Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema 9780748695676

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Omnibus Films

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Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Omnibus Films Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema

David Scott Diffrient

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© David Scott Diffrient, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9565 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9566 9 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9567 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9568 3 (epub) The right of David Scott Diffrient to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgments viii Part I  Historical and Theoretical Perspectives 1 2 3 4

“Beginnings without Ends”: Conceptual Parameters and the Critical Discourses of Episodic Cinema Regulated Variety and Excess: Antecedents and Extensions of Episodic Cinema Key Concepts in Transauthorial Cinema: Abundance, Change, Containment, and Order Key Concepts in Film Studies: Audience, Authorship, Genre, and Nation

3 37 65 90

Part II  Get on the Omnibus: Case Studies in Transauthorial Cinema 5 6 7 8 9

Wartime “Consensus Pictures” and the “Housing” of History: From Forever and a Day to Dead of Night 113 Three Cases of Maugham: Quartet, Trio, and Encore 133 Episodic Erotics and the Politics of Place: From Love in the City to Love and Anger 148 Collective Opposition, Political Participation, and Worldwide Competition: From Visions of Eight to Visions of Europe 174 The Recent Revival of the Omnibus Film: From Paris, je t’aime to 11ʹ09ʺ01 202

Notes 222 Filmography 248 Index 267

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Figures

1.1 and 1.2  An early scene from the documentary Ticket x 3 showing the three directors: Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, 25 and Ermanno Olmi. 1.3  The main menu on Facets Video’s DVD release of Tickets.27 1.4  One of the three menu screens for the region 2 DVD release of Tube Tales. 27 1.5 and 1.6  Two of the individual episode titles interspersed throughout Tube Tales. 29 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3  In the opening minutes of the 1960 omnibus film Love and the Frenchwoman, hands enter the frame to open a 48 book.  2.4 and 2.5  The title shots for two of the five episodes comprising Pearls of the Deep. 57 3.1 and 3.2  Frame enlargements from the opening credits of the Paramount production If I Had a Million. 68 3.3 and 3.4  Frame enlargements from Tokyo! 79 3.5 and 3.6  Frame enlargements from Three . . . Extremes.80 3.7 and 3.8  Frame enlargements from Federico Fellini’s contribution to Boccaccio ’70. 87 4.1 and 4.2  Part of the opening credits of RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello.94 4.3  Frame enlargement from RKO’s wartime propaganda picture Forever and a Day. 104 5.1 and 5.2  An unassuming country cottage is the setting for the circular frame narrative in the British multi-director horror classic Dead of Night. 127 5.3 and 5.4  The circular narrative framework of Dead of Night, which culminates with a shot of Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns).  129 6.1  A frame enlargement from O. Henry’s Full House. 136 6.2  W. Somerset Maugham sits at a desk in a facsimile of his study where he greets the audience of Quartet. 138 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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f igure s vii 6.3  The first page of “The Facts of Life,” one of the four stories comprising Quartet. 139 6.4 and 6.5  Frame enlargements from the 1951 film Encore. 145 7.1  The cover of a fifteen-page miniature “magazine” sent to American movie theaters. 152 7.2  French poster for the 1965 Italian sex farce The Dolls (Le bambole). 157 8.1  Promotional material highlighting the many directors involved in the making of the omnibus film Visions of Europe. 184 8.2  Frame enlargement from the ninth episode of Visions of Europe, entitled “Room for All.” 197 9.1 and 9.2  Alexander Payne’s contribution to the omnibus film Paris, je t’aime in which Carol, a postal worker from Denver, gazes at the city of Paris. 204 9.3 and 9.4  Two back-to-back episodes in Paris, je t’aime both culminate with a young man and woman embracing. 210 9.5  A screen capture from 11ʹ09ʺ01, showing one of the interstitials separating two of its episodes. 212 9.6  German film poster for 11ʹ09ʺ01, an omnibus film concerning the events of – and global reaction to – September 11, 2001. 213

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Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the unflagging support of my friends, family, and colleagues, as well as the professors at UCLA with whom I worked when I initiated research into omnibus films while pursuing my doctorate degree. I am particularly appreciative of the early guidance provided by Vivian Sobchack, Teshome Gabriel, Peter Wollen, and James Goodwin, all of whom inspired my project with their insights and encouragement. A special note of gratitude goes to Vivian who helped shape the structure of the project at its foundational stages with her tireless editing and timely feedback. She has consistently offered the kind of professional support and personal care so essential to the advancement of my academic career. I would also like to thank Nick Browne and David E. James, important influences from UCLA and USC respectively. Richard Porton, Leonard Quart, David Gerstner, Philip Gentile, and Scott Dixon McDowell deserve recognition for their enthusiastic encouragement of my earlier academic endeavors, encouragement that helped propel me toward a doctoral degree in the first place. I am indebted to all of the archivists and librarians who assisted me throughout my research, in particular Rose-Marie Haynes at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), Flavia Morabito at the Cineteca of the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema (Rome), and Ron Magliozzi and Charles Silver at the Film Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art (Queens, NY). Barbara Hall and her incredible staff at the Margaret Herrick Library (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) have been especially helpful during these past seven years, as have the many professionals at the UCLA Arts Library Special Collections, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland. The courteous staff at the UCLA Film and Television Archive enabled me to view many otherwise unavailable films in welcoming settings, and to them I owe a large debt of gratitude. A small portion of Chapter 7 (dealing partially with Italian and FrancoItalian omnibus films) appears in Beyond Life is Beautiful, Comedy and Tragedy in the Cinema of Roberto Benigni (Troubador Publishing, 2005). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a c kno wle dgme nt s ix I would like to thank the editor of that collection, Grace Russo Bullaro, for her helpful comments. Additional appreciation goes to Steffen Hantke who gave constructive feedback regarding my work on Dead of Night and other horror-themed examples of episodic cinema. I am also very thankful to have such wonderful colleagues at Colorado State University: Sue D. Pendell, Karrin Vasby Anderson, Eric Aoki, Carl Burgchardt, Martín Carcasson, John Crowley, Greg Dickinson, Thomas Dunn, Katie Gibson, Ann Gill, Cindy Griffin, Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, Katherine Knobloch, Nick Marx, and Elizabeth Williams. I love teaching at CSU but miss the former colleagues whose travels have taken them elsewhere, including Jonathan Lupo at Saint Anselm College, Shelley Bradfield at Central College, and Andy Merolla at Baldwin Wallace University. Infinite gratitude is due Hye Seung Chung. Wife, friend, and colleague, she has contributed to this book in innumerable ways. Not only did she meticulously read the entire work but she also offered alternative perspectives that enriched my readings of key texts. My deepest appreciation goes to her for immensely improving it with many wonderful suggestions and helping me through rough patches with love and understanding. And, finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank my parents, Harry and Donna Diffrient, whose emotional support throughout my academic career has been a constant source of strength.

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Part I

Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

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C H A PT E R 1

“Beginnings without Ends”: Conceptual Parameters and the Critical Discourses of Episodic Cinema This book examines omnibus films, a “transauthorial” branch of what can be broadly referred to as episodic cinema. The expression “omnibus film” has been around for decades, and is still commonly used by producers and reviewers to refer to any multi-director feature in which several selfcontained episodes are presented to the viewer one after the other. But the term has also been deployed by critics with less concern for definitional specificity in their reviews of single-director episode films. Throughout this book I shall use the term to denote feature-length motion pictures showcasing the contributions of two or more directors (or, more accurately, two or more teams of filmmakers, including screenwriters, cinematographers, and other creative artists responsible for the content and form of their individual episodes). By calling omnibus films a kind of “transauthorial cinema,” I entertain the idea that cinematic authorship – a much-debated concept in film studies – is not only prone to change or revision but also subject to a kind of textual flux and inter-episodic flow which result from several authordirectors’ segments being combined as autonomous yet connected units in a single motion picture. Meaning “across,” “between,” and “through,” the prefix trans- tells us that an omnibus film is a motion picture containing both movement and borders, permeable though the latter might be. In fact, the permeability of those internal divisions is what facilitates transit from one episode to another, not only during the actual viewing of a film but also after that experience is officially over, when spectators have the opportunity to reflect back on a motion picture’s formal properties, narrative structure, and thematic motifs as a whole while “moving” themselves, mentally, back and forth across the boundaries separating the individual segments. As I will explain toward the end of this book, being “moved” (emotionally) is a form of spectatorial engagement that carries ethical implications, particularly when one is confronted with human rightsthemed omnibus films, such as If You Were Me (Yŏsŏtgae ŭi sisŏn, 2003), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Stories on Human Rights (2008), and Then and Now: Beyond Borders and Differences (2011), the last film an NGO-commissioned work whose title alone reminds us that the prefix trans- can take us “beyond” the aforementioned meanings to showcase similarities as well as differences in a given authorial assemblage (which, in the case of Then and Now, includes an international roster of filmmaking talent: Tata Amaral, from Brazil; Fanny Ardant, from France; Hüseyin Karabey, from Turkey; Masbedo, from Italy; Idrissa Ouédraogo, from Burkina Faso; Jafar Panahi, from Iran; and Robert Wilson, from the United States). Unlike other subcategories of episodic cinema (such as the anthology film and the compilation film), the omnibus film thus brings together not only two or more discrete episodes or narrative sketches but also two or more filmmakers who, in certain cases, may serve as national representatives, contributing short works to a larger whole that encompasses a range of directorial styles, performative modes, aesthetic sensibilities, and possibly genres. Consider, for example, Most People Live in China (Folk flest bor i Kina, 2002), a film that, despite its title, was produced in Norway as an opportunity to explore party politics following the country’s parliamentary elections in September 2001. The contributing directors of this omnibus production range across a variety of different professional backgrounds, and include well-known leaders in the Norwegian film and television industries, such as Hans Peter Moland and Thomas Robsahm, as well as individuals with little prior experience, such as debut director Arild Frölich and film school graduate Sara Johnson. Another, more telling example of transauthorship is The Wind Rose (Die Windrose, 1957), a five-episode omnibus film commissioned by the International Democratic Women’s Federation, supervised by Joris Ivens and Alberto Cavalcanti, and shot in five different countries (Brazil, China, France, Italy, and Russia) by filmmakers hailing from those countries (Alex Viany, Wu Kuo Yin, Yanick Bellon, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Sergei Gerassimov, respectively). Consider as well Paris, je t’aime (2006): Over the course of this omnibus film’s two-hour running time, spectators are not only confronted with a host of stories and characters but are also witness to a wide spectrum of cinematographic techniques, from the undercranking of German director Tom Tykwer’s hyperkinetic tale of a blind man’s (Melchior Belson) relationship with his actress girlfriend (Natalie Portman) to the single-shot long take of Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s “Parc Monceau” which steadily tracks the movement and conversation of a father (Nick Nolte) and his daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) as they walk down an avenue in the City of Lights’s 17th arrondissement. Significantly, film critic Mick LaSalle, in his review of the eighteenNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episode Paris, je t’aime, notes that “most of the shorts have the feeling of fragments, of half stories, or of beginnings without ends, or ends without beginnings.”1 But this is part of the omnibus film’s allure, its mystery – a sign of its commendable tendency to “leave something hanging in the air, or at least something unsaid.” These latter words, drawn from LaSalle’s generally positive review of the film, are also a reminder of the reason why omnibus productions often fail to resonate with many audience members, particularly those who expect to have a “hearty meal” rather than a helping of “side dishes” (or a la carte items) when they enter a movie theater or sit down to watch a DVD at home. As I hope to show, however, there is a fullness to the omnibus film viewing experience, despite the form’s propensity to spread narrative thin, across a range of scenarios that might have few overt connections to one another. As LaSalle states, viewers of Paris, je t’aime get “the sense of having seen a panorama of human experience, of having witnessed a moment of time in all its true fullness” – something alluded to in the “bulging” titles of certain omnibus films, such as O. Henry’s FULL House (1952), ENORMOUS Changes at the Last Minute (1983), and ALL the Invisible Children (2005).2

Minding the Gap As someone who has studied, taught, and written about film criticism, history, and theory for over a decade, I find it remarkable that few scholars have attempted to conceptualize and contextualize omnibus films, which number in the hundreds and span the breadth of motion-picture history. This omission is made even more extraordinary by the continued production and proliferation of internationally distributed, multi-director motion pictures over the past ten years alone. Besides filling a gap in film history, recuperating heretofore overlooked motion pictures, this study seeks to make a theoretical intervention in questions related to authorship, genre, and nationhood while expanding the critical language through which to analyze episodic cinema. Prior to this book, the most sustained treatment of episode films could be found in Michael Steven Sinclair’s PhD dissertation, Molti-Story Cinema: The Episode Film in the Italian Cinema. Completed in 2004, Sinclair’s wide-ranging, in-depth study of il film ad episodi focuses primarily on single-director productions, such as Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1945), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron (Il Decameron, 1971), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995). Because of this, as well as its emphasis on a single national film culture, Sinclair’s work differs considerably from my own study. Moreover, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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accessing internationally distributed omnibus films has become a lot easier since Sinclair completed his dissertation in 2004 when he wrote that the “issue of availability is another major reason for the non-existence of an extended study of the Italian and French episode films in the English language.” Though many films are still not available in DVD or Blu-ray formats, several have been released on home video and have been posted (sometimes illegally) on the Internet over the past decade. Despite the differences between our studies, I feel compelled to tease out the implications of Sinclair’s statement that “filmmakers who often utilized or contributed to the episode film form clearly must have had aesthetic and/or ideological reasons for doing so.”3 I also hope to build upon Mark Betz’s trailblazing work on omnibus films, included as a lengthy section in his recent publication Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Betz’s book contains a chapter entitled “Exquisite Corpses: Art Cinema, Film Criticism, and the Omnibus Film” as well as an accompanying filmography that is exceptionally thorough.4 Though principally limited to European multi-director films of the 1950s and 1960s, Betz’s study provides an admirable and necessary first step in shaping broader considerations of the genre. His preliminary questions about the status of episode films in general, as well as his long list of omnibus productions, have helped to sketch some of the terrain that I shall map out in a more thematically comprehensive, historically grounded, and transculturally adventurous manner. Of the major film theorists and historians – those whose combined writings constitute the canon of cinema studies – only Siegfried Kracauer offers more than a fleeting glimpse of what he describes as films that are themselves “collection[s] of independent little movies.” Unfortunately, the eleven pages in Theory of Film that Kracauer devotes to works that are either “monadic” (meaning: resistive to further division, as with a short subject, or composed of numerous cellular units) or simply “porous” (that is, “full of gaps into which environmental life may stream”) add little to our understanding of episodic cinema’s various permutations. While his mobilization of concepts such as “permeability,” “self-containment,” and “framing” point toward a more supple exploration, his brief mention of omnibus-style pictures is brusquely dismissive: In order . . . to profit by this – effective and cinematic – story form, the film industry has fallen on the device of assembling, anthology fashion, several short units under a common heading . . . Le Plaisir and Encore are nothing but mechanical packages of self-sufficient episodes. True, all the episodes are adapted from Maupassant and Maugham respectively, but this does not confer on either package a semblance of unity.5

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Discounting these and a few other publications, even episode films – a more expansive, encompassing category of cultural production than omnibus films – have received scant theoretical attention. But they have frequently been used by non-academic reviewers as opportunities to rethink or call into question some of the fundamental principles within film studies. Again, for the sake of clarification: an episode film is a featurelength motion picture composed of two or more autonomous segments that might share thematic and/or stylistic elements. As will be discussed more thoroughly in subsequent chapters, critics have often mobilized various terms interchangeably in their discussions and analyses of episode films, regardless of the number of directors involved. For example, in his 1953 review of the seven-episode Italian anthology Times Gone By (Altri tempi, 1952), Parker Tyler describes director Alessandro Blasetti’s unusual amalgam of marquee stars (including Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio De Sica, and Aldo Fabrizi) and genre elements (such as courtroom comedy, vacation romance, and literary adaptation) as a charmingly conceived “potpourri.”6 An anonymous critic at Cue magazine uses the words “omnibus,” “collection,” “compilation,” and “skit, sketch, comic and dramatic compote” in his assessment of the same film.7 Though the reviewer feels that Times Gone By, like most episode films, offers “something for everybody” (including “sweet romance, slapstick, strong drama, bedroom farce, satire, melody”), one senses in the critic’s spasmodic search for terminological certainty an underlying uncertainty about what constitutes the various phrases and concepts that are freely substituted one for the other. Compounding the difficulties involved in categorizing it, the film itself includes a dialogue-free intermission between the fifth and sixth episodes entitled “Potpourri of Songs,” in which a young man courts a female companion to the tunes of “Un Peu d’amour,” “Valse bleue,” and “Baciami, Baciami.” Unlike the lyrical interlude that comes two-thirds of the way through another single-director episode film, The Little Theater of Jean Renoir (Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir, 1969), a tribute to the belle époque titled “When Love Dies” and sung by Jeanne Moreau, the intermission in Blasetti’s film betrays its own discursiveness, its own internal episodicity. As a “potpourri” or combination of incongruous things, the film gestures toward the offscreen presence of the eleven screenwriters who were responsible for much of this categorical uncertainty. Just as Renoir’s Little Theater – a trio of sketches written, produced, and directed for television by the famous French septuagenarian – is rooted in various traditions (opera, literature, theater, and popular music) and is what Stanley Kauffmann once called a “bundle of reminiscences,”8 so too does Times Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Gone By dip into the semantic pools of other, non-cinematic cultural productions, the extreme contingency of which demands a certain linguistic flexibility and, yes, creativity on the parts of critics and historians. The frame narrative (or wraparound story) of Times Gone By involves a busybody bookseller, played by Aldo Fabrizi, who leafs through a volume of tales, each of which is set at the turn of the century. Every page he turns generates a new episode, launching the spectator back in time to bygone days of the man’s youth. Though the reviewer Ruth Waterbury, writing for the L.A. Examiner, feels that the episodes comprising Times Gone By “are infinitely better tied together than the various collections of Maugham stories that England sent over here” (a reference to the films Quartet [1948], Trio [1950], and Encore [1952]),9 this bibliophilic link between the bookseller and the otherwise disparate fragments that make up his nostalgic reminiscences only further complicates our quest to set definitional parameters on a meta-genre that is equally beholden to, among other things, vaudevillian and literary sources, thus collapsing distinctions between presentation and representation, between stage and page. Waterbury even uses the term “novella” to describe each of the short stories within Times Gone By, once again illustrating the cross-media maneuvers necessary to gain an understanding of films that are unique in the history of cinema yet redolent of other types of cultural production. Another episodic work released in 1952, the Franco-Italian coproduction Adorable Creatures (Adorables créatures), besides being referred to as a “vulgar film” and a “nasty anthology” by several French critics at the time of its theatrical release, generated comparisons with earlier forms of popular entertainment. Certain writers pointed out the ways in which Adorable Creatures – as a collection of four disparate tales sutured together by the sardonic, offscreen commentary of narrator Claude Dauphin – borrowed from vaudeville, the music hall, and the grandes revues.10 Other critics opted for a description of the film as a “cavalcade.”11 In groping for suitable, yet suggestive, metaphors for anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films, in attempting to bring epistemological clarity to these overlapping categories of cultural production, critics have been forced to create neologisms and portmanteau words along the way. The episodes in such films have been called everything from “cinemanecdotes” to “dramettes.” Kauffmann, writing about The Little Theater of Jean Renoir in an article for The New Republic, refers to its three episodes as “playlets,” a term that had occasionally been deployed in earlier critical language to denote short narratives that, if not stagebound, nevertheless evince a strong theatrical disposition, something to which the title of Renoir’s swansong directly alludes.12 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“ b e ginnings witho ut e n ds ” 9 Having considered the above-mentioned examples of epistemological slippage, I adopt an intertextual analytical approach in this book, taking stock of the episode film’s relationship to various non-cinematic cultural productions as well as its metaphorical ties to material collections. Though I shall do much the same thing in subsequent sections, the first two chapters concern themselves primarily with two modes of address – the presentational and the representational – whose distinct characteristics in the context of cinematic narration are often consolidated via the episode film’s ontological bivalency and regulated variety. After sketching out some of the forerunners of episodic cinema, such as vaudeville, music hall, burlesque, and revue as well as the short-story cycle, I ruminate on the “episoding conventions” that are at once unique to this form of storytelling yet reminiscent of other types of cultural production. This sets the stage for my eventual discussion of Quartet, Trio, and Encore in Chapter 6, three adaptations of W. Somerset Maugham’s literary work that foreground the commensurability between episodic storytelling and the physical circumscription of objects within collections. This emphasis on the episode film’s status as a collection as well as its cross-media connections (as a variety-based form of entertainment sometimes blessed with a literary pedigree) thus lays conceptual groundwork for the rest of the book’s chapters, including my analysis of what is perhaps the single most significant example of this meta-genre in the Englishspeaking world: the aforementioned British adaptation of Maugham’s tales, Quartet. Besides spawning two sequels (Trio and Encore), this otherwise unassuming omnibus film – directed by Ken Annakin, Arthur Crabtree, Harold French, and Ralph Smart, and featuring the author himself as a prolocutor presiding over the cinematic retelling of four of his stories – was largely responsible for unleashing a spate of similar multistory films from both sides of the Atlantic. As a work which foregrounds the processes and performative trademarks of storytelling, Quartet is at once representative and exceptional in the history of episodic cinema. Ostensibly a “conservative” collection of adapted stories bearing little resemblance to their pricklier originals, the film nevertheless reveals the polyvocal and dialogic appeals of cinematic episodicity through the combined presence of a book (whose pages are turned to reveal new episodes) and an author (who directs his comments to the camera and injects an air of authenticity into the proceedings). Before delving into that and other important case studies, however, it will be useful to lay out some of the pertinent terminological and critical coordinates of this endeavor, broadly contextualizing various patterns and movements of episodic cinema at its embryonic stages, vis-à-vis the fin de siècle fascination with vaudeville and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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variety shows, and then moving on to a discussion of postwar “package features” toward the end of the second chapter.

The Terminology of Episodicity The word came to me then – that arid word “Episode” – and yet I seemed to feel myself as something Eternal. I knew that this poor child would never lose the memory of this hour . . . and yet for me she was already something that was past, something that was fleeting – an Episode. Monologue from Arthur Schnitzler’s play, The Affairs of Anatol

Before plunging any deeper into the murky waters of episodic cinema, it will be useful to explore some preliminary definitions so as to parcel out the differences and similarities between the omnibus film and its sister categories, including the anthology film, the compilation film, the portmanteau film, and the sketch film. While there are numerous instances of categorical overlap or contingency, as when particular films display structural characteristics identified with more than one group, the subtle distinctions between these often conflated terms can be confronted once we recognize that their etymological foundations are the seeds from which new definitions might grow – definitions, I might add, that do not always coincide with those circulating in common parlance. The first question to be addressed is rudimentary yet necessary: What is an episode? The straightforward, unequivocal nature of that question masks what is in fact a host of ambiguities. It is not for lack of use that the term “episode” remains ambiguous, for it crosses periods, cultures, and disciplines, popping up in the vocabulary of novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers.13 An Episode of Napoleon’s War with Spain (Episodio della guerra Napoleonica in Spagna, 1909) is one of the first films to feature the word in its title. This Italian one-reeler was released the same year as D. W. Griffith’s Pippa Passes which, besides being the first truly episodic film (one composed of separate stories), has the distinction of being the inspiration for the New York Times’s first film review. There have been Austrian, Canadian, Danish, and Norwegian feature-length films simply titled Episode. Besides those non-episodic works, there have even been a few anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films that call direct attention to their episodicity, including the Canadian production Mania: Episodes in Terror (1986) and the South Korean production Action Episodes (Hwalgŭk daesa, 1971). This latter film not only self-reflexively alludes to its own internal multiplicity but also links that supposedly “small” narrative unit to an outsized form of masculinity (indeed, all three stories comprising this action film are about men thrust into difficult situations, from Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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hunting an enemy and tracking down a cache of gold bars to seducing the president’s wife and sacrificing one’s life for the nation), thus highlighting the miniature/gigantic dialectic so intrinsic to this meta-genre. Often imprecisely spoken of as a digressive subdivision in a continuous composition, an episode is referred to in this book as an individual, coherent story, vignette, or sustained narrative event in itself. The term grows from the Greek epeisodion, meaning “coming in beside” as well as “parenthetic story.” It is precisely these not-strictly metaphoric parentheses – ­typographical trademarks rendered as narrative “frames” bracketing episodes – that provide the skeleton on which to hang the skin of the episodic film, thus imparting a palpable sense of the sequential, the segmented, and the sequestered. These narratological attributes, which fall under the general heading of seriality, are indelibly stamped on all episode films, regardless of the number of directors involved, and significantly shift these films’ syntactical alignments from a mode of continuous engagement with a single subject to a more fluctuating set of spectatorial appeals. From this working definition, we can assume not only that the term “episodic” refers to any text composed of a series of separate, loosely connected (or unconnected) stories following one after the other, but also that serially organized films featuring discretely demarcated narrative zones differ significantly from chronologically scrambled, spatially fragmented, often non-linear ensemble films employing what might be called a “braided” storytelling structure in which multiple plot lines dovetail and diverge.14 D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is the earliest example of this last type of film, with more recent, less historically expansive examples including Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer (Kongbu fenzi, 1986), Cameron Crowe’s Singles (1992), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (Duoluo tianshi, 1995), Goran Paskaljevic’s Cabaret Balkan (Bure Baruta, 1998), P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (Code inconnu, 2000), and Barbara Albert’s Free Radicals (Böse Zellen, 2003).15 Though fascinating from a narratological standpoint, and crucial to developing a comprehensive understanding of multi-story cinema, the “braided” film (distinguished by its dense interweaving of narrative threads) will not be investigated in this book, simply because, given my immediate interest in episodicity and seriality, these films do not fall squarely within my critical playing field. That is, they do not adhere as strictly to what social theorist Erving Goffman calls the “episoding conventions” of both everyday life and cultural productions such as musical revues, stage plays and paintings (which, like representative omnibus films Quartet and Boccaccio ’70 [1962], often rely on act curtains and/or external frames to designate boundaries). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Nor will I devote pages to what might be called picaresque films, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), Alain Tanner’s Messidor (1979), and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985). I do not dispute the fact that these cinematic descendants of Cervantes’s Don Quixote comprise a quasiepisodic variety whose overriding narrative trajectory is shaped by a protagonist’s pit-stop-peppered land journey. One need only consider Peter Jackson’s mammoth “road movie” The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Writing about this film, David Denby states, It’s in the DNA of quest movies, I suppose, to be episodic: Frodo and his companions rush to get somewhere or other until they run into a fearsome obstacle or firebreathing danger, which they overcome, escaping at the last second, and the quest then moves onto new turf, where the group faces new perils and thrills.16

Similarly, Hitchcock saw his 1935 British production The 39 Steps as “a film of episodes,” stating in his interview with François Truffaut, “As soon as we were through with one episode, I remember saying, ‘Here we need a good short story.’ I made sure the content of every scene was very solid, so that each one would be a little film in itself” [emphasis added].17 Hitchcock’s remarks notwithstanding, while each stopover in the road movie or picaresque offers new, offbeat characters for the deracinated protagonist to interact with as well as different dramatic goals to be surmounted, the fluidity of the form as well as the steady, forward march of the diegesis cannot be completely reconciled within the framework of narrative seriality, and thus falls outside the purview of this book. The focus of this book, then, is on feature-length films that are individually composed of two or more tales, vignettes, or segments that have been contributed by different filmmakers. Thus, while I foreground seriality as a fundamental element, film serials and series will not be discussed, given the different experiential relationships such texts engender. Whereas an audience typically watches a feature-length episode film in a single sitting, a serial requires a much longer mode of engagement, one that might be spread out over several days or weeks. Moreover, unlike most episode films, the serial adheres to one particular plot line or narrative arc, however splintered it may be by cliff-hangers – open-ended climaxes that, according to William C. Cline, make the serial “vastly more like life than any other type of storytelling.” Despite their structural differences, therefore, I should like to retain Cline’s notion that “life is episodic, without clear-cut beginnings and endings – except for the initial beginning and the ultimate end.”18 Perhaps one reason that omnibus films and other subcategories of episodic cinema are so often marked as “other” is that they are too uncannily or uncomfortably familiar to viewers whose Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“ b e ginnings witho ut e n ds ” 13 embodied experiences, both inside and outside the movie theater, are equally fragmented and intermittent. Like a serial, a film series features the same character or group of characters throughout. Examples include MGM’s “Thin Man” and “Andy Hardy” series of the 1930s and 1940s, and, more recently, George Lucas’s six-film Star Wars franchise (which has done more to popularize the term “episode” than any other cultural production in history). Yet the series is different from the serial insofar as it consists of a succession of usually feature-length films, each one whole and complete in itself. There have been, in recent years, “omnibus film series,” such as “Momentous Events: Russia in the 1990s” and “2000 As Seen By . . .” The former project, initiated during a period of political transition and social as well as industrial transformation in the former Soviet Union, is made up of sixty-minute contributions from a half-dozen directors: Peter Bogdanovich, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Nobuhiko Ohbayashi, and Ken Russell. The latter project consists of eight feature-length films directed by some of the world’s brightest talents (Miguel Albaladejo, Alain Berliner, Laurent Cantent, Ildiko Enyedi, Hal Hartley, Walter Salles, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Tsai Ming-liang), each concerning the anxiety that accompanies the arrival of the new millennium in places as far-flung as Mali, Hungary, and Taiwan. Such apprehension about future “momentous events” relates to the way that spectators might experience a degree of unease in their viewing of multi-episode films, which are in many ways about impending narratives that habitually shift the viewer from one setting to another in a serial fashion. Having hinted that seriality is one of the overriding characteristics of episode films, I wish to begin unpacking this meta-genre’s puzzling particularities. The terms “anthology,” “omnibus,” “portmanteau,” and “sketch” (along with near synonyms “compendium,” “compilation,” “composite,” “novella,” and “package”) are frequently employed arbitrarily and interchangeably, a trend I hope to at least partially reverse. According to Merriam-Webster’s, “anthology” is defined as a collection of selected literary pieces (such as poems, short stories, or plays), works of visual art, or music. Spawning this definition is the etymological root of the word – a Latin and Greek fusion (anthos + logia) meaning “flower-gathering.” The term therefore insinuates the utopian ideal of bringing together disparate yet similar items into a kind of fragrant bouquet. Though often utilized in literary studies to denote a collection of several authors’ works (as in, for example, The Norton Anthology of English Literature), “anthology” will be shaded with a slightly different meaning in this book. Harking back to its original definition (“flower-gathering”), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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my use of the term speaks to the nature of a more “personal” mode of accumulation and display, the centripetal drive to unite elements and the centrifugal splitting of the self specific to single-director episode films. It might be helpful, then, to think of the omnibus as a collective (made up of many directors) and the anthology as a collection (made up of many stories yet helmed by a single director). Such delineations might be unnecessary or even confusing, especially since omnibus films, when subjected to the materialist metaphors that I will employ throughout this book, can be seen as assemblies of narrative “objects” (rather than people) arranged in ways that emulate other types of collection. Still, my decision to distinguish omnibus from anthology films strictly on the basis of directorial computation, though seemingly arbitrary, offers a practical means of counterposing distinct modes of authorship without falling back on vague terminology.19 The editors of The Film Studies Dictionary, an otherwise useful resource for terminological clarity, partially collapse distinctions between “anthology” and “compilation.” They state that an anthology is a feature-length film comprised of excerpts from other, longer films or of complete short films or independent episodes. That’s Entertainment [sic] (1974), which contains scenes from approximately one hundred classic MGM musicals, is an example of the former, while Bodybags (1993), featuring two horror tales directed by John Carpenter and one by Tobe Hooper, and Paris vu par . . . (1965), containing six episodes each focusing on a different section of Paris and each made by a different French New Wave director, are instances of the latter type.20

A compilation, according to the editors, is a “film made largely or entirely from footage from other films or visual media. Unlike collage films, compilation films tend to be documentaries rather than experimental or avantgarde films, and to be structured rhetorically, to explain or persuade, rather than lyrically.”21 In an effort to distinguish the compilation from the omnibus and anthology, however, we need only return to MerriamWebster’s, which says that a compilation is a book or document composed of materials gathered from other books or documents. It is based on the Latin compilare, meaning “to plunder.” After the term “compilation film” was first coined by Jay Leyda in his book Films Beget Films (1964), only the most politically charged documentaries were thought to embody this newly defined genre.22 Today, however, everything from Esther Shub’s trilogy [Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), The Great Road (1927), and The Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy (1928)] to the seemingly frivolous Footlight Varieties (1951), The Great Chase (1963), The Bugs Bunny/ Road Runner Movie (1979), and Mondocartoon (1989) fall under the compilation banner. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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As an episodic subgenre in which various scenes or truncated footage from earlier productions are strung together to create a new work, the compilation film is a kind of anthology of “greatest hits.” One of the most famous examples of a compendium of highlights confiscated from previously released films is That’s Entertainment! (1974). Because the people behind the making of this and other compilation films are inheritors, rather than producers, of texts, the vintage clips (over which a narrational voiceover is often poured like cement) synthesize into an object not unlike a Duchampian “readymade.” Moreover, the recycled, compiled clips represent, in their new narrative habitat, what are supposed to be the most attractive commodities available, serialized in such a way as to invoke a cinematic mode of “window shopping.” Of course, window shopping, as Anne Friedberg has established, is itself an ocular experience broken into episodic moments.23 If, as Friedberg and other scholars have argued, window shopping epitomizes the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century’s version of flânerie, its instrumentality as a metaphor for narrative consumption depends as much on the exigencies of social mobility, mercantilic display, object commodification, and personal longing as on the phenomenology of embodied spectatorship in general. After all, part of the function of That’s Entertainment! as a cinematic “showroom” is to plant seeds of desire in viewers to seek out and consume the original films. Despite their emphasis on the above themes, not to mention the fact that compilation films ultimately objectify desire and replace the context of origin or production with the context of the collection, I have decided not to include such works as Gaslight Follies (1945), Road to Hollywood (1947), Variety Time (1948), Down Memory Lane (1949), Make Mine Laughs (1949), and That’s Entertainment! in my study of episode films. Certainly, however, this group of films, largely neglected, deserves a separate study of its own. The term “portmanteau” – often indiscriminately used in place of both “anthology” and “omnibus” by American, French, and British film critics – brings to mind two additional definitions: the first denotes any hybrid neologism emerging from the compression of sounds and meanings of two different words (for example, “chortle” is a portmanteau word in which “chuckle” and “snort” merge);24 the second refers to a large leather suitcase that opens into two hinged compartments folding out symmetrically. My use of the word “portmanteau,” fluctuating between these two pragmatic definitions, departs significantly from standard parlance to embrace only those episode films that are broken into two, relatively equal halves (regardless of the number of directors involved). Examples of this rare breed – the two-story “point and counterpoint” film – include Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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single-director works such as Eroica (1957), Of Love and Lust (1960), Bad Company (Les Mauvaises fréquentations, 1966), Movie Movie (1978), Let’s Shake on It (Qua la mano, 1980), Chungking Express (Chongqing senlin, 1994), The Power of Kangwon Province (Kangwŏn-do ŭi him, 1998), Foreign Correspondents (1999), and Storytelling (2002) as well as multi-director works such as Actors and Sin (1952), Face to Face (1952), Gideon and Samson (I grandi condottieri, 1965), Juego Peligroso (1967), The Beginning of an Unknown Era (Nachalo nevedomovo veka, 1967), The Couples (Le coppie, 1970), and The Day That Doesn’t Exist (Yee yuet saam sap, 1995). The portmanteau film, because of its binarized structure, invites a sustained critique of narrative symmetry, perspectival disjuncture, and thematic reverberation – an invitation that I have taken up elsewhere.25 Writing about the portmanteau film Face to Face at the time of its original theatrical release, a writer for New Yorker magazine, John McCarten, linked it to earlier forerunners of cinematic episodicity, including Quartet, Trio, and Encore, all of which he refers to as “amalgam pictures.”26 Derived from the French amalgame (itself beholden to the medieval Latin term amalgama, meaning a mollifying poultice or plaster that is softened), the word “amalgam” suggests a union or conjunction that is “complete” and “intimate,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Though McCarten’s neologistic expression was used to denote the intimate bonds linking the individual episodes in a group of British films (which I refer to, in Chapters 5 and 6, as “consensus pictures”), “amalgam picture” might more evocatively be deployed as a cinematic metaphor for midcentury nation building and consciousness-raising in the United States. This is directly thematized in the postwar omnibus film It’s a Big Country (1951), a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production (overseen by studio head Dore Schary and producer Robert Sisk) that was subtitled “An American Anthology” at the time of its original release. Regardless of whether it is called an “anthology” or an “amalgam,” this episodic picture about cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity in the United States (based on multiple short stories in a 1947 collection entitled Americans One and All) deserves recognition for its scale and the ambition of its makers, including the seven directors who contributed individuals segments.27 Described by Sisk as a film designed to increase moviegoers’ understanding of “the melting pot that is America [through] contemporary stories of the different kinds of people in this country,” It’s a Big Country represents the potential in omnibus productions to explore issues of nationhood, citizenship, and cultural diversity in a unique – in a uniquely amalgamated – way.28 Finally, the word “sketch” is deployed throughout this book in particular generic and national contexts. Tellingly, whenever critics and blogNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“ b e ginnings witho ut e n ds ” 17 gers utilize the term, a dismissive tone can be detected, as evidenced in a recent online review of the three-episode East Asian production Visitors (Ŏtŏn bangmun, 2009). Writing for the online fanzine Korean Grindhouse, one reviewer refers to the individual contributions of Japanese director Naomi Kawase (“Koma”), Korean director Hong Sang-soo (“Lost in the Mountains”), and Filipino director Lav Diaz (“Butterflies Have No Memories”) as “discarded sketches”; by which he means, “[T]hey come across as both unfinished and unwanted.” Referring to Kawase’s episode in particular, the reviewer states that “Koma” seems as though the filmmaker is testing out ideas for a bigger film, more than making an actual short movie. Characters are underdeveloped, and the story – about a young man who comes to pay his respects to his grandfather’s former employer only to find himself seduced by a crazy woman who may be misinterpreting him as her spirit bridegroom – is skeletal and would require more fleshing out to be compelling.29

Once again, a prejudice against omnibus films makes itself felt in this passage, evincing a widely held belief that “heaviness” rather than “lightness” should be celebrated and sought out in art cinema, a cinema of presumed “depth” rather than “shallowness.” Admitting to his readers that omnibus films often succeed in giving “a quick taste of a few artists,” the Korean Grindhouse blogger ends his review by stating that the motion picture left him “looking for a meal elsewhere,” searching for “another menu” offering more filling/fulfilling experiences than that provided by the three sketches in Visitors. In denoting a short, often satirical play or scene in a variety show or revue, “sketch” seems particularly applicable as a description of the narrative segments comprising quickly produced, cheaply shot, histrionic comedies such as Dynamite Chicken (1971), Groove Tube (1972), Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), and Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), as well as their Italian forerunners of the 1960s such as The Dolls (Le bambole, 1965), High Infidelity (Alta infedeltà, 1965), The Complexes (I complessi, 1965), and other representative works featuring excessively encoded stereotypes related to femininity and masculinity. Whereas the first three of the American films are solo-directed efforts (by Ernest Pintoff, Ken Shapiro, and John Landis, respectively), Amazon Women on the Moon is a multidirector production featuring the contributions of five directors (Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton, John Landis, and Robert K. Weiss). The film’s twenty-one individual sketches last anywhere from just a few seconds to several minutes, emulating the experience of a television viewer switching channels. These and other comedy sketch films (including the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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widely panned 2013 release Movie 43), despite their seemingly contemporary concern with scatological humor, hark back to the variety acts of vaudeville thanks to their often self-conscious staging of comic business as well as their presentational bearing. Though the term also brings to mind a brief or informal literary composition, a tentative or preliminary experiment confined to the page, it is this presentational, rather than strictly representational, quality that makes sketch films – as unique cultural expressions of comical corporeality – all the more fascinating from the vantage of film phenomenology. In France, episode films are generally called films à sketches (though the term films collectifs is also habitually used).30 In Germany, anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films fall under the catchall category Episodenfilm. Italian cinephiles have a wider lexicon from which to draw, referring to this type of cinematic praxis as il film antologico, il film ad episodi, il film collettivo, and il film di repertorio, among other terms. And, while English-speaking critics had used the conjoined term “episode film” since the theatrical release of D. W. Griffith’s Home, Sweet Home (1914), it was not until the late 1940s and early 1950s that the terms “omnibus film,” “anthology film,” and “sketch film” first entered common parlance in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other American dailies.31 The term “portmanteau film” was likewise first used by British critics around that time. Today these words are habitually substituted for one another and are accepted as synonyms for the overarching term “episode film.” In a way, the transdefinitional collapse of meaning that might result from the mishmash of these signifiers is akin to the transauthorial mixing of filmmakers’ voices in a multi-director episode film, a polyvocal cultural form that is “postmodern” in its decenteredness and which continues to elude many critics’ grasp. Let us now consider the word “omnibus.” According to Michael Quinion, the term first appeared in 1820s France as part of voiture omnibus, a “carriage for everyone” (the Latin omnis means “all”).32 More specifically, the word dates back to 1825, when a Frenchman by the name of M. Baudry applied it to his firm’s vehicles which transported sundry passengers “between Nantes and a nearby bathing place.” As detailed in the Oxford English Dictionary, the omnibus was thus distinct from earlier modes of transport, such as the caroche (a more luxurious carriage or coach designed for nobles or the upper classes). And, because it offered cheaper fares and larger seating areas, the omnibus became a favored means of getting from one end of the city to the other, not just in Paris but in London as well where (in the late 1800s) the term began popping up in English conversations and newsletters covering political matters, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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such as the passing of “omnibus bills” (measures that contained several different proposals). Eventually, “omnibus” blossomed into the more abstract connotation of a miscellaneous collection, gaining “the sense of a large number of distinct items or objects lumped together solely for convenience.”33 Yet it was not until the Daily Telegraph proclaimed January 1, 1929 to be “a day of what the publishers call ‘omnibus books’, meaning works which carry many and varied passengers,” that the term came to designate printed collections of writings on a related subject.34 Throughout this book, I draw upon the word’s indelible mobility and inclusiveness to refer to multi-director episode films produced over the past century. It’s a Big Country, Love in the City (L’amore in città, 1953), Love and the Frenchwoman (La Française et l’amour, 1960), Far from Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam, 1967), Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978), In Our Time (Guang yin de gu shi, 1982), New York Stories (1989), All the Invisible Children (2005), Zagreb Stories (Zagrebacke price, 2009), Tales from the Golden Age (Amintiri din epoca de aur, 2009), and 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (2011) are just a few of the many transauthorial motion pictures that can be likened to a vehicle carrying numerous passengers, an open vessel of mass transportation whose social symbolism is historically linked to a felicitous transition from traditionalism to modernism (to postmodernism) and connotes the coalescing of disparate demographic groups as well as geographic spaces. Think of the omnibus film, then, as a collective carriage transporting not one but several directors as well as production crews, screenwriters, and actors (not to mention audience members) over a textual terrain that is necessarily “bumpy,” or pockmarked by narrative fissures. Though the history of episode films dates back to the second decade of the twentieth century, the expression “omnibus film” was not used by critics and reviewers until the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to a series of British, French, and Italian motion pictures theatrically released during that period. In a 1953 Theatre Arts article penned by Parker Tyler, the esteemed American critic deployed the term in his assessment of the Franco-Italian coproduction The Seven Deadly Sins (Les sept péchés capitaux, 1952), an “omnibus film” (in his words) that strings together the work of seven prominent directors: Eduardo De Filippo (“Avarice and Anger”), Jean Dréville (“Sloth”), Yves Allégret (“Lust”), Roberto Rossellini (“Envy”), Carlo Rim (“Gluttony”), Claude AutantLara (“Pride”), and Georges Lacombe (“The Eighth Sin”).35 That same year, after encountering such internationally distributed works as The Story of Three Loves (1953) and Encore, an anonymous Australian reviewer at the Sydney Morning Herald accurately proclaimed, “The ‘omnibus’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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film habit seems to be growing.”36 This prognosis came three years after Bosley Crowther, a film critic at the New York Times, had suggested that multi-director pictures like Quartet and Ways of Love (1950) were part of a fashionable new trend in European filmmaking – a trend that was beginning to spread to America with the theatrical releases of the MGM production It’s a Big Country, which showcases the work of seven directors (Clarence Brown, Don Hartman, John Sturges, Richard Thorpe, Charles Vidor, Don Weis, and William A. Wellman), and the Twentieth CenturyFox production O. Henry’s Full House (1952), which showcases the work of five directors (Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King, Henry Koster, and Jean Negulesco).37 In an even earlier report about the financial problems plaguing British film producers during the postwar era, published in the New York Times on March 13, 1949, C. A. Lejeune made passing reference to Train of Events (1949), calling it an “omnibus picture” (one of the first times that the term was used in the newspaper).38 Significantly, this episodic feature, combining the short films of three directors (Sidney Cole, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden), is set within a means of transit – a night train traveling from Euston to Liverpool – that is itself split into separate yet connected sections or “compartments” (the cars of a locomotive destined to crash at the end of the film). Produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios, Train of Events was neither the first nor the most important omnibus film to have graced movie theater screens by the time the term itself had gained traction in critical discourse, having been predated by such American and British works as If I Had a Million (1932), Forever and a Day (1943), Dead of Night (1945), and On Our Merry Way (1948). But its title alone serves to highlight how this transauthorial genre – like a train – chains together several groups of people and incidents, both internally (or diegetically) and externally (or extradiegetically), all of which are contained within a mobile yet stationary frame that, from the “outside,” appears linear and unbroken. But, as I hope to illustrate, the omnibus film is a genre of cinematic fragments whose ability to connote wholeness or completeness is as much the result of critical interventions in the form as it is the product of culture industries and companies aiming to attract a broad demographic of diverse audiences from different backgrounds and with divergent tastes. Words therefore matter, especially when it comes to addressing what an omnibus film is, how it functions, and why a title like “Train of Events” serves an important role in prepping the audience for the episodes that follow. As we shall see, part of the omnibus film’s dysfunctional status as a “failed” narrative can be attributed to spectatorial preconceptions about the nature of cinematic art which is problematically assumed by Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“ b e ginnings witho ut e n ds ” 21 many critics to be structurally consistent and stylistically harmonious. This is particularly apparent in the commentary surrounding the 2005 film Tickets, an omnibus feature whose title, rendered in plural, connotes the value – the “bang for one’s buck” – associated with episodic cinema (wherein audiences are presented with two or more stories for the price of one). Like those in Train of Events, the separate yet interlocking episodes of this multinational coproduction are set on the cars of a speeding train. That setting, as a kind of “moving target,” becomes an operative means of unpacking the omnibus film’s horizontal depth, metaphorically suggested by the size, shape, and structure of the vehicle itself.

Horizontal Depth and Paratextual Proliferations, from Tickets to Tube Tales “Each story is different, each story is separate – but together they do make a picture.” Director Ken Loach, speaking to fellow filmmakers Ermanno Olmi and Abbas Kiarostami during the production of Tickets (2005)

A Medusa Films release of a Fandango/Sixteen Films coproduction (in association with the United Kingdom’s Film Council), Tickets is a decidedly mixed type of cultural artifact. As such, it is an appropriate “vehicle” through which to initiate a book about that most motley and unruly of meta-genres, the omnibus film. Produced by Carlo Crest-Dina, Babak Karimi, Rebecca O’Brien, and Domenico Procacci, this cross-cultural experiment in directorial collaboration brings together “a gaggle of great auteurs” – Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ken Loach – whose distinct yet connected stories, according to Donald Clarke (a critic at the Irish Times), are “surprisingly cohesive” despite the occasionally “teethjarring . . . messy splices” required to link up the lives of disparate travelers.39 Among the train’s passengers are an elderly biochemist from Rome, the haughty widow of an Italian general, and a trio of young football fans from Glasgow who argue with a family of Albanian immigrants over a stolen train ticket. Unlike many episode films of the youth-oriented 1960s, such as the Yugoslavian production Raindrops, Water, Warriors (Kapi, vode, ratnici, 1962), which showcases the work of three young, first-time directors (Zivojin Pavlovic, Marko Babac and Kokan Rakonjac, all of whom were members of the Kino Klub in Belgrade), Tickets unites the short films of seasoned auteurs whose reputations precede them. Moving from the first episode (Olmi’s poignant, flashback-laden exploration of the daydreaming biochemist’s romantic longing for a woman he left behind in Germany) to the second episode (Kiarostami’s comically inflected yet pathos-filled look Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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at the frustrations faced by a male escort of the irascible general’s wife) to the third episode (Loach’s bemused take on three rowdy Scots on their way to a Champion’s League game in Rome), Tickets appears to steadily build momentum.40 The term “momentum” has sometimes been used by critics to suggest the cumulative effects of cinematic episodicity which, in the case of Tickets, can be said to “gather steam” over the course of the film’s nearly two-hour duration, despite the narrative “whistle stops” along the way. Besides building momentum across the narrative breaches that separate the episodes, Tickets also builds connections across cultures, among characters from vastly different national backgrounds. This is one of the constituent features of omnibus narrativity: its capacity to forge ties between distinct social groups and discrete spaces that nevertheless retain their autonomy owing to their sequential arrangement (one after the other). As I will elaborate throughout this book, the gap-filled structure of the omnibus film makes it possible for audiences to fill in missing information and perceive connections between seemingly disparate people, a maneuver that has aesthetic as well as ethical implications. Because of the combined length and brevity of the form, as a feature-length motion picture composed of several shorts, the omnibus film paradoxically facilitates the spectatorial act of “crossing over” by withholding information, by sketching in only a few details, by allotting open spaces in which viewers might dwell (if only momentarily) as active participants. Indeed, the omnibus film’s inter-episodic juxtapositions reveal a perverse logic at play in this most contradictory of genres, with sometimes “unseemly” connections being forged and with the very concept of depth being altered in the process. Depth, traditionally conceived of as a kind of vertical plunging into profundity or “geological” search for meaning below the surface, is thus made horizontal or “geographical” in the context of omnibus features. Though the act of extracting hermeneutic significance through sustained engagement (with a single group of people or a solitary protagonist) is one way of acknowledging the relative depth of a cultural production, this attempt to dig below the surface of texts is offset by a new model of profundity in films such as Tickets. What this and other omnibus productions do is move beyond the temporal–historical markers of vertical depth to point toward the spatial–textual coordinates specific to what I call horizontal depth, which extends signification across an array of narrative environments or social milieus, segmentally organized and transtextually linked. In the case of Tickets, those spaces would seem to be limited to the cars of the train where most of the action is set. As in the 2006 production Paris, je t’aime, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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however, which ostensibly confines each of the contributing filmmakers to a given arrondissement of the French capital, spatial limitations can be overcome through a variety of means; whether by extending the touristic gaze so that a more panoramic vision brings together distinct districts, compartments, and people, or through the interjection of cinematic devices (such as flashbacks and voiceover commentary) that strengthen identificatory links with characters whose lives are “bigger” than their narrative settings. In transiting from one setting to another, the viewer of Tickets or Paris, je t’aime not only engages in a kind of intersubjective cosmopolitanism, increasing his or her capacity to see similarities among the text’s visible differences, but also metaphorically enacts, at the “local” level, the kind of border-crossing movement inscribed in transnational flows. Indeed, as I shall explain in the final two chapters of this book (devoted to allegorical narratives, political participation, and supranational initiatives designed to heighten regional cooperation), the omnibus film is the most “trans” of all transpositional cultural forms, collapsing transmedial, translinguistic, transgeneric, translocal, and transnational modes in the space of a single feature that unites multiple voices and visions, making it transauthorial as well. It is telling that Loach, one of the three contributors to Tickets, adopts the term “horizontal” when elaborating his belief that individuals “have much more in common with people in the same position in other countries than they do with those at the top of their own society.” In a recent interview, the British filmmaker stresses that one of his goals in participating in this multi-director production was to “encourage people to see their loyalties horizontally across national boundaries,” a comment that underlines the transnational valences of much episodic cinema. This is something that occurs in Loach’s episode which, as John Hill points out, concerns “three working-class Celtic fans on board a train for Rome [who] assist a family of Albanian immigrants before they themselves are helped (to escape the police) by Italian football supporters.”41 The “horizontal identification” that he stages in and around the space of a single train compartment (including the platform area and the station), though hinging on a form of cross-cultural kinship that is born from a shared sense of social marginalization, extends beyond the physical confines of the speeding train and becomes a rhetorical solicitation to all spectators. Audiences are thus asked to make parallel attempts to mentally join up disparate communities as part of a cosmopolitan hermeneutics that is sensitive to the textual similarities among separately shot short films. In this way, Tickets is not unlike another multi-director film, ID Swiss Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(1999), a documentary in seven segments organized around the general theme of “Multicultural Switzerland.” Produced by Samir and Werner Schweizer, sponsored by the Consulate General of Switzerland, and sprinkled with statistical facts about immigration (as part of the transitional breaks between the segments), this latter film offers a prismatic view of multiracial identity, with episodes directed by the half Indian, half Waadtländer filmmaker Kamal Musale (“Raclette Curry”), the Cairoborn filmmaker Wageh George (“Was Wie Wann Wohin Gehört”), the Italian-heritage filmmaker Fulvio Bernasconi (“Hopp Schwyz”), and four other directors whose “connection to Swiss identity is complicated by some other cultural affiliation.”42 Like Tickets, ID Swiss is set within a nationally bounded space but similarly imposes a transnational perspective by way of highlighting the horizontal comradeship that develops among otherwise separate social groups and people joined together by their shared sense of marginalization. The metaphorical camaraderie discernible as a theme within Tickets finds its literal partner in the solidarity expressed offscreen by the three directors. For their part, and based on information provided in a supplemental documentary included on Facet Video’s North American DVD release of Tickets, Olmi, Kiarostami, and Loach all seemed to have sensed the difficulties involved in linking up their distinct worldviews, artistic temperaments, and thematic preoccupations as soon as they began shooting the film. But, as self-designated “friends,” they endeavored to smooth out potential problems during the preproduction stages. As detailed in that behind-the-scenes documentary, entitled Ticket x 3, the three directors worked together to hash out the basic ideas for their stories. Though Kiarostami came up with the original concept of having a trilogy of tales told by a trio of filmmakers, and told producers Carlo Cresto-Dina and Babak Karimi that the directors with whom he would like to work were Olmi and Loach, each of the three played a vital role in determining the structure of the film as well as the trajectory of its train-bound narrative.43 Significantly, in an early scene of the documentary, Olmi uses the word “game” to describe his notion of their collaboration, equating the act of making an omnibus film to an “exquisite corpse”-type activity. “Let’s start with three colors . . . red, black, and white,” the Italian director tells his gathered guests (including multiple translators, two for each of the other filmmakers), elaborating that one person could select a color as the inspiration for a scenario that would lead to another color-inspired segment. Amid the cacophony of voices, the torrent of translated speech in this moment of transauthorial brainstorming, Loach softly yet assertively responds that he cannot “start with a colour” as the conceptual or Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 1.1 and 1.2  An early scene from the documentary Ticket x 3 [directed by Leonardo di Costanzo and included as a supplementary feature on the North American DVD release of Tickets (2005)], the three directors – Abbas Kiarostami (left), Ken Loach (right), and Ermanno Olmi (far right) – are shown brainstorming during the preproduction stage. This scene in particular and the entire documentary in general highlight how collaborative this transauthorial project was, continuing throughout the postproduction and assembly stages.

imagistic basis for a story. “It’s too abstract,” the British director intones, explaining that he needs “something else” as the spark of inspiration. “I can start with faces or situations or conflicts,” he states, as his friends seated across from him nod in agreement.44 Eventually, Olmi would introduce the idea of a train journey, with Kiarostami agreeing to include some of the Italian filmmaker’s characters Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in his story, and Loach taking responsibility for the film’s concluding episode (introducing new characters while wrapping up Olmi’s initial side-plot concerning an Albanian family). Other facts about the making of Tickets are included in this nearly one-hour documentary which comes to an end with a scene of the three directors deciding how to edit a key scene – an exterior shot showing the immigrant family boarding the intercity train to Rome. Even without this information, though, spectators would likely detect thematic reverberations throughout the text, with the theme of compassion emerging in each episode and the subject of theft worming its way through the proceedings (in the second episode, a cell phone is taken, whereas a ticket is stolen in the third episode). As I will argue throughout this book, however, paratextual elements, including posters, film titles, supplemental features, directors’ commentary tracks, and even DVD and Blu-ray disc menus, play a part in our hermeneutic unpacking of omnibus narratives. As Jonathan Gray asserts in his recently published study of media paratextuality, meanings are “constructed outside of what we have often considered to be the text itself.”45 Therefore, it behooves us to consider those situationally proxemic textual manifestations, or what Gray refers to as “proliferations” (such as promotional material and DVD “bonus tracks”), in our pursuit of an appropriately discursive interpretative framework for film analysis. To take one example of the way in which media “peripherals” or “proliferations” inform the meaning-making process, we need only turn to the chapter menu for the region 2 DVD release of Tube Tales (1999). As with Tickets, much of the onscreen drama in this multi-director film unfolds within the space of a crowded train; only this time mass transit takes the form of an underground vehicle, the titular subway system spread out like a vascular network under the Greater London area. The brainchild of producer Richard Jobson, who “was interested in making a film about London” (because, in his words, “it’s never been captured on film properly”),46 Tube Tales is the result of a competition publicized in Time Out magazine in 1998. Inviting readers to send in stories related to actual experiences (their own or others’) in the London Underground, Jobson and the fledgling film company Sky Pictures (a division of the British Sky Broadcasting group) eventually selected nine scenarios from over three thousand submissions. Those ideas were then handed over to nine directors, some of whom are better known for their work in front of the camera: Gaby Dellal, Stephen Hopkins, Bob Hoskins, Menhaj Huda, Armando Iannucci, Amy Jenkins, Jude Law, Charles McDougall, and Ewan McGregor. Though the completed film, produced on a total budget of $2.6 million, premiered on pay TV in November of 1999, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 1.3  The plain-looking main menu on Facets Video’s DVD release of Tickets offers only four “chapter stops” – one for each of the three episodes as well as one for the film’s opening credits. Significantly, the chapters are accompanied by titles (“The Professor,” “The Widow,” and “The Celtic Fans”) that are not provided in the film itself (and were not decided on by the three filmmakers).

Figure 1.4  One of the three menu screens for the region 2 DVD release of Tube Tales (1999). Modeled on the look of a subway map, this chapter menu provides a visual approximation of the film’s nine separate yet linked episodes, all of which are set in and around the London Underground.

