By Jim Healy, Director of Programming, UW Cinematheque & Wisconsin Film Festival

Of the many movies I saw for the first time in 2015, I've selected 20 that were my favorites. In alphabetical order they are:

ABOUT ELLY (2009, Asghar Farhadi)
BEYOND THE FOREST (1949, King Vidor)
BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015, Steven Spielberg)
CREED (2015, Ryan Coogler)
DAÏNAH LA MÉTISSE (1932, Jean Grémillon)
THE EMIGRANTS (1971, Jan Troell)
GREEN ROOM (2015, Jeremy Saulnier)
THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015, Quentin Tarantino)
INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1949, Clarence Brown)
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2015, Matthew Vaughn)
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015, George Miller)
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION (2015, Christopher McQuarrie)
PRIVATE PROPERTY (1960, Leslie Stevens)
RICKI AND THE FLASH (2015, Jonathan Demme)
RISATE DI GIOIA (aka THE PASSIONATE THIEF, 1960, Mario Monicelli)
SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE (2015, Richard Starzak & Mark Burton)
SON OF SAUL (2015, László Nemes)
SPOTLIGHT (2015, Tom McCarthy)
SUNSET SONG (2015, Terence Davies)
TANGERINE (2015, Sean Baker)

Here are another 100 titles that I really enjoyed:

ALL FALL DOWN (1962, John Frankenheimer)
ANGST (1983, Gerald Kargl)
ANT-MAN (2015, Peyton Reed)
THE ASPHYX (1973, Peter Newbrook)
AVENGING FORCE (1986, Sam Firstenberg)
THE BABY MAKER (1970, James Bridges)
BACHELOR MOTHER (1939, Garson Kanin)
BEWARE OF MR. BAKER (2012, Jay Bulger)
BEYOND THE LIGHTS (2014, Gina Prince-Blythewood)
BLUES IN THE NIGHT (1941, Anatole Litvak)
BORN FREE (1966, James Hill)
THE BRIDGE (1960, Bernhard Wicki)
BROOKLYN (2015, John Crowley)
THE BUBBLE (1966, Arch Oboler)
CARAVAN (1934, Erik Charrel)
CHUCK NORRIS VS. COMMUNISM (2014, Ilina Calugareanu)
COP CAR (2015, Jon Watts)
THE D TRAIN (2015, Jarrad Paul, Andrew Mogel)
DANGEROUS TO KNOW (1938, Robert Florey)
DANGEROUS WHEN WET (1953, Charles Walters)
DAUGHTERS COURAGEOUS (1939, Michael Curtiz)
DAY OF ANGER (1967, Tonino Valerii)
DEAD OF NIGHT (1945, Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti)
EATING RAOUL (1982, Paul Bartel)
END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1966, Jan Schmidt)
EVEREST (2015, Baltasar Kormakur)
THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG (1982, Lawrence Schiller)
FAMILY FILM (2015, Olmo Omerzu)
FEBRUARY (2015, Osgood Perkins)
FIVE FINGERS (1952, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)
FOXCATCHER (2014, Bennett Miller)
THE GOOD DINOSAUR (2015, Peter Sohn)
THE GREAT RUPERT (1950, Irving Pichel)
HENRY GAMBLE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY (2015, Stephen Cone)
HERO’S ISLAND (1962, Leslie Stevens)
HESTER STREET (1975, Joan Micklin Silver)
HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN (1944, Delmer Daves)
HOME (2015, Tim Johnson)
IN NAME ONLY (1939, John Cromwell)
IRRATIONAL MAN (2015, Woody Allen)
JAUJA (2014, Lisandro Alonso)
JET STORM (1959, Cy Endfield)
JURASSIC WORLD (2015, Colin Trevorrow)
KEEPER (2015, Guillaume Senez)
A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS (1955, Carol Reed)
KIDNAP SYNDICATE (1975, Fernando Di Leo)
KING OF THE WILD STALLIONS (1959, R.G. Springsteen)
LA PETITE LISE (1930, Jean Grémillon)
THE LADY IN THE VAN (2015, Nicholas Hytner)
THE LAST MOVIE (1971, Dennis Hopper)
LAZYBONES (1925, Frank Borzage)
LONDON ROAD (2015, Rufus Norris)
THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (1958, Martin Ritt)
LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY’S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (2014, David Gregory)
LOVE AND PEACE (2015, Sion Sono)
LUMIÈRE D’ÉTÉ (1943, Jean Grémillon)
MADAME BOVARY (1949, Vincente Minnelli)
MARIE’S STORY (2014, Jean-Pierre Ameris)
MISTRESS AMERICA (2015, Noah Baumbach)
MY SISTER EILEEN (1955, Richard Quine)
THE NIGHTMARE (2015, Rodney Ascher)
NINJA III: THE DOMINATION (1984, Sam Firstenberg)
OKAY, AMERICA! (1932, Tay Garnett)
ONE CROWDED NIGHT (1940, Irving Reis)
PADDINGTON (2014, Paul King)
PETE KELLY’S BLUES (1955, Jack Webb)
PICKUP (1951, Hugo Haas)
A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (2014, Roy Andersson)
POLLYANNA (1960, David Swift)
PRINT GENERATION (1974, J.J. Murphy)
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1956, Val Guest)
THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE (1958, Vincente Minnelli)
RESULTS (2015, Andrew Bujalski)
ROOM (2015, Lenny Abrahamson)
THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER (2015, Chad Gracia)
SAPS AT SEA (1940, Gordon Douglas)
THE SEVENTH CROSS (1944, Fred Zinnemann)
SHOW PEOPLE (1928, King Vidor)
THE SINS OF RACHEL CADE (1961, Gordon Douglas)
SPARTANS (2014, Nicolas Wadimoff)
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER (2015, Paul Tibbitt)
SPY (2015, Paul Feig)
STAR WARS EPISODE VII THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015, J.J. Abrams)
THE STEEL TRAP (1952, Andrew L. Stone)
STINKING HEAVEN (2015, Nathan Silver)
THE SYSTEM (1953, Lewis Seiler)
TENDER COMRADE (1943, Edward Dmytryk)
THE TREASURE (2015, Corneliu Porumboiu)
TURKEY SHOOT (1982, Brian Trenchard-Smith)
UNCLE KENT 2 (2015, Todd Rohal)
VARIETY (1983, Bette Gordon)
THE WALK (2015, Robert Zemeckis)
WHILE WE’RE YOUNG (2014, Noah Baumbach)
WHITE GOD (2014, Kornél Mundruczó)
WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS (1928, W.S. Van Dyke)
WILD TALES (2014, Damian Szifron)
THE WISE KIDS (2011, Stephen Cone)
WOMAN ON THE RUN (1950, Norman Foster)
YOU AND ME (1938, Fritz Lang)

