An online commonplace book
I would rather read the 1545 Bible translation of Martin Luther than any of the German Romantics, and who can walk past Joseph Conrad’s short stories or Hemingway’s first forty-nine stories — especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” — without experiencing something phenomenal?
– Werner Herzog
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
If I were caught on a desert island, without a doubt I would want all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep me company. Such an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, one of the greatest cultural monuments the human race has created. Thousands of scholars have contributed to it over one hundred and fifty years.
– Werner Herzog
Werner’s birthday was this week. Reference books are underrated.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
In the early days I made a living, but only just. I lived with very few possessions, most of which were the tools of my trade: an Arriflex camera, a car, a typewriter, a flatbed editing machine, a Nagra tape recorder. My material needs have always been limited. So long as I have a roof over my head, something to read and something to eat, all is fine. I own one pair of shoes, a single suit, and once I finish a book I pass it on to a friend. I’m just a man from the mountains who isn’t very interested in owning things.
What makes Herzog rich?
What makes me rich is that I’m welcomed almost everywhere. I can show up with my films and am offered hospitality, something you could never achieve on money alone.
And the struggle for true liberty:
I have struggled harder than you can imagine for true liberty, and today am privileged in the way a boss of a huge corporation ever will be. Hardly anyone in my profession is as free as I am.
You can open any page of A Guide for the Perplexed and unearth a gem.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp246
Sami theorizes that Anderson’s fine grained visual style came out of his writing, which is similarly exact. There’s not much room for verbal improvisation in a Wes Anderson picture because the dialogue is written to mirror, complicate, or intensify Anderson’s filmmaking choices. Every ellipsis, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, parenthetical, and period in a line of dialogue complements the camera movements, lighting, visual effects, sound effects, and music. It’s all of a piece. Filmmaking is screenwriting, screenwriting is filmmaking. All is text. The discrete shots are phrases, sentences, or paragraphs within the larger manuscript of the film. Words matter. Punctuation matters. Sentence length matters. The longer more elaborate camera moves in a Wes Anderson picture could be compared to a monologue in the theater, or a run-on sentence in an essay or novel that keeps going and going till it finally stops.
Scripts can be dismissed in terms of how a movie looks visually. We typically think storyboards and dailies communicate the visual direction the filmmaker desires.
But as Sanjay Sami theorizes, the preciseness of Anderson’s scripts, e.g. word choice, punctuation, the location of a colon or exclamation point, all contribute to the look.
Screenwriting is filmmaking. Akira Kurosawa agrees:
What happens when Wes Anderson visits one of the last video stores in Paris?
An extensive list. All titles mentioned below.
This one took ages. Enjoy!
1. Vengeance Is Mine, Shōhei Imamura (1979)
2. Drunken Angel – Akira Kurosawa (1948)
3. Simon of the Desert, Luis Buñuel (1965)
4. City Streets, Rouben Mamoulian (1931)
5. Love me Tonight, Rouben Mamoulian (1932)
6. Applause, Rouben Mamoulian (1929)
7. Queen Christina, Rouben Mamoulian (1933)
8. Silk Stockings, Rouben Mamoulian (1957)
9. We Live Again, Rouben Mamoulian (1934)
10. Becky Sharp, Rouben Mamoulian (1935)
11. The Mark of Zorro, Rouben Mamoulian (1940)
12. Blood and Sand, Rouben Mamoulian (1941)
13. The Pajama Game, George Abbott, Stanley Donen (1957)
14. Le Chant du Missouri, Vincente Minnelli (1944)
15. Sadie McKee, Clarence Brown (1934)
16. The Tall Target, Anthony Mann (1951)
17. T-Men, Anthony Mann (1947)
18. Raw Deal, Anthony Mann (1948)
19. Border Incident, Anthony Mann (1947)
20. Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955)
21. Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan (1952)
22. Little Lord Fauntleroy, John Cromwell (1936)
23. Marie-Antoinette, W.S. Van Dyke (1938)
24. The Fire Within, Louis Malle (1964)
25. The Big Risk, Claude Sautet, (1960)
26. Max et les ferrailleurs, Claude Sautet, (1971)
27. Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati (1958)
28. Vagabond, Agnes Varda (1985)
29. The Crime of Monsiuer Lange, Jean Renoir (1936)
30. La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir (1937)
31. Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir (1939)
32. Toni, Jean Renoir (1935)
33. The Man Who Loved Women, François Truffaut (1977)
34. Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard (1963)
35. Birth, Jonathan Glazer (2004)
36. Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson (2010)
37. Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg (2015)
First Steven Spielberg, who is, if you make movies, if you direct movies, this is somebody who can help you. You look to his movie for solutions. He usually found a way to do it right. He’s one of my favorites.
– Wes Anderson
38. Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant (1990)
39. Barfly, Barbet Schroeder (1987)
40. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Mel Stuart (1971)
41. Hollywood: A Celebration of the Silent American Film, Kevin Brownlow & David Gill (1980)
42. Witness, Peter Weir (1985)
43. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hideaki Anno (1994-2013)
44. Only yesterday, Isao Takahata (1988)
45. Pompoko, Isao Takahata (1994)
Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli in general, that’s one of those great bodies of work that is something, you know, a treasure for cinema.
– Wes Anderson
From Ishiguro’s Top 10 movies of all time entry on the Criterion Channel site. Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the modern version of Ikiru – Living, which released in select American theaters this weekend.
Read his list in full here.
I first saw Ikiru when I was a child growing up in England, and it had a profound influence on me. That’s not just because it was one of the very few Japanese movies I was able to see at that time, but because it said something really encouraging to me, something I held with me all through my student years and as I was becoming an adult. It told me you don’t have to be a superstar. You don’t have to do something magnificent that the world applauds you for. Chances are that life is going to be relatively ordinary—at least that’s what I had imagined for myself. For most of us, life is very circumscribed and humble and frustrating; it’s a daily grind. But with some supreme effort, even a small life can turn into something satisfying and magnificent.
Kazuo Ishiguro, January 6, 2023. https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/518-kazuo-ishiguros-top-10
Can we muster a supreme effort today? And build on that tomorrow, if granted?
A no fluff list of five Wes Anderson short films. Yes, some of these are commercials.
Castello Cavalcanti
Come Together
Moonrise Kingdom, book short
Candy L’Eau
My Life, My Card
“We know that we’re dust, and that we come back to dust”
Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda running rampant in the Criterion Closet. Her picks are below:
An Angel at My Table – Jane Campion
Taste of Cherry – Abbas Kiarostami
La Promesse – Dardenne Brothers
Bande à part – Jean-Luc Godard
The Marriage of Maria Braun – Rainer Werner
The biggest surprise? Tiny Furniture. Though Lena Dunham’s feature debut does have a French New Wave quality to it.
“Give me a screen. Give me dvd reader. And I do.”
Agnès Varda
Floodlights and Goalposts 