Icon Entertainment International platformed it to international theatrical distributors at the American Film Market that same month, around the time that it played at the London International Film Festival.47 Three years would elapse before a DVD of the film was commercially available, one released by the British company Cinema Club. Unlike the rather ­stripped-down, simple menu design selected for the Facets Video DVD Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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release of Tickets (in which a mere four chapters provide access points to the first scenes in each segment, in addition to the opening credits), the designers of the Tube Tales DVD menus opted for a more elaborate approach to paratextual suggestiveness. Theirs is a graphical approximation of a subway map, spreading the disk’s ten chapters (one for each of the episodes plus one for the entire film’s opening credits) across three screens representing separate “zones.” The film’s combined sense of fragmentation and unity is conveyed in these menu designs, which show a red Tube line extending horizontally, from left to right, across several subway stops (four on the first two screens, two on the last screen) so as to suggest both episodicity and linearity. Those stops become narrative entryways for the spectator whose agency is enhanced by way of a paratextual extension of the selection process that is such an important feature of the text itself (with several episodes pivoting on the theme of choice). That is, the home video-viewing audience is granted a degree of choice when confronted with this “map” of the film’s narrative, arranged in such a way as to draw attention to the episodes’ titles and numerical designations as well as to presumably representative screen shots used as visual accompaniment to those titles and numbers. Those frame enlargements from the episodes – each a medium close-up or closeup shot of the main character(s) – belie producer Richard Jobson’s argument that London is “the most international city in the world.” Stating in an interview that there is “a huge mixture of races here, and the only place you really see those people is on the Tube,” Jobson’s intention to highlight heretofore overlooked areas of the city’s demographically diverse population is certainly admirable. But the finished omnibus production, as represented by the DVD’s chapter menu, encapsulates a somewhat limited view of cultural and racial heterogeneity, despite the presence of ethnic minorities in the fourth episode (Mehaj Huda’s “Grasshopper”) and the ninth episode (Charles McDougall’s “Steal Away”). Equally telling are the film’s embedded paratexts, the individual episode titles interspersed throughout Tube Tales and rendered as (or inscribed upon) material objects. The title of Perkins’s episode, “Mr. Cool,” appears as a logo on the black jacket worn by a motorcyclist who enters a commercial building through revolving doors. Though he is of little importance to this short segment, concerning the attempts by two business executives to woo a young woman on her way home from work, this mysterious figure – the first to be shown in the film – bears the director’s name on his back (in addition to the episode’s title) and is thus significant as an authorial inscription or placeholder fleetingly witnessed. Entering the building at the very moment when this episode’s main Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 1.5 and 1.6  As “entryway paratexts,” to quote Jonathan Gray, the individual episode titles interspersed throughout Tube Tales could also be said to function as “in medias res paratexts,” another of Gray’s terms. Here it is used to describe the hermeneutic solicitations to the spectator that occur during the act of watching an omnibus film.

character, Emma (Kelly MacDonald), exits it, he shoulders the burden of nonverbally communicating the allegorical nature of omnibus narrativity, wherein beginnings (or entrances) are structurally contingent upon endings (or exits). The other images chosen as title breaks in Tube Tales serve an “entryway” function, insofar as they visually announce something about to come in the ensuing narratives (as the stacks of money do at the beginning of director Charles McDougall’s “Steal Away”), or use material ephemera (such as a newspaper, a ticket stub, a french fry, and a cigarette pack) to connote the ephemeral nature of cinematic episodicity. Two of the episodes’ titles are presented as “environmental text,” words spray-painted and plastered on the walls of a public space that, like the omnibus film, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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bring together disparate people across ethnic and racial lines. Tellingly, the episode that most clearly revolves around London’s socially marginalized people – director Menhaj Huda’s “Grasshopper” – begins with an image of a discarded Tube ticket, a piece of everyday economic transaction that litters the station but is overlooked by most of the travelers who step on it. This object, not unlike a movie theater ticket stub, is a momentary possession, one that enters a person’s life (much like an episode in an omnibus film) only to be tossed away and quickly forgotten. That action, captured in the opening seconds of “Grasshopper,” assumes deeper meaning in the context of a story about a paranoid drug courier hopping from compartment to compartment (to get away from his juvenile mates) and who is eventually stopped by police. Rather than bust the young man for his illegal dealings, however, the authorities ask him to produce his seemingly unimportant Tube ticket, a material metaphor or marker of a transaction that ensures adherence to the law. Trains and their associated metaphors of enclosure, segmented linearity, and mobility proliferate within the omnibus filmography. Besides the aforementioned examples, films such as It’s a Big Country, Golden Arrow (a.k.a. The Gay Adventure, 1949, released 1953), The Year 01 (L’An 01, 1973), Africa Dreaming (1997), Tales of the Unusual (Yo ni mo kimyo na monogatari, 2000), and Queer Boys and Girls on the SHINKANSEN (2004) begin and/or end with episodes either set at a train station (a place of arrival and departure) or taking place inside a train compartment. The four-episode Italian film Of Wayward Love (L’amore difficile, 1962) does not begin with a train sequence but its final segment, directed by Nino Manfredi, is set in a crowded compartment where a soldier (Manfredi) heading for Sicily encounters a grieving widow (Fulvia Franco). Dressed from head to toe in black, with a veil failing to cover her face completely, the woman makes contact with the soldier sitting beside her, first with her eyes, then with her knees, and finally – once all of the other passengers have departed – with the rest of her body. An improbable sexual encounter, this, but one whose combined brevity and intensity – brought to a precipitous end once she, too, gets off the train and leaves the man in a state of expectation – conjure qualitative aspects of cinematic episodicity that I will attend to throughout this book. Finally, because trains are also linked to deadlines and timetables, they lend material solidity to a theme that might otherwise “melt” into air. Time, that sometimes palpably felt yet slippery component of cinematic narrativity, is “spatialized” via the train-like compartmentalizing of storytelling unique to episode films, especially one like Tickets in which the impending end of a journey lends urgency to the various characters’ efforts to reclaim lost objects. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Insofar as Tickets concerns travel across literal and figurative, real and imaginary spaces, it is significant that the film provides opportunities for critics to make their own “departures,” their own spirited excursions out of the text into adjacent territories. Prompted by an early scene in the film’s first episode, Judy Meewezen does just that, making the intertextual leap from Tickets to The Tree of Wooden Clogs (L’Albero degli zoccoli, 1978), another, more highly praised Olmi-directed film that shares much in common with the Italian auteur’s fleeting, thirty-minute narrative aboard the train. For Meewezen, the sight of the aging professor gazing forlornly out of the train window – his thoughts gravitating toward the image of “a dark-haired rich girl playing Chopin in a far-off decade” – recalls a scene from Olmi’s Palme d’Or-winning tale of a destitute peasant who, at one point, “peers into a room where a bourgeois boy plays Bach on the piano.”48 Though “the consistent rhythms of the train and the uniformly enclosed space bind the narratives together well,”49 as a multi-episode film featuring the contributions of three directors (each famous for developing his own unique style or artistic vision over a lengthy career) Tickets is nevertheless a “broken” text. Watching it, the spectator might feel compelled to fill in the gaps, not only in terms of imagining more elaborate backstories for the characters who briefly populate the narrative but also by linking each episode to a larger authorial corpus, as Meewezen does with Olmi’s contribution. And yet, despite the intertextually playful activity that this and similarly episodic motion pictures generate, several reviewers responded negatively to Tickets, which, “like most ‘omnibus’ films, doesn’t really gel.” According to one critic, the film’s three episodes “are only tenuously connected,” regardless of their shared setting, and they vary wildly in terms of their emotional textures and tonalities (with Olmi’s story being “inconsequential,” Kiarostami’s a “livelier” improvement over the first, and Loach’s curtain-closer a “deeply moving” reminder of the British filmmaker’s skill with young actors).50 Donald Clarke, one of the relatively few critics to argue for the film’s tonal consistency, nevertheless wraps up his review of Tickets with disparaging comments about the omnibus form in general, saying that there is “always a suggestion of compromise in such projects” and that, regardless of how enjoyable much of the film is, “you wouldn’t really call it a proper film.”51

Not a Proper Film: the Omnibus Film’s “Defects” and Detractors If Tickets is not a “proper film,” then just what kind of film is it? To return to Clarke’s dismissive account of the omnibus film’s failings as Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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an aesthetic and cultural form, it is significant that he refers to Tickets “as a sort of taster menu, designed to drag you back to future work from its distinguished directors.”52 That is, whatever artistic merits the film and its individual episodes might have are overshadowed by the text’s usefulness as a springboard that encourages leaps back into the comforting familiarity of a more “properly” emplotted narrative, one that steers clear of episodicity and adheres to a linear path upon which a single group of characters sets out. According to this “logic,” when one watches an omnibus film such as Tickets, one should be less concerned with sorting out the intratextual echoes and thematic reverberations across the conjoined episodes than with making intertextual connections between elements in a given segment and the larger body of feature-length films attributed to that segment’s director. One of the omnibus film’s supposed defects – its failure to conform to conventional narrative formulas – is thus tied to a fundamental misperception about the form, or rather a critical failure that has resulted in a further foreclosure of inquiry. For far too long, and in far too many casually dismissive journalistic reviews, critics have failed to appreciate the omnibus film’s intratextual complexities as a structure that is paradoxically unified by its flaunted narrative faultlines, its visible gaps that can be imaginatively inhabited or attended to by active audiences. Examples of this kind of critical response are plentiful and can be traced back to André Bazin’s statement, in 1948, that “the film composed of sketches” is “a bastard and phony type of film if ever there was one.”53 Likewise, in his harsh condemnation of the omnibus film genre as “an idiot quasi-genre that was momentarily hot potatoes in the New Waveyness of the 1960s, as everybody from Godard to Pasolini to Marcel Ophüls was happily commissioned to make crazy shorts that were then packaged together into congenitally ramshackle features,” the Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson provides a representative voice of dissent that, ironically, harmonizes with the general tenor of anti-episodic bias in the popular press. That bias has become particularly exacerbated in the past few years, with the theatrical releases of what are generally recognized as artistic “failures,” such as Four Rooms (1995) and Eros (2004) , the latter an “omni-bust” consisting of short films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong Kar-wai that Atkinson was reviewing when he made the above pronouncement.54 At the time of its release, Four Rooms – a pet project by four young directors (Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino) – momentarily became the focus of highbrow cultural authorities and “serious” film critics who dismissed the work, not only as Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“ b e ginnings witho ut e n ds ” 33 a failed experiment in narrative form but also as an omen of things to come in the “self-indulgent” world of studio-bankrolled, independent filmmaking. Beginning with its dismal premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Four Rooms received a thrashing not unlike the hotel rooms themselves, none more so than the most “successful” of the four episodes – Robert Rodriguez’s “The Misbehavers.” In this third sequence of Four Rooms, two precocious tykes left alone by their parents proceed to lay waste to hotel property. In manic bursts of Tex Avery-style comedy-violence, they deface the furniture and make weird memorandums on the walls of this once magnificent, now decaying landmark of old Los Angeles: an architectural signifier of the classic Hollywood studio system that gave way to American independents. The wanton vandalism on display in Four Rooms can therefore be read as a mise en abyme of the film itself, which assaulted conventional narrative logic while foiling audience expectations. Moreover, the wrecked room connects to the abuse heaped on Tarantino and company, hip young filmmakers who, like the boisterous, destructive kids, let loose their unchecked imaginations in a space of social deviance. The result was not so much a kind of hostility toward hostelry but, rather, a skepticism toward all things episodic. Because so many people seemed to loathe Four Rooms, the omnibus format itself became the target of some damning reviews in the months and years that followed, a trend that has not changed even after the 2007 release of Rodriguez’s and Tarantino’s double-barreled cult hit Grindhouse. Not all discourse is damning, however. In his contemporaneous review of the 1989 transauthorial trifecta, New York Stories (a work enchaining the short films of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen), Peter Rainer, a film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, admits that he has “always been a fan of multi-episode anthology movies.” Saying that such films are the “equivalent of short-story collections,” Rainer reminds his readers that “if you don’t like a particular piece, don’t fret, it’ll soon be over.” For him, “the short-story format seems to bring out an acuteness and a prankishness in directors that are sometimes muffled in their feature-length forays,” an idea that he elaborates in his analysis of Woody Allen’s contribution to this film, a comically inflected sketch entitled “Oedipus Wrecks.” “He’s more of an artist here in this dinky toss-off of a sketch than he is in something like Another Woman (1988),” Rainer writes, concluding that “the irresponsibility of the material brings out [Allen’s] truest comic instincts.”55 Besides Rainer, Vincent Canby is one of the few contemporary critics to subtly extol the virtues of episodic cinema. In 1989, the year of New York Stories’ theatrical release, Canby admitted that audiences Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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may be more offended by the least successful of the anthology’s segments than buoyed up by the most successful one . . . The same people who will willingly sit through a double feature appear to resent, rather than appreciate, being asked to adjust their sights to three, four or five beginnings, middles and ends within one film . . . It’s as if they suspected they were being cheated by being asked to do more work.56

While Canby is convincing in his argument that audiences of anthology and omnibus films get more bang for their box-office buck (something that the aforementioned Grindhouse foregrounds by offering up two mini-features linked by fake movie trailers, each directed by a different filmmaker), he does not specify what kind of “work” is involved in our spectatorial engagement with them. Nor does he provide more than a passing reference to the qualitative “worth” of such works whose success or failure is based on unclear criteria or on aesthetic standards found in traditional narratives. And, unfortunately, his relatively balanced appraisal of episodic cinema’s merits and shortcomings has been lost on many contemporary reviewers, especially those who write for a twentyfirst-century online audience. A generally excellent source for reviews of the latest releases of East Asian films, the website lovehkfilm.com nevertheless puts forth a standard (dismissive) line of argument when its reviewer of the Hong Kong production A Decade of Love (Sup fun chung ching, 2008) calls this multidirector effort “predictably uneven.”57 According to this reviewer, the film – a commemoration of the former British crown colony’s 1997 handover, ten years after the fact – is “predictably a mixed bag,” and its aesthetic deficiencies can be partly attributed to “the omnibus format.” “[N]ot a lot can be done in each ten-minute short film,” the reviewer claims, “so any negatives are expected and even excusable.”58 At another website devoted to East Asian cinema, the three-director action film Triangle (Tie saam gok, 2007) is given a generally positive review (with the writer calling it “the most entertaining film out of Hong Kong in years”) though yet another swipe at the omnibus format wipes away any goodwill directed toward it. For all of its “great cinematography” and “thrilling atmosphere,” and despite its “fantastic soundtrack by Guy Zerafa,” this multi-director work is “actually quite inconsistent” and thus “a strange viewing experience.”59 As these examples suggest, variations and synonyms of the word “predictable” frequently spring up in the critical commentary surrounding omnibus films, as do the terms “inconsistent,” “uneven,” “mixed bag,” and “hit-and-miss.”60 Of the many scathing comments written by Andrew Sarris about the French-language “propaganda” film Far from Vietnam (in his 1967 review for Village Voice), one sentence stands out for its relevance Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to the current discussion. After beginning his denunciation with the words “Zero as art,” Sarris writes that he has not seen “such a patchwork quilt since Mondo Cane.”61 The latter film, released in 1962, would have been familiar to most of Sarris’s readers, given its notoriety as a globetrotting “shockumentary” showcasing unusual customs and rituals in such farflung places as the Trobriand archipelago (east of New Guinea), Nocera Terinese (a village in the Calabria region of southern Italy), and Raiputh (a fishing community on the Malay coast). Besides launching a litany of “mondo” knockoffs (including Mondo Macabro [1965], Mondo Freudo [1966], and Mondo Topless [1966]), this notorious production, written and directed by Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti, also helped to popularize the episodic structure, even if very few of the anthology and omnibus films released during that decade were as “patchwork” as it is. With over two dozen autonomous vignettes detailing everything from car cemeteries in California to tapioca eaters on the island of Tabar (part of the Bismark archipelago), Mondo Cane is, indeed, a “mixed bag,” and Sarris’s reference to it in his Far From Vietnam critique reinforces the general consensus that most episodic works are a hodgepodge, a misshapen jumble, a mess. Similarly, in his New Yorker review of the “diffuse and whimsical” film The Red Violin (Le Violon rouge, 1999), David Denby argues that director Françoise Girard “has fallen into the troubles typical of the cranky and deservedly marginal form he has chosen: the omnibus film.”62 Ironically, “cranky” is a fitting description of most film critics who find the lack of a single and sustained narrative in The Red Violin and other solo-directed and multi-director episodic works so unappealing. Another critic writing about The Red Violin, Andy Klein, states, “Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While there once was a time – long ago – when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released.”63 True though this last statement may be, one ought not mistake paucity for inferiority; nor should one neglect to account for the many classics of international cinema whose uniqueness hinges upon their episodic emplotment of assorted stories, from singledirector films, such as Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs about Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934), to multi-director works, such as La vie est à nous (1936) and Germany in Autumn. Though these three examples of agitprop cinema are not included in the authoritative International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, a half-dozen now-canonized, internally fragmented films do receive coverage in that text, including the multi-director motion pictures Fantasia (1940) and Dead of Night (1945) as well as such single-director Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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films as Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), and Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1969). Dead of Night, a five-episode feature from Ealing Studios, is generally thought to be the best British psychological thriller made prior to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), yet its structural distinctiveness and connections to earlier horror anthologies and omnibus films from other national cinemas are often overlooked. While these films, along with Love in the City, Boccaccio ’70 (1962), and Spirits of the Dead (Histoires extraordinaires, 1968), are among the titles frequently mentioned in historical overviews of world cinema, hundreds of other, less famous examples have been conveniently swept under the rug, if not dismissed outright. This book, if it manages to generate interest in this overlooked metagenre, constitutes a rectifying effort to reclaim the margins of film history. It is also offered up as a corrective to so much of the knee-jerk criticism still being leveled against omnibus films – the often vitriolic responses that refuse to evaluate the episodic form on its own terms, as an inherently contradictory structure snared between the dueling imperatives to splinter off and join together.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

C H A PT E R 2

Regulated Variety and Excess: Antecedents and Extensions of Episodic Cinema

[W]hat a wonderful new field this opens up to moviemakers. There are hundreds of short stories which would make charming 15 or 20 minute episodes, but which simply fall to pieces when blown up to full feature length . . . There should be some form which will allow us to present vignettes, character studies and delightful incidents. Actress Anne Baxter, interviewed on the set of O. Henry’s Full House (1952)

The preceding chapter established the conceptual focus of this book, which is chiefly concerned with the unruly nature and devalued status of the omnibus film, a transauthorial subset of episodic cinema in which the contributions of multiple filmmakers are strung together, one after the other, as individual yet linked episodes in a feature-length production. To grasp the distinctive structural characteristics of the omnibus film, however, it is important to consider the more broadly conceived umbrella term “episode film.” Though an episode film need not combine the work of two or more filmmakers, as a more general classification it still manages to convey what is narratologically unique about transauthorial omnibus productions. From the very beginning, episode films drew liberally and steadfastly upon literary and theatrical resources. The first serially emplotted, singledirector episode film produced in the United States, D. W. Griffith’s Biograph production Pippa Passes (1909), consists of four segments based on a famous poem by Robert Browning. Much critical discussion about this film has focused on the director’s groundbreaking use of light and shadow effects which prefigure German expressionist filmmaking by a decade and show off the technical brilliance of his long-time collaborator, cameraman Billy Bitzer. But those stylistic breakthroughs are an extension of the film’s narrative structure, divided into four separate vignettes entitled “Morn,” “Noon,” “Eve,” and “Night.” Making her way through town to celebrate a day off from mill work, Pippa sings a “song of conscience” that is overheard by various people in the midst of alcoholic binges, ­adulterous Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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situations, or murderous inclinations. The effect that the music has on them, effectively lifting their heavy burdens and injecting a glimmer of hope in their once-gloomy lives, ironically inverts the spectral passage from morning to evening. With twilight gradually encroaching on daylight (a circadian movement that sets the stage for Griffith’s and Bitzer’s cinematographic experiments), the film’s individual segments and groups of characters are bound together in a linear, yet fragmented, narrative frame that posits temporal, as well as spatial, adjacency as a fundamental element in episodic storytelling. Though it is a one-reeler consisting of only seventeen shots, Pippa Passes gestures toward future uses of episodicity in feature-length singledirector and multi-director productions, beginning with Griffith’s fivereel, three-episode (plus prologue and epilogue) biographical drama Home, Sweet Home (1914). Program notes for this latter production – the first feature-length episode film produced in the United States – indicate that companies and reviewers were using the term “episode” to denote the individual stories within multi-narrative works as early as the 1910s and 1920s (and that only much later did critics begin inventing neologisms such as “dramette,” “cinemanecdote,” and so on to describe an episode). Home, Sweet Home also anticipates subsequent “rushes to the relics,” to paraphrase Tom Gunning’s description of adaptation in his study of the origins of American narrative film. Multi-story episode films would seem to be naturally predisposed to adapting preexisting literary “miniatures” to the screen and, indeed, there have been numerous such productions based on poems, one-act plays, and (more often) short stories, from O. Henry’s Full House (1952) and Three Tales of Chekhov (Tri rasskaza Chekhova, 1961) to The Gordimer Stories (1983), Tales of Borges (Cuentos de Borges, 1991), and Paul Bowles: Half-Moon (Paul Bowles: Halbmond, 1995). Yet there have been almost as many episodic works whose inspirational sources and generic foundations lay elsewhere – fairy tales, fables, novels, classic myths, comic books, newspapers, television series, and radio programs, to name just a few. Based on John Howard Payne’s same-titled poem, Griffith’s Home, Sweet Home stars twenty-five luminaries of the silent screen (a Who’s Who of Biograph company mainstays, such as Henry Walthall, Donald Crisp, the Gish sisters, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Ralph Lewis, Miriam Cooper, and Irene Hunt). In addition to being the first feature-length episode film made in the United States, it is generally thought to be the first “all-star film,” a phrase that might bring to mind a bevy of musicals and epics from the classic Hollywood studio period as well as such multistory films as If I Had a Million (1932), Tales of Manhattan (1942), and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Forever and a Day (1943). One of the film’s biggest stars, Blanche Sweet, once told an interviewer that, as in these latter three examples, “Each section of Home, Sweet Home could exist on its own. Griffith filmed it that way in case the total product wasn’t satisfactory, he would still be able to salvage something and possibly use it as a one-reeler.”1 This approach has also been given as the rationale behind Buster Keaton’s first foray into feature-length filmmaking, a tri-part parody of Griffith’s monumental variations-on-a-theme film, Intolerance (1916). Titled Three Ages (1923), and furthermore reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dryer’s 1921 “mythic ages” epic Leaves from Satan’s Notebook (which similarly presents episodes of the distant and recent pasts in the manner of a sweeping historical pageant), this episodic work found Keaton riding on the creative coattails of trailblazers like Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, exerting a level of autonomy that was somewhat anomalous for that period in film history which was marked by a detailed division of labor and dominated by what David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger refer to as the central producer system.2 As Robert Knopf argues, this sixty-three-minute episode film is significant in Keaton’s oeuvre, for its multiple-story structure allowed “him to link several short films through a common theme. In this way, Keaton produced his first full-length film without necessitating a major change in his thinking about narrative structure.”3 Additionally, the structure of the film made sense from a business standpoint, for “if Three Ages did not work as a feature film, Keaton could have easily divided it up into three short films, a possibility that Keaton himself realized.”4 Historians have debated this idea, though, arguing that it is unlikely that Three Ages would have been released as three separate two-reelers, given the film’s reliance on inter-episodic gags (which are partly based on the moment-to-moment reappearance of actors, including Kewpie Morgan who plays a caveman, a roman thug, and the emperor in different sections). Nevertheless, that potential divisibility of the text played into Keaton’s earlier, precinematic career onstage. Born in 1895 to a family of Kansasbased entertainers, Joseph Francis Keaton Jr became a child star who, according to some biographers, made his first vaudeville stage appearance when he was three years old (others say five; some even say nine months). As one of The Three Keatons, “Buster” (nicknamed, legend has it, by Harry Houdini) appeared onstage with his mother, Myra, and his father, Joe. Touring the country on the vaudeville circuit, young Keaton spent his adolescent years learning the ins and outs of the business, and quickly developed the acrobatic and mimicry skills, gift for improvisation, and comic timing that he would later perfect onscreen. He also honed a sense Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of the vaudevillian penchant for episodicity that would eventually manifest itself in Three Ages, a film that anticipates many of the sketch comedies hailing from the United States, Italy, England, and other countries in later years. Sketch comedy, in its filmic and in its televisual manifestations, is entrenched in the performative traditions nurtured in such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century institutions as the music hall, vaudeville theater, and burlesque – venues that not only served as the structural encasements of variety act entertainments but also encapsulated some of the characteristics of the many avant-gardes that came into being just thereafter (including surrealism and Dadaism). As Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the affinity between “the operations of the comic and the episodizing logic of the various modernisms” can be accounted for once we move beyond “the meaning of laughter,” beyond “some ‘comic spirit’ or world-view,” to notice “the discontinuous structure” of the variety show or music-hall format from which, for example, Buster Keaton’s autonomous visual gags derived.5

A Vaudevillian Paradigm: Variety as a Structural Determinant Variety has long been a salient characteristic of American and European entertainment forms, infiltrating everything from nineteenth-century circuses, extravaganzas, and wild west shows to concert saloons, burlesque theaters, and minstrel shows. Though the term “variety” came to be replaced in the United States by “vaudeville” around the turn of the century (only to resurface decades later as a late-night televisual format), it nevertheless continued to be a fitting description of the structured diversity of the performances therein which ran the gamut from musical numbers and brief comic monologues to elaborate magic shows, acrobatics, and animal acts. Much like the more respectable British music hall, there was a predilection for song-and-dance-based entertainment in American vaudeville wherein a number of acts per program guaranteed at least partial audience satisfaction. The acts’ combined eclecticism, as well as the breakneck pacing of their presentation, contributed to a rhythmic discombobulation that was both thrilling and challenging for spectators. Indeed, the appeal of vaudeville acts, their ability to touch the lives of so broad a demographic, come from this structured diversity which replicates the heterogeneity of the audience, many of whom came from working-class immigrant backgrounds. Immigration itself was a source of thematic relevance in these acts which oftentimes dealt directly with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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re gul a t e d va r ie ty and e x c e s s 41 the everyday social problems faced by recent émigrés as well as with aspects of an increasingly industrialized and alienating urban experience. A vaudeville show’s success thus rested on its ability to entertain audiences across a broad spectrum of social positions. Then, as today, laughter was the great leveler; communal giggles erased the individual or at least momentarily subsumed him or her within the collective. Significantly, like the episode film genre that it partially spawned, the live variety act show at the turn of the twentieth century brought diverse groups together, both on stage and in the audience. Thus, in a way that gestures back to their precinematic antecedents, omnibus productions could be said to constitute a kind of “regulatory scheme,” to borrow genre theorist Rick Altman’s terminology, one that facilitates “the integration of diverse factions into a single social fabric.”6 Though not an American invention, vaudeville nevertheless represented a democratic ideal of what the country and its citizenry could achieve along sociopolitical lines. It, like the film genres that it influenced, was an allegorical form of creative expression capable of gesturing toward the heterogeneity of a nation celebrated for the opportunities it affords its people. Also, as a veritable smorgasbord of comic, dramatic, and musical “goodies” (consumed one after the other), vaudeville was a living model of the kind of fetishistic consumption that grew out of economic development and Western capitalism. As we shall see, many episode films tap into that fetishism and turn what appear to be performative and presentational units (likewise organized around simple situations and precipitous payoffs) into “objects” within a collection whose main, if not sole, purpose is to engender a serial form of consumption that knows no end. As an extension of vaudeville, which was eventually supplanted by more technologically advanced forms of popular amusement (cinema, in particular), the episode film announces at once the former’s obsolescence as well as its transmedial reincarnation – a cinematic embodiment of the past which, paradoxically, continues to be consumed in various generic guises and national contexts. Like vaudeville, musical revues were an extension of nineteenthcentury burlesque and, much like the variety acts, were compendiums of comic skits and dramatic bits set to popular songs. But, whereas different players performed in variety acts, a single cast was usually spotlighted in musical revues to lend a sense of cohesiveness, stylistic consistency, and interconnectedness to the shows. Most famously represented by the Ziegfeld Follies (of 1907, 1919, 1927, etc.), this unique cultural phenomenon reached its zenith throughout the 1920s and 1930s, running up to, and overlapping with, that pivotal period in American film history (1926–27) when early synchronized sound recording had begun radically Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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t­ransforming the industry and the medium. Interestingly, it was in the first two years of the Great Depression that a group of five all-singing, all-dancing “talkies” was released in the United States, each one a musical comedy revue in which various actors and performers appeared (and sometimes reappeared) in different sketches. These cinematic musical comedy revues were not as unified as their theatrical predecessors, and oftentimes seemed to lack consistent themes or integrative designs that would suggest an underlying coherence or narrative framework. Nevertheless, as throwbacks to vaudeville’s catchall style of collective entertainment, these films can be seen as emblematic expressions of a widespread cultural desire to shore up a sense of esprit de corps at a time when the nation was facing economic and social setbacks. They can also be understood as liminal leadins, situated between the purely theatrical traditions of the past and the cinematic experiments that would characterize omnibus film production in the years that immediately followed (beginning with the release of the 1932 Paramount film If I Had a Million). This short-lived vogue for musical comedy revues is one of the most curious phenomena in American cinema history, a concentrated burst in which four out of the five major (vertically integrated) Hollywood studios (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Fox, and Paramount) plus one of the three minor studios (Universal) produced an episode film within a year and a half of one another. It all began on June 20, 1929, when M-G-M released The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Besides garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, this two-strip Technicolor production set the template for subsequent episode films that similarly relied upon such rhetorical devices as the “opening and closing of curtains, the use of title cards, the dimming of lights, the crescendo of orchestral music, or the reappearance of a master of ceremonies,” who stands before the audience on a proscenium stage and introduces the (often gaudy) musical numbers, comic sketches, and short dramas.7 In The Hollywood Revue of 1929, emcee duty is shared by Jack Benny and Conrad Nagle who, with witty banter and self-reflexive asides, preface the performances of some of the studio’s biggest stars, including Marie Dressler, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Marion Davies, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In the next musical comedy revue released that year, Warner Bros.’s The Show of Shows (1929), a less accomplished, more arrogant comedian, Frank Fay, takes the reins as emcee, doing his best to fend off a constant stream of interruptions (which are allegorical inscriptions of the disrupted text as a whole) while whetting the audience’s appetite for the nearly two dozen dances, songs, tableaux, and blackout sketches, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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none of which is connected along narrative lines. Among the highlights of the film are a spoof of the famous “Singin’ in the Rain” number from The Hollywood Revue (“Singin’ in the Bathtub,” performed by Winnie Lightner), a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Henry VI performed by John Barrymore (his first speaking role in motion pictures), and a two-strip Technicolor sequence, “Chinese Fantasy,” performed by Myrna Loy and “introduced” by Rin Tin Tin. Add to these a faked guillotining set during the French Revolution, a thunderously orchestrated military drill featuring a “Chorus of Three Hundred Beauties,” a pirate ship number entitled “Skull and Crossbones,” an aria sung by French chanteuse Irene Bordoni, a Keystone-style comedy starring Ben Turpin, and a satiric riff on Al Jolson’s fame, and one gets a sense of the rhetorical discursivity and generic hybridity inherent within this most schizophrenic (or textually scattered) of film subgenres. Interestingly, the seventh sequence in The Show of Shows, a bizarre amalgam of Parisian romance and American calisthenics, culminates with a squad of dancing girls dropping their parasols, disrobing to their bathing suits, and arranging themselves against a black backdrop as if part of a human collection to be consumed by the camera all at once. This metonymic image, a combination of orderly display and rampant multiplicity, provides the viewer with a means of seeing the film’s individual episodes as self-governing yet unity-driven objects in a patterned field. Such instructional indices are not unusual within the context of episodic cinema, which quite often proffers images of humans or objects arrayed or fragmented in such a way that the spatial dimensions of the collection becomes particularly pronounced.8 In trumpeting the film’s lavishly decorated sets, its “seventy-seven stars and 1,000 Hollywood beauties” (the production cost ran to a whopping $800,000), Warner Bros.’s program notes for The Show of Shows emphasize that “in its opulent variety [the film] embodies everything from Shakespeare to super-jazz” and is “100 shows in one.” The hyperbolic notes go on to proclaim that, “There never before was anything like it, nor ever again will be.”9 Of course, there was a similar film that predated it, just as there would be works made by rival studios in the wake of its release: musical comedy revues, such as Fox’s early widescreen experiment Happy Days (1930), that were just like it in terms of their reliance upon a presentational mode of performance rooted in vaudeville and a structural form that naturally engenders audience anticipation for the next act – a willingness to wait out the less amusing or less interesting bits in order to get to the really “worthwhile” ones. Two months after the February 13, 1930 release of Fox’s Happy Days, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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which was shot in the 70mm “Grandeur” process and which features an episode (“A Toast to the Girl I Love”) that utilizes a multiple-screen effect in telling the song’s story in vignettes,10 both Paramount and Universal unveiled their own revue films, respectively Paramount on Parade (1930) and King of Jazz (1930). Paramount on Parade’s twenty skits are tied together by not one but three emcees (Jack Oakie, Skeets Gallagher, and Leon Errol) and the film is generally believed to be the most successful of the five revue productions, with an even bigger roster of directors (including Dorothy Arzner, Ernst Lubitsch, and Edmund Goulding) contributing to the film’s maelstrom-like multiplicity. Lubitsch directed three numbers starring Maurice Chevalier whose central performance, in the guise of a gendarme keeping watch over a public park, injected a cosmopolitan flair into the proceedings (which not only features scenes set in Paris and Venice but also includes a smattering of French, Russian, and Chinese dialogue). Besides Chevalier, some of Paramount’s top talent – Clara Bow, Fredric March, Fay Wray, and Ruth Chatterton – give their best efforts over the course of the film’s 102-minute running time (of which only eighty minutes survive). Furthermore, the combinatory power of episodic cinema is exploited in a single extraordinary segment, entitled “Murder Will Out.” In just ten minutes, this meta-mystery play (practically a postmodern parody) brings together four cinematic icons – Fu Manchu (Warner Oland), Sherlock Holmes (Clive Brook), Philo Vance (William Powell), and Sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette) – who vie against one another after Fu Manchu’s supposed murder of Jack Oakie. The use of the word “parade” in the title of this Paramount revue film is not insignificant or coincidental because so much of the appeal of episodic cinema rests on their status as “marquee bait,” luring audiences into theaters based on the promise of many celebrities and stars who are presented, one after the other, as if in a procession or pageant.11 Premiering in Los Angeles on April 19, 1930 (the same night that Paramount on Parade debuted in New York), Universal’s King of Jazz is just as elaborate and diverse, going so far as to include a Walter Lantz cartoon explaining how portly bandleader Paul Whiteman earned the sobriquet “King of Jazz.” Immediately preceding the animation is an image of announcer Charles Irwin onstage, standing before a monolithic “Paul Whiteman’s Scrapbook,” its pages “crowded with melodies and anecdotes,” which Irwin promises “to bring to life for you by the magic of the cinema.” Though the film is packed with musical performances from the likes of the Delta Rhythm Boys (featuring Bing Crosby in his first movie appearance), John Boles, and violinist Joe Venuti, this bibliophilic image anticipates the spate of anthology and omnibus films that would Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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re gul a t e d va r ie ty and e x c e s s 45 come in its wake and which similarly foreground books as the “proper” containers of stories regardless of their origins. Moreover, the shot of the towering scrapbook, which dwarfs the film’s host yet contains within it the necessarily small fragments of quotidian life, sets the stage for additional manifestations of this miniature/gigantic dialectic, the first of which occurs once the cartoon ends. After Lantz’s animated rendering of Whiteman, who is shown hunting in “darkest Africa” and being chased by a lion (the savage beast is eventually soothed by the white man’s music), the bandleader himself appears onstage with a satchel. He opens it to reveal his band, or rather, a tiny version of it. All forty members of the miniaturized orchestra step out of the bag, eventually returning to their normal size behind their instruments which they play in piecemeal fashion as Whiteman introduces each of them individually. Just as jazz is a kind of musical equivalent of the episode film, equally torn between solo and group performances, so too does the sight of these once small, now large, musicians consolidate the proportional dialogism of this genre in which the increased proliferation of miniature sketches or narrative “scraps” contributes to a given work’s overall “giganticism.” Ironically, by virtue of their smallness, the many brief comedy “quickies” – some lasting no longer than ten seconds – sprinkled throughout the film lend the musical sequences a weightiness and substantiality at odds with conventional wisdom (which says that such performances are necessarily light and insubstantial). Though there is a similar image of a miniaturized orchestra in Paramount on Parade (when the Abe Lyman band climbs out of a giant shoebox to perform “Dancing to Save Your Sole”), in King of Jazz the aforementioned tension between the large and the small infiltrates practically every episode, from “The Bridal Veil,” which climaxes with a bevy of brides carrying a veil so large that it spans an entire flight of stairs, to “Rhapsody in Blue,” a tribute to George Gershwin’s music in which five pianists sit side by side at a giant keyboard while the rest of the orchestra is tightly tucked inside the body of the instrument. In another episode, “Happy Feet,” a group of chorus girls dances through a miniature mock-up of Times Square, their outsized performance casting in comparative relief the smallness of the male musicians. The giant scrapbook would appear to be, then, just one of the many special effects in King of Jazz, a film whose impressive camera techniques (including stop-action photography) put it in a different league than the earlier revue films. Yet, as a cinematic scrapbook, it is a compendium of “memory fragments” made material, suggesting that “scraps” and “sketches” comprise the souvenirs of one’s daily life. Between each Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episode, disembodied hands turn the pages of the book, revealing a different title that, each time, primes the audience for something new, even as the very premise of material “scraps” suggests something old or decaying; a memento mori that puts a decidedly (and deadly) personal spin on the collection. Much of the film’s complexity stems from its ontological bivalency, its fluctuation between such diametrically opposed poles as the new and the old, the large and the small, fullness and absence. With regard to this latter binary, the film’s episodes – as mnemonic clusters of images and sounds – repeatedly remind the viewer of things that are missing, despite the ostensibly extensive and all-inclusive nature of the collection. As the titular man of the hour, Paul Whiteman wears his moniker with aplomb, though jazz historians would certainly debate his claim to “royalty” given the complete absence of African Americans and minority musicians in the film. In fact, by beginning King of Jazz with a cartoon in which Whiteman goes to Africa and tames its “beasts,” and by ending the film with a “Melting Pot” finale ironically devoid of racial difference, director John Murray Anderson (a well-known Broadway impresario) and his writers modulate the very theme of origins which is central to the ontology of scrapbooks and of cinematic compilations (in which objects are removed from their originating contexts and, according to Susan Stewart, placed “within the play of signifiers that characterize an exchange economy”).12 If the film whitewashes the origins of jazz (black spirituals, blues, work songs, ragtime), it nevertheless manages to convey – through that primal, bibliophilic image – the ancestral basis of episode films which are as beholden to books as they are to vaudevillian variety. By the spring of 1930, Hollywood had declared an end to musical comedy revues (this comes after the February release of a British omnibus film, Elstree Calling, a “Cine-Radio-Revue” comprising nineteen episodes directed by Andre Charlot, Jack Hulbert, Paul Murray, and Alfred Hitchcock). As a reporter at Variety wrote, “Any kind of picture, whether musical or not, that does not have a strong story basis, is taking big chances in the opinion of film showmen. Public must have their stories and plots, they say.”13 Despite the fact that these cinematic equivalents of a vaudeville program offered audiences a kind of Whitman’s Sampler of studio talent as well as an assortment of genres, they quickly fell out of favor due to their inability or refusal to adhere to the “comforting” uniformity of narrative found in more traditional films. This is not to say, however, that vaudevillian paradigms disappeared altogether. In fact, episode films from a wide range of national and cultural contexts continued to play up their connections to earlier forms of entertainment. Besides the occasional American compilation film combining footage from earlier productions, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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re gul a t e d va r ie ty and e x c e s s 47 such as Variety Time (1948), an RKO pastiche of musical numbers and short subjects hosted by Jack Paar,14 there were vaudeville-inspired anthologies (single-director episode films) from all corners of the globe. These include Domenico Paolella’s Great Vaudeville (Gran varietà, 1954), a five-episode, Italian-language backstage musical about quick-change artists, aspiring singers, and has-been actors; and Variety Stars (Vesyolyye zvyozdy, 1954), director Vera Stroyeva’s look at the Russo Variety Hall stage, complete with a ballet troupe, acrobats, and a portly songstress. Indeed, given the steady flow of multi-story episode films throughout Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, who could blame a character in Julien Duvivier’s French-language The Devil and the Ten Commandments (Le Diable et les dix commandements, 1962) for exclaiming, “Everything’s vaudeville these days!”

A Scheherazadean Schism: Episodic Storytelling and Visual Bibliophilia Ironically, what many critics and reviewers were calling “vaudeville films” were, in fact, an extension of a bibliophilic strain of episodic cinema that began as early as 1920, the year that the Fox Film Corporation’s While New York Sleeps was released. Written and directed by Charles J. Brabin, this ambitious depiction of three discrete socioeconomic worlds (arranged from top to bottom from the first episode’s focus on the occupants of a palatial mansion to the final episode’s ramshackle setting on the Manhattan harbor) begins with the image of an open book, a convenient container of the film’s disparate tales. Though there is a degree of thematic overlap between the episodes (for instance, each story concerns a form of betrayal as well as the threat of death by gunfire), they would nevertheless appear to be quite remote from one another were it not for the insertion of the book whose own material borders suggest a metaphorical means for marking off the film’s spatiotemporal dimensions. As mentioned previously, this narratological framing device has been a central component of numerous anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films which foreground the visual presence of books so as to rein in the diversity of their tales while promising to give the audience what musical comedy revues ostensibly could not: stories and plots. Such films as Love and the Frenchwoman (La Française et l’amour, 1960), Famous Love Affairs (Les amours célèbres, 1961), and Twice Told Tales (1963), to take very different examples, attest to the iconographic presence of books as objective correlatives for both the presentational and representational ambitions of the genre. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3  In the opening minutes of the 1960 omnibus film Love and the Frenchwoman, hands enter the frame to open a book, the title page of which contains the film’s title. Then follows a series of episode titles, each printed on a page of the book and accompanied by the names of the screenwriter(s), the director, and the composer of the music featured in the corresponding segment of the film.

As early as the 1930s, the combined imagery of books and private libraries had been used as a narrative device with which to explicitly tie different tales together in episode films. Sacha Guitry’s historical extravaganza The Pearls of the Crown (Les perles de la couronne, 1937) consists of a string Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of flashbacks (or what Georges Sadoul called “a lavish series of revue sketches”) tracking the separate journeys of four valuable pearls. After the credit sequence shows the various players’ images plastered on pages of an open book, the “lives” of these fetish objects are recounted in a frame narrative starring the flamboyant filmmaker himself as a raconteur telling the fantastical stories to his wide-eyed wife. This hyperpresentational approach to storytelling, which Guitry had exploited one year earlier [in the non-episodic Story of a Cheat (Le roman d’un tricheur, 1936)], has since been reconfigured in various national cinemas throughout the decades with much the same distancing effect. For instance, the wraparound story for the 1966 spy film Killer’s Carnival (Gern hab’ich die Frauen gekillt, a.k.a. Le carnaval des barbouzes), a multinational coproduction involving resources from Austria, Italy, and France that consists of three episodes (each directed by a different filmmaker and set in a different city: Vienna, Rome, and Rio de Janeiro), concerns a serial killer holding an aristocrat hostage in his library. The killer – actually an undercover private i­ nvestigator who believes his hostage to be the real murder suspect – forces the old man to tell stories about Holmesian detectives-for-hire and karate-chopping special agents before tricking him into signing a confession. In Killer’s Carnival, the frame narrative’s bibliophilic, indeed ­bibliographic, setting, where personal collection and interpersonal recollection combine, recalls the gentlemen’s club smoking room in Julien Duvivier’s Flesh and Fantasy (1943), a three-episode collection of supernatural tales whose frame story is similarly saturated with Scheherazadean recitation. As in the multi-director spy film, one of the two men in Flesh and Fantasy is a diegetic receiver of tales that, rather than being directed toward the camera/spectator, are told solely to this onscreen surrogate. Also, spaces of international transit in Killer’s Carnival (expressed through shots of passengers exiting an Alitalia airplane in the Rome episode, as well as the flight from San Francisco to Rio in the final episode which is filled with ethnographically rich travelogue imagery) provide stark contrast to the centeredness and immobility of the frame story’s setting, implying that Scheherazadean storytelling is linked to spatial stability or stasis. That contrast is likewise reflected in a very different kind of anthology film made decades later, the American independent feature Getting to Know You (1999). Though this low-budget, high-concept adaptation of three Joyce Carol Oates stories (“Craps,” “Leila Lee,” and “Getting to Know You”) is not a multi-director omnibus film but, rather, a singledirector episode film helmed by former documentarian Lisanne Skyler, it deserves mention here, not simply because the director brings unique Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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insight to this depiction of three teenagers with troubled pasts and unsure futures but primarily for the way it renders visible what is often masked or hidden in less metatextual motion pictures. Set in upstate New York, the film begins with sixteen-year-old Judith (Heather Matarazzo) and her eighteen-year-old brother Wesley (Zach Braff) arriving at a run-down bus depot, a heterotopic setting that connotes both movement and stasis. Judith is set to return to the Rome County Home where she has lived ever since their alcoholic father left and their mother was institutionalized; Wesley is bound for college. Before they take their separate journeys, another teenager, Jimmy (Michael Weston), insinuates himself into their hermetic space, claiming that he recognizes them from high school. Over the course of the afternoon, while Wesley waits patiently for his bus, Jimmy seduces the emotionally wounded girl with imaginative stories about the lonely people wandering through the depot. His tales, rendered as serial flashbacks overlaid with voiceover, provide oblique glances at his own personality and past. Each story he recounts has elements of both truth and fiction yet, ultimately, they reveal autobiographical details that he might otherwise try to suppress. Cautious yet curious, Judith is drawn into the stories, hanging on his every word. At first a naïve listener, someone who does not question the veracity of the tales, she soon gains an apprenticeship in narrative construction and becomes an onscreen surrogate for the audience. Referred to by one critic as a “pair of Scheherazades in a treehouse,”15 these two teenagers are emblematic figures of filmic fiction, spinning out scenarios as a way of delaying the inevitable. Jimmy tells stories not only to simultaneously escape from and confront his own life’s harsh realities but also to delay Judith’s impending departure, to hold her attention and achieve intimacy. The title of Getting to Know You is ironic insofar as short stories cannot – owing to structural constraints and limitations on descriptive detail – deliver as much information about a character as a novel or a single-story, feature-length film can. Episodic cinema reminds us of the extreme proximity of entrances and exits, the openings and closings of chapters in a life. Jimmy, who has been haunting this bus station on a daily basis, even becomes a spokesperson for episodicity, saying about his fellow transients, “I’m like a god to them; I’m like Janus, a god of entrances and exits.” By situating the film’s frame narrative in a public space of arrivals and departures (as opposed to the libraries mentioned earlier), Skyler not only gestures back to her earlier documentaries (which were set in a South Central pawnshop and a Mission District bar) but also lends the solipsistic act of storytelling a broadly social dimension. As the above examples attest, storytelling is a fundamental dynamic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in many episode films, with the act of recounting tales often being foregrounded in conspicuous ways. Works as diverse as Disney’s Song of the South (1946), director Anthony Pellisier’s adaptation of Noel Coward plays Meet Me Tonight (a.k.a. Tonight at 8:30, 1952), and the Spanishlanguage Mexican film Roots (Raíces, 1955), the latter a collection of four stories based on writer Francisco Rojas Gonzáles’s work, explicitly highlight the conventions of presentational and representational storytelling. Those distinct, yet related, modes are rendered as a profound baring of the narrational device through either the literal inscription of an author (such as W. Somerset Maugham in Quartet [1948]), the placement of an authorial agent acting on behalf of the “creator” (as in O. Henry’s Full House which benefits from the introductory presence of John Steinbeck), or the less conspicuous bundling together of a single author’s stories. Examples of the last case are numerous: Max Ophüls’s collection of Guy de Maupassant yarns, Le Plaisir (1952); the Mario Cecchi Goriproduced multi-director film, Pleasant Nights (Le piacevoli notti, 1966), which ties together three stories inspired by the work of sixteenth-century fairy-tale author Giovanni Francesco Straparola; and Valérie Stroh’s adaptation of three Doris Lessing tales, A Man and Two Women (Un homme et deux femmes, 1991), are just three of the many episodic adaptations of great writers’ works. Another example, one of the earliest featurelength episode films produced in the Soviet Union, Ranks and People (Chiny I Liudi, 1929), chains together three Anton Chekhov tales (“Anna on My Neck,” “Death of a Petty Official,” and “Chameleon”) and, in doing so quantitatively, makes a case for the Russian author’s qualitative significance as a short story writer whose collected works evince thematic continuity and stylistic complexity. Bearing all of this in mind, the multistory film can be linked not only to literary models that, as collections of independent tales strung together like beads, foreground polyvocality (from The Arabian Nights to The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales) but also to traditional modes of oral storytelling.16 Significantly, at the same time that vaudeville and variety shows were becoming a dominant cultural force in America and Europe, a literary equivalent of the episode film was developing into an expressive and allegorical form capable of encapsulating the tensions between the individual and the community. Sometimes referred to as a “composite novel,” “short story composite,” or “rovelle” (combination roman and nouvelle), the short story cycle is a literary work “composed of shorter texts that, although individually complete and autonomous, are interrelated in a coherent whole according to one or more organizing principles” (such as topographical unity, thematic reverberation, or semantic reiteration).17 Situated between Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the novel at one end and the “collection of unconnected stories” at the other, the short story cycle is, according to Forrest Ingram, a set of tales “linked to each other in such a way as to maintain balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit.”18 Though this unique and understudied literary form, which is “at once ancient and avant-garde,” dates back to Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it is perhaps best represented by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works such as Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden (1905), James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). It reached its artistic zenith in three works published within six years of one another: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). Because it often features multiple perspectives (or what might be called a “collective protagonist”), the short story cycle disarms a reader’s preconceptions of, and allegiance to, single-story linearity and univocality. Gerald J. Kennedy, in the Introduction of his edited collection Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, sees the inherent tension between multiplicity and unity as the telescoping of centrifugal and centripetal forces which, when temporally rendered as a sequential narrative experience, gather steam incrementally (as each story fades behind a new story). If, as Kennedy also argues, “the novel has for about seventy-five years been veering toward the short story sequence as a decentered mode of narrative representation,”19 then its developments should be seen as running parallel to equally decentered cinematic modes of representation. As precursors of the modern short story cycle, The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales have filtered into the semantic and syntactical foundations of episodic cinema. Besides being the primordial templates for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” (the sumptuous, sexually explicit, episodic adaptations il Decamerone [1970], I Racconti di Canterbury [1971], and Il Fiore delle mille e una Notte [1974]), these three works figure in several anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films. Consider, for instance, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), a double-barreled Disney “package feature” that begins in a library and shows a hardback copy of The Wind and the Willows placed next to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Another example is Boccaccio ’70 (1962), an Italian-language omnibus production that is rooted in the “vulgar idiom” and novellistica tradition of The Decameron, as is the threeepisode Japanese erotic film Tokyo Decameron: Three Tales of Madness and Sexuality (2000). Scheherazade, the storytelling heroine of The Arabian Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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re gul a t e d va r ie ty and e x c e s s 53 Nights, is literally evoked in the final episode of Gene Kelly’s three-part musical Invitation to the Dance (1957). This tale, “Sinbad the Sailor,” features an animated rendering of the literary icon by cartoonists William Hanna and Joe Barbera, her presence in the text oscillating between mimesis and diegesis as she turns pages of the 1001 Nights. Even when these three seminal texts are not directly referenced, subtle allusions become apparent in the staging and framing of stories within single-director and multi-director episode films. The Bed (Il letto, a.k.a. Secrets d’alcove, 1954), a four-episode Franco-Italian production, is a good example. In this unusual yet representative omnibus film, four men from different national and cultural backgrounds take refuge in a cabin after being sidetracked by inclement weather on their way to a conference. Despite their outward differences, the stories they recount to one another (director Henri Decoin’s “Le Billet de logement,” Gianni Franciolini’s “Le Divorce,” Ralph Habib’s “Riviera Express,” and Jean Delannoy’s “Le Lit de la Pompadour”) are linked by their shared emphases on the titular piece of furniture as well as by their spatial contiguity within the frame narrative which shows the four men gathered in a semi-circle around a stove. This convivial configuration creates an internal frame that strengthens their mutual preoccupations with the opposite sex (the heated stove suggests a phallic presence) while gesturing toward the groups of individuals gathered together in the frame narratives of The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. If not as numerous or as heterogeneous as the motley group of twenty-nine pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn, ready to make their way toward Canterbury in Chaucer’s book, and if not as compelled to speak out of fear of death as the plague-evading Florentine ruffians in Boccaccio’s, these four men in The Bed nevertheless evince a sense of the “playful contract” implicit in storytelling, one in which each narratee becomes, in turn, a narrator.20 The same type of staging can be seen in The Vault of Horror, Amicus Studios’ 1973 follow-up to their successful Tales from the Crypt (1972). Here, five men gather around a table and discuss their all-too-real dreams. Between each episode the frame story reappears, emphasizing this company of ill-fated men’s centrality to the narrative speech act. Vault of Horror is not unique, though, as storytelling is a prominent feature of horror anthologies and supernatural omnibus films made before and after its release, from Dead of Night (1945) to Campfire Stories (1998). Even many of the horror films released in other parts of the world attest to this trend. For example, the Hong Kong omnibus production Troublesome Night (Yin yang lu, 1997) begins with a “host” telling the audience, “Well, let me tell you a story which happened in a graveyard,” only to end with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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him invoking the ghost of Ripley, saying, “It’s up to you to believe it or not.” Unlike the use of embedded narrators in Vault of Horror, these comments in Troublesome Night are directed toward the camera, effectively eradicating the fourth wall and calling attention to the viewer’s centrality in the hermeneutic unpacking of individual narratives supplied by three different directors (Cheng Wai-man, Tam Long-cheung, and Herman Yau). Such a direct (or viewer-directed) form of address is not unusual in episode films. In fact, an entire subset of this narratological genre – authororiented works which foreground canonical writers or author surrogates as their hosts – collapse the presentational and representational binary in a particularly fascinating way. In the 1995 German production Paul Bowles: Half-Moon, the titular author – an American expatriate famous for the mid-century novel The Sheltering Sky and his 1947 short story “A Distant Episode” – appears before each of the three thirty-minute segments: “Merkala Beach,” “Call at Corazon,” and “Allal,” which are directed by different filmmakers and based on Bowles’s exotic short stories. Speaking directly to the audience from his study in Tangiers, Bowles brings a degree of self-promotion to the proceedings, calibrating the audience to be especially receptive to the film’s overriding themes of jealousy, alienation, and revenge while exacerbating the physical disconnect between him and the men and women in his stories (Moroccans, Indians, South Americans, etc.). Though lacking the possessive marker of earlier anthology and omnibus films, such as O. Henry’s Full House (a five-episode collection that suffered the loss of one of its segments – Howard Hawks’s adaptation of “The Ransom of Red Chief” – after negative reviews), the apostrophe-free Paul Bowles: Half Moon foregrounds the importance of the “original” (pre-filmic) author as an arbiter of meaning and guarantor of cohesion, someone whose pro-filmic presence before the camera is merely one of the many “episoding conventions” employed by the two directors (Frieder Schlaich and Irene von Alberti) over the course of the entire motion picture.

Episoding Conventions: Acts, Curtains, Frames In his groundbreaking book, Frame Analysis, theorist Erving Goffman describes some of the basic frameworks “available in our society for making sense of events.”21 Throughout our everyday lives, we rely on frames of reference and “episoding conventions” that mark off the space and time of different social activities. In Goffman’s terms, these “strips” of experience (a term that evokes the celluloidal ribbon which has spatial Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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as well as temporal qualities) adhere to certain organizational principles not unlike those on view in episode films. Explaining that a frame arranges experience into autonomous blocks, Goffman illustrates this premise with examples taken from popular forms of entertainment and the arts, such as sports, where there are “breaks between quarters, rounds, innings, and halves,”22 and theater, wherein common devices include the dimming and extinguishing of house lights in an auditorium (to announce the start of a show) and the raising and lowering of a curtain (to mark off the beginnings and endings of scenes). The use of theatrical “act curtains” as a framing device is a salient aspect of numerous episode films, from the aforementioned musical comedy revues (Paramount on Parade, King of Jazz, and so forth) to works like Meet Me Tonight, a British 1952 adaptation of three one-act plays by Noel Coward, and Boccaccio ’70, which is significant for the way that it actually refers to its episodes as “acts” (similar to the terminology diegetically employed in the operetta-derived films The Three Waltzes [Les trois valses, 1938] and The Tales of Hoffmann [1951]). Similarly, the wooden or gilt frame of a picture or painting, which is “presumably neither part of the content of activity proper nor part of the world outside the activity but rather both inside and outside,”23 figures in such diverse single-director and multi-director episode films as Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Yume, 1990), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), and Picture Windows (1994). Significantly, the first episode of the British omnibus film Three Cases of Murder (1955) suggests a correlation between paintings, frames, stories, and dreams. Entitled “The Picture,” this episode (directed by Wendy Toye and based on a short story by Roderick Wilkinson) anticipates the abovementioned Kurosawa film by showing a museum guide stopping for a moment before a framed artwork in the gallery only to be “transported” into the nightmarish mansion on view in the painting – the main setting for this segment’s spine-tingling story. Similarly, though the title of the made-for-TV omnibus film Picture Windows denotes a large, single-paned glass fenestration that provides an outside view, its frame story begins inside an art museum where three particular paintings (Edward Hopper’s Bleu, Sandro Botticelli’s La Primavera, and Edgar Degas’s The Rehearsal) become the objects of the camera’s caressing gaze as it transports the viewer into the artwork. The first image of each episode is thus a cinematographic reproduction of an original that, in actuality, hangs in another, real museum (respectively, the Whitney in New York, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Glasgow Museum). Such metatextual moments are not uncommon but quite prevalent as signs of this genre’s capacity to foreground narrative conventions and “containing” operations in a reflexive way. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Containment is one of the central issues appertaining to cinematic episodicity, which seeks some middle ground between unchecked excess and absolute boundaries. How does one mark off one self-contained narrative from another in a package feature or omnibus film? Asking the reader to consider “the possibility that the bracket initiating a particular kind of activity may carry more significance than the bracket terminating it,” Goffman draws attention to such commonly used bibliophilic terms as “introduction,” “preface,” and “orienting remarks,” which not only “establish an episode but also will establish a slot for signals which will inform and define what sort of transformation is to be made of the materials within the episode.”24 In a significant number of episode films, the title cards and credits for each of the embedded tales are given at the very beginning, allowing each story to follow one after the other with only a minimally disturbing fade out and fade in separating them. For example, in the horror collection Kwaidan (1964), a classic Japanese film based on ghost stories written by Lafcadio Hearn, each segment is introduced in the first five minutes of the film through separate title cards superimposed against a backdrop of swirling ink and water. Some films, such as Disney’s Fantasia and the Italian spoof of that animated classic, Allegro non troppo (1976), utilize onscreen announcers who verbally delineate episodes. Backlit interstitials showing the silhouettes of the orchestra in the Disney feature, photographed by James Wong Howe, separate each of its musical selections. In the omnibus production Do Not Forget Me, Istanbul (2011), a project undertaken to showcase Turkey’s cultural diversity, repeated shots of a ferry leaving a port in the title city ironically help to syphon off the excesses of this cinematic miscellany and inject a degree of narrative cohesion, despite the film’s widely ranging characters and themes. In other cases, particularly those films that lack a frame narrative, it becomes necessary to include graphic inscriptions, in the manner of title cards or title shots, which prep the audience for what they are about to see. Though this is not the case for every omnibus film (for instance, the episodes in Blood of the Werewolf [2001], a low-budget horror film shot on video, are separated by nothing but a brief fade to black which can create confusion for the audience), it is true of many of them. The 1965 Czech omnibus film Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně) distributes its five title cards evenly throughout the text while ensuring that associational discontinuities are kept in check or minimized, something furthermore achieved by the grouping together of episodes based on the absurdist short stories of writer Bohumil Hrabal and through the use of a single cinematographer, Jaroslav Kucera. Still, it is significant that there are aesthetic discrepancies or stylistic differences among those five embedded title shots. Though Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 2.4 and 2.5  The title shots for two of the five episodes comprising Pearls of the Deep, a mid-1960s omnibus film from members of the Czech New Wave.

three of the segments in Pearls of the Deep (Jirí Menzel’s “Smrt pana Baltazara” [“Mr. Baltazar’s Death”], Jan Němec’s “Podvodníci” [“The Imposters”], and Věra Chytilová’s “Automat Svet” [“The Restaurant The World”]) each begins with onscreen text featuring the name of the director and the title of the episode, two of them do not. “Dum radosti” (“The House of Joy”) does not include the name of its director (Evald Schorm), and Jaromil Jires’s contribution is not listed by title (“Romance,” which is indicated in the film’s promotional material). More typical of the “containment” protocols unique to transauthoNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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rial cinema is the 1995 Japanese animated feature Memories. Each of the three roughly thirty-minute sections in Memories begins with a card. That onscreen text reads, in the order of their presentation, “Episode 1: Magnetic Rose,” “Episode 2: Stink Bomb,” and “Episode 3: Cannon Fodder,” with the directors’ names (Koji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura, and Katsuhiro Ōtomo, respectively) appearing in English below the titles. Tellingly, each title card reminds the audience of its numerical order in the entire assembly. Because such devices mark off the boundaries of an embedded work which is positioned in sharp contingency to other works, we can more readily imagine their object-hood, or material thing-ness, in spatial terms within the collection. Though radically different in terms of its generic affiliation and cultural associations, the Hungarian omnibus film From Europe into Europe (Európából Európába, 2004) likewise identifies, by name, the contributing directors before each of the ten episodes. In this latter production, however, the filmmakers are actually shown onscreen, facing the camera, and accompanied by their “signature” – a kind of autographed inscription of the self in the midst of a national collective. Such textual devices, besides orienting the spectator and delineating episodes (and, in the case of Memories, assigning them numerical order), are the literal inscriptions of a collective desire (on the part of producers as well as consumers) to establish boundaries through “brackets,” diminishing in the process the potential for unchecked excess.

Episodicity and Excess, Kitsch and Containment As stated above, transauthorial episode films, such as Pearls of the Deep and Memories, frequently foreground their own “containing” operations, metatextually revealing, rather than masking, the means by which narrative segments are put into an open yet (en)closed form. This largely overlooked aspect of cinematic episodicity is denoted by the title of the film Basket of Mexican Tales (Canasta de cuentos mexicanos, 1956), a widescreen, Technicolor adaptation of three short stories by German-born author B. Traven. Though only its third tale deals with a browbeaten basket-weaver, the product that he makes for American tourists becomes a fitting material metaphor for the consumption and containment of all the stories within this film. Perhaps no other subcategory of episodic cinema so revels in this tendency to materialize metaphors than the animated “package feature,” a junior branch of the genre that was spawned from Walt Disney’s Technicolor spectacle Fantasia and which is observable in national contexts beyond the United States’s borders (particularly in Japan where Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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several contemporary omnibus films, such as Robot Carnival [Roboto kânibauru, 1987], Neo-Tokyo [Meikyû monogatari, 1987], and the aforementioned Memories, have been made as a way to give up-and-coming animators the opportunity to flex their creative muscles).25 Though approximately three dozen feature-length, multi-episode motion pictures had been produced throughout the world prior to the release of this 1940 film, few broke so decisively with narrative formulas to foreground the aesthetic dimensions of storytelling, something subsequently highlighted in its various spinoffs, including Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, and Melody Time. These and other Disney productions of the 1940s, which share certain structural characteristics with the musical comedy revue films that enjoyed brief popularity during the early 1930s (in particular their piecemeal and presentational modes of performance), collectively comprise a cultural phenomenon that has only recently been accounted for in terms of its connection to preexisting cinematic paradigms as well as its centrality to contemporaneous debates about animation’s place in the broader history of art. Rather than attempt a full recovery of that postwar cultural phenomenon and devote pages to Fantasia (a film that has received ample coverage in many histories of the medium), I wish to conclude this chapter with comments about the ways in which narrative units concretize in these package features, which put otherwise intangible stories into a material form that suggests tangibly present items in a collection. This is perhaps most obviously displayed in an episode of the aforementioned film Memories, a collection of three tales based on the work of the legendary manga artist and writer Katsuhiro Ōtomo.26 Each of this film’s trio of Ōtomo-inspired stories, though completely disconnected from the others in terms of characters, animation styles, and musical elements (one episode is swept along by an operatic score while another features a jazz fusion soundtrack), envisions a futuristic environment fraught with dystopian possibilities, and thus lays down a thematic track that allows for counterpoint and similarity. One in particular, director Koji Morimoto’s “Magnetic Rose,” deserves special mention for its cross-cultural themes and its particularly striking use of mise en abyme structures. As denoted by the title of Ōtomo’s original manga story, “Her Memories” (adapted into screenplay form by the then-emerging auteur, Satoshi Kon), this first episode of the film revolves around a remembrance of things past, one anachronistically situated – like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) – in the psychological sci-fi domain of the future. Set in the year 2092, it begins with a quartet of intergalactic collectors trawling through space on a “garbage ship” in search of usable debris Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(junked satellites and the like). Responding to an unusual SOS signal emanating from the mysterious “Sargasso” region, they discover, in the middle of this galactic void, a gigantic, rose-shaped space station. Three members of the ragtag salvage crew board the structure (via one of its “petals”), only to find a baroque, European-style opera house inside. It turns out that this satellite once provided asylum for an opera singer who died six decades earlier. When the men hear the sound of the soprano singing an aria from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, it becomes clear that her spirit still haunts this enticing, yet misleading, space which is actually a holographic image designed to imitate a European original. Everything – from the grand ballroom and its magnificent chandelier to the sun-dappled garden adjoining it – is a technological fiction, something the scavengers discover in their separate journeys through the satellite-mausoleum’s holographic halls. While one of the men, Miguel, takes a drink of wine at a banquet table only to spit it out after discovering that it is fake, another one, Heintz, happens upon the singer herself, Eva Friedel, or rather her ghost, and is forced to confront his own painful memories (involving the death of his daughter Emily back on Earth). The episode culminates with an image of this “diva of the century” contained in an ever-growing translucent sphere that breaches the hull of the station and unleashes her aria into the deepest reaches of outer space. The image of the diaphanous globe, which holds both woman and nature in its confined, yet unlimited setting, is an ingenious way of staging episodicity in material terms. It is also reminiscent of one of the translucent bubbles in Fantasia’s “Nutcracker Suite” section. Among the many wind-blown miniature shapes (snowflakes, seeds, thistles, etc.) and underwater forms comprising Fantasia’s second episode, it is this orb – this mise en abyme of narrative containment – which gestures toward two of the most fetishized objects in a kitsch collector’s compendium: the paperweight and the snowglobe. As Celeste Olalquiaga argues, paperweights, like the Victorian globes and “vegetable jewelry” adorning mid nineteenth-century drawing rooms (live ferns encased in glass containers), are material objects that suggest a crystallized moment in time, forever frozen.27 In her book, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, Olalquiaga links these mass-produced containers of nature to other collecting crazes of the 1850s and 1860s, from aquariums full of sea anemones to the millefiori globes made by Baccarat and other companies that standardized manufacturing practices and provided an industrial model for the serial characteristics of personal acquisition. The paperweight may seem only tangentially connected to a snowglobe filled with bits of collophoNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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nium, with miniature men and women trapped in blinding blizzards. Yet both reproduce “an anthropocentric view of . . . life in miniature scale” and artificially preserve time’s transitoriness and fragments.28 In the absence of authenticity, these globes suggest an auratic glow, one that – like a fetishized and encased episode – transmits the “intensity of a lived moment” to the masses through mechanical reproduction as well as the suggestion of a world within the world, of infinite regress into a nostalgic past. What is remarkable is just how assiduously this image of a consuming, yet consumable, globe keeps creeping back into animated package films. In the fourth episode of the animated feature Metamorphoses (a.k.a. Winds of Change, 1978), a Fantasia-inspired international coproduction written and directed by Japanese artist Takashi, the doll-like character, Orpheus, catches a giant crystal tear shed by the god Pluto (a figure reminiscent of Tchernobog, the towering black god from the Disney film’s “Night on Bald Mountain”). In Orpheus’s hands, the tear affects the shape and materiality of a large paperweight or snowglobe. The narrative device that ties together the six episodes in the animated sci-fi fantasy film Heavy Metal (1981) is a similarly shaped orb, a glowing green stone called the Loc-Nar, which exerts a fetish-like, yet malevolent, power over those who come into contact with it. One could argue that the Loc-Nar, a mysterious object that is both treasure and curse (capable of taking telepathic possession of men’s souls and melting the flesh from their bones) is a material embodiment of the film itself which, like Fantasia, has been both fetishized and scorned by audiences, not to mention extended into the paratextual realm of the souvenir by way of collectible objects (books, figurines, etc.). If souvenirs are the material hardening of remembrances that stand in “for events or situations they were contingently associated with,” then the crystallized, monadic moments in episodic “package features” can likewise be seen as being invested with “fetishized potential.”29 Kitsch may be “the commodification of the souvenir,” according to Olalquiaga, but it is also “the capturing in a concrete thing of the most ineffable feelings and tenderest emotions.”30 The habitually repeated visual motif of transparent bubbles in these films not only conjures up those polyurethane souvenir globes and plastic snowglobes of the twentieth century (as well as their more valuable predecessors of the glass-obsessed Victorian era) but also draws our attention to the fact that episode films are things containing other things, much like glass cases, albums, boxes, armoires, and cabinets of curiosities. Such a reading, admittedly unconventional, follows from Walt Disney’s own original conception of Fantasia as a collection of “paintings,” physical objects in time and space whose placement (one beside the other) would Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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inspire audiences to adopt an appropriately respectful or fetishistic relation to the text. Disney had not anticipated, however, the backlash against that 1940 film (and its many sequels) from various corners of the critical community.31 Though writing some twenty years after its original release, the French critic Jean Mitry can be thought of as a representative voice of dissent, dismissively calling Fantasia a “travesty” in his book Esthétique et psychologie du cinema (published in 1963, the year of the film’s theatrical rerelease). Advising his readers to scrupulously avoid this bastardized copy of art (which supplanted the “poetic fantasies” of the original composers with “miserable Mickey Mouse effects”), Mitry, like his predecessors of the 1940s, draws attention to the “bad taste” of Fantasia’s many directors, to their irrational attempts to impose meanings through representational, concrete imagery.32 It should be pointed out, however, that this emphasis on concreteness lends the work a kind of material solidity, despite its transcendent posturing and ephemeral temporality; and, as such, gestures toward the ways in which cinematic episodicity can be likened to real people collecting real objects, be they toys or treasures. This is something connoted in the frame narrative of Ziegfeld Follies, an all-star omnibus revue produced by MGM in 1944 (to commemorate the studio’s twentieth anniversary), theatrically released after a series of delays in 1946 and featuring the contributions of eight filmmakers. Besides being aesthetically beholden to Fantasia, this exemplary film begins with the world-famous showman Florenz Ziegfeld (William Powell) admiring the many toys and trinkets on display in his heavenly abode: elaborately framed objects not unlike the framed episodes to follow in this exorbitantly budgeted ($3.2 million) production. Like those in Fantasia, the episodes in Ziegfeld Follies – particularly the ones directed by Vincente Minnelli (including “This Heart of Mine” and “Limehouse Blues,” two dance numbers featuring Lucille Bremer and Fred Astaire) – call attention not only “to the ways that high and low distinctions of taste can be blurred for comic effect” but also to the similarity between events in time and objects in space. They do this, according to Matthew Tinkcom, by plunging the spectator “into the camp pleasures of texture, masquerade, and performance”; aspects of mise en scène that not only compete with the narrative but in fact “become the narrative.”33 Thus, the “refined vulgarity” of this film’s visual field, which is filled with chinoiserie, floral arrangements, and soap bubbles, is the aesthetic foundation upon which events (the staging of amorous affections around songand-dance numbers), however ephemeral, crystallize into material objects. The many critics who dismiss Ziegfeld Follies and other plotless (“all number and no narrative”) features, whose individual episodes set to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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orchestral accompaniment prefigure music videos in their compactness,34 merely reiterate the binaristic logic of Western thought. As Susan M. Pearce states, this entrenched duality, expressed as a set of opposed pairs (good/bad, original/imitation, creator/created, subject/object, reality/ representation) posits material culture as the lowly “other” in an unequal equation. In affording the object, the physical thing, a subordinate or secondary role in the grand scheme of metaphysical things, many critics unconsciously express the “essential superiority of the non-material world.”35 A few detractors, however, have shifted the critical anchorage away from metaphysics to the material plane and asserted the value of filmic objects in delineating less tangible aspects of human desire. In doing so, they, like Flo Ziegfeld (who fetishizes a collection of memory objects while ensconced in his “celestially appointed pink luxury hotel suite in heaven”), position themselves as “possessors” before a collection of otherwise elusive cinematic moments. In his book Cineliteracy: Film Among the Arts, Charles Eidsvik rightly points out that film is both an event, linked to duration and rhythm, as well as a mechanically produced and projected object whose materiality is as vital to the reader-spectator’s comprehension of meaning as that of printed language, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and architecture.36 Owing to the ephemeral “slipperiness” of celluloidal and electronic transmission, however, many scholars have overlooked the object-hood not only of film as a substance in time and space but also of its individual narrative units, particularly those that are discretely demarcated in anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films, which seem to prompt materialist readings of them as collections of things to be looked at and fetishized, if not literally handled. One’s physical and/or libidinal attachment to an object endowed with powers or invested with meaning is a form of mystification known as fetishism, a relationship that reflects not an inherent quality of the material itself but, rather, something that, according to Karl Marx, “attaches itself to the products of labor so soon as they are produced as commodities” (emphasis added).37 As Mark Wigley points out, the fetish (an offshoot of the Latin factitius, meaning “manufactured” or “fraudulent”) is linked to embellishment, artifice, and adornment. By definition, the fetish object “convolutes the distinction between structure and ornament.”38 Similarly, Eidsvik and other critics sensitive to this structural-ornamental slippage would perhaps argue that “kitschy” episode films, such as Fantasia, Ziegfeld Follies, and The Tales of Hoffmann (a Michael Powell–Emeric Pressburger collaboration from 1951), convolute the distinction between events and objects in a pronounced way. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Adhering to the spatial logic associated with postmodernism (as opposed to the temporal logic of traditional narrativity), episodic films are crammed so “full of ‘punctual event-objects’ connected less by narrative causality than by literally material signifiers,” that, as Vivian Sobchack suggests, they circumvent the chronological constraints of history. Though Sobchack is speaking specifically about picaresque sci-fi films of the past twenty-five years, such as Repo Man (1984), which are “episodic, fragmented, serial rather than sequential, and little concerned with the temporal consequences of ‘cause and effect,’ “ her spatializing logic can be applied to such obviously non-postmodern texts as Disney’s Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, and Melody Time, whose “ “strung out’ and concatenated series of episodes” provides tangible phenomenological signifiers of the fetishistic material therein.39 If, like kitsch, these omnibus films are representative of the “shattered aura” affected by mass reproduction, then the many Japanese sci-fi anime films they seem to have inspired (including the above-cited Memories) provide hard material evidence of a simulacrum-like saturation effect specific to the postmodern moment.40 Given the generally poor reviews generated by Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, and Melody Time during the 1940s, it is not surprising that Walt Disney attempted only one more package feature before the close of the decade, the two-episode portmanteau film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Taking place in a home library, the frame story for this double adaptation of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind and the Willows is reminiscent of the wraparound images in Quartet, a contemporaneous adaptation of four Somerset Maugham stories that set the stage for other bibliophilic episode films in the early 1950s, such as Trio and Encore. In the second half of this book, I shall turn toward those and other British motion pictures as well as their American equivalents, extending my focus on previously mentioned “episoding conventions” (including the filmmakers’ use of onscreen author–narrators who stand before the camera and introduce their work in lieu of title cards) so as to tease out the connections between narrative containment and national consensus.