This essay on Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Cornere was written by Matt Connolly, Ph.D. candidate in UW Madison Dept. of Communication Arts. Shop will screen as the final Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen, in the Chazen Museum of Art, on Sunday, December 13 at 2 p.m. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we are not able to screen the film on 35mm as originally announced. A DVD will be shown in its place.

By Matt Connolly

Writing in Film Comment on the striking paucity of films dealing with the workplace as a concrete reality of everyday life, Kent Jones notes at least one movie that honors the daily grind with neither an overreliance on cynicism nor an overdose of sentimentality. “What separates The Shop Around the Corner from almost every other work-centered movie is its honesty,” says Jones of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy, adding that it’s “known for its ingenious and delicate romantic entanglements, but it would be nothing without this frank acknowledgment of human fallibility in the workplace, unencumbered by moral hierarchies.”

Jones is one of our very finest critics, and there’s little I can say in response to his broader analysis of The Shop Around the Corner’s nuanced portrait of retail labor besides an enthusiastic nod of the head. I can only add that the film’s great strength and singularity lies in how effortlessly it links the aforementioned “ingenious and delicate romantic entanglements” of its protagonists with the workplace in which they squabble, negotiate, and finally connect with one another. Few films so strikingly underscore the barriers we attempt to place between our work and our private lives, only to reveal (with great wit and insight) how inevitably fuzzy that line really is.

