Waning One-Time Art House Titans

[GaryC]

I think Duigan is an example of a director who was "cancelled" long before it was fashionable. Sirens was also subject of similar stories at the time.

Duigan hasn't directed since 2012, though he had a writing credit on the 2023 film Sight. As he's seventy-six now, maybe he's retired.

I think there may be another factor with Duigan and other Australian directors of the 1970s and 1980s. I often hear people say they "love Australian films" when they mean Ozploitation and not much else. So if you can pass something off as Ozploitation, it's getting a restoration with possibly a Blu-ray or even UHD release. Other than a few standard classics (Picnic at Hanging Rock being one; Sunday Too Far Away has had an Australian Blu-ray release; Criterion put out My Brilliant Career) anything else seems to be slowly disappearing. Several films which not that long ago were considered classics of the 1970s/1980s haven't gone further than DVDs and SD streams or are AWOL. For example: Newsfront, Caddie, Careful He Might Hear You, all of which I own on now quite elderly DVDs and would pick up Blu-rays of in a shot.

Paul Cox is another example, though I understand there are moves to restore his films, many of which have never had even conventional DVD releases. And he's no longer here to contribute and enjoy the attention. He was probably the nearest Australian equivalent to a European arthouse director. In the UK, his first film to have a cinema release was Man of Flowers, which was sold as arty erotica. His previous film Lonely Hearts (one of his best) then came out, followed by every new film bar one (Island, 1989) until Golden Braid in 1990. After that, none of his films came out in British cinemas other than Innocence in 2000, as I guess distributors saw how well his films hadn't done and no doubt thought he was no longer viable even for UK arthouse audiences.

[GaryC]

Two years ago the BFI Southbank put on its Film on Film festival - Thursday evening to Sunday evening in which everything shown was from a film print, including 35mm nitrate. They did it again this year and it's planned to be a biennial event. But what I valued both times was that it gave me the chance to see films that once had a high reputation, from directors who were names to conjure with back in the day, that I'd certainly heard of but which I couldn't remember when I'd last had an opportunity to see them at all (let alone from a film print), if I ever had. Many of the films I saw that way in 2023 and 2025 were, in my opinion, undeservedly obscure now and the lack of availability is no doubt key to that.

I particularly remember the Friday of the 2023 event when I saw, one after the other, Louisiana Story (1948), The House of the Angel (1957) and Aloha Bobby and Rose (1975), all in 35mm prints. I knew Louisiana Story had been joint fifth place in the 1952 Sight & Sound Greatest of All Time poll. I might have had a chance to see The House of the Angel in 1988, when the National Film Theatre put on a Leopoldo Torre Nilsson retrospective and maybe in 2007 when the NFT showed all of the first-ever London Film Festival programme for the fiftieth anniversary. And while I had certainly heard of Floyd Mutrux, only two of his five films as director had had UK cinema releases and had been on TV (Dusty and Sweets McGee was passed by the BBFC but I've yet to trace any UK cinema showings) I hadn't seen them. Of such are discoveries made.

Another one for me was Last Summer in this year's event - I was too young to see it in the cinema and hadn't seen either of the two 1990s TV showings. This was reckoned to have been its first 35mm showing in at least a couple of decades, and it sold out. Hopefully Frank Perry (with or without Eleanor Perry) is getting some attention now - Play It as It Lays has just had a 4K restoration which is doing the rounds and I'm wondering if that might turn up on Blu-ray sometime soon.

[MichaelB]

I doubt David Lean was ever 'art house'.

No, this ties in with the point that I made earlier about how 100% mainstream commercial films made in one country somehow magically become "arthouse" films in another. David Lean was always entirely a creature of the mainstream British film industry - his 1940s films are the exact equivalent of Hollywood dramas on similar themes.

[MichaelB]

Paul Cox is another example, though I understand there are moves to restore his films, many of which have never had even conventional DVD releases. And he's no longer here to contribute and enjoy the attention. He was probably the nearest Australian equivalent to a European arthouse director. In the UK, his first film to have a cinema release was Man of Flowers, which was sold as arty erotica. His previous film Lonely Hearts (one of his best) then came out, followed by every new film bar one (Island, 1989) until Golden Braid in 1990. After that, none of his films came out in British cinemas other than Innocence in 2000, as I guess distributors saw how well his films hadn't done and no doubt thought he was no longer viable even for UK arthouse audiences.