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C H A PT E R 3

Key Concepts in Transauthorial Cinema: Abundance, Change, Containment, and Order

“Just room for one more inside, sir!” A maniacally laughing prison guard to the frazzled protagonist, Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns), near the end of Dead of Night (1945)

If the omnibus film (in particular) or the episode film (more generally) is, indeed, a genre (or a meta-genre), then it is the most Bakhtinian of all genres, a dialogic and carnivalesque mishmashing of elements that has the latent capacity to level social fields, demolish aesthetic hierarchies, and provide alternative visions of life “free from conventional rules and restrictions.” Besides its hybridized status as a text of continuous, yet limited, replenishment, the omnibus film allows the spectator to laugh in the face of death, for the withering away of one story is followed by the blossoming of another (at least until the very end). The death of the old and the birth of the new, so central to Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of carnival, is marked by extreme contiguity as well as moral quandaries in the context of episodic cinema, wherein what is “new” (here indicative of renewal and the future) quickly becomes “old” (itself indicative of stasis and the past). Moreover, since episode films in general and omnibus films in particular are, in some ways, about the crossing of boundaries, this type of cinematic praxis seems especially prone to Bakhtinian metaphors: in particular, the breaching of “borders, thresholds, and territorial demarcations” that can emancipate people from their confined sociopolitical states so as to challenge the status quo. Such thresholds may be literal or figurative, spatial or corporeal and, indeed, few types of cultural production lend themselves so readily to corporeal metaphors or “body language” as the omnibus film. As embodied subjects situated before the screen, spectators might simultaneously long for both closure and openness, finality and perpetuity while viewing an omnibus film – a seemingly self-cancelling drive that betrays our need for repeated narrative fulfillNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ment in the face of episodic cinema’s deferment of the ultimate “end,” which promises to free us from what is, paradoxically, an already emancipatory experience (film-viewing, couched in the rhetoric of “escapism”). Finally, because carnival offers its participants and onlookers the opportunity to “taste the world” (to paraphrase Bakhtin),1 the banquet of elements on display in episode films – the sheer abundance of stories, sketches, characters, and situations – suggests a remarkably democratic alternative to traditional storytelling, a spreading out (or spreading thin, some might argue) of narrative incident. This showcasing of abundance in miniature(s) is literalized in a scene from the single-director episode film What’s It All About (El perquè de tot plegat, 1995), when several tiny, tasty desserts on a buffet are served to a female patron at a restaurant. Directed by the Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons, this motion picture consistently reminds us, through such evocative pictorial metaphors and mise en abyme images, that we are sampling a variety of dishes and delicacies as the spectators of episode films, stories laid before us like pastries on a buffet table. Unfortunately, whenever this kind of rhetorical maneuver – this mobilization of food metaphors – is performed by critics in their reviews of omnibus films, it generally serves to underscore the limitations of such storytelling, putting emphasis on the smallness of the “dishes” being consumed by audiences who are said to leave screenings feeling “hungry” rather than full. In an earlier chapter I cited Donald Clarke’s review of the recently produced multi-director film, Tickets, which he refers to as a “taster menu.” Such rhetoric, however, has had a long history in film criticism. In 1965, a film critic for Newsweek magazine referred to Love in Four Dimensions (Amore in quattro dimensioni, 1964) as a “four-sliced pizza of passion,” alluding to the number of episodes and directors in this production while mobilizing a culinary stereotype associated with this film’s country of origin.2 Less stereotypical, but no less bizarre, was the New Yorker’s designation of the three-episode film Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domani, 1963) as a “club sandwich,” words that would anticipate Richard Schickel’s reference to the Franco-Italian coproduction Spirits of the Dead (Histoires extraordinaires, 1966) as a “sandwich of baloney.” Pushing the metaphor to an extreme, Schickel argues that, like so many omnibus productions, Spirits of the Dead “leave[s] the taste buds burning (or at least deranged) as a result of the disconcerting mixture of ingredients tossed to them.”3 Another example, albeit one with more than one metaphor employed to describe the “failings” associated with the topic under discussion, can be found in Mark Schilling’s review of the seven-episode Japanese anime feature Genius Party (2007). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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As Schilling states, “Omnibus films are hard sells to ticket buyers and critics; the former because they want a full cinematic meal, not a plate of hors d’oeuvres, the latter because they see a package of segments as a sort of horse race – and proclaim disappointment when all the horses/segments don’t cross the finish line first.”4 Significantly, Jonathan Culler, in his Saussure-inspired, structuralist study of genre systems, employs the metaphor of the restaurant menu when describing syntagmatic relations and paradigmatic contrasts, saying, In the food system . . . one defines on the syntagmatic axis the combinations of courses which can make up meals of various sorts; and each course or slot can be filled by one of a number of dishes which are in paradigmatic contrast with one another (one wouldn’t combine roast beef and lamb chops in a single meal; they would be alternatives on any menu). These dishes which are alternative to one another often bear different meanings in that they connote varying degrees of luxury, elegance, etc.5

Having served an “appetizer” of sorts in the first two chapters, which detail the classificatory status of episode films and the differences between omnibus productions and other types of fragmented cinema, I shall now move to the “main course” of this book – the overarching questions that will continue to emerge throughout the remaining sections as well as the case studies that explain, through textual analysis, how episodicity functions as a salient metaphor for life in postmodernity. The first issues to be addressed are those that are related to the editing and ordering of episode films which “cut” and “count” in ways that differ from other types of cinematic praxis.

The Unkindest Cut For the program houses these 124 minutes can actually be cut at will by reel. Entire spools can go out and not be disastrous to the release as a whole.6 Anonymously written review of the episodic revue film The Show of Shows (1929) Never do a picture with episodes, because some of them can be cut out. Episodic is no good. You know, like twenty minutes can go out.7 Billy Wilder, famous for his cynicism, offering advice to up-and-coming directors

Given the marginalized status of multi-director, episodic cinema, it should hardly be surprising that much of the research that has been directed toward this subject is hampered by inconsistent, and even contradictory, archival material and film reviews, making it difficult to adduce the artistic limitations faced by contributors to the form and the industrial Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 3.1 and 3.2  Frame enlargements from the opening credits of the Paramount production If I Had a Million, one of the first omnibus films made in the United States and the source of much confusion with regards to directorial contributions. Despite the fact that Ernst Lubitsch supplied the least substantial of the film’s eight episodes (a slight concoction appearing midway through in which Charles Laughton’s character, a company clerk, blows a raspberry at his boss), the German-born auteur’s name appears at the top of the credits. This illustrates the fact that, although omnibus films ostensibly promote narrative discursivity and authorial commensurability, they often resort to a hierarchical ordering system that lifts certain filmmakers above their fellow contributors.

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circumstances surrounding the production, distribution, and exhibition of certain films. For example, the Paramount production If I Had a Million (1932), one of the first multi-director films made in North America, was distributed throughout the United States upon its initial release without all of its episodes intact, and today exists in at least three versions.8 To complicate matters further, no critical consensus has been reached concerning the contributions of the film’s seven directors and, even today, there are online and offline reviews of If I Had a Million that contain copious errors, as do numerous accounts of episodic films in general. Consider, for instance, the CinemaTexas program notes that accompanied If I Had a Million’s public screening at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. In the program notes, the “Grandma” episode is mistakenly attributed to director Edward Sutherland, and the “Road Hogs” episode is misattributed to H. Bruce Humberstone who (according to other sources, such as the American Film Institute catalogue) actually directed the “Forger” episode which is mistakenly said to be Stephen Roberts’s sequence.9 These kinds of transauthorial discrepancies are nothing new to those of us who are critically invested in the episodic film format, sometimes making it difficult to ascertain which segments were directed by whom. In an effort to bring both legitimacy and greater intelligibility to this frequently maligned meta-genre, I have made every effort to double-check sources and sift through sometimes contradictory reports so that a more concise, yet conceptually discursive, field might be opened up for future scholarship in this area. Significantly, the title of this 1932 Paramount film gestures toward the idea that the spectator (positioned here as the titular “I”) has an almost infinite array of choices to make when watching episodic features, particularly those that not only are filled with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars (in this case, Gary Cooper, W. C. Fields, Charles Laughton, Jack Oakie, George Raft, and many others) but also showcase several directors’ contributions. Whether intentionally or not, the episodes in an omnibus film are often pitted against one another, each one vying for the steadfast attention of an audience who, unlike John Glidden (the dying tycoon played by Richard Bennett in If I Had a Million randomly picking eight names from a telephone book when divvying up his fortune), retroactively selects the “best” of the bunch based on each episode’s relative merits. Besides If I Had a Million, several other omnibus films – Dead of Night (1945), O. Henry’s Full House (1952), Love in the City (L’amore in città, 1953), Boccaccio ’70 (1962), Of Wayward Love (L’Amore difficile, 1962), Beautiful Swindlers (Les plus belles escroqueries du monde, 1964), The Dirty Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Game (La guerra segreta, 1965), and Spirits of the Dead, to name only a few – had episodes removed from release prints for international distribution. When the four-episode Franco-Spanish-Italian coproduction Les quatre vérités (a.k.a. Las cuatro verdades/Le quattro verità, 1962), an adaptation of some of Jean de la Fontaine’s most famous stories, was released in the United States under the title Three Fables of Love, not only was the first episode (director Luis García Berlanga’s contribution, “Death and the Woodcutter”) cut because of its length but also severed from the multinational whole was the country of Spain, a nation for whom Berlanga had been the cinematic representative. As one of the many European ­coproductions imported into the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, this omnibus film (funded by the Madrid-based Hispamer Films, the Rome-based Ajace Produzioni Cinematografiche, and the Parisbased Franco London Film and Madeleine Films) was emblematic of the postwar cultural climate and financial incentives that facilitated the creation and dissemination of multi-director, star-filled, polyglot episodic features. In dispensing with the Spanish segment, however, and retaining episodes directed by the French and Italian contributors (Hervé Bromberger’s “The Crow and the Fox,” René Clair’s “Two Pigeons,” and Allesandro Blasetti’s “The Tortoise and the Hare”), Janus Films, the stateside distributor of the motion picture, simultaneously solidified the high standing of the last two national cinemas while diminishing the importance of the first which, furthermore, had no internationally recognized actors of the caliber of Monica Vitti, Sylva Koscina, Rossano Brazzi, Anna Karina, Leslie Caron, and Charles Aznavour (some of the stars who appear in the Franco-Italian cut of Three Fables of Love, distributed to North America the following year, in 1963). Omnibus pictures produced in the United States likewise lend themselves to the eradication of entire episodes when sent abroad. In May of 1944, when MGM’s $3 million musical comedy extravaganza Ziegfeld Follies was in production, Sandy Roth and Dorothy B. Jones of the Office of War Information’s (OWI) Motion Picture Division read the script submitted by the studio.10 Ross and Jones, plus the two film viewers at the OWI who watched an original cut of Ziegfeld Follies in October of that year, felt that two episodes – director Vincente Minnelli’s “Death and Taxes” (starring Jimmy Durante and Edward Arnold) and director George Sidney’s “Pay the Two Dollars” (another “old vaudeville skit,” this time pairing Arnold with Victor Moore) – should be deleted prior to the film’s overseas distribution.11 As William Cunningham, one of the OWI’s two film viewers, stated in a letter to MGM executives in November of 1944, those two episodes (dealing with tax evasion and a man Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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arrested for spitting in the subway, respectively) “could give foreign audiences an unfavorable opinion of the institutions of American government and justice.”12 Because this was a revue-style film composed of separate sketches and musical numbers (directed by Lemuel Ayers, Roy Del Ruth, Robert Lewis, Merrill Pye, Norman Taurog, Charles Walters, in addition to Minnelli and Sidney) the Motion Picture Division staff reasoned it should be relatively easy to cut the two offending skits out of export prints. In response to this pressure, MGM partially relented, taking out Minnelli’s sketch but leaving in Sidney’s, and telling Cunningham that the studio’s foreign representatives (in Australia, England, and other countries) should decide whether “Pay the Two Dollars” would be cut from prints.13 Adopting a similarly amenable attitude, Walt Disney, acknowledging that the Wilfred Jackson-directed “Ave Maria” episode that brought his 1940 animated package film Fantasia to a close might turn off viewers in countries that were not predominately Christian (owing to its imaging of a pilgrim’s passage to a Gothic cathedral), gave exhibitors the option of deleting it. Disney, like Billy Wilder (quoted above, advising young filmmakers to “never do a picture with episodes”), understood that the episodic format facilitates the removal of significant chunks of screen time. Unlike the Austro-Hungarian-born filmmaker, however, the Illinois-born animation pioneer understood the instrumentality of episodicity, opting not to retreat from multi-story filmmaking but to harness it for cultural, economic, and even ideological purposes throughout the 1940s, following the release of Fantasia. As indicated in the preceding chapter, the many animated omnibus films that were spawned from Fantasia include Disney’s postwar “package features,” among them The Three Cabelleros (1944), Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), and Melody Time (1948).14 If Disney gave exhibitors the green light to delete episodes from his package features’ theatrical releases, a less accommodating, more objectionable case of narrative “cutting” affected the film Tales of Kish (Ghessé hayé Kish, 1999). An Iranian production financed by investors from the island of Kish in the Persian Gulf (including Mohammad Reza Yazdanpanah, director of the semi-private Kish Free Zone Organization), Tales of Kish was originally conceived as a six-episode film. When presented in competition at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival in 1999, however, it was whittled down to a seventy-two-minute, three-episode work, leaving only the contributions of Nasser Taghvai (“The Greek Boat”), Abolfazl Jalili (“The Ring”) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (“The Door”) intact. One of the intended contributions, an episode by Dariush Mehrjui, was not finished Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in time; another, by Bahrain Bayzai, was deemed unworthy of inclusion, presumably on aesthetic grounds; and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s story was cut by Iranian censors because its thirteen-year-old heroine showed too much hair under her scarf.15 When Tales of Kish was presented at the 17th Fajr International Film Festival in Iran, Bani-Etemad found herself once again at the center of controversy, her episode blocked by national censors, and the omnibus film as a whole viewed by local audiences in an incomplete state. Of course, single-director (and co-director, rather than multi-director) episode films have also been deprived of segments upon their entry in international film festivals. At the 18th Cannes Film Festival held in May of 1965, Masaki Kobayashi’s Japanese-language Kwaidan (1964) went from a quartet of feudal ghost stories to a trio. When Satyajit Ray’s three-hour Three Daughters (Teen Kanya, 1961) was sent abroad, one of its “daughters” likewise got axed, thus becoming the two-hour Two Daughters. The same thing happened to the Taviani Brothers’ co-directed adaptation of three Pirandello novellas, You’re Laughing (Tu ridi, 1998), which dwindled from a triptych to a two-episode film prior to its debut at the Toronto Film Festival. In his essay “Cruel Naples,” André Bazin discusses Vittorio De Sica’s coldly received The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli, 1954), a film about gangsters, gamblers, wayward wives, and prostitutes that originally consisted of a half dozen “novelettes.” For its Paris release, The Gold of Naples was shorn of two of its original six episodes (one of which Bazin believed to be the most significant).16 Besides being a measured response to those audiences put off by this nearly forgotten masterpiece’s seemingly random episodicity (published, ironically, only a few years after the French critic called the sketch film in general “a bastard and phony type of film”), Bazin’s analysis should prompt further study into the effects of removing one or more segments from an episode film. Given all of the shifting that takes place both inside and outside these narratives, it would seem, then, that the episode film is akin to what Vladmir Propp, speaking in the context of folktale morphology, terms a multi-move text: “the first move is such and such, and . . . the second move is something else again.”17 Though these divergent “moves,” generated from heterogeneous material, cluster into a larger syncretic corpus, they are not necessarily recuperated within a single hermeneutic trajectory. In many cases, the episodes do not fall into a linear narrative chain or clearly chronological order, which begs the question: How important is their ordering or arrangement within the film as a whole? This is something rarely asked by film critics or reviewers but, when it is, there never seems to be a compelling answer.18 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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In the years that I have spent poring over journalistic reviews, synopses, program notes (for university screenings and festivals), and critical essays, I have encountered few that attempt a nuanced study of the subject. One that does, however, is a short, unpublished piece written by Nick Barbaro, the co-founder and publisher of the Austin Chronicle. The piece of writing to which I refer, however, did not appear in Austin’s alternative news weekly but was featured as part of the CinemaTexas program notes accompanying the University of Texas at Austin’s March 9, 1977 screening of The Seven Deadly Sins (Les sept péchés capitaux, 1952). As a graduate student-run film society hosted by the university’s Department of Radio-Television-Film, CinemaTexas had been showcasing both rare and popular examples of international cinema since its founding in the early 1970s, and the program notes throughout that decade (and in the years that followed) are notable for their insight and sophistication. One of the most insightful accompaniments to a screening was penned by Barbaro for The Seven Deadly Sins, a Franco-Italian coproduction bringing together a ‘Who’s Who’ of European talent both in front of, and behind, the cameras. The people involved in this film include the French directors Yves Allégret, Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Dréville, Georges Lacombe, and Carlo Rim, and the Italian directors Eduardo De Filippo and Roberto Rossellini. Whereas most American and British critics who wrote about the film in 1953 agreed that it was “uneven,”19 Barbaro attempts to adduce its unifying themes, regardless of “whether they were part of the original instructions to the directors or arose spontaneously out of the shooting.”20 After stating that The Seven Deadly Sins “concerns the reversal of audience expectations,” he then proceeds to reveal how this occurs, episode by episode. The film begins with not one but two titular offenses, “Anger and Avarice” (“L’avarice et la colère”). That is the title of De Filippo’s tale of an impecunious music teacher, Edoardo (played by the director), who, penniless, cannot pay his rent. Luckily, he finds a wallet though it, too, is bereft of cash. Then he miraculously stumbles upon a fortune but he is forced to hand it over to the police. A reward is offered but it is not enough to pay his miserly landlord, Mr Alvaro (Paolo Stoppa). The pendulum between potential wealth and unfortunate loss continues to swing throughout this episode which culminates with “a final miracle” and “happy ending” that, ironically, leaves Edoardo as broke(n) as he had been at the beginning. The second episode, Jean Dréville’s “Sloth” (“La Paresse”), which was written by Carlo Rim, builds upon the main theme introduced in the first episode: “there are no simple solutions to social problems.” But, whereas Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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De Filippo’s story is rooted in a neo-realist aesthetic, grimly narrativizing the trials and tribulations of a ruined man as a series of embedded vignettes within the episode (a strategy that I refer to as internal episodicity), Dréville’s is sprightly and upbeat, adopting a comical-fantastical mode of storytelling. French comedians Louis de Funes and Noël-Noël are cast in the lead roles, an obvious indicator that this segment will depart radically from the darker tones of the preceding one. Though “Sloth” comes to an end with a scene in which “divine intervention” plays a part, “there is no suggestion that this cinematic solution can be carried over into the real world,” an argument that leads Barbaro to state, “the serious sins of the first episode are no worse than the ‘comic’ sins of the second.”21 The next two episodes – Yves Allégret’s “Lust” (“La Luxure”) and Roberto Rossellini’s “Envy” (“L’Envie”) – put emphasis on the personal and psychological, rather than social, aspects of human iniquity, and thus form a “pair” of sorts. Both are “cold, almost clinical” in their depictions of individuals and romantic couples coping with unresolved yearnings and jealousies. This is especially true of Rossellini’s contribution: the tale of an Italian artist and the French woman whom he has recently married – an allegorical story, based on a piece by Colette, that is indicative of not only the director’s own cross-cultural relationship with his wife (Ingrid Bergman whom he married one year before making this short film) but also the coproduction status of The Seven Deadly Sins, which unites Italian and French resources. The fifth and six episodes – Carlo Rim’s “Gluttony” (“La Gourmandise”) and Claude Autant-Lara’s “Pride” (“L’Orgueil”) – each relies on “a single punch line” which reveals, once more, that “the sin of which the protagonist is guilty, the title sin, is not the most serious one.”22 This, according to Barbaro, further underscores the entire film’s overarching theme, even if these two episodes mark a stylistic break in the text not only vis-à-vis the four preceding episodes but also with one another (with Rim’s being little more than a one-joke comedy sketch about the relationship between food and sex, and AutantLara’s being a more “traditional production” suffused with big-name stars, moving performances, and resplendent set design). After having witnessed a total of seven sins brought forth in six episodes, the spectator might expect the film to end after Autant-Lara’s rousing short. But, in fact, an additional sin – director Georges Lacombe’s “The Eighth Sin” (“Huitième péché”) – is inserted as a frame story, opening and closing the film with the image of an ebullient carnival barker (Gerard Philipe) soliciting participation among the gathered listeners of his tales. Such spectatorial solicitation works both diegetically and extradiegetically, enjoining the audience to see how easily “we, the . . . movie-going public, are drawn in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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k ey conc e p t s in t r a ns autho ri a l c i n e m a 75 to a good tale.” As Barbaro states, “In its basic form, this tale resembles all the others,” despite its surface dissimilarities (as a noirish evocation of mysterious intrigue, couched in the carnival barker’s story of a cardinal who appears to visit a house of prostitution).23 Particularly insightful is Barbaro’s intratextual assemblage of meaning, his ability to see patterns in The Seven Deadly Sins that seem to have eluded the scores of critics who reviewed the film years earlier, upon its original release. Besides calling attention to each episode’s surprise ending, the “final twist which turns the rest of the film upside down,” he notes that the structure of the film as a whole reveals “the extent to which we judge people and their actions”: Episodes 1 and 2 are social fantasies, demonstrating the complexity of the social problems they pretend to solve. The next two are psychological dramas which show the difficulty of assigning blame in personal relationships. The last pair are one-joke tales, leading up to the ultimate punch line – the reversal of the entire film in “the Eighth Sin”. There are two other patterns into which the episodes divide. 1 and 4 are the Italian contributions – somewhat more serious in tone than the others. Each is followed by a light comedy written by Carlo Rim, which serves to temper the serious tone of the previous sketch. Parts 3 and 6 are the French studio pieces scripted by [Jean] Aurenche and [Pierre] Bost, and represent a sentimental middle ground between the serious and the farcical. There is one more interesting structural pattern: each episode has progressively less to do with the sin it purports to illustrate. For instance, “Anger and Avarice” deals primarily with those subjects, whereas “Pride” . . . has little or nothing to do with that subject. This progression leads us directly into the Barker’s admonition that “the greatest sin is to imagine sin where none exists”. Whereas in the beginning we were prepared to judge the characters, by the end of the film, it is clear that our judgments are arbitrary and unfair.24

I have quoted the final paragraph of Nick Barbaro’s structuralist reading of The Seven Deadly Sins in its entirety not only because it is a fine piece of writing but also because it reveals the extent to which the ordering of stories or segments in both single-director and multi-director episode films matters. Indeed, the arrangement of episodes should be a decisive factor in the hermeneutic unpacking of these films’ themes. Moreover, episode order sometimes betrays the underlying ideological or nationalistic motivations of producers, distributors, and/or exhibitors. Discounting any dissimilarities based on cultural proficiency, my understanding of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Vanquished (I vinti, 1953), a three-episode film that I was fortunate to see in Paris in the winter of 2003, is no doubt different from that of Italians who have screened the film in cities such as Rome, Milan, or Naples, at least in terms of the episodes’ order which is often rearranged depending on the country in which the film is shown. Whereas the French episode came first in my viewing Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(followed by the Italian and then the British episodes), Antonioni’s countrymen and women encountered the Italian episode in that privileged inaugural slot (followed by the French and British episodes) according to Italian-language film reviews published at the time of its original release. Based on this fact, one might make the conjectural leap that screenings in London likewise favor the British episode as the lead off, something that could be accomplished with a mere shuffling of film reels. No one has yet remarked on this transnational phenomenon – this penchant for (trans)textual reorganization across geopolitical and cultural borders to fit indigenous audiences’ tastes and preferences (although Robert Koehler has recently published a short essay that touches on this film’s difficult production, helping to clarify why it exists in different versions).25 Another important, if overlooked, film to consider here is Beautiful Swindlers, produced and released in 1964. It was in the anchoring, rather than introductory, spot of this four-slot multinational coproduction that director Claude Chabrol’s contribution was initially placed upon the film’s August 14, 1964 premiere in Paris. When French audiences and critics deemed Chabrol’s episode (“The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower”) the least effective of the quartet, however, the order was shuffled so as to accentuate what most people agreed was the best of the bunch, “The Diamond Necklace,” director Roman Polanski’s charming tale of youthful deception set in Amsterdam. Three years later, when Beautiful Swindlers was picked up for American release by Walter Reade’s Continental Distributing, director Hiromichio Horikawa’s sequence, entitled “The Five Benefactors of Fumiko,” was shifted to the end (from its original introductory post), giving Polanski the first position. Like other omnibus films, this example of transauthorial cinema suggests a kind of “living text,” one that is not static or stable but, instead, prone to flux. And yet, for all of their transauthorial valences, as the above examples attest, privileged sections tend to come either first or last in the chain of miniature narratives comprising episode films. Producers and programmers may feel that such an arrangement either immediately captures the attention of audiences, making them more likely to immerse themselves in subsequent episodes after the first segment has cast its spell, or engenders spectatorial anticipation for the final, fetishistically framed bit, as with, for instance, Jean-Luc Godard’s contribution to the prostitution-themed film The Oldest Profession (Le plus vieux métier du monde, 1967). Whatever the motivations or reasons behind omnibus story ordering, in the absence of a frame narrative the presence of a strong opening and/or closing episode puts greater emphasis on the terminal points of a film, thus containing any excess narrativity that might spill over the “rim” of the text while Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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k ey conc e p t s in t r a ns autho ri a l c i n e m a 77 counterbalancing any inconsistencies of tone, milieu, or characterization that might give rise to spectatorial disinterest or agitation along the way. Coincidentally, Beautiful Swindlers, which was originally conceived as a five-episode production, became a quartet of tales after Jean-Luc Godard’s contribution was deleted in the weeks leading up to its Paris premiere and eventually released as a separate short entitled “Le grand escroc.” Such migratory maneuvers are actually not so extraordinary in the context of this most transmutable of film genres. For instance, the ironically titled Romanian feature Tales from the Golden Age (Amintiri din epoca de aur, 2009) has generated publicity not only for its artistry as a collectively realized evocation of life under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in the 1980s (rendered in satirical narrative sketches by Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höffer, Răzvan Mărculescu, Constantin Popescu, and the film’s main architect: producer and writer Cristian Mungiu) but also for the manner in which it was screened throughout Europe. As explained in the presskit notes put together by the film’s distributor, Tales from the Golden Age is “a film with variable geometry,” meaning that different arrangements and numbers of episodes were screened at different festivals. At Cannes, five episodes were shown at the first two screenings but the third screening, according to the press notes, included a sixth episode. In Romanian theaters, four of the episodes were screened as a feature entitled Tales of Authority and the remaining two were presented separately as Tales of Love. The rationale behind this “variability” is explained by the distributor, Wild Bunch: Waiting in line during communist times, you never knew what you were going to get. We transferred the principle to the film: different screenings of Tales from the Golden Age will feature a different combination of episodes. So if you talk to somebody who has seen a different episode than you, think of what we experienced staying in line.26

Recalling the removal of Godard’s episode in Beautiful Swindlers, each of the three episodes comprising the Australian feature Three in One (1957) – “The Load of Wood,” “Joe Wilson’s Mates,” and “The City” – was shown individually as a supporting “featurette” to longer films in the years following its original theatrical release, thus providing an ironic footnote to a production concerned with workers’ solidarity and the collective spirit of labor unions. Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, 1965), a Czech New Wave film stringing together the short works of five film school graduates (who got their start at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), was originally intended as an even more varied assembly before two contributions (“A Boring Afternoon” and “The Junk Shop,” made by Ivan Passer and Juraj Herz) were deleted from the final cut and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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released separately in theaters. Years later, and in a completely different generic context, over half of the seven episodes comprising Dark Stories: Tales from Beyond the Grave (2001) – a multi-director, “highbrow horror film” from New Zealand – were screened separately at different international festivals, where each received an award.27 Another omnibus horror film, the pan-Asian coproduction Three . . . Extremes (Sam gaang yi, 2003), has seen one of its episodes – Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s “Dumplings” – go on to become a feature-length film in its own right. Originally a forty-minute short meant to be viewed in the context of an episodic feature consisting of two other tales (supplied by Japanese director Takashi Miike and South Korean director Park Chan-wook), Dumplings (Gaudzi, 2004) – the ninety-minute feature that Chan released a few months later – leavens the gruesomeness of the original story (about a thirty-something former actress who goes to great lengths to maintain her youthful appearance) with additional scenes of observational humor and nuanced characterization. Audiences who have seen both versions can retroactively project those aspects of the longer cut onto the episode of Three . . . Extremes which thus undergoes a paratextual change that is in keeping with the story’s focus on physical transformation. Only in its shortened version, however, positioned between Miike’s episode “Box” (involving a woman’s nightmarish memories of her dead sister) and Park’s episode “Cut” (a visceral tale about a disgruntled movie extra who chops off a woman’s fingers one by one to teach her husband, a director who had ignored him, a lesson) does Chan’s film gain transauthorial resonance not only as an allegory of Hong Kong’s liminal situation in the years after the city’s 1997 handover to China (when fears of being “boxed in” and “cut off” were widespread) but also as a meditation on the violence that sometimes accompanies interclass jealousy, obsession, betrayal, greed, and vanity. These themes snake through the entire film, linking otherwise disparate and self-contained tales that are distinct from one another in terms of spoken language and diegetic setting. Cut off from the other episodes and encased in narrative “boxes,” each story nevertheless blends into a thematic whole, an idea similarly expressed through objective-visual correlatives in the multi-director city-film Tokyo! (2008). Like the female pianist’s three detached fingers deposited into a blender in Park’s contribution to Three . . . Extremes, the three main characters in Tokyo! – young Hiroki, who eventually transforms into a wooden chair in Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” the gruesome subterranean troll who attacks passersby in Léos Carax’s “Merde,” and the lonely hikikomori, or shut-in, in Bong Joon-ho’s “Shaking Tokyo” – are collectively enclosed Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 3.3 and 3.4  Frame enlargements from “Interior Design,” the first episode in Tokyo! (2008). Directed by Michel Gondry, this self-reflexive, movie-themed episode is filled with several metaphoric images that approximate the “containing” operations of omnibus films which are characterized by the interstitial gaps between narrative “compartments” (like the ones occupied by this film’s many isolated characters). Through editorial juxtaposition and visual resemblance, Gondry suggests a connection between the “boxes” into which people as well as objects are put (apartment buildings and gifts).

within a structure that simultaneously mixes and segregates, integrates and isolates. Here I am reminded of the words used by a Variety critic to describe the Japanese omnibus film Female (Fîmeiru, 2005) which he equates to a “bountiful bento box . . . a five-part meal of consistently satisfying flavors.”28 Moreover, the interclass contact zones in both “Dumplings” and “Cut,” which pit people from different social and regional backgrounds against one another, are sites of linkage that are themselves joined together by way of a sonic bridge between the two episodes. The sound of former actress Mrs Li chewing the titular food (whose rejuvenating power comes from Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 3.5 and 3.6  Frame enlargements from Three … Extremes (2003), an omnibus film featuring the work of three directors from different East Asian countries – Park Chan-wook (“Cut,” upper), Takashi Miike (“Box,” lower), and Fruit Chan (“Dumplings,” not pictured). While the first image suggests the fragmentary nature of omnibus films, which are predicated on the cleaving of screen time into smaller segments, the second image indicates the unique combinatory patterns on view in such works, which also bring together filmic “bodies” in unusual ways.

its unusual main ingredient, aborted fetuses) at the end “Dumplings” segues to the similar sound of another actress, this time a Korean dressed in vampire’s attire, sucking the blood from the throat of a male victim at the beginning of “Cut.” In both cases, a dead thing becomes a source of nourishment and new life for women whose “twinning” across episodes had been prefigured by the presence of lookalike female contortionists – young sisters Kyoko and Shocko – in Miike’s contribution to Three . . . Extremes. Though none of their episodes was deleted in the way that entire secNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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tions went missing from If I Had a Million, Love in the City, and the other motion pictures mentioned above, Three . . . Extremes and Tokyo! remind us that the short films collectively comprising a feature-length omnibus film often have “lives” outside of their original or intended “container.”29 They also foreground the processes through which episode films are rendered both divided and divisive in the minds of critics who are prone to inhabit their own spectatorial “boxes,” their own preconceived notions about the relationship between form and content that inhibit one’s ability to grasp this meta-genre on its own terms. Of course, when episodes are rearranged or cut, the thematic development of a given series is necessarily altered, making it sometimes difficult to arrive at a critical consensus about the motivic meanings as well as the various parts’ intertextual and intratextual relations.30

Intertextuality and Intratextuality, the Large and the Small Ever since it emerged as a neologism in theorist Julia Kristeva’s 1966 essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” the term “intertextuality” has been useful in mapping out the ways in which one text or utterance draws on the meanings of another text or utterance. According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. In place of the notion of intersubjectivity that of intertextuality affirms itself and poetic language is read, at the very least, as a double.”31 Meaning, she argues, resides in the interaction between two or more texts, that discursive network of relations formed out of conscious or unconscious similarities in style, mode, genre, and authorial imprint. But how does one go about mapping out the relationships between two or more texts within a single text? This is a question posed by the very presence of episode films, the sections of which are uniquely independent yet interdependent (or, in Gilles Deleuze’s terms: molecular yet molar). That is, each episode exercises a stand-alone autonomy yet attains deeper meaning in the context of the collection where intratextuality is as important a critical paradigm as intertextuality.32 Though it is important to make every effort to situate episode films within a broad intertextual matrix that highlights the importance of noncinematic cultural productions, from the short story cycle in literature to the variety acts of vaudeville, a more fundamental concession should be made to the concept of intratextuality, a paradigm that asks the interpreter to perceive a single text as being made up of multiple texts whose interpenetration provides points of thematic overlap or disjunction. In Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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this way, a single film can be understood as a constellation of various situational contexts and narrative possibilities, not to mention transitional (and transnational) linkages. Indeed, the “situatedness” of an episode, its temporal as well as spatial relationship to other episodes, proves to be an especially slippery yet necessary concept in thinking about – or in thinking through – the “bodies” of these texts while meditating on the various situational modalities (social, cultural, philosophical) impinging on our mental, emotional, and even physical reception of them. Through the concept of intratextuality, a better picture of the “bridging” techniques employed in episode films comes into view, allowing us to perceive more clearly the means by which different directors’ segments might be joined together structurally (through transitional links) and spectatorially (through our own ability to make connections between seemingly disparate images or ideas). For instance, the potentially disrupting segue between the stylistically dissimilar short films contributed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to the three-episode omnibus production New York Stories (a 1989 feature that closes with a short piece by Woody Allen) is softened through visual means, despite the twenty seconds of black screen separating the two. Scorsese’s episode (“Life Lessons”), which is packed with close-ups of a middle-aged abstract expressionist’s latest masterpiece, ends with said artist meeting a young female apprentice with whom he hopes to start a partly paternal, partly physical relationship. Though Coppola’s contribution to the film, a lightweight charmer about adolescent imagination entitled “Life without Zoë,” begins far away from New York’s underground art scene, its first image – that of twelve-year-old Zoë (Heather McComb) painting a watercolor image of her father in Indian garb – echoes the pictorial abstractions of lecherous Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte) and provides the audience with an intra-filmic visual linkage, one that is useful in making the leap from the not-so-mean streets of Soho to the posh Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Whether or not that linkage was intended by these two directors or the film’s producers is less important than its capacity to forge transauthorial connections in the mind of the spectator who might be encouraged to read Coppola’s episode as an extension of Scorsese’s. Transauthorial cinema practically demands that critics adopt an analytical mode of inquiry attuned to a text’s intratextual echoes and reverberations, as demonstrated in Nick Barbaro’s appraisal of Seven Deadly Sins (mentioned above). Indeed, without an intratextual reading strategy, such multi-director episode films as The Turning (2013) and Movie 43 (2013) might seem like “sketchy,” scattershot side-projects and pointless experiments in form that depart nonsensically from traditional narrativity. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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k ey conc e p t s in t r a ns autho ri a l c i n e m a 83 These and other motion pictures, though, are composed of many literal and figurative “pairings,” each one piled atop the others, and so the question of quantity as well as size arises when we cast our gaze at this most unruly of cinematic texts.

A Question of Quantity and Size: the Macro-composite and the Micro-composite Given all of the transauthorial mixing taking place in omnibus films, it should not be surprising that producers have utilized various “prefab” structures as models for cinematic narrativity. Indeed, multi-episode films not only accommodate a diverse spectrum of intertextual readings, thanks to their habitual recourse to varied source material (fables, fairy tales, novels, short stories, stage plays, comic books, and so on), but are also occasionally structured and ordered according to such things as the alphabet as well as seasonal and weekly calendars and daily rituals. For example, The ABCs of Death (2012) is a transauthorial horror film made up of twenty-six episodes, each contributed by a different filmmaking team. Those filmmakers, hailing from Asian, European, North American and South American countries, were approached by producers Ant Timpson (CEO of Timpson Films) and Tim League (CEO and founder of Alamo Drafthouse) and asked to make short films on a small budget ($5,000 each) about mortality inspired by letters of the English alphabet. The order of the twenty-six episodes was thus determined by the directors’ alphabetic choices, with Spanish up-and-comer Ignacio Vigalondo’s “A is for Apocalypse” naturally leading off the feature-length film which comes to an end two hours later with Japanese gore maestro Yoshihiro Nishumura’s “Z is For Zetsumetsu.” Despite the tonal schizophrenia of the film as a whole, which moves from cerebral art horror to schlocky B-film aesthetics and cartoonish violence (and back again), a stabilizing form of order is superimposed on The ABCs of Death through the producers’ use of a prefab structure that is itself episodic yet linear (moving from A to Z). Similarly, the arrangement of the episodes comprising Love and the Frenchwoman (La Française et l’amour, 1960) is predictable, taking the viewer through various stages of life (from “Childhood” to “Adolescence” to “Virginity” to “Marriage” to “Adultery” to “Divorce”) before culminating with “A Woman Alone,” director Jean-Paul Le Chanois’s contribution to this most “orderly” of omnibus films. Similarly, four stages of a single man’s life determine the order of the quartet of episodes comprising Vogelfrei (2007), a Latvian film directed by Janis Kalejs, Gatis Smits, Janis Putnins, and Anna Viduleja. Kalejs’s segment, “Childhood” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(which introduces the spectator to the main character, Teodors, played by Igors Suhoverhovs), is naturally followed by Smits’s segment, “Youth,” which depicts the boy’s adolescent growth as a socially awkward hockey player out of step with his surroundings (this time he is played by the teen actor Karlis Spravniks). Then comes Putnins’s episode, “Adulthood,” tracking Teodors’s professional success as a businessman (now played by Ints Teterovskis) who nevertheless struggles to connect with other people. The much older actor Liubomiras Lauciavicius puts his graceful spin on the graying character in Viduleja’s concluding segment, aptly titled “Old Age” – an episode that was destined to fall into the film’s final slot. Like Love and the Frenchwoman, another example of transauthorial cinema, 7 Days in Havana (7 días en La Habana, 2012) is made up of seven individual stories. Here, though, each segment is written by the Cuban screenwriter Leonardo Padura and each represents a different day of the week in the lives of several characters living in Cuba’s capital city. Beginning with Benicio Del Toro’s “El Yuma,” which takes place on a Monday, and culminating with director Laurent Cantet’s Sunday-set “La fuente,” this omnibus film is both expansive and contained – stylistically “spread out” yet bounded by a days-of-the-week temporal template that dictates, to a degree, the number and length of the episodes as well as their order. Tellingly, French-based Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s contribution to 7 Days in Havana, “Ritual,” set on a Friday, stands out as a dialogue-free look at a voodoo exorcism, but its title is what lingers as a reminder of the formal constaints – the structural and temporal limitations – sometimes placed on multi-director episode films, be it a collective work about the “seven deadly sins” or slice-of-life evocation of Cuba’s cultural specificity told over the course of a single week.33 A handful of episode films are bound by the temporal constraints of a single day. For instance, Bits and Pieces (I Cielo è sempre più blu, a.k.a. The Sky is Always Bluer, 1996) offers a kaleidoscopic view of life in an Italian city within a twenty-four-hour period, capturing quotidian moments as its diverse population of youth gangs, college professors, mechanics, doctors, meter maids, businessmen, scriptwriters, and hit men pass by the camera in fleeting vignettes. Despite the fact that many of these slices of life are interwoven, there remains a sense of seriality in the film’s piecemeal, almost random presentation of more than sixty-five main characters, and thus can be spoken of in the context of episodic cinema. Another film set during a single day, Just Another Day in London (1996), is broken into twelve sections, each of which is approximately five-minutes long. This nycthemeron of digital filmmaking was organized by former punk rocker Richard Jobson who split the single day of shooting into twelve two-hour Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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chunks that were then apportioned to the twelve contributors (including sculptors, musicians, and filmmakers), none of whom was adequately prepared for the chaos that ensued thanks to unforeseen rain, delays, and noshows by the actors. More recently, the Turkish-American coproduction Time Piece (2006) brought together a dozen filmmakers – six from Turkey and six from the United States – to encourage culturally distinct representations of “Daybreak,” “Morning,” “Noon,” “Afternoon,” “Twilight,” and “Dark of Night.” Also noteworthy is the pan-Asian omnibus film Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner (2010), which takes the three main meals of a day as the structural basis for its three episodes (directed by Wang Jing, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and Kaz Cai, a trio of female directors hailing from Mainland China, Thailand, and Singapore, respectively). The film begins in Nanjing with the consumption of wonton soup, segues to Bangkok, where two schoolkids lap up lunchtime noodles, and ends in in Singapore, where an old woman reflects over supper on her past career as a nurse. Once again, the arrangement and order, as well as the number and length of the episodes, are established through a collective agreement on the part of the filmmakers who were guided through the entire production process by Bee Pin Tay of (Singapore’s Wormwood Films). Bee Pin Tay instructed the directors that they should forge intratextual linkages among the three episodes which not only are set at mealtime but also feature female protagonists named “Mei” (moreover, each makes fleeting reference to the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan). In his study of British poet Roy Fisher’s lifetime-spanning literary “composite-epic” (which begins with the writer’s 1961 City and ends with his 1994 Birmingham River), literary scholar Peter Barry discusses intratextuality, which he posits as “the primary distinguishing characteristic of the composite work.”34 Though the subject of his essay might not seem relevant to the study of episode films, Barry’s attempt to distinguish between “two basic kinds of composite work” – the micro-composite (which contains a large number of small parts) and the macro-composite (which contains a small number of large parts) – can be usefully adopted by film scholars seeking to differentiate episodic works from one another and to gain a more thoroughgoing understanding of the genre’s proportional attributes.35 Moreover, Barry acknowledges an oft-ignored aspect of intratextuality which, he argues, is “notionally sub-divisible into two types: firstly, the interaction between each of the component parts and the overarching containing structure; and secondly, the interaction of the component parts with each other.” Barry calls these, respectively, “primary intratextuality” and “secondary intratextuality,” and adds that the former Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“is more important than secondary in the macro composite,” while the latter “is more important than primary in the micro composite.”36 With each of its twenty-six episodes averaging only a few minutes, The ABCs of Death is obviously an example of a micro-composite work. Equally extreme versions of this type of intensified narrativity include the twentyepisode omnibus film Danish Girls Show Everything (Danske piger viser alt, 1996), the twenty-one-episode omnibus film Stories on Human Rights (2008), and the twenty-five-segment European Union project Visions of Europe (2005). Another example is To Each His Cinema (2007), a remarkable film bringing together thirty-five directors around the world (including Jane Campion, David Cronenberg, Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, and Lars von Trier) to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival – their three-minute shorts “as varied as the nationalities of the directors onboard” (according to promotional material). Pushing the micro-composite to an extreme is the sixty-episode 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (2011), an unparalleled collection of one-minute short films conceived by Veiko Õunpuu and funded by a variety of cultural institutions around the world (including the Estonian Ministry of Culture and the European Union–Japan Fest Committee). On the other side of the scale is a macro-composite film like Boccaccio ’70, a multi-director work that consisted of four episodes upon its 1962 debut, was subsequently reduced to three episodes when shown at Cannes that same year, and only recently has been reconstituted to its original running time of nearly four hours. Indeed, so long is the reconstituted version that public screenings of the newly restored print are often divided in half, spread over two days (two episodes per day). This was precisely how I saw the film when it was shown in Paris in the spring of 2003 – its four episodes (directed by Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Mario Monicelli) broken into two pairs. Despite being internally divided (from within) and torn apart externally (from without), Boccaccio ’70 is unified as a whole based on its overriding thematic focus on, appropriately enough, quantity and size. The largeness of this macro-composite is particularly accentuated in Fellini’s contribution, a fifty-minute episode entitled “The Temptation of Dr. Antonio.” The main character in this tale is a prim and puritanical middle-aged professor who makes it his business to report to the authorities the many signs of “obscenity” around him (from couples necking in cars to scantily clad women appearing at outdoor luncheons). Dr Antonio’s biggest challenge comes when a towering billboard is erected opposite his apartment complex. As an advertisement for Italian Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 3.7 and 3.8  Frame enlargements from Federico Fellini’s contribution to Boccaccio ’70, showing one of the many instances in which the emphasis on size and proportion allows spectators to reflect not only on screen dimensions but also on the relative largeness of this “macro composite” film’s individual episodes (which are themselves dwarfed by the size of the entire picture).

dairy products, the billboard features Swedish platinum blonde Anita Ekberg (famous for her Trevi Fountain scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, made two years earlier) voluptuously reclining on a sofa and holding a glass of milk. When the good doctor catches sight of the image, around which the entire neighborhood and a group of African American tourists gather, he is scandalized. So caught up does Dr Antonio become in trying to rid the city of this obscenity that he begins hallucinating and, in a nocturnal scene that is representative of the filmmaker’s penchant for surreal grotesqueries and stylistic excess, imagines the giant Ekberg stepping down from her billboard and traipsing through the miniature streets of Rome. The fifty-foot woman suggests a female King Kong, especially when she Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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begins taunting the tiny man. Dwarfed by this voluptuous object of male desire, Antonio momentarily falls under the spell of her immense bosom only to snap out of it and call her a “witch.” Reviewers of the film seemed similarly fixated on Ekberg’s “mammoth mammaries,” or what one critic referred to as “glacier-like promontories” and another called “Vesuvius trying to whisper to Fujiyama.”37 What no one bothers to mention is how this tension between the gigantic and the miniature, as an extension of the billboard’s attempt to promote the consumption of an Italian product, is an embedded sign of Boccaccio ’70’s own attempt to reconcile the large and the small across a four-hour running time. That reconciliatory maneuver also thematically infiltrates the other episodes, from De Sica’s “La riffa” (which stars the equally Amazonian Sophia Loren) to Monicelli’s “Renzo e Luciana” (a tale about newlyweds who, after having a small church wedding and being forced to live in a cramped apartment with no privacy, finally get some “time to themselves” in a crowded movie theater). In an early scene in the Monicelli episode, when Renzo, the husband, tells wife Luciana that she is “smaller than a refrigerator,” the remark might seem as curiously out of place as the jukebox in the church playing their wedding march. But it provides further evidence of the intratextual complexity of an “overcrowded” film whose own size was a source of extradiegetic fascination and even anger at the time of its release. When Boccaccio ’70 was picked up for US release in 1962 by Twentieth Century-Fox and Embassy Pictures, filmgoers in Los Angeles and New York were treated to some of the largest promotional signage ever created for a film. Featuring 21-foot rotating murals of the film’s three main stars (Ekberg, Loren, and Romy Schneider), each “Tri-Vision’ sign – some three stories high – was as excessive in its spectatorial appeals as both the billboard in Fellini’s episode and the entire film which, as mentioned earlier, was cut down to a three-segment version after its initial run.38 Even in this abridged cut, which made roadshow engagements throughout the United States before its June 26, 1962 New York premiere, the three episodes were separated by not one but two intermissions, effectively extending its duration. The stateside posters and advertising slicks for Boccaccio ’70, besides erroneously promoting the film as “The First 3-Act Motion Picture Ever Presented,”39 foreground the names of only three of its four directors (Fellini, De Sica, and Visconti), pushing to the periphery the contribution made by Monicelli (whose episode was cut before the film’s American release).40 And yet, for all its promotional material’s outward emphasis on these auteurs and their stars, the film nevertheless remained producer Carlo Ponti’s project. In the following chapter, I ruminate on the ways in which omnibus films, as directorial showcases, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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k ey conc e p t s in t r a ns autho ri a l c i n e m a 89 promote internationally renowned auteurs while redirecting attention toward other ­individuals behind the scenes, including producers like Ponti who have been instrumental in spearheading such ventures. Additionally, an engagement with the topic of genre hybridity will animate my discussion in the following section.

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C HA PT E R 4

Key Concepts in Film Studies: Authorship, Audience, Genre, and Nation

[T]he omnibus film poses problems for the historiography of European cinema as well as the structuring paradigms of film studies as an academic discipline. It demonstrates how these paradigms condition and limit what is possible to say within the terrain of film history and how they demarcate a disciplinary horizon of intelligibility. Mark Betz, “Exquisite Corpses: Art Cinema, Film Studies, and the Omnibus Film”

Who is the “author” of the feature-length, animated film Winter Days (Fuyu no hi, 2003)? Is it Kihachirō Kawamoto, one of Japan’s greatest puppet animators, who dreamt up the idea of paying cinematic tribute to the seventeenth-century poet Bashō (a.k.a. Matsuo Manefusa) by adapting the latter’s same-titled work in the form of thirty-six filmic “stanzas”? Is it Tatsuo Shimamura, the producer who assisted Kawamoto in gathering together a roster of celebrated animators from around the world to bring Bashō’s work to the screen? Or are the thirty-five internationally renowned animators, including Yuri Norstein (from Russia), Raoul Servais (from Belgium), and Bairong Wang (from China), equally deserving of authorial credit, given their relative autonomy throughout the production process which gave them creative freedom to illustrate the stanzas of the film’s source material on their own terms (using everything from traditional cel techniques to CGI)? This question is complicated by the fact that the original haiku collection Winter Days was itself a transauthorial experiment, a renga (renku or hankasen in classical Japanese) published in 1684 that chained together the work of six poets (Yasui, Kakei, Jugo, Tokoku, Shohei, and Yasui) who alternated as contributers, successively writing the stanzas that comprise the collection. In many respects, the omnibus film can be thought of as a cinematic extension of that classical literary form. Indeed, the renga – a long, imagefilled chain poem written by a large group of poets taking turns – seems strikingly similar to the type of cinema that I am exploring in this book; and Winter Days simply foregrounds that antecedent type of cultural Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ke y co nce p t s in f ilm s tu di e s 91 production more forcefully than other multi-episode films which likewise make the determination of authorial designations a difficult task. Film historian Mark Betz has made a similar argument, but goes further in connecting the omnibus film to the cadavre exquis (“exquisite corpse”), a 1920s parlor game played by surrealists in which an anatomical structure or literary composition is cobbled together from disparate elements collectively authored by the players to create a “montage of parts.”1 Before the game became a café-culture pastime in 1930s Paris (where American novelists and painters, such as Henry Miller, partook in the collective authorship of texts designed to stimulate the imagination), the exquisite corpse began its life as a form of “symbolic exchange” among influential artists such as André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, and Jacques Prévert. Such exchange, necessarily spontaneous and fragmentary, according to Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), was instrumental in laying the groundwork for more recent developments in “remix culture,” anticipating mash-up videos, rap songs, and other types of production in which multiple authors are present.2 It also seems to have crept into the collective “mindspace” of authorial talent behind such films as Felix (1987) and Triangle (Tie saam gok, 2007). The former film was a West German production overseen by Theo Hinz who, ten years earlier, had initiated the collective project Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978). Felix is notable for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it features the directing talents of four women: Helma Sanders-Brahms, Helke Sander, Margarethe von Trotta, and Christel Buschmann. Together, these filmmakers sequentially plot out the life of a single character, Felix (Ulrich Tukur), who has just been left by his partner at the beginning of the story. In Sanders-Brahms’s “The Last Straw,” the protagonist is alone in his apartment following the breakup, and decides to take a trip. In the second episode, Sander’s “Taking Precautions,” Felix takes that trip, encountering a couple of blonde women at a beach where expectations for an emotional “rebound” run high. Next comes von Trotta’s segment, a short narrative entitled “Eva,” named after a newly introduced character played by Eva Mates who appears in an ice cream parlor where the two characters commiserate. Because Eva looks like his lost love, Felix is attracted to her, only to discover that she is a lesbian. The film’s final episode, directed by Buschmann, documents “the dark night of Felix’s shallow soul.”3 This segment is entitled “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” a fitting end to the story of a man who finally descends into the lurid world of Hamburg’s love motels and low-life bars.Though just one editor, Jane Seitz, was employed to piece together this entire film, each director worked from her Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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own screenplay and with her own cinematographer (Frank Brühne, Mike Gast, Martin Gressmann, and Franz Rath) as part of the baton-passing, renga-like process of making Felix. One of the latest transauthorial efforts to come from Hong Kong, Triangle likewise encapsulates the spirit of collaborative game-play established in the “exquisite corpse” decades earlier. Indeed, the premise of this gangster film appears to be indebted to the French surrealists, insofar as three well-known directors – Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To – together create an unruly filmic body composed of their individually shot segments, each of which was lensed by the same cinematographer, Cheng Siu-keung. Unlike most of the films under consideration in this book, Triangle features a single narrative, albeit one that is divided into three parts of equal length. Before shooting began, the three members of this “Heroic Trio” decided that Tsui Hark would direct the first thirty minutes of the film which would introduce the main characters and dramatic conflicts while laying the groundwork for the central storyline. That storyline, concerning three young drinking buddies [Fai (Louis Koo), Lee Bo Sam (Simon Yam), and Mok Chung-yuan (Sun Honglei)] who search for hidden treasure under Hong Kong’s Legislative Council building (after being given a gold coin from a mysterious stranger), would carry through into the second major segment, directed by Ringo Lam. Tying everything together at the end is Johnnie To, director of the film’s third major section. To’s predilection for swooning slow-motion effects differs considerably from the visual style of his predecessor, Lam, a filmmaker known for gritty realism. Like a runner’s baton being handed from one relay racer to another, the camera becomes an object of both symbolic and actual exchange, something established during the filming process, which was itself segmental and sequential (with one director shooting his part before handing the production over to the next director). The ludic experience of the original “exquisite corpse” itself – its ability to engender a playfully participatory mode of collaborative engagement in which contributing artists “learn something about the world” through chance-based operations as well as through “presentation rather than through re-presentation” – is important to consider.4 Even if the act of inscribing oneself into the collective form of the omnibus film is not exactly aleatory or spontaneous, the presentational, rather than representational, aspects of recreational gameplay can be seen in this agonistic cinematic form which likewise promotes “radical openness” despite the limitations or guidelines set by a producer (in the case of Triangle, the film’s three directors – Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To – also served as its producers). If the structured chaos or rule-bound anarchy of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the omnibus film seem like an unresolvable paradox, then we should bear in mind that its roots in avant-gardist cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s point toward a solution of sorts, a way out of the contradiction.5 Just as “the explicit theoretical objective of Surrealism is the reconciliation of antinomies,”6 according to Anne M. Kern, so too might multi-director episode films pivot on a dialectical point of potential collapse where the singular and the collective collide and synthesize into what Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger refer to as a “singularizing collectivity.”7 Returning once more to the animated episode film Winter Days, from a production standpoint it is possible to say that its “author” is simply the “singularizing collectivity” that together contributed episodes at the behest of producers Kihachirō Kawamoto and Tatsuo Shimamura: the thirty-five animation directors and their individual teams of artists whose own loose-knit togetherness mimics the way in which the six poets responsible for the film’s source material were themselves “singularized” under the banner of Bashō over three centuries earlier. Historically, unlike animated productions, live-action omnibus films have tended to emphasize the marquee value of the many stars therein (as with, for instance, the Mario Cecchi Gori-produced Pleasant Nights [Le piacevoli notti, 1966] which features such ubiquitous icons of Italian cinema as Vittorio Gassman, Gina Lollobrigida, and Ugo Tognazzi). They have also traditionally highlighted, on posters and in other forms of advertising, the numerous established auteurs whose contributions are promoted as selling points or as a means of luring cinephiles to screenings – a point made conspicuous with the acronymic RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello, 1962) which foregrounds the individual contributions of Roberto Rossellini (RO), Jean-Luc Godard (GO), Pier Paolo Pasolini (PA), and Ugo Gregoretti (G).8 As a paratextual extension of RoGoPaG’s movie posters and other publicity material, the film’s opening credits present, in order: 1. the name of the producer (Alfredo Bini); 2. the title of the film; 3. the list of directors; and 4. the modus operandi of the project, which states: “Four stories by four writers who confine themselves to recounting the gay beginning of the world.” Omnibus films are usually conceptualized as a whole, however, and put together – or structurally organized – by producers, who might have their eyes on younger directors rather than already established auteurs. An example of this is Love at Twenty (L’Amour à vingt ans, 1962), a fiveepisode attempt to reveal the all-consuming nature of love as experienced by “the inscrutable youth of the atomic age.” It is a film that simply would not exist had it not been for French producer Pierre Roustang.9 A year Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 4.1 and 4.2  Part of the opening credits of RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello, 1962).

before this film’s release, Roustang thought it would be interesting to see how a host of young filmmakers from around the world (including France’s François Truffaut, Italy’s Renzo Rossellini, West Germany’s Marcel Ophüls, Japan’s Shintaro Ishihara, and Poland’s Andrzej Wajda) would collectively address the titular subject. In some respects, Love at Twenty harks back to A Tale of Five Women (a.k.a. A Tale of Five Cities, Passaporto per l’oriente), a multinational, multi-director film with episodes set in Rome, Paris, Berlin, London, and Vienna. It also anticipated the production of The Adolescents (Les Adolescents, 1964) as well as more recent omnibus films, such as Yulu (Wise Words, 2011), a collection of seven young directors’ works about a dozen different inspirational figures in present-day China (including an investigative reporter, an environmentalist, and a real-estate entrepreneur, all under the age of forty). As with Yulu, the directors of the 1962 film were chosen by Roustang because of their age which would lend authenticity to the production. But he also selected the five because of their centrality to their own national cinemas’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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emergent new waves. And, indeed, their completed short films were given titles by the producer that linked authorship to the cities – and, by extension, countries – in which the stories take place: “Paris,” “Rome,” “Tokyo,” “Munich,” and “Warsaw.” In his study of Italian cinema (a hotbed of episodic activity during the 1960s and 1970s), Peter Bondanella argues that the vogue for omnibus films during those politically volatile and financially unstable years “clearly reflects the domination of economic imperatives over artistic ones.” Because men like Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti “encouraged such works” which could be “done in sections by different directors and combining boxoffice attractions that would normally be employed in three or four separate films,” these low-cost alternatives to the regular feature not only muddy the waters of conventional critical categories but also might represent a transformative shift in the motivations, if not powers, of the producer.10 Still, whenever mentioned by critics, episode films are typically framed within an auteurist lens that privileges already canonized personalities. Echoing a sentiment voiced by French filmmaker Louis Malle (who once referred to omnibus films as “a great producer’s scam” to bring in stars and famous directors very cheaply),11 outspoken auteurist Andrew Sarris pronounced Spirits of the Dead to be “much more of a producer’s package than a director’s dream,” but went on to argue, in his appropriately titled book Confessions of a Cultist, that “the individual ingredients deserve more attention than the total concoction.”12 Following Sarris’s lead, the tendency of film criticism and historiography is to wrench from each motion picture’s lineup of directors those auteurs affiliated with European Art Cinema (such as Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini), whose contributions can be isolated and analyzed autonomously at the expense of lesser-known yet equally prolific directors such as Ugo Gregoretti, Mino Guerrini, Gianni Puccini, Ettora Scola, and Luigi Comencini, and with little regard to the collection as a whole. This tendency, one among many that needs to be problematized, serves as an occasion to expand the preexisting framework of authorship studies. With regards to authorship, the omnibus film in particular – a text composed of two or more directors’ individual works – exposes some of the shortcomings of one of the central theoretical positions in academic film studies. The “auteur theory,” an Americanized take on the politique des auteurs polemic launched in the 1950s by French film critics writing for the Cahiers du cinéma, celebrates the works of specific directors (like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks) who occupy a pivotal place both in the history of the medium and in the texts t­ hemselves as generators of meaning. Even after the 1968 publication of Roland Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Barthes’s essay, “The Death of the Author,” which forced scholars to ruminate on the relationship between the concept’s “death” and other metaphors of mortality (such as the “end of history” and the “end of grand narratives”),13 the auteur theory and its post-structuralist modifications continue to proliferate within American, British, and French academia as a convenient way of discussing a single person’s significance to textual hermeneutics – someone who is individualized, yet situated as a locus of converging social and industrial forces. It is perhaps ironic that the hierarchically stratified auteur theory promoted by Andrew Sarris and others should be such an ingrained feature of American cultural criticism, given the fact that the United States is lauded worldwide for its democratic ideals and egalitarian values, not to mention the fact that the classical Hollywood studio system (in which Welles, Hitchcock, Hawks and other auteurs worked) demanded a collaborative, assembly line approach to motion picture production that suggests not one but several hands coming together. Nevertheless, an underlying conviction in the individual (whose autonomy, inventiveness, and initiative are placed above his or her ability to assimilate within, and contribute to, a collective effort) surely informs not only the sustained “authority of authorship studies” in the United States but also the relative disinterest in the omnibus format here. While multi-director episode films are frequently cited in academic journals and books throughout the world (from Germany to Japan, Italy to South Korea – countries where there are commonly known keywords and definitions already firmly in place), they are rarely mentioned in even the most exhaustive accounts of world cinema written by stateside historians, critics, and theorists. As such, one of the most vital interventions in the dominant, yet ideologically suspect, history of film authorship has been consistently overlooked.