In true romantic comedy fashion, the eventual couple at the center of The Shop Around the Corner meet cute. Unbeknownst to them for much of the movie, they actually do it twice. Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), the top salesman at leather goods shop Matuschek and Company, has answered a newspaper personals ad placed by a fellow Budapest resident. He delights in their written exchanges on literature, culture, and ideas, and hopes that it will develop into a real-life romance. Around the same time, he meets Klara Novak (Margaret Sullivan), who comes to Matuschek and Company seeking a job and who is soon hired after selling a particularly undesirable cigarette box to a fellow customer. (The cigarette box plays a grating rendition of “Ochi Chërnye” whenever it’s opened, but Klara reframes the item as a candy box whose tune reminds one to watch their consumption of sweets.) Alfred and Klara quickly grate on one another at work, while both privately continue a rewarding written back-and-forth with their respective pen pals. (Klara has also found a smart and charming companion via the newspaper.)

Needless to say, Alfred and Klara are one another’s mystery correspondents—a charming contrivance in and of itself, but one that takes on evermore humorous and poignant dimensions as the film progresses. Alfred eventually discovers that Klara is the woman on the other end of the letters, keeping the revelation under wraps as he attempts to pursue her in person. Klara rebuffs these tentative advances by drawing withering contrasts between Alfred and the man with whom she’s been writing to. In a stinging rebuke, she dismisses Alfred as “a little insignificant clerk.” The moment lands with particular impact as it succinctly underscores how inconceivable it is to Klara that the poetic, intellectually engaged man with whom she’s been falling for might also occupy the same quotidian workplace as herself. (In fairness, Alfred feels much the same way about Klara before discovering her true identity.) Both Klara and Alfred so strive to distance themselves from the commonplace nature of their job that they’re largely blind to the fellow dreamer right beside them.

So much of The Shop Around the Corner rests upon a knowing—and knowingly empathetic—conception of how work fosters relationships at once tender and uneasy. It’s one of the film’s great unspoken jokes that, though we hear snippets of their poetry-laden letters to one another, it is Alfred and Klara’s snappish workplace repartee that let us know how truly aligned they are in intellect and emotional temperament. Their relationship exists within a wider network of friendships, alliances, and affinities throughout the staff of Matuschek and Company. And while at least one of these is revealed to be built on deception, most exude a kind of ambivalent warmth, illuminating the singular blend of affection and proximity that defines so many workplace bonds. The complex rapport between Alfred and shop owner Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan) particularly exemplifies this, with Hugo looking upon Alfred as variously a mentee, subordinate, romantic rival, and surrogate son.

The Shop Around the Corner fittingly concludes on Christmas Eve, a traditional time to gather with loved ones that’s also a typical financial windfall for retail stores. The delicate imbrication of professional and personal intimacies that the film charts so well find their logical conclusion in these last moments: the triumph of teamwork; the bonds of time and labor; the gradual dissipation of the group as each one says their goodnights and heads home to spouses and children, or parents, or friends, or an empty house or apartment. We are finally left with our two would-be lovers, chatting as they close up shop for the hundredth (or thousandth) time. It’s just another day of work—a prospect within which The Shop Around the Corner finds both the most prosaic of pleasures and the most precious of possibilities.

This essay on Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951) was written by Harry Gilbert, a graduate of Williams College (B.A., History). A 35mm print of The Prowler, will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen "35mm Forever" series on Sunday, December 6 at 2 p.m. The 35mm restored print screens courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation.

By Harry Gilbert

In a New York Times interview conducted a year before his death in 1984, Joseph Losey reflected on the ambivalent effects of the Hollywood blacklist. “Without it,” Losey mused, “I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm.” If Losey’s comments can be taken as indicators of his interests in social issues and investments in film as a mode of social critique, one could chart a trajectory that extends through the director’s oeuvre. In this respect, The Prowler (1951) is Losey par excellence.

The Prowler was produced at an historical moment in which the crime film was undergoing transformation. In the early 1940s, the plurality of crime films featured a “fugitive outsider” as the protagonist towards whom the camera structured the sympathies of the viewer. In this narrative, a working or middle class citizen, rather than the gangster or organized crime network of earlier crime films, comes into conflict with the law through false accusations or crimes of poverty, and subsequently resists social, political, and economic authority in an attempt to ascertain the true origins of the crime. Put differently, these films offered a critique of contemporary conditions that located guilt with hegemonic systems of power—the state and capitalism foremost among them—and situated the “fugitive outsider” as an ordinary person struggling to get by. This, when placed within the chiaroscuro sets of the urban environment, was film noir.

These films emerged during a period of violent and prolonged class conflict in Hollywood and the United States more broadly. Repression followed. Among other national and international factors, the House Un-American Activites Committee (HUAC) pressured unions to purify themselves of their more radical members and Hollywood studios to police—or blacklist—their more radical artists. This moment marked a shift in the dominant narratives of the crime film. By the 1950s, the police officer or detective became the protagonist, and the once sympathetic “fugitive outsider” became the criminal whose apprehension would show audiences the mechanisms of the criminal justice system and demonstrate the need to preserve order in the shadow of the Red Scare.

The Prowler, then, finds itself among a small group of films that persisted as once-effective avenues for social critique became increasingly foreclosed. Indeed, Losey goes so far as to provide a critique of the narrative shift itself. The story follows patrolman Webb Harwood (Van Heflin) to the suburban Los Angeles home of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), who had earlier reported a late-night prowler outside of her window. Both Webb and Susan aspire to attain the American Dream. Webb is just an “ordinary guy” from a working class background who “hates being a cop” and desires to one day own a motel so that he may “make money while he sleeps.”  Webb hopes to forge a path for himself that his father was too complacent to take. For Webb, the acquisition of a wife is a part of this process, and he will do whatever it takes to secure that asset.  Serendipitously, Susan grew up in the same town as Webb, but lived in the other, richer community. After a few years “knocking around” Hollywood, Susan marries disc jockey John Gilvray in a “happy,” “unexciting,” and, much to Susan’s dismay, childless marriage. 

The development of a physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive relationship between Webb and Susan—despite what critics might say, the film has not persuaded me to believe that any of the interactions between the two are consensual—drives a narrative that theorizes and indicts how systems of power create the contexts in which individual decisions are made and poses questions about who is most effected and why, often with uneasy or absent answers. In a contemporary moment where the issue of race, gender, sexuality, and police oppression has re-entered mainstream (i.e., white) discourse due to the political work of people of color, these questions remain just as pressing today as they did when the film was first released.

The Prowler positions the figure of the cop outside of the law and thereby questions the role of the police, the decidedly illegal yet state-sanctioned means by which the law is enforced or skirted, and the privileges and pressures the role ordains upon a person—in this case, a man. The film thinks through the distinct ways the police as an institution exerts violence, in particular the patriarchal violence against women, and generates sympathy for itself. This critique, however, is tempered in ways that (I think) are important to consider as a viewer of the film. How does the characterization of Charles “Bud” Crocker (John Maxwell) suggest an exceptionalism to Webb that exculpates the police more generally? And how might the conclusion suggest that the police force is capable of regulating itself and thereby reinvest in the organization’s inviolability?

Susan registers the configurations of patriarchal forces in the 1950s, and her decisions enable her to survive. How might the camera-as-prowler implicate the viewer in the male gaze, one which Susan attempts to control through an internalized belief in the justice of the police and a recourse to carceral feminism? What does it mean for Susan to seek the security of marriage because of the precarity of Hollywood and capitalist labor markets for women? And how does the body of Susan become a site for masculine impotency, and how does she negotiate the repressive and creative potentials of this (im)position?

This prowler only exists outside of the frame, yet this role names the film, establishes the film, and makes possible the relationship between Webb and Susan. How do we think about the always-already racialized figure of the prowler and their visual absence from the film? Who is the “stranger” in the context of 1950s Los Angeles, with a particular history of white supremacist violence, redlining and policing neighborhoods, xenophobia, and colonialism? Bud asks us to think about how “There’s history slathered over every square foot of this country of ours.” In a film that commences with the racialized figure of the prowler, and stages the extrajudicial practices of the police and the endorsement of these measures by the state, the specter of lynching and white supremacist violence is not far. In a genre that that takes the white working class man as its subject and capitalist systems as the antagonistic object of inquiry, does The Prowler move beyond and critique this racist logic, or does it rely on them?

To pose, answer, and complicate these questions, The Prowler assembled a team of politically aligned artists who were masters of film noir. Losey himself had already directed two film noirs released in 1951 alone: a remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and The Big Night. Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted in 1947 for Soviet sympathies and connections to the Communist Party, composed a screenplay credited to close friend Hugo Butler, whose name would also soon be found on the blacklist. Boris Leven, whose recent filmography included noir classics Criss Cross (1949) from Robert Siodmak and House by the River (1950) from Lang, served as art director and hired uncredited—read: blacklisted—designer John Hubley, famous for his experiments in animation, to craft the film’s sets.

