Snow is on the water (but a good cigar is a smoke): The pandemic interviews of Godard

The world’s greatest living filmmaker still has some ideas he’d like to impart. He’s now 90 (offering an excuse for his crankiness, which, admittedly, he’s displayed for the 60 years he's been making films), his voice trembles, and he’s clearly not in peak condition. But he still smokes fat cigars, is amenable to being interviewed at length every few months, and has some things to say.

The gent in question, Jean-Luc Godard, speaks in a decisive, declarative fashion, but he often travels circuitously around a topic he’s been asked about, only to give an answer that is related to the question but also introduces a second, related idea. He speaks conceptually yet also poetically — making his answers to questions seem like prepared notions or aphorisms while they are really just the products of a very unique method of thinking.

It is that unique approach to ideas and poetry that has made his films so important in the six decades since A Bout de Souffle. He remains one of the most influential filmmakers currently working while still also offering new ideas, striking imagery, and playful audio collages. We can count ourselves lucky to still be able to see new work by him in this most confused and chaotic of centuries.

Two lengthy interviews have been conducted with Godard (hereupon referred to sporadically as “Uncle Jean,” his farcical alter-ego from some of his Eighties “comeback” fiction features) since the onset of the pandemic. In the more recent one he is seen to be less healthy, more fragile, yet still engaged and opinionated. Much was made of the fact that the second interview contains his declaration that he will retire for good after making two more features. Given his current condition, we would be very lucky to see two more features come from him. After that, he certainly deserves a rest.
*****

The first of the two interviews was conducted for students of the ECAL, Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne, on April 7, 2020. Although Godard has noted that he felt Swiss in France and French in Switzerland, he does have a strong connection to his homeland — since that’s where he came back to, to focus his energies on film- and video-making, and to just live. (Of course, to be the true-blue contrarian he has always been, he notes “I may have a Swiss passport, but I’m French.”)

He tells the interviewer, Lionel Baier, that he can have as much time as he wants, but Baier sticks to his own questions and doesn’t ask the ones that were supplied by students. He, like the later interviewer, is obviously a great student of Godard’s work, and so his questions are mostly about the themes that JLG has been obsessed about for the last few decades.

The discussion starts with Godard mentioning a project he thought about but never went through with — showing the life of a cable-news anchor. In classic poetic JLG-speak, he notes this about his inability to get a real news anchor to allow their professional and personal life to be seen on-camera for his film: “They were willing to die for the news, but not willing to live it.”

The interviewer asks him how he takes in news these days, and Godard says he reads three newspapers (Liberation, Charlie Hebdo, Le Canard Enchaîné) and watches TV news (the kind without commercials) twice a day.

The first major topic tackled is, of course, the pandemic. Godard immediately goes into metaphorical mode, noting that “the virus is a form of communication… It needs to latch onto a host like certain birds.” In reference to the rapid progression of COVID, he notes “Yes, that’s capitalism for you. It’s all about growth.”

He speaks in metaphor and poetic likenings throughout. He posits at one point that the American attack on Iraq could be viewed as an attack on the area where language began (Chaldea). He then notes that, of course, George W. Bush and his cohorts wouldn’t know at all what was meant by that, but he then launches into a characteristically brilliant riff on how the best writers and artists tried to go “beyond, besides, and below language.” He quotes the poet Boileau-Despreaux, who said [JLG’s phrasing] “Review your work 20 times, and polish and re-polish it constantly.”

A great portrait of JLG, taken in July 2020
by the terrific photographer Hedi Slimane.
All the shots in this series
 can be viewed here or on Slimane's site.

This returns to a theme I’ve talked about on the Funhouse TV show in the past few months — how non-American filmmakers, especially those brought up in Europe, are very knowledgeable about the other arts besides cinema. We’re lucky if American filmmakers know the history of cinema, whereas the masters of the medium have always been familiar with literature, painting, classical music, and other foundational work that one can then veer away from (while still being aware of what the seminal works are in other media).