“Sketch Artists,” from Annakin to Zavatinni It should be pointed out that many legendary and respected directors in Sarris’s “pantheon” tried their hands at episodic narrativity at some point in their careers, including Fritz Lang (Destiny [Der Müde Tod, 1921]), Ingmar Bergman (Secrets of Women [Kvinnors väntan, 1952]), John Ford (The Rising of the Moon, 1957), Jean Renoir (Le petit théâtre de Jean Renoir, 1969), and Michelangelo Antonioni (Beyond the Clouds [Al di là delle nuvole, 1995]). Film scholars have rarely explored the structural, stylistic, or thematic properties of these “minor” motion pictures, which occupy relatively lowly positions in the directors’ larger bodies of work. Of course, certain filmmakers are more central to this narratological genre than Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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others. Vittorio De Sica, for instance, not only directed but also starred in several anthology and omnibus films (including episodes directed by other filmmakers).14 Moreover, major filmmakers have been known to do terrible (or less inspired) work in multi-director episode films. Howard Hawks’s contribution to the 1952 omnibus film O. Henry’s Full House, an adaptation of the titular American author’s “The Ransom of Red Chief,” is generally thought to be the weakest of the five episodes (the others were directed by Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Henry Koster, and Jean Negulesco); as is John Ford’s Civil War episode in How the West Was Won (1962), a lengthy segment that is about as nuanced as the many explosions sprinkled liberally throughout it. Conversely, less well-known, yet equally prolific, filmmakers, such as Ken Annakin and Mario Monicelli, never quite exceeded their remarkable contributions to omnibus films. Annakin, a British director responsible for adapting W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Colonel’s Lady” for the 1948 film Quartet, stated in a 1990 interview that this episode “is one of the best pictures I ever made, and is touching though sentimental . . . Of all my British films, I would like to be remembered for ‘the Colonel’s Lady’.”15 Monicelli’s humiliating experience with Boccaccio ’70, in which his episode was deleted at the behest of producer Carlo Ponti on the eve of the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, evidently did not sour his interest in the narrative format, as he went on to contribute another ten short films for various producers of omnibus pictures, beginning with High Infidelity (Alta infedeltà, 1964) and culminating with Letters from Palestine (Lettere dalla Palestina, 2002), a quasi-documentary that he also edited. More recently, filmmakers such as Idrissa Ouédraogo (from Burkina Faso) and Mira Nair (from India) have excelled as contributors to omnibus productions, surpassing their own feature-length works as specialists in the short film form. As these examples suggest, a better understanding of episode films might result from shifting the anchorage away from lionized directors and their canonized works to so-called “pretenders to the throne” — less esteemed yet significant filmmakers, such as Julien Duvivier and Sacha Guitry who did more to “spread the gospel” and justify the existence of episode films than their illustrious peers. It also demands that we look beyond the director’s chair and examine the contributions of other members of a given film’s production team. Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini is a good case in point. Besides being the foremost spokesman in Italy for a kind of “poetic naturalism” in motion pictures highlighting quotidian details of everyday life, Zavattini was one of the most important individuals responsible for the development and growth of episodic cinema during the postwar period. A screenwriting legend, whose Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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career spanned the neo-realism period of the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s as well as the emergent burst of sexually provocative anthology and omnibus films during the 1950s and 1960s, he had a hand in such classics as We, the Women (Siamo donne, 1953), The Gold of Naples, and Boccaccio ’70, not to mention the racy sketch films Latin Lovers (Le Italiane e l’amore, 1961), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domain, 1963), Mysteries of Rome (I misteri di Roma, 1963), The Witches (Le streghe, 1967), Woman Times Seven (1967), and The Couples (Le coppie, 1970). He has not yet been accorded the same degree of reverence, however, as the many directors with whom he worked (such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti – all of whom were frequent contributors to omnibus films). Not coincidentally, the Italian screenwriter surrounded himself with miniatures at his Rome apartment, its walls filled with dozens of framed, postcard-sized paintings by some of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century (including Giorgio de Chirico, Massimo Campigli, and Leonor Fini). Zavattini the collector of small portraits and Zavattini the purveyor of small stories are one and the same, a figure of singular stature and multiple interests who found a way to collapse ontological distinctions between his work and his life. Indeed, the most interesting contributors to omnibus films in particular and episodic cinema in general do just that: they tap into a uniquely personal mode of reflective collection through which to mine the universal appeal of material objects or souvenirs that lay claim to our own senses and memories. As Andrei Tarkovsky states in Sculpting in Time, the filmmaker “is rather like a collector,” a fetishist of isolated, epiphanic moments that, like episodes in an anthology or omnibus film, attain the aura of inanimate objects. According to Tarkovsky, the filmmaker’s “exhibits are his frames, which constitute life, recorded once and for all time in myriad well-loved details, pieces, fragments, of which the actor, the character, may or may not be a part.”16 That the viewer is able to reap the intellectual and emotional rewards of these fragments and enter into a “complex system of values” based on aesthetics and sentiment as well as material functionalism, suggest that a consolidation of personal and public desires is made possible through the production and reception of episode films. Alongside cinematic “sketch-artists,” such as Julien Duvivier and Sacha Guitry, studio producers, such as Michael Balcon and Carlo Ponti, were not only guiding forces in the development of this narratological genre throughout the Western world but also, like Zavattini, avid collectors in their lives away from the cameras and studio back lots. Having caught the collecting bug, these and other individuals across the globe transformed the way in which we think about films which are, in their own way, compendiums of discrete moments made material in our fetishistic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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relation to them and through their onscreen and offscreen (or paratextual) presentations. It is ironic yet fitting, then, that directors themselves are subject to being “collected” by the producers of omnibus films and put on “display” in advertising material. This was made explicit by Regina Ziegler, the Berlin-based producer of Erotic Tales (the first of several episodic films on the subject of sex she commissioned beginning in 1994), when she declared in an interview, “I collect my directors like jewels.”17 Ziegler’s comment suggests not only that the many filmmakers with whom she worked on Erotic Tales (including Nicolas Roeg, Hal Hartley, Susan Seidelman, Ken Russell, and Paul Cox) serve an “ornamental” purpose but also that their works are as prone to both taxonomic classification and fetishization as glittering objects in a jewelry box or display case, an idea more recently exploited in the “sexually explicit” omnibus films Fucking Different! (2005) and Destricted (2006). Indeed, the episode/director-as-fetish object is an intrinsic aspect of omnibus films that has thus far been overlooked. Just as a collection can be characterized as a kind of organized obsession, so too can desire be imaginatively “ordered, arranged, and manipulated” via the momentarily possessed object/episode, whose “position in a system of referents,” according to Susan Stewart, “determines its fetishistic value.”18 This underlying libidinal charge – a latent quality, I argue, of all episode films – is brought to the fore in everything from the West German omnibus production Wet Dreams (1974) to the Italian bedroom farce Sex with a Smile (40 gradi all’ombra del lenzuolo, 1976), from the Hong Kong– Taiwanese coproduction Crazy Sex (Nian hua re cao, 1976) to such softporn, straight-to-video, multi-tale collections as the Playboy Channel’s Inside Out (1992) and Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries 4: Auto-Erotica (1994). By conceptualizing the omnibus film as a collection of people, both real and fictional, one begins to grasp the corporeal dimensions of this most promiscuous meta-genre, as well as the idea – put forth in one of the four stories making up the 1967 horror anthology Torture Garden (“The Man Who Collected Poe,” about an obsessed hoarder of manuscripts and memorabilia who boards up the actual body of the titular author) – that the very act of acquiring, displaying, and consuming an artist’s work is linked to both a psychological need and an emotional state of embodied infatuation before the screen.

Friendly Rivalries and Critical Favorites In most cases, each contributor to an omnibus film knows that his or her work will be seen alongside a handful of others. This understanding of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the internal juxtapositionality of the text, which facilitates the passing of spectatorial judgment based on the relative success or significance of a given episode, surely informs a director’s decisions on what to film and how to film that subject. In an interview conducted near the end of his life, Sidney Cole, one of the associate producers on the 1945 film Dead of Night, referred to the “friendly rivalry” that existed between the film units at Ealing Studios responsible for shooting the five separately directed episodes of that horror classic – units that worked in a spirit of combined competitiveness and transauthorial collaboration unique to omnibus films.19 Don Boyd, the iconoclastic British producer behind the operatic omnibus Aria (1987), said much the same thing when he was interviewed: that the film’s ten directors (Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, Bill Bryden, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Frank Roddam, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Charles Sturridge, and Julien Temple) “wanted to do their best” in the spirit of competition.20 One can easily imagine similar “friendly rivalries” brewing behind the scenes of Visions of Eight (1973), an omnibus film about the 1972 summer Olympics that has been metaphorically spoken of by critics and historians as itself an olympiad, a gathering together of eight filmmakers (Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Juri Ozerov, Michael Pfleghar, Arthur Penn, John Schlesinger, and Mai Zetterling) intent on proving their skills to an international audience. One of the co-producers of the film, Stan Margulies, corroborated this interpretation when, in an interview, he testified to the “natural competition” between the filmmakers whose various “ego problems” forced him and the film’s other producer, David Wolper, to act as referees throughout the sixteen-day shooting schedule.21 Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin even went so far as to conclude his article on Visions of Eight with “a scorecard as well as a collective judgment,” handing out “three golds, two silvers, two bronzes and one out-of-the-metal . . . with a special producers’ trophy for an imaginative idea brought off in the face of monumental logistical problems.”22 Champlin’s metaphorical scorecard is not unlike the mental notes taken by the majority of moviegoers – nonprofessional “critics” or “line judges” who, upon viewing an omnibus film, will often rate the success of specific episodes according to the logic and language of relationality and rank.23 Of course, one critic’s favorite episode is another critic’s least favorite. In scouring through reviews of omnibus films, I have encountered much disagreement as to what the “best” and “worst” segments of a given work are, at least in certain people’s estimations. For example, in his largely negative response to The Dolls (Le bambole, 1965), Kevin Thomas refers to this Italian film’s second sequence (“Treatise in Eugenics,” concerning Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a Swedish woman who seeks a perfect Italian male with whom to make a genetically flawless child) as the point where “the picture starts to fall apart.”24 This episode’s director, Luigi Comencini, is blamed for its “slow tempo,” although a reviewer for Variety argues the flip side of that critique, not only praising Elke Sommer’s performance as the superficial eugenicist but also singling out the “good pace” of Comencini’s direction.25 A third reviewer, writing for Time magazine, harrumphed that this episode was terribly “predictable,” reserving his praise for the film’s fourth segment, a Boccaccio-inspired sketch (entitled “Monsignor Cupid”) that stars Gina Lollobrigida as a promiscuous hotelkeeper who tempts a bishop’s virginal nephew to her bed.26 Referring to this sexy farce, which is loosely based on a story in The Decameron, as “the pick of the lot,” the Time critic clearly experienced The Dolls differently from Thomas, who had no kind words for director Mauro Bolognini’s “Monsignor Cupid,” calling it “merely improbable.”27

Audience-testing, Spectatorial Activity, and The Story of Three Loves Studio executives and marketing departments have picked up on the above phenomenon and have actively solicited spectatorial responses in the weeks and months prior to a motion picture’s theatrical debut. Questionnaires handed out after test screenings of particular omnibus films reveal a great deal about their reception as well as the general audience’s savvy understanding of a meta-genre often dismissed by dumbfounded professional critics. One such case is the initial reaction to The Story of Three Loves, a three-episode omnibus film produced by Sidney Franklin at MGM in 1952 and released in March of the following year (it opened at Radio City Music Hall after being shelved for over nine months). At the end of this film’s test run at the Academy Theater in Pasadena, California on September 17, 1952, audience members were asked to fill out a questionnaire. When asked which episodes they liked most, twentyeight female members of the audience were noncommittal and responded “All.” Another eleven voted for the “First Sequence” (director Gottfried Reinhardt’s “The Jealous Lover”); two for the “Second Sequence” (Vincente Minnelli’s “Mademoiselle”); and thirty-six for the “Third Sequence” (“Equilibrium,” also directed by Reinhardt). The women’s individual responses, transcribed by Howard Strickling (MGM’s publicity chief and later vice-president), reveal a sense of the narrative proportion and symmetry sought by viewers of mainstream films. For example, one respondent wrote, “Second part poor. Almost Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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exactly like another picture.” Another movie patron wrote, “I believe the third story would be an excellent feature in itself, but appeal of each is too different to be interesting to all viewers;” while yet another offered up the following advice: “Start picture with second sequence, then first, then third.” Perhaps the most significant bit of counsel came from a woman who wrote, “The credits should be shown at the beginning of each story instead of before the picture. It would be easier to know who everybody was that way.” It appears that studio heads neither took all of the women’s advice to heart nor made radical alterations to the picture as a whole before its March 5, 1953 premiere in New York. A frequent complaint, however, about the “break between each of the stories” no doubt resulted in a reconceptualized frame narrative that, besides incorporating voiceovers to soften the segues episode to episode, uses the iconography of a cruise ship and brings together three different groups of individuals on deck – ­passengers who serve as the subjects for its three episodes.28 Though each of its tales is set inland, taking us down the lonely streets of three different European capitals, The Story of Three Loves extends the heterogeneity and feeling of isolation inscribed in the ocean liner to the landlocked men and women of the city, strangers in strange places whose cultural differences are prominently displayed. For instance, Minnelli’s “Mademoiselle” (based on Jan Lustig and George Froeschel’s short story, “Lucy and the Stranger”) is about a French governess who looks after a twelve-year-old American boy living in Rome; whereas “Equilibrium” indeed brings a sense of balance or symmetry to the proceedings by focusing on an Italian woman living in Paris, her suicide attempt foiled by a local high-wire artist played by the quintessentially American actor, Kirk Douglas (whose centrality to this final tale was perhaps the reason for its appeal to stateside test audiences). Just as cultural difference plays a pivotal part in each of the three episodes, one might expect gender difference to be a factor in the reception of the film on that September day in 1952. But, in fact, male viewers responded similarly, offering up such advice as “Make first and second story come up to standard of third story.” Though many of these men believed that “the first plot leaves such a bad taste in your mouth you can’t fully enjoy the other two,” a few felt that, as a whole, The Story of Three Loves was “better than the S. Maugham flicks,” a comment that illustrates not only how ingrained in the popular imagination such films as Quartet, Trio (1950), and Encore (1952) had become but also how sensitive mainstream audiences were in terms of their intertextual awareness of episodic precedents. Given the title of the film (The Story of Three Loves) which, according to one French reviewer, consolidates a “love of art” (in the first episode), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a “love of love” (in the second), and a “love of work” (in the third),29 it is perhaps ironic that the majority of test audiences did not fancy all three of its tales. Indeed, this story of one love (“Equilibrium”), one like (“The Jealous Lover”), and one dislike (“Mademoiselle”) tellingly reverses the preconceived notion that the celebrated Vincente Minnelli is more of an “auteur” than the less well-known Gottfried Reinhardt (whose greatest claim to fame may be his patrilineal connection, as the son of legendary theater director Max Reinhardt), and furthermore reveals how necessary it is for viewers of episode films to momentarily settle for second or third best in the act of watching. Interestingly, a passage of dialogue in The Story of Three Loves’ first episode connotes this need to adapt. Entitled “The Jealous Lover,” this story concerns the romantic machinations of world-famous choreographer Charles Coudray (James Mason) who falls in love with an aspiring dancer named Paula Woodward (Moira Shearer) and writes a ballet for her, so enchanted is he by her beauty and technique. Unbeknown to Charles, Paula has a fatal cardiac condition and her doctor has forbidden her to dance. Eager to please the impresario, however, she displays her talents and soon thereafter collapses in a cold sweat. In the ensuing scene, Charles tells her that there are “many, many things” in life besides dancing. “We’ll learn to like other things,” he says, to which Paula replies, “We’ll try.” These words subtly suggest the requisite need to “settle for something else” when watching episode films – a point strengthened by the fact that Paula, previously a performer, has since become a spectator watching from a distance. The burden of episodicity is constantly being offset by a renewed spectatorial agency which can be mobilized in a variety of ways when viewing anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, and sketch films. For instance, the surfeit of personalities populating many episodic ensemble films, such as the omnibus productions If I Had a Million and Forever and a Day (1943) as well as the Julien Duvivier-directed Tales of Manhattan (1942), can be said to stimulate, rather than debilitate, the spectator’s mental activity. Though in traditional film screenings, spectators are expected to sit for two hours in a relatively immobile, “anaesthetized” state of surrender before the screen, this hallucinatory experience akin to dreaming is problematized – the “spell” is broken, so to speak – by the episodicity and multiplicity of omnibus films which transform the “relative passivity of the situation” (to borrow Jean-Louis Baudry’s words) into a dynamic site of continuous interruption, assessment, comparison, interaction, and recollection.30 Indeed, one of the reasons that episode films are thought to be attractive to audiences is because of their inherent heterogeneity, their Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 4.3  Frame enlargement from RKO’s wartime propaganda picture Forever and a Day. The film’s opening credits scroll up to reveal dozens of famous stars and character actors who are figuratively and literally “contained” within this episodic account of an ancestral house and the generations of family members who lived there over a period of 140 years.

ability to combine in a single framework several genres, stories, and performers that are nevertheless presented in a piecemeal and consecutive, rather than blended and simultaneous, way. Forever and a Day, an RKO production made during the Second World War and whose proceeds went to various charities throughout the world,31 is particularly interesting in this light, as one of the first films to amass such an astonishing array of stars in one setting (mostly British actors who were as recognizable to American audiences as the Union Jack, with a few Hollywood dignitaries and clowns thrown in – all passing through a single house at various times in history). The spectator is first introduced to these famous performers (including Ray Milland, Claude Rains, Cedric Hardwicke, Merle Oberon, Buster Keaton, Anna Neagle, Jessie Matthews, Gene Lockhart, C. Aubrey Smith, and Dame May Whitty) in the opening credits which scroll to show each of the seventy-eight major actors’ names as part of a larger group. The frame is literally congested with words and signification, so much so that they obscure the panoramic London skyline (which takes in the Thames and the Houses of Parliament). As film critic Dilys Powell states in a review of another omnibus film (Six in Paris [Paris vu par . . . , 1965]], “the difficulty with composite films is the crowd of names; give them all and the reader stifles . . . But there is an easy way out: choose one sketch” (italics added).32 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Just as choosing a favorite episode is the audience member’s prerogative, however, so too can he or she engage in a more actively participatory role vis-à-vis this unrelenting presentation of stars, which undercuts the pessimistic claim by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer that the “sound film, far from surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story.” Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous contention, articulated in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, that “the stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves,”33 was once held up as an axiomatic truth by many media critics. In the six decades since that book’s original publication, however, it has been challenged by scholars sensitive to the narrative complexity and spectatorial activity embedded in cultural productions, such as Tales of Manhattan and Forever and a Day, which allow for an emancipatory play of looks that “untraps” the viewer from the regulated network of gazes and generates myriad meanings. This is partly achieved through what Richard Dyer describes as the “audience foreknowledge [of] the star’s name and his/her appearance (including the sound of his/her voice and dress styles associated with her/him) [signifying] that condensation of attitudes and values which is the star’s image,” regardless of whether the aspects of a star’s image fit perfectly, selectively, or problematically with all of the traits of a given character.34 The hugely ambitious Malayalam feature Kerala Café (2009) is especially conducive to such activity, given that the film not only consolidates the work of ten directors but also relies on a frame narrative set at a railway cafeteria where some of the biggest names in the local industry – celebrated actors such as Suresh Gopi, Dileep, Salim Kumar, Rahman, Mammootty, Nithya Menon, Rima Kallingal, and Prithviraj (among many others) – enter and exit in ways that metaphorically “open” and “close” this cinematic spectacle on numerous occasions. Lee Mishkin, writing for New York’s Morning Telegraph at the time of Forever and a Day’s original release, highlighted one way that this film might appeal to what he terms “the average customer,” saying that the greatest attraction “will be the thrill of picking out the familiar faces in the movie, breathing, ‘that’s Ida Lupino!’ or ‘there’s Donald Crisp!’ or ‘lookit Merle Oberon!’ and so on.”35 Indeed, the participatory game of spotting or identifying actors (be they full-blown stars or bit players skirting along the frame’s periphery) and assigning them qualitative values based on Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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earlier associations as well as present narrative configurations informs the episode film’s “specularity” and “spectacularity,” conferring a sense of authorial power to those viewers who, contra Adorno and Horkheimer, indeed utilize their “imagination” and “spontaneity.” While he or she may not enjoy total phenomenological dominion over the images and episodes as they transpire over time, the spectator can at least connect the dots of those star signs’ constantly shifting constellations by drawing from his or her mental archives and forming hypotheses about possible narrative outcomes based on genre expectations as well the performers’ national affiliations. While this kind of mental activity also characterizes our spectatorial relationship to single-story features, it becomes a necessarily intensified experience during the viewing of all-star omnibus productions, such as Forever and a Day and Kerala Cafe, which trot out one celebrity or bit player after another and organizes vision, not around a single figure but rather around the idea of celebrity or stardom.

Problematizing Paradigms: Genre Hybridity and National Identity Episodic storytelling in film, regardless of whether or not it is the transauthorial brand of cinema specific to omnibus productions, also raises questions about genre categorizations and what has sometimes been referred to as “genre hybridity.” Light Grey (Svetlo sivo, 1993), a Macedonian film bringing together the contributions of three directors (Srdjan Janicijevic, Darko Mitrevski, and Aleksandar Popovski), exemplifies this propensity to mix generic elements: magical realism blends with urban drama in the first episode, western and horror iconography merge in the second episode, and musical moments mate with comic scenes in the final episode. So too does the Japanese multi-director production Jam Films (2002), a collection of shorts assembled by producer Shin’ya Kawai, famous for his earlier horror film Ring (Ringu, 1998). Beginning with action auteur Ryuhei Kitamura’s “The Messenger,” a dark, supernatural tale about a gangster in a concrete bunker where he is haunted by a female spirit, Jam Films proceeds to combine genres in unexpected ways, subsequently synthesizing science fiction and sex farce (in the third episode, director George Iida’s “Cold Sleep”), hostage drama and black comedy (in the fourth episode, director Tsutsumi Yukihiko’s “Hijiki”), and live action and animation (in the seventh and final episode, director Shunji Iwai’s “Arita”). Moreover, there is a tendency in episode films not only to hybridize but also to allot and gather together distinct spaces for the textual articulation Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of generic difference in a serial fashion. For instance, the four-episode National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (a.k.a. Movie Madness, 1983), later edited down to three segments (when released on home video), chains together radically different film genres whose iconographic disparities are partially played down under the umbrella of parody. Segueing from a Joseph Wambaugh-style police procedural (director Henry Jaglom’s “The Municipalians”) to a domestic drama in the vein of Kramer vs. Kramer (director Bob Giraldi’s “Growing Yourself”) to a takeoff on Judith Krantz-inspired soap operas (another Giraldi-directed episode, “The Success Wanters”) to a disaster movie that recalls the 1977 film Black Sunday (Jaglom’s “The Bomb”), the film is a decided mishmash of generic references, styles, touristic locales (including Rome, Hong Kong, Zurich, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Paris and Saint-Tropez), directorial styles, and characters (including a tough cop, a psychotic killer, a beautiful millionairess, the president of the United States, a group of terrorists, and a ballet company). Similarly, the single-director horror film Creepshow 2 (1987) is ostensibly tethered to the semantic and syntactical coordinates of one particular genre, or rather subgenre: the horror anthology. Yet this Michael Gornickdirected follow-up to George Romero’s successful 1982 film Creepshow features: 1. a road-narrative (“The Hitchhiker”); 2. a modern-day western set in a mining town (“Old Chief Wood’nhead”); and 3. a teen slasher story involving college coeds (“The Raft”). In the same way, another film based on an EC Comic book series of the 1950s, Two-Fisted Tales (1991), features three episodes, each directed by a different filmmaker: 1. Richard Donner’s “Showdown,” a wild west tale; 2.Tom Holland’s “King of the Road,” a drag-racing story set in the 1950s; and 3. Robert Zemeckis’s “Yellow,” an account of trench warfare set during the First World War. Each of these episodes is vastly different from the others in terms of generic affiliation. Such films, far from being exceptions to the rule, represent a general trend in which macro-composite and micro-composite texts either exploit a variety of generic ingredients, so as to engage a broad demographic of viewers, or utilize multiplicity as a means of rehearsing certain time-honored tropes. The latter case is explicitly rendered in the Italian omnibus film Exercises in Style (Esercizi di stile, 1996), a protean adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s famously fragmented text of the same title that features the work of fourteen filmmakers who, one after another, situate a serially repeated love story in different generic contexts (from thriller to comedy to western and so on). Despite their generic multiplicity, the two aforementioned films, Creepshow 2 and Two-Fisted Tales, are nevertheless located under the general heading of horror, based on their Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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shared rhetorical, stylistic, and thematic characteristics as well as their paratextual “proliferations” in the form of advertising and promotional material. Significantly, horror is a category in which multi-episode films proliferate, as demonstrated by the recent explosion of omnibus films such as Rampo Noir (Rampo jigoku, 2005), Trapped Ashes (2006), Little Deaths (2011), Chillerama (2011), V/H/S (2012), and The ABCs of Death (2012). The same can be said of other genres (comedy and drama, for example) yet, in the realm of horror, as Richard Davis states, “the short story is, except in very rare cases, always more effective than the longer work.”36 In comparison, and despite its significance and longevity in American cinema, there have been relatively few episodic varieties of the western to speak of. How the West Was Won, a mammoth 1962 MGM production filmed in Cinerama and trumpeting the talents of four directors (John Ford, George Marshall, Henry Hathaway, and Richard Thorpe), is without a doubt the most famous example. Lesser-known works such as Grim Prairie Tales (1990) and Into the Badlands (1992) are so steeped in supernatural and horror elements that their connection to the western is tenuous at best. And, while most readers will be familiar with Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), this omnibus film directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Romero is one of the surprisingly few examples of episodic narrativity in the realm of science-fiction/ fantasy cinema. Made at Warner Bros. nearly two decades after the classic sci-fi television series of the same title ended its run on primetime television, Twilight Zone: The Movie consists of four individual segments, the last three of which are based on half-hour episodes from the original program created by the late Rod Serling. Like the television series, which was itself derivative of O. Henry’s short stories in terms of the episodes’ narrative structure and twist endings, the film explores the uncanny convergence of time and space in human consciousness as well as the rational fears that are borne out of irrational situations, including time travel, mind/body transference, and wish fulfillment. Though several pages of this book have been devoted to select junior branches of episodic cinema, this focus should not be mistaken as a privileging or exclusionary tactic designed to separate “good” (or worthy) objects of critical scrutiny from the “bad” but rather as an opportunity to ruminate on heretofore overlooked or misunderstood subgenres that share structural characteristics with other cultural productions and aesthetic traditions. Of course, discussions of genre need not focus exclusively on iconographic and structural characteristics of specific categories. Linked to patterns of production, marketing, and consumption, genre builds and manipulates spectatorial expectations about the outcome of a given Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ke y co nce p t s in f ilm s tu di e s 109 story and typically reinforces normative conceptions of class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality that reveal an underlying ideological function. By putting multiple genres in close proximity to one another, an episode film thus has the potential to capsize or destabilize normative ideological patterns through contesting or contradictory appeals to different demographics or sensibilities. Nevertheless, such optimizing of generic diversity and cultural difference within a single text can be understood as a capital-intensive maneuver by studio executives, film producers, and/ or distribution companies to tap into an expanded array of world markets and ironically minimize difference on a global scale. This is perhaps best illustrated in Tales of Manhattan, a single-director episode film (produced at Twentieth Century-Fox during the Second World War and helmed by émigré auteur Julien Duvivier) that not only chains together disparate genres (screwball comedy, backstage musical, concert film, courtroom drama, social problem film, gangster film, and all-black musical) but also stylistically evokes German expressionist cinema as well as French impressionist cinema, both of which are stifled to a certain degree by an American studio system style that betrays the director’s contract status. In terms of national cinema, anthology, omnibus, portmanteau and sketch films pose yet another problem for historians and theorists. As my filmography at the end of this book attests, several episode films are international coproductions. By virtue of their connections to various industrial and cultural bases, such polyglot, pan-European works as Attenzione: guerra! (1961), from Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium; The Moment of Peace (Der Augenblick des Friedens, 1965), from West Germany, France, and Poland; and Death Travels Too Much (Umorismo in nero, 1965), from Italy, Spain, and France, may have benefited from the large number of resources (equipment, facilities, and personnel) made available to them. Yet they were nevertheless expected to satisfy the goals of several companies and appeal to as wide and culturally diverse an audience as possible in as many national markets as possible – a formidable task to say the least and one that likely led to these films’ commercial if not artistic “failures.” Because I am primarily engaged in explicating the experiential dimensions as well as the material metaphors and formal strategies unique to episodic, transauthorial cinema, I have not devoted space to tracing the contours of film legislation laid out by members of the European Economic Community (EEC) and adducing the means by which cooperative developments among filmmaking bodies of Western European nations were sustained during the postwar era. And yet, because so large a percentage of omnibus films are the Franco-Italian, star-studded productions emerging during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s (for example, Tales of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Paris [Les Parisiennes, 1961], RoGoPaG, Spirits of the Dead, and Love and Anger [Amore e rabbia, 1969]), it is necessary to at least gesture toward the historical and industrial contexts in which pan-European cooperatives were erected to stave off the economic effects of Hollywood hegemony (or American cultural imperialism in general) and expand the international market. In this regard, Thomas H. Guback’s The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945 has proven to be a pivotal text for providing firsthand data regarding the bi-, tri-, and multi-lateral investment treaties that allowed European nations to dip into larger state subsidy pools.37 In 1966, seventeen years after a coproduction agreement was signed in October 1949 (when taxes were first imposed on imported American films), French and Italian authorities hammered out a revised policy that expanded the framework of subsequent cultural, as well as political, relations. As Guback states, “During the 1960s, approximately 67 percent of French, 52 percent of Italian, 40 percent of Spanish, and 36 percent of German films were coproduced. By 1966, the purely national film had been eclipsed by the coproduction in each of these nations.”38 With the erection of the European Community (EC) in 1970, and throughout the post-Mitterand period, an even stronger set of initiatives and more coherent production and distribution plan have created what many critics refer to as a kind of cinematic “Europudding.” This has only intensified with the arrival of, for example, MEDIA (Mesures pour Encourager le Développement de l’Industrie de Production Audio-Visuelle), and the release of supranational episode films such as the aforementioned Visions of Europe, a collection of twenty-five five-minute shorts – one from each of the independent states in the newly expanded European Union (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). In the penultimate chapter of this book, I shall return to Visions of Europe as an exemplary case study through which to explore deeper, geopolitical aspects of transauthorial cinema.

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Part II

Get on the Omnibus: Case Studies in Transauthorial Cinema

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C H A PT E R 5

Wartime “Consensus Pictures” and the “Housing” of History: from Forever and a Day to Dead of Night

“ ‘A nation?’ says Bloom. “Nation is the same people living in the same place.” James Joyce, Ulysses

The history of omnibus films dates back to the first two decades of the twentieth century when vaudeville shows and other variety-based forms of entertainment were still attracting audiences in cities throughout North America and Europe. It was not until the 1940s, however, that a flurry of such productions swept into movie theaters around the world. Indeed, the wartime and postwar periods were bursting with multi-director episode films from both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the United States and Britain, although the French and Italian film industries would soon get into the swing of things with such jointly produced features as Cab No. 13 (Fiacre 13, 1948) and The Seven Deadly Sins (Les sept péchés capitaux, 1952) – motion pictures made around the time of these two countries’ first coproduction agreement.1 This was a sign, perhaps, of the need to encourage support for collectivist ideals as well as the efforts on the part of industry leaders to develop or maintain production standards during a time of national crisis and urban renewal. As such, widely consumed narratives posing possible solutions to interpersonal and social conflicts, especially those films in which the collaborative participation of multiple directors and dozens of other creative personnel could be mapped onto the broader patterns of consensus-building, deserve attention. During the Second World War, members of the Soviet film industry were the first to throw their hats into the ring with a string of “Fighting Film Albums” (Boevoi kinosbornik), each a collection of short films about the armed forces featuring the contributions of several directors. Released in the Soviet Union throughout the fall of 1941 and into the early spring of the following year (both in theaters and to soldiers on the front), the twelve omnibus films comprising this series celebrate the everyday heroism of embattled doctors, nurses, peasants, and resistance fighters Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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while emphasizing the brutality of German soldiers and firing squads gunning down Russian and Polish civilians. As the film historian Peter Kenez states, The content, style and quality of the shorts that made up the kinosborniki varied greatly. They included humorous sketches, Allied documentaries on subjects such as the British navy or the air war over London, and simple dramas. The unifying thread in the first collection was provided by the imaginary figure of Maxim, a hero of a famous film of the 1930s, who introduced the shorts.

According to Kenez, this “Fighting Film” collection of omnibus films deserves special attention because this was a uniquely Soviet genre. In no other country would it have been possible to give the audiences such obvious propaganda. Americans and British and even the Germans would have found such products counterproductive. Soviet directors, on the other hand, had no need to disguise what they were doing. They could do this because their audiences had been prepared by decades of experience and because the agitation and propaganda machinery were already in existence.2

Nevertheless, following the successful release of these films in the Soviet Union, the two studios involved in their production – Lenfilm Studios (based in Leningrad) and Mosfilm Studios (based in Moscow) – turned their attention to the American market, and quickly cobbled together a compilation of episodes that had been deemed the best of the series. As a result, the seventy-minute, eight-episode film This is the Enemy! (1942) was released in the United States in the summer of 1942, where it was attached to Russian War Relief efforts in New York and other metropolitan areas and greeted with less than sympathetic reviews.3 New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, for instance, felt that it was “impossible to regard This is the Enemy! as anything but a piece of demagoguery – well-intentioned, perhaps, but extreme in its theatrical method.”4 Though at this point in the war’s history, American film producers and studios were cautiously hesitant to make what might be called “atrocity pictures” focusing on Nazi Germany’s genocidal incursions into occupied Poland, Yugoslavia, and other European countries, their Russian equivalents had no such reluctance. This is the Enemy!, as well as the twelve “Fighting Film Albums” that preceded it, are indicative of their perhaps unsubtle but passion-fueled attempts to “arouse popular sentiment” and engender widespread support for the war effort. However admirable its goal, the film was dismissed by Crowther as “inflammatory . . . crude and melodramatic” propaganda in which Germans are “presented as utterly contemptible – porcine or lupine, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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invariably – and the heroes are stout, courageous fellows, sharp-witted and even frolicsome.”5 A very different critical reception met another omnibus film released during the Second World War. That film, an Anglo-American collaboration between distributor RKO Radio Pictures and a vast assembly of British filmmakers and actors, was given the evocative title Forever and a Day (1943). As mentioned in a previous chapter, this star-studded, moraleboosting spectacle, like other wartime releases such as Stage Door Canteen (1943), Hollywood Canteen (1944), and Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), is so fertile as a text filled with celebrity-based signifiers that it actually offers, beneath its veneer of quaint, propagandistic intent, a heteroglossia of rival, sometimes oxymoronic and incongruous, discourses. Nevertheless, its initial 1943 release at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City was greeted with almost unanimous critical support from the press, including the New York Times, the New York Post, and PM New York, and it was thought to be an early contender for Oscars the following year. This goodwill was perhaps a response to the philanthropic nature of the production itself, a “labor of love” whose box-office proceeds were given to various charities throughout the world, including the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (in the United States) and the American Red Cross.6 It was, to borrow the word of one reviewer, “worthy” of accolades insofar as it not only proffered a utopian vision of cross-cultural partnership at a time of international distress7 but also engendered a spirit of charitable giving among the movie-going public who were essentially participating in the British war relief effort by purchasing tickets and attending screenings.

Building a “Bridge across the Atlantic” The brainchild of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, a British thespian who originally conceived the film as a war-relief charity appeal with the provisional title Let the Rafters Ring, the 1943 RKO release Forever and a Day was created through the combined efforts of close to two hundred actors (seventyeight of them famous for their work in Hollywood), twenty-one screenwriters, four cinematographers, and six noted filmmakers in addition to Hardwicke. Those half-dozen directors – Frank Lloyd, Herbert Wilcox, Robert Stevenson, Victor Saville, René Clair, and Edmund Goulding – had individually made names for themselves as proficient yet artistically inclined filmmakers willing to take risks with their material. Hardwicke, a Shakespearean-trained actor capable of creating sympathetically intelligent yet acerbically tough and sometimes wicked characters (such as Mr Kentley in Hitchcock’s Rope [1948], Edward IV in Olivier’s Richard Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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III [1955], and Pharaoh Sethi in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments [1956]), had never produced or directed a film prior to Forever and a Day. Throughout its production, he, along with production coordinator Lloyd Richards, officiated over the proceedings as an overseeing eye, guiding the other six directors through their scenes so as to sustain a seamless thematic, tonal, and stylistic continuity, diplomatically ironing out any differences of opinion between the many creative hands. Apart from the stage crew and technicians, none of the people involved in the making of this film received any payment; all of the actors, writers, and directors worked for free, off and on, over a two-year period beginning in 1941, sacrificing some of their personal ambitions to this truly collaborative project which had to be shot in their spare time (evenings, Sundays, and vacations between other pictures) and which was carefully orchestrated around a calendar of publicity dates.8 As Britain’s way of thanking those nations offering material and moral support during the Second World War, the film, which was promoted as an altruistic benefit yet commodified as an object of capitalist consumption, could be seen as the cinematic equivalent of such United Nations relief funds as the “Bundles for Britain” program (which allocated donations to numerous war-stricken communities) as well as a means through which the mass culture industry galvanizes public support and political endorsements around potentially profit-making ventures. The following suggestions, written by RKO’s publicity department as part of a letter issued to American exhibitors, illuminate just how important a carnival-like atmosphere was to the film’s presentation: Treat your presentation of Forever and a Day as one of those important occasions worthy of official cooperation from local authorities and bespeaking civic and civil backing. Call attention to the fact that the picture paints the spirit of free peoples in contrast to those under the heel of dictatorship, and shows the toughness and tenacity of the British and the unity in ideals of British and Americans. Get a Mayor’s proclamation, if you can, both on account of the subject matter of the picture and the worthy cause to which the proceeds from its distribution are to be devoted. Set into action all the committees of women’s clubs, civic organizations, educational societies and the like, getting behind the picture for the reasons above cited.

The machinery was set in motion in late January of 1943. Theater owners in separate municipalities were called into civic action to muster up germinal interest for the film. They in turn acted as mobilizing agents, propelled to motivate audiences to attend screenings where they would be subjected to subtly propagandistic messages about cross-Atlantic cooperation. Perhaps, sitting for two hours in a docile state of defenseless surrenNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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war t ime “ c o ns e ns us pict u r e s ” 117 der, audiences were subject to manipulation or indoctrination. After all, the physical conditions of movie-going, as Jean-Louis Baudry suggests, produces a hallucinatory experience akin to dreaming and incorporates “the darkness of the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects which result from the projection of images, moving images.”9 For wartime audiences, however, overwhelmed with combat pictures and looking for escape in those dream theaters, the very format and structure of Forever and a Day – a multi-episode film filled with intertextual “departures” in the guise of stars – undercut such pessimistic claims about spectatorial docility and remind us of the agency inscribed in omnibus film viewing. Considering the unusual nature of this star-filled film, as well as the circumstances surrounding its production and exhibition, it is amazing that Forever and a Day has thus far received only a modicum of critical attention. Surely no film of the wartime era managed to tally such an impressive array (and number) of actors, several of whom had made careers out of playing well-known historical figures and literary icons – individuals whose “associative baggage,” so to speak, influences our reception of their performances. Despite its performative “heft” and the combined gravitas of its main attractions (including the brief but memorable appearance of Charles Laughton who plays a lugubrious, sherry-sipping butler named Bellamy), Forever and a Day has been largely forgotten or treated as a rather old-fashioned type of “light” entertainment undeserving of critical scrutiny. The film’s somewhat “busy” or “convoluted” storyline might be one reason for this oversight or rejection. Before ruminating further on this omnibus film’s extratextual significance as a site of meaningful discourse about the relationship between cultural productions and national institutions focused on wartime and postwar rebuilding, it will be helpful to dwell on (and figuratively dwell in) its narrative, the main “character” of which is itself a dwelling – a house, built in 1804, that metaphorically represents the nation and through which the film’s many characters pass. The film begins with an offscreen narrator explaining that Forever and a Day, a production that took two years to complete, “was finally made possible only through the cordial cooperation of all the Hollywood studios and the technical branches of the industry.” Accompanied by an extreme long shot of the River Thames and St Paul’s Cathedral behind it, the voice intones, “We hope that this truly cooperative effort may symbolize the common efforts of ourselves and our allies to make secure the ideals for which this picture stands.” The scene that then follows is set in the lobby of the Rex Hotel, where a young American newspaperman is dropping off his room key before leaving. As he is about to return to the United States Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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after covering for his newspaper the Luftwaffe bombing of London, this war correspondent, Gates T. Pomfret (Kent Smith), receives a cable from his father to arrange for both the sale of the old Trimble–Pomfret house (which belongs to their family) and the acquisition before he leaves of a huge portrait hanging inside it (a painting of the admiral who built it in 1804). A close-up of the message shows that it is dated March 8, 1941, establishing the frame narrative’s temporal setting. Leaving the hotel, Gates encounters a doorman and a cabby. This moment offers the first of several “celebrity sightings” throughout the film, brief encounters with well-known actors whose appearances in Forever and a Day are necessarily fleeting. Today, when audiences first encounter Victor McLaglen as the hotel doorman Archibald Spavin, they might expect – if they have seen the actor’s roughneck performances in John Ford’s The Informer (1935), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Quiet Man (1952) – an epic-sized brawl to ensue. But to those people who know that McLaglen was in real life a hotel doorman before he was discovered by a British film producer, the space he occupies in the film brims with authority and verisimilitude. Toward the end of his brief appearance in the film, we see him quibbling with a crotchety cabby played by Billy Bevan. The latter actor, like McLaglen, often played subsidiary characters skirting along the margins of film narratives, on the periphery of the frame. Here he is again playing a comic-relief taxi driver, something he would do over the course of his career (for instance, in Piccadilly Jim [1936], Love from a Stranger [1947], and Terror by Night [1946]). Audience foreknowledge of the two performers’ bodies of work, as well as their onscreen and offscreen personas, informs our spectatorial understanding of their roles in Forever and a Day. Following this first scene of the film, Gates reaches the address just as another German invasion begins overhead. In the cellar of the Trimble– Pomfret house, now turned into a public air-raid shelter where a poster of Churchill with the slogan “Let us go forward together” conspicuously hangs, he meets Lesley Trimble (Ruth Warwick) who wants to buy the place. Gates at first scoffs at Lesley’s compulsion to purchase a house that could be destroyed at any moment by Nazi bombs, and his frivolous attitude and superficially silly demeanor irritate her. Hoping to convince this most typical Yank that the building is a sanctum of dust-riddled memories and spectral remnants of the past as well as a living page from Britain’s annals, she tells him the story of the old structure, rendered as a series of flashbacks which vividly paints a narrative panorama of English life over the course of 140 years. Through these analeptic episodes we are granted a nostalgic view of the many romantic and not-so-romantic confrontations Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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war t ime “ c o ns e ns us pict u r e s ” 119 that took place within the house between various members of the Trimble and Pomfret families. Significantly, it was Forever and a Day’s emphasis on the nation’s “ancestral homes, knights, and feudal aristocracy” – the semantic “stuff” of the film’s syntactical linking of England’s past glories, presented in piecemeal fashion – that most concerned members of the United States Office of War Information’s Motion Picture Bureau, a point to which I shall return momentarily. Lesley begins her tale of the house’s origins with the story of fiery Admiral Eustace Trimble (C. Aubrey Smith) who built the house in 1804 as a stronghold of defense against Napoleon’s impending encroachment as well as a dwelling in which subsequent generations of Trimbles could be born and raised. We are situated in the episode by way of a shot dissolve between 1941’s backdrop of flames licking the sky and 1804’s landscape of bucolic splendor where the sound of chirping birds takes the place of detonating bombs. Directed by Herbert Wilcox, this episode not only details the construction of the house and the first family to live in it but also establishes the mortal stakes that figure throughout the rest of the film, which is furthermore concerned with familial legacies and the transference of traditions from one generation to the next. Toward the end of this episode, the admiral’s son, Bill (Ray Milland), dies in a battle at Trafalgar but leaves his wife (Anna Neagle, Wilcox’s real-life wife) and an infant son to carry on the tradition of ownership and control. Like Wilcox, director Robert Stevenson was married to one of the Annas of Forever and a Day, in this case Anna Lee who does little more in her one scene than walk down a staircase in a bridal procession as if it were the climax of the entire picture. Stevenson directed the next episode, a short sequence in which the implacable Ambrose Pomfret (Claude Rains) unscrupulously buys the house in 1821 after the admiral’s death. The scheming man lives out the rest of his short life there in misery. Considering the fact that Stevenson would eventually be recognized for his directorial work in ebullient live-action Disney films, such as The Absent Minded Professor (1961), Mary Poppins (1964), The Love Bug (1969), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), contemporary audiences might find it unusual that his contribution to Forever and a Day is its darkest section, in terms of both theme and mise en scène, more strikingly stylized than any of the other sequences. Conversely, Victor Saville’s episode, which immediately follows, seems light and frivolously comedic compared to the somber scenes of Ambrose that preceded it. Here, in a section of the narrative that takes place in 1845, Pomfret’s grandson, Dexter (Ian Hunter), marries the admiral’s great granddaughter, Mildred (Jessie Matthews), blending the two families in a way that will significantly impact the house’s “life” in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the years to come. Thanks to the inveigling and “feminine” skulduggery of his new wife, he makes a fortune in the iron works. Mildred, meanwhile, is shaking things up as a social revolutionary, striving to change the hygiene habits of her countrymen and countrywomen. We are then introduced to Dexter’s grandson, Anthony TrimblePomfret (Edward Everett Horton). Anthony, a technophobe who refers to a newly installed telephone as “a sheer waste of money,” is knighted by Queen Victoria at her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It is his son, Augustus (Wendell Hullet), who goes to America where he will eventually become the father of Gates. At the same time, one of Sir Anthony’s housemaids, the impish Jenny Jones (Ida Lupino), takes a break from fretting over the newly installed yet temperamental gas oven to marry a coalman, Jim Trimble (Brian Aherne), a direct descendant of the old admiral. Together the newly-wed couple goes to America. This section of the film was directed by René Clair, a Parisian filmmaker who, before making his own journey to the United States in 1941, became famous in France and abroad as the director of À nous la liberté (1931), Entr’acte (1924), and Paris qui dort (1924). Set during the Gay Nineties period, Clair’s episode in Forever and a Day is a miniature version of the longer, yet equally nimble, feature-length comedies and fantasy films that this transplanted émigré made in Hollywood, including I Married a Witch (1942) and It Happened Tomorrow (1944). Another of the film’s contributors, director Edmund Goulding, could likewise be said to evoke his broader body of work in his episode. Set in 1917, it focuses on Jenny and Jim’s son, Ned (Robert Cummings), who travels to London as an American soldier and finds that the ex-Pomfret home has been converted into a select boarding house. Masquerading as “The Trimble Hall Hotel” (a less resplendent variation of the titular space in Goulding’s earlier ensemble film, Grand Hotel [1932]), the boarding house is residence to a disparate group of individuals, including the mother and father of a prestigious young British fighter pilot, Captain Archibald Barringer. Smitten by the receptionist Marjorie (Merle Oberon), the American doughboy marries her. Meanwhile, the Barringers (elegantly played by Gladys Cooper and Roland Young) and the other guests of the boarding house eagerly await the return of Archibald, the “conquering hero,” only to receive news that he has died in a French battle. Eventually, Ned, too, is killed in action during combat in Flanders. Marjorie, using money that has been willed to her by her dead husband’s parents, restores the dwelling. Director Goulding, after having been wounded in the First World War, emigrated to the United States to direct such popular films as the aforementioned Grand Hotel, the 1938 remake Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of Howard Hawks’s Dawn Patrol (in which First World War fighter pilots sing “Hoorah for the Next Man Who Dies”), and the two 1946 screen adaptations of W. Somerset Maugham’s novels, Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge. Like Goulding’s romantic weepie Dark Victory (1939), in which Bette Davis plays an heiress who copes with mortal resignation and failing eyesight after discovering that she has a brain tumor which will eventually lead to death, this sequence of Forever and a Day (which, incidentally, features actor Robert Coote as an officer who is blind) highlights the difficulties involved in maintaining one’s enthusiastic, outward disposition and frame of mind in the face of inevitable tragedy. At the end of Goulding’s episode, we learn that Lesley, our 1941 heroine, is the daughter of Ned and Marjorie. That makes her Gates’s fifth cousin. At this point, the film returns us to the present-day setting, as Lesley is finishing her story. Her rationale for wanting to buy the house is now clear. Suddenly, a Nazi bomb hits the old house and nearly demolishes it but the sturdy beams put up by the admiral years ago hold fast and no one in the cellar is hurt. Gates and Lesley, surveying the damage and stepping through the rubble, decide to rebuild it together, brick by brick, so that it will stand “forever and a day,” as the ongoing symbol of Britain’s tenacious courage, its peoples’ dogged pursuit of peace and happiness in the face of national calamity. The house is therefore presented as a Rock of Gibraltar built out of love (though it has been partially leveled by the Nazi bombs of Hitler’s blitzkrieg at the end) and, regardless of the number of stars, is the film’s central character. In his 1943 review of the film, Edgar Price summarized its story as that “of an English home – a man’s castle. A solid structure, it stands for all that is decent and noble. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world when it was erected in 1804.”10 The Trimble–Pomfret house, as it undergoes both subtle and significant changes over the years, is an archetypal paradigm of English history, a space internally demarcated by gender and class divisions yet outwardly inclusive, at least superficially. The dilapidated nature of the house during the First World War allegorically mimics the state of Britain after the turn of the century when doubt and disillusionment (spawned from a domestic landscape that saw the rigidity of gender divisions undermined by the constitutional demands of the suffragettes, the demographic shift to smaller families, and the British woman’s altered sense of identity) began to set in after a period of tremendous wealth and security (for some, at least) under Queen Victoria.11 Gates, ignorant of its significance as an objective correlative, refers to the house as a “weird old heap.” It has “something in common with a pile of bones,” he casually remarks. When a character who was born in the house Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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says, “Americans haven’t much appreciation for old houses, have they?”, Gates replies, “Oh, yes. We like them . . . up to ten years. After that, of course, being a generous people, we turn them over to the termites.” Forever and a Day was marketed to the American public as a joint venture between British and Hollywood forces, a strategy that analogously aligns with the representation of the principal romantic characters in the film’s 1941 sequence: Smith’s Gates T. Pomfret and Warrick’s Lesley Trimble. By the end of the film, these characters, signifying the youthful “can-do” spirit of young people in the United States and Britain, courageously work together to “rebuild the world and rid it forever of despotism.”12 This is an idea that was applauded by members of the Office of War Information’s (OWI) Bureau of Motion Pictures who screened the film in January of 1943, prior to its general theatrical release. As Larry Williams, one of the two OWI viewers (along with Dorothy Jones), remarked in his analysis of the film, “Forever and a Day will unquestionably go a long way toward achieving its goal of creating Anglo-American goodwill.”13 RKO’s marketing strategy – its promotion of the film as a cross-Atlantic collaboration – echoes, in its vacillation between two distinct yet mutually dependent national identities, the idealized sentiment tucked inside Walt Whitman’s poem “Two Together,” which includes the line, “Someday I’d like to see a bridge across the Atlantic.” That metaphorical bridge, in reality, however, was not as solid as the studio wished to suggest. Though, in the opening seconds of the film, we are immediately told by the offscreen voiceover that Forever and a Day encapsulates and demonstrates the “common effort,” teamwork, and esprit de corps necessary for an enterprise founded on lofty principles, it nevertheless forges a somewhat schematized opposition between the two nations, regardless of the potential for cross-cultural romantic coupling embedded within the text. The narrative’s many dichotomized differences in customs and social etiquette are not as smoothly glossed over by superficial national/military alliances as they are in Herbert Wilcox’s I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945) which was titled A Yank in London for its American release. Although the “T” in Gates T. Pomfret stands for “Trimble,” an appellative signifier metonymically linked throughout the film to the traditions of “Old England,” in the opening scene he dismisses the idea of staying any longer in London, and only hesitantly decides to go to the house. Speaking to the hotel staff, he admits, “Frankly, I never did go much for the shock-and-shell stuff . . . If I’m going to collect shrapnel I’ll do it on my own country’s time.” Moreover, he effectively disregards his own English ancestry by severing the Trimble part of his name, explaining at one point, “we [the American people] don’t go much for the double-barreled names back home.” Like Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Smith’s character in the previous year’s Cat People (1942), Gates is an average-Joe American who becomes involved with a mysterious woman from “another place” and, regardless of the attraction between them, he remains entrenched in his culturally delimited view of the world, at least until the end. Like Robert Cummings’s character Ned Trimble (who, in the 1917 sequence of the film, unwittingly mocks hackneyed British aphorisms), Gates cannot easily surmount his own stereotypical American attitudes and behavior, and is only able to articulate a more sensitive range of emotions to Lesley in the film’s concluding scene, amid the rubble that necessitates their union. A summation of Forever and a Day’s paradoxical attitude toward stereotypical “Americanisms” occurs when Major Garrow (Nigel Bruce) tells Marjorie in a scripted yet unfilmed section of the First World War episode, “Coming over in droves, so they tell me. Great place, you know, America. Great continent . . . Never been there, of course . . . but great country. Hardly call them civilized, of course, but great people, once their spirit’s been awakened.” This quote demonstrates one way that cultural distinctions between Yanks and Brits are constructed and maintained, and how asymmetrical relationships are founded on the self’s presumed superiority over the “other.” This was a problematic delineation, no doubt, but one that accorded with a once-imperialistic nation’s colonial adventures of the previous century – its history of conquest within “uncivilized” lands. Frank Lloyd, one of the thirty-six founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and best known for his directorial work on Cavalcade (1933) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), directed the two 1941 sequences that bookend the film. As opening and closing scenes, they frame the flashback sequences that reveal many of the events leading up to the house’s wrecked state. Forever and a Day, in fact, recapitulates much of the subject matter found in Lloyd’s slightly more jingoistic Cavalcade. The latter film, like other motion pictures derived from Noel Coward’s plays, such as In Which We Serve (1942), deftly interweaves public events and private lives. It paints a richly impressionistic pageant of English life from New Year’s Eve 1899 until 1933, showing how the lives and fortunes of two British families intersect during a tumultuous post-imperial climate that saw the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic and the Great War, all with a gaggle of servants thrown in for comic relief. Moreover, there exists in Cavalcade an undercurrent of extreme nationalism marked by what can only be construed as a deeply reactionary and belligerent foreign policy, one that attempts, with an unabashedly sentimental love of the English class system, to maintain the status quo.14 That love of country, however, is perhaps even more Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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emphatic in the film’s source material, Coward’s play, which ends with the entire cast singing “God Save the King” after a final toast which contains a Forever and a Day-like message of hope, with characters proclaiming, “Let us couple the future of England with the past of England.” Compared to these earlier cultural productions, however, Forever and a Day exposes, beneath the veneer of English emotional reticence, a deep-seated romanticism that can fuel, rather than deflate, cross-cultural cooperation between different national representatives. While RKO’s involvement in the production of Forever and a Day precipitated the studio’s joint production and distribution deal with J. Arthur Rank in hopes of creating and marketing films cast with both British and American talent for an expanding world market, there still existed a decisive split between the two nations. London’s film industry had been, since the 1920s, dominated (or, as Robert Sklar suggests, “strangled”) by the economic, stylistic, linguistic, and political systems particular to, or associated with, Hollywood,15 and, by the 1940s, members of that industry were beginning to conceive of ways to weaken the hegemonic hold of American cinema over the British public without completely severing ties to its financial and material resources. A lengthy editorial from the London Times (dated July 19, 1945), as quoted in the New York Times, emphasized a growing anxiety regarding American filmmaking, particularly those dramas which manipulatively depict English homefront struggles during the Second World War: Hollywood during the war had failed to understand what German occupation meant in the countries overrun by the Nazis . . . Hollywood, while occasionally condescending to portray the American scene shows an insatiable desire to attempt to interpret Europe according to her own peculiar ideas. Her efforts are generous in intention and perhaps effective, but as propaganda, to show the countries of Europe under German occupation, were pitiful not only in their lack of insight into the meaning of occupation but also of the power to create the feel and flavor of the cities, Brussels, Prague, Oslo, and Paris, where the action was supposed to be taking place. England has an irresistible attraction for her, but Mrs. Miniver is a rose which does not easily transplant, and England, as Hollywood is accustomed to present her, is little more than a quaint affair of lath plaster and misconception.

Although the above comments were not directed at Forever and a Day, the film was singled out as a “useful contribution to the American war effort” by the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures which not only viewed the film prior to its general theatrical release but also read its script. In a response to the script, dated January 5, 1943, the bureau representatives extolled the manner in which the fragmented narrative “illustrates the ties of blood, tradition, and spirit which bind America and England together.” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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war t ime “ c o ns e ns us pict u r e s ” 125 Yet the OWI also “wished that a more complete representation of all the English classes had been made” – a difficult task for any film but one that could perhaps be best achieved (if only partially) by means of an omnibus production which is “democratic” in its capacity to unite disparate (narrative) communities. As the bureau’s script reader goes on to state, England is, after all, not all knights, and gentry, and ancestral homes. England is also laborers, and shop keepers, and men of business. Our alliance with Great Britain is predicated on the basis of our desire for a world in which men and women of all stations in life can live with insured freedom. Therefore, the suggestion that the England and the English way of life for which we are fighting in an England peopled largely by landed and monied gentility gives only a half-picture which does not perform as great a service as it might otherwise have done.16

It is telling that, despite being a very “full” film, one that is “overcrowded” with both stories and celebrities, Forever and a Day failed to satisfy the OWI’s desire to see a truly diverse range of identities on the screen. As a “half-picture” highlighting only a portion of the British society that is purportedly represented both within and by the structure of the strong yet crumbling building, the film is symptomatic of the challenges laid before producers of omnibus films. While many such producers might endeavor to bring together, within a single narrative and perhaps within a single setting, a broad cross-section of humanity representing different social classes and ethnic backgrounds, even this most amenable type of discursive storytelling comes up short on many occasions. Nevertheless, a handful of other single-director and multi-director episode films have attempted to fully achieve what the creative personnel behind Forever and a Day strove unsuccessfully to do, using the inclusive, yet fragmentary, narrative form as a vehicle through which to foster a sense of national belonging and cultural cohesion while reminding audiences that true togetherness depends on relational elasticity and a willingness to breach class and racial boundaries. Some viewers might find this argument untenable, given the laudable array of social positions on display in the film. From the landowner, played by Claude Rains, to the maidservant, played by Ida Lupino, to the cockney plumbers, played by Buster Keaton and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Forever and a Day allots space for social difference, albeit along a hierarchical scale (from high to low) and through a reliance on famous actors whose associative meanings as signifiers complicate monolithic readings of the film. Yet it does not do what another wartime episodic drama – director David MacDonald’s This England (1941) – does. It does not couple “national resistance with a local resistance to oppressive, neglectful or corrupt aristocratic landlords,” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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something that distinguishes the latter motion picture which, as Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards state, “adds a distinctly radical element which mirrors the shift to the left in the national mood and the desire for a juster, fairer and more humane postwar society.”17 This England, produced by British National Films and given the title Our Heritage for its Scottish release, similarly adopts a flashback structure to tell the story of a farm and village. Compared with Forever and a Day, there are fewer episodes – just four – spread out over a much broader historical period, from 1086 (following the Norman Conquest) to 1588 (as the Spanish Armada approaches) to 1804 (at the height of the Napoleonic wars) to, finally, the First World War, encompassing the years 1914 to 1918. Like the 1943 RKO film, this British production relies upon the presence of a visiting American journalist, John Rookeby (John Clements), as a kind of receptacle into which information about England’s past can be poured. Besides simply trying to “explain Britain to America,” though, This England “stresses the timelessness and eternity of England and the English people by having the same actors play the same symbolic roles in each episode: vicar, doctor, blacksmith, publican, and in particular yeoman farmer . . . [who] are prepared to fight and kill to defend the land.” Moreover, “in locating the nation’s source of strength in an alliance of country gentry and the rural working classes against foreign aggression in an unyielding defence of the land, the film provided the necessary consensual message for a national effort in wartime.” according to Adgate and Richards.18 Culminating with a recitation of John of Gaunt’s muchquoted “This England” speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II (a staple of Second World War popular culture), the film ends on a triumphant note and leaves a lingering sentiment that the working classes and peasantry, as much as the landowners, in this “consensus picture” are responsible for the nation-building project. Nevertheless, contemporaneous critics, while receptive to such patriotic themes, dismissed the film’s poor craftsmanship and lamented its deployment of an “episodic structure,” which, in the words of one reviewer, “robs it of constructional unity and dramatic momentum.”19 Less dismissive was the critical commentary attending the theatrical release of Dead of Night, a 1945 Ealing Studios production that has been lauded for its sophisticated treatment of time and space, among other things. As the only omnibus film included in Anthony Slide’s 1985 publication Fifty Classic British Films, this classic horror film has already been the subject of numerous critical studies and, as such, will not take pride of place among this section’s case studies. As a way of charting out the historical trajectory of England’s episodic film output during the postwar Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 5.1 and 5.2  An unassuming country cottage is the setting for the circular frame narrative in the British multi-director horror classic Dead of Night (1945).

period, however (leading up to Quartet and its two sequels which will be discussed in the following chapter), I shall use Dead of Night as a pivot point around which a series of subsequent productions will be discussed.

Completing the Circle and Starting from Scratch Unlike many of the films discussed in this book, Dead of Night, shot at Ealing Studios and famous for its O. Henry-style twists at the end of each shock-filled tale, enjoyed commercial success equal to the critical accolades heaped upon it. The five scenarios comprising this British omnibus production – two directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, the others by Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer – consign semantic elements associated with supernatural horror (a group of strangers gathered at an English country house; a spectral hearse driver; a cursed antique mirror; a golfing ghost; and, most famously, a ventriloquist’s sinister dummy) to a Chinese-box nightmare-narrative. The film’s unrelenting (re)statement of oneiric theme suggests a kind of spatial and temporal imprisonment made permanent by the narrative’s cyclical denouement, a “resolution” of infinite revisitations that seems bleaker than death. The circular, never-ending narrative within Dead of Night might remind readers of the work produced by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luís Borges whose 1941 collection The Garden of Forking Paths (El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) has also been seen as anticipating the advent of hypertext fiction. Indeed, this anthology of eight stories, subsequently included in the 1944 volume Ficciones, not only proved to be influential on several literary and philosophical movements but also provided a template for subsequent cinematic and computer web-based attempts to convey an idea of “the infinite” through finite structures. Much of what has been written about Borges’s collection focuses on the last of the eight stories, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which a Chinese-German double agent in Britain during the First World War, Yu Tsun, upon taking the gently winding road away from his pursuer, imagines “a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars.”20 Yu Tsun reflects back on the garden of his dead ancestor, Ts’ui Pen, a metaphysician who spent thirteen years of his life writing a book of infinities. In the village of Ashgrove, Yu Tsun meets British Sinologist Stephen Albert who has collected and translated Ts’ui Pen’s manuscript into an inexhaustible novel in which the hero dies in one chapter yet is “alive again” in the next. Initially dumbstruck by the idea that “a book could be infinite,” Albert surmised that it could only be “a cyclical, or circular, volume, a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on indefinitely.” He likens it to “that night at the center of the 1001 Nights, when the queen Scheherazade (through some magical distractedness on the part of the copyist) begins to retell, verbatim, the story of the 1000 Nights, with the risk of returning once again to the night on which she is telling it – and so on, ad infinitum.”21 Produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios just a few years after Borges’s story was first published, Dead of Night was also prefigured by a much earlier flashback-filled British film, Friday the Thirteenth (1933). This Gainsborough production, directed by Victor Saville, distributed Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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by Gaumont, and “intended as a vehicle for virtually all of the Gaumont stars,” features a Grand Hotel-style gathering of the studio’s top talent, several of whom take center stage in suspenseful vignettes connected by a London bus crash.22 A very different narrative device is used to link the five episodes (contributed by four directors) in Balcon’s production, a somewhat surreal omnibus film in which an upper middle-class farmhouse in Kent is transformed into a hothouse of dread and desire when Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) and five additional guests recount chilling, supernatural episodes in their lives. The frame story, which shows each

Figures 5.3 and 5.4  The circular narrative framework of Dead of Night, which culminates with a shot of Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arriving at the English country house where he had earlier arrived (at the beginning of the film), is represented visually through recurring circle patterns.