I don't know if this was the case with Paul Cox, but it's quite often the case that individual directors have a particular champion working in distribution, to the extent that they carry on picking up the films even when there's no obvious commercial reason to do so.

I've worked in arthouse curation, exhibition and distribution in some capacity or other for a full 36 years now, and if this wasn't substantially a labour of love people simply wouldn't do it - a hit is manna from heaven not because it makes everybody concerned rich, but because it keeps the bailiffs away* and might possibly subsidise something that we really want to do but otherwise can't justify economically as it's an all but guaranteed loss-maker.

(*The recent announcement of a 4K UHD of The Last Seduction reminded me that it was that film that saved Metro Tartan's bacon - they'd taken a humungous financial clobbering over Hard-Boiled, which they genuinely expected to be a whopping hit and so spent a fortune on marketing, and I gather... well, that The Last Seduction came along at exactly the right time. They weren't expecting it to be that year's word-of-mouth sleeper hit, but that made the surprise even more pleasant.)

[GaryC]

I don't know if this was the case with Paul Cox, but it's quite often the case that individual directors have a particular champion working in distribution, to the extent that they carry on picking up the films even when there's no obvious commercial reason to do so.

As you mentioned Andi Engel and Artificial Eye upthread, Theo Angelopoulos's profile in the UK was pretty much entirely due to them. The Travelling Players was one of AE's earliest cinema releases. I remember in the 1990s when Landscape in the Mist (which is one of his more accessible and certainly shorter films) failed at the box office, they reluctantly passed on his next film, The Suspended Step of the Stork. They did put it out on DVD later, though.

Add the late Percy Adlon to the list of those who were briefly in fashion in the UK in the 1980s and early 1990s, then stopped being distributed in cinemas after Salmonberries (1991). Younger and Younger was shown on Sky TV, had a VHS and later DVD release, but not on the big screen.

[Zot!]

I doubt David Lean was ever 'art house'.

No, this ties in with the point that I made earlier about how 100% mainstream commercial films made in one country somehow magically become "arthouse" films in another. David Lean was always entirely a creature of the mainstream British film industry - his 1940s films are the exact equivalent of Hollywood dramas on similar themes.

Absolutely...and Bridge on the River Kwai is the one that (probably by virtue of William Holden and our mutual love of war) to cross-over fully to the American mainstream consciousness. But as soon as Americans hear ANY accent, we're absolutely patting ourselves on the back as to how sophisticated our tastes are. I'm guessing most Americans would consider Guy Ritchie's oeuvre to be exotica. This is why we remake everything that might have any hope of being a domestic success. In the case of James Bond we'll meet you in the middle.

[domino harvey]

I thought I was familiar with Alain Tanner but I was thinking of Alain Cavalier! I have seen zero Tanner films, and have only ever encountered his work via La vallee fantome (and then only due to Trintignant), so if this was a once popular director in the states, he surely isn’t anymore. Did any of his films ever get an English friendly DVD here? Even Deville managed a few!

[Zot!]

I thought I was familiar with Alain Tanner but I was thinking of Alain Cavalier! I have seen zero Tanner films, and have only ever encountered his work via La vallee fantome (and then only due to Trintignant), so if this was a once popular director in the states, he surely isn’t anymore. Did any of his films ever get an English friendly DVD here? Even Deville managed a few!

I think I saw this one back in the day....but perhaps it's a different Bruno Ganz movie. Man, I wish we were getting more of this, and less dormant ninja zombie movies.



EDIT: I don't think anything arrived on DVD.
EDIT#2: I think what I saw was was actually another dour Bruno Ganz, again taking a evening stroll on a New Yorker Video template. Bring on the Tanner, I don't think I have seen anything, and the synopses sound intriguing.

[Michael Kerpan]

Trigon (perhaps a Swiss company?) released some of his films as subbed (R2) DVDs. Not sure I was able to get all of these. One of his films (Light Years Away) was set in Ireland and was in English (and got a DVD release). Salamandre and Messidor never seem to have gotten subbed DVD releases. (New Yorker had a subbed VHS version of Salamandre that looked like rubbish). I would say that, by and large, he was pretty thoroughly ignored throughout the entire DVD era. Too bad.