It’s been noted about Godard by some who knew him that the books that he’s quoted from in his films have not actually been read by the filmmaker. He has himself admitted that he has looked for the best quotes in certain works of fiction and poetry. In the ECAL interview, he notes he currently prefers reading non-fiction (and detective stories in the world of fiction — the names Jean-Patrick Manchette and David Goodis are singled out for praise). He notes he remains interested in the scientific method and the work of scientists (thus, his interest in the virus). 

At the point the ECAL talk was done he was working on a project, but would only say it was on the topic of (and he says this phrase in English) “fake news.” He said the notion was to pit the “news virus” one gets at home with simply living one’s life. (And he acknowledges that one of his best-known films is titled Vivre Sa Vie). Another project he was interested in doing in 2020 was an opera, with music to be provided by the jazz-experimental record label ECM (which has released the full soundtracks — dialogue and sound effects included — of some of JLG’s films). 

He talks about Anne-Marie Melville, with whom he’s been involved as a filmmaking partner and as a real-life partner since the 1970s. He notes that their devotion to the cause of Palestine brought them together — and in the second interview, discussed below, he refers to her several times as “my wife.” (But the two have never legally married — unless they’ve hidden that fact away from the public and press — and haven’t lived together for years.)

Then the real contrarian impulse kicks in, since he’s talking with a film scholar and being viewed by cinephiles — Uncle Jean starts bitching about living and dead filmmakers by saying that “three-quarters of them are not auteurs.” Of course, the buffs will love this, thinking he’s bitching about mainstream directors who make crappy action movies, crappy comedies, and crappy dramas. But, in a characteristically cranky mode, he wants to redefine who was in and out of the Nouvelle Vague, and who of the critically vaunted directors really was an auteur and who wasn’t.

Ben and Benedict
 poster

Thus, he orphans Claude Chabrol by saying he was not truly a New Wave filmmaker — “he was never an auteur. He was different. There was Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, and me. And three or four lesser-knowns, such as Claude Nedjar’s wife, Paula Delsol, who made a good little film [Ben et Bénédict, 1977], which I consider to be better than Agnes Varda. At the beginning Agnes made a few good films, two or three….”

He then admits that a few other names could be included in the New Wave. He, of course, leaves out the Left Bank, except for Varda whom he demotes — Resnais, Marker, and other directors of the same age group and similar disposition — Demy, Malle, and a few others. He basically has a problem with the term “filmmaker” as well as auteur/author. To him, auteur “is a status,” not a marker of quality.

He also downgrades two of the greatest cult heroes of the critic/filmmakers of the Fifties/Sixties: Sam Fuller and Nick Ray. The great Fuller acted for Godard in Pierrot Le Fou and his shots are mimicked in a bunch of JLG films, including A Bout de Souffle; the rebel-icon Ray was habitually mentioned in the Sixties Godard films and his work was included in later video essays like Histoire(s) du cinema. They are now, according to older, crankier, Uncle Jean “auteurs moyens” (middling authors).

Possibly the most surprising “demotion” for lovers of great French cinema is his current day takedown of Jacques Becker — after he himself wrote one of the finest-ever reviews of an admittedly lesser Becker film, which I quote in this blog post.

Casque d'or (1952), one of
Becker's many masterpieces.

“We [at Cahiers] even defended authors of bad films. In my opinion, there’s only one film in which Becker was really the author, and that was Touchez Pas au Grisbi. None of the other films…. were [as good]. I wrote a review that upset him. I said, it’s because it was bad that he dared to do it badly.” JLG never clarifies which film he’s talking about, but again I direct you to his rave review of Montparnasse 19, which I mentioned in my posts about Becker.

Bresson, however, has lost none of his luster for Godard — he notes the reverence the New Wavers had for Bresson’s little book Notes on Cinematography. He also later in the ECAL chat oddly also underscores that the now-“rediscovered” (by cinephiles like the recently departed Bertrand Tavernier, whose list of favorites seemed to be comprised mostly of those directors “demoted” by the Cahiers group back in the Fifties) Claude Sautet. Godard praises Sautet’s films as “tight.” An odd combination, that — Bresson and Sautet….

At one point the interviewer does touch an emotional cord by asking if Godard misses his old New Wave colleagues. “Yes, I miss them a lot. Because we talked a lot, but now we hardly ever do. We talk about films when there’s a film to make, but apart from that it’s different.”