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member of the group of strangers speaking in turn, is reinitiated at the end of the film to suggest an infinity of repetition not unlike that described by Albert in the Borges story. Thus, the terrifying uncertainty at the core of this British picture contrasts the certainty of endless repetition marked by its frame story which, like a Chinese box, is a dream containing several dreams, each one filled with flashbacks, following the other until the circle is complete. Other similarities between Dead of Night and “The Garden of Forking Paths” abound, such as the German/British binary that Borges uses to oppose body and mind, physical strength and metaphysical ­imagination; in Dead of Night that dichotomy is inversely figured in the guises of two individuals: Dr. van Straaten (Frederick Valk), an overly rational psychoanalyst, and Walter Craig, the aforementioned protagonist whose uncanny dreamworld cannot be so easily explained away or exorcised. The double motif personified by the antagonistic van Straaten and Craig in the frame story spreads throughout each of the five embedded tales (“Christmas Party” and “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; “Golfing Story,” directed by Charles Crichton; “Hearse Driver,” directed by Basil Dearden; and “The Haunted Mirror,” directed by Robert Hamer) wherein characters find themselves reflected by doppelgängers of sorts. Like Craig, an architect who has been summoned to Pilgrim’s Farm to begin reconstructing the old farmhouse, Albert has devoted part of his life to reconstructing Ts’ui Pen’s puzzling text, the manuscripts of which the Englishman has compiled and translated. Significantly, in trying to grasp the notion that a book could be infinite, Albert conjectures that what Ts’ui Pen had in mind was “a platonic, hereditary sort of work, passed down from father to son, in which each new individual would add a chapter.” These words conjure the transauthorial dimensions of Dead of Night and other omnibus films in which different directors add a new “chapter” to a series organized around a core idea or proposition, thereby suggesting several paths or futures emanating outward from a narrative center while, paradoxically, delineating a cyclical pattern indicative of a single future (which, to further compound the paradox, is the past). Ultimately, Stephen Albert puts his faith in the forked-path, rather than strictly cyclical, variety of storytelling, for he realizes that, In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts’ui Pen, the character chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, thereby, “several futures,” several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.23

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Perhaps Dead of Night’s most significant contribution to the history of omnibus storytelling lies in its ability to reconcile antagonistic attitudes toward death through an aggressively repetitive foregrounding not only of human mortality but also of narrative mortality. Because its audience members encounter numerous hermeneutic reconfigurations (tale to tale, they must literally “start from scratch” with newly sprung characters and plots), this and a few other horror-based anthology and omnibus films show change to be the operative means of traversing painful thresholds within a narrative situation and, more importantly, within a life situation. This premise would be easier to entertain had the multi-episode horror film received the amount of critical attention necessary to elevate it from its status as a cinematic curio to a viable, credible area of academic research. As I have argued elsewhere, however, the subject represents a noticeable gap even in studies confined to the horror genre, and, whenever such episodic works as Twice Told Tales (1963), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967), The House that Dripped Blood (1970), Asylum (1972), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Vault of Horror (1973), and From Beyond the Grave (1973) are discussed by media scholars, they are often singled out for their “cheesiness,” “cheapness,” and “unreality.”24 Consequently, these single-director American and British productions, as well as more recent multi-director works, such as Body Bags (1993), Campfire Tales (1997), Terror Tract (2000), Dark Stories: Tales from Beyond the Grave (2001), Werewolf Tales (2003), and Tales from the Beyond (2004), have been marginalized to the point of near oblivion, a trend that will, I hope, be reversed in the years to come. In contrast to the critical hostility that characterizes the reception of multi-episode horror films (with the notable exception of Dead of Night), the three omnibus films discussed in the next chapter – Quartet, Trio, and Encore – are among the most important examples of episodic cinema in the English-speaking world. This importance is due less to any aesthetic or technical breakthroughs on the parts of their creators than to their paradigm-shifting attempts to chain together disparate stories lacking overt thematic and stylistic parallels while utilizing organizational frames that are much more than mere dividing markers. These films have no doubt faded in the memories of many contemporary cinephiles and media scholars, being consigned to that “quaint” and “cozy” period in British cinema (prior to the eruption of the “Angry Young Man” of the late 1950s and early 1960s) when literary adaptations and costume melodramas were a la mode. As historical touchstones, however – each based on short stories written by W. Somerset Maugham – they were so unlike anything that had come before and so popular with mainstream audiences and critics alike Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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at the time of their theatrical runs that, for years afterwards, they would serve as a kind of template for adducing the relative failure or success of subsequent multi-story omnibus productions. Indeed, in the annals of episodic cinema, few films have been as frequently referenced by critics in English-language reviews as Quartet and its two sequels, Trio and Encore.

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C H A PT E R 6

Three Cases of Maugham: Quartet, Trio, and Encore

Four complete stories – each containing as much entertainment, as much drama, and as many stars as any one ordinary film! Promotional discourse in the hyperbolic program notes for Quartet (1948) Why are English films so unreal? An anonymous reviewer for New Statesman and Nation writing about the British episode film Meet Me Tonight (1952)

One might have expected the above words, written as part of a review of the British production Meet Me Tonight, to have been directed toward a horror film or set of supernatural tales, such as Dead of Night (1945). This reviewer for the New Statesman and Nation however, succinctly summarizes the general tenor of critical discourse – the out-and-out hostility – being directed toward more straightforward multi-episode adaptations such as Meet Me Tonight, a cinematic rendering of three one-act plays originally written by Noel Coward (“Red Peppers,” “Fumed Oak,” and “Ways and Means”). Tellingly, the critic ends his review of the film with a reference to an earlier example of episodic cinema, stating that Meet Me Tonight suffers from West End success: poisonous disease! It should be ringed off within Shaftesbury Avenue and St. Martin’s Lane. How admirable, by comparison, is the least of screened Maugham! He, a most live, charming reptile, can scatter carelessly trios, quartets and what you will. Mr. Coward, lizardly, can’t. His best has turned out, in cinemas, well. His worst – well, here it is, and Heaven help those who queue ninety minutes in order to enjoy it.1

The critic’s reference to Quartet (1948), a four-episode film based on the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, would have been recognized by most readers at the time of this review’s publication. Indeed, this omnibus film would continue to be cited throughout the postwar period, into the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as a touchstone moment in the history Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of ­multi-director cinema. In fact, as early as 1948, this important motion picture was being referenced in relation to subsequent attempts by filmmakers to tell stories in discrete episodes, including that year’s Bond Street, a film that – despite being helmed by only one director (Gordon Parry) – was “done somewhat in the Quartet fashion,” according to a reviewer for the Motion Picture Herald. By the time W. Somerset Maugham was approached in 1947 by producers Antony Darnborough and Sydney Box to participate in the making of what was originally titled Quintet, there had already been a handful of single-director and multi-director episode films produced in Britain, most notably Dead of Night. There had also been several single-story productions based on the British author’s novels, plays, and shorter pieces, with such films as Rain (1932), Of Human Bondage (1934), The Secret Agent (1936), and The Moon and Sixpence (1943) increasing his celebrity if not his standing in the critical community. Box, then managing director of Gainsborough Pictures at Shepherds Bush Studios, was himself no stranger to the multi-story film, having already tried his hand at the form with Holiday Camp (1947), a microcosmic look at the British working classes and the postwar pursuit of “organized leisure.” Directed by Ken Annakin (who would later helm the “The Colonel’s Lady” episode that brings Quartet to an end), Holiday Camp was produced at the height of multi-story film production in postwar Britain. In a concentrated burst that began with the Ealing production It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)2 and which ended not long after the same studio’s Dance Hall (1950) was theatrically released, there were no fewer than ten multi-story films produced in England, though not all of them are truly episodic in the way that Dead of Night and Quartet are (as collections of self-contained, clearly demarcated stories).3 In his book A Mirror for England, Raymond Durgnat, one of the few historians to adopt an appreciative stance toward this frequently maligned meta-genre, provides numerous insights into the allegorical potential of anthology and omnibus films which he sees as emblems of an artificially imposed, yet organically recuperative, form of British postwar consensus. As Durgnat states, “British movies were well aware that services life, for all its exasperations, had a unity of purpose, and a meaningful togetherness, sadly lacking in peacetime Civvy Street.” From the still smoldering ashes of the Second World War grew a formula – what Durgnat broadly labels “the ‘omnibus’ genre” – wrought “with sympathetic, if, eventually, ill-directed, earnestness.”4 Many of these “communal films” were organized around “leisure activities,” from the aforementioned Dance Hall, a romantic melodrama about four young women at the Palais de Danse, to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the Sidney Box-produced Gainsborough picture Easy Money (1948), a four-episode look at the effects of a football pool on various middle-class individuals that, according to Jeffrey Richards, is “symbolic of the notion of the people as hero . . . not so much the people as a proletariat but the people as the nation, which is something very different.”5 Additional examples of the multi-story format from this period include the 1948 Anatole de Grunwald-produced Bond Street and The Golden Arrow (a.k.a. The Gay Adventure, 1949), as well as Ealing Studios’ Train of Events (1949) . Sir Michael Balcon, doyen of the British film industry at that time, was largely responsible for the episodic explosion. This cofounder of Gainsborough at Islington Studios and one-time director of production at Gaumont British eventually succeeded Basil Dean as head of production at Ealing Studios in 1938. It was there at Ealing where Balcon mounted a handful of episode films as a way to tap into studio resources (particularly its deep roster of stage-trained players) and metaphorically gesture toward the fragmentation and need for consensus within postwar British society.6 In his poststructuralist approach to this period of British filmmaking, Andrew Higson asks, “Is it not possible to see the 1940s films as offering a vision of a plural, complex, heterogeneous and hybrid nation, and a sense of multiple ‘British’ identities, similar to that of [My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Bhaji on the Beach (1994)]?” In their constant negotiation of dialectical entities (the individual and the collective, dissent and unanimity), the episode films shepherded through the various stages of production by Balcon practically demand that such questions be broached. Though he later lamented about having made so many episode films, which he viewed as the result of “a weakness of storytelling,” Balcon can be credited for expanding the boundaries of cinematic narrativity and, as his interviewer John Ellis points out, for telling “the story of a fairly diverse group of people rather than just one person.” The films he produced brokered a new sort of interdependence in postwar civilian life, one that constituted a kind of “virtual togetherness,” according to Durgnat, in which national solidarity could be balanced with an acknowledged disruption or social strafing of the state.7 Near the end of his brief examination of omnibus films produced in England during the postwar period, Durgnat makes passing reference to Quartet and its two sequels (Trio [1950] and Encore [1951]), stating that – unlike earlier examples of episodic cinema – these adaptations of Maugham have “no actual framework at all other than that of an author’s particular tone.”8 He goes on to argue that

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one advantage of the formula is that, since the audience get a varied bill of fare, identification need be less consistent. This might well facilitate characterizations and stories which are just a little odder, sadder, truer, and more, in a semi-Brechtian sense, alienating, yet recognizable, than the principal characters in a one-story feature.

Though these three films were not the only episodic works churned out by British studios during the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were nevertheless the oddest, saddest, truest, and most alienating yet recognizable (if I may borrow Durgnat’s description) in terms of the quirkily drawn characters therein: disillusioned, needy, cautious, destructive, and selfloathing people whose “muffled, seething, restrained, [and] polluting” spitefulness would not manifest so distinctly again until the “angry young men” made their entrance a decade later.9 Most of the author-oriented episode films that came after Quartet invariably owe something of their failure or success to it, from Face to Face (1952), a two-episode portmanteau combining Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (produced by art patron Huntington Hartford), to Twentieth CenturyFox’s O. Henry’s Full House (1952), based on five tales written by William Sydney Porter (better known by his titular pen name), each of them ending – like rattlesnakes – with a sting in their tails.10 But not only did Quartet and its two official sequels inspire a spate of similar films in the United States, they also provided audiences with an innovative alternative to the single-story tradition of feature-length

Figure 6.1  A frame enlargement from O. Henry’s Full House in which a shot of John Steinbeck, speaking to the audience, is momentarily superimposed atop the name of the author whose work is featured in this 1952 omnibus film.

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thre e c a s e s o f maugh a m 137 filmmaking. Ironically, part of that innovation was the result of what may now seem to be a very traditional method of presenting stories. In each of the films, author Maugham himself is on hand as host, someone who not only introduces all of the tales at the beginning but also returns at the end to impart parting words of wisdom that retrospectively illuminate latent themes. With the exceptions of the five vaudeville-inspired collections of comic bits, dramatic performances, and popular songs mentioned in a preceding chapter (The Hollywood Revue of 1929 [1929], Show of Shows [1929], Happy Days [1930], Paramount on Parade [1930], and King of Jazz [1930]), as well as Walt Disney’s “package features” of the 1940s (Fantasia [1940], Saludos Amigos [1943], The Three Caballeros [1945], Make Mine Music [1946], Fun and Fancy Free [1947], and Melody Time [1948]), no episodic works prior to Quartet had taken so radical a departure from traditional framing and narrative organization. Indeed, most episode films up until that point had opted to tie tales together by way of a single setting (such as a train), a shared object (such as a tailcoat), or an overt thematic through-line (such as marriage). When, in October 1947, Joseph I. Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, received scripts for ten of Maugham’s stories, he rejected several for their “immorality” and demanded changes of others that entailed a radical alteration and whitewashing of storylines. For a writer accustomed to changes more surgical than cosmetic, Maugham was neither surprised nor angry, and gave his consent to screenwriter R. C. Sherriff to expunge any cynical, salacious, or politically incorrect material from the originals that the latter saw fit. British film scholar Anthony Slide has already explored the tortured processes involved in the studio’s attempt to meet Breen’s standards. According to Slide, the ten stories under consideration were “Red,” “The Sanatorium,” “The Alien Corn,” “The Facts of Life,” “The Kite,” “The Round Dozen,” “The Unconquered,” “The Happy Couple,” “The Force of Circumstance,” and “The Colonel’s Lady.” Producers Antony Darnborough and Sydney Box ultimately agreed with Sherriff that, based on Breen’s requirements, four particular stories – “The Facts of Life,” “The Alien Corn,” “The Kite,” and “The Colonel’s Lady” – seemed to complement one another as a quartet.11 Images from that titular quartet of tales featured heavily in the studiogenerated publicity material accompanying its original release – material that emphasized that consumers of episode films get a lot of entertainment for their money. Though the studio’s promotional discourse surrounding Quartet emphasized the many stars on view in it, the film itself begins with an offscreen speaker’s words, “The star of this film is not an actor or actress, but a writer.” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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What is perhaps most remarkable about these films is the manner in which Maugham is presented to the audience: as a fleshy, squinty eyed entity whose sheer physicality lends each story an aura of authenticity. At the beginning of Quartet, biographical details about the author’s life are spoken by an offscreen voice (“Born in Paris in 1874 . . . the author of twenty-four novels, twenty-four plays, and upwards of one hundred shorts stories . . . “). This disembodied introduction of yet another introducer’s body of work is accompanied by a slow tracking shot that ushers us into an exact copy of Maugham’s library and study (at his villa in the south of France), complete with mock Picassos on the wall and faithful facsimiles of the Etruscan vases he had collected throughout his life.12 In actuality, the setting was created at Pinewood studios, some 20 miles west of London, and this outright fabrication sets the stage, so to speak, for the film’s constant oscillation between fact and fiction – two modalities that Maugham says he believes are virtually indistinguishable. Just as this studio set was dressed to “look the part” of his library, so, too, did the seventy-four-year-old author receive a makeup session that carved a decade off his life. Despite his slight stammer, everything about Maugham’s comportment – his stance, pose, intonation, phrasing – suggest that the author was feeling at ease in front of the camera, a comfort level that he tries to extend to the audience whose approval he seeks to win through an almost ritualistic politeness. A shortened version of Quartet (cut for international distribution) does away with Maugham’s introductions between the segments, opting instead for another, offscreen voice. Though the original author is still

Figure 6.2  W. Somerset Maugham sits at a desk in a facsimile of his study where he greets the audience of Quartet (1948).

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thre e c a s e s o f maugh a m 139 present at the beginning and ending of the film, this disembodied narrator exerts his own authorial aura, his speech act mimetically corresponding with words visible onscreen – opening passages printed in a book shown in close-up (with the directors’ names appearing at the bottom of each page, just below the writer’s trademark watermark, a Moorish symbol that is also shown before the credits). This narrational and textual imprint complicates Maugham’s possessory credit, as do the four directors (Ken Annakin, Harold French, Ralph Smart and Arthur Crabtree) whose condensation and revision of the original stories’ narrative content (by means of mise en scène, montage, cross-cutting, camera angle, superimpositions, dissolves, manipulated point-of-view, flashbacks, voiceover, sound effects, and music) diffuse authorship even as they, along with screenwriter Sherriff, highlight the first (literary) author in such a pronounced way. Notably, the close-up images and verbal recitation of the onscreen text do not correspond to Maugham’s text, which was reprinted alongside Sherriff’s screenplays in book form six months after the film’s November 1948 debut. Published by the New York-based Doubleday & Company, the book allows for juxtapositional comparisons between the two versions of each tale. It also includes transcriptions of each of Maugham’s introductions, which were cut from many international release prints and replaced by the aforementioned voice, which, in a sense, “speaks” the film and posits the possibility that Maugham may not be the “true” narrator. Though he is presented as an agent of discourse propelling each story, one comes to realize that the stories which are being told are not, strictly speaking, his.

Figure 6.3  The first page of “The Facts of Life,” one of the four stories comprising Quartet, which departs in word and image from its source material.

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They have, through the process of adaptation, transmogrified into new cultural artifacts (sometimes bearing little resemblance to the original texts). Directed by Ralph Smart, the first vignette, based on a 1939 story entitled “The Facts of Life,” revolves around gambling, moneylending, and a naïve young man’s susceptibility to the charms of a deceptive woman. The man in question, a tennis player named Nicky (Jack Watling), had been warned to stay away from all three potential pitfalls prior to his trip to Monte Carlo. The episode begins with a recounting of that journey by Nicky’s father, sitting in a gentlemen’s club along with three companions who listen intently to the story. This scene, reminiscent of a similar moment of storytelling in the Italian film, The Bed (Il letto, a.k.a. Secrets d’alcove, 1954), is itself a frame for a series of embedded flashbacks presented in consecutive fashion, culminating with a surprise ending that would not seem out of place in an O. Henry tale. Even after the frustrated father tells these three “men of the world” the outcome (in which Nicky, seemingly an innocent rube, walks away from the escapade a thousand francs richer), they urge him to have a drink and “forget about it,” a suggestion that resonates with the spectatorial demands of episode films which ask audiences to put the past (a previous story) behind them and think only of the present. Such an endeavor becomes particularly challenging in cases where a tragic event – say a murder or suicide – corresponds with an episode’s ending, the brutal conclusiveness of which ironically makes closure difficult for viewers who continue to feel sympathy for the victim well after the point of narrative departure. Concerning a young aristocrat named George Bland (Dirk Bogarde) who dreams of becoming a concert pianist, the second episode, “The Alien Corn,” was directed by Harold French, a filmmaker who would later direct segments of Trio and Encore. This section of Quartet foregrounds, in a particularly salient way, the difficulties involved in attaining one’s personal and professional goals. Like Nicky, George goes against his dumbfounded father’s wishes in pursuing this lifelong dream, yet his story ends not with a comic reversal but with a tragic death. Following George’s utter failure to impress famous pianist Lea Makart (Françoise Rosay) with his mediocre talent after two years of study in France, his “accidental death” by self-inflicted gunshot can be read as a suicide – something explicit in Maugham’s original 1931 story yet tempered in the film version because of the conservative sociopolitical climate of the postwar period and the ongoing threat of censorship. In fact, many aspects of this story were altered in the adaptation process, most notably the ethnic identities of the appropriately named Bland family. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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In contrast to the film’s English – and implicitly Protestant – landed gentry, the family at the heart of Maugham’s original is Jewish. Having changed their name from “Bleiker” to “Bland,” they represent an assimilative trend in British cultural history. George studies in Germany, not France, and there he “encounters the Jews of Frankfurt and Munich, who have maintained their culture.”13 Unlike the protagonist in Maugham’s story, who “develops an urge to give up his family’s English life and join these Jews in Germany,” the one in the cinematic retelling returns to the fold as a neutered individual lacking in any political drive or sexual agency that might advance a cause greater than his own solipsistic desire for artistic greatness. He is thus the forerunner of another character in the later film Trio, the garrulous “Mr. Know-All,” who, though “immediately established as a Jew” in Maugham’s original, is portrayed by Nigel Patrick as a “universal figure.”14 Producers Darnborough and Box, screenwriter Sherriff, and director Harold French are all partly responsible for this obliteration of Jewish references, yet Maugham himself is also culpable owing to his consenting presence in the text as a source of authenticity and fidelity. Though he habitually distances himself from these stories that are once or twice removed, prefacing them with comments like “Since I was not there . . . “ and “[I]t is not my story . . . ,” by virtue of his very presence Maugham bears some responsibility for what transpires onscreen. In contrast to George’s parents’ temperamental insensitivity to his artistic calling, Mr. and Mrs. Sunbury (Mervyn Johns and Hermione Baddeley), the proud father and mother of Herbert (George Cole) in “The Kite,” might strike audiences as overly sensitive vis-à-vis their son’s odd hobby. As the main character in this bizarre psychodrama of obsession, parental possessiveness, and the social pretensions of the lower middle class, Herbert – a mild-mannered clerk whose one true passion in life is flying kites – is introduced in an unusually roundabout way. Multiple narrators, including Ned Preston (a character who ostensibly told this story to Maugham) and the prison warden (who shares with Ned the childhood story of Herbert) are embedded like nested Russian dolls in this third episode of Quartet (directed by Arthur Crabtree). Their collective encasement of the kite-flying fetishist’s narrative is visually represented by his own incarceration, the result of a monomania that grew from his family life, infringed on his marital life, and thus led to the withholding of his wife’s alimony. Just as George’s girlfriend had tried in vain to lure him away from the keyboard in the preceding episode, so, too, does wife Betty (Susan Shaw) seek to rid Herbert of his unusual fixation in one of the many flashbacks in this episode, but to no avail. Culminating with Herbert’s release from prison, the voiceover (not Maugham’s but that of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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his sonic stand-in) intones, “That’s the end of the story as Ned Preston told it to me, and I never knew what happened to Herbert and Betty.” The speaker then goes on to speculate that the couple eventually reunite on conciliatory terms – this being a tacked-on ending that departs significantly from Maugham’s original (which left the obstinate prisoner in jail). Equally sharp in its social satire is the fourth and final episode, directed by Ken Annakin. Entitled “The Colonel’s Lady,” this glimpse behind the facade of a dull marriage reveals unexpected passions and pent-up desires. Colonel George Peregrine (Cecil Parker), a stuffy, middle-aged country gentleman cut from the cloth of Colonel Blimp, is shocked to discover that his wife (the “lady” of the title, played by Nora Swinburne) has written a book of romantic verse under a pen name. Once the publication has taken all of London by storm, the placid and bespectacled wife, Evie, is forced to admit that she, indeed, is the author, a revelation that sends the colonel into a fit of jealousy for he believes the love poems to be autobiographical, a secret diary of Evie’s affair with a younger man who has since died. Because infidelity was such a taboo subject on English screens, another invented ending was added, one that explained that the wife’s secret lover was Peregrine himself as a younger man, someone who metaphorically died because of a lack of understanding between the two. Interestingly, the arrogant colonel, who sees nothing wrong with keeping a mistress, yet chastises his wife for her “illicit affair,” never actually reads the notorious book. Instead, he has his secret girlfriend, Daphne (Linden Travers), give him a synopsis, a maneuver that replicates the adumbrative and mediated qualities of film adaptation. Capping the episode’s denouement, Evie tells her husband that, because “the man is dead [and] it all happened a long time ago,” he should “forget it.” Putting her feelings into words that once again resonate with the spectatorial appeals of episodic storytelling, she says, “The world moves quickly and people’s memories are short. They’ll soon forget.” By the time Maugham reappears onscreen at the end of Quartet, saying to the audience (and perhaps even to the many literary critics who had called him “superficial” throughout his career), “I hope we shall part good friends,” the characters who were introduced in the first episodes of the film may indeed have been momentarily forgotten. What we should not forget, however, is the importance of this film in energizing cinematic episodicity in the postwar years and blending not only fiction and fact but also the presentational mode of vaudeville with the representational mode of bibliophilic storytelling (discussed at length in Chapter 2). Filled with staged as well as documentary moments (including shots of a real tennis match in episode 1 and of the actual pianist Lea Makart playing onscreen Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in episode 2), and consolidating various “voices” (from Maugham’s own to the unidentified and disembodied extradiegetic voiceover), Quartet effectively merges two distinct types of communication, what André Gaudreault refers to as monstration (showing) and narration (telling).15 By bringing together theatrical mimesis (monstration) and novelistic diegesis (narration), the film cleared a path for subsequent author-oriented omnibus films that question the very notion of authorship and present onscreen written materials (such as titles, intertitles, and even credit sequences) as textual inscriptions of an external cinematic narrator. One of the reasons why Quartet was received so favorably is spelled out in Bosley Crowther’s March 29, 1949 review of the film for the New York Times. “Usually,” he begins, “pictures in which several short stories or vignettes are strung together to make a feature take their character and effect from the cleverness of the surprises achieved at the ends of the tales.” Concluding that “surprise is the usual intention of the modern short story,” Crowther argues that the “twist” moment often associated with an O. Henry work or a supernatural horror tale (such as director Alberto Cavalcanti’s “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” episode in Dead of Night) is relatively absent in Quartet.16 Or, rather, it “is not as marked as the studied and searching illustration of personality,” a more probing exploration of identity that, despite the shortness of the four tales, attains profundity by the film’s end. We arrive, once again, at my notion of “horizontal depth” although, this time, the text under consideration is not a multinational coproduction uniting distinct regions, languages, and cultural traditions (as in a film such as Tickets [2005]). Rather, what Quartet and its two sequels, Trio and Encore, achieve is a piecemeal presentation of both ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of individuals who, despite having a rather limited background (as middle- and upper-class white people), collectively come to represent the nation in all of its breadth. Being both “deep” and “wide,” these films offer penetrating views of everyday life while calling attention to the artificial way in which nationhood itself is constructed. It is noteworthy that Crowther’s comment about “the studied and searching illustration of personality” in Quartet was written a mere seven years after proclaiming, in 1942, that “the short story as a distinct literary (or cinema) form has been largely neglected in the movies – or, rather, painfully abused.”17 In this – one of the first articles to explore episodic cinema beyond the reach of a single feature – the critic for the New York Times reminds his readers that omnibus and anthology films, such as If I Had a Million (1932) and Dance Card (Un carnet du bal, 1937), “have had a refreshing distinction in the run of conventional plot films.” He Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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argues, however, that “they have not been profound in their reflections of the deeper things of life, since profundity is seldom a quality which short stories – or films, indeed – possess.” A highly contentious argument, yes, but one that is partially offset by his belief that “it must be agreed that a series or mélange of episodic tales is congenial to the compact story-telling which the camera is able to effect.”18 Like those in Quartet, the stories comprising that film’s two sequels, Trio and Encore, were also scrubbed clean in terms of potentially offensive or taboo material. As detailed in Robert L. Calder’s study of Somerset Maugham and the cinema, “Sanatorium” – a story concerning the lives of tuberculosis patients at a Scottish health clinic – had to be gutted of any references to sexual activity that might offend viewers in Britain and the United States before making its textual transmigration to the screen, as one of the episodes in Trio.19 Similarly, another Harold French-directed episode, “Gigolo and Gigolette,” is a tamed version of Maugham’s original story of the same title. As the third, concluding episode in Encore, this tale revolves around successful nightclub performers Stella (Glynis Johns) and Syd Cotman (Terence Morgan) whose past as paid dancers on the Riviera “is passed over quickly and lightly.”20 More telling are the alterations made to Maugham’s “Winter Cruise,” a story in which a loquacious spinster aboard a ship bound for Jamaica is paired with a young steward who has been encouraged by other crewmembers to sleep with her. Calder points out that the sexual satisfaction provided to Miss Reid (Kay Walsh) by the accommodating young man is replaced by “romance” in Encore, a censorship tactic that was not unusual during the 1940s and 1950s. As in Quartet, Maugham appears at the beginning of both Trio and Encore, introducing himself and the stories that follow. In Trio, he is shown sitting near a window providing visual access to the beaches along the bay, just beyond his grounds at Villa Mauresque. From there the camera returns us from a fake Mediterranean backdrop to the book-lined shelves of his study where a volume carrying the title of the film is pulled out and brought into close-up view. Tellingly, Encore begins with shots of the grounds surrounding the author’s villa, eventually bringing the viewer into close proximity with Maugham who sits outside, soaking up the sun. Though this film also takes us back into his dimly lit study, where yet another close-up of the soon-to-be opened book reinforces the bibliophilic disposition of this omnibus series prior to seguing into the first tale (director Pat Jackson’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper”), the exterior shot suggests that, incrementally, the three motion pictures comprising this series are shifting focus from internal to external factors impinging on the relative fidelity of these cinematic texts. Having already Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figures 6.4 and 6.5  Frame enlargements from the 1951 film Encore show that Maugham, now seated on the patio outside his villa, has completed the interior to exterior movement begun in the earlier omnibus film Quartet. This follow-up to Trio furthermore foregrounds the complex relationship between authenticity and artifice by way of its juxtaposition of an actual outdoor setting and a cinematically manufactured book cover displayed for the camera inside studio walls.

alluded to the ease with which entire episodes can be cut from the theatrical releases of omnibus films, I might point out here the related issue of studio concern about particular episodes’ presumed effectiveness (or lack thereof) expressed prior to the actual shooting or during the early stages of principal photography on a production. This was the case with Trio, which Sydney Box, a production chief at Gainsborough Pictures, made with the financial assistance of J. Arthur Rank and in collaboration with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Paramount Pictures. As reported by Thomas Pryor, “Paramount’s representative didn’t like one of the stories” that Box had selected, and the studio representative “gave him some very good reasons from the point of view of acceptability in the American market.” “We decided to drop that one,” Box later explained, “and, as a matter of fact, Mr. Maugham was quite happy because he didn’t like it too well either.”21 Around the same time that Sydney Box was touring the United States in the fall of 1950 (in hopes of drumming up interest in his latest productions and learning more about the American market), a most unusual motion picture was being made in Hollywood. Though the last of Box’s Somerset Maugham films – Encore – was touted on American posters as something “Excitingly Different!” and wholly unlike any production made prior to it (a decidedly misleading message, given its indebtedness to the two Maugham adaptations that preceded it), only one multi-director motion picture at that time can truly claim to be distinct, if not entirely unprecedented, as a site of textual debates related to that most vexing of questions: What is a nation? That film – the 1951 omnibus production It’s a Big Country – is an intentionally propagandistic work that attempts to present the United States as a unified, yet diverse, collection of people who are nevertheless narratively segmented into discrete ethnic and racial categories. Like Jan van Kessel’s Amerika (a sixteen-panel series of wildlife paintings created in 1664), the makers of this MGM production (including studio head Dore Schary, producer Robert Sisk, and the seven directors who contributed episodes: Clarence Brown, Don Hartman, John Sturges, Richard Thorpe, Charles Vidor, Don Weis, and William A. Wellman), sought nothing less than to represent the totality of the nation, if not the world, in miniature. Any questions broached by the seven filmmakers in relation to social fragmentation and internal marginalization (concerning such issues as the neglect of old people, anti-Semitism, interethnic feuds, Southern separatism, and so forth) are brushed aside by countering narratives of solidarity, harmony, and reconciliation. Despite its creators’ good intentions, however, It’s a Big Country was not received favorably by the contemporaneous press. A reviewer at Time magazine complained, “It’s a Big Country is an omnibus film, possibly produced on the theory that its eight episodes would make it twice as good as Quartet. They don’t . . . Each episode takes its own rosily superficial view of a different facet of U.S. life.”22 Up to this point, I have only briefly taken up questions related to the possible consequences of uniting disparate entities under the umbrella of a nation employing (or, more accurately, narrativizing) strategies of conNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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thre e c a s e s o f maugh a m 147 tainment. Such an inquiry, however, is especially pertinent to my examination of omnibus films produced not in the United States and England but rather in Italy and other European countries – national contexts in which episode films in general and omnibus films specifically have been consistenly used to shore up a sense of community and consensus in the face of calamity and crisis over the past half-century.

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C HA PT E R 7

Episodic Erotics and the Politics of Place: From Love in the City to Love and Anger

Though episode films pepper the histories of most national cinemas, a comprehensive filmography would attest to their pervasiveness in the land of Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, and Visconti. These filmmakers, along with their lesser-known compatriots, have collectively churned out dozens of such works since 1945, the year when the multi-director documentary Days of Glory (Giorni di gloria), featuring the contributions of Giuseppe De Santis, Mario Serandrei, Marcello Pagliero, and Luchino Visconti, was released (one year prior to Roberto Rossellini’s six-episode film Paisà [1946]). Indeed, il film a episodi is to Italian cinema what olio d’oliva is to Italian cuisine, an essential if oft-ignored ingredient in the material constitution and authentication of a national culture – an element without which any attempt to write a comprehensive history of Italian film would be malnourished.1 Despite their significance to this and other national cinemas (including French cinema), episode films, particularly sketch comedies, have been critically belittled and grossly understudied. This is both understandable and lamentable. For, while they offer “bite-size,” quickly consumed stories in a single sitting (and are therefore perfect for an audience increasingly characterized by short attention spans), the anecdotal nature of sketch films – their apparent slightness in terms of thematic content, plot development, character growth, and diegetic duration – suggests a narrative form of little consequence and limited returns. A brief look at episode films produced in Italy (before venturing outward, beyond that country’s national borders) reveals a narrative complexity as well as a literary awareness that belies their seeming irrelevance. As a work consisting of two or more discrete, causally unrelated yet thematically related stories strung together like beads, the episode film simultaneously adheres to, and departs from, conventional narrative paradigms. I have explained in previous chapters that, traditionally, a mainstream single-narrative film is characterized by rising action and a set of conflicts faced by a lone protagonist or group of characters that must be resolved Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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within a three-act structure. To a certain degree, many audiences expect each short narrative comprising an anthology, omnibus, portmanteau or sketch film to comply to this rule, even if the brevity of the form makes this easier said than done. Additionally, for all their heterogeneity, episode films are supposed to “hang together,” harmoniously, around a central theme or narrative conceit – their individual parts often being deemed less important than the syncretic whole. This is complicated by the fact that an episode film might be the product of numerous directors, each working in “collaborative isolation” and contributing a short work to a producer who then links several together. For example, Of Life and Love (Questa è la vita), a 1954 adaptation of Pirandello stories that was compiled from two preexisting episode films, further muddies the already murky waters of cinematic authorship by uniting the work of four directors: Giorgio Pàstina, Mario Soldati, Luigi Zampa, and Aldo Fabrizi. Regardless of the number of cooks in the kitchen, the episodic sketch film is an inherently disparate text, capable of allegorizing any of the many contradictions plaguing contemporary life through a narrative form that is both singular and multiple, unified and fragmented. In the case of Italy, the abrupt shifts in narrative found in anthology and omnibus films provide a diegetic correlative for the experiences of a country whose citizens had grown accustomed to quick, sometimes violent change by the time the sketch film format was beginning to peter out in the late 1970s. Indeed, by the time Premier Amintore Fanfani took office in 1982 (initiating Italy’s forty-third government since 1945), Italians had become increasingly alienated from the political process yet paradoxically aware of its transformative dimensions in the post-Democrazia Cristiana era.2 Nevertheless, in the years leading up to the early 1980s, the once vital genre of the omnibus film had sunk into abysmal decline. No longer a vehicle for addressing matters of great national import, nor a form whose intrinsic heterogeneity could cogently represent the country’s linguistic, racial, ethnic, and regional differences, the episode film – indeed, Italian film in general – had become mired in the tired iconography of “tits and asses.” Even animator Bruno Bozzetto could not resist peppering his Fantasia-inspired episode film Allegro non troppo (1976) with the kind of roly-poly corpulence and carnal imagery that made one French film critic bemoan at the time, “l’érotisme a remplacé la Résistance,”3 a comment that sums up the thematic preoccupation of popular Italian cinema as it reached its industrial nadir. This diminution in quality, if not quantity, can be attributed to a number of cultural factors, from the changing notions of what constituted pudore (public decency) to the availability of magazines per soli uomini (for men only) and the advent of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a luci rosse (­red-light cinemas) in Rome. Inspired by the nobler episode films comprising Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” – The Decameron (Il decamerone, 1970), The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury, 1971), and Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte, 1974) – soft-porn adaptations of literature’s three greatest short story cycles came down the pipeline. These “nudies,” bearing titles such as Decameroticus (1972) and Decameron n. 4 . . . Le belle novelle del Boccaccio (1972), were likened by movie critics to the work of Boccaccio “had he limited his writings to graffiti and articles for the National Enquirer.” By the time Italy’s first hardcore theaters appeared in 1977, audience members had become inured to images of scantily clad women in mainstream cinema. This cheesecake trend ran parallel to, ironically, a more conscientious move toward sexual liberation and antidiscrimination laws: only two years earlier (in 1975), Italy’s new Family Law insured equal rights for all people regardless of gender; and, in 1977, additional Equal Opportunity laws were passed, extending greater civil liberties to women who were nevertheless expected to conform to long-standing stereotypes: voluptuous hussy, romantic beauty, devoted mother. The first half of this chapter casts light on that trend in Italian cinema, examining why relatively few of the country’s sketch films of the 1960s and 1970s posed alternatives to the male-normative positions so dominant during those decades when such androcentric fictions as Latin Lovers (Le Italiane e l’amore, 1961), The Italians and the Women (Gli italiani e le donne, 1962), Ever More Beautiful Women (La donna degli alti è sempre più bella, 1963), Women of the World (La donna nel mondo, 1963), and Woman is a Wonderful Thing (La donna è una cosa meravigliosa, 1964) were all the rage. The exuberant chauvinism and machismo on display in these and many other episodic films contrasts the handful of omnibus productions that are infused with female agency and which are sensitive to women’s voices. Outside of Italy, one finds a number of such works, from the Australian docu-experimental film Ladies’ Room (1977) to a host of West German productions of the 1980s, including Out of the Clear Blue Sky (Aus heiterem Himmel, 1982), The Daughter’s Inheritance (Die Erbtöchter, 1983), and Felix (1987), the last film a look at male chauvinism in four chapters directed by Christel Buschmann, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Margherita von Trotta. Another example is the Canadian production Five Feminist Minutes (1990) which features sixteen episodes covering everything from childhood incest to teenage incarceration and prostitution. The heterogeneity (aesthetically and thematically) of this latter film is analogous to the national patchwork from which the nearly two dozen female directors (from various ethnic and racial backgrounds) derive their experiences.4 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 151 While a few of the episode films produced in Italy tackled relevant subjects, such as terrorism, children’s sweatshops, the corruptibility of the judicial system, and the political status quo, even the most biting satires, such as Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen (Signore e signori, buonanotte, 1976), could not resist the temptation to “assault the solar plex [with] close-ups of breasts, buttocks, and thighs.”5 A grab-bag of skits written and directed by Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy, Luigi Magni, Mario Monicelli, and Ettore Scola, Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen utilizes a fake newscast frame narrative in which Marcello Mastrioanni (playing lascivious anchorman Paolo T. Fiume), when not introducing telefilms about a variety of social ills, woos his female staff members. In one sequence, he ogles a language instructor who illustrates English lessons by pointing to her naked breasts and exposed backside. Though it pokes fun at religion (a phlegmatic cardinal lectures pregnant women about the crime of abortion) and the military (a high-ranking officer, unable to fish his gold pocket watch from a shit-filled lavatory, puts a gun to his head), Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen ultimately resorts to empty titillation. As such, it barely rises above the ranks of Saturday, Sunday, and Friday (Sabato domenica e venerdi, 1979), This and That (Questo e quello, 1983), and other episode films which eschew social commentary altogether. Though many of the motion pictures discussed in the following section foreground (and fetishize) female bodies as objects of the male gaze, a few, such as the 1953 omnibus features Love in the City (L’amore in città) and We, the Women (Siamo donne), proffer a less frivolous, more encompassing “body politic” composed of disparate individuals (characters and spectators) linked by a shared concern for serious social and political issues, including the rights of women in a predominately patriarchal culture.

Love in the City, Sex on the Screen Originally conceived by the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (in collaboration with producers turned “publishers” Riccardo Ghione and Marco Ferreri) as the inaugural issue of The Spectator (Lo Spettatore), a “screen magazine” that was ultimately abandoned after the first volume, Love in the City mined many of the social rifts opened up in Italy’s postwar years. Three years before the release of Love in the City, Ghione and Ferreri secured financial backing for a trio of short films entitled The Monthly Document. According to production notes, “each short consisted of three episodes, each the work of a different director. They were never given national distribution, but were relegated to the very active circuits of cinema clubs which thrive all over the Italian peninsula.” Having seen Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 7.1  The cover of a fifteen-page miniature “magazine” sent to American movie theaters, complementing the 1954 stateside release of the Italian omnibus film Love in the City (Vol. 1, no. 1 of a planned series). Inside are production notes about the individual episodes, prefaced by a Table of Contents modeled after an actual journal. Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

the shorts at one of these venues, Cesare Zavattini contacted the two men responsible and began to conceptualize a fresh approach to cinematic journalism, one that would privilege real life over fiction.6 Ultimately, his project gave seven luminaries of post-neorealist cinema (Carlo Lizzani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dino Risi, Federico Fellini, Francesco Maselli, Alberto Lattuada, and Zavattini) the opportunity to pool their considerable talents and editorialize on such issues as prostitution, attempted suicide, and unwed mothers. As with many omnibus features, this occasionally playful, frequently morose, marriage of celluloid and journalism shifts tones and milieus so radically that new ruptures become apparent.7 Viewing the film today, some audiences might feel that these narrative fissures diminish the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 153 emotional rawness of the film’s most compelling episodes: Antonioni’s “Attempted Suicide” (“Tentato suicidio”) and Zavattini and Maselli’s “Story of Caterina” (“Storia di Caterina”). The two most amusing sequences, Risi’s “Paradise for Three Hours” (“Paradiso per tre ore”) and Lattuada’s “The Italian Stare” (“Gli italiani si voltano”), concern the mating rituals of young and old alike – the former by casting in relief the chasm between northern and southern Italy in Rome’s Paradise Dancehall, and the latter through a series of “candid camera” close-ups of men gawking at hip-swinging women. Both sketches stand alone yet sit tenuously next to the other, more downbeat episodes. The resulting tension between comedy and calamity, between individual story and what might be called the “narrative community” of the entire package, foretold the psychic split that would characterize Italian life during the mid 1950s and early 1960s, a period of economic prosperity marked by cultural homogenization and what Mirco Melanco calls “social atomization.”8 Throughout these years of industrial development, both Lattuada and Risi led the charge of the commedia all’italiana. This cycle of commercial, ostensibly escapist fare turned away from the shantytowns of neo-realism to the high-rise offices and vacation resorts being peopled by the emergent middle class – a group whose demand for salary increases, mass migration to northern cities and consumption of such ubiquitous goods as home appliances and sports cars sparked this socioeconomic progress. In place of impoverished shoeshine boys and their vehicularly challenged fathers, shallow intellectuals, feminized cuckolds, petty politicians, and bulbouseyed businessmen took center stage in episodic comedies that cynically revealed the dark underbelly of Italy’s so-called miracolo economico. This new class of “suburban subaltern” – a bumbling alternative to peplum’s hypermasculine Hercules and Samson – emphasized a figure of little virtue and much vice for whom personal incentives took precedence over collective needs. As sketch films of the 1960s attest, greed, crime, and corporate scandal came with the economic upturn, as did a kind of cultural displacement that can be partly attributed to the influx of American pop music, movies, and goods. After the economic boom, commedia all’italiana continued to gain momentum, only now as a cathartic, if still satiric, means of resolving conflicts among the classes and sexes, none of whom were exempt from the dull blade of caricature. Grotesque figures, from the gap-toothed yokel to the “buxom lady” stereotype, magnified economic disparities of the era while harking back to the tradition of Commedia dell’arte, a popular public entertainment consisting of comic sketches, witty banter, music, and dance. Performed throughout Europe, whether on Paris’s Pont-Neuf Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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by companies like the comédie-italienne or in Roman piazzas full of snake charmers and charlatans, these medieval and early Renaissance plays might seem remote from 1960s Italian cinema but they not only established the exaggerated postures and ridiculous situations that would characterize raucous episode films, such as These Crazy, Crazy Women (Queste pazze, pazze, pazze donne, 1964) and Let’s Talk About Women (Se permette parliamo di donne, 1964), but also made political subversion and religious satire safe for even the most disenfranchised spectators. Mario Monicelli, one of the key writer–directors responsible for the international dissemination of both commedia all’italiana and episodic cinema, makes a case for historical continuity, explicitly contending that the impetus behind the former’s malicious humor of misery stems from the satiric disposition of commedia dell’arte. Monicelli states: Commedia dell’arte heroes are always desperate poor devils who are battling against life, against the world, against hunger, misery, illness, violence. Nevertheless, all of this is transformed into laughter, transmuted into cruel joking, in mockery rather than wholehearted laughter. This approach belongs to a very Italian tradition that I have always defended: Italian comedy comes from this and it isn’t true that it’s vulgar, that it was always a matter of chamber pots, excrement, clysters, farts. Let’s face it, there is a crude side, but this isn’t important since the true underlying factor is the element of despair.9

The “element of despair” upon which Monicelli muses was certainly an engrained quality of the sketch comedies released during the post-boom era, a period that, beginning in 1963, saw increased inflation, worker discontent, a fall in domestic investments, and violent protests among students, not to mention a renewed interest in the gallows humor of Commedia dell’arte. Though Monicelli attempts to diminish the importance of scatology to the legitimization of comedic forms in Italy’s cinematic, literary, and theatrical heritage, I argue that the “vulgar” slapstick and “obscene” gestures found in Commedia dell’arte (buffoons strapping sausages to their groins, breaking wind, and baring the ubiquitous ass) have been a vital, if recklessly deployed, means of recuperating the margins of society while attacking bourgeois conformism. It could be argued, however, that the sketch comedies of the 1960s, while critical of the increased privatization and social indifference resulting from Italy’s economic upturn, never adequately revealed the systemic causes of this national malaise, opting instead to focus on the era’s surface excesses and “monstrosities.” It was as if the physical tics and stereotypes performed by ubiquitous actors Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassmann, Ugo Tognazzi, and Alberto Sordi were sufficient material Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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for social critique. Sordi, an iconic fixture of commedia all’italiana, who went on to flex his directorial muscles in such post-commedia episode films as A Common Sense of Modesty (Il commune senso del pudore, 1976) and Where are You Going on Holiday? (Dovè vai in vacanza?, 1978), had apparently so “benumbed the minds of the Italians” with his vulgar, yet palatable, shtick that he alone bore the brunt of blame in Nanni Moretti’s Ecce Bombo (1978), a film in which a character launches the invective, “It serves you right, Alberto Sordi!”10 Though his characters (salesmen, craftsmen, clerks) were often, like most audience members, “deprived of social authority,” Sordi represented the self-absorption and conformity of the middle class to a younger generation of leftist filmmakers who, in the 1980s, saw in the sketch film the potential for disseminating dissent through pluralistic discourse and group solidarity. Thus, on the one hand, the sketch film, as Enrico Giacovelli points out, gave commedia all’italiana directors and screenwriters the opportunity to tackle topics and themes en masse that had otherwise been deemed taboo in the context of conventional narratives; on the other hand, it propagated images that fed middleclass consumption and played into perennial stereotypes. Be it the pitfalls of drug abuse (White, Red, Yellow, Pink [a.k.a. The Love Factory, Bianco, rosso, giallo, rosa, 1964]), the felicities of cross-dressing (How Funny Can Sex Be? [Sessomatto, 1973]), the backlash against homosexuality (High Infidelity [Alta infedeltà, 1965]), or the social stigmas faced by people with physical defects (The Complexes [I complessi, 1965]), the episodic sketch film showcased alternative lifestyles and widespread prejudices without fully explicating the institutional roots of exclusion.11 The three alternate English titles of the episode film L’amore difficile (1962) – Of Wayward Love, Erotica, and Sex Can Be Difficult — convey the libidinal disposition and raciness of Italian sketch comedies throughout the 1960s when romance, sex, and marriage were the predominant themes. Given this emphasis, it should not be surprising that Italian and American authorities seized several of these films on charges of obscenity. The third episode of the Carlo Ponti production Countersex (Controsesso, 1964) was deemed immoral by government officials upon the film’s debut in Rome, Turin, Bologna and other cities. Though the entire film initially passed the censors (with a ban prohibiting only those audience members under the age of fourteen from seeing it), a Rome court order found that the third section, featuring Nino Manfredi and Dolores Wettach, contained incriminating shots of the latter in the nude. According to newspaper articles at the time, the director of the episode, Renato Castellani, as well as producer Luigi Tedeschi, distributor Augusto Fanteschi, and eight exhibitors around the country were “given two-month suspended prison Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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sentences on charges of making and releasing an ‘obscene film’.” While neither Manfredi nor Wettach were charged, two of the actors appearing in the 1965 omnibus film The Dolls (Le bambole) were not so lucky. This black-and-white sex farce, one of the most notorious and provocative of its day, trots out the talents of no fewer than four voluptuous actresses – Virna Lisi, Monica Vitti, Elke Sommer, and Gina Lollobrigida – who each takes center-stage in her respective episode. A Franco-Italian coproduction made by Documento Film and Orsay Films, and released in the United States by Royal Films (the art branch of Columbia Pictures during the mid 1960s), The Dolls drew fire from the Vatican censorship agency (the Catholic Cinematographic Centre) for what was perceived to be its licentious material, and was the focus of an important Italian court ruling in June 1965, one that had serious implications for the national film industry. Gina Lollobrigida and Jean Sorel, stars of the fourth episode “Monsignor Cupid” (“Monsignor Cupido”), plus its director Mauro Bolognini and the film’s producer Gianni Hecht Lucari12 were all brought up on charges of obscenity due to a bedroom seduction scene between the amorous couple and copious shots of the half-dressed actress.13 All four were sentenced to two months in prison on top of a fine (40,000 lire each). Ultimately, the sentence was suspended, and the notoriety surrounding this “trial of the year” contributed to the film’s relatively strong box-office performance in the United States; despite the fact that numerous Italian episode films, such as Three Nights of Love (Tre notti d’amore, 1964) were frequently locked up in United States Customs for up to six-month stretches before getting distribution.14 The offending episode in The Dolls is a modern-day adaptation of an already bawdy tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron. It concerns the machinations of a hotel proprietor attracted to the nephew of a Monsignor in town for Ecumenical Congress. Apparently a part-time concierge and full-time temptress, Lollobrigida’s Beatrice tries to lure Sorel’s Vincenzo into her bedroom by tricking his uncle, Monsignor Arcudi, into operating as a go-between. Initially unresponsive to the woman’s advances, the chaste young man is finally drawn into the femme fatale’s web and, to the clergyman’s chagrin, succumbs to her whims in a story that culminates with a semi-nude sex scene between the two leads. It was this scene that religious groups, government officials, and moral watchdogs found offensive, one in which the actress, after wriggling about in flesh-colored tights and spying on her “victim” through a conspicuously large keyhole, completely exposes her side to the camera. In contradistinction to the more progressive rendering of femininity in later female-directed episode films, such as the Canadian production Love (1982), the American production Enormous Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 7.2  French poster for the 1965 sex farce The Dolls (Le bambole). Note the use of display boxes to promote the presence of actresses Virna Lisi, Monica Vitti, Elke Sommer, and Gina Lollobrigida (who each stars in one of the four episodes comprising this Franco-Italian co-production). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque du Film (BiFi).

Changes at the Last Minute (1983), the West German production Felix (1987), and the British production Siren Spirits (1994), The Dolls gives its predominantly male audience a keyhole view into the private worlds and bedchambers of women. As in other androcentric fictions of its day, the women in this film are stereotyped and fetishized as objects of the male gaze. Though they seem to be active rather than passive participants in the diegesis, women in charge of their situations, an offscreen force is manipulating them, something insinuated in the film’s opening credit sequence. Showing a female doll obsequiously bending as if on a puppetmaster’s string, the credit sequence as well as the French and Italian posters supporting the film’s release lay Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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bare the patriarchal maneuvers needed to manipulate woman and contain female sexuality so as to make it cohere and adhere to dominant, culturally accepted ideological formations. Indeed, the original movie poster design for The Dolls foregrounds various display boxes used to promote the presence of actresses Virna Lisi, Monica Vitti, Elke Sommer, and Gina Lollobrigida, who, like the female stars of an earlier omnibus film (the Franco-Italian production Tales of Paris [Les Parisiennes, 1961]), are literally “boxed in” as objects to be consumed. The first three episodes of The Dolls are no less outrageous than “Monsignor Cupid” in their foregrounding of female sexuality, beginning with Verna Lisi’s scantily clad character in “The Telephone Call” (“La telefonata”). Directed by Dino Risi, this episode concerns the domestic frustrations of Giorgio, a married man whose negligee-wearing, sofalounging bride, Luisia, proves to be too distracting for her sex-starved husband. As Luisa fends off Giorgio’s advances while gabbing nonstop with her mother long-distance, he grows increasingly impatient. Insisting that it is much too early in the morning for them to make love, Luisia is so preoccupied with her mother’s problems that she fails to notice her frustrated husband across the apartment courtyard, in the arms of a sunbathing nymphomaniac. Because he, like the audience, has been asked to wait before “something happens” in their relationship, the ethical questions that might be raised about his infidelity are vitiated and redirected towards the “lusty” appetite of the spectator who, at least when watching episode films, promiscuously consumes one story after another with little regard or concern for fidelity to the many characters they leave behind.

Lustful Anticipation, “Tasteful” Exploitation As the Marquis de Sade wrote in L’Histoire de Juliette, ou les prospérités du vice, variety and multiplicity “are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.”15 Based on the kinds of motion pictures being made and released during the 1960s and 1970s, Italian filmmakers knew this perhaps better than anyone, turning the French author’s aphorism into a male-focalized modus operandi through which a struggling industry could quickly and cheaply churn out a seemingly endless procession of similar, yet different, sketch films, thus satiating domestic and international audiences’ desire for the titillation of tastefully rendered sex and nudity. As veritable smorgasbords of sexuality and pent-up desire, of structured anticipation and release, episode films reflect in miniature that industrial procession through a serial-like succession of guilty pleasures and cheap thrills. The process and act of waiting take on unique existential and pheNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 159 nomenological dimensions vis-à-vis the reception of episodic cinema. In a sense, Giorgio’s impatience and anticipation in The Dolls extend to the audience who are similarly forced to endure a series of complications and setbacks throughout this multi-story film. Its second episode, “The Soup” (“La minestra”), directed by Franco Rossi, reiterates the theme of impatience, this time focusing on the plight of a woman, Giovanna (Monica Vitti), who is forced to live out her married life in a slum with Alfonso, a boring and inattentive soup slurper who complains about eating the same minestrone each day. The thematic carryover is suggested in the opening minutes by way of a musical number whose lyrics paint a grim portrait of a marriage. Once again, seriality – an experiential phenomenon imparted to the viewers of episode films – is evoked in Giovanna’s search for someone to kill her husband who, day after day, consumes the same soup for dinner. She approaches one person after another, from a gang of doublecrossing thugs to a Marlon Brando impersonator, with no success. After enlisting the aid of swindlers and bunglers, to whom she loses her money, Giovanna finally takes matters into her own hands. Her plan, however, backfires. In the end, she accepts her fate of being forever saddled with her slob of a husband. The third episode, Luigi Comencini’s “A Treatise on Eugenics” (“Il trattato di eugenetica”) finds Elke Sommer’s vacationing Swede, Ulla, in search of the perfect male specimen, an Italian who is both intelligent and physically fit enough to father her baby. Not interested in love or marriage, the sightseeing woman trains her gaze on large statues and the male anatomy. Again, seriality is evoked in the way that she moves from man to man, holding the measuring tape up to their legs and challenging her prospective sires with brainteasers and matchstick games. Her admission that it is difficult to find a man who is the perfect package, one in which everything (face, ears, legs, and so on) is put together in an aesthetically pleasing manner, not only turns gender roles upside down but also relates to the ways in which episode films are seen as collections of disparate parts which rarely amount to a “perfect” package in the eyes of critics. This notion of a freethinking and socially mobile woman having a baby out of wedlock is both risqué and potentially progressive, yet the episode’s brush with illegitimacy is circumvented at the end when Ulla is shown, years in the future, as married to her admiring chauffeur, pregnant with a gaggle of kids at her hip. For all of its foregrounding of female desire and agency, for all of its ongoing attempts to show the world through the eyes of women, The Dolls leaves its four protagonists in less than autonomous positions at the end, thereby reproducing a patriarchal order that fixes gendered subjectivity at a point of diminishing returns. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Of course, the Italian film industry did not have a monopoly on risqué material, as evidenced in contemporaneous French productions such as The Playboys (Les bons vivants, 1965). This three-episode sexploitation comedy about the official closing of Parisian brothels in the late 1940s highlights the theme of prostitution. This theme, which has been a fixture of international cinema dating back to the episode film Prostitution (Die Prostitution, a.k.a. Das gelbe Haus, 1919),16 figures heavily in French and Italian coproductions of the 1960s. Whereas Hollywood films of the classical studio era masked references to the profession behind euphemisms such as “café hostess,” European cinema was not so prudish. Prostitution was often used for thematic purposes in individual episodes of films, as in the aforementioned Love in the City (Carlo Lizzani’s “Paid Love” [“L’amore che si paga”], which was cut from American prints), the Franco-Italian omnibus film Boccaccio ’70 (1962), and Vittorio De Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domain, 1963), the last two both featuring Sophia Loren as a flirtatious working girl. But not until the 1967 release of The Oldest Profession (Le plus vieux métier du monde) did an entire omnibus film exploit this most exploitative of subjects episode to episode. The premise of this Italian-French-West German joint production, combining the contributions of six directors (Claude Autant-Lara, Mauro Bolognini, Philippe de Broca, Jean-Luc Godard, Franco Indovina, and Michael Pfleghar), is to provide audiences with a history of prostitution in a half-dozen sketches. As such, the film takes the viewer from prehistoric times to the Roman Empire to the French Revolution to the belle époque in Vienna, to the modern-day Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and finally to a future time and technologized place where prostitution is the normal way of life and women are literally sex machines. Interestingly, the episodic nature of the profession itself is emulated by the film’s structure which provides fleeting encounters and spectatorial “flings” with some of the world’s most beautiful actresses (Michele Mercier, Elsa Martinelli and Raquel Welch). But most historians and critics today will be interested in the film solely for its last episode, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.17 Titled “Anticipation,” this stylistically audacious sketch is set “2000 years after Christ.” It features Anna Karina as a talkative alternative to Marilù Tolo’s sex machine whom Jacques Charriér’s intergalactic space traveler dispenses with in search of personal contact. The short’s Alphaville-like portrait of a dystopian future world, which is rendered in tinted monochrome and photographic negatives, is a radical departure, stylistically and aesthetically, from the preceding episodes. To emphasize Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 161 its distinctiveness, a timpani drum roll and scrolling text at the beginning of this anchoring episode announce Godard’s significance to The Oldest Profession with much fanfare, as opposed to the simple title cards prefacing the other directors’ contributions. Mark Betz argues that the title “Anticipation” refers “not only to its temporality in the history of the film’s unifying theme but also the reason why cinephiles . . . would seek out this film and suffer through the darkness of the previous episodes’ lesser lights in order to be illuminated by the final sequence.”18 As we have seen, anticipation is structurally codified in numerous episode films of the 1960s, particularly those that promise or suggest the presence of sexual themes and onscreen nudity. Just as cinephilic art film connoisseurs seek mental stimulation in the last of The Oldest Profession’s six sketches, so too do audiences enticed by the title of Dino Risi’s film Vedo nudo (1969) have to wade through a half-dozen vignettes – touching on everything from a chicken thief who defends himself in court and a cross-dressing postal worker to a man who is obsessed with trains – before getting to the final episode (a parody of Antonioni’s Blow-Up [1966] entitled “Vedo Nudo”) which brings the film to a satisfying “climax” with stroboscopic flashes of female nudity. These omnibus and anthology films owe something to the so-called “Night Films” which preceded them: saucy, bar-hopping movies like Europe by Night (Europa di notte, 1959), The World by Night (Mondo di notte, 1960), Hot World by Night (1961), Sexy World by Night (Mondo sexy di notte, 1962), and America by Night (America di notte, 1962) which, by the mid 1960s, had all but glutted Italian theaters. Alessandro Blasetti, a progenitor of episodic cinema who wrote and/or directed the sketch films Times Gone By (Altri tempi, 1952), Our Time (Tempi nostri, 1953), The Four Truths (Les quatres vérités, 1962), and Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others (Io, Io, Io . . . e gli altri, 1965), can be credited for the advent of this ethnographic “night cycle” which presented in provocative vignettes a vision of sex as spectacle. As Mira Liehm points out, the generally permissive attitude toward mass-produced erotic films during this period was paradoxical, and episodic works such as Europe by Night reflected the typical mentality of the Italian middle-class male with, as the saying has it, “one foot in the church and the other in a brothel.” These sex movies could also be regarded as an unconscious revolt against the “idolization of the family,” against . . . the sacred image of “the mamma” and the “motherwife-sister” mythology . . . They brought an end to certain taboos without changing in any way the overall puritanistic morality of the Italian audiences. After brothels were outlawed in January 1958, the Italian male stepped with his other leg into the pornographic movie theatres, indulging in “a rite of collective masturbation.”19

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Opening in Rome exactly one year after the outlawing of brothels, Blasetti’s “tastefully exploitative” Europe by Night gave audiences a flavor of nightclub life minus the “cigarette haze, crowded tables, and cover charges,” effectively marking a new era not only in adult-oriented entertainment but also in genre diversification. As a musical travelogue tour of some of Europe’s most famous high-class dives, including the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris and Madrid’s El Corral de la Moriera, the film presents one burlesque or café act after another. Onstage performers include bellydancer Badia, the Rastelli clowns of Milan, cancan girls, Swiss acrobats, magician Channing Pollock, female impersonator Coccinelle, comic mime Henry Salvador, the Archie Savage Dancers, American pop stars The Platters, ventriloquist Robert Lamouret, Spanish movie star Carmen Sevilla, jazz ballet and gypsy flamenco dancers, and Elvis Presley clone Colin Hicks. Despite the disparate nature of the presentation, which harks back to vaudeville shows and revue films (which I discussed in Chapter 2) while gesturing toward future uses of salacious material onscreen, the acts are unified – at least in the 1963 American release – by an Englishlanguage commentary track written by Merton Koplin and narrated by television humorist Henry Morgan. The latter’s voice is the cement that holds the various bits together. By the time the eighteenth segment brings the film to a climax with a trio of striptease artistes followed by images of dawn breaking on the Seine and the Spanish Steps in Rome, the audience has been exposed to a new continental cartography unique to cinema, wherein spaces can be serialized yet blended so as to suggest a near eradication of barriers. As a visual analogue of the film’s “homogenous heterogeneity,” a miniature set of various European cities is shown in the opening minutes – their geographic proximity and relation to one another at odds with their actual situatedness. Paris, Rome, Madrid, London, and other cities are resituated so that in one camera move such disparate places as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Kremlin, the Coliseum, Westminster Abbey, and Big Ben come into view. These are the architectural highlights, according to the offscreen narrator, “that most people remember” after their trips abroad, places that “are only for tourists.” The miniature set “isn’t a real city,” as Morgan reminds us but it nevertheless represents Europe in its totality as a series of spectacularized sites and speedily consumed narrative bits. Though subsequent Mondo-style “Night Films,” such as Night Women (La femme spectacle, 1964), went further in terms of portraying female sexuality as something to be consumed in different cultural contexts and European capitals, Blasetti’s original set the template for the geospatial shifting and barrier breaching of multinational anthology and omnibus Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 163 films throughout the 1960s, from Mondo Bizarro (1966), a sensationalistic faux travelogue that links its vignettes with images of a spinning globe hung from a string, to RoGoPaG (1962), a multi-director production that begins with an airplane crossing national borders.

City-living, Border-crossing, and the Rhetoric of Togetherness The world is a huge great ball with loads of cities on it. The first words spoken in the omnibus film Istanbul Tales (Anlat Istanbul, 2005), delivered by a young Turkish girl who quickly concludes that her city of birth is “the nicest one of all.”