This essay on Agnès Varda's Mur Murs and Documenteur (both 1981) was written by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Mur Murs and Documenteur will both screen on Saturday, November 21, beginning at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. The program will begin with a special introduction by Kelley Conway, Professor of Film, author of Contemporary Film Director's: Agnès Varda, now available from Univeristy of Illinois Press.

By Jenny Oyallon-Koloski

Agnès Varda enjoys filming real people. She says as much in Varda par Agnès, suggesting that she likes “watching them put themselves into the scene, listening to the way they talk, observing their gestures, their settings, and the objects they surround themselves with.” Her children, Rosalie Varda-Demy and Mathieu Demy, would agree with her. The latter proposes in an interview that his mother has always chosen to work with reality, in stark contrast to his father, fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy, who stresses instead “the importance of tales and wonder.”

Varda and Demy spent several years in Los Angles at the end of the 1960s, during which time she became fascinated with the proliferation of murals around the city. A subsequent visit to California from 1979 to 1981 revitalized the interest, and Varda spent months inventorying and studying the neighborhood-specific art forms. Made in part thanks to a grant from the French Ministry of Culture, Murs Murs (1981) is the result of Varda’s determination to discover the creators behind these murals and interview them by their art. “Murs has all the sun and glory of Los Angeles,” the filmmaker tells Variety: “It’s all in there—the bad, like gang killings, as well as the good. But it’s very alive. And the people I filmed say incredible things about this city, about the dream-like quality of life here.” As Varda and her editor, Sabine Mamou, were finishing the final cut, an idea for a new film—about a woman struggling with the recent separation from her husband—emerged like the “shadow,” as Varda recalls, of the first.

As a continuation of her interest in non-actors, Varda links her narrative strategies in Documenteur (1981) to several of her earlier works—La Pointe Courte (1955), L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), and Cleo de 5 à 7 (1962)—in which she also films everyday people in a documentary style and juxtaposes these images with the fictionalized concerns of her protagonists. The film’s Variety reviewer finds that “Varda has a great eye for composition, with remarkably bleak but arresting shots of the beach where the woman works, accompanied by well-chosen minimalist shots of the city and beach plus montages of blank, lonely faces.” But Varda’s subsequent Los Angeles-based project is also a family affair. Sabine Mamou emerged as the natural choice in Varda’s mind to play Emilie because of her presence during the early planning stages but also because “she was like a part of the family.” The natural choice, then, to play Emilie’s son, Martin, was Mathieu Demy.

The incorporation of friends and family, especially, into her work is not unusual for Varda’s filmmaking practice, or for the greater Varda-Demy household. Rosalie Varda-Demy can be seen in Varda’s earlier film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) and had small roles as a child in some of Demy’s films, notably playing Genvieve’s daughter at the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). She subsequently pursued a career as a costume designer, working on several of Demy’s later films as well as Varda’s Vagabond (1985). Mathieu Demy, now a professional actor and filmmaker, appears in Varda’s Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) and Kung-Fu Master! (1988), while also playing a bit role in Demy’s final feature of the same year, Trois places pour le 26 (1988). His presence in Documenteur seems to have stuck with him the most, however, as he incorporates shots from Varda’s film into his directorial debut, Americano (2011). As Varda explains before a 2014 screening of her film at the Cinémathèque française, her son’s desire to incorporate parts of Documenteur motivated a restoration that appealed to both parties, since “he got the bits he wanted, and I got the rest.” The choice to cast family members in her film, especially, allows us to observe what Mathieu Demy refers to as Varda’s “re-appropriation of reality.”

We should be wary of taking these people’s realities and Varda’s portrayals of them at face value. The pun in Documenteur (menteur = liar) suggests as much. But we also cannot completely separate the film’s fictionalized account of a woman and her son’s struggles from Varda’s separation from Jacques Demy during this period; “like much of Varda’s work” Variety suggests, “the film is more than a little autobiographical.” Rosalie mentions in an interview that Documenteur was an emotionally difficult film for her to watch at the time of its making, given its “focus on Agnès’ suffering.” Mathieu also remembers the early 1980s as a painful period, but recalls with pleasure his time roller-skating around Los Angles with his father. A photograph from Varda’s collection shows the duo in action, with a series of abstract murals framing them in the background. Like Mathieu and Jacques Demy skating around Venice Beach, Varda’s films and their blend of reality and fiction will never cease to keep us on our toes.