Young French filmmakers in 1959.
Front row, left: Truffaut. Back row:
Chabrol (glasses), JLG (shades).

Keep in mind, of course, that when he recorded this interview, even Varda had died, so the core of the Nouvelle Vague *and* the “Left Bank” brilliant innovators had all died. So, one assumes he’s speaking in the present tense about the past – or simply implying that he used to talk with more collaborators (as when he had the same cinematographer for several years — Raoul Coutard — and when he had a filmmaking partner other than Ms. Mieville — Jean-Pierre Gorin).

In closing, he is asked to provide the usual “advice” to young filmmakers. With typical circuitous elan, he simply says, “They should check what they’re doing.” (We return to the Boileau-Despreaux quote above.)

And the interviewer does “break character” to add in, while the tape is still running, “You mean a lot to us.” Uncle Jean’s unsentimental but still jovial response? “Yes, I’m aware of that. … So far, so good….” 

 

 *****

A year can make a lot of difference in a senior’s life. In the second lengthy interview video, which was uploaded to YouTube on March 2 of this year, Godard seems shakier, more tired, and more uncertain. The last, however, comes from the fact that this interview came off poorly, not for its content but because of persistent technical troubles and difficulties in understanding between the interviewer and Godard.

The talk was tied in to the fact that Godard was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala in India. Godard was seen briefly via his cellphone at the ceremony where he was awarded the honor but, luckily for the festival, he agreed to be interviewed at another time. Unluckily for the festival, the chat was conducted on the Net and was conducted in English, a language that Godard admittedly doesn’t remember all that well. (A translator was standing by online, but she also had technical problems and had to render quick translations of what Uncle Jean had said, which is not an easy task under the best of circumstances.)

So, this is a more jarring and saddening viewing experience, but if you view this interview video first (as I did), it’s a lot less jarring (minus the obvious increasing tremor in JLG’s voice). The difficulties encountered in the discussion are quite daunting, though. Godard’s circuitous, conceptual, and poetic language is very hard to translate and make sense of. (One would have to paraphrase or rethink the wording in the second language.)

Here, both speakers are operating with verbal impediments. The interviewer, C.S. Venkiteswaran, is clearly a brilliant, sharp thinker, who speaks with an Indian accent; Godard, on the other hand, has his classic speech impediment (which was quite well approximated by Louis Garrel in the rather awful Le Redoubtable, aka “Godard, Mon Amour,” 2017).

One adds onto those trouble-causing elements for a bilingual conversation the fact that the Net connection between the two suffered glitches and lags, and the fact that both gentlemen are clearly very set in their ways: Godard is always going to answer in his characteristically circuitous fashion, and Venkiteswaran continued to ask rather lengthy questions, even when it was obvious that shorter queries would’ve worked better, given all the difficulties. (As someone who has many lengthy questions in interviews, I sympathize.)

Again, Uncle Jean smokes a BIG cigar with much relish and again, he starts off likening cinema to the coronavirus. When called “one of the youngest filmmakers” currently working, he admits “I’m still at the beginning” and then affirms that his main concern is “movies and reality — what reality is and what is the [best] way to catch reality.”

The central metaphor he latches on to here — and this seems to reflect on the commodification of “content” on the Net and the consumer society in general — is that “production” should be what people are concerned about, and instead “distribution” becomes the main obsession. In the case of cinema, he notes that “distribution has choked production to be at the service of the viewer.”

On the shoot for the 3-D film
 Adieu au langage (2014).

He continues with this metaphor for a while and revives the idea throughout the interview. He notes that commercials should be longer — one assumes, since he craves sheer honesty, and if commercials stopped pretending they were just mere interruptions, the viewer would be clearer about what they are and what they’re conveying. At this point a period of dead silence ensues, the first of a bunch in the video.

Godard takes this little sejour from the conversation to reflect on silence. He asks the interviewer if he could describe “an image of silence.” When Venkiteswaran says he can’t, JLG provides what might be the most profound and beautiful moment in the talk when he says, “I look out my window and there is snow. The [18th-century French] writer Jules Renard said silence is snowing on the water.” He then adds, “In doing that we are still making cinema.”