Beginning with Love in the City and culminating recently with producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s Paris, je t’aime (2006) and its sequels (including New York, I Love You [2009]), omnibus films have long provided filmmakers with an appropriately fragmented means to “map out” the relationships between disparate communities. Moreover, cinematic episodicity facilitates a flaneurial engagement with the medium as an embodied experience snagged between contrasting modalities. Drifting from episode to episode, spectators enact a process not unlike a city wanderer, a stroller of streets and patroller of meanings who might, on occasion, succumb to the epiphanic instant of a fleeting encounter or the alluring, “aggregate spectacle” of mercantilic/metrophilic displays. While this experiential aspect of omnibus films was apparent as early as 1953 (when Love in the City was released), it became especially pronounced a decade later when the French film producer, Barbet Schroeder, and a group of New Wave filmmakers undertook an ambitious project called Paris vu par . . . That year, Schroeder unfolded, like a map, the spatial coordinates of “cinematic Paris” even as he diminished the city’s diverse ethnic makeup. A former philosophy student at the Sorbonne and writer for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, Schroeder had, by late 1963, established his own production company (Les Films du Losange) and a year later gathered together a half-dozen of his fellow Cahiers critics and alumni for an unusual project, a feature-length film about Paris consisting of six fifteen- to twenty-minute episodes shot in 16 mm and with direct sound recording.20 Like Paris, je t’aime thirty years after it (albeit on a very different scale), each episode would be set in a different section of the city, introduced by way of expository captions to identify the various locales and names of the directors (a veritable Who’s Who of Nouvelle Vague auteurs: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet, and Jean Daniel Pollet). Bundled together under the title Paris vu par . . . Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(Paris Seen by . . . , a.k.a. Six in Paris, 1965), the six constituent parts of this transauthorial film crystallize various facets of French life scattered across the map of Paris (from Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the Gare du Nord to Rue Saint Denis to Place de l’Etoile and beyond), thus imparting a sense of representational wholeness despite the film’s metonymic slippage into modularity. In attempting to distill the local flavors of each neighborhood and bring together cinematic and cartographic elements, this multistory omnibus film magnifies its own patchwork topography as well as the structural limitations placed on the contributing filmmakers. Like six authors in search of a character, Douchet, Rouch, Pollet, Rohmer, Godard, and Chabrol, under the watchful eye of producer Schroeder, tapped into a “reservoir of images that constitute the past” only to rework them in an ironic, parodic, and hyperconscious way. This transauthorial re-articulation is linked to what Jim Collins refers to as “the perpetual circulation and recirculation of signs that form the fabric of postmodern cultural life.”21 Tellingly, the Eiffel Tower, which is visible in the film’s first image (a bird’s-eye view of the city) is not present in the last “postcard” image of the film, and the hijacking of this sign above all other signs not only thwarts our expectations but also undermines the joie de vivre vision of an imaginary Paris that first circulated in the pre-modern culture of views of the nineteenth century and continues to proliferate in today’s popular media (despite parodic attempts at dismantling it). To quote André Breton, “It is not for me to ponder what is happening to the “shape of the city’, even of the true city distracted and abstracted from the one I live in by the force of an element which is to my mind what air is supposed to be to life. Without regret, at this moment I see it change and even disappear.”22 The city film genre, however, did not disappear. In fact, it became an even more conspicuous presence within the expanding corpus of episode films of the 1960s when such omnibus productions as Dangerous Game (Juego peligroso, 1967), Three Times Bucharest (De trei ori Bucaresti, 1967), and Prague Nights (Prazské noci, 1968) gave audiences around the world various perspectives on individual cities. Though filmmakers had used episodicity to depict the multifarious characteristics of urban life as early as 1920, the year that the screenwriter–director Charles J. Brabin made the three-segment While New York Sleeps at Fox, and while there were several examples in Italy during the 1950s, such as Love in the City and The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli, 1954),23 it was not until after the release of Paris vu par . . . that the metrophilic impulse in anthology, omnibus, and sketch films became truly pronounced on a global scale, culminating recently with Prague Stories (Praha ocima, 1999), a four-director cross-section of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 165 lives set in the capital of the Czech Republic; Tokyo Tales (Tokyo zance, 2001), an omnibus film whose seven episodes are organized around the theme of transportation; Istanbul Tales (Anlat Istanbul, 2005), a Turkish production uniting the work of five directors (all of whom based their contributions on classic fairy tales); Skopje Remixed (2011), a feature-length assembly of ten Macedonian directors who each contributed a short love story set in the title city; and Centro Histórico (2012), a Portuguese work composed of stories celebrating the rich cultural heritage of Guimarães (located in the north part of the country). In 1984, a sequel to Paris vu par . . . was produced by the French company Films A2. Titled Paris vu par . . . 20 ans après (Paris Seen by . . . 20 Years Later), this six-episode omnibus brings together the work of directors Frederick Mitterand (“Rue du Bac”), Philippe Garrel (“Rue Fontaine”), Chantal Akerman (“J’ai faim, J’ai froid”), Vincent Nordon (“Paris-Plage”), Philippe Venault (“Canal Saint-Martin”), and Bernard Dubois (“Place Clichy”). When the film debuted in Paris, it was shown on a double bill with the original Paris vu par . . . (1965), thus affording audiences the opportunity to directly compare the two and see a presumably more complete picture of the city (as well as alternative points of view toward it). As is often the case with omnibus films, one director’s contribution received more attention than the others and, in the case of Paris vu par . . . 20 ans après that episode was “J’ai faim, J’ai froid.” This mini-récit, directed by the Belgian-born minimalist Akerman, concerns two adolescent runaways’ trip from Brussels to Paris. As the only black-and-white sequence as well as the only one lacking a location name, it seems a natural choice to be critically isolated, one that stylistically and thematically harks back to European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Wandering through Paris, exiled teenagers Mack and Tosh repeat the words “I’m hungry, I’m cold.” Their despondency is a throwback to the earlier refrain “I’m sick of Paris” (from the 1965 original) which, in lieu of familiar landmarks (such as the Opéra, the Place Vendôme, and the Place de la Concorde), sonically rationalizes both films’ ultimate deferral of any complete portrait of the capital, a ville manqué or “absent city.” Given its prominent focus on individuals and groups of people as opposed to material representations of the metropolis itself (that is, its buildings, parks, street signs, and so on), perhaps a more fitting title for Paris vu par . . . 20 ans après would have been Les Français vus par . . . (The French as Seen By . . . ), a title that was eventually used in 1988 for yet another omnibus production. Indeed, many so-called city films devote less time to actual urban experience than to interpersonal relationships among inhabitants and visitors who treat the city as merely an architectural or Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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botanical backdrop. As such, people, rather than cities, are the protagonists or central agents in most episode films which initially promise all-inclusive portraits of urban life as a visual and sensory experience, yet renege on that promise by gravitating inward rather than outward – toward rather than away from the lives of these potential promeneurs. This is a strategy taken, for example, by Ayelet Menahemi and Nirit Yaron, directors of the three-episode Israeli film Tel-Aviv Stories (Sipurei Tel-Aviv, 1994). Though its title suggests an exploratory and touristic view of one of Israel’s youngest, most thriving cities (founded in 1909), the film puts a great deal of emphasis on the interior, rather than exterior, worlds of three different women whose names supply the titles of the episodes: fashion designer Sharona; newspaper reporter Zofit; and policewoman Tikva. Offering only fleeting glimpses of the Bauhaus-inspired city architecture, as well as its high-rise office buildings (notably the forty-story Migdal Shalom), this city film leaves much of the municipality offscreen, including the palm tree-lined Tayelet, the Yemenite Quarter, Hayarkon Park, the neighboring area of Old Jaffa, and Kings’ Square (renamed Rabin Square just one year after the release of the film when the Israeli prime minister was assassinated). In a sense, these short stories could be set anywhere, easily transposed onto different cultural milieus.24 Though in his May 1966 review of Paris vu par . . . for the magazine Films and Filming, Peter Whitehead bemoans the fact that “such a project could never be set up” in America, latter-day films, such as New York Stories and New York, I Love You, suggest otherwise. The idea for the omnibus production New York Stories originated with Woody Allen. A longtime admirer of such works as Dead of Night (1945) and Boccaccio ’70, Allen took the idea to producer Robert Greenhut who initially had reservations about such a venture because of the genre’s poor track record at the box-office. The director won out, though, and drew Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola into the project. Each of their contributions – Scorsese’s “Life Lessons,” Coppola’s “Life without Zoë,” and Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” – is set in Manhattan. Taken as a whole, the film privileges the upper-crust world of one borough (featuring the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, the Russian Tea Room, Tavern on the Green, and a million-dollar costume ball in the Metropolitan Museum) while peripheralizing the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island – boroughs that remain offscreen much like New York’s many racial minorities (only in Allen’s episode is there a fleeting glimpse of an African American).25 In contrast to Paris vu par . . . and New York Stories, two racially homogeneous omnibus films each featuring a single metropolis seen Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 167 through a variety of narrative lenses as its principle “character,” there are more geospatially radiant films in which the narrative borders separating episodes delineate national boundaries, thus connecting certain stories to certain cities or regions. Despite an abundance of transmigrations, films in the latter category, such as The Wind Rose (Die Windrose, 1957), Love at Twenty (L’amour à vingt ans, 1962), The Beautiful Swindlers (Les plus belles escroqueries du monde, 1964), and The Dirty Game (La guerre secrete, 1965), tend to represent border-crossings as invisible penetrations through episodic “blockades” built atop narrative fault lines. Because empires themselves can be thought of as anthologies – collections of countries and cities wherein populations are further fenced off from one another – an ideologically charged analysis of these films might expose the exclusionary tactics, as well as the politics of containment and regulation, necessary to empire-building. One might also interrogate the very idea of omnibus “togetherness” so as to question the consequences of uniting disparate entities through the rubric of nationhood. The combination of two seemingly antithetical concepts – containment and border-crossing – is particularly salient in those episode films, such as Paisá, which utilize inserts of maps to indicate the geospatial positioning of narrative segments. The five episodes that make up Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) – each of which is set in a different part of the world and foregrounding a different language or patois (Los Angeles English, Brooklynese, French, Italian, and Finnish) – are similarly linked by interstitial images of the Earth as seen from outer space, a spinning globe whose mobility is ironically predicated on rotation and repetition. Before each narrative returns us to the spatial confines of a taxi interior (made even smaller by its comparative relation to a large city), the globe reappears onscreen along with five clocks mounted on a wall. Time thus turns back on itself only to move forward once again. In much the same way, Hal Hartley’s Flirt (1995), a three-episode film set in New York (February 1993), Berlin (October 1994), and Tokyo (March 1995), tells the same story thrice, their only differences being the cultural backgrounds and sexual persuasions of the characters who are embroiled less in their respective cities and times than in their selfenclosed, private worlds. Simultaneously sprawling and hermetic, Flirt is awash in both repetition and difference. Its international locales are suggestive of ethnic and racial heterogeneity yet linked together into a kind of global gestalt wherein “universal truths” come to the fore. One of the underlying similarities between its episodes is a shared focus on the theme of commitment, played out in the story of two lovers who, threatened with separation, must decide whether or not their relationship Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is worth saving. This theme is an important one in the context of episodic cinema, which hinges on an audience’s willingness to commit to a given fiction that is bound to end prematurely or abruptly, thus turning diegetic separation (of characters) into an allegorical concept related to our own spectatorial estrangement from texts that are at once flirtatiously revealing and withholding. In crossing the border between Belgium and France, the two main characters in Akerman’s aforementioned “J’ai faim, J’ai froid” are like the viewers of those episode films that visualize more than one city. That is, their geospatial breaching of barriers emulates the spectatorial movement between segments in an anthology, omnibus, portmanteau, or sketch film. A more salacious example of border-crossing can be found in Malamondo, an episode film about teenagers that was theatrically released in 1964. Over the course of twenty-three vignettes, this feature-length production from the Italian studio, Titanus, takes the spectator through a series of youthful improprieties, from the butchering of a pig by Italian students to nude skiing in Switzerland, from French teens holding an orgy in a graveyard to Swedish students contemplating suicide. With the main attraction being Italian pop idol Adriano Celentano singing “Sad Saturday Night,” this film caters specifically to a European crowd, forging a community of regionally dispersed spectators who collectively, if secretly, derive “pleasure” from seeing impotent young men in a Swiss clinic being aroused by nurses, or witnessing a student in Heidelberg having his face slashed by a barber. If, at eighty minutes, the film tries to pack too much of a “bad thing” within its limited time frame, the speed at which it moves from episode to episode conveys the breakneck pace of social change during the 1960s, a period when a growing number of mondo-style anthologies and omnibus films, weighing in with twenty-plus episodes, were produced under the banner of “More is Better.” In the remaining part of this chapter, I question this notion (found in many omnibus films) that “more is better,” and explore the participatory impetus or imperative of several more regionally and globally dispersed multi-director productions, many of which pivot on pleas for social justice and calls for political action.

Episodic Politics: Love and Anger In the mid to late 1960s, a handful of politically engaged omnibus films was being produced alongside the more commercially oriented ventures mentioned in the preceding section, including Far from Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam, 1967), Tales from the New World (Erzählungen aus der neuen Welt, 1968), and Love and Anger (a.k.a. Vangelo ’70, Amore e rabbia, 1969). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 169 A few of these works span various parts of the globe, highlighting the border-crossing movements of young characters as well as a host of cities where social change was beginning to foment in response to the war in Southeast Asia, the widening divide between the wealthy and the poor, student and worker uprisings, and civil rights movements taken up by women and racial minorities. Love and Anger, a project conceived by the director Carlo Lizzani, originated as a thematically linked assembly of stories based on ideas found in the four gospels of the Bible, although it ended up being one of the strongest – and strangest – calls to action in the history of omnibus films. A longtime contributor to omnibus films himself (as one of the seven directors involved in the earlier Love in the City as well as a participant in the making of Amori pericolosi [1964] and Thrilling [1965]), Lizzani knew all too well the challenges involved in orchestrating such an endeavor, and reached out to another filmmaker with omnibus experience, Jean-Luc Godard. In addition to the French director, Italian filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Velerio Zurlini were offered the opportunity to work on the project, although the latter’s contribution was ultimately cut owing to its excessive length (going well beyond the twenty- to twenty-five-minute limitation placed on all of the filmmakers). In place of Zurlini, another Italian, Marco Bellocchio, was brought on board although his segment – “Discutiamo, Discutiamo” (“Let’s Discuss, Let’s Discuss”), a Brechtian staging of class opposition within an actual university classroom where students are pitted against protestors – is only tenuously connected to the larger film’s overarching gospel theme. And yet, despite this final episode’s departure from the thematic throughline, its tone and staging are fairly consistent with the four episodes that precede it: Lizzani’s “L’indifferenza” (“Indifference”), Bertolucci’s “Agonia” (“Agony”), Pasolini’s “La Sequenza del fiore di carta” (“The Paper Flower Sequence”), and Godard’s “L’Amore” (“Love”). Not surprisingly, critics fell in “love” with Godard’s episode, citing it as the superior contribution and thus diminishing the efforts of the Italians to tackle serious themes within the limited confines of their short episodes. But, of the five total sections, Godard’s is perhaps the least interesting part of Love and Anger – a film whose title alone registers the critical tendency to qualitatively compare and contrast episodes along preferential lines (with hostility often being directed toward the least loved portions of omnibus films). Far more fascinating, and indicative of Love and Anger’s tumultuous historical background, are the other episodes, beginning with the film’s first: a twelve-minute sequence about public apathy set in New York Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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City and the riverside area of New Jersey. If the Allen–Coppola–Scorsese group effort, New York Stories, presents a “scrubbed” picture of the titular city (blemish free, in terms of its lack of references to New York’s social underclass), then this first episode of the Franco-Italian coproduction presents a comparatively more “realistic” depiction of the struggles faced by city dwellers, including homeless men and women who are shown at various junctures (interspersed with shots of people who are glued to their television sets watching a Yankees game). In addition to these images of street-level destitution, Lizzani (a specialist in poliziottesco, or gritty police dramas) juxtaposes two storylines: one concerning a young woman who is mugged, raped, and finally murdered in some bushes outside a high-rise apartment building (while her neighbors gaze forlornly out their windows, doing nothing); the other concerning a man struggling to flag down a motorist on an expressway who might transport his dying wife to a hospital following a deadly auto accident. As embedded episodes within a single episode, these discrete storylines thematically interpenetrate, showcasing the way that individual instances of indifference can breed widespread apathy among people trapped in their tenement dwellings or shut off from the world as drivers or television viewers oblivious to the suffering around them. The Bad Samaritan “bystander effect” exhibited in this first episode of Love and Anger also goes by the name of the “Genovese Syndrome,” an expression coined by psychologists after the 1964 death of Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese. Like the young woman being assaulted in the film, Genovese was attacked and stabbed to death outside her home in Queens, to the disregard of her unresponsive neighbors (according to news reports). “Let someone else help you.” That comment, uttered by a criminal in a stolen vehicle seconds after being flagged down as a potential means of transit for the harried man and his dying wife, suggests the general lack of concern infecting the city. As a counterbalance to that indifference (as well as to Lizzani’s quick editing style), Bertolucci’s languidly paced episode offsets the titular agony experienced by a dying man in a private hospital room with the sight and sound of an avant-garde performance troupe. Played by the painter, poet, and performance artist Julian Beck, the cofounder (along with actress Judith Malina) of The Living Theatre, the old man is attended to by a Roman Catholic priest performing last rites and then by the young men and women outside his private chamber. After collectively enacting violent scenarios against a sonic backdrop of their own guttural, meditative chant, these members of The Living Theatre gather around the old man and make a number of individual announcements in different Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 171 languages (English, French, and German) – short declarative statements and non sequiturs about freedom, pain, repentance, and the desire to end the war in Vietnam, followed by a brief recitation of the parable of the fig tree (a biblical reference that reminds one of the film’s grounding in the New Testament). In a way, the young men and women are reminiscent of the silent mimes who pop up in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) although, here, the troupe’s bizarre movements (writhing about until their bodies are physically entwined) suggest an outward expression (or expulsion) of inner turmoil. Having earlier made the Garbo-like comment, “I want to be alone,” the man finds himself surrounded by these troubled souls before slowly succumbing to death. By the time his frail body is posthumously dressed in papal robes by attendant priests, the episode’s underlying binaries – including the relationship between chaos and ceremonial ritual – have risen fully to the surface. Throughout this episode, the tension between the individual and the collective, peace and violence, is palpable and very “real,” despite the obvious “artificiality” or “staginess” of its presentation. A similar sort of staginess infuses the drama at the heart of both Godard’s and Bellocchio’s episodes. Godard’s “Love” attempts to deconstruct the titular sentiment by way of a conversation between an Italianspeaking man and a French-speaking woman, presented as a series of extreme close-ups that carve up their bodies into abstract shapes. The topic of their bilingual discourse is another couple or, rather, the “movie” of another couple, visible from the comfort of their rooftop garden. While the first couple comments on the relationship between a Europeanized Arab man and a Jewish woman who has shed her ethnic and religious identity, the second couple ruminates on the pressing (political) topics of the day: exploitation, oppression, revolution, and war. Moreover, in typical Godardian fashion, the director expresses his own commentary about the ontology of his chosen medium by having the characters discuss the state of cinema which is “dying” (according to one person) and which “doesn’t exist yet” (according to another). Like Bertolucci’s segment, Godard’s episode metatextually lays bare the protocols and processes of cinematic signification (focusing in particular on the actors’ performances) while suggesting that a couple’s potential “split” might be likened to a broader breakdown in society. As one character suggests, democracy and revolution cannot coexist. The coexistence of diametrically opposed forces is central to Bellocchio’s “Let’s Discuss, Let’s Discuss” in which a group of left-wing agitators and war protestors breaks in to a lecture hall at the University of Rome and begins chanting “Long Live Ho Chi Minh” to the chagrin of the initially Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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dumbfounded, apolitical students seated before them. Besides these two groups, the school administration is present or, rather, comically portrayed by students in cheap, obviously fake beards. The artificiality of the professors’ costuming and facial hair, like the ridiculous plastic bats meant to represent police clubs, indicates the filmmaker’s Brechtian conception of communal didactics and comedic dialectics, aimed at the class-based educational system in Italy as well as the authoritarianism that induces social quiescence or subservience to the status quo. Besides being both didactic and dialectical, this final episode in Love in Anger is also dialogic in its staging of point–counterpoint communication and opposing views between politically entrenched social actors – a tactic that encapsulates the omnibus film’s potential for internal contradiction and even self-negation. Produced and released in the wake of several pivotal moments in the Vietnam War (including the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre of 1968), Love and Anger – like Far from Vietnam before it – will seem somewhat dated to many contemporary viewers. It is, to use a hackneyed expression, a “product of its time,” suffused with the kind of eye-rolling imagery that makes many examples of hippie-suffused sixties cinema seem like relics of a distant past. As further evidence of that, an actual “flower child” is on view in the film’s third episode, “The Paper Flower Sequence.” Directed by Pasolini, this ten-minute episode (the shortest of the bunch) shows actor Ninetto Davoli capering aimlessly down a busy street in Rome, stopping occasionally to assail bystanders with questions. As he dances merrily through the crowd and alongside cars, he carries an oversized paper flower which anticipates the obviously artificial professors’ beards and plastic police bats in the fifth episode. His innocent demeanor creates a stark contrast to the director’s knowing use of stock footage, superimposed atop the newly shot street scene and featuring ghostly, palimpsest images of government figures, political rallies, and war atrocities, which will thereafter “haunt” the remaining sections of the film (the fourth and fifth episodes, discussed above). Though much could be critically extrapolated from Pasolini’s intentional conflation of visual signifiers representing past traumas and naïve hopefulness, not to mention his frequent cuts to telephone wires as well as early superimpositions of a map and a globe (which amount to a reminder of this and other omnibus films’ border-crossing ability to foster crosscultural communication), I wish to linger not on the titular flower (which droops but never dies, owing to its artifice) but rather on the actor’s simple act of crossing the street at the beginning of the episode. It is significant that his movement is fraught with danger, and that this simultaneously upbeat and depressing episode culminates with a shot of Davoli lying Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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episod ic e ro t ics a nd t he po l iti c s o f   p l a c e 173 on the ground, still breathing but metaphorically “dead,” following the sound of a bomb exploding and black-and-white documentary footage of decimated bodies – Jewish and Japanese – illustrating the human cost of war. His initial crossing of the street, presented at the beginning of the episode, is allegorically suggestive of the challenges that lay ahead of spectators when they view multi-episode films such as Love and Anger. Moreover, the happiness, which the actor projects to the pedestrians and motorists around him, is offset by Pasolini’s incorporation of stock footage superimposed atop the images of Davoli and showcasing a series of war atrocities and political events that might remind contemporary audiences of this omnibus film’s historical context at the time of its theatrical release. In next chapter, I confront the issue of political participation and collective opposition, taking into consideration those omnibus productions that utilize episodicity to invite reflection on social problems, perhaps even fostering a sense of agency on the part of audience members.

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Collective Opposition, Political Participation, and Worldwide Competition: from Visions of Eight to Visions of Europe It should be noted that there is a long, if understudied, tradition of generating dissent and attempting to mobilize the masses through the inclusive, participatory format of the omnibus film. Beginning with the agitprop vehicle La vie est à nous (Life is Ours, 1936), a series of narrative sketches and newsreels produced by the French Communist Party, supervised by Jean Renoir, and today recognized as an early forerunner of latter-day “film collectives,” such as Return to Life (Retour à la vie, 1949), The Moment of Peace (Der Augenblick des friedens, 1965), Far from Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam, 1967), Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978), After the Gulf War (Harbu al-Khallij wa B’ad, 1991), The Only Country in the World (L’unico paese al mondo, 1994), and Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation (Deutschland 09 - 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation, 2009), the politically charged omnibus feature has proven to be a perennial means of both challenging official policies or prejudicial attitudes and solidifying public consensus while mining the many economic and material resources made available through Europe’s common market. First outlined fifty years ago, with the 1957 signing of the Treaty of Rome, the common market has remained a fundamental component of the bi-, tri-, and multilateral investment treaties allowing European nations to dip into larger state subsidy pools. In the years that followed the first co-production agreement between France and Italy, signed in 1949 (when taxes were first imposed on imported American films), national representatives revised the policies that would expand the framework of subsequent cultural as well as political relations. This was furthermore prefaced by the signing of Franco-German and Franco-Spanish coproduction agreements in 1953 and the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958. Though significant geopolitical shifts had occurred prior to the 1949 coproduction contract between the French and Italian ­governments – notably the establishment of the General Agreement on Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 175 Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 and the signing of the Treaty of Brussels in 1948 (when France, Britain, and the Benelux countries agreed to share economic, social, cultural, and military resources) – it was not until the 1960s that these pan-European cooperatives came to dominate cinematic praxis. Indeed, in the years leading up to the 1970 erection of the European Community (EC), dozens of star-studded omnibus productions burst into theaters, giving audiences an opportunity to sample a diverse array of auteuristic talents and story treatments within single, feature-length motion pictures. Additionally, coproduction arrangements enabled the creation of a viable economic and artistic platform for bringing together Europe’s finest filmmakers and actors well into the post-Mitterand period when an even stronger set of initiatives (such as the Council of Europe’s Eurimages, established in 1994 as a support for coproduction agreements between Eastern and Western European countries) and a more coherent production and distribution plan created what many critics refer to as a kind of cinematic “Europudding,” in which the coexistence of multiple cultural components results in a bland and homogenized final product geared toward mass consumption patterns.1 A recent omnibus production, Visions of Europe (2004), points toward this trend in European Union multilingual film productions which, for the past ten years, have benefited from such funding bodies as the Motion Picture Public Foundation (MPPF) and Mesures pour Encourager le Développement de l’industrie de Production Audio-Visuelle (MEDIA) as well as exhibition venues like the European Union Film Festival (EUFF). It has also contributed to reviving interest in the multi-director format once popular during the 1960s when Franco-Italian coproductions, such as RoGoPaG (1962), The Beautiful Swindlers (Les plus belles escroqueries du monde, 1964), and Spirits of the Dead (Histoires extraordinaires, 1968), were seen by large numbers of cinephiles, critics, and casual moviegoers. Usually organized by ambitious producers, such as Carlo Ponti, Tonino Cervi, Alberto Grimaldi, and Pierre Roustang, these projects gave some of Europe’s brightest talents – directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Roberto Rossellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini – the opportunity to experiment with short films and sketches running ten to thirty minutes on average. Moreover, multi-episode films of the 1960s often lent themselves to collaborative, cooperative efforts to shore up a sense of solidarity in the face of historical, social, and technological change. For instance, there was an unprecedented outpouring of anthology and omnibus films in Czechoslovakia prior to, and immediately following, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, including A Place in the Crowd (Místo v houfu, 1964), Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, 1965), Crime in the Girls’ School (Zlocin Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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v dívcí skole, 1965), Dialog 20-40-60 (1968), Prague Nights (Prazské noci, 1968), and The Deserter and the Nomads (Zbehovia a pútnici, 1969).2 Such examples attest to the importance of transauthorial cinema in capturing a wide assortment of perspectives on contemporaneous moments of political contestation, social unrest, and/or industrial transformation, as evidenced in subsequent productions, such as The Sandwich Man (Er zi de da wan ou, 1983), a film that jumpstarted Taiwan’s New Wave of the early 1980s, and Echoes of Conflict (1989), a collection of three short films (directed by Gur Heller, Jorge Johanan Weller, and Amit Goren) about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Indeed, the textually transformative and multiple dimensions of the omnibus film make it conducive to addressing calamity, crisis, and change – something expressed in these recent productions (to take just four examples): • Spotlights on a Massacre (1998), a ten-episode collection that highlights the destructive power of land mines, with contributions from an internationally mixed group of directors (Youssef Chahine, Pierre Jolivet, Mathieu Kassovitz, Pavel Lounguine, Rithy Panh, Volker Schlondorff, Coline Serreau, Bertrand Tavernier, Fernando Trueba and Jaco Van Dormael); • Underground Zero (2002), a multiperspectival meditation on the September 11, 2001 attacks, as seen through the lenses of over a dozen American independent filmmakers; • 18-j (2004), an Argentinean film combining ten shorts about the July 18, 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. • 18 Days (Tamantashar yom, 2011), an Egyptian collection of short films by ten directors who focus on the titular period of time during which the 2011 revolution swept through the streets of Cairo. An even more ambitious example of this kind of production is the 2008 collective project Stories on Human Rights. Under the guidance of producer Adelina von Fürstenberg, Stories on Human Rights brings together the short films of twenty-five directors (including Jia Zhangke from China, Idrissa Ouedraogo from Burkina Faso and Walter Salles from Brazil), thus consolidating multiple languages, ethnic identities, and regional settings into a commemorative celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (UDHR) historical significance as the first United Nations (UN)backed statement committed to upholding the basic civil and political rights of all people regardless of nationality. Initiated at the behest of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (a UN agency established in 1993), this project, launched by the non-profit organization Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ART for the World, was designed to promote international cooperation and the rule of law in countries where it would be theatrically exhibited. Consisting of over two dozen three-minute episodes (each directed by a different filmmaker), Stories on Human Rights succeeds in bringing forth a multitude of themes. Paradoxically, however, it waters down the language of human rights (and perhaps even undermines its legal foundations) by suggesting that chauvinism, narrow-mindedness, and a general disrespect for other people’s feelings are sufficient in satisfying the requirements for humanitarian intervention. Still, the structural properties and phenomenological appeals of transauthorial cinema make it a suitable forum in which to address political turmoil as well as public tragedies necessitating multiple perspectives – something expressed in recent omnibus productions such as 11ʹ09ʺ01 (2002), a multi-director rumination on the September 11, 2001 attacks, composed of eleven episodes that collectively cast a wide net over the horror of global terrorism. As the Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf stated in an interview following the release of 11ʹ09ʺ01 (a film to which she contributed), “I like the idea of a collective film . . . I see it as a form of democratic cinema that gives different points of view.” In the following pages, I shall explore the 1972 omnibus production Visions of Eight and the aforementioned Visions of Europe so as to test Makhmalbaf’s notion of “democratic cinema.”

An Olympic Omnibus: Visions of Eight Visions of Eight is perhaps the most unusual Olympic documentary ever produced. On the surface, this omnibus film appears to be curiously “empty,” at both the diegetic and extradiegetic levels, insofar as it captures only fleeting, impressionistic glimpses of the festival held in Munich (from August 26 to September 11, 1972) and, furthermore, only briefly alludes to the deadly act of terrorism which capped the Olympics that year. Nevertheless, as an omnibus film composed of eight discrete yet connected sections, each running between five and sixteen minutes, Visions of Eight is, in fact, a very “full” evocation of the Olympic experience for it manages to convey both the personal and collective aspirations of the participants involved (athletes as well as filmmakers) through a narrative form that is naturally amenable to political allegory and the interrelated themes of competition and cooperation. Because this multinational, multi-director film foregrounds the spirit of competition and cooperation so intrinsic to the Olympic ideal, it provides an illuminating opportunity for charting out the ways in which the narratological genre of the omnibus Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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film not only problematizes conventional paradigms of authorship and nationhood but also supplies a textual correlative to the sometimes contradictory modes of participation inscribed in sporting events. As the brains behind Visions of Eight – a film that combines the efforts of eight directors from eight different countries – producer David L. Wolper consolidated talents and resources from around the world and thus gestured to the spate of omnibus films that predated his own. It was his interest in the ostensibly apolitical world of sports that gave Wolper – by then a master of staging live events for the camera – a decided advantage in the race to make the official film about the 1972 Summer Olympics. That event would become mired in political debate and controversy when, in the pre-dawn hours of September 5, six Palestinian guerrilla fighters, known as “Black September,” climbed the cyclone fence surrounding Olympic Village, entered a building at 31 Connollystrasse, and took eleven members of the Israeli wrestling team hostage before killing them.3 Led by Issa (the mysterious “Man in the White Hat” believed to have been Lebanese national, Mohammed Mahmud Essafadi) and joined inside the village by two more Palestinians, the terrorists felt that, by taking the men hostage, their demand for the release of 236 revolutionary prisoners would be met. The standoff between the Black Septembrists and the German armed forces finally ended that evening when five of the eight terrorists were killed during a climactic melee at the Fürtenfeldbruck military airfield (14 miles west of Munich).4 A memorial service was held the next day (September 6) at Olympic Stadium, with flags at half-mast and e­ ighty-thousand mourners in attendance. After the Munich Philharmonic performed the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica, Olympic Organizing Committee member Willi Daume spoke of the Games as a “great and fine celebration of the peoples of the world . . . that had been dedicated to peace.” International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage echoed those words and announced that the Games would go on.5 Dedicated to the memory of the martyred athletes, Visions of Eight actually makes only passing reference to the actions of the terrorists who easily circumvented the minimum security measures that fateful day in Munich and put all of Germany, a nation eager to dissociate itself from Hitler’s Berlin Games, on high alert.6 That the film at first appears so uncommitted in its political aspirations, that it seems so disinterested in the ideological implications of the Olympics, can be partly attributed to the fact that 90 percent of its principle photography had been completed by the time the terrorists took their hostages. Wolper, who had no intention of extending the schedule to include footage of an event that would already be telecast around the world before the film’s theatrical debut Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 179 the following year, left the task of footnoting the tragic occurrence to the one filmmaker who had not yet completed his contribution to Visions of Eight, John Schlesinger. Appropriately, Schlesinger’s twelve-minute film, an exposé of British research scientist turned marathon runner, Ron Hill (who appears disturbingly nonchalant toward the terrorist act which has delayed the 26-mile race one day and thrown many runners off their game), brings Visions of Eight to a ruminative and somewhat self-incriminating conclusion. Though Schlesinger wanted to change his subject during those final days and make a short film about the effects of the killings (a topic vetoed by Wolper), his ultimate decision to focus on human endurance offers the viewer opportunities to ponder not only humankind’s capacity to weather misfortune but also the spectatorial perseverance needed to appreciate this and other multi-episode films that shuttle from one narrative event to the next. Unlike the other seven contributors to Visions of Eight (Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Juri Ozerov, Arthur Penn, Michael Pfleghar, and Mai Zetterling), Schlesinger opted to deal with a particular individual; and yet, despite this focus on a single person, the sensitivity he had displayed in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) toward a broad range of people and social problems resurfaces in “The Longest.” Beginning with a voiceover narration in which the director says that he was drawn to the idea of someone who trains alone and competes against himself, and ending with an image of Hill disappearing into his house, the episode nevertheless departs from this “Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner” premise to incorporate reports of the hostage situation and images of other marathon runners who come in before and after Hill’s sixth-place finish. Images of the last runner finally trickling into the stadium in the rain are intercut with a shot of the autocratic Olympic official Avery Brundage declaring the Games officially ended (this would also mark the end of the octogenarian’s twenty-year tenure as IOC president). The flame is extinguished, the German farewell “Auf wiedersehen” goes out, and shots of the Olympic flag at half-mast and the Israeli flag provide sobering reminders that, behind the joyful facade, several lives have been lost. A sign reading “Montreal 1976” is visible in these final images which bring closure to Visions of Eight and gesture toward the next Olympics.7 Given the fact that the eight directors draw inspiration from a variety of sources and deploy different styles to suit their individual topics, it is not surprising that many critics bemoan what Gene D. Phillips describes as “the uneven quality” of Visions of Eight. Phillips, a biographer of John Schlesinger, is not alone among the film’s semi-detractors in thinking that, “in retrospect, it would have been better to have had a single director Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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shoot the entire film in order to provide some sense of stylistic and thematic continuity throughout.”8 What Phillips and his auteurist ilk overlook are the many consistencies and reverberations within this transauthorial film which celebrates, rather than denounces, cultural difference yet allows similarities of intent to creep in (several directors, for instance, attempt to balance the theme of selfhood with that of togetherness). In fact, owing to the immensity of its production, Visions of Eight practically demanded the cooperative as well as competitive involvement of the contributors who assisted one another when they themselves were not shooting. And for all the talk of stylistic discrepancies, there is actually a number of sonic and visual flourishes that resurface throughout the film, lending the eight “separate visions” a unified appearance. This cohesiveness is due in no small part to the contributions made by film editor Edward Roberts and composer Henry Mancini. Though interwoven with bits of other music (Willheim Killmayer’s “Rainbow Chorus,” Claude Debussy’s “Quartet in G Minor,” Carl Orff’s “Rota-Sommerkanon,” the aforementioned Beethoven), Mancini’s jazzy, yet melodic, score is spread evenly throughout the film, its percussive rhythms the perfect accompaniment to the stop-start time signatures of the episodic narrative. Also, each segment begins with black-and-white snapshots, and this repeating visual element helps to structure the entire piece. Along with these still frames, each director’s national affiliation is displayed in parentheses below his or her name. This lexicographic imprint of the personal and the national on to the (potentially and, indeed, eventually) political backdrop effectively brackets the various countries as constituent characteristics of the filmmakers’ personal visions and subtly connotes the containability of a nation (Germany) that not only was a temporary container of other nations but also was forced to contain the threat of terrorism. Though Visions of Eight was shown outside of competition at Cannes in 1973 and eventually won the award for Best Documentary Film at the Golden Globes in 1974, it has since been brushed aside in historical accounts of the Olympics in favor of better known films such as Olympia (1936) and Tokyo Olympiad (Tokyo Orimpikku, 1965). That this multinational, multi-director sports documentary has thus far received only a modicum of critical attention since its theatrical release indicates just how neglectful historians have been of omnibus films in general. And yet, Visions of Eight, in particular, offers us a unique opportunity not only to expand the preexisting framework of narrative and authorship studies but also to ruminate about the way in which its eight directors – like a team – each “passes the baton” to one another in the course of cinematically capturing other teams and individuals. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Allen Guttmann, a preeminent American studies professor and Olympic historian, stands virtually alone when he calls it a “brilliant collective documentary.”9 Suggesting that the film’s power resides in its ability to unite disparate elements into a single producer’s package, Guttmann points toward Wolper’s significance to the project as well as the latent political and ideological meanings inscribed in the word “collective,” which has historically been mobilized to describe a consolidation of potentially revolutionary groups, goals, and ideas. There are, however, considerable differences among the episodes, and this underlying dissimilarity creates textual as well as phenomenological ruptures that are not so easily surmounted by viewers who, for instance, may find Mai Zetterling’s implicit critique of masculine power and national industrialization (in the second episode, entitled “The Strongest”) progressive, yet feel that it is undercut by Michael Pfleghar’s subsequent, regressive fixations on the female form (in the fourth episode, entitled “The Women”). In his liner notes accompanying the album release of Henry Mancini’s eclectic score for Visions of Eight, magazine editor Harvey Siders describes how the music (written, we are reminded, to satisfy not one but eight directors) “breaks down language barriers; leaps over national boundaries; and shatters all diplomatic and political hurdles.” Much the same could be said of the film itself. Visions of Eight is that rare sport documentary that speaks a universal language yet structurally accommodates the ethnic, racial, cultural, and national diversity on which Olympic organizers pride themselves. Moreover, the film’s episodic structure, consisting of several “openings” and “closings,” resonates with historian George G. Daniels’s description of the Olympics as a “symbol of regeneration.” Writing about the Munich Games in particular, Daniels states, “One spirit passed and was gone; four years later another rose in its place. On they came, the Games of resurrection, following one after another in an unbroken chain.”10 Each episode comprising an omnibus film forms part of a chain, each one signaling a regenerative break from the past. Set in the Bavarian capital, which had once been home to the Nazi Party and was located just 11 miles away from a Second World War concentration camp, Visions of Eight as a whole may not signal a complete break from the past. But its discrete segments, brought together in the spirit of cooperation and goodwill, suggest that the importance of sports and cinema resides in their capacity to build a better future.

Beyond Cooperation and Competition If Visions of Eight succeeded in at least gesturing toward West Germany’s attempts to contain the threat of terrorism at a time of national division and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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reflection on the past, then it can be seen as laying the foundation for other films with more overtly political agendas, including the 1978 omnibus production Germany in Autumn. As a film composed of nine short fiction and non-fiction pieces, directed by Alf Brustellin, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Alexander Kluge, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert, and Bernhard Sinkel, Germany in Autumn revolves around the death of German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer who was kidnapped and killed by members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), in the fall of 1977. The funeral of the magnate, shown at the beginning of the film, is later echoed by the funeral of his three terrorist killers, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and JeanCarl Raspe, who either committed suicide (according to German authorities) or were murdered by the state. Between these bookending boundaries of the text, the contributing filmmakers cast a critical eye on everything from media censorship and the manufacturing of public hysteria to the troubling reemergence of rightist nationalism in Germany and its citizens’ willingness to forgo democratic principles in pursuit of anti-terrorist agendas. As such, Germany in Autumn remains a key work in the larger omnibus filmography, inspiring a host of subsequent productions that have likewise sought to rhetorically intervene in matters of tremendous cultural and social importance, including those films, such as 11ʹ09ʺ01 and State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters (Zur Lage: Österreich in sechs Kapiteln, 2002), which are in part concerned with the infringement of, or threats to, civil rights that often result from national tragedies or government policies designed to “police” borders in an increasingly “globalized” world. The last film, a frequently funny yet disturbing documentary divided into six segments and featuring the contributions of four directors (Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger, Ulrich Seidl, and Michael Sturminger), reminds viewers that racial bigotry and intolerance are not things of the past but indelibly woven into the fabric of the interviewees’ everyday lives. Released not long after the controversial right-wing politician Jörg Haider and his “Freedom Party” had risen to power, State of the Nation crystallizes a pivotal moment in Austria’s recent history when xenophobia, antiSemitism, Islamophobia, and immigrant bashing more generally appear to be on the rise. Tellingly, the general lack of diversity among this film’s half-dozen “chapters” (with the exception of Albert’s episode, a series of portraits in which eight very different women speak their minds) reflects the outdated worldview and desire for ethnic “purity” being espoused by its many interviewees, including patrons at a wine tavern (in Seidl’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 183 episode) and motorists who declare their extremist views unabashedly to one of the directors (Glawogger, shown hitchhiking across the country). What State of the Nation and other omnibus films such as ID Swiss (1999) show is that prejudicial attitudes and racist indoctrination continue to be passed down from generation to generation, and that recent developments in the history of the European Union (leading up to the 2007 signing of the Lisbon Treaty) have neither rectified nor reversed the much longer history of national antagonism and xenophobia within the region. This idea that tensions persist, despite efforts to shore up supranational support for policies that would protect the rights of all people, informs many of the individual segments that make up Visions of Europe, a remarkable, twenty-five episode omnibus project that is the centerpiece of this chapter’s second half. Like the earlier “vision” film discussed above (Visions of Eight), Visions of Europe is a hugely ambitious production that consolidates a variety of directorial vantages or perspectives on topics of international concern, including (to varying degrees) the specter of global terrorism. Though terrorist activities cast a pall over the 1972 Summer Olympics, Visions of Eight does not dwell on that subject and instead focuses on the games that promised to unite the world around a peaceful celebration of athletic accomplishments. As indicated in the previous section, the idea of filtering the Olympics through eight different lenses or perspectives (the titular “visions” of a group of art house and up-and-coming filmmakers) was not unique insofar as it was an extension of the omnibus phenomenon popular throughout Europe during the 1960s. But Visions of Eight differs from other, non sports-related omnibus films in the way that it foregrounds the theme of competition – something diegetically inscribed in the guise of competing athletes and extradiegetically implied in the presence of many directors whose talents are showcased under a single “roof.” The directorial component of Visions of Europe, however, is more participatory than competitive, and does not steer clear of controversial subjects. Instead, it mobilizes the omnibus structure as a means of uniting disparate voices from the margins of society, many of whom speak out against rights ­violations and the mistreatment of immigrants and other minorities.

Toward a Supranational Cinema Europe does not exist . . . Europe is everything. Contradictory words written on a chalkboard by a young Danish student in director Christoffer Boe’s “Europe,” one of the twenty-five episodes in the omnibus film Visions of Europe (2004)

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Figure 8.1  Promotional material highlighting the many directors involved in the making of the omnibus film Visions of Europe (2004).

In February 2004, the Danish production company Zentropa Entertainment, in association with Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) and the French–German television network ARTE, commissioned twenty-five filmmakers throughout Europe to participate in an unprecedented cinematic project. The project would reflect the diverse attitudes toward EU expansion and changing socioeconomic policies in the months leading up to the historic enactment of the Treaty of Accession in May of that year when ten additional member states were added to the fifteen nations that had constituted the European Union since the mid 1990s. After confirming a roster of first-time directors and respected auteurs (including Britain’s Peter Greenaway, Hungary’s Béla Tarr, and Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki), Zentropa producer Mikael Olsen laid the ground rules for the contributors who were each given €34,000 (approximately $41,000) and asked to make a five-minute short dealing with the present condition and/or future outlook of Europe. Together, these twenty-five short films, concerning such varied topics as immigration, worker exploitation, religion, identity, cultural hybridity, and interagency bureaucracy, make up the appropriately titled omnibus feature Visions of Europe, a work whose initial theatrical release was timed to coincide with the May 1 expansion of the European Union. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 185 Though Visions of Europe has generally not been seen outside the film festival circuit, a few television channels throughout the continent managed to broadcast the motion picture in its entirety on that historic day, giving millions of viewers the rare opportunity to see an example of what might be termed supranational cinema. By “supranational,” I mean that which transcends, rather than merely traverses, national borders and cultural boundaries, thus extending above and beyond the sphere of economic influence and/or governmental authority held by individual states and regional organizations. Insofar as it involves the participation of not two or three but several countries, with national sovereignty taking a backseat to pancontinental initiatives, ideals, and goals, the still-nascent idea of supranationalism is especially relevant within contemporary film studies as an expression of the various macro-organizational models being erected outside of the United States in the age of free market liberalization and globalization. Moreover, much like the European Union itself, a supranational cinema strives not only to promote dialogue among its various participants but also to consolidate and manage, at the institutional level, a multiplicity of potentially contentious “voices” and conflicting “visions” while ensuring the uninhibited movement of services, goods, and capital so central to the concept of the common market (first outlined over fifty years ago with the 1957 signing of the Treaty of Rome). One way to shed light on the increasingly supranational disposition of contemporary European coproductions is to focus on an exemplary case study through which to gauge the strengths, as well as shortcomings, of a critical concept for which there are still relatively few examples. Indeed, no other film so perfectly encapsulates the contradictory appeals of “supranational cinema” as Visions of Europe, a collection of twenty-five dramatic and experimental shorts, one from each of the independent states in the newly expanded European Union: Austria, Belgium, Britain, Cyprus, the  Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden (since this film’s release, three countries have been added to the Union: Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania). This extraordinary cinematic undertaking proves to be especially enlightening as a barometer of public opinion about the abovementioned themes, sustained as they are across narrative “borders” (the liminal breaks between episodes) that are themselves representative of the continent’s porous, yet closely monitored, national boundaries. Whether those diegetic buffer zones between the short vignettes facilitate or hinder the spectator’s own ruminations about­ ­border-crossing – perhaps the most prominent theme of the film – is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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just one of the many questions I take up in this section which, likewise, navigates the extradiegetic divisions between numerous countries and cultures so that a more comprehensive vision of European cinema can be ascertained as well as problematized. By examining the film’s distinct, yet interrelated, episodes individually and in concert with one another, I hope to highlight the ways in which Visions of Europe is similar to, yet differs from, such contemporary multidirector works as Lest We Forget (Contre l’oubli, 1992), The Only Country in the World (1994), Lumière and Co. (Lumière et compagnie, 1996), Slidin’ – All Bright And Colorful (Slidin’ – Alles Bunt Und Wunderbar, 1998), 99 Euro Films (2002), Europe 99euro-films2 (2003), Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2003), Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2003), Solidarity, Solidarity . . . (Solidarnosc, Solidarnosc . . . , 2005), Lost and Found (2005), and Paris, je t’aime (2006). These are just a few of the many omnibus films that have been produced in Europe over the past twenty years, a period that witnessed enormous social, economic, and political changes, from the collapse of communism, to the further dismantling of the visible and invisible signs of the Cold War, to the adoption of a single currency, to the passing and institutionalization of various minorities’ rights bills in countries such as Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and Germany. The spectacle of the last nation’s unification, which began with the November 9, 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall, provided the backdrop against which the equally momentous Maastricht Treaty on European Union (signed in February 1992) came to subsequently signify a historical shift away from the traumas of the past toward a utopic vision of the future in which disputes, grievances, and infringements could be dealt with through intergovernmental conferences, democratic institutions, and a Court of Justice (based in Luxembourg) ensuring the uniform application of Community law.11 The agreements reached at the Maastricht summit, besides revising the Rome treaty and laying the groundwork upon which economic and monetary union would eventually be realized, made further expansion of the European Union a feasible proposition once its three “pillars” – European Communities, Common Foreign and Security Policy, and Justice and Home Affairs Policy (later renamed Judicial Co-operation in Criminal Matters) – were erected and solidified. Though these three pillars would have been subsumed within a single structure if the European Constitution had been ratified, and were eventually abandoned with the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty (in 2009), they still serve as reminders of the major concerns of the European Union with regard to social, economic, environmental, security, human rights, and foreign policies. Moreover, they propped up the cooperative partnerships Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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among cultural producers who were (and continue to be) concerned with such issues as immigration, minority rights, and civil justice, all of which have been major themes in contemporary films dealing with Europe’s recent transformations. Such dramatic transformations, I argue, can be (and have been) distilled through the appropriately fragmented, yet unified, narrative form of the omnibus film, a transauthorial meta-genre that shares much in common with the socioeconomic “ensembles” that first emerged in Europe around 1992 (the same year, it should be pointed out, that the Franco-German television channel ARTE was launched). As defined by Randall Halle, these ensembles – the free market, the closed trade zone, and the international federation – offer distinct, yet interrelated, paradigms for understanding how European countries have coped with America’s dominance in the age of global capitalism, whether through the adoption of protection policies or through the eradication of trade barriers within the Community.12 More important to the present discussion, however, are the allegorical dimensions of these paradigms vis-à-vis the reading strategies we might adopt when faced with the ungainly form of the omnibus film, itself an “ensemble” made up of several contact zones whose relationships with one another both determine and are determined by the organization of the work as a whole. As a narrative system that can facilitate or frustrate comparative analyses of constituent parts, omnibus films demand a willingness to shift focus from the macro-structural devices keeping the potential “chaos” of the collection in check to the micro-structural aspects of particular episodes that may reverberate across the breaks. Thus, attention should be paid to their “global,” as well as to their “local,” elements within an inter-episodic “economy of exchange,” one in which critics and taste-makers play a part insofar as value can be ascribed to specific texts that are singled out as the “best” of the bunch. Again, Randall Halle’s conceptualization of “ensembles” points toward hermeneutic pathways that we might take when making our mental peregrinations through Visions of Europe, a film that is multiple and mobile, fixated on particular themes yet driven in different directions, pitted toward consensus yet riven by the kind of contradictions that ostensibly undermine solidarity. According to Halle, cinematic praxis with a nationalist bent can be conceived as “oppositional, marginal, or subaltern” if posited within the free market paradigm wherein Europe is a borderless space “open to transnational Hollywood corporations.” Similarly, a borderless narrative is one in which the breaks between episodes have been conveniently overlooked or dispensed with as signs of subaltern identity or sensibility, thus allowing the spectator to perceive the omnibus film as Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a single and coherent object of supranational consensus, albeit one that bears the traces of outside influence. The closed trade zone is open internally but closed in terms of its external borders. Within this “fortress Europe” model of socioeconomic protection, Hollywood is seen as a threat, against which local cultural productions are poised and geared toward a broad demographic of audiences across the continent. When adopted as a textual paradigm, it suggests the ways in which thematic and stylistic motifs may emerge episode to episode within an omnibus film whose “end zones,” so to speak, enclose the text, marking the entire collection off as a uniquely “European” cultural object free from outside influences. Finally, the international federation is composed of interdependent economies and relatively autonomous nationstates. Within this ensemble, “the nation becomes a commodity,” one that may be “dependent on exchange beyond its borders” but which, nevertheless, exists to “provide ‘authentic’ experiences for tourists, whether physical travelers or cinematic voy(ag)eurs.”13 Such a paradigm reminds us that omnibus films are often made up of several self-contained expressions of national character, itself a backdrop for the “specificity of local color.” As Visions of Europe makes clear, however, the presence of local culture and national agency does not deny the possibility that certain subjects of broadly European interest – “problem issues,” according to Halle, such as “unemployment, crime, cancer, homosexuality, [and] women’s place in the world” – can be traced in contingent lines across the textual ensemble as a whole.14 These three paradigms thus provide a useful taxonomy for mapping out the “competing concepts of market economies” that emerged around 1992, as well as the various flows of trade, capital, people, and ideas across political borders that characterize the process of globalization. These three also assist as reading strategies that spectators might bring to multi-episode omnibus films, narrative ensembles in which the interepisodic movement of thematic motifs can likened to the larger matters of economic cooperation, cultural exchange, and foreign policy coordination (three of the ways in which accession to the European Union became a reality for many Central and East European countries at the beginning of the twenty-first century). In the years that have elapsed since 1992, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of omnibus films being produced in Europe – multinational coproductions that frequently confound critics yet attract audiences because of their inherent heterogeneity. Some fairly disparaging discourse permeated the critical reception of Visions of Europe after it opened the eighth annual European Union Film Festival (EUFF). Besides calling it everything from a “pan-continental Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 189 portmanteau pic” to a “cinematic smorgasbord” to a “compilation of short films laid end-to-end,” several critics derided it on the basis that it lacked a single, sustained narrative, that it was paratactic to an extreme. Many critics also apparently felt a need to privilege particular directors in their reviews of the film. How might this conventional favoring of established filmmakers (see, for instance, my earlier reference to internationally renowned auteurs) and convenient oversight of lesser known contributors resonate with what political scientists and social theorists refer to as “differentiated integration,” or the notion that some EU member states “may find themselves excluded from certain discussions altogether,” in the words of Jeffrey Lewis?15 I take up this question of “variable geometries” toward the end of this chaper which, like the omnibus film, problematizes conventional paradigms of authorship and national cinema.

Room for All? Visions of Europe A contextual analysis of the various cooperative developments among filmmaking bodies of particular nations helps us to understand the historical and industrial parameters within which postwar European coproductions were positioned against Hollywood’s international hegemony and American cultural imperialism in general. It is at the textual level, however, where Visions of Europe distinguishes itself from the spate of European coproductions being made each year, and where it provides a narratological template for future omnibus films that stake a claim in supranational representation. Indeed, as a polyglot text, glutted with more than two dozen self-contained, yet thematically interrelated, episodes, this film is structurally well suited to encompass the contradictory positions bound up in the polity system of the European Union which oscillates between neofunctionalism and intergovernmental collaboration, between complete integration and persistent division. In turning my attention from context to text, I shall now examine the individual episodes as well as the film as a whole. Though each of the short films in Visions of Europe is discrete, featuring none of the same actors, settings, or storylines, many are thematically linked and all are arranged in such a way as to provoke an active hermeneutic response to its cyclical structure. Such a structure, typical of episodic subgenres (as evidenced in everything from the multi-director Dead of Night [1945] to Max Ophüls’s La Ronde [1950] to Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó [1994]), might suggest a closed system from which spectatorial emancipation or “escape” is denied. The intermittently broken flow, however, in fact facilitates a mental, if not literally perambulatory, “stroll” from one narrative milieu to the next, thus Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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providing a means to momentarily inhabit the life worlds of several characters without fear of becoming permanently fastened. Indeed, despite its supranational disposition, Visions of Europe effectively communicates both the difficulty and desirability of border-crossing by inviting its audience to move with the text from one situational context to another, each separated by title cards or markers of identification highlighting the names and national affiliations of the film’s twenty-five directors. As we shall see, such branding assumes extratextual dimensions in light of the critical privileging of particular auteurs whose works are said to stand out from the flock – an idea made concrete in the very first episode. After a title card flashes up against an abstract blur of yellow and black imagery, the film begins with Swedish writer–director Jan Troell’s contribution, an episode entitled “The Yellow Tag.” Produced by Goran Guner for Athenafilm, and set to composer Magnus Dahlber’s original score as well as portions of Beethoven’s Sixth and Ninth Symphonies (not coincidentally, the last’s “Ode to Joy” is the European anthem), this satiric bit consists of several separate, yet connected, shots of grazing livestock. The animals, which are the subject of a school teacher’s lesson (delivered to a classroom full of impressionable children who repeat what she tells them), bear yellow EU tags on their ears, a marker of their official registration and identity within the collective. These tags furthermore connote the way in which each contributor’s episode is signaled by way of title cards that at once mark off the limits of narrativity and yet situate them within the larger ensemble. Besides foregrounding the piecemeal approach of the entire Visions of Europe project, the individual shots of sheep and cows prep the audience for the many quotidian images and religious iconography to follow. Significantly, Troell’s broad swipe at the administrative absurdity of the bureaucratic establishment in Brussels (where the European Commission and the Council of the European Union are headquartered) crosses spatial as well as temporal boundaries, taking us from actual animals outdoors to painted representations of them inside art galleries housing Renaissance Nativity scenes, all of which are sandwiched between the scholastic scene at the beginning and a surrealistic shot at the end of the episode in which hundreds of businessmen drop from the sky (recalling the paintings of René Magritte). Mikael Olsen’s decision to put Troell’s contribution at the beginning of the film – a seminal spot in any omnibus feature – attests to his respect of an esteemed auteur who could be depended on to set the appropriate tone for the entire work.16 As if echoing the pedagogic imagery in “The Yellow Tag,” Troell figuratively hands the baton (or, rather, the piece of blackboard chalk) to Danish filmmaker Christoffer Boe, one of the youngest contributors to Visions of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Europe (born in 1974, one year after Denmark became an EU member) and the writer–director of its second episode, “Europe.” As the only one of the twenty-five episodes actually produced by Olsen for Zentropa Entertainments7, “Europe” is the most critically reflexive of the bunch, brimming with witty asides about the indeterminate state of the subcontinent, which is both everything and nothing, open to interpretation yet impossible to pin down or even locate. That impossibility is inscribed at the beginning of the episode, when a grade-schooler writes “Europe does not exist” on a chalkboard in English (a carryover image from the previous episode’s focus on schoolteachers and children). From there we move to the back seat of a Danish dignitary’s limousine where the man admits to the camera that “his old friend” Europe now leaves a metallic taste in his mouth. “It’s as if that word touches nothing in me,” he states, struggling to pronounce it (“Yuuup”). With only five minutes to go before he has to give a speech (the length of time allotted to each contributing director), the official’s female aide patiently instructs him on how to say “Europe.”17 “Yurowp,” she intones, in a nocturnal scene that gives way to mysterious insert shots of the same woman, now with blood vampirically trickling from her mouth, down her chin and on to a map of Europe. The self-contradicting notion that “Europe does not exist” and yet is “everything” parallels the many paradoxes and ambiguities within Boe’s critically lauded debut feature, Reconstruction (2003), another Copenhagen-based film about mass amnesia and premeditated chance encounters that divides its time between duplicitous doppelgängers and alternate narrative outcomes. The loquacious overflow of the spoken word in Boe’s episode stands in stark contrast to the verbal lack characterizing Visions of Europe’s third episode. Produced, written, and directed by Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnin, “It’ll Be Fine” consists of several speechless moments in which various men and women pose awkwardly for the camera outside schools, recreation centers, factories, shopping malls, and their homes, saying nothing yet revealing much about their social backgrounds and class standing through dress, comportment, and setting. Itself a little compendium of discrete scenes (silent save for the amplified sounds of motorcycles, airplanes, and buses passing by), this episode provides a mise en abyme through which to perceive the larger episodicity of Visions of Europe.18 Indeed, its many staged shots of blue-collar workers, young parents, and members of the older generation are chained together so as to suggest a community of individuals and families otherwise disconnected from one another. Connections can be forged metaphorically as well as materially, Pakalnin Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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seems to suggest, thanks to her decision to show an elderly woman opening her photograph album to reveal the contents therein. As the woman flips through the pages of the album, we are taken from one set of frozen images to the next, each vacation picture an opportunity to ruminate on the “family of man” metaphor that both strengthens and undermines European solidarity, inclusively registering shared sensibilities yet exclusively focusing on merely the surface similarities between diverse groups of people. Still, for all of this segment’s interest in outward appearances and fabricated facades, the photo album plunges us even deeper into the mise en abyme of embedded episodicity. A pronounced break from the previous episode, Fatih Akin’s “The Evil Old Songs” fills the film’s fourth slot. Shot in black and white and set entirely within the resplendent Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where Turkish-German actress Idil Üner sings an updated version of Heinrich Heine and Robert Schumann’s “Die alten, bösen Lieder,” this musical segment might at first seem to belong in another omnibus feature, the ten-episode Don Boyd production Aria (1987), given its manifest interest in the kitschy dimensions of “high culture” and the performative traditions of European theater. It, like so many of the other episodes in Visions of Europe, however, revolves around contemporaneous attempts to grapple with the past, to dismantle the difficult and trauma-filled legacies of national history in hopes of moving forward into a multicultural future. That is, after all, one of the reasons why the Federal Republic of Germany was among the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established in 1952 and today looked back on as a major step toward postwar reconciliation (with France), economic recovery (throughout Europe), and, much later, reunification (with East Germany). It is thus significant that Fatih Akin, a “postwall auteur” of Turkish ancestry who helped revitalize German cinema in recent years as a purveyor of so-called Spasskultur (‘fun culture’),19 should set his episode within the confines of a neo-baroque theater which, in the mid 1930s, served as a cultural center for the National Socialists. Though worlds away from Akin’s typical milieus, in which culturally diverse segments of German society come together despite socioeconomic obstacles, the theater – linked to Nazism and Fascism as well as to the peace and prosperity that eventually came to postwar Germany – provides a fitting location for the staging of a nation’s dissolution and renewal, the former evoked by the hiss of an old phonograph record and the latter connoted by the imaginative reworking of Schumann’s music by avant-garde artist F. M. Einheit who manipulates electronic instruments and found objects onstage to the tune of “Die alten, bösen Lieder.” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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As Eric Rentschler states, “Traditional notions of homeland, nation, and identity no longer offer reliable sources of orientation” in contemporary German cinema. “Where to go? Who to be? What to do?” Rentschler asks, before concluding that the films of Andreas Kleinert (Paths in the Night [Wege in die Nacht, 1999]), Andreas Dresen (Grill Point [Halbe Treppe, 2002]), Wolfgang Becker (Goodbye Lenin! [2003]), and Hans-Christian Schmid (Distant Lights [Lichter, 2003]) “mark the fall of borders, measuring the seismic jolts that have come in the wake of unification while remaining acutely aware of the continuing divide that separates east and west.”20 Among these young auteurs, Fatih Akin stands out as someone whose films transport the spectator “to broken homes, vacant factories, rundown buildings, and nocturnal scapes as characters contemplate bleak pasts and confront uncertain futures.” Despite its rarefied and hermetic setting, “The Evil Old Songs” resonates with Akin’s featurelength films, many of which “spirit us through the crowded multicultural neighborhoods of Hamburg” while “illuminating obscured spaces and respecting marginal perspectives.”21 From his crowd-pleasing romantic road movie In July (Im Juli, 2000) which tracks its starry eyed protagonist’s trip from Germany to Turkey, to his Golden Bear-winning drama Head On (Gegen die Wand, 2004), which charts a similarly cathartic (if less comedic) cross-continental journey, Akin’s films betray a fascination with border-crossing, a theme that would appear to be absent from his Visions of Europe episode, confined as it is within a single interior space. The mere presence of Idil Üner, however, the iconic actress who had earlier played Melek (Turkish for “Angel”) in Akin’s In July, in addition to his decision to include a brief color interlude, elevate the material and open up the text, if not the domed theater, to the possibilities of social mobility, cultural hybridity, genre mixing, and aesthetic transcendence. A persistent theme in Visions of Europe is immigration, one of the most controversial issues across Europe where ethnic conflict and xenophobic attitudes are still problems that have not been fully resolved by EU policies. Not surprisingly, the most moving episodes in the film are those dealing explicitly with asylum seekers and refugees, from Portuguese director Teresa Villaverde’s “Cold Wa(te)r,” in which a traditional Bengalese folk song provides the sonic backdrop for slow-motion documentary footage of local officials fishing lifeless bodies out of the sea, to Irish director Aisling Walsh and poet–playwright Gerard Mannix Flynn’s “Invisible State,” a bracing performance piece about the trafficking of human cargo. Villaverde’s episode is the fifth of the film, a segment that not only offers a more literal inscription of border-crossing than Fatih Akin’s but also reveals, sans voiceover commentary, the lengths to which Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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refugees will go to escape tyranny and persecution. Filmed at Ardmore Studios in Wicklow, Ireland, Walsh’s segment is the eleventh episode of Visions of Europe and contains a monologue (written and delivered by Flynn) that is as dazzling in its intensity as it is commendable for its humanitarian sweep. Sitting before the camera on an empty stage, Flynn unleashes an impassioned plea for tolerance, at one point saying, These are the ghost people, the invisible . . . they are the recycled, the turned away, fodder, raw product for the only industry they know: Human cargo. They are the smuggled goods. The media will call them non-nationals. Eastern Europeans, Africans, aliens, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, spongers. But I know them as Lithuanians, Bosnians, Romanians, Nigerians, Sudanese, Irish, Russians, my fellows.

