Waning One-Time Art House Titans

[Zot!]

Ivory Merchant is a good example...I think the films hold up rather well actually...and the wife is STILL talking about Julian Sands' (RIP) penis as a formative experience. Speaking of nudity, I am Curious (Yellow and Blue) or Sjoman generally hasn't been heard from since Criterion put out the twofer DVD. He probably fell into the unfashionable political category of Wajda and Costa-Gavras, where the topics are perhaps no longer relevant to a modern audience. A lot of the Godard Dziga-Vertov stuff would probably there too if not for his abstraction and impressive style.

[beamish14]

I have to disagree with Remains of the Day, which I actually kind of liked when I saw it as a kid, but I revisited it many years later and thought it was wildly uneven. Hopkins is excellent, much of the cast is fine, but what it was trying to say in terms of political history felt clumsily executed with no new insight. I wish I did like it more because it is handsomely mounted in terms of production design and costumes - presumably all genuine articles loaned to the production or rented for a pittance - and besides the cast it does have a fine score, but in some ways that just made it all the more disappointing that the rest of the film wasn't better.

I'm also bewildered how the company can have so many problems with everyone it's worked with. I can't remember if it was an obit or some other article, but one of the trade papers published something on Merchant some years back after he was dead and the comments section filled up with production personnel who blasted him for failing to pay anyone (or paying far less than promised) and generally treating them like garbage. It was pretty shocking and sadly details that have emerged since then haven't contradicted anything.

I said this in another thread, but Remains could have been really something with Mike Nichols directing Harold Pinter’s script and casting John Cleese as the lead

[Mr Sausage]

Ivory Merchant is a good example...I think the films hold up rather well actually...and the wife is STILL talking about Julian Sands' (RIP) penis as a formative experience. Speaking of nudity, I am Curious (Yellow and Blue) or Sjoman generally hasn't been heard from since Criterion put out the twofer DVD. He probably fell into the unfashionable political category of Wajda and Costa-Gavras, where the topics are perhaps no longer relevant to a modern audience. A lot of the Godard Dziga-Vertov stuff would probably there too if not for his abstraction and impressive style.

Costa-Gavras no longer relevant to modern audiences? Surely movies about fascism, authoritarianism, and white supremacy are especially relevant now. If he’s currently neglected, it’s not going to be for untimely topics.

[The Curious Sofa]

Over three watches I've been up, down and up again on Remains of the Day, that performance by Emma Thompson is really something. If there is a flaw to this film and Howard's End (I'm not the only who thinks these are their two best films), then its the mystery of why either of the women she plays in the films would fall for Anthony Hopkin's characters. And I while I don't think casting John Cleese would have solved the problem in one case, it is something Kenneth Lonergan's mini-series of Howard's End improved on. But overall I still prefer the movie.

[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.

[Altair]

Merchant Ivory really doesn’t fit - their films are on British television all the time. Oliver Stone’s stock might have fallen amongst critics, but his films are programmed frequently. It’s the filmmakers that are no longer in repertory or easily available on English language discs who are the real forgotten.

[MichaelB]

My own encounter with Ismail Merchant was brief but memorable - he rang me up in the mid-90s asking if I wanted to play his film In Custody, which was about to finish at its London premiere venue.

I very much didn't, partly because I didn't think there was a local audience for a film about an Urdu poet (where we were based, the most lucrative ethnic minority was North London Jewish), and mostly because I was fully aware as to why it was coming off prematurely as I read the UK trade papers and particularly scoured the box-office reports for professional reasons - but I made a suitably non-committal response.

A few minutes later, his distributor - who I knew well - rang me up and said "Is it true that you've just agreed to play In Custody for six weeks?"

I replied in no uncertain terms that it was not true, that we didn't do six-week runs of anything (three weeks maximum was the norm), and that I hadn't agreed to play it at all and certainly wouldn't be doing it now - and the distributor laughed and said that that was Ismail all over.

Although it gave me a real insight into how a frequently shoestring outfit like Merchant-Ivory managed to function - largely on the back of Merchant's sheer chutzpah.