At this point one is happy to realize that Godard’s mind is as nimble as ever, with tangents that might only completely work if translated into and out of Japanese. (The above Renard quote has the distinct feeling of a Japanese epigram.)

Venkiteswaran’s best question for Godard produces another one of these tangents — in this case it is unfortunate, because the question is indeed so good. To wit, with surveillance cameras and webcams everywhere, the state is currently the biggest mass producer of images; add to that the wild profusion of images uploaded by consumers onto the Internet. With these two new sources for millions and millions of images, where does the contemporary filmmaker fit in?

Godard’s answer to this is refer to history — in this case “archeology” done on family history that he has done over the years. He refers to the human memory as being finite and emphasizes that our memory of our family can only be traced back a few generations (“a few grandmothers – I don’t count in centuries, but in grandmothers,” he notes).

Another shot of Godard in July 2020,
taken by the great Hedi Slimane.

At this point there is more silence, and so Godard goes into another reverie. Again, the meat of the conversation is a tangent. He meditates on the fact that in film “a few seconds after saying ‘Action,’ we say, ‘Silence!.’ The difficulty of today’s cinema is that it only thinks Action and does not think Silence. However, it says both while shooting!”

The next two topics are again extended metaphors by Uncle Jean — the first involves a discussion of his favorite topic, language. (He notes that “Today there is only speech, only words, only alphabet.”) The second returns to the theme of virus as communication. He mentions that he once appeared on TV with his cousin Jacques Monod, who “discovered DNA.” (Per Monod’s Wiki, he is “widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology.”)

Godard maintains he asked Monod in which direction DNA could go — his cousin maintained that it only proceeded in one direction, but the contrarian filmmaker says he still inquired about it going in the opposite direction… prefiguring the RNA molecule. (This is how he puts it — at these points, one assumes that his ideas are sound, but his method of conveying them is, again, roundabout and possessing a degree of Wellesian self-aggrandizement.) This retrovirus, he notes, brings us something that “we try to destroy,” instead of trying to understand it.

After another metaphorical tangent, in which he discusses how most filmmakers frame images (from the outside in) and how he likes to frame (from the center outward), he takes out his latest “script,” which is in fact an accordion-pleated succession of cardboard cards that have images and handwritten sentences on them. (His handwriting is a sight familiar to those who’ve seen any of JLG’s films from Pierrot Le Fou onward.)

At this point he makes the announcement that became the most-repeated item from this interview. He states that he has two scripts assembled, called “Scenario” and “Droles du guerres” (Funny Wars). “I’m finishing my movie life by doing two scripts, and after that I will say goodbye to cinema.” One hopes he can get both films made, or even one of them, since he does indeed seem shaky. (But infinitely determined, which is what has clearly kept him alive until the age of 90.)

Toward the end of the chat Godard speaks about the nationality of he and his “wife,” the filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. He notes that they are expatriates in both Switzerland and France — “The Swiss authority doesn’t consider us as good Swiss people, and the French authority has completely forgotten us as French citizens.”

At the end, Venkiteswaran asks Godard why India, the world’s leading producer (and, as Uncle Jean notes, the leading distributor!) of films, wasn’t included in his epic video project Histoire(s) du Cinema. JLG confesses that he knows nothing of Indian cinema outside of Satyajit Ray, because Indian films were very hard to see in France. When quizzed by the host of the event at the very end as to why he has never traveled to India, the always-circuitous Godard instead recounts a tale of how he was rejected from traveling to Vietnam when the war was on.

The end of the interview reminds us that Uncle Jean is indeed an old gent who is only passingly familiar with modern devices, even though he has several times in the last decade sworn fidelity to his iPhone. He wants to show an illustration of what he believes himself to be to the hosts, and thus he searches around for quite a while to find it. With the help of his cinematographer-producer-researcher Fabrice Aragno, he finally comes up with the image in his iPhone gallery — it’s a drawing of a fisherman casting his line, waiting to see what he will catch.

