Week that Was

A Paramount Decision

The classic Hollywood era essentially came to an end this week in 1949 when Paramount signed an anti-trust agreement that would separate production from distribution and greatly weaken the studios that had grown into industry behemoths. The fact that this moment had not come sooner was surprising, as the Federal Trade Commission had first investigated Famous Players-Lasky (the company that grew into Paramount) on grounds on monopolization already in 1921, but subsequent actions against them and the other major studios were other nullified or postponed due to the Great Depression and then World War Two. There was an obvious conflict in studios producing films as well as owning the theaters which would then show them, while "block booking" (where theater chains would have to buy a lot of mediocre movies if they wanted to get a desirable one from a studio) was also deemed unlawful. Studios either owned or co-owned 17% of theaters in the U.S. after WW2 and raked in just under half of all film rentals as a result because of this "vertically integrated" business model. After the anti-trust agreement (which affected all studios), exclusivity agreements were no more and theaters could play a film by any studio or independent producer, and studios were forced to make their theatrical arms into distinct companies. While this hurt the studios, who would never see such profits again, this greater freedom was a great boon to exhibitors and independent producers, and also increased the number of foreign films which were screened.

The No-Budget Auteur

"If Robert Rodriguez didn't exist, independent filmmakers would have to invent him," wrote Peter Broderick in Filmmaker Magazine about Robert Rodriguez, whose debut feature El Mariachi was released on February 26, 1993. During the ascendance of the "no-budget" American independent film movement, the Texas-based filmmaker underbid his competitors by making a list of what he could get for free – a car, a bar, a dog – and then building a story around those elements. Rodriguez raised $9,000 for his movie and came in under budget at only $7,225. That parsimoniousness was partially due to the director's ability to wear multiple hats. He told Filmmaker, "Part of the problem with student films with 100 people in the credits is that you can't tell what exactly is the director's talent. On El Mariachi, I took the credit-or blame-for the writing, direction, camerawork, and editing. The nice thing about making a movie by yourself is that you can take credit for any aspect of it anyone likes." Rodriguez planned to sell his film to a Spanish-language straight-to-video distributor and, while waiting for the deal to close, sent a copy to ICM where agent Robert Newman spied the director's talent. Shortly thereafter, Rodriguez was signed to a two-picture deal with Columbia Pictures, which also kicked in more money to properly finish and release El Mariachi in theaters. The film went on to gross a couple of million dollars, but, more importantly, launched a writer-director who would go on to make innovative hits like Spy Kids and Sin City.

Dr. Caligrari's Mysterious Cabinet

Emerging from the rubble of a horrific world war, Germany created in Expressionist cinema a style to reflect its inner pathos and terrors. Before such films as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Walther Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (both 1927) exploited his off-kilter dark approach for their goals, one film, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, cast the first shadow when it was released on February 27, 1920. The film's plotline revolves around the eponymous doctor, a Machiavellian figure who displays his somnambulist assistant Cesare at country fairs, and after dark hypnotizes him and sends him out into the city of Holstenwall to kill his enemies. A collision of modern art and cinema, the film was shot on warped, angled sets depicting a surreal, insane world, and further pushed the envelope by telling the whole story through flashback, then a new cinematic technique. At the core of the film were the ideas that figures of authority were not to be trusted, and that things were never what they appeared to be, both a direct commentary on the fallout from the Great War. Wiene's film has since become a hallmark and enigma of German Expressionist Cinema, picked up as starting point for the Siegfried Kracauer's landmark 1947 study From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.

Deutschland über Deutschland

On a chilly Wednesday in the German town of Oberhausen, an industrial city in the Ruhr Valley, 26 of Germany's rising artists and filmmakers signed a manifesto (soon to be known as the "Oberhausen Manifesto") which denounced the moribund state of German Cinema. The occasion of the 8th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, and the imagination and daring exhibited by German short films there, served as the reason to call for equal imagination and daring in feature films. The post-war German film industry, which was churning out a bland diet of melodrama, operetta and Heimatfilm (literally "homeland film," a national genre in which family values played against scenic alpine landscapes), had stifled a younger generation who yearned to address and explore Germany's pathos and the terrible shadow of the Nazi regime. Writer-director Haro Senft had drafted the manifesto and assembled its signers (which included such leading figures as Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz). The Manifesto proudly proclaimed: "We declare our intention to create the new German feature film. This new film needs new freedoms. Freedom from the conventions of the established industry. Freedom from the outside influence of commercial partners..." In time these sentiments helped changed the financing structure of German film, leading to the formation of a German New Wave and the work of such directors as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders.

Cinéaste Maudit

One of the most important but least recognized filmmakers of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette, was born on March 1, 1928. Like fellow icons of the movement Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, Rivette was a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, but unlike his colleagues, his work infrequently captured the imagination of a broader public. His mysterious films often run past the three- and four-hour marks with elaborate, multi-tentacled plots that must be actively assembled by the viewer. Writing recently in the New York Times, the critic Dennis Lim noted, "Even in the heyday of the French New Wave, the cinematic revolution he helped to foment, Jacques Rivette was known as a 'cinéaste maudit.' The term, which translates as "accursed filmmaker," is a double-edged compliment, accorded to those visionaries who have a tough time getting their movies produced and whose achievements tend to be devalued or misunderstood." Despite this daunting reputation, Rivette has worked steadily over the years, creating masterpieces like Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991). And this year on February 22, just before his 80th birthday, he opened his latest, The Duchess of Langeais, a relatively straightforward adaptation of an 1833 Balzac novel, in New York to strong reviews.

The Line to Justice

On March 1, 1989, in a courtroom in Austin, Texas, convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams was made a free man. In 1976, police officer Robert Wood was shot to death when he stopped a car late in the night outside Dallas, Texas. Initially the evidence pointed to 16-year-old David Ray Harris, but the police eventually turned their attention to Adams, an out-of-town stranger who was just passing through. Based on a coerced confession and dubious eye-witness reports, Adams was convicted of Wood's murder in 1977 and sentenced to death. Despite numerous appeals, Adams made no headway in clearing his name. Then in 1985, another stranger passing through town, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, learned about Randall's case while researching the infamous Dr Death, a Dallas psychiatrist named James Grigson whose "expert" testimony pushed many people onto death row, including Adams. Morris became so fascinated by the case and its obvious miscarriage of justice that he decided to make a documentary about it. His 1988 The Thin Blue Line made Morris's career as well as bringing national attention to Adams' case. Eventually the Texas courts reconsidered and overturned Adams's sentence, leading to his walking out of court a free man on March 1. But the story was not over quite yet. In a strange turn of gratitude, Adams went after Morris the next year to reclaim his life rights, which were in the end returned.