[tolbs1010]

Bruno Barreto is another prime candidate for this thread. 2 Oscar nominations, and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands was wildly successful, but he’s toggled between Brazilian films and Hollywood garbage

Carried Away is one that deserves reappraisal and a decent release. Dennis Hopper is tremendous in it--one of his best performances. There are several emotionally-complex scenes that are handled well by Barreto, Hopper, and Amy Irving. To be fair to the film's critics, it requires some suspension of disbelief at young, hot Amy Locane throwing herself at Dennis Hopper's character.

[bdsweeney]

I'm also a fan of John Duigan, and other than Sirens (probably due to prurient interest) he's pretty much disappeared.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Duigan’s rep took a big hit after Thandiwe Newton spoke out about his predatory actions during the filming of Flirting. Listen to her interview on WTF to hear her speak about it. Awful stuff.

[Matt]

Your mention of Thandiwe Newton reminded me of Neil Jordan, who might be a candidate for this thread. He's always been frustratingly inconsistent and bouncing between the arthouse and the multiplex. Mona Lisa to High Spirits to The Crying Game to Interview with the Vampire to The Butcher Boy and so on is a wild ride. Then again I don't know that he's ever intentionally tried to be an arthouse director. Looks like he's working on a Liam Neeson prison break movie next.

[The Curious Sofa]

I don't think he would be considered an arthouse director in Ireland or the UK. The Company of Wolves is perhaps the closest Neil Jordan came to making an arthouse film, but it was essentially a horror film made at a time when werewolf films were enjoying a brief period of popularity. He mostly makes genre films, though with more flair than most. The second half of his career has largely been a series of critical and financial duds, which would explain the decline of his reputation.

[MichaelB]

I suspect the fact that he was a serious novelist before he became a filmmaker fed into the "arthouse" perception.

[MichaelB]

This discussion has tangentially reminded me of an already established arthouse titan who then made just one film.

Andi Engel may well be the single most important figure in British arthouse distribution - he founded Artificial Eye in the 1960s and ran it for pretty much the rest of the 20th century, building it into arguably the UK's most prestigious arthouse brand (and its success allowed him to bid for the higher-profile Cannes, Berlin and Venice-winning titles out of reach of other boutiques), and even if he'd never made a film himself his position in the field would be rock-solid.

But he did make one, Melancholia (1989), a fascinatingly personal story of an exile (like him) with a far-left political past (again, like him), although I'm pretty sure Engel was never contacted by a former comrade and asked to carry out a political assassination. Anyway, that's the subject of his only film, which achieved a decent amount of critical acclaim if unsurprisingly minimal box-office, and it was assumed that he'd capitalise on that success by making another one - but he said that he'd said everything that he wanted to say with that one film, and was otherwise perfectly happy with his day job.

[thirtyframesasecond]

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!

[thirtyframesasecond]

Your mention of Thandiwe Newton reminded me of Neil Jordan, who might be a candidate for this thread. He's always been frustratingly inconsistent and bouncing between the arthouse and the multiplex. Mona Lisa to High Spirits to The Crying Game to Interview with the Vampire to The Butcher Boy and so on is a wild ride. Then again I don't know that he's ever intentionally tried to be an arthouse director. Looks like he's working on a Liam Neeson prison break movie next.

Jordan always seemed one of those "one for them, one for me" directors. He'd make a small-budget film in Ireland/UK that would get great reviews and do decent BO, then he'd go to Hollywood and make something very tepid on a bigger budget, which would then allow him to make another small-budget, well-reviewed film.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Take Lawrence of Arabia out of the equation for a second, but David Lean? I still think his early films are his best - and even his early 50s films are decent - but I don't really see his other films appearing in best films lists. And the post-LoA films tend to be more criticised than appreciated for the sense of scale/literariness?

[The Curious Sofa]

I doubt David Lean was ever 'art house'. Putting that aside, he still seems widely admired and his movies certainly pop up on British best films lists, Brief Encounter frequently being considered one of the greatest British films of all time. The Bridge on the River Kwai, In Which We Serve and the Dickens adaptations also pop up and on such lists and Doctor Zhivago still is a popular classic. And I say that as someone who never quite got Lean only ever really liked his Summertime.

[beamish14]

I’m trying to figure out what exactly happened to Alain Tanner after In the White City. Regular arthouse distribution in big North American cities, the publication of his script collaborations with John Berger, and fawning reviews from many major critics, and then he seemingly became relatively obscure by the turn of the 90’s and none of his latter films got significant attention. Did the quality drop precipitously? Trends changed too much?I do hope his catalog becomes easier to see in HD

[Michael Kerpan]

It has been pretty much impossible to see any of his films for ages -- and possibly totally impossible to see any of his later ones. I rather liked the few films of his that I was able to watch.

[zedz]

I'm also a fan of John Duigan, and other than Sirens (probably due to prurient interest) he's pretty much disappeared.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Duigan’s rep took a big hit after Thandiwe Newton spoke out about his predatory actions during the filming of Flirting. Listen to her interview on WTF to hear her speak about it. Awful stuff.

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.

A lot of the directors who were identified as creeps back in the day have since had their very public comeuppance, but I've always wondered about the ones who haven't. Was it smoke without fire? Did they mend their ways and rebuild their industry reputations? Or have they just been really, really lucky?

[Matt]

I’m trying to figure out what exactly happened to Alain Tanner after In the White City.

I wonder how many of these faded filmmakers are just victims of poor distribution. For example, most of Alain Tanner's films were distributed in the US by New Yorker Films. I remember getting them on VHS in the late '90s from the public library or rental stores but they probably never got put on DVD.

Looking at the 1993 New Yorker Films catalog I linked above is like walking through a graveyard of films. So many that were the hot film of the moment and then practically vanished through New Yorker's home video incompetence. Mike Leigh's High Hopes, Wajda's Man of Marble, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence, a handful of Zhang Yimou films, Fernando Solanas' Hour of the Furnaces. Buñuel, Resnais, Oshima, and Chabrol films that are still unreleased on disc in the US. Some of the films in this catalog have only had fairly recent rescues from Criterion like Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time and Rohmer's A Tale of Springtime.

[zedz]

I’m trying to figure out what exactly happened to Alain Tanner after In the White City. Regular arthouse distribution in big North American cities, the publication of his script collaborations with John Berger, and fawning reviews from many major critics, and then he seemingly became relatively obscure by the turn of the 90’s and none of his latter films got significant attention. Did the quality drop precipitously? Trends changed too much?I do hope his catalog becomes easier to see in HD

Tanner might be one of those distribution nightmare stories. I saw a bunch of his films in a touring retrospective organized by the Swiss Embassy in the early 90s, but by then he was already falling into obscurity (his features seemed to no longer be automatic selections for the big three festivals), and I think he might have missed the (English-friendly) home video boom entirely. But he was a solid, high-profile auteur throughout the 70s and 80s, and his films shouldn't have dated particularly badly, so I wonder if this is a case of a dormant distribution company, or a sales agent asking too much for films without any commercial profile left. Alert the Radiance Rescue Team!

I have no idea about the quality of the latter half of his career!

(EDIT: Matt had the same idea as me.)

[Matt]

Aleksandr Sokurov might be another former titan who's fallen on hard times. Russian Ark was a gigantic hit by arthouse standards, and his films have been in contention for the Cannes Palme d'Or five times. But I'm still clinging to old Fox Lorber DVDs as the only way to see some of his work.

[charal]

The only way I could collect all of Tanner’s films (up to MESSIDOR) was by buying 2nd rate European DVD editions and some bootlegs. I finally tracked down a copy of Retour d’afric from an online bootlegger. It’s not a brilliant transfer but it’s better than nothing. You can see most of his films online now and again (try ok.ru or YouTube).
I would love it if Radiance could put out a blu ray set of his 70s work.

[GaryC]

In Tanner's case I have to wonder what effect his erotic films starring Myriam Mézières had on his reputation? A Flame in My Heart (1987) and The Diary of Lady M (1993) were distributed in the UK marketed as arty erotica (the former is in black and white, after all). If I remember rightly without looking up contemporary reviews, they were mostly slated. I was at a press showing of the latter and remember it provoking laughter which I'm pretty sure wasn't intended.

Channel 4 showed some of his films in the early days - I remember watching In the White City and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 that way. As she was mentioned upthread, they certainly showed some Lina Wertmuller too - certainly A Night Full of Rain. I saw Blood Feud late one night on ITV but don't now remember any more about it than that.