Go to Hell, Bastards!: the feverish films of Deceased Artiste Seijun Suzuki

A master of subversion, Seijun Suzuki took the relatively low budgets he was given to make B-features by the Nikkatsu studio and created scores of the most memorably surreal, Freudian, and explosive films ever. Like many cult icons, Suzuki was underappreciated while he was working regularly, but he thankfully lived to see his work hailed around the world as groundbreaking and completely unique. (Although, being an infinitely frank soul, he did declare it “too late.”)

Many of his obits felt that contextualizing him was in order, so the magic name “Tarantino” was invoked. Tarantino’s work is closer to that of the more procedural, less dazzling, and far more violent Japanese genre filmmaker Kenji Fukasaku than Suzuki. The obits also cited Wong Kar-Wai and Jim Jarmusch. The latter is a diehard fan and paid tribute to Suzuki’s work rather brilliantly in Ghost Dog. The former might love Suzuki’s work, but John Woo is closer to the mark — particularly in The Killer, where he seemed to be fusing Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967) with Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, which is quite a combination of influences.

It was also interesting to note that the official announcement of his death was made by a Nikkatsu representative, given that he had an acrimonious split with the studio, whose head at the time said his films “made no sense” and weren’t making any money. Whether or not they did well at the box office, it’s been noted that young Japanese college students loved them and were in fact the first cultists for his work.

The most-circulated interview with Suzuki is this one, conducted in 1997:

Suzuki's frenzied stylization of his storylines made him “a Japanese Sam Fuller” (although, of course, Fuller was as much a screenwriter as he was a director). By the time that he was able to do what he wanted with these assignments — mostly because the Nikkatsu chiefs initially ignored their B-feature production, so the directors could do what they wanted — he was using every method possible to make his films jump off the screen into the lap (and mind) of the viewer.

A recent festival held at the Walter Reade theater in Lincoln Center included a few of his earlier genre pics that have been unseeable in the U.S. (some of them signed by “Seitaro Suzuki,” his real name). The revelations were that they were *heavily* plotted for B-features, and that, even though Suzuki and his crew were breaking the fourth wall by drawing attention to the film’s style, he did stick rather closely to the formulaic plots he was given. If one sees his pictures in chronological order, it’s obvious that he was desperate to break free of the constraints of B-moviemaking.

Here is the trailer for one of the earlier efforts, Everything Goes Wrong (1960):

Thus, he began to “explode” his heavily-plotted genre pics with framing, editing, eye-jarring sets, and surreal touches like an overlay of animation. In interviews, he stressed that he was intent on making “entertainment,” not art, and that he wanted to please the audience. His array of techniques, though, suggested that he was well-aware of the European masterworks made in the Fifties and Sixties, as well as the modernist work of contemporaries like Oshima and, without question, the pop art that overwhelmed the era.

Kabuki has been cited as another influence, and while it no doubt was, one gets the sense watching his work that Suzuki was an incredibly “cinematic” artist, rather than one toying with theatrical techniques.

And he had some of the best titles in the business. The second half of this title is one of my all-time favorites for a crime film — or a film in any genre. Herewith the opening of Detective Bureau 23: Go to Hell, Bastards! (1963):

One of the names who is rarely linked to Suzuki is another kindred spirit, namely Robert Aldrich. In Kiss Me Deadly, Aldrich approximated the unapologetic violence of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels. Being a master-manipulator — and an artist who loved to play with and rework the genres he took on, much like his near-namesake Robert Altman — he left the graphically violent moments in the narrative *between* the shots. “Beat” Takeshi Kitano did this beautifully in his Hana-bi (aka Fireworks) (1997), and Beat has also cited Suzuki as a cinematic hero. This is another dominant characteristic of Suzuki's work: going “over the edge” in terms of subject matter and behavior, and yet not showing anything truly objectionable onscreen.

His trippiest yakuza drama was undoubtedly Tokyo Drifter (seen here in its entirety with no English subs), which was one of the two films that became cult items in the West during the Nineties.

I would also liken him to Nicholas Ray, in that both men were masters of widescreen and “color-coding” their characters. Akira Kurosawa was most certainly one of the greatest widescreen filmmakers ever, but Suzuki is closer to Nicholas Ray in terms of the feverish pace of his films and the fact that he unabashedly used color to tell his story, as he did in the unusually-kinky-for-its-time, brothel-set drama Gate of Flesh (1964) (seen below in its entirety, but with no English subs).