He follows these comments with the statements: “The only people pleased to see them will be their traffickers. They are the goods in transit. Welcome aboard flight EU 2004.” It should not be surprising that this most critically reproachful of episodes comes from the Republic of Ireland, given the fact that it and the United Kingdom are the only two EU nations not to have signed the 1985 Schengen Agreement which overhauled preexisting border systems and called for common immigration policies and customs controls. Though the playwright holds court with his verbal pyrotechnics, we should not overlook the visual design of this episode which incorporates found footage as well as staged scenes of political outsiders struggling individually and en masse against their enslavers. Aisling Walsh’s creative use of such devices is a testament of her artistic inclinations, which have oftentimes been hindered by the production budgets of her made-for-TV films. As a director specializing in feature-length period pieces, contemporary crime thrillers, and literary adaptations (Forgive and Forget [2000], Song for a Raggy Boy [2003], Fingersmith [2005]), it is not coincidental that Walsh chose to bring Flynn’s written text to the stage and screen, embellishing that literary property with a variety of visual flourishes that accentuate the main themes of migration and exploitation. Other themes that stand out in Visions of Europe are related to religious practice and belief, with Christian iconography predominating in a handful of episodes, most notably Slovakian director Martin Sulik’s allegorical tale “The Miracle,” in which a sixteen-year-old girl tries to convince a local man of the cloth that her pregnancy is the result of an immaculate conception. Against the protests of her parents and the priest, who find the whole matter disgraceful, embarrassing, and blasphemous, she sticks to her story. One can only speculate as to what Sulik’s intenNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 195 tions were with regard to this episode’s symbolism: the miraculous pregnancy professed by the girl, not to mention the floating coffee cup and saucer later witnessed by the doubting priest, are somehow linked to the spectacle of European Union expansion, itself a “miracle” of sorts. It seems certain, however, that the girl’s vision of an angelic, blue-robed woman disparaging humans for their greed, indifference, and folly stands for the filmmaker’s own “vision of Europe,” his conception of a world in which peace remains a distant hope so long as an unequal distribution of resources and goods leaves people empty-handed and barefooted. This sixth episode of the film then gives way to Italian director Francesca Comencini’s “Anna Lives in Marghera,” which is no less beholden to biblical prophesies, no less critical of society’s ills. Concerning a member of a women’s organization devoted to environmental issues, this episode, produced by Donatella Botti for Biancafilm, combines documentary footage of a pro-democracy, anti-pollution demonstration held in Venice with staged scenes of Anna explaining her Master’s thesis, a study of the effects of textile dyes and industrial waste in the local waters which have caused hundreds of deaths. Capped by a captioned explanation that “the Venice Lagoon is highly polluted” due to the chemical plant at Marghera, Comencini’s contribution is a call for change at the environmental and industrial levels, one that assumes spiritual proportions when sprinkled with images of Anna reading from the Bible and praying silently before going to bed. Her prayer for hope extends beyond the frame of this particular episode to connote each contributor’s desire for some kind of sociopolitical transformation that might alleviate people’s suffering at home and abroad. The water imagery so abundant in “Anna Lives in Marghera,” which is set along the canals of Venice (once the economic capital of Europe, now a polluted tourist zone), returns in the next episode, Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas’s “Children Lose Nothing.” At the edge of a brook, a girl collects frogs in a jar. Nearby, another young girl and her companion bend down beside a waterfall and send an origami boat down the stream. Overlaid with the lachrymose music of Vytautas Leistrumas (with vocals by one of Lithuania’s greatest folk singers, Veronika Povilioniene), this sepia-toned episode begins quietly, the plaintive chords of a cello carrying the spectator from one wordless image to the next. But violence soon erupts in the form of adolescent aggression born out of jealousy, as two boys fight over the same girl. Blood droplets spill from one boy’s nose into the river, imagery recalling the vampiric insert shots in Christoffer Boe’s earlier episode “Europe.” As the paper boat tumbles down the cascades, a river frog struggles against the current. These quotidian images, full of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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expectation and apprehension, suggest a latent brutality behind the most austere facades, as well as the difficulties faced by those seeking to eke out a living in the remote valleys and barren landscapes of post-Glasnost Lithuania – a country that witnessed economic growth in select sectors after its recent entrance into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, yet still lags behind other member states in terms of gross domestic product. Similar challenges are brought forth in the next episode, entitled “Room for All.” Produced by Lilette Botassi, and written and directed by Constantine Giannaris, an iconoclastic auteur sensitive to the lives of minorities and other marginalized people in his native Greece, this segment not only provides various perspectives on European multiculturalism but also introduces another mise en abyme structure into Visions of Europe, one that represents, in miniature, the dialogic appeals of the film as a whole. Beginning with a series of embedded frames, in which unrelated individuals state their names and national backgrounds to the camera, the episode quickly morphs into a space in which contradictory attitudes come into play. With speakers hailing from such places as Nigeria, Cameroon, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Georgia, Romania, France, Albania, Bulgaria, Cypress, Uzbekistan, and Turkey, there is much to parse through with regard to their respective views on both Greece and the European Union. As one person says, “For me, Greece is Europe” – a statement that aids in our attempt to “see” the entire film through the lens of this single episode. It is thus significant that, while each of the interviewees is allowed to speak his or her mind, none is shown engaging in an actual conversation. Despite the fact that there is no dialogue in “Room for All,” however, the episode is intensely dialogic. Thus, while a few people praise the multi-ethnic makeup of Greece and celebrate its many opportunities for cross-cultural exchange, others complain about the country’s bureaucratic labor policies and residency requirements which have undergone several changes since its entrance into the European Union in 1981. Yousse Azer, an Egyptian man living in Greece, explains that “there are rarely any problems with racism and xenophobia,” only to be immediately followed by Tang Bing, a Chinese woman, who says, “Of course, there is prejudice . . . The older generation, they are a bit afraid.” Azer himself contradicts his earlier claim, stating that locals still fear foreigners and non-EU nationals. Such fear is examined more fully in Giannaris’s feature-length film From the Edge of the City (Apo tin akri tis polis, 1998), an unflinching depiction of immigrant life in Athens where recently arrived Pontians from Russia struggle to survive drug dealings, gang warfare, family violence, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 8.2  Frame enlargement from the ninth episode of Visions of Europe, entitled “Room For All.” Dialogic to an extreme, this short segment, directed by Constantine Giannaris, captures the discursivity and heterogeneity of the entire film by allowing men and women from a variety of different cultural backgrounds to share their thoughts about racism, immigration, and xenophobia in Greece (a country that is compared to all of Europe, at one point). This short episode furthermore anticipates a later segment, set in the Czech Republic (Sasa Gedeon’s “Unisono”), which likewise features a host of people – in this case foreign dignitaries speaking before their nations’ flags – blending their voices in such a way as to suggest supranational unity rather than division.

and prostitution. In many ways, From the Edge of the City anticipates the dialogic intensity and thematic disposition of Giannaris’s contribution to Visions of Europe, so entrenched is the former film in the dystopic reality of its diegetic world, filled with xenophobic locals who bemoan the arrival of new Albanians, Russians, and Italians. Indeed, this casual xenophobia is put front and center when a trash-talking taxi-driver tells Sasha, the seventeen-year-old protagonist of the film, “God knows I’m no racist. But this country is crawling with foreigners these days. You go to a whore house and all you fuck is imported cunt . . . This country has gone to pot.” If the overlapping monologues in “Room for All” lack the abrasiveness of such language, the episode still manages to distill the cultural ethos in which xenophobia assumes insidious forms. It is important, then, to consider the ways in which omnibus films in general function as database (re)directives, as bundles of indexical entries pointing the spectator toward numerous external texts – cultural productions such as the aforementioned Reconstruction, In July, and From the Edge of the City which elaborate thematic material that can only be gestured toward, never fully unpacked, in a five-minute episode. In this sense, Giannaris’s decision to visualize multiple perspectives on minority rights by way of a hyperlink structure is appropriate insofar as Visions of Europe similarly contains a kind of point-and-click array of episodes and auteurs, each conveniently labeled on the DVD menu and throughout Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the interstitials, each an imaginary conduit into a filmography filled with additional examples that help flesh out the five-minute narratives. Though slotted into the film’s tenth spot, Béla Tarr’s episode is entitled “Prologue,” a term generally reserved for the introductory chapter or preface of a literary work. If not an actual exordium for Visions of Europe, this episode nevertheless functions as an effective introduction to Tarr’s unique filmmaking style, a conciliatory overture, in a sense, designed for neophytes unfamiliar with his work. In typical Tarr fashion, a single, unbroken tracking shot of a bread line (photographed in black and white by Robby Müller) evokes the existential deadlock in which many provincial townspeople and farmers throughout Hungary find themselves, its rigorous treatment of time and space an analogue for the austerity of rural life there. Silent save for the plaintive chords of composer Mihaly Vig’s melancholic score, and shot in 35 mm, this episode stands dramatically apart from its loquacious lead-in, Giannaris’s talking-head digital video “Room for All.” While minimalist to an extreme, however, both segments are filled with faces, so much so that the list of credits at the end of Tarr’s episode (which names each of the more than two hundred people standing in line for bread) becomes another film of sorts, a lengthy celebration of humanity in all its fortitude if not diversity (this is, after all, one of the few segments in Visions of Europe that is ethno-culturally homogeneous). In contrast, a single face – that belonging to Gerard Mannix Flynn – dominates the film’s eleventh episode, the aforementioned “Invisible State.” In fact, so commanding is Flynn throughout his monologue that one forgets that this is Aisling Walsh’s contribution to Visions of Europe, an omnibus project notable for bringing together the work of seven female directors. Interestingly, an “invisible presence” in the previous episode was that of Ágnes Hranitzky, the wife of Béla Tarr who has co-directed and/or edited many of his most famous works, including The Outsider (Szabadgyalog, 1981), Damnation (Kárhozat, 1988), and Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000). Though Hranitzky is credited as the co-director of “Prologue,” most critics have ignored her important contribution. If we are to interpret both her and Walsh’s involvement with the project as being obscured by the domineering presence of the men with whom they collaborated, this does not diminish the significance of the omnibus film as a narratological genre particularly well suited to stories about sexual, ethnic, and racial minorities. Indeed, as a kind of narratological “other” frequently misunderstood or maligned by critics, the omnibus film could be said to exist on the margins of cinematic praxis, a heterotopic hinterland likewise occupied by minority filmmakers and other cultural producers predisposed toward so-called “small” stories. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 199 The episode immediately following “Invisible States” is supplied by another female director, Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska. Entitled “Crossroad,” this poetic parable is set to the music of Mozart and Chopin, and centered on a large weathered crucifix which stands at an intersection of two snow-covered roads. “Crossroad” not only culminates with the symbolic image of two men in a van stopping alongside the cross to replace it with a shiny, if kitschy, new model (a metaphor, perhaps, of the expanded European Union) but also shows a variety of groups and individuals over the course of its five-minute running time, from a group of school children who nonchalantly passes by the crucifix to a couple who make out in a car beside it to a man who urinates at a nearby tree. Thus, like many episodes in Visions of Europe, it is itself a mini anthology or compendium of sorts, combining in a piecemeal fashion many people and stories. This internally episodic approach recalls the contributions of Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina (“It’ll Be Fine”) and Greek filmmaker Constantine Giannaris (“Room for All”), the latter a mise en abyme conglomeration of people spontaneously speaking (in self-contained frames and split screens) about multiculturalism, work permits, and the promise of inclusion. Few of the creative personnel associated with Visions of Europe have devoted so much energy over the course of their careers to the intertwined themes of immigration and cultural intermixing as Tony Gatlif, an Algerian-born, French filmmaker whose five-minute “Paris by Night” fits perfectly within his oeuvre. In this mostly black-and-white sequence, three illegal immigrants (two men and one woman) make their way into the French capital, their various travails accompanied by the stirring sounds of Francis Lemarque’s classic song “À Paris.” Upon arrival, they fend off cold winds while bathing in the Seine and tending to the bandaged foot of Abdel, one of the three who refuses to seek professional care in a hospital. Fearing that he would be sent back to North Africa, Abdel perseveres on his own, with only his sister Leila to look after him once the third member of their party parts ways with them at the Quai d’orléans. The episode ends on a triumphant note, however, with a caption that reads “Three Months Later” followed by a postcard-like shot of Abdel and Leila standing before the Moulin Rouge, a red stamp appearing in the top right-hand corner of the frame. That small splash of color recalls the image of a red traffic light at the beginning of the episode when all three were huddled together under the trailer of a truck taking them into Paris. A similar image can be found in Gatlif’s Exiles (Exils, 2004), an exuberant road movie whose two main characters, Zano and Naima (Parisians on a pilgrimage to their parental homeland, Algeria), meet another pair Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of travelers, Leila and Habib (Algerians going in the opposite direction) near Seville. Played by the same actress who appears in “Paris by Night,” young Leila hides with her brother from the Spanish authorities behind the rear wheel of a truck leaving the village, an image that is later echoed in the two protagonists’ own attempt to board illegally a ferry bound for Algeria (hiding under covers and atop a van). Like “Paris by Night,” Exiles is a film about freedom, something put forth in the lyrics of a song that plays in its opening minutes (“It’s urgent to talk about freedom, it’s important to question the missing ones, those who live without democracy in general”), not to mention the Che Guevara napkin used by Naima to wipe her mouth as the two depart by train to a place that has occupied their thoughts yet remains an abstract ideal. The freedom and sense of belonging the couple seek are partially found by the end of Exiles, which culminates with the performance of a Sufi cleansing ritual, a tour de force moment in which music and dance provide a spiritual outlet for characters and spectators alike. Audiences who are familiar with Gatlif’s work know that music is a primary, rather than secondary, consideration in his choice of material. Gadjo Dilo, his 1997 film about a young Frenchman’s search for a famous gypsy singer in a remote Romanian village, is perhaps the most notable example. This work begins with an image of the protagonist, with a red bag, trudging down an icy road, soon to become a nomad among nomads yet also a “crazy stranger” (gadjo dilo) whose outsider status (and inability to speak Romanian) dictates his relationships with the initially apprehensive gypsies. The brief bit of gypsy music in “Paris by Night,” played by a small band that accompanies a newlywed bride across a bridge over the Seine, as well as the fleeting glimpses of red in an otherwise black-and-white world, thus posit this episode as an extension of Gatlif’s earlier features which similarly revolve around dislocated souls in need of physical, as well as spiritual, rejuvenation. Like Fatih Akin’s contribution, a music-video-style reflection on Germany’s past, entitled “The Evil Old Songs,” Gatlif’s consists of black-and-white cinematography with fleeting interludes of color, visually connoting the stylistic diversity of the omnibus film as a whole. Indeed, for many critics, one of the most discombobulating aspects of Visions of Europe is the eclectic range of cinematic styles spread out over its twohour running time, which shuttles us from the rigorous formalism of Bela Tarr’s single tracking shot of a long breadline in “Prologue” (anticipating another line of beggars and buskers, gathered for soup, in the film’s Belgian episode) to the intentionally low-tech dynamics in Theo van Gogh’s television game show parody, “Euroquiz,” the film’s fourteenth Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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collective o pp o s itio n, po l itica l p a r t i c i p a t i o n 201 episode. Despite this apparent non-uniformity, however, the underlying thematic concerns with the abovementioned issues (particularly immigration) lend symmetry and structure to Visions of Europe, suggesting that a supranational cinema can be understood as existing in a “common cultural market” in which widespread concerns with social problems (such as worker exploitation and civil rights violations) are what unifies people in a “post-national” world and, ironically, strengthens this particular film’s dialogic appeals. Limited space prevents me from providing the reader with a complete tour of the remaining episodes in Visions of Europe, which transports audiences from a “Luxembourgish” language classroom peopled by prostitutes to a Slovenian countryside where European football is the topic of conversation among characters from different cultural backgrounds, all the while foregrounding multiple scenes of map-based transit and transnational crossing (for example, bus travel in Barbara Albert’s Austrian episode, air travel in Arvo Iho’s Estonian episode). It is hoped that the textual analysis above has given a sense of this film’s unique, if not totally unprecedented, allotment of space for multiplicity and diversity, despite its overriding thematic focus on a few issues of social and political import. What I have attempted to do in this chapter is showcase the participatory imperative inscribed in many omnibus productions, wherein directors’ transauthorial involvement with a project might illustrate the efficacy of political participation for spectators who might likewise join groups of similarly committed individuals in the fight for democracy or the effort to remedy rights violations at home or abroad.

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C HA PT E R 9

The Recent Revival of the Omnibus Film: from Paris, je t’aime to 11ʹ09ʺ01

In December of 2004, as part of my initial research for this book, I was treated to a special screening of the 1973 omnibus film Visions of Eight at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Film and Television Archive’s Hollywood facility, a space set aside for the individual viewing of rare motion pictures on Steenbeck machines. My screening of this documentary about the 1972 Summer Olympics was “special” for two reasons. Because Visions of Eight was not commercially available on videotape or DVD, the opportunity to watch a 35 mm print of this important, yet overlooked, example of multi-director cinema was rare in its own right, an invaluable part of my completist pursuit to see as many such filmic “oddities” as possible. But the experience was made more memorable, more meaningful, by virtue of the circumstances that led to my brush with celebrity – a brief encounter with someone who would soon make his own contribution to multi-director cinema, as one of the filmmakers responsible for the omnibus project Paris, je t’aime (2006). Upon entering the small viewing room, I saw that a second Steenbeck was occupied by someone so immersed in the film that he was watching – Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) – that he took no notice of my presence. Not long after taking a seat behind him, however, putting on headphones, and starting the first reel of Visions of Eight, I detected a shift in his focus, a slight turn of his head. Pivoting 90 degrees in his chair, my fellow spectator appeared to take an interest in the film that I had begun watching, his subtle movement making a faint impression on the periphery of my vision. I paid little attention to him, though, and instead trained my gaze on the flickering images of athletic preparation that kick off the film, as part of its first episode (a short vignette entitled “The Beginning,” directed by Yuri Ozerov). Several minutes later, during the first reel change (attended to by the Archive staff), I removed the headphones and turned my focus to the person whose viewing of McCarey’s classic tearjerker was coming to an Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 203 end. It was then when I realized that this somewhat snoopy cinephile was Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth (1996), Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), and Sideways (2004), who quickly introduced himself and inquired about the movie that I had been watching. When I explained that Visions of Eight was an omnibus film, or what I was calling “transauthorial cinema,” his eyes lit up. As a UCLA graduate steeped in film history, Payne revealed his awareness of this unusual, often derided, form of cultural production, reeling off a litany of titles that should be familiar to many media scholars (if not the general public), including Dead of Night (1945), Boccaccio ’70 (1962), and New York Stories (1989), as well as a few less well-known examples, such as the postwar British film Quartet (1948) and its American near equivalent, O. Henry’s Full House (1952). I was surprised to learn of his interest in a subject that was consuming so much of my time as a PhD student at his alma mater – a subject that I was writing about as part of my dissertation work. My surprise doubled when the filmmaker alluded to his own interest in contributing to an omnibus film, something that he eventually would do a year after our meeting, which came to an end with handshakes and the sharing of email addresses. In August of 2005, I received an email from Payne. He shared news of his impending trip to Paris where he was scheduled to shoot a five-minute episode to be included in a multi-director feature. Because I had sent him a list of omnibus films a few days after our meeting (many of which are set in the City of Lights), he kindly reciprocated by informing me that he would be contributing to Paris, je t’aime, an ambitious project – overseen by the French film producer Emmanuel Benbihy – consisting of twenty episodes (one for each of the capital city’s administrative districts). Though two episodes would eventually be removed (bringing the total to eighteen), Benbihy remained committed to having Payne’s contribution appear at the end of the film, in its final – some might say most important – slot. His completed episode, entitled “14e Arrondissement,” is set around Tour Montparnasse and the surrounding environs where an American tourist named Carol (Margo Martindale) spends her first European holiday far from her home in Denver, Colorado. A humorous yet melancholic vignette, this slice-of-life evocation of a sightseer’s sense of isolated belonging – a paradoxical idea hinted at in her voiceover comment that she feels both “joy and sadness” (or la joie et la tristesse, words delivered in thick American-accented French) – is indicative of Payne’s ongoing thematic interests as well as his commitment to realism in even the most “extreme” of tragicomic tales. But the combination of tonal registers or “moods” in this short film is also a byproduct of its own ­“isolated Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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b­ elonging” to a feature-length motion picture that, like all omnibus productions, is itself founded on contradictory principles. As I had earlier remarked to Payne during our brief meeting at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, omnibus films often foreground emotional extremes, owing in part to their associational complexity as collections of individual stories featuring the performative talents of many actors. Running the gamut from joy to sadness, Paris, je t’aime as a whole can be said to emulate a few of the individual episodes that it contains,

Figures 9.1 and 9.2  In director Alexander Payne’s contribution to the omnibus film Paris, je t’aime, Carol, a postal worker from Denver, gazes at the city of Paris while standing atop Tour Montparnasse. Together, this panoramic view of the city, whose various arrondissements serve as the settings for the entire film’s many episodes, as well as the close-up shot of Carol in a moment of sublimity, convey the correspondence between public memory and personal experience. They also communicate a paradoxical sense of the sprawling size and quotidian “smallness” so central to omnibus films.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 205 especially those like Payne’s that extend the touristic gaze beyond the confines of their geographic settings, their titular arrondissements. A key scene in “14e Arrondissement” makes this point clear. Walking along the top of the Tour Montparnasse in a moment of combined reverie and contemplation, Carol scans the city’s horizon from right to left as the camera provides a panoramic point-of-view shot. Here the viewer is invited to feel both the loneliness and the exhilaration of this character who, for a moment at least, can claim the entire city as her own. When I watched this episode for the first time (in 2007, four years after my own eleven-month stay in Paris), I could not help but think of Payne standing atop that tower where his actress stands (and where I, too, once stood), overlooking the entire city and making a similar claim on the many spaces that serve as settings for the film’s other episodes. Hence the appropriateness of this episode’s placement as the final segment of Paris, je t’aime. And hence the reason why I have opted to end this study of multidirector cinema with an anecdote about its “beginnings,” its formative state as the topic of conversation between myself and a filmmaker whom I have come to admire and respect, not least for his awareness and appreciation of a narrative form that has been unfairly denigrated by many critics. Ending his emailed message with the sentiment that he would “actually love to read” my work on omnibus films, Payne provided the spark of inspiration that helped propel it forward.

Multiple Meanings and the Omnibus Film as Meta-genre If, as the nineteenth-century novelist Henry Adams once prophesied, multiplicity is the quintessential feature of the twentieth century, then the multi-director omnibus film – a plural text brimming with autonomous, discretely demarcated tales strung together like beads – would seem to epitomize the era. Because even the earliest episodic motion pictures render salient the modernist and postmodernist fascinations with dissonance, drift, fragmentation, heterogeneity, and plurality, a politically charged and historically informed study of them offers a unique vantage from which to gauge their organization of social hierarchies, gender divisions, and class mobilities. Perhaps this premise would be easier to entertain had episode films as a corpus received the amount of critical attention necessary to elevate them from their status as generic oddities to a viable, credible area of academic research. Surprisingly or not, the subject represents a noticeable gap in film history, with only a few scholars, including Mark Betz, Michael Sinclair, and Shekhar Deshpande, devoting critical energy to it in recent years.1 As discussed in the previous chapters, even Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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when episode films are mentioned in textbooks, general overviews, and other critical accounts, they are typically dismissed as hit-and-miss hodgepodges filled with ill-conceived sketches. They are theater emptiers, films from which audiences “stay away in droves” (to paraphrase an old Goldwynism) or, at the very least, they promote lackadaisical strolls to the concession stand. Besides “bombing” at the box office, episode films – if we are to believe the rhetoric of popular critics – are “rarely satisfying” and “predictably uneven.” Such rhetoric, I have argued, is counterproductive and thus not conducive to a rigorous unpacking of the omnibus film as a “meta-genre.” To refer to the omnibus film as a meta-genre is to posit the possibility of reconceiving the relationship between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of textual signification. It furthermore suggests that questions of content and form are treated as significant issues in episodic cinema, which twists the “spigot” of the semiotic axis so as to visually manifest structural components that are typically concealed in other kinds of film. This 90-degree turn of the syntagmatic/paradigmatic axis thus renders visible otherwise “invisible” textual relations. By extension, it provides filmmakers with a wide, yet limited, repertoire of narrative possibilities for breaking texts into separate sections, and therefore facilitates our attempts to uncover “family resemblances” between seemingly dissimilar omnibus films. Division markers, such as title cards containing information about the ensuing episodes and the names of contributing directors, thus become the iconographic features to look for and take note of; the visual content rather than exclusively a structural function or formal property of a larger narrative system of signification. As Michael Sinclair states in his study of multi-story Italian cinema, “By their very structure, episode films foreground such basic binary oppositions as similarity and difference and are inherently self-reflexive in mediating the gap between mimesis and diegesis, between ‘showing’ and ‘telling.’”2 Just as the syntagmatic becomes paradigmatic, so too does the paradigmatic become syntagmatic, with the motivic emphasis on couples in conversation (so typical within omnibus features) superimposed atop the couplet structure of thematically linked episodes which can be said to “communicate” with one another, to share a kind of “dialogue” across the breach of space and time separating them. This aspect is especially noticeable in the “Cities of Love” films that have been spawned from the international success of the eighteen-episode feature Paris, je t’aime,3 a motion picture featuring the contributions of Olivier Assayas, Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, Joel and Ethan Coen, Isabel Coixet, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Gerard Depardieu, Christopher Doyle, Richard Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 207 LaGravenese, Vicenzo Natali, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydès, Walter Salles, Oliver Schmitz, Nobuhiro Suwa, Tom Tykwer, and Gus Van Sant. Set in different sections of the French capital (from the Latin Quarter to the Bastille area), Paris, je t’aime not only extends its representational reach across various sociocultural milieus but also metatextually foregrounds communication-based processes through which disparate stories and heterogeneous groups of people (including young Muslims, American tourists, a Spanish nanny, a Chinese salon owner, a Nigerian newcomer to the country, and even vampires) become artificially linked or “coupled” through a uniquely cinematic form of storytelling. For evidence of Paris, je t’aime’s internal heterogeneity, one need only turn to Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali’s “Quartier de la Madeleine,” a dark gothic fantasy that is stylistically unlike any other segment in the film. Set in the eighth arrondissement and positioned in the film’s fourteenth narrative slot, “Quartier de la Madeleine” is somewhat similar to Payne’s episode in that it too focuses on an American tourist in Paris. This time, however, the main character is a young backpacker (Elijah Wood) who literally falls head over heels for a bloodthirsty vampire (Olga Kurylenko). Their nocturnal meeting on the eerily empty streets of Paris is completely silent, save for the spooky orchestral accompaniment that plays throughout this episode. Whereas Payne’s contribution is suffused with naturalism and wistfulness, treating cinematic style as something that should recede into the background so that a single character and her combined euphoria and melancholia can be brought to the foreground, Natali’s episode is more aggressively “artificial,” privileging a Sin Cityinspired type of noirish mise en scène over psychological depth or emotional complexity. Featuring cold blue cinematography offset by splotches of red – the same neon sizzle that Natali has brought to his feature-length work (including Cube [1997], Cypher [2002], and Splice [2009]) – “Quartier de la Madeleine” could not be farther removed from the pastel hues and sundappled shimmerings of “14e Arrondissement,” which seems more casual in its camera movement, less calculated. Moreover, the genre trappings of Natali’s episode, rooted in vampire fiction and horror film iconography, are the stuff of fantasy, offsetting the cultural verisimilitude and comparative realism so prominent in many of the other episodes, including the one that immediately follows “Quartier de la Madeleine,” a dialogue-filled sketch about a couple on the brink of separation, set in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Entitled “Père Lachaise,” this fifteenth episode of Paris, je t’aime seems especially naturalistic and visually pared down when compared to its atmospheric, gothic horror lead-in. This is somewhat ironic given that “Père Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Lachaise” was directed by Wes Craven, a filmmaker who is famous for delivering fright, rather than psychological insight, in his many slasher films of the past four decades. True Craven enthusiasts and horror film aficionados know, though, that this Cleveland-born filmmaker had earned undergraduate and advanced degrees in English and philosophy before going on to teach college courses as a humanities professor, a professional line cut short once he started shooting low-budget movies in the 1970s. Because of this, his excursion into the Parisian cemetery, a place potentially ripe for the most macabre of imaginations, provides a rare glimpse into his pre-horror past and indicates his deftness in handling quotidian scenes between real people, rather than fictional monsters, in a restrained way. Like most of the other episodes in Paris, je t’aime, with the exception of Alexander Payne’s quiet vignette about a woman touring the city on her own, “Père Lachaise” concerns a couple – a man and a woman who are forced to come to grips with a sudden, potentially momentous change in their lives. Flanked on either side by the graves of such cultural icons as Frédéric Chopin and Marcel Proust, a young English woman named Frances (Emily Mortimer) walks through the cemetery, searching for one burial site in particular: that of Oscar Wilde. Accompanying Frances is her less-than-impressed fiancé William (Rufus Sewell) who thinks that traipsing through a cluttered memorial to “dead people” is a waste of time, ­especially since the couple is on their pre-marriage “honeymoon” (taken early because of the lack of available days in his schedule as a company consultant). Slight bickering between these soon-to-be newlyweds peppers their tour of the Père-Lachaise and, gradually, the underlying problems in their relationship begin to rise to the surface, leading her to eventually take leave of him. He is far too serious, according to her, failing to approach the world with the same sensitivity of feeling that she attributes to her literary hero, Wilde, whose lipstick-covered gravestone she finally stumbles upon. What Frances misses most in their relationship is “lightness,” a word she utters in a moment of emotional candor, after revealing – to him and possibly even to herself – that she cannot marry him. Though the tone of this scene is momentarily dark, rather than light, levity soon returns to the episode in the form of Oscar Wilde’s ghost, whom William sees after bumping his head on the gravestone. The spirit of the Irish writer and wit gives a word of advice to William, telling him that he “will die” if he lets Frances get away. “Death of the heart is the ugliest death there is,” Wilde muses, his words shaking the once humorless consultant back to his senses, back to his lightness of being. Suddenly, he rushes after his fiancée, calling out her name in desperation as romantic musical accompaniment swells voluptuously on the soundtrack. Finally Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 209 catching up with Frances near the edge of the cemetery, he spins her around and plants a prolonged kiss on her lips. After admitting his mistake, he tells her, “Friends stab you in the front.” This spoken non sequitur, a quote attributed to the real Oscar Wilde, leads to William’s final apologetic comment, “I’m sorry,” whispered in her ear as he watches the spirit of the poet slowly disappear. As this episode ends and the next one – Tom Tykwer’s fast-paced “Faubourg Saint-Denis” – begins, the words “friends stab you in the front” might linger in the mind. Indeed, this deadly humorous expression brings additional meaning to the story of a young blind man named Thomas whose American girlfriend, Francine, breaks up with him over the phone in the opening minute, telling him that “there are times when life calls out for a change, a transition.” Or, rather, Thomas mistakenly believes that Francine is ending their relationship, only to learn, in the film’s closing seconds, that the young actress was simply rehearsing lines from a movie that she’s been auditioning for. Given the interpenetration of themes among the various stories comprising Paris, je t’aime, I wish to argue that “friends stab you in the front” can be taken metaphorically. Perhaps it is a reference to the way that, in omnibus films, the “back end” of an episode’s narrative quickly gives way to the “front end” of another episode’s narrative. That is, the ending of one tale often “bleeds” into the beginning of a subsequent tale, despite the possible presence of interstitial markers, such as “chapter titles,” brief blackouts, and other devices. Like each of the other episodes in this multi-director film – indeed, like each episode in every omnibus film – “Père Lachaise” assumes associational complexity and attains dramatic weight (despite its “lightness”) as a result of its situated relatedness with other episodes. As such, the various stories comprising an episodic work such as Paris, je t’aime should not be analyzed in isolation, individually, as autonomous short films shorn from their narrative “housing.” As a transauthorial genre as well as a meta-genre (one that comments on the categorizing impetus of critical discourse), the omnibus film both highlights and complicates traditional aspects and understandings of the auteur theory. Moreover, it is a form that is conducive to mise en abyme structures as well as self-reflexive gestures that call attention to the permeable and shifting boundaries between constituent narrative units. Though these ideas have been fleshed out in the book’s main chapters, it is useful to maintain focus on the way that Paris, je t’aime, like other multi-director features, accrues meaning incrementally, over the course of two or more episodes. It thus continuously calls into question the epistemological premises upon which audiences cognitively come to grips with cinematic narration. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Coming immediately after Vincenzo Natali’s “Quartier de la Madeleine,” Craven’s stroll through the cemetery seems visually muted, if also dialogically intense, by comparison. Frances and William’s conversation about death, however, combined with a shot of a freshly sealed casket being carried into the place by pallbearers (briefly visible behind the couple), build upon a theme introduced in Natali’s episode which culminates with the young American tourist – now a sharp-fanged bloodsucker thanks to a vampiric blood transfusion – necking lasciviously with the creature who saved him from certain death. The couple embraces at the end of “Quartier de la Madeleine” in much the same way that Frances and William will in the ensuing episode.

Figures 9.3 and 9.4  Despite their tonal and generic differences, these two back-to-back episodes in Paris, je t’aime both culminate with a young man and woman embracing. As visual references to the overarching theme of this omnibus film, these expressions of physical attraction and romantic love are furthermore indicative of the “coupling” tendency within such films in which meaning arises from the conjoining of two episodes.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 211 This is a visual motif that had been established earlier in the film (in an episode contributed by the Japanese writer–director Nobuhiro Suwa, entitled “Place des Victoires”), and which lends substance to the notion that the individual stories comprising Paris, je t’aime are themselves ­“coupling” or “mating” with one another, creating additional meanings and new themes by virtue of their narrative cohabitation. The fact that Oscar Wilde is played by none other than Alexander Payne (his only stint as a film actor up to that point) only further solidifies the idea that an omnibus episode is but one among many others. An episode is only a small part of a much larger whole that resists essentializing and which, by virtue of its narrative complexity and multiplicity, simply cannot be “contained” by the reductivist discourse of critics. Payne’s fleeting appearance as a spectral presence in “Père Lachaise,” besides injecting a touch of the fantastic in an otherwise “realistic” setting, and besides gesturing toward Craven’s scholarly interest in literary figures such as Wilde, preps the audience for the way his own invisible hand shapes the proceedings in “14e Arrondissement.” Indeed, as an offscreen authorial presence, Payne brings a lightness of touch to the film’s concluding episode, injecting a hint of the wit of Wilde while also highlighting the melancholic undercurrents of the poet’s aphorism, “Death of the heart is the ugliest death there is” – a statement that, when reintroduced in a site of personal longing and isolation (that of Carol, the lonely letter carrier from Denver), is lent new emotional shadings as the film comes to an end.

“Little Bits and Pieces”: 11ʹ09ʺ01 As described in the previous chapters, multi-director omnibus films have been used as vehicles for political intervention and social change since the 1930s. This does not mean, however, that such works transcend or escape critical scrutiny in their “nobility” or “benevolence” as well-intentioned texts. Indeed, for all their good intentions, many omnibus films fail to deliver on the promise of a truly democratic cinema, and frequently rely on simplistic allegories and stereotypes as well as exclusionary tactics as part of their paradoxically “divisionist” efforts to combine, yet separate, groups and individuals within a single, yet fragmented, narrative space. An example of this paradox is the the 1997 film Riot. Set during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, immediately after the police officers who were accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted by a mostly white jury, this omnibus production explores the widening rifts between Chinese Americans, Hispanics, Anglo-Americans, and African Americans – four groups allotted equal time space in the discretely demarcated narrative Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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zones. The “narrative community” in Riot is thus segmented and partially segregated along racial and ethnic lines (extradiegetically represented by the film’s four writer–directors: Galen Yuen, Alex Munoz, Richard DiLello, and David C. Johnson) while it simultaneously problematizes and recapitulates conventional representational paradigms unique to the American multicultural experience (from the incense-burning, convenience store-owning Asian family to the tattoo-covered, wife-beating Latino to the racist white cop to the black drug user). In contrast, the eleven episodes comprising 11ʹ09ʺ01 (2002) – a collectively conceived, eleven-episode rumination on the September 11, 2001 attacks (which left nearly three thousand innocent people dead and a worldwide economic cost of roughly $2 trillion) – cast a much wider net over a far more disparate group of individuals, many of whom resist essentializing and bring forth their own agency in a film ostensibly about the debilitating fear of global terrorism. Initiated by French producer Alain Brigand, funded by Galatee Films and Studio Canal, and theatrically released on September 11, 2002 in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Budapest, and Rome, 11ʹ09ʺ01 was never widely distributed in the United States (although it was belatedly shown in New York City a year later). The film’s episodes were directed by Samira Makhmalbaf from Iran, Claude Lelouch from France, Youssef Chahine from Egypt, Danis Tanovic from Bosnia–Herzegovina, Idrissa Ouedraogo from Burkina Faso, Ken Loach from Britain, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu from Mexico, Amos Gitai from Israel, Mira Nair from India, Sean Penn

Figure 9.5  A screen capture from 11ʹ09ʺ01, showing one of the interstitials separating two of its episodes and leading in to director Ken Loach’s contribution to the film. Visually presented as a world map, the screen pinpoints Loach’s country in relation to the location of the tragedy, New York City, suggesting both proximity and distance.

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Figure 9.6  German film poster for 11ʹ09ʺ01, an omnibus film concerning the events of – and global reaction to – September 11, 2001.

from the United States, and Shohei Imamura from Japan. These internationally celebrated filmmakers were promised creative license in bringing their opinions about the events to the screen. The only stipulation was that each episode should clock in at exactly eleven minutes and nine seconds (with one frame thrown in for good measure). For the most part, 11ʹ09ʺ01 steers clear of exploitation and sensationalism although its tone is sometimes sentimental. Particularly sentimental is Penn’s contribution, an intimate look at a lonely widower (Ernest Borgnine) who is so immersed in his daily routine (laying out his dead wife’s dresses on the bed) that he fails to notice the Twin Towers crumbling outside his Lower Manhattan apartment. Only after sunlight cuts through the settling dust clouds outside his window does the old man snap out of his myopia, seeing for the first time the radiant bloom of once-wilted flowers on the sill. Despite its occasional corniness, and perhaps due to its dialogic engagement with the worldwide perception of a traumatic event, this transnational, transauthorial film was criticized upon its premieres at the Venice and Toronto film festivals for propagating anti-American sentiments. A few of the contributors are justifiably critical of US foreign policy. In the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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third episode, for example, Youssef Chahine holds court in a typically forthright fashion, though his clumsy and didactic condemnation of the American government – spoken by his onscreen alter ego, Nour el-Sharif, to the ghost of a dead American soldier who was killed in Beirut years ago – smacks of fuzzy fact finding (the filmmaker’s research on United States atrocities throughout the world, from Hiroshima to Vietnam, was apparently limited to the Internet). In contrast, Ken Loach takes the high road, offering a subtle yet compassionate indictment of the Nixon administration’s role in the September 11, 1973 assassination of Chilean elected President Salvador Allende and the bloody, repressive, anti-socialist tide that ensued, leaving some thirty thousand people dead and sweeping away any hope of democratic change. Based on the testimony of Vladimir Vega, a London-based political refugee from Chile who writes an open letter of condolence to the American people, this episode draws parallels between the CIA-backed bombing of Santiago (which made possible General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat) and the act of terrorism undertaken by members of al-Qaeda – a “calendrical coincidence” in which two tragedies separated by twenty-eight years eerily inform one another. Given the film’s subject matter, viewers might be unprepared for the introduction of ironic, if lighthearted, comedy into the proceedings. Lending 11ʹ09ʺ01 tonal variety is Idrissa Ouedraogo’s humorous fable about a newspaper delivery boy who, believing that he has seen Osama Bin Laden on the streets of Ouagadougou, gathers his young friends together to track and capture the terrorist for cash reward. The African filmmaker’s episode reminds audiences that 11ʹ09ʺ01 not only offers a balanced set of views on the international context of the September 11 attacks but also breaks from the presentational solemnities associated with 9/11 memorials. Moreover, the eleven contributions to 11ʹ09ʺ01 not only highlight the critical dissent that arose in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks but also respond to the increased pressure for genre diversification in the international film festival circuit. Episode to episode, the film veers wildly from cross-Atlantic epistolary narrative to West African coming-of-age comedy, from Israeli documentary reportage to allegorical Japanese folktale. This textual schizophrenia reflects the ideological implications of globalization and transnationalism unique to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. As we move from the earthy hinterland of an Iranian shelter (where Makhmalbaf focuses on the localized education of Afghan refugee children) to the upscale environs of a Manhattan apartment (where Lelouch deposits his deaf French female protagonist) to the streets of Srebrinica (where Tanovic depicts grieving women honoring the memories of their dead husbands, fathers, and sons: Bosnian Muslims Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 215 massacred on July 11, 1995), our phenomenological basis for understanding the global implications of the attack is both necessarily fragmented and sufficiently enlarged. Despite this textual schizophrenia, there are repeated images and themes throughout the film, giving it an intratextual – as opposed to strictly intertextual – density. For example, the imagery in Shohei Imamura’s ostensibly unrelated story of a Japanese Second World War veteran who believes that he is a snake (slithering on the ground before slipping into a brook) visually echoes the mysterious shots of a deep water well in Samira Makhmalbaf’s episode. Also, the sensorial deprivation introduced in Claude Lelouch’s episode, set in Manhattan and featuring a deaf Frenchwoman, reemerges in Alejandro Gonzales Iñarritu’s experimental short, only this time in a more cinematically reflexive, if visually impaired, fashion. This harrowing episode completely deprives the viewer of images, save for a few violent flashes of bodies falling from the World Trade Center towers (images that were intentionally suppressed in America’s media coverage of the event). Even more shocking than these fleeting shots is the soundtrack that accompanies the otherwise black screen. Creating a dense sonic collage consisting of panicked sobs, Islamic chants, roaring jet engines, crashing steel, 911 calls, answering-machine messages, and racial epithets spewed on radio talk shows, Iñarritu manages to effectively represent the unrepresentable, capping this disturbing, yet thought-provoking, episode with a burst of light and a question at the end (printed in Arabic and English): “Does God’s light guide us or blind us?” The cacophonous blend of voices and noises in this requiem furthermore encapsulates the protean aspects of the film as a whole, which brings together not only several spoken languages (with dialogue in Farsi, Arabic, French, English, and Hebrew) but also a diverse cross-section of personal reflections and political statements about a contentious event. Because it embodies so much of what is peculiar and particular about the omnibus film format, I have chosen to bring this book to a close with a reference to 11ʹ09ʺ01. But to speak of “closure” and, by extension, the “end” of a book that is concerned with a type of film that dates back to the early history of cinema and continues to be made throughout the world, is to go against the very grain of my project. Indeed, not only does each year bring another spate of episode films but also the individual texts themselves gesture toward both perpetuity and multiplicity. When cycling through a seemingly endless string of episodes in a single film (such as the multi-director collections Visions of Europe and The ABCs of Death [2012] which contain twenty-five and twenty-six segments, respectively), one becomes acutely aware of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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passage of time and the mediated, as well as presentational, nature of film narrativity. One also begins to realize that the many endings in an episode film are but new beginnings, apertures opening to reveal yet another set of characters, settings, and situations that lends the texts a decidedly spatial dimension (hence my reliance on materialist, collection-based metaphors throughout). Just as the British omnibus film Dead of Night (1945) is able to gesture toward infinite narrativity through a finite yet circular spatiotemporal structure, I have sought to present a variety of approaches through select case studies that neither exhaust the possibilities for future conceptualizations, modifications, or debates, nor presume to be the final word on the subject but rather suggest the untapped potential of a narratological genre that knows no end. At the beginning of this book, I provided evidence of the critical hostility that has often been directed toward omnibus films, with reviewers often going to great lengths (and relying on often excessive rhetoric) to point out this meta-genre’s many deficiencies. Now, in bringing my study to a close, I would like to pose a question whose rhetorical openness risks turning this conclusion into an introduction to yet another study. To paraphrase a passage from Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “One for My Baby,” a song made famous by Frank Sinatra, we may drink to “the end of a brief episode.” But, in raising an additional point not fully covered in this book, I wish to leave the reader with “one more for the road.” Why, given the overwhelmingly negative reactions that they seem to habitually engender, would multi-director episode films continue to be made year after year? What are the motivations behind their production? There are, as I alluded to in Chapter 2, industrial and economic reasons behind their existence. Louis Malle, a contributor to the Franco-Italian omnibus production Spirits of the Dead (Histoires extraordinaires, 1968), once sarcastically informed an interviewer that “these segment films were a great producer’s scam: you gather together a lot of famous directors; they bring stars; each works a week; it’s very cheap.”4 Conversely, a filmmaker may actually relish participating in a such a production, which offers an opportunity to compete against other directors’ works. Certain stories that are appealing to filmmakers may require only fifteen to thirty minutes of screen time; any more and the fabric of a given narrative would be stretched to the point of breaking. For producers dissatisfied with the three-act structure, the format allows them to exploit the indeterminate and episodic nature of real life while throwing a much larger mosaic of ideas on the screen than typically yielded. Writers and directors have historically gravitated toward the episodic format for a variety of reasons besides the cost-saving and resource-sharing opportunities that such Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 217 productions sometimes afford, and irregardless of its inherent political suggestiveness as a cinematic “collective.” To take just one example: 3:11 A Sense of Home (2011), an omnibus film made in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, gave twenty-one internationally renowned auteurs (including China’s Jia Zhange-Ke, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Spain’s Victor Erice, and Japan’s Naomi Kawase who initiated the project) an opportunity to reflect on those tragic events, contributing individual episodes at a required length of three minutes and eleven seconds each. The thinking behind this project was that a more expansive, more poignant cinematic memorial could be created through the transauthorial interplay of meaning unique to omnibus films. Several such films have been made to celebrate or commemorate less seismic events in history than the ones discussed in this Conclusion and the preceding chapter. Swiss Made (1969), one of the few omnibus films to dip into the semantic pool of science fiction, was financially backed by a national bank to commemorate its hundredth anniversary (only one of its three episodes, Yves Yersin’s self-reflexive “He Who Says No,” actually deals with the world of personal finance, albeit tangentially). Another omnibus project, producer Denise Robert’s six-episode Montreal vu par . . . (1992) was jointly financed by the Ontario Film Development Corporation and the Quebec film agency, Société Générale des Industries Culturelles du Québec (SOGIC) to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Canada’s most populous city. That same year, 1992, also saw the theatrical release of Southern Winds (Sazanwinzu 1 miraju), a four-episode omnibus film featuring the work of directors from Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia that was made to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The 2005 film Lost and Found was initiated by Nikolaj Nikitin (the chief editor of the film journal Schnitt) and produced by Herbert Schwering and Christine Kiauk (from Icon Film) to promote the work of six young filmmakers from Central and Eastern European countries: Bulgaria (Nadejda Koseva’s “The Ritual”), Romania (Cristian Mungju’s “Turkey Girl”), Bosnia (Jasmila Zbanich’s “Birthday”), Hungary (Kornél Mundruczó’s “Short-Lasting Silence”), and the Republic of Serbia (Stefan Arsenijevic’s “Fabulous Vera”). The filmography that follows attests to the fact that critical consensus against episode films does not seem to hinder their output. Indeed, in recent years there has been an increase in the number of anthology and of omnibus films throughout parts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, adding to the already substantial body of works produced in Europe and North America over the past one hundred years. For example, the first Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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pan-African film was an omnibus production: Africa Dreaming (1997), a quartet of dramatic shorts about love lost, from Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, and Tunisia, featuring four spoken languages (Portuguese, Nama, Wolof, and Arabic). Stories of Love, a Singaporean multi-episode production from 2000, is believed to be the first feature-length digital film commercially released in Asia. Tracey Moffatt’s directorial debut BeDevil (1993), a three-episode film supported by the Australian Film Finance Corporation, was the first feature directed by an Aboriginal woman in that country. Perhaps more importantly, the episodic narrative format is amenable to the experiential process of mourning, which occurs in stages. For, as Marian Fontana, the widow of a New York City firefighter, eloquently remarked one year after the September 11 attacks, “Grieving is not linear. It comes in little bits and pieces.”5 Episode films in general, and omnibus films more specifically, provide the bits and pieces of not only a larger history of cinema but also a larger history of humanity which continues to endure despite a seemingly endless series of subtle and convulsive changes.

Conclusion: Every Ending is a New Beginning The episodic film narrative, which grew out of the late vaudevillian era when autonomous acts could be presented successively as modular units in short “variety brackets” lasting only a few minutes, has persisted throughout the years in different generic guises yet remains a decidedly undecidable form for many audiences. Oftentimes referred to as anthology, compendium, compilation, composite, episode, omnibus, novella, package, portmanteau or sketch films, these narratological curios are what Aristotle warns against in his Poetics: “fables composed of many fables.”6 According to Aristotelian logic, which asserts that tragedy should imitate a complete, rising action wherein a beginning, a middle, and an end can easily be discerned, literary – and, by extension, cinematic – works featuring episodic plots connected by loose transitions are deemed suspicious, if only for their relative lack of continuity and causality.7 Few contemporary critics, however, would subscribe to so rigid a doctrine in light of the multi-story format’s ability to reinvigorate film narrativity through a decentered, constantly shifting cinematic speech act or enunciative structure. Mimicking that shifting structure, throughout this book I have tried to consolidate a variety of methodologies so as to enlarge the vocabulary and epistemological lens through which to discuss and, more importantly, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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experience episode films – feature-length works that are made up of two or more stories or sketches presented one after the other in a serial fashion. I began by putting forth the modest proposal that omnibus films are both unique in the history of cinema and indebted to earlier expressive/­ communicative forms that rely upon episodic structures. At once unified and fragmented, singular and multiple, these contradictory texts complicate traditional narratological paradigms and problematize critical categories and concepts such as authorship, genre, and national cinema. Any attempt to write a “critical history” of multi-director cinema might give readers the false impression that a single, monolithic, and definitive historical account of omnibus films could be spun from the many “wisps of narratives” (to borrow Jean-François Lyotard’s words) that comprise this subject. Much like the French theorist famously described History as the “stories that one tells, that one hears, that one acts out . . . that sometimes let themselves be collected together to constitute big stories and sometimes disperse into digressive elements,” an exhaustive critical account of omnibus films must necessarily contend with “a mass of millions of insignificant and serious little stories.”8 Sorting through such a mass, deposited from all corners of the globe, could literally take a lifetime. The Braudelian desire for “total history,” which Lyotard and other postmodern theorists implicitly criticize in their rejection of organic unity and their espousal of the fragmentary, surely runs aground when faced with so heterogeneous and unruly a category as omnibus films. Moreover, by promising a “critical history,” a scholar in this area would have set up a portmanteau concept ill-equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of the episodic form which not only gives rise to contradictions in content but also exists non-synchronously within a global cinematic gestalt composed of various national and political contexts. In ultimately opting out of a straightforward, linear historiography and in choosing to instead limn out new conceptual frameworks for dealing with thematically organized material, I find myself following in the footsteps of Susan Stewart, a writer whose work has been a personal inspiration, and who, in the Introduction to On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, says that her book is “itself is a collection and not a chronicle.” As she states, “I am more concerned with representing a display of heterogeneity than with accounting for a model of causality.”9 I can only hope that my own approach to “miniatures” and “collections” opens similarly multiple entryways into the subject of omnibus films and illustrates how narrative “wisps” and “scraps” together form the tattered tapestry of not a single History but several micro-histories with often discrete, though sometimes Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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o­ verlapping, episodes. Hence the focus of my book which offers multiple, transnational perspectives on the subject of narrative complexity and the literal and figurative crossings undertaken by both filmmakers and audiences as coequal participants in the making of omnibus films – a subject that has thus far been largely ignored by theorists and historians. As I sit down to write this Conclusion, I am reminded of a line of dialogue in Sunday Lovers (1980), an otherwise forgettable omnibus film featuring the contributions of four directors (Bryan Forbes, Edouard Molinaro, Gene Wilder, and Dino Risi). In the film’s first episode, entitled “An Englishman’s Home” and set in London, wealthy playboy Harry Lindon (Roger Moore) takes his latest romantic conquest (a sightseeing woman from California named Carmen) to one of the many bedrooms in his twelfth-century mansion (which, unbeknown to her, is actually the property of someone else, a gentleman named Sir Charles who is away for the weekend). Opening the door to the “Churchill Suite,” Harry, who is actually Sir Charles’s chauffeur, informs her, “This room is crawling with history. They have all been turned on in here: Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton . . .” Putting aside this line’s ridiculousness as a pre-fling come-on, I find it interesting that a compact compartment (albeit one contained within a sprawling mansion) should be associated with such an expansive period of history, one that spans the centuries (from the 1500s to the 1700s to the 1900s) and accommodates multiple cultures. Moreover, Harry’s sexual adventures, presented as a series of disconnected encounters with different women (sexy stewardesses, mainly), can be mapped onto the broader pattern of narrative “entrances” and “exits” in Sunday Lovers, a film whose final episode (“Armando’s Notebook,” directed by Risi and set in Rome) likewise shows a litany of women succumbing to the charms of one man (Armando, played by Ugo Tognazzi). Like the Churchill Suite, the film is thus able to contain a diverse range of amorous encounters, comedic scenarios, and national representatives, including the two episodes sandwiched between these bookending boundaries: Wilder’s “Skippy” (set in Los Angeles) and Molinaro’s “The French Method” (set in Paris). Even more noteworthy than the above reference to a room “crawling with history” (an idea that I took up in Chapter 5, devoted in part to the “housing” of history in omnibus films whose episodes are set within a single abode) is the statement made by a butler named Parker at the end of the first episode. After Sir Charles’s servant walks in on Harry with two women in the Churchill Suite, he makes a comment that lends additional meaning to this film’s complex episodic structure, saying, “As Sir Winston said in another context, it is not the beginning of the end, but Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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th e rece nt r e v iva l o f t he o m n i b u s f i l m 221 merely the end of the beginning,” Sunday Lovers, like all omnibus films, is structurally reliant on the coexistence of multiple beginnings and endings, serially sprinkled throughout the text and suggestive of the ways that we, as audiences, “enter” into and “depart” from all motion-picture experiences, even those that are not episodic (that is, those that tell a single story over the course of approximately two hours). Having arrived at the end of my own text, I want to stress that I have not endeavored to put forth the final word on this book’s subject. This book is merely the first step toward a more complete picture of the omnibus film’s narrative complexity and historical significance over the past century. In other words, it is an episode.

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Notes

Chapter 1   1. Mick LaSalle, “Tales of the City of Light, from 18 Directors,” San Francisco Chronicle (May 25, 2007): n/a.   2. Of course, “fullness” is not always a drawing attraction to the omnibus film. As a writer for the Saturday Review writes, a multi-director episode film such as O. Henry’s Full House “may be too full, may contain at least one story too many.” Anon., “SR Goes to the Movies: Homage to O. Henry, Fun with Faust,” Saturday Review (September 13, 1952): 34.   3. Michael Steven Sinclair, Molti-Story Cinema: The Episode Film in the Italian Cinema, PhD dissertation (Los Angeles, University of Southern California, 2004), 9.   4. Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), 179–284.  5. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 253.  6. Parker Tyler, “Accent on the Omnibus,” Theatre Arts (August, 1953): 86.   7. Anon., “Review of Times Gone By,” Cue (January 2, 1954): 14.  8. Stanley Kauffmann, “le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir,” The New Republic (May 25, 1974): 22.   9. Ruth Waterbury, “Times Gone By is Champagne,” L.A. Examiner (April 17, 1953): n/a. 10. See, for instance, Henry Magnan, “Adorables créatures . . . en struc,” Le Monde (September 24, 1952): n/a. 11 Henri Michel, “Un faux bon film,” Education nationale (October 16, 1952); and Claude Brule, “Des créatures qu’on appelle adorables . . . ,” Paris presse (September 19, 1952): n/a. 12. Kauffmann, 22. 13. For example, “episode” is a constituent or sole part of several short story titles, such as Julie Alvarez’s “The Kugelmass Episode” and W. Somerset Maugham’s “Episode,” not to mention poems such as Vladislav Khodasevich’s “Episode” 14. Slavoj Žižek refers to such films as “tapestry-narratives” in which a “multitude of parallel lines interact.” Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 191, n. 17. See also: David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 176–7. 15. For more information about recent multiprotagonist films, see Evan Smith’s article, “Thread Structure: Rewriting the Hollywood Formula,” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 51, no. 3/4 (Fall–Winter, 1999–2000): 88–95. Smith provides an elucidation of the multiple story thread structure that has become increasingly employed by contemporary filmmakers searching for alternatives to conventional plot lines. 16. David Denby, “Good Fights,” The New Yorker (December 24 and 31, 2001): 125. 17. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 95–9. 18. William C. Cline, In the Nick of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 1984), 8. 19. Though they omit direct references to omnibus films, Richard B. Armstrong and Mary Willems Armstrong address some of the characteristics of anthologies in The Movie List Book: A Reference Guide to Film Themes, Settings, and Series. The authors explain that anthologies are “episode films” containing “two or more separate stories, typically linked by a framing device.” Erroneously pinpointing the birth of the anthology film as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the two Armstrongs unfurl in a single paragraph this subgenre’s “history,” with casual allusions to both single-director and multidirector films such as If I Had a Million, Tales of Manhattan, Flesh and Fantasy (1943), Dead of Night, Quartet, Trio (1950), Encore, Tales of Terror (1962), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), and Torture Garden (1967). The authors’ failure to make a terminological distinction between single-director and multi-director episode films points toward a general tendency to conflate terms. Richard B. Armstrong and Mary Willems Armstrong, The Movie List Book: A Reference Guide to Film Themes, Settings, and Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 15–17. 20. Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant, and Jim Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12. 21. Ibid., 55. See also Ira Konigsberg’s The Complete Film Dictionary (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1997), for similar definitions of anthology and compilation films, and similar omissions of omnibus and portmanteau films. 22. Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1964). 23. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 24. For a discussion of the play of simultaneity and meaning in portmanteau words, which can be traced back to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, see Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 163–5. 25. See, for instance, my analysis of the Hollywood production Actors and Sin (1952) and other portmanteau films near the end of my essay: David Scott Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Diffrient, “Alternate Futures, Contradictory Pasts,” Screening the Past 20 (Fall 2006), 26. John McCarten, “Up from Bokar,” New Yorker (January 24, 1953): 62. 27. Dore Schary, Preface to unpublished It’s a Big Country script collection (August 21, 1951), Charles Palmer Collection, Folder 7, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 28. AFI Catalogue Notes on It’s a Big Country. http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/ title/785/It-s-a-Big-Country-An-American-Anthology 29. P. Drew, “Visitors: When a Filmmaker Works in Charcoal, This Is What Happens,” Korean Grindhouse (November 20, 2011), http://koreangrindhouse.blogspot.com/2011/11/visitors-when-filmmaker-works-in.html 30. For example, Louis Chauvet, a film critic at Le Figaro (June 25, 1980), invites his readers to “Remarquez en passant qu’au cinéma les producteurs utilisent le mot ‘sketch’ terme légitimement humble, plus évocateur des Folies Bergère que de Maupassant” [“Note in passing that film producers use the legitimately humble word ‘sketch’, a term more evocative of the FoliesBergère than of Maupassant”]. 31. Though the term “sketch film” was frequently used to designate French, Italian, and Franco-Italian productions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that exhibited satiric tendencies (also known as les films à sketches), and is today often linked to English-language comedies, such as Amazon Women on the Moon and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), its first appearance in the pages of a major American newspaper was in connection to Benito Alazraki’s Roots (Raíces, 1955), a four-episode collection of tragic tales (based on Francisco Rojas Gonzáles’s work) that won the International Critics Association Award at Cannes that year. See Robert F. Hawkins, “US Prestige Raised by Cannes Victories,” New York Times (May 22, 1955). 32. Michael Quinion, “A Word for All: The Odd History of Omnibus,” World Wide Words 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Parker Tyler, “Accent on the Omnibus,” Theatre Arts (August 1953): 86–9. 36. Anon., “More ‘Omnibus’ Films,” Sydney Morning Herald (July 30, 1953): 7. The critic’s comment that “the ‘omnibus’ film habit seems to be growing” was made two months after another reviewer, writing about the three-episode British feature Meet Me Tonight (a.k.a. Tonight at 8:30, 1952), proclaimed that this single-director film was “carrying on the omnibus movie tradition like mad,” before ultimately dismissing the work as containing little more than “Cowardian theatrical tidbits” (a reference to the source material, Noel Coward’s plays). Anon., “Tonight at 8:30,” Cue (May 30, 1953): n/a. 37. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times (December 13, 1950): n/a. 38. Though the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther used the word Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“omnibus” following the release of a single-director episode film, Julien Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan (1942), and four years later employed the conjoined term “omnibus film” as part of his December 6, 1946, review of Till the Clouds Roll By (an MGM biopic about Jerome Kern that features, in Crowther’s words, “a plethora of performers”), not until 1949 did an actual multi-director episode film – Train of Events – really earn that appellation in the pages of the New York Times. See “Tales of Manhattan,” New York Times (September 25, 1942); and “Little by Little,” New York Times (October 4, 1942). Also, one year after the release of Train of Events, the New York Times printed a review of the British film Quartet (released in England two years earlier, in 1948) that featured the word “omnibus.” See Thomas M. Pryor, “Some New Words from an ‘Old Party’.” New York Times (October 1, 1950). 39. Donald Clarke, “First-Class Comforts,” Irish Times (December 30, 2005): n/a. 40. Deborah Young, “Tickets,” Variety, Vol. 398, no. 2 (February 28, 2005): n/a. 41. John Hill, “Routes Irish: ‘Irishness,’ ‘Authenticity’ and the Working Class in the Films of Ken Loach,” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 19, no. 1 (February 2011): 99. 42. Anon., “The Greatest Shows on Earth,” Citypages (April 4, 2001), 43. During the directors’ brainstorming sessions, one of the film’s producers, Domenico Procacci of the Rome-based independent studio Fandango, told Daily Variety that “the train will give it a unity of place and time.” See: Nick Vivarelli, “Trio in Line to Direct Tickets Together,” Daily Variety, Vol. 282, no. 70 (April 2, 2004): 15. 44. As a documentary about authorial collaboration, Ticket x 3 is very different from the “making-of” material included on Magnolia Pictures’s North American DVD release of Triangles which focuses on just one of the contributing filmmakers, Johnnie To, and excludes behind-the-scenes footage of Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam working. Indeed, few documentaries about the making of omnibus films offer as much valuable information as Costanzo’s Ticket x 3 which not only provides rare footage of the three filmmakers at work but also shows what their rehearsal processes were like and how a seemingly simple yet editorially challenging scene was put together. 45. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), ix. 46. In terms of its central concept, Tube Tales is similar to the made-for-TV film Subway Stories (1997). The latter is an omnibus production combining the talents of ten directors (Bob Balaban, Patricia Benoit, Julie Dash, Jonathan Demme, Ted Demme, Abel Ferrara, Alison Maclean, Craig McKay, Lucas Platt, and Seth Rosenfeld) and likewise premised on the potential for drama that comes from strangers encountering one another in a literally transitional space. A work commissioned by the premium cable television network HBO Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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which, in the mid-1990s, asked viewers to submit stories about their experiences with New York City’s rapid transit system, Subway Stories begins with an episode directed by Demme in which a musician (Bill Irwin) struggles to board a sardine-packed subway car. So tightly packed are the people aboard it that he is forced to move to another car, and another car, and so on. This movement, in addition to the image of an overly crowded space, conveys the compartmentalized narrative trajectory and filled-to-the-gills nature of most omnibus films, regardless of their settings. 47. Derek Elley, “Tube Tales,” Variety (December 20, 1999): n/a. Significantly, Elley, adopting the disposition of so many other anti-omnibus film critics, states, “By nature, episoders rep a tricky theatrical proposition.” 48. Judy Meewezen, “First-Class Journeys and No Passengers,” The Times (United Kingdom) (December 8, 2005): 20. 49. Clarke. 50. M. L., “Mixed Media: Films,” New Internationalist, no. 385 (December 2005): 26. 51. Clarke. 52. Ibid. 53. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 34. 54. Michael Atkinson, “Triple X Omni-bust: Wong’s early climax can’t make up for a spent Soderbergh and a flaccid Antonioni,” Village Voice (April 5, 2005): n/a. Interestingly, Atkinson, only a few months later, put a slightly more positive spin on this “idiot quasi-genre” in his review of Love and Anger (Amore e rabbia, 1969), calling the omnibus film (or what he refers to as “portmanteau film”) “one of the loveliest free-form ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s.” See Michael Atkinson, “Flashback for Today’s Anti-War Movement,” Village Voice (October 11, 2005): n/a. 55. Peter Rainer, “Filmmakers Anthologize New York,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner (March 3, 1989): 8. 56. Vincent Canby, “Anthologies Can Be a Bargain,” New York Times (March 12, 1989): n/a. 57. Similarly, a reviewer for the London-based publication Time Out, in his or her response to 11ʹ09ʺ01 (2002), states, “Omnibus films are by nature uneven.” Anon., “Longshots: 9/11 the Movie,” Time Out (September 18, 2002): n/a. 58. Anon., “A Decade of Love,” LoveHKFilm, http://lovehkfilm.com/ reviews_2/decade_of_love. html 59. Anon., “Triangle,” Asian Movie Web, http://www.asianmovieweb.com/en/ reviews/triangle.html 60. For example, Joseph Fahim, a writer for the Daily News Egypt, calls the tenepisode film 18 Days (Tamantashar yom, 2011) “uneven” before remarking that the “shorts in similar projects are hits or misses.” See: “A Disappointing Turn for Egyptian Films at Abu Dhabi Film Fest,” Daily News Egypt Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(October 27, 2011), http://thedailynewsegypt.com/film/a-disappointingturn-for-egyptian-films-at-abu-dhabi-film-fest.html 61. Andrew Sarris, “Far From Vietnam,” Village Voice (October 12, 1967): 31. Sarris’s metaphor harks back to Otis L. Guernsey’s reference to the FrancoItalian picture The Seven Deadly Sins (Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1952) as a “patchwork quilt.” See Otis L. Guernsey, “Seven Short Stories,” New York Herald Tribune (May 12, 1953): n/a. 62. David Denby, “Running Wild,” New Yorker (June 14, 1999): 90. Though they are in the minority, there have been a few champions of the episode film in newspapers and magazines. For instance, Michel Pérez, a critic at Le Matin writing a review for the 1982 French omnibus film The Archipelago of Loves (L’Archipel des amours), expresses happiness at seeing the once-defunct genre (which, he insists, has not been properly exploited since the heyday of sketch films some fifteen years earlier) being brought back to life at a moment when French cinema most needed a shot of adrenaline. In his review, Pérez lists some of the advantages of producing episode films, an “exhilarating” narrative format, according to the critic, which allows screen personalities to display their talents in a variety of genres within a single film and facilitates a freer play of self-pastiche by directors who are bound to more rigorous conventions in feature-length narratives. Michel Pérez, “L’Archipel des amours par neuf réalisateurs – Du tender à la carte,” Le Matin (March 18, 1983): n/a. 63. Andy Klein, “The Lucky Bidder Beware,” New Times Los Angeles (June 10–16, 1999): 45.

Chapter 2   1. Stuart Oderman, Lillian Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1999).  2. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 91–3.  3. Robert Knopf, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31–2.  4. Ibid.   5. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 211.   6. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 208.   7. Henry Jenkins, “ ‘A High-Class Job of Carpentry’: Toward a Typography of Early Sound Comedy,” Movie Acting: The Film Reader, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik (New York: Routledge, 2004), 114.   8. In his study of American film musicals, Rick Altman makes the case that revue films, such as The Show of Shows, differ radically from more traditionally plotted narrative musical films such as The Love Parade (1929) and Anchors Away (1945). As he states, “Instead of being sensed in contradistinction to the narrative progression that they interrupt, the musical numbers of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a revue are instead seen as opposed to the comedy routines with which, as in the vaudeville tradition, they commonly alternate.” Taking as an example the “This Heart of Mine” episode from the 1946 omnibus revue Ziegfeld Follies, Altman goes on to add that an individual number in a revue “may recapitulate in miniature the narrative and musical patterns of the full-length musical.” Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 102.  9. The Show of Shows program notes, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), Los Angeles. 10. Edwin M. Bradley, The First Hollywood Musicals: A Critical Filmography of 171 Features, 1927 through 1932 (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1996), 268. 11. The parade-like quality of many omnibus films recalls a comment by the old writer in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) when he refers to the “long procession of figures before his eyes” as a series of “grotesques,” a word that has furthermore been used by critics and scholars to describe each of the separate, yet linked, tales in this short story cycle. 12. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 153. 13 Quoted in Bradley, 260–1. 14. Variety Time, besides being the first of three “vaudeville films” released by RKO in the late 1940s, is hosted by Jack Paar in his pre-TV talk show days – an appropriately liminal emcee who directs the following comments to the audience: “I don’t know how many of you remember vaudeville. It died in the late twenties, but is now being revived in television. I had a television set of my own but last week the police broke into my house and took it away . . . I didn’t have a liquor license . . . But vaudeville gave us some really great entertainers.” Noticeably, the schizophrenic shifting of subject in Paar’s monologue replicates the variety form of the film (which combines short subjects, musical numbers, and comedy routines from earlier RKO films) while providing a bridge connecting an entertainment form of the early twentieth century with one that would eventually eclipse cinema in the latter half of the century: television. 15. Elvis Mitchell, “In a Bus Station, Surrounded by Stories and Lies,” The New York Times (June 28, 2000). 16. Theorists who are interested in the episodic, multi-narrative film’s structural characteristics might also benefit from drawing out affinities to even earlier fragmented literary and historiographical precursors, beginning with, for example, the Shi Qing and the Manyoshu – ancient Chinese and Japanese anthologies of poems, eulogies, courtship songs, and dynastic legends that similarly rely on plot compression, ellipsis, segmentation, and bracketing. 17. Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition (New York: Twayne Studies in Literary Themes and Genres, no. 6, 1996). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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18. Forrest Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 13–18. 19. Gerald J. Kennedy, ed., Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), x. 20. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 258. 21. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 10. 22. Ibid., 260. 23. Ibid., 252. 24. Ibid., 255–6. 25. Indeed, episodicity has been especially useful in the Japanese animation industry where young artists have been able to gain experience by trying their hands at experimental shorts in omnibus films while developing advanced graphic styles. 26. Best known for his groundbreaking anime feature Akira (1988), Ōtomo contributed episodes to both Robot Carnival and Neo-Tokyo. The various segments of these films take the spectator from comedic to dramatic to suspenseful to romantic passages that would otherwise seem antithetical to one another but are nevertheless contained, with all their generic heterogeneity and suggested infinities, within the finite boundaries of a single film text. Robot Carnival in particular epitomizes the cinematic subgenre, known as “showcase anime,” a type of production that recalls Disney’s earlier “package features” insofar as it privileges visual pyrotechnics as well as abstract animation styles over traditional, dialogue-oriented narratives and representational imagery. Featuring the contributions of eight other animation directors besides Ōtomo, each one probing the biological/mechanical divide so central to Akira, the film is tonally varied (shifting from the heavy metal stylings of director Hidetoshi Omori’s “Deprive” to the slapstick comedy of Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s “A Tale of Two Robots”) but it ultimately works as a coherent whole due to thematic overlap. 27. Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 47. 28. Ibid., 74. 29. Ibid., 76. 30. Ibid., 80, 89, 98. 31. Walt Disney’s goal of making “a new version of Fantasia every year,” articulated by the studio boss in an article for the Journal for the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (January 1941), grew out of his belief that the pattern or structure of the film is “not really a concert, not vaudeville or revue, but a grand mixture of comedy, fantasy, ballet, drama, impressionism, color, sound, and epic fury.” Robin Allan, Walt Disney and Europe (London: John Libbey and Co. Ltd, 1999); Charles Solomon, The Disney that Never Was Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(New York: Hyperion, 1995). New segments could replace old ones, Disney thought, so long as Leopold Stokowski continued recording additional compositions. Nothing ever came of this conception of a constantly evolving film though Fantasia was subsequently reissued in different incarnations, each time undergoing significant changes. Besides being re-released in 1963, under the title Fantasia Will Amaze-ya, and in 1983 with newly orchestrated music, it was drastically pruned from a two-hour running time to eighty-one minutes before eventually making its way to home video in a restored version. 32. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 263–4. Even many of the contemporaneous “positive” reviews of Fantasia were conditional: as in Richard Mallett’s article in Punch (August 6, 1941), where the critic calls it an “interesting patchwork.” 33. Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 55. 34. Bob Strauss, in his review of British producer Don Boyd’s multi-director Aria, says the film is “like MTV, only with great music and intelligent ideas.” Bob Strauss, “Aria helps Don Boyd satisfy creative urges,” Chicago SunTimes (July 3, 1988): n/a. 35. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 17–19. 36. Charles Eidsvik, Cineliteracy: Film among the Arts (New York: Random House, 1978), 180–2. 37. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). 38. Mark Wigley, “Theoretical Slippage,” Fetish, vol. 4 (1992): 101. 39. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 279–80. 40. Beyond the realm of animation, Japan has a rich history of live-action omnibus films, with such titles as A Certain Adultery (Aru mittsû, 1967) and Zipper and Tits (Fasuna to chibusa, 2001) giving a sense of the thematic material and carnal imagery to be found in these pictures.

Chapter 3   1. Mikhail Baktin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 281. This passage is quoted in Steven Marsh’s book Popular Spanish Film under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (New York: Palgrave, 2006) which attempts to “politicize Bakhtin’s insights” about carnivalism and heteroglossia.   2. Anon., “Rhubarb Pizza”, Newsweek (October 11, 1965): n/a.   3. Richard Schickel, “A Sandwich of Baloney and Fellini,” Life (September 5, 1969): n/a.   4. Mark Schilling, “Feting Japan’s Finest Animators,” The Japan Times Online Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(January 28, 2007). < http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20070628r2. html>   5. Jonathan Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana, 1985), 104.   6. Anon., “The Show of Shows,” Variety (November 27, 1929): n/a.   7. Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 232.  8. This includes: (a) a “complete” version which, at ninety-five minutes, appears to be the “authoritative” one; (b) one missing the “Prostitute” episode which New York censor James Wingate disapproved of (eighty-eight minutes); and (c) one missing both the “Prostitute” episode and the “Death Cell” execution episode which upset many local censorship boards (approximately eighty-three minutes).   9. Only after consulting the production files housed at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was I able to reconcile some of the discrepancies. The opening (framing) episode of If I Had a Million was directed by Norman Taurog; the second episode (“The China Shop” a.k.a. “Henry Peabody”) was directed by Norman Z. McLeod; the third episode (“The Streetwalker” a.k.a. “Violet,” a.k.a. “The Prostitute”) was directed by Stephen Roberts; the fourth episode (“The Forger”) was directed by H. Bruce Humberstone; the fifth episode (“The Auto” a.k.a. “Road Hogs”) was directed by Norman McLeod; the sixth episode (“The Condemned Man” a.k.a. “Death Cell”) was directed by James Cruze; the seventh episode (“The Clerk”) was directed by Ernst Lubitsch; the eighth episode (“Three Marines”) was directed by William Seiter; and the ninth episode (“Old Ladies Home” a.k.a. “Grandma”) was directed by Stephen Roberts. 10. Office of War Information (Motion Picture Division), Feature Script Review: Ziegfeld Follies (May 4, 1944), Washington National Records Center. 11. Office of War Information (Motion Picture Division), Feature Viewing: Ziegfeld Follies (October 31, 1944), Washington National Records Center. 12. William S. Cunningham, correspondence with Captain Louis S. Chappelear, Jr, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (November 7, 1944), Washington National Records Center. 13. Captain Louis S. Chappelear, Jr, correspondence with William S. Cunningham, Office of War Information Overseas Bureau (November 10, 1944), Washington National Records Center. 14. David Scott Diffrient, “Cabinets of Cinematic Curiosities: The Animated ‘Package Feature’, from Fantasia (1940) to Memories (1995),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 26.4 (October 2006): 505–35. 15. Bani-Etemad’s episode was disposed of in a way that is visually connoted by one of the final version’s most striking images – an abandoned ship which looms off the coast of the titular island (which is itself practically deserted) – and suggests just how prone the various components of these types of films are to fluctuation, drift, and eviction. 16. See Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed./ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 151–8. Two of the episodes were likewise lopped off when the Distributors Corp. of America picked up The Gold of Naples. The six-episode film was not shown in its complete form in the United States until December 11, 1993, at the Museum of Modern Art. 17. Vladmir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. trans. Lawrence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 103. 18. For example, J. G. Pierret, in his review of the four-episode film Adorable Creatures (1952), asks, “Pourquoi nous les montre-t-il dans cet ordre? Pourquoi pas dans un autre?” J. G. Pierret, “Adorables Créatures,” Radio Cinéma Télévision (September 21, 1952). 19. See, for instance, Otis L. Guernsey, “Seven Short Stories,” New York Herald Tribune (May 12, 1953): n/a. One reviewer even begins his review of the film by pointing out that “it is almost inevitable” that episodic productions are “uneven.” Archer Winsten, “Seven Deadly Sins on View at Paris,” New York Post (May 12, 1953): 34. 20. Nick Barbaro, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” CinemaTexas Program Notes, Vol. 14, no. 2 (March 9, 1977): 56. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Ibid., 58. Gluttony, one of the “sins” showcased in the film, is an apt term to use when describing the abundance of narratives and “excess” signification associated with omnibus films. 23. Ibid., 59. 24. Ibid. 25. According to Koehler, Antonioni’s The Vanquished was a film shepherded through production by Film Constellazione, a pro-Roman Catholic company partially financed by Pope Pius VII. As he states, both the French and the Italian segments in this three-episode film “were harmed by outside meddlers.” The French episode antagonized censors and generated protests because it “was a barely concealed dramatization of the so-called ‘l’Affaire J3’, in which the young Alain Guyader was senselessly murdered by schoolmates, ultimately forcing the film to be banned in France until 1963.” The producers of the film, Turi Vasile and Diego Fabbri, also required a rewrite of the Italian episode (“Uno dei Nostri Figli”), which originally showcased “a neofascist youth bombing a factory and framing Communists for the terror act.” Further changes resulted from The Vanquished’s poor performance at the Venice Film Festival, attendees of which harshly attacked the Italian episode. Antonioni agreed to the censors’, producers’, and moralists’ requests for changes. 26. Tales from the Golden Age presskit, 27. As early as 1920, the year when director Charles J. Brabin’s three-episode feature While New York Sleeps was released, a critic writing for Wid’s Daily remarked that a segment of this film (“a truly great tragedy,” entitled “The Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Gay White Way”) “might well make a separate feature.” Anon., “Three Stories in One Picture Offer Distinct Novelty,” Wid’s Daily (August 1, 1920): 15. And as recently as 2009, Nadejda Koseva’s seven-minute short film “Omelette,” which originated as a segment in the Bulgarian omnibus film 15: 15 Authors, 15 Years, 15 Short Films (2008), was separated from that national/narrative collective to become a Sundance standout on its own (winning “Special Jury Mention” at the Park City festival that year). 28. Russell Edwards, “Female,” Variety (August 15, 2005): n/a. 29. Fruit Chan was also involved in the two-episode omnibus production Chengdu, I Love You (Chengdu, wo ai ni, 2009), a feature-length film centered around the titular city in China (which was rocked by a devastating earthquake a year prior to production) and modeled after Paris je t’aime and New York, I Love You. This Mandarin-language film, which also features a story directed by Jian Cui, was initially intended to include a third short, directed by Korean filmmaker Hur Jin-ho. The Korean director’s episode, however, was expanded into a full-length feature, entitled Season of Good Rain (Hou sijŏl, 2009), and presented separately from Chengdu, I Love You, illustrating once again how prone the various parts of an omnibus film are to transformation and tweaking both during and after production. 30. Charting out the intratextual relations between the episodes in the 2002 pan-Asian coproduction Three (the precursor to Three . . . Extremes) proves to be especially vexatious for consumers of its DVD release. Though shown together theatrically in a preordained order (framed by a comprehensive opening title and end credits), each of the roughly forty-minute episodes comprising this horror film (directed by Kim Chi-un from South Korea, Nonzee Nimbutr from Thailand, and Peter Chan Ho-sun from China) takes up a single platter of the three-disk DVD set from Hong Kong distributor Panorama Entertainment. Fans of the film can therefore watch the three in any sequence, albeit with the added frustration of having to change the disks at the conclusion of each episode. Even on a single platter, an episode film viewed at home through the audience-friendly format of DVD becomes malleable as a text, open to the possibilities of reordering thanks to chapter stops and time codes. 31. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Oudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 66. 32. The idea that each episode in an omnibus film exercises a stand-alone autonomy, regardless of the thematic parallels and transauthorial resonances that link individual segments into a whole, is especially strong in 15 Malaysia: Voices Of New Malaysia (2009), a project launched by social activist, film producer, and musician, Peter Teo, to highlight the increasingly multicultural aspects of the titular Southeast Asian monarchy. Each of the fifteen episodes comprising this work is available for download through YouTube and other social media websites. 33. No fewer than six anthology and omnibus films based on this ecclesiastical Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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enumeration of vice have been made over the past fifty years. These include a British production (Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, 1971), a Norwegian production (De 7 dødssyndene, 2000), two Franco-Italian co-productions (Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1952/1962), and a Belgium–Luxembourg joint production (Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1992). A feminist approach to Pride, Covetousness, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, Anger, and Sloth was taken by the contributors to Seven Women, Seven Sins (1987). Commissioned by German television, this film gave seven directors (Chantal Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Maxi Cohen, Laurence Gavron, Valie Export, Helke Sander, and Bette Gordon) the opportunity to deconstruct a set of theologically tinged tropes long situated within a masculinist domain. 34. Peter Barry, “ ‘Birmingham’s what I think with’: Roy Fisher’s CompositeEpic,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 13, no. 1 (2000): 88. 35. Ibid. To illustrate his points, Barry refers to the Elizabethan sonnet sequence as an example of the micro-composite, and Sophocles’ Oedipus plays as well as T. S. Eliot’s poetic sequence Four Quartets as an example of the macro-composite. 36. Ibid. 37. Anon., “Movies Abroad: Chicks Boccacciatore,” Time (March 23, 1962): 75; and Anon., “Every Italian a Stallion?” Time (June 29, 1962): 60. 38. The signs, which were seen by a projected 1 million people daily in New York alone, are discussed in “Boccaccio Sign,” Hollywood Reporter (April 24, 1962): n/a; and “Levine, Loren to Activate Times Sq. Boccaccio Sign,” Hollywood Reporter (January 17, 1962): n/a. 39. There were, of course, numerous three-episode anthology and omnibus films made prior to Boccaccio ’70, including Flesh and Fantasy (1944), Trio (1950), and Three Husbands (1950). In 1952 alone came Three Forbidden Stories (Tre storie proibite), from Italy; Three Women (Trois femmes), from France; Three Stories (Trzy opowiesci), from Poland; Three’s Company, from Britain; and Secrets of Women (Kvinnors väntan), from Sweden. 40. For information about the brouhaha that resulted from producer Carlo Ponti’s decision to remove Monicelli’s episode on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, see “Talk of Boycott vs. Ponti Follows Boccacio [sic] Rumpus,” Variety (May 23, 1962): n/a. According to this article, the other Italian directors rallied to Monicelli’s side, saying that they would shear their entries to make room for his. At Cannes that year was François Truffaut who, having contributed an episode to the omnibus production Love at Twenty (L’Amour à vingt ans, 1962), considered the incident “overblown,” saying that multiepisode films are “not a director’s but a producer’s concept.”

Chapter 4   1. Betz (2009), 179–87.   2. Paul D. Miller, “Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse,” in Kanta Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, eds, The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (University of Nebraska, 2009), xi.   3. Kay Armatage, “Felix,” Toronto Festival of Festivals program (1988): 77.   4. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, “The Algorhythms of the Exquisite Corpse,” in Kochhar-Lindgren et al., xxiv.   5. Producers and organizers of omnibus films have often given their directors strict guidelines, or game-like rules, before cameras begin rolling. Some of the more interesting examples of this include two recent Japanese multidirector projects. The first, Cop Festival (Deka Matsuri, 2003), was organized by Makoto Shinozaki who asked a group of filmmakers to make short films concerning police work. Besides featuring a cop in the lead role (played by Susumu Terajima), each episode had to have at least one “gag” or comic bit for every few minutes of the actor’s screen time. Subsequent iterations of this project have since enforced other guidelines. In the second Cop Festival film, for example, all of the police officers had to be women. Released two years later, Jam Films S (2005) is equally fascinating. For this third entry in an ongoing Japanese omnibus project, producer Ryuhei Kitamura asked the seven contributing filmmakers (Kenji Sonoda, Ryuichi Takatsu, Hitoshi Ishikawa, Ryo Teshima, Yuichi Abe, Daisaburo Harada, and Masaki Hamamoto) to submit twelve- to eighteen-minute works that each elaborates an overall theme related to the letter “S” (designating “Succession, Success and Special”). See Mark Schilling, “Here’s to Watching the Directors Again and Again,” Japan Times Online (June 4, 2003),   6. Anne M. Kern, “From One Exquisite Corpse (in)to Another,” in KochharLindgren et al., 6.   7. Kochhar-Lindgren et al., xxiii.   8. Some omnibus films make distinctions between the contributing filmmakers’ work by privileging one director’s name above the others, as on the title card that begins The Year 01 (L’An 01, 1973). This film’s opening credits are contained on two handwritten cards, the first of which shows, in the top left portion of the frame, director Jacques Doillon’s name and, to the right of it, the names of the other two filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch. The names of these last two individuals are smaller in size than that of Doillon, however, who was the “lead” director on this globetrotting production (taking the viewer from New York to Nigeria) and who therefore exercised greater creative control than his fellow filmmakers.   9. Bolestaw Michatek, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda, trans. Edward Rothert (London: Tantivy Press, 1973), 75. 10. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1996), 159. 11. Louis Malle, Malle on Malle, ed. Philip French (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 64. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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12. Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955/1969 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 459. 13. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image – Music – Text, ed./ trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977). 14. De Sica appeared in: Alessandro Blasetti’s “Il processo di Frine” from Times Gone By (Altri tempi, 1952); Lionello De Felice’s “Pendolin” from One Hundred Years of Love (Cento anni d’amore, 1953); Blasetti’s “Scena all’aperto” from Our Time (Tempi nostril, 1954); Domenico Paolella’s “Il fine dicitore” from Great Vaudeville (Gran Varietà, 1954); Gianni Franciolini’s “Il divorzio” from The Bed (Il letto, 1954); and Franciolini’s “Incidenta a Villa Borghese” from It Happened in the Park (Villa Borghese, 1954). 15. Brian McFarlane, ed., Sixty Voices: Celebrities Recall the Golden Age of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 7. 16. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 140. 17. James Ulmer, “Filmmakers titillate with talk of erotic fest,” Hollywood Reporter (February 16, 1993). 18. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 163–4. 19. Brian McFarlane, 64. 20. Bob Strauss, “Aria helps Don Boyd satisfy creative urges,” Chicago SunTimes (July 3, 1988). 21. Lee Margulies, “Filming the Olympic Games – A Producer’s Nightmare,” Los Angeles Times (September 17, 1972): 26. 22. Which directors deserve which “medals” Champlin does not say but one can surmise – based on his dismissal of Pfleghar’s “chauvinistic ogling of the nubile swimmers and other pretty ladies” – who the recipient of the “out-ofthe-metal” is. Charles Champlin, “Olympics as an Art Form,” Los Angeles Times (August 17, 1973). Early precedents for this type of critical maneuver can be found in Philip K. Scheuer’s review of the Italian episode film Times Gone By (Altri tempi, 1952); Scheuer reveals the “50-50 results” of his scoring, saying “I jotted two ‘fairs’, one ‘good’, and one ‘better’.” Philip K. Scheuer, “Omnibus Film Stories Good, Bad and So-So,” Los Angeles Times (April 17, 1953). Ten years later, a reviewer writing for The New Yorker rates each of the three episodes comprising Of Wayward Love, “zero, zero, zero” (April 4, 1964). 23. Curiously, this reliance on sports metaphors in adducing the value of episode films manifests where one would least expect it. For instance, numerous reviewers of the omnibus feature New York Stories (1989) referred to it as “an all-star game” highlighting the talents of three American auteurs: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen. David Ansen, in particular, puts a pithy spin on this figure of speech, arguing that omnibus films, such as The Seven Deadly Sins (Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1962) and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Aria “rarely bat better than .333. That’s great for a ballplayer but bad for a movie. New York Stories . . . hits a happy two out of three. The one strikeout – Coppola’s contribution – is tucked in the middle, so you can’t avoid it.” David Ansen, “Make Mine Manhattan,” Newsweek (March 6, 1989): 58. 24. Kevin Thomas, “Bambole Fumbles Use of 4 Beauties,” Los Angeles Times (September 24, 1965): n/a. 25. Anon., “Le Bambole,” Variety (February 3, 1965): n/a. 26. Anon., “Four for Foolery,” Time (July 9, 1965): n/a. 27. Thomas (1965): n/a. 28. The Story of Three Loves production files, the Vincente Minnelli Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA. 29. Jean de Baroncelli, “Histoire de trois amours,” Le Monde (January 30, 1954): n/a. 30. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” trans. Betrand Augst and Jean Andrews, Camera Obscura, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall, 1976): 119. 31. In the United States, for example, the proceeds from Forever and a Day’s box-office intake were distributed to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the American Red Cross. See Edgar Price, “Forever and a Day, a Beautiful Picture with a Message of Hope . . .” Brooklyn Citizen (March 13, 1943): n/a. 32. Dilys Powell, “A Fantasy of the Great War,” The Sunday Times and Jury, No. 7 (February 28, 1966): n/a. The “stifling” quality of multi-story cinema has been hinted at in several reviews of omnibus films, as illustrated in the following sentence, about a 1952 Twentieth Century-Fox production: “In truth, O. Henry’s Full House may be too full, may contain at least one story too many.” Anon., “SR Goes to the Movies: Homage to O. Henry, Fun with Faust,” Saturday Review (September 13, 1952): 34. 33. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993), 126. 34. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 261. 35. Lee Mishkin, “Forever and a Day Worthy Film; The Hard Way Strand Offering,” Morning Telegraph, N.Y. (March 13, 1943): n/a. 36. Richard Davis, “Torture Garden,” Films and Filming (March 1968): n/a. 37. Thomas H. Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969). 38. Ibid., 182.

Chapter 5   1. As Anne Jäckel mentions in a recently published essay, the first “experimental” coproduction agreement between France and Italy was signed on October 29, 1946, the result of Monsieur Fourre-Cormeray’s initial idea for Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a mutually reciprocal treaty that would benefit both nations during a time of cinematic rebuilding. Anne Jäckel, “Dual Nationality Film Productions in Europe after 1945,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Vol. 23, no. 3 (2003): 231.   2. Peter Kenez, “Films of the Second World War,” The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed., Anna Lawton (New York: Routledge, 1992), 156–9.   3. New York’s Stanley Theatre, located on 7th Avenue between 41st and 42nd, is where This is the Enemy! debuted for stateside audiences on July 3, 1942. The programmer linked it to a group of prize-winning short films celebrating the artistry of dancer Tamar Khanum, opera singer Ivan Kozlovsky, and composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Besides distributing information about the Russian War Relief seed program (which would “give life and strength to the fearless fighters on our Russian Front”), the Stanley staff advertised the film with a poster proclaiming This is the Enemy! as “The First Soviet drama of Europe’s heroic resistance to the Hitler Beast” while also giving the film a subtitle that hinted at its structural fragmentation: “Episodes in the Peoples War against Hitler.”  4. Bosley Crowther, “This Is the Enemy! A Soviet Film Made Up of Five Dramatic War Episodes, at the Stanley,” New York Times (July 4, 1942): n/a.  5. Ibid.  6. Edgar Price, “Forever and a Day, a Beautiful Picture with a Message of Hope,” Brooklyn Citizen (March 13, 1943): n/a. Since studio executives would see none of the film’s revenue, very little money was allocated for direct, media-based advertising campaigns. Weight, therefore, shifted to the field of exhibition, as RKO sent press kits and memos to all of the theater owners who were to show Forever and a Day, outlining the desired publicity, advertising, and exploitation tactics to construct, by proxy, successful marketing campaigns. As the funds from the film were being donated to charities, additional importance was placed on its showings for, as one studio-issued statement to a theater owner made clear, “it gives your public an added incentive for going to see the picture over and above its interest in it as a genuine cinema attraction – the incentive of aiding the fight against infantile paralysis, a cause which is dear to all sections of this country.” Theater owners were warned in bold print, however, not to solicit donations from audience members in connection with the showing of Forever and a Day.   7. Irene Thirer, “Forever and a Day Brings 78 Names to Rivoli Screen,” New York Post (March 13, 1943): n/a.   8. Some of the crew and cast members on Forever and a Day, unable to get special permission from their trade unions, had to receive nominal minimum wage checks and sign them back to the charitable funds. See A.C., “English Stars Sacrifice Personal Glory to Nation,” NY World Telegram (March 13, 1943): n/a.  9. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” trans. Betrand Augst and Jean Andrews, Camera Obscura, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 119. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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10. Price (1943): n/a. 11. Rubert Hildyard and Wilfred Mellers, “The Edwardian Age and the Inter-War Years,” Early 20th Century Britain, ed. Boris Ford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4. 12. Ned Depinet, President of RKO, in a letter to “Friends of Better Motion Pictures” (March 6, 1943). 13. Larry Williams, “Forever and a Day,” Office of War Information (January 6, 1943). 14. Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986), 200–2. 15. Anon, “Response to Story Synopsis: Forever and a Day,” Office of War Information, US National Archives (January 5, 1943). 16. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of the American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), 215. 17. Aldgate and Richards, 139. 18. Ibid. 19. Anon., “This England,” Monthly Film Bulletin (February 8, 1941): 14. 20. Jorge Luís Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 122. 21. Ibid., 124. 22. William K. Everson, “Program Notes,” The New School Film Series, The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film (April 13, 1984). A reviewer for the London Times wrote a generally positive review of Friday the Thirteenth but felt that the structure of the film “handicapped” the large cast “by having [them] paint miniatures rather than full-length portraits.” Anon., “Friday the Thirteenth,” Times (London) (December 10, 1933). 23. Ibid., 125. 24. David Scott Diffrient, “Narrative Mortality: The ‘Fragmegrated’ Corpse of the Horror Anthology Film,” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 17 (spring 2002): 271–301.

Chapter 6   1. Anon., “The Movies,” New Statesman and Nation (September 20, 1952): n/a.   2. The downbeat ensemble film It Always Rains on Sunday can more accurately be called “quasi-episodic” because, unlike Quartet, there are no clear divisions between its intricately intertwined stories, all of which are set in London’s Bethnal Green, an East End railway yard and temporary home to an escaped convict. In this and similar films, such as The Blue Lamp (1949), The Pool of London (1951), and I Believe in You (1952), producer Michael Balcon encouraged directors to use unique institutional or geographic settings as a means to depict broad cross-sections of British life across otherwise unbreachable social and class barriers. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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  3. Though this four-year period is a particularly concentrated one in terms of British-produced anthology and omnibus films, there were additional examples well into the mid to late 1950s: director Herbert Wilcox’s Derby Day (a.k.a. Four Against Fate, 1952), for instance, as well as its semi-sequel The Extra Day (1956), a multi-plotted look at the lives of several movie extras whose day jobs and backstories are the sources for the individual episodes. The title of the sprawling dramatic comedy The Crowded Day (1954), an episode film set on the single most bustling day of the year, when Christmas shoppers are sardine packed into department stores, draws attention to the congested nature of such productions which teem with enough stars and character actors for an additional three or four films.   4. Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 201.   5. Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 129.   6. By the end of the 1940s, Balcon had turned the once small Ealing Studios into a major production unit and attracted such notable documentarians as Alberto Cavalcanti and Henry Watt to his stable. Thanks to the presence of these and other filmmakers, Ealing not only began exploring the relationship between fact and fiction in works as diverse as the political satire Passport to Pimlico (1949) and the fantastical mystery The Halfway House (1945) but also adopted a socialist outlook sympathetic to the Labour government and the inequalities faced by lower- to middle-class men and women.   7. See Andrew Higson, “The Instability of the National,” British Cinema, Past and Present, eds Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 39–40. John Ellis’s interview with Michael Balcon (August 7, 1974) can be found in the Michael Balcon clipping files, New York Public Library. Portions of this interview appear in John Ellis, “Made in Ealing,” Screen, No. 16 (1975): n/a.   8. Durgnat, 201.   9. Ibid., 202. 10. O. Henry’s finely wrought tales, famous for their anecdotal humor and surprise denouements, have served as the basis for numerous multi-story films throughout the world, including the Soviet film Business People (Delovue Lyudi, 1963) and South Korean director Yi Sŏng-gu’s The Last Leaf (Majimag ipsae, 1977), which contains not only the title story but also a crosscultural version of “The Gift of the Magi” (entitled “The Gift of Hye-sun”) as well as “The Act of Love.” Nicknamed “The Yankee Maupassant,” Porter found extraordinary success abroad, particularly in the USSR, where he was second only to Anton Chekhov as a literary source for cinematic episodicity. The latter author’s work was translated into such episode films as Three Tales of Chekhov (Tri rasskaza Chekhova, 1961), produced by the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Culture, and Family Happiness (Semejnoye schastye, 1969), a Mosfilm Studio production. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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11. Anthony Slide, Banned in the USA: British Films in the United States and their Censorship, 1935–1960 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 123–4. 12. Whereas Quartet and O. Henry’s Full House each begins with shots of a real author greeting the audience from his bookshelf-lined study, another bibliophilic episode film, director Valérie Stroh’s A Man and Two Women (Un homme et deux femmes, 1991), takes a very different approach in terms of introducing the spectator to the ensuing stories. An adaptation of three short works by the British writer, Doris Lessing, Stroh’s film is about the creative process – its opening scenes showing an unmarried female writer listlessly turning to and fro in her bed before having a flash of inspiration for the tales that follow (all of which take place in her mind and pivot on the related themes of heterosexual romance and illicit affairs). 13. Robert L. Calder, “Somerset Maugham and the Cinema,” 267–9. 14. Ibid., 268–9. 15. André Gaudreault, “Narration and Monstration in the Cinema,” Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 39, no. 2 (spring 1987): 34. 16. Bosley Crowther, “Quartet,” New York Times (March 29, 1949): n/a. 17. Bosley Crowther, “Little by Little: Tales of Manhattan Boosts the Stock of the Short Story in Films,” New York Times (October 4, 1942): n/a. 18. Ibid. 19. Calder, 265. 20. Ibid. 21. Thomas M. Pryor, “British Producer to Explore US by Trailer,” New York Times (September 17, 1950). 22. Anon., “It’s a Big Country,” Time (January 28, 1952): 96.

Chapter 7   1. Food metaphors, at least within an Italian context, are usually born out of cultural misperceptions and stereotypes. It should be noted, however, that few genres lend themselves so readily to the culinary imagination as does the episode film which is frequently labeled “film-minestrone” by French, British, and Italian critics. For instance, Henry Lemaire, writing for Le Soir (June 21, 1967), calls Nanny Loy’s all-star production Made in Italy (1965) a “film-minestrone fait d’une vingtaine de sketches, d’annotations, de ‘flashes’, de situations à peine esquissés ou de traits satirques terriblement percutants.” Enrico Giacovelli says much the same thing, albeit in Italian, in his book La Commedia all’italiana: La storia, i luoghi, gli autori, gli attori, i film (Rome: Gremese Editore, 1995), 65. Coincidentally, the title of Sergio Citti’s Il Minestroni (1981), a picaresque collection that was shown in a longer television version in three separate installments, hints at the film’s implicit episodicity. In addition to that soupy metaphor, which speaks to the episode film’s all-inclusiveness (its minestrone-like blending of different ingredients), other foods have been evoked by critics wishing to describe the genre. Although Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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an anonymous American reviewer of Made in Italy – this time writing for Variety (May 4, 1967) – found the ensemble cast (including Anna Magnani, Sylva Koscina, Jean Sorel, Virna Lisi, Nino Manfredi, Alberto Sordi, and Catherine Spaak) appealing, he/she believes that “the episodic nature of the telling tries to cram too many ingredients into the pizza.” And in his review of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domain; 1963), a film critic writing for the New Yorker puts an indigenous spin on this figure of speech, referring to the three-episode coupling between Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni as a “club sandwich” (April 4, 1964).   2. For an elaboration on this combustible period in Italian politics, see Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 418–19.   3. Anon., “Le Sexe faible,” Figaro Magazine (June 21, 1980).  4. Predating Five Feminist Minutes by nearly a decade is the 1982 Canadian production Love. The idea for this generically titled, six-episode film (helmed by four female directors) began with producer Barry Levinson, who had been so impressed with the widespread appeal of the softporn hit Emmanuelle (1974), which made controversial subjects palatable for suburban audiences, that he felt the time was right for a female-directed film about the sexual and psychological dimensions of love. Originally conceived as a collection of nine “mini-movies,” each one based on ten-minute scripts written by the world’s most legendary women, the project failed to attract the attention of Simone de Beauvoir, Rebecca West, Gloria Steinem, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Jeanne Moreau (some of the women Levinson had approached but all of whom declined the offer). The women who did agree to submit scripts included historian Lady Antonia Fraser, New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt, restaurant critic Gael Greene, Australian feminist Germaine Greer, Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, Canadian singer–songwriter Joni Mitchell, screenwriter Nancy Dowd, Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, and Swedish director–actress Mai Zetterling. These last four individuals ultimately took over as directors of the individual segments which numbered six in the end. Financed by the Canadian Film Development Corp., the film was viewed as that country’s “shot at celluloid respectability,” one capable of a breathing life into an industry supported by the government and faced with frequent box-office failures. For additional information, see Charles Schreger, “A Feminine Omnibus: Film has Nine ‘Loves’,” Los Angeles Times (December 5, 1980): 7.   5. I am borrowing Amos Vogel’s words in his analysis of Love in the City, a film that culminates with an episode – “The Italian Stare” (sometimes referred to as “Italy Turns Around”) – filled with close-ups of women’s bodies interspersed “with the stares of men, unbelieving, lecherous, furtive, [and] aggressive.” Amos Vogel, “Limits of Neo-Realism,” Film Culture 12 (1957): 18–19.   6. After this collaboration with Ghione and Ferreri, Zavattini planned to follow Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the first issue of The Spectator with “an investigation of Christianity in the modern world,” a project that was dumped after Love in the City’s less than stellar box-office returns. Love in the City clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), Los Angeles.  7. Though Love in the City was not followed by another “screen magazine,” the Franco-Italian production Our Times (Tempi nostri, 1954) did manage to capture the former film’s disconcerting combination of comedy and calamity by juxtaposing – over the course of five episodes – a happy-go-lucky cabby as well as the iconography of impoverished and suicidal men and women.  8. Mirco Melanco, “Italian Cinema, Since 1945: The Social Costs of Industrialization,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Vol. 15, issue 3 (August 1995): 388.   9. Jean A. Gili, Italian Filmmakers – Self Portraits: A Selection of Interviews, trans. Sandra E. Tokunaga (Rome: Gremese, 1998), 75. 10. Melanco, 387. 11. Enrico Giacovelli, La Commedia all’italiana: La storia, i luoghi, gli autori, gli attori, i film (Rome: Gremese Editore, 1995), 64–6. 12. Having made a name for himself as a producer and director of hundreds of short documentaries, Gianni Hecht Lucari became one of the heads of Documento Film in the early 1960s, when he turned his attention to sketch films – a genre for which he is now best known. Besides producing The Dolls, he oversaw such episode films as Via Margutta (Run with the Devil, 1963), High Infidelity, The Faeries, Made in Italy, I nostri mariti (Our Husbands, 1966) Le Dolci signore (Anyone Can Play, 1967), and Where are You Going on Holiday? 13. Lollobrigida was the first Italian woman to be convicted of movie obscenity. For additional information, see Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (New York: Praeger, 1972), 179. 14. One of the most important court decisions in the history of motion picture exhibition revolves around an episode in a Franco-Italian omnibus film. Most film scholars are aware that the United States Supreme Court’s landmark 1952 “Miracle Decision,” named after Roberto Rossellini’s 1948 film Il miracolo, marked a turning point in the way that motion pictures would thereafter be perceived and legally protected under the First Amendment against charges of sacrilege. What people are less likely to remember is the fact that Rossellini’s forty-minute film (written by Federico Fellini and starring Anna Magnani as a village outcast beguiled by a man she thinks is Jesus Christ) was, in fact, only one-third of an omnibus production – Ways of Love (1950) – combining the Italian filmmaker’s episode with those of two French filmmakers: Jean Renoir’s Guy de Maupassant adaptation, “A Day in the Country,” and Marcel Pagnol’s 1933 short “Jofroi.” Even before it was attacked by the National Legion of Decency as “a blasphemous mockery of Christian religious truth” and denied an exhibition permit by the New York State Board of Censors, the episode Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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had been shown at the 1948 Venice Film Festival as one-half of a double bill entitled Amore – the other half of the diptych being Rossellini’s “The Human Voice” (“L’umano voce”). In the immediate wake of Ways of Love, another Italian episode film, Three Forbidden Stories (Tre storie proibite, 1952), was slapped with a “C” (condemned) rating from the National Legion of Decency. According to a Variety report dated April 21, 1954, the film – a collection of tales centered around women who have been injured in a stairwell collapse – drew fire because its “gross suggestiveness in situations and costumes” offended “Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency.” 15. Marquis de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press 1968). 16. Prostitution was written, produced and directed by the Austrian-born Richard Oswald, the man behind another early episode film: Uncanny Tales (Unheimliche Gerschichten, 1919). The theme of prostitution, besides occupying a central if subdued role in such pre-Production Code Hollywood films as Dishonored (1931), Call Her Savage (1932), Shanghai Express (1932), and Faithless (1932), filtered into individual episodes of anthology and omnibus films such as If I Had a Million (1932) and O. Henry’s Full House (1952). 17. Godard has contributed episodes to twelve omnibus films throughout his career, including RoGoPaG (1962), The Seven Deadly Sins (Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1962) Beautiful Swindlers (Les Plus belles escroqueries du monde, 1964), Paris vu par . . . (1965), and Love and Anger (Amore e rabbia, 1967). This is on top of his own episodic feature, My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962), which, like Godard’s contribution to The Oldest Profession, stars Anna Karina as a prostitute. 18. Mark William Betz, Remapping European Art Cinema, 1945–1975: A Historiography of Geopolitical and Disciplinary Boundaries [dissertation] (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, 1999), 100. 19. Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 187. 20. The film, whose total production cost was roughly $100,000, was blown up to 35 mm for distribution. Anon., “Better Tools a Boon for Young Producers, Per Schroeder of France,” Variety Weekly (September 22, 1965): n/a. An earlier article in Variety (May 12, 1965) reports that Schroeder received governmental dispensations and “that the total production cost was about same as a 30-minute short, which would be between $10,000 to $15,000.” 21. Jim Collins, “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,” Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher (New York: Routledge, 1993), 246, 254. 22. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 154–5. 23. In Italy, as in other countries, there have been numerous literary equivalents to the “cityscaping” subset of episodic films representing a single metropolis from multiple perspectives. Consider the collection of short works antholoNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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gized by famed Calvino-translator William Weaver, Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999). This book contains the work of seven Italian authors (Ignazio Silone, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Carlo Emili), each one of their stories painting an image of a postwar city still recovering, but gradually blossoming, after the overthrow of a Fascist regime. 24. This is underscored by the fact that an Los Angeles-based independent company, Capella Connections, purchased the remake rights of Tel-Aviv Stories. Emanuel Levy, “Tel-Aviv Stories,” Variety (January 3, 1994): n/a. 25. For a more complete picture of New York’s socioeconomic diversity, one might turn to the low-budget, black-and-white film La Ciudad (1998), director David Riker’s four-episode look at the city’s impoverished Latino communities.

Chapter 8   1. Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (University of Illinois Press, 2008), 33.   2. In addition, there was a similar burst of episodic features in the two years leading up to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, including The Day That Doesn’t Exist (Er yue an shi, 1995), Passion (Mao xian you xi, 1995), 4 Faces of Eve (4 Si Mian Xiawa, 1996), and, most notably, horror films such as Till Death Do Us Laugh (Guai tan xie hui, 1996), 02:00 a.m. (1997), 03:00 a.m. (1997), Midnight Zone (1997), and Troublesome Night (1997).   3. Having already claimed responsibility for an attack on Wasfi al-Tal, prime minister of Jordan, Black September – an organization independent of Fatah which took its name from the autumn month in 1970 when at least four thousand fedayeen (fighters for the faith) were slaughtered by Jordanians – was nevertheless not as well known to the Western world as were other Palestinian liberation movements at that time.   4. The remaining three terrorists were captured and imprisoned, only to be released from custody in late October 1972 when two gunmen, claiming to be Black Septembrists, hijacked a Lufthansa airplane and demanded that their comrades be returned to Libya as free men. The Bavarian authorities quickly capitulated to the skyjackers’ demand, not only to put the bungled rescue attempt at Fürtenfeldbruck behind them but also to prevent the “propaganda bonanza” that a public trial would inevitably entail. For an elaboration of the hostage situation in Munich and the German government’s response, see George G. Daniels, The XX Olympiad: Munich 1972, Innsbruck 1976 [Vol. 18 in The Olympic Century Series] (Los Angeles: World Sport Research & Publications, Inc., 1996), 49–65, 106–7; and Simon Reeve, One Day in September (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).   5. Brundage’s decision to suspend the competition for just one day angered many people who wanted the Games to be canceled. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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 6. The tragic events in Munich eventually became the subject of French ­journalist Serge Groussard’s book The Blood of Israel (1975), as well as subsequent films: first, the ABC television movie 21 Hours at Munich (1976); then the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September (2000), an adaptation of Simon Reeve’s same-titled book.  7. Coincidentally, Games of the XXI Olympiad Montreal 1976, another multidirector film (featuring Jean-Claude Labrecque, Georges Dufaux, Jean Baudin, Marcel Carriere), was the product of that event. It took a more straightforward approach to the subject and profited from the familiar faces of Nadia Comaneci and Bruce Jenner.   8. Gene Phillips, John Schlesinger (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981), 36.  9. Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, second edition (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 138. 10. Daniels, 67. 11. Leonard, 76–7. 12. Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema,” New German Critique, no. 87, Special Issue on Postwall Cinema (autumn 2002): 8. 13. Halle (2008), 38. 14. Ibid., 39. 15. Jeffrey Lewis, “The Council of the European Union,” European Union Politics, ed., Michelle Cini (Oxford University Press, 2007), 163. 16. It is telling that the task of kicking off the entire film fell to Troell, one of the older contributors to the project who, forty years earlier, had directed an episode of the Scandinavian omnibus film 4 x 4 (1965). This little-seen, yet historically significant, motion picture is composed of four shorts, one each from Finland (Maunu Kurkvaara’s “Varför”), Norway (Rolf Clemens’s “Pike med hvit ball”), Sweden (Troell’s “Uppehåll i myrlandet”), and Denmark (Klaus Rifbjerg and Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt’s “Sommerkrig”). While not as famous as many of the other multi-director European productions of the 1960s mentioned earlier, 4 x 4 helped secure a semblance of regional solidarity during that turbulent decade and is thus an important forerunner of Visions of Europe. 17. T. R. Reid points out the grammatical impact that resulted from the widespread adoption of the Euro as a common currency. Reid mentions the fact that the “euro” marked a shift away from feminine words (such as the Italian lira, the German mark, and the Spanish peseta) toward a masculine term “that just about every European could pronounce – although not the same way. The sound varied from ‘yoo-rah’ in Ireland to ‘yu-ro’ in Spain to ‘oy-rho’ in Germany and Austria.” T. R. Reid, The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 72. 18. Having made over a half-dozen documentary shorts before 1998, the year her feature-length drama about Baltic Sea border violations, The Shoe (Kurpe), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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was released, Laila Pakalnin was particularly sensitive to the demands of the cinematic miniature by the time she was approached to contribute an episode to Visions of Europe. Indeed, as a filmmaker capable of painting an expansive audiovisual landscape within the space of just five minutes, Pakalnin draws upon her expertise in documentary production to foreground the ambient sounds of offscreen automobiles and airplanes, thus enlarging the diegetic world within the frame and adding a dash of reality to the otherwise artificially staged scenes of “It’ll Be Fine.” 19. Eric Rentschler, “Postwall Prospects: An Introduction,” New German Critique, no. 87, Special Issue on Postwall Cinema (autumn, 2002): 4. 20. Ibid., 5. 21. Ibid.

Chapter 9   1. Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009); Shekhar Deshpande, “Anthology Film. The Future is Now: Film Producer as Creative Director,” Wide Screen, Vol. 2, no. 2 (2010): 1–14.   2. Sinclair, 47.  3. New York, I Love You (2009) was the first of producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s sequels to Paris, je t’aime, followed by Rio, I Love You (Rio, Eu Te Amo, 2010), Shanghai, I Love You (2011), and Jerusalem, I Love You (2011).   4. Louis Malle, Malle on Malle, ed. Philip French (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 64.  5. See Dave Siff’s article “New York Marks Anniversary of Tragedy” (September 11, 2002) which is archived online at www.cnn.com.  6. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics 1996).  7. Rick Altman argues that the linear, Aristotelian conception of narrative, imbricated within the structuralist narratology of Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerald Prince, “has long held a stranglehold on narrative theorizing. By stripping texts down to a single narrative framework, this approach treats each link in relation only to immediately preceding and following links.” Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 136.   8. François Lyotard, Instructions paiennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977), 39.   9. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), xiii.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Filmography

Note: I first began piecing together portions of this omnibus filmography over ten years ago. Since that time, film scholar Mark Betz has produced a lengthy list of film titles as well, included in his book Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). I am deeply indebted to his path-clearing work in this area and have included below several titles that I originally had missed but which made their way into his filmography. Readers are encouraged to consult Betz’s filmography for a complete list of directors attached to each of the following omnibus films (Betz, 245–85). Multi-director Omnibus Films (a chronological list) Hoffmanns Erzählungen [Tales of Hoffmann] (Austria/Hungary) Trilby [Three Tales of Terror; Der Hypnotiseur] (Austria/Hungary) Elstree Calling (UK) Paramount on Parade (US) 1932 If I Had a Million (US) 1933 Nü’er jing [A Bible for Daughters] (China) 1936 La vie est à nous [People of France; Life is Ours] (France) 1937 Lianhua jiaoxianqu [Symphony of Lianhua] (China) Yihai fengguang [Vistas of Art] (China) 1940 Fantasia (US) 1941 Boevoi kinosbornik 1 [Fighting Film Album 1] (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 2 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 3 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 4 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 5 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 6 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 7 (USSR) Kino-kontsert 1941 [Russian Salad] (USSR) 1942 Boevoi kinosbornik 8 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 9 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 10 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 11 (USSR) Boevoi kinosbornik 12 (USSR) Leningrad v borbe [Leningrad in Combat] (USSR) This is the Enemy (USSR) 1911 1912 1930

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f il mo gr a p hy 249 1943

1944 1945

1946 1947 1948

1949 1950

1951 1952

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Forever and a Day (US/UK) Kino-kontsert K25 letiju krasnoj armii [Moscow Music Hall] (USSR) Saludos Amigos (US) The Three Caballeros (US) Dead of Night (UK) Gaslight Follies (US) Giorni di gloria [Days of Glory] (Italy) Gli assi della risata [The Axes of Laughter] (Italy) Il cinema delle meraviglie [The Cinema of Wonders] (Italy) Make Mine Music (US) Song of the South (US) Ziegfeld Follies (US) Dreams that Money Can Buy (US) Fun and Fancy Free (US) Yottsu no koi no monogatari [Four Love Stories] (Japan) Fiacre 13 [Cab No. 13; Taxicab No. 13] (Italy/ France) Melody Time (US) On Our Merry Way [A Miracle Can Happen] (US) Quartet (UK) Tri vstrechi [Three Encounters] (USSR) The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (US) Retour à la vie [Return to Life] (France) Train of Events (UK) Dwie brygady [Two Teams] (Poland) Osvobozhdennym Kitaj [Liberated China] (USSR/China) Ren hai wan hua tong [Kaleidoscope] (Hong Kong) Trio (UK) Ways of Love (France/Italy) It’s a Big Country (US) Passaporto per l’oriente [A Tale of Five Women] (Italy/UK) Actors and Sin (US) El cerco del diablo [Besieging the Devil] (Spain) Encore (UK) Face to Face (US) The Genie (UK) Kontsert masterov iskusstov [Concert of Stars] (USSR) O. Henry’s Full House (US) Les sept péchés capitaux [Seven Deadly Sins] (France/Italy) L’amore in città [Love in the City] (Italy) Les crimes de l’amour (France) Siamo donne [We, the Women] (Italy) The Story of Three Loves (US) Tres citas con el destino [Three Appointments with Destiny] (Mexico/ Argentina/Spain) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1956 1957 1958 1959

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o mnibus f il m s Trzy opowiesci [Three Stories] (Poland) Villa Borghese [It Happened in the Park] (France/ Italy) L’amante di Paride [The Loves of Three Queens] (Italy) Amori di mezzo secolo [Mid-Century Loves] (Italy) Continente perduto [Lost Continent] (Italy) Destini di donne [Daughters of Destiny] (Italy/ France) Pueblo, canto y esperanza (Mexico) Questa è la vita [Of Life and Love] (rereleased 1957; Italy) Se vincessi cento milioni (Italy) Secrets d’alcove [Il letto; The Bed] (France/Italy) Tempi nostri (Zibaldone n. 2) [Anatomy of Love; Our Time] (Italy/ France) Ai, Shangji [Love, Part One] (Hong Kong) Ai, Xuji [Love, Part Two] (Hong Kong) Aisureba koso [If you Love Me; Because I Love] (Japan) Kuchizuke [The Kiss] (Japan) Three Cases of Murder (UK) Tri zgodbe [Three Stories] (Yugoslavia) Trzy starty [Three Starts] (Poland) Cipelice na asfaltu (Yugoslavia) Vesennie golosa [Spring Voices] (USSR) Acht mal Acht [8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements] (Switzerland) Koniec nocy [End of the Night] (Poland) Die Windrose [The Wind Rose] (East Germany) O Večech nadprirozenych [On Miraculous Happenings] (Czechoslovakia) Power among Men (UK) Las canciones unidas [The United Songs] (Mexico) Cico, Pepe e l’allegra brigata (Italy/Czechoslovakia) Tri rasskaza Chekhova [Three Tales of Chekhov] (USSR) Vstup zakázán [No Admittance] (Czechoslovakia) Al Banaat wa Al-Saif [Girls and Summer] (Egypt) La Française et l’amour [Love and the Frenchwoman] (France) Gyvieji didvyriai [Living Heroes] (Lithuania/USSR) Három csillag [Three Stars] (Hungary) Jokei [Women’s Scroll] (Japan) Yoru no nagare [Evening Stream] (Japan) Attenzione: guerra! (Italy/Czechoslovakia/ Belgium) Cronache del ‘22 (Italy) The Devil’s Messenger (Sweden/US) Le italiane e l’amore [Latin Lovers; Les femmes accusant] (Italy/France) Les Parisiennes [Tales of Paris; a.k.a. Of Beds and Broads] (France/Italy) I sogni mudiono all’Alba (Italy) Sovershenno seryozno [Absolutely Seriously] (USSR) L’amore difficile [Erotica; Of Wayward Love] (Italy/West Germany) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1964

L’Amour à vingt ans [Love at Twenty] (France/Italy/Japan/Poland/ West Germany) Boccaccio ’70 (Italy/France) Cinco vezes favela [Slum Times Five] (Brazil) Las cuatro verdades [The Four Truths] (Spain) Cuba ‘58 (Cuba) How the West Was Won (US) Kapi, vode, ratnici [Raindrops, Water, Warriors] (Yugoslavia) Malen’kije miecztatieli (USSR) Mondo Cane (Italy) RoGoPaG [Laviamoci il cervello] (France/Italy) Les sept péchés capitaux [Seven Deadly Sins] (France/Italy) Spóznieni przechodnie [Those Who Are Late] (Poland) Les veinards (France) I cuori infranti (Italy) La donna nel mondo [Women of the World] (Italy) Dva rasskaza [Two Stories] (USSR) I fuorilegge del matrimonio [Marriage Outlaws] (Italy) Grad [The City] (Yugoslavia) Italia proibita (Italy) I misteri di Roma [Mysteries of Rome] (Italy) Les Quatres vérités [The Four Truths] (France/Italy/Spain) La rabbia [Italy] Weekendy [Weekends] (Poland) Les adolescents [The Adolescents] (Canada/France/Italy/Japan) Alta infedeltà [High Infidelity] (Italy/ France) Amore in 4 dimensioni [Love in 4 Dimensions] (Italy/France) Amori pericolosi (Italy/Spain) Les baisers [The Kisses] (France/Italy) La chance et l’amour (France/Italy) Controsesso [Countersex] (Italy) La donna è una cosa meravigliosa [Woman is a Wonderful Thing] (Italy/ France) Extraconiugale (Italy) Gli eroi di ieri oggi, domani [The Heroes of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow] (Italy) Go-Go Big Beat (UK) L’idea fissa [Love and Marriage] (Italy) La mia signora [My Wife] (Italy) Místo v houfu [A Place in the Crowd] (Czechoslovakia) Paris vu par . . . [Paris as Seen By . . . ; Six in Paris] (France) Les plus belles escroqueries du monde [The Beautiful Swindlers] (France/ Italy/Japan) Spots in the Sun (Japan) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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o mnibus f il m s Le tardone [Las otoñales] (Italy/Spain) Tre notti d’amore [Three Nights of Love] (Italy) 4 X 4 (Sweden/ Norway/ Denmark/ Finland) Amor, amor, amor (Mexico) Der Augenblick des Friedens [The Moment of Peace] (West Germany/ France/Poland) Le bambole [The Dolls; Four Kinds of Love] (Italy/France) Les bons vivants [The High Lifers; Per favore] (France/Italy) I complessi [The Complexes] (Italy/ France) I grandi condottieri [The Great Leaders] (Italy/Spain) La Guerre secrète [The Dirty Game] (France/Italy/West Germany) Ključ [The Key] (Yugoslavia) Das Liebeskarussell [Daisy Chain; Who Wants to Sleep] (Austria) Le lit à deux places [The Double Bed] (France/Italy) Oggi, domani, dopodomani [Paranoia] (Italy) Ot siemi do dwienadcati [From Seven Till Twelve] (USSR) Perličky na dně [Pearls of the Deep; A String of Pearls] (Czechoslovakia) Tagumpay ng Mahirap [Triumph of the Poor] (Philippines) Thrilling (Italy) I tre centurioni (Italy/France) I tre volti [Three Faces of a Woman] (Italy) Umorismo in nero [Humour noir; Death Travels Too Much] (Italy/Spain/ France) Viento distante [The Distant Wind] (Mexico) Zlocin v dívcí skole [Crime in the Girl’s School] (Czechoslovakia) La fabbrica dei soldi [Les Combinards] (Italy/France/Spain) Le fate [The Queens; The Fairies] (Italy/France) Gern hab’ich die Frauen gekillt [Killer’s Carnival] (Austria/Italy/ France) The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (US) I nostri mariti [Our Husbands] (Italy/France) Le piacevoli notti [Pleasant Nights] (Italy) Puteshestvie [Journey] (USSR) Las viudas [The Widows] (Spain) El ABC del amor [The ABCs of Love] (Brazil/Argentina/Chile) Aru mittsû [A Certain Adultery] (Japan) De trei ori Bucaresti [Three Times Bucharest] (Romania) Geschichten jener Nacht [Stories of the Night] (East Germany) Juego Peligroso (Mexico/Brazil) Lichnaya zhizn Kuzaeva Valentina [The Private Life of V. Kuzyayev] (USSR) Loin du Vietnam [Far from Vietnam] (France) Der Paukenspieler (West Germany) Le plus vieux métier du monde [The Oldest Profession] (France/West Germany/Italy) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1968

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1971

Quatre d’entre elles [Four Women] (Switzerland) Stimulantia (Sweden) Le streghe [The Witches] (Italy/France) Suaugusiu žmoniu žaidimai [Grown-Up Games] (Lithuania) Wiener Schnitzel (Austria) Belijat kon, Armando (Bulgaria) Brasil verdade [True Brazil] (Brazil) Capriccio all’italiana [Caprice Italian Style] (Italy) Dialóg 20-40-60 (Czechoslovakia) L’enfer à dix ans [Hell is Ten Years Old] (Algeria) Erzählungen aus der neuen Welt [Tales from the New World] (East Germany) Faire l’amour: de la pilute a l’ordinateur [Hot Pants] (France/West Germany/Sweden) Histoires extraordinaires [Spirits of the Dead] (France/Italy) Journey into Darkness (UK) Journey into Midnight (UK) Komedie pomylek [Comedies of Errors] (Poland) Pražské noci [Prague Nights] (Czechoslovakia) Sus og dus pa by’n [Riot and Revel on Order] (Norway) Swiat grozy [World of Horror] (Poland) Thalass Kassas [Three Stories] (Egypt) Trampas de amor (Mexico) Trilogia do Terror [Trilogy of Terror] (Brazil) Yeo, Yeo, Yeo [Woman, Woman, Woman] (South Korea) L’alibi (Italy) Amore e rabbia [Vangelo ’70; Love and Anger] (Italy/France) Aus unserer Zeit [Episodes from Our Time] (East Germany) Dager fra 1000 år [Days from a Thousand Years] (Norway) Los desafíos [The Challenge] (Cuba) Histoires de la revolution [Stories of the Revolution] (Algeria) Night Gallery (US) Semejnoye schastye [Family Happiness] (USSR) Siempre hay una primera vez (Mexico) Swiss Made (Switzerland) Thalath nisa [Three Women] (Egypt) Tres noches de locura [Three Nights of Madness] (Mexico) Le coppie [The Couples, a.k.a. Man and Woman] (Italy) Documenti su Giuseppe Pinelli (Italy) Edin mig svoboda [A Moment of Freedom] (Bulgaria) Hsi, Nu, Ai, Le [Four Moods] (Taiwan) Tú, yo, nosotros (Mexico) Pastel de sangre [A Blood Cake] (Spain) Three to Go (Australia) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

254 1972 1973

1974 1975

1976

1977

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o mnibus f il m s Qun ying hui [Trilogy of Swordsmanship] (Hong Kong) L’An 01 [The Year 01] (France) A qui appartient ce gage? (Canada) Fe, esperanza y caridad (Mexico) Libido (Australia) Linksmos istorijos [Funny Stories] (Lithuania) Visions of Eight (US) Daigdig ng Sindak At Lagim (Philippines) Wet Dreams (Netherlands/West Germany) Au-u! (USSR) Collections privées [Private Collections] (France/Japan) Niezwanyje gosti (USSR) Obrazki z zycia [Pictures from Life] (Poland) Profesori za školou [Teacher is Playing Truant] (Czechoslovakia) Zwaarmoedige verhalen voor bij de centrale verwarming [Melancholy Tales] (Netherlands) Amici più di prima (Italy) Basta che non si sappia in giro! . . . (Italy) Ciag dalszy nastapi [To Be Continued] (Poland) La goduria (Italy) Quelle strane occasioni [Strange Events] (Italy) Sana ula hub [First Year of Love] (Egypt) Signore e signori, buonanotte [Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen] (Italy) Xianggang qi an [The Criminals] (Hong Kong) Ladies’ Room (Australia) I nuovi mostri [The New Monsters; Viva Italia!] (Italy) Ride bene . . . chi ride ultimo [He Who Laughs Last Laughs Best] (Italy) Three Dangerous Ladies (US) Tre tigri conro tre tigri [Three Tigers Against Three Tigers] (Italy) Zdjecia próbne [Screen Tests] (Poland) Deutschland im Herbst [Germany in Autumn] (West Germany) Dovè vai in vacanza? [Where Are You Going on Holiday?] (Italy) Ha luo, ye gui ren [Hello, Late Homecomers] (Hong Kong) Io tigro, tu tigri, egli tigra (Italy) Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair (UK) Ulideul-ui kogyosidae [Our High School Days] (South Korea) Cuentos éroticos [Erotic Tales] (Spain) I diecci diritti del bambino [Together for Children] (Italy) Histoires abominables [Abominable Tales] (France) Sabato domenica e venerdi [Saturday, Sunday, and Friday] (Italy/Spain) Supertotò (Italy) Tre sotto il lenzuolo (Italy) Wielki podryw [The Big Kill] (Poland) Aventuras prohibidas [Prohibited Adventures] (Peru) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1981 1982

1983

1984

1985

Cuentos para una escapada [Stories of an Escapade] (Spain) Chto mozhno Kuzenkovu? (USSR) Contos eroticos [Erotic Stories] (Brazil) Mundo mágico (Mexico) No Nukes (US) Objectivo: Sexo [Objective: Sex] (Spain) Sunday Lovers [Les Séducteurs] (France/Italy) Zapowiez ciszy [Announcement of Silence] (Poland) National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (US) Aus heiterem Himmel [Out of the Clear Blue Sky] (West Germany) Geminis (Spain) Guangyin de gushi [In Our Times] (Taiwan) Krieg und Frieden [War and Peace] (West Germany) Love (Canada) Plaché pribehy (Czechoslovakia) Progetto manzù: il vento e l’amore (Italy) Archipel des amours (France) Die Erbtöchter [The Daughter’s Inheritance] (West Germany/ France) Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (US) Erh-tzu te ta wan-ou [The Sandwich Man] (Taiwan) La France interdite [Forbidden France] (France) Die Gedächtnislücke (West Germany) Gordimer Stories (US) Inflation im Paradies (West Germany) Juke Box (Italy) On, ona, oni [He, She, They] (Poland) Ripping Yarns (UK) Ta Lun-hui [The Wheel of Life] (Taiwan) Twilight Zone: The Movie (US) La vita comincia a . . . (Italy) L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer (Italy) Paris vu par . . . 20 ans après [Paris as Seen by . . . 20 Years Later] (France) Shake, Rattle and Roll (Philippines) Tales of the Third Dimension (US) 1985 – Vad hände katten i råttans år? [1985 – The Fate of the Cat in the Year of the Rat] (Sweden) Absolutorium (Poland) Address Unknown (US) Even More Ripping Yarns (UK) Fright Show (US) Historias Violentas [Violent Stories] (Mexico) Night Train to Terror (US) Prima del futuro [Before the Future] (Italy) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

256 1987

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1991

o mnibus f il m s Amazon Women on the Moon (US) Aria (Belgium/France/Italy/Austria/UK/US) Felix (West Germany) Meikyû monogatari [Neo-Tokyo] (Japan) Roboto kânibauru [Robot Carnival] (Japan) Sieben Frauen – Sieben Sünden [Seven Women, Seven Sins] (Germany/ France/US/Austria/ Belgium) We Shall Keep Our Love Forever (Kazakhstan) Bakayaro!: Watakushi oktte masu [Bakayaro! I’m Plenty Mad] (Japan) Brise-Glace [Icebreaker] (Sweden/France) Huang-se gushi [The Game They Call Sex] (Hong Kong) Les Français vus par . . . [The French as Seen By . . . ] (France) Martha, Ruth, and Edie (Canada) La Septième dimension [The Seventh Dimension] (France) Sposi [Bride and Groom] (Italy) 12 registi per 12 città [Twelve Directors for Twelve Cities] (Italy) After Midnight (US) Bakayaro 2 (Japan) Brachni shegi [Marital Jokes] (Bulgaria) Cita con la muerte (Mexico) Echoes of Conflict (Israel) Kako je propao rokenrol [The Fall of Rock and Roll] (Yugoslavia) New York Stories (US) Night Terror (US) Pieces of Darkness (US) Razvodi, razvodi [Divorces, Divorces] (Bulgaria) La Révolution française (France/Italy) Tales from the Crypt (US) I taràssachi [The Dandelions] (Italy) Terrifying Tales (US) Terror Eyes (US) Adrénaline (France) Bakayaro 3 (Japan) Boku ga byoki ni natta wake [The Reason I Got Sick] (Japan) City Life (Argentina/Netherlands) Dark Romances, Vol. 3 (US) Due occhi diabolici [Two Evil Eyes] (US/Italy) Five Feminist Minutes (Canada) Mujer transparente [Transparent Woman] (Cuba) Red Hot + Blue (US/UK) Les Secrets Professionels Du Docteur Apfelglück (France) Tales of the Unknown (US) Women and Men: Stories of Seduction (US) Campfire Tales (US) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1992

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1994

Contre l’oubli [Lest We Forget] (France) Corsica! (Italy) Cuentos de Borges I [Tales of Borges, Part 1] (Argentina) La domenica specialmente [Especially on Sunday] (Italy/France/Belgium) He Said, She Said (US) Montréal vu par . . . six variations sur un thème [Montreal Sextet] (Canada) Two-Fisted Tales (US) Visages Suisses [Swiss Profiles] (Switzerland) With Friends Like These . . . (Canada) Dark Dealer (US) Harb el-Khallij wa B’ad? [After the Gulf War?] (Tunisia/Italy) Inside Out: Erotic Tales of the Unexpected (US) Pineapple Tours (Japan) Prokleta je Amerika [Damned By America] (Yugoslavia) Les Sept péchés capitaux [Seven Deadly Sins] (Belgium/Luxembourg) Southern Winds (Indonesia/Philippines/Thailand/Japan) Strangers (US) Women and Men 2: In Love There Are No Rules (US) 80 Mq – Ottantametriquadri (Italy) Body Bags (US) Erotique (Germany/US) Fallen Angels (US) Fallen Angels II (US) Kekkon (Japan) Horror Express (South Korea) Necronomicon (US) Neues Deutschland (Germany) Red Shoe Diaries 3 (US) Svetlo sivo [Light Grey] (Macedonia) Things (US) Two Mikes Don’t Make a Wright (US/UK) 3,000 scénarios contre un virus [3,000 Scenarios to Combat a Virus] (France) The Cockpit (Japan) Cosmic Slop (US) DeGenerazione (Italy) Erotic Tales [Tales of Erotica] (Germany) Les films sans qualité (France) Future Shock (US) Lian ai de tian kong [Modern Romance] (Hong Kong) MