Waning One-Time Art House Titans

[jt938]

Another film that constantly (and annoyingly) shows up is Los Angeles Plays Itself.

[Maltic]

I don’t get the list to be honest because a lot of these are valid entries in a filmography

Sure, and FWIW there's a significant drop-off in annoyance factor once you get past the top half or so (I may have just kept adding films as they occured to me, actually).

[Maltic]

Lelouch has a wonderful LB filmography.

A Man and a Woman followed by 5 omnibus films and the 8-minute Rendezvous (1976)

[domino harvey]

Lelouch is a great example of a once omnipresent director who is hampered by most of his films not having English friendly American releases, despite most of them playing commercially here. Le voyou had an MGM DVD at least, so I imagine that one is somewhere higher in the mix

[beamish14]

Another film that constantly (and annoyingly) shows up is Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Thom Anderson is such a nice guy, and I am fortunate to have seen UCLA’s restoration of his masterful Eadweard Muybridge film and assorted shorts at the Academy Museum, but my god is Los Angeles Plays Itself overplayed

[MoreOrLesss]

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.

I'd guess at the time it was possible to dismiss Wings of Desire a bit of a too pleased with itself celebrity jolly with Falk, Cave, etc in it? I mean you could argue the sequel and Until the End of the World did end up a bit as well but Wings somehow works wonderfully with Falk especially being a great fit for it.

Kieslowski I'd guess part of it was being put up against Pulp Fiction and viewed yesterdays self important mid brow arthouse but honestly I don't think that holds up, even without going much earlier I think Three Colours Blue holds up very well indeed and really was the launch of Binoche's career at the top.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Dusan Makavajev

This is a good one even for non-Danes. I’m not sure how many people even register the name despite Criterion having released five of his most well regarded films (and upgrading none of them, though I imagine Sweet Movie isn’t high on the list in our current climate), but I’ve been reading a lot of film criticism journals from the late 60s and he was a more major figure than he seems to be these days. Maybe one day we’ll at least get WR on Blu from someone if not Criterion

Sweet Movie (NSFW) is also still currently banned in the UK, although it is an interesting censorship case since there are so many different forms of contentious material, and it appears that the issues causing it to be banned seem to have moved from the Otto Muehl, Viennese Actionism commune stuff, and more towards the boat captain seducing underage children.

Manifesto has been one of the films I've been desperate to watch, mainly because Simon Callow had a weird time making it.

[TechnicolorAcid]

Would Sacha Guitry count? He was once considered one of the key figures of French cinema pre-New Wave but has become a barely recognizable name nowadays with his most popular and beloved film, The Story of a Cheat, holding less than 6K watches on Letterboxd despite having influenced figures like Welles and Truffaut.

[Red Screamer]

He's still well-respected in France, from what I can tell -- as a name known among non-cinephiles and with releases of his films opening to, for example, a bunch of four-star ratings from Cahiers. I don't think he was ever big outside of the country, though, and an often-repeated bit of praise about him is that his wit is untranslatable.

[domino harvey]

Guitry’s plays are part of general education in France, I believe, so if anything he’s well inoculated into the culture there, but as Red Screamer says, he was never huge here

[dda1996a]

What about Juan José Campanella? The guy made one Academy Award winner and had a nomination before that (Secret in Their Eyes & Son of the Bride), and I just found out made quite a few films before and inbetween those two.
But after winning his oscar, he turned to American TV directing, only making two further films - animated Metegol and The Weasel's Tale that both look horrid. I guess the American remake of Secret in Their Eyes failing also didn't help much.

I get the TV directing, but not his 2 follow up films...

[knives]

The answer in that case like with a lot of others is that he isn’t and never was arthouse. Just foreign.

[MichaelB]

I’m at the Gdynia Film Festival in Poland right now, and can confirm first hand that although every film I’ve seen is foreign, a pretty tiny percentage of those titles would qualify as “arthouse”.

(Equally tellingly, they tended to be the ones I was less impressed by…)

[beamish14]

I’ve been listening to Neil Jordan’s autobiography (a satisfying read, although a bit too slim, and it completely neglects certain films like The Miracle) and thinking about how his stature has fallen. He’s become more prolific as a novelist, but maybe his films have become too esoteric for the mainstream (I remember seeing Ondine with maybe 6 other people on opening weekend) and more slick than the art house crowd can tolerate

[thirtyframesasecond]

Neil Jordan's career (for a while) was very much: excellent personal film > average studio film > excellent personal film and so on.

[MichaelB]

And this continued for nearly two decades, with The Butcher Boy being one of his very best films - it's only in the 21st century that he's properly waned.

Although he does at least have the option of falling back on a different medium. I've never read his novels, but I do keep meaning to.

[beamish14]

And this continued for nearly two decades, with The Butcher Boy being one of his very best films - it's only in the 21st century that he's properly waned.

Although he does at least have the option of falling back on a different medium. I've never read his novels, but I do keep meaning to.

Geffen/WB gave him complete freedom with Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy due to the success of Interview the the Vampire

Regarding his written output, I love The Neil Jordan Reader, as it contains his excellent short stories.

He’s had a number of interesting projects that fell to the wayside, including an adaptation of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, which is one of the best British novels I’ve read in the last 20 years

[MichaelB]

Well, not complete freedom with Michael Collins – I believe Julia Roberts' involvement was a non-negotiable condition of Jordan getting backing for a big-budget film that would only be a guaranteed hit in Ireland (a piddlingly small territory as far as WB was concerned).

Although at least the historical character that she was playing did exist and the resulting love triangle did actually happen.

[beamish14]

Well, not complete freedom with Michael Collins – I believe Julia Roberts' involvement was a non-negotiable condition of Jordan getting backing for a big-budget film that would only be a guaranteed hit in Ireland (a piddlingly small territory as far as WB was concerned).

Although at least the historical character that she was playing did exist and the resulting love triangle did actually happen.

You’re right. I think she did it for scale, which allowed the money to go towards ensuring the sets looked great

[lacritfan]

When I started getting into arthouse movies in the mid-late 80's the big three were Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman. Somewhere in the rest of the top ten was François Truffaut. 400 Blows and Jules & Jim were required viewing. He won an Oscar for Day for Night. Last Metro was pretty big. Directed the adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. He was one of the few that had most of his movies on VHS. Nowadays other than 400 Blows no one really talks about him.

Also pretty much the same for De Sica.

[colinr0380]

Well, not complete freedom with Michael Collins – I believe Julia Roberts' involvement was a non-negotiable condition of Jordan getting backing for a big-budget film that would only be a guaranteed hit in Ireland (a piddlingly small territory as far as WB was concerned).

Although at least the historical character that she was playing did exist and the resulting love triangle did actually happen.

And Julia Roberts played Irish again for Stephen Frears in the same year's Mary Reilly, that version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from the outsider's viewpoint of the Good Doctor's maid witnessing his comings and goings.

[The Curious Sofa]

When I started getting into arthouse movies in the mid-late 80's the big three were Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman. Somewhere in the rest of the top ten was François Truffaut. 400 Blows and Jules & Jim were required viewing. He won an Oscar for Day for Night. Last Metro was pretty big. Directed the adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. He was one of the few that had most of his movies on VHS. Nowadays other than 400 Blows no one really talks about him.

Also pretty much the same for De Sica.

‘...no one really talks about him’ is a rather subjective statement. I don’t think the key art-house directors in general are discussed nearly as much or are as influential as they were in the ’70s or even the ’80s. And while Truffaut’s films share a distinct sensibility and recurring themes, he doesn’t have as instantly recognizable a style as the three directors you mentioned, partly because he worked across a wide range of genres.

Then, of course, there’s the age-old Godard vs. Truffaut debate, where the self-appointed ‘cool kids’ of film appreciation stake their territory by endlessly trashing Truffaut (just take a look at the Truffaut thread here). I find that whole discourse as tiresome as the Stones vs. Beatles argument.

Truffaut, however, remains well represented on home video, most of his films are available on Blu-ray (and likely all of them in France). Quentin Tarantino took it upon himself to rag on Truffaut not long ago, which I can only take as a ringing endorsement. He is almost always wrong whenever he strays outside his comfort zone of exploitation cinema. But that shows, he still seems to be in the conversation.

[MichaelB]

It also very much depends on where you're based. I distinctly recall Truffaut films being rather hard to see in London from the late 80s onwards, and aside from a new-print revival of Jules et Jim circa 1991 they very rarely popped up - I'd already seen quite a few of the late ones on BBC2 in the early 80s, but it wasn't until the DVD revolution that I was able to catch up with most of them (including big-screen revivals).

And, as The Curious Sofa correctly reminds us, he's unusually well represented on home video (and high-definition home video at that) - so somebody must be buying these releases, as distributors have a bottom line. In fact, if I was to draw up a shortlist of major French directors who are better represented on home video, it wouldn't be very long - Eric Rohmer, definitely, Robert Bresson, possibly, Luc Besson, obviously (but he's a far more commercially appealing prospect), and of course Jean Vigo, but who else?

[colinr0380]

Similarly I have not got any of Claude Lelouch's feature length films on DVD or Blu-ray at this point, but I was lucky enough to be around for the BBCs major retrospective of Lelouch's films in 1999 which showed Happy New Year, Us Two/An Adventure For Two, And Now My Love, Edith and Marcel and his then most recent film Chance or Coincidence. But since then, no sight or sound of anything after that, on television or as far I as I can recall on UK or US discs.

(That was also the same year that the BBC last did a Truffaut mini-season with The 400 Blows, Shoot The Piano Player, Day For Night and Jules and Jim)

[MichaelB]

I don't recall playing a single Lelouch film in the six years (1989-95) that I worked full-time in London rep cinema programming, and the Hampstead Everyman was one of the most francophile cinemas in the country.

In fact, I'm not even sure that any were available for me to book - by then, even the ones that had been picked up for UK distribution in the 1960s/70s would have expired.