One of the other things that is truly mind-roasting and extremely important about Suzuki's work is the way in which, as he progressed through the Sixties, he began to toss off sequences that other directors would've made longer set-pieces out of. This is most blatant in Branded to Kill, where he quickly disposes of two impressive “trick-shot” murders (one of which is duplicated in Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, thus the thanks to SS at the film's end) and a brilliantly insane twist — our hero getting away from a tightly secure building by leaping out the window and riding a hot-air balloon to safety.

Other filmmakers would've spent 10-15 minutes easily on each of these moments, while Suzuki disposes of them in less time than it takes to listen to a Ramones song.

The most famous aspect of Branded is that it got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu. He sued the studio and then became the subject of a blacklist that found him unable to work as a director for a decade. The ironic element here is that he had taken on the film as a favor to the studio. It was begun by another director, but then became one of the “most Suzuki” of all of Suzuki's genre pics. When he was unable to work as a director he took on work as an actor on TV and in the movies. Here is an ad he appeared in for a toilet cleaner of some kind:

When he finally returned to filmmaking, he wound up making seven more films, the last two of which were released internationally, as they were made after his worldwide cult-reputation had grown. I will confess that, while I enjoy his “Tasho trilogy” of very “high art” films, I prefer him subverting a weird script, as he does in his “comeback” film, A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977).

The film, to which I devoted an entire episode of the Funhouse, is a bizarre tale of the “making” of a female athlete — at first turned into a sexy golf pro by corporate execs, the lead is later stalked by a scary neighbor who wants to steal her lifestyle. It's an amazing film that definitely is an extension of the weirdness that he was crafting in the Sixties (it is in fact that only film he made after his comeback that practices the same kind of subversion).

Watching it I was put in mind of two films about the manufacturing of a woman star by men. The first was Dennis Potter's too-little-seen Blackeyes (1989) and the second was The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) by none other than Robert Aldrich. Suzuki's film is definitely in the same vein, as we see the execs figuring out how to have their golf pro dress, which ends up in her wearing a bikini on the links at one point.

The first half of the film is decidedly about male manipulation of women, but the second half is a more tangled statement about celebrity and its horrors, embodied in the person of the fangirl neighbor who wants to “be” our golf pro heroine (who has also become the host of a daytime talk show). Sorrow and Sadness is a great Suzuki film that has been shuffled under the carpet for the most part — it was released in the U.S. on DVD but with scenes that were missing the proper subtitling. The film is not available for free streaming online, but I found a music video created with images from it:

Suzuki's “Tasho trilogy” was the first time that he was making art films “on purpose.” The first film in the trio, Zigeunerweisen (1980), is a beautiful-looking picture that has some unforgettable imagery. Suzuki seems to have seen the films of Alain Resnais (whose work is as influential as Godard's to some leading Asian filmmakers) and works on a Marienbad-like level of ambiguity with these films, set in an era when Japan had a fixation on Western culture and dress. When Suzuki was unable to secure theatrical distribution for the film he had it shown in an inflatable dome in Tokyo.

The second of the two “Tasho” films, Kagero-Za (1981), also contains some gorgeous imagery but is, admittedly, rather slow-going.

The “Tasho” films are indeed beautiful-looking, but they lack the humor and sheer perversity of Suzuki's earlier work. Before the third film in the trilogy was made, Suzuki directed the very strange and pretty much unfindable Capone Cries a Lot (1985), a too-long-for-its-own-good but still imaginatively designed drama. The humor and perversity returned for good in Pistol Opera (2001), his remake of Branded to Kill with women in the lead roles.

His last film is certainly a wonderful genre-bending act of subversion. The musical Princess Raccoon (2005) is an intentionally kitschy musical that blends Western musical genres and a fabricated Japanese fairy tale. It is not as involving on a narrative level as his Sixties work, but it proved that, even at the age of 82, he could still deliver downright weird and brilliantly imaginative sequences.

