely the same situation, but there was also City of God failing to land even a nomination for the foreign-language award the year before it got four nods in the general categories.

I don't know how far back this goes, but until the 2014 Oscars members could only vote in the foreign-language category by proving they'd seen all five nominees in a theater; the only other category with this rule was Documentary Feature, which has a similar reputation for oddball picks (and ditched the rule a year earlier). The result is that the winners in these categories were determined by a few hundred ballots while most other categories got thousands. (This isn't even getting into the nomination processes, which had and have their own issues.) Starting with next year's Oscars the requirement to see all nominees will be applied to all categories, but without the requirement for theatrical attendance. In practice the rule is basically unenforceable, but then that would be the case even with a theatrical screening requirement, since voters could just buy tickets and skip the actual screenings.

[beamish14]

Many of the sometimes bizarre choices for Best Foreign Film were fleetingly famous only because of their surprise win. For instance, who remembers 1991's Journey of Hope, which I've just cited for the fourth time in these forums' entire history, all three previous cases merely featuring its inclusion on a list?

But that beat Cyrano de Bergerac, Ju Dou and The Nasty Girl.

The following year’s winner in said category, Mediterraneo, is similarly completely forgotten. Truly wretched, revisionist look at what Italy was actually complicit in during the Second World War, and financed by criminal future PM Silvio Berlusconi. So bad that both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel walked out of a screening of it.

Miramax really did an amazing job at getting AMPAS voters to support their garbage