[Hopscotch]

I thought I was familiar with Alain Tanner but I was thinking of Alain Cavalier! I have seen zero Tanner films, and have only ever encountered his work via La vallee fantome (and then only due to Trintignant), so if this was a once popular director in the states, he surely isn’t anymore. Did any of his films ever get an English friendly DVD here? Even Deville managed a few!

A great director. Messidor is my personal favorite of the Tanner films I've seen and is ripe for reappraisal (or any appraisal at all, really). He was a friend of John Berger's, who cowrote several of his 70s films. Unfortunately I think the answer to your question about stateside home video availability is no, but you can find nice copies of his major films on backchannels. A box set of his work would be a real event.

[colinr0380]

I kind of responded to The Remains of the Day on a recent viewing by seeing it as a kind of zombie film about the concept of Englishness - the 'true' Englishman (to an almost parodical stiff upper lipped extent), trapped by the class system, has to disavow his working class father and damningly a potential romance with someone of his own station (though I'm afraid I find Emma Thompson rather annoying in her scenes! Although maybe her bluntness, especially in that library scene, is itself meant to be a kind of crass working class contrast to Stevens' attempt to remain unemotional? To her, and the majority of the other more pragmatic (realpolitik?) staff of the house, it is just a job, short term at that, and not a devotion) to devote himself entirely to his master and the concept of proper ways of doing things. Only his master is a doddering, clueless old fool who has no concept of the forces he has allied himself with and will eventually wipe him out entirely. Similarly our head butler gets talked down to and condescended at incredibly cruelly in the scene where, in a kind of after dinner piece of entertainment, he is sarcastically asked for 'his opinion' of the political climate, which of course he has no concept of because it is completely outside of his sphere of specialised knowledge. A valueless knowledge in the grand scheme of things because it is trying to keep the bedrock of everything (i.e. the principles and proprieties of English society) ticking along even whilst it is in the process of blatantly being sized up and sold out piecemeal from under him.

Eventually with the previous owner gone and the entrance of the 'nouveau riche' American as the new owner of the estate (who wants to treat Stevens more as an 'employee' than a 'faithful and trusted servant', which is simultaneously an upgrade and downgrade in status) Stevens has to come to terms with the idea of his whole world as it previously stood as being meaningless. All of the sacrifices and hard graft that was put in for a master who barely even noticed or acknowledged the effort, or only noticed when his father's illness and eventual death was inconveniencing a dreadfully important dinner party. But that 'old world' was his whole world too, which makes the 'normal, modern world' outside of it seem as strange and unwelcoming as it would for a prisoner in long term confinement stepping outside of the jail for the first time. So even when the opportunity is potentially there with a 'better' master, or another chance at romance in the 'modern world', its too late to take up the offer and start all over again from nothing. Because it was an offer that should have come (or a leap of faith that should have been made) decades earlier.

It is TROTD where his dad, played by Peter Vaughan, dies, but he's just completely repressed about it - you just want to smack him!

Yes, the father is the bond that has to be forsaken by Stevens, and seemingly wanted to be willingly forsaken by the father, who wants for his son to do better (With an implication that he is trying to ride on the success of his son. In some ways that film Joe has a similar father-son dynamic, only in that one the father is definitely portrayed as the feckless baddie dragging his son down!) in order to progress in the world. For me the best/worst moment of the scenes with the father is that scene where the dad trips and falls on the stone patio whilst taking tea to the VIPs in the sunroom. There is the really nasty accident that makes even the master of the house have to at least feign some concern, whilst for Stevens it is kind of the climax of the run of scenes of the father messing things up and embarassing him in front of everyone. But once the father is bundled off to ail and eventually die in the servant's quarters, everything is pretty much back to normal for the elites, who expect Stevens to be back to performing his duties as normal. Perhaps damingly for Stevens he does try to do that, because the idea of English proprieties and behaviours takes precedence over the true biological ties to his country, and lineage, however 'common' it was. That kind of makes Remains of the Day the anti-Downton Abbey, where it mourns the loss of those who 'bought into the myth' too much and go on to make considerable sacrifices to keep the society running (with the expectation that the pillars of society will stand tall in perpetuity and re-pay them in some small way in terms of status) and simultaneously condemns those blithe ruling classes who demand deference and pretend that they have dreadfully important loftier ambitions that occupy their time fully, but eventually prove to be rather incompetent at even their one and only task of sustaining their own class privilege.

[beamish14]

Over on the 35mm Forum, many members who were a part of university cinema societies have said that they cut ties with New Yorker Films due to the atrocious quality of the prints they would distribute

[Michael Kerpan]

Apparently some of Tanner's movies are available from Cinefiles, a Swiss streaming service, so long as you can set up a TWINT account (and the film is not blocked from showing in one's foreign copuntry). TWINT currently only uses Swiss francs....

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I remember reading a few years ago that there were some rights tangles around much of Tanner's work that were only settled near the end of his life, by which point the Cinémathèque Suisse had embarked on a substantial restoration project. The fruits of that occasionally pop up on the repertory circuit in the U.S. and elsewhere, though AFAICT only a couple of his films have been issued on Blu.

Over on the 35mm Forum, many members who were a part of university cinema societies have said that they cut ties with New Yorker Films due to the atrocious quality of the prints they would distribute

I wasn't even much of an arthouse attendee when New Yorker was still a thing and I'd heard complaints about how they would keep prints in circulation long after they should've been pulled (and, ideally, re-struck). The one experience I had with this myself was a 16mm screening of Godard's Weekend in the early aughts—the print was labeled as a Grove Press release (meaning it was probably from the late '60s or early '70s at latest), had completely faded to pink, and was nearly missing entire scenes at the beginnings and ends of the reels. It also used English voiceovers for some of the longer monologues instead of subtitles, examples of which you can hear in the trailer.

[MichaelB]

Back in my 1990s rep cinema days we kept a bulging folder of detailed descriptions of the prints that we received (which were often the only ones in distribution) giving each a mark out of ten based on various factors, and if it dropped below three we no longer booked it.

Unless it was a special case like Salò, where pre-2000 there was no alternative to the only 35mm print that had ever been struck of the James Ferman-supervised version (the only one that local authorities would sanction), so we used to stick a warning up in the box office window.

[GaryC]

Back in my 1990s rep cinema days we kept a bulging folder of detailed descriptions of the prints that we received (which were often the only ones in distribution) giving each a mark out of ten based on various factors, and if it dropped below three we no longer booked it.

Unless it was a special case like Salò, where pre-2000 there was no alternative to the only 35mm print that had ever been struck of the James Ferman-supervised version (the only one that local authorities would sanction), so we used to stick a warning up in the box office window.

That Salò print was in a pretty poor state when it passed through my hands at University in 1986. It left Southampton in a better state of repair to that which it arrived in. There was a section near the start of one reel where all the sprocket holes on one side had been broken. After much use of tape on my part, it went through the projector with all fingers crossed and sounded like machine-gun fire when it did. I don't think anyone watching noticed anything untoward other than the focus going in and out for a few seconds.

[hearthesilence]

I've become less critical of good DCP's for this reason. I want to say half of the 35mm screenings I've been to in recent months looked inferior to what I had in my library at home. (FWIW, I don't know how many 35mm prints of French Cancan are out there, but the one I saw at BAM back 2010 was gorgeous while the one at MoMA this year was kind of bad - could be the same print for all I know, but it was definitely worse than watching the BFI Blu-ray.)

[beamish14]

I've become less critical of good DCP's for this reason. I want to say half of the 35mm screenings I've been to in recent months looked inferior to what I had in my library at home. (FWIW, I don't know how many 35mm prints of French Cancan are out there, but the one I saw at BAM back 2010 was gorgeous while the one at MoMA this year was kind of bad - could be the same print for all I know, but it was definitely worse than watching the BFI Blu-ray.)

I probably saw that same BAM print at the Vancouver Cinematheque, and it was wonderful

[zedz]

Hauff was never really an arthouse titan (or even an also-ran, really), but boy, is he ripe for rediscovery.

[domino harvey]

That one I've heard of because Cohen put it out on Blu-ray

[nowhereisaplace]

I remember reading a few years ago that there were some rights tangles around much of Tanner's work that were only settled near the end of his life, by which point the Cinémathèque Suisse had embarked on a substantial restoration project. The fruits of that occasionally pop up on the repertory circuit in the U.S. and elsewhere, though AFAICT only a couple of his films have been issued on Blu.

Over on the 35mm Forum, many members who were a part of university cinema societies have said that they cut ties with New Yorker Films due to the atrocious quality of the prints they would distribute

I wasn't even much of an arthouse attendee when New Yorker was still a thing and I'd heard complaints about how they would keep prints in circulation long after they should've been pulled (and, ideally, re-struck). The one experience I had with this myself was a 16mm screening of Godard's Weekend in the early aughts—the print was labeled as a Grove Press release (meaning it was probably from the late '60s or early '70s at latest), had completely faded to pink, and was nearly missing entire scenes at the beginnings and ends of the reels. It also used English voiceovers for some of the longer monologues instead of subtitles, examples of which you can hear in the trailer.

I remember a similar experience around the same time with a print of Godard’s Une film comme les autres - the French soundtrack was dropped low and there was just a voiceover reading the English dialogue. The image was faded and pink and there were a couple times the print snapped and needed to be rethread through the projector. It was my first time seeing it, so I half wondered if that was how Godard intended the audio to be.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I remember a similar experience around the same time with a print of Godard’s Une film comme les autres - the French soundtrack was dropped low and there was just a voiceover reading the English dialogue. The image was faded and pink and there were a couple times the print snapped and needed to be rethread through the projector. It was my first time seeing it, so I half wondered if that was how Godard intended the audio to be.

I have no idea whose idea it was to dub the film into English instead of using subtitles, but D.A. Pennebaker (who distributed it in the U.S. along with some other Godard films from the period) claimed that audience members at the New York premiere started ripping up the seats because the English dub was mixed at the same level as the French and it was next to impossible to make either of them out clearly.

[MichaelB]

Hauff was never really an arthouse titan (or even an also-ran, really), but boy, is he ripe for rediscovery.

Of course, that's another very fertile topic - people who should have been arthouse titans from day one, but for various reasons (never picked up for distribution, opening in the wrong week, etc.) they simply weren't noticed.

There are a gazillion examples, but František Vláčil is a particularly glaring one, as he pretty much didn't put a foot wrong throughout his five-film output in the 1960s, quite a few of those films are regarded as major masterpieces of Czechoslovak cinema and of course Marketa Lazarová is locally hailed as their supreme national film classic. And yet hardly anyone in the English-speaking world had heard of him until about two decades or so ago - there's barely a namecheck in English-language books or articles outside specialist cases like Peter Hames' The Czechoslovak New Wave.

And of course there's also Zoltán Huszárik, similarly regarded as a giant back home in Hungary (and for years before his first feature: Élegia was hailed from day one as a masterly short film), but who was pretty much unknown outside Hungary for a similarly lengthy period, and it's only been in the last few weeks that it's become possible to see an English-friendly version of his second and final feature Csontváry. I daresay it's had a minimal number of festival screenings here and there, but I'm not aware of any English-language release in any medium prior to Second Run's Blu-ray.

[beamish14]

I think I’m among the few here who is a big admirer of the Dutch auteur Marleen Gorris. She definitely had one singular commercial hit that has overshadowed her superior initial films, but she’s always been pretty consistent. She always kept Hollywood at an arm’s length, but she migrated to Anglophone projects like Mrs. Dalloway and The Luzhin Defense

[Black Hat]

I've become less critical of good DCP's for this reason. I want to say half of the 35mm screenings I've been to in recent months looked inferior to what I had in my library at home. (FWIW, I don't know how many 35mm prints of French Cancan are out there, but the one I saw at BAM back 2010 was gorgeous while the one at MoMA this year was kind of bad - could be the same print for all I know, but it was definitely worse than watching the BFI Blu-ray.)

It was horrendous, and given the near sell out crowd it drew to its screenings, compared to the sparse attendance for the rest of the Maria Felix series, it shows the 35mm absolutists are not nearly as intelligent as they think they are and only use rep cinema as a way to funnel their mental illness into a social setting tolerant of their regressive behavior.