Suzuki’s legacy is assured — the man whose movies “made no sense and no money” outlasted his detractors and former employers.

Savage Innocence: the films of Nicholas Ray

All his films are crossed by the same obsession with twilight, the solitude of beings, the difficulty of human relations.—Jacques Rivette
Nicholas Ray is in the top rank of American filmmakers for a number of reasons, among them that he made such a deep impression in such a short period of time with so few films, and that the films have remained emotional powerhouses a half century later. His best-known film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), is grounded in Fifties America, but its depiction of the trials of a teenage misfit is timeless. In a similar fashion, They Live By Night (1949) is in the top rank of “lovers on the run” films, The Lusty Men (1952) is an impeccable portrait of macho self-destruction, Johnny Guitar (1954) is one of the most unique Westerns ever — a baroque creation that is both sincerely operatic and wildly satiric (both of Western clichés and McCarthyism), Bigger Than Life (1956) is perhaps the ultimate statement on the American family in the Fifties (and an amazing template for The Shining, minus the violence), and Bitter Victory (1957) is one of the best war movies ever, exploring cowardice and bravery while giving the young Richard Burton one of his first great movie roles.

This week’s Funhouse episode presents a survey of the filmmaker’s career, in conjunction with the current Nicholas Ray retro at the Film Forum in lower Manhattan. I urge everyone reading this to try and check Ray’s films out on the big screen, especially his later CinemaScope creations. Barring that, I think ya just gotta see the films in one sitting, as his sense of pacing was immaculate, and the stronger films do still pack quite a punch. Since the Internet continues to yield untold pleasures and is one of the finer (and most accessible) research tools, I offer the following clip-survey, courtesy of (you guessed it) YouTube:

An interview clip, from Ray’s Seventies teaching phase:


For some reason no trailer for the perfect They Live By Night can be found on YT, but a French firm has put up an isolated scene from early in the film:


In a Lonely Place (1950) is one of Ray’s best, and also gave Bogart one of his finest roles. The film costars the wonderful Gloria Grahame (who had been Ray’s wife, but the two were in the process of separating while the film was being made). Here is the trailer:


Johnny Guitar has many memorable moments but this exchange of dialogue between Johnny (Sterling Hayden) and Vienna (Joan Crawford) is among the most famous. Godard has been a fan of the film since it came out, and still is — it was included in his recent Histoire(s) du Cinema project:


And in case you can’t imagine what a baroque Western looks like, check this out:


Rebel Without a Cause is available in its entirety on YT:


The trailer for Ray’s masterful Bigger Than Life:


This Bigger Than Life scene serves as a backdrop on the show this week. Here you can watch it with dialogue intact:


Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957) is available on DVD perfectly letterboxed and is a must-see. The opening can be found here:


An eye-catching interlude from Wind Across the Everglades (1958):


Another item that appears on this week’s show, under my commentary. A Cyd Charisse musical number from Party Girl (1958) in BRIGHT Technicholor:


And for those in search of a complete Ray rarity, one generous poster has put up the film The Savage Innocents (1960), which has never been available on VHS or DVD in America. The film is best known for having inspired Bob Dylan to write "Quinn the Eskimo" which became a hit for Manfred Mann. It is also the last real Nick Ray feature film, as his next two works were for-hire epics, and the student film he worked on for years, We Can't Go Home Again hasn't been shown publicly since it was first conceived, and it was a quite complicated piece that involved different types of film (8, super 8, 16, 35mm). The Savage Innocents has been buried for quite some time, and I wonder if that is due to the fact that it would currently be labelled un-"p.c." in its depiction of Eskimos. What Ray was after, however, was to depict a race that has its own moral codes and perfectly organic way of life — and is then disrupted by the white man's sense of "order" and "civilization."


Most viewers had their first and final glimpse of Ray himself in Wim Wenders’ elegiac Lightning Over Water, aka Nick’s Movie:


But this is truly the most amazing Ray rarity on YouTube, the short “The Janitor,” which Ray made for an anthology called Wet Dreams in 1974. It’s quite a bizarre and debauched piece that features Nick in two roles. It is well worth your attention, and I can guarantee you haven’t seen it anyplace else if you live in the U.S.: