Global Films

Above: Toshiro Mifune, starring in the the crime film High and Low (1963), directed by Akira Kurosawa

One of the classes I'll be teaching in the spring is Global Films, and I'm always on the lookout for good websites and possible new films. In today's Sunday New York Times (it's only 4:27 Sunday morning as I write) three of their film critics, Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, and Stephen Holden, discuss the upcoming New York Film Festival. (There is a link where you can hear each critic speak while you watch stills from the films they are discussing: it's very cool.) A "sidebar" at the Festival is a showing of thirty classics from Janus Films. They each discuss two of their favorites from the Janus collection, including La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini; Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), directed by Agnes Varda; Jules et Jim, directed by Francois Truffaut; the French classic Children of Paradise (1945), and High and Low (1963) by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

The last is not as well known as his samurai films, as the speaker notes, which include The Seven Samurai, remade in the U.S. as The Magnificent Seven, and his Shakespeare adaptations, Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear). Scott describes it as a great crime film, based on a novel by American crimewriter Ed McBain.

Children of Paradise was made, Holden explains, with great difficulty in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and is considered "the French Gone with the Wind," a tribute to French theatre.

I always use La Strada as the first film we study, when we discuss post World War II films. I think I'll switch this year from Les 400 Coups to Jules et Jim for an example of French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) films. I've also used clips of L'avventura (Antonioni). I haven't seen Children of Paradise or High and Low, but Kurosawa is always a great favorite with students, partly because his films can be found in video stores and especially in public libraries, so they can easily access a cross-section of his work. I've never found anyone who doesn't enjoy Kurosawa.

Update: I corrected the spelling of Agnes Varda: It was spelled "Anges" in the link, and I thought it was some odd name - but I realized it was "Agnes," which made sense, when I was ordering some films through the Facets.org foreign film catalog. So there is no director Anges Varda - I think! I also had to remove the link to work on some formatting. If you are interested in the site, Google "New York Times" and "Janus Films." And Facets has a $1.99 sale going on for videotapes of 100 foreign movies. I'm guessing they are phasing out videos in favor of DVDs. For one thing, it's possible to make DVDs in a format that can be seen on American, European, and Asian computers or DVD players, but the VHS format is different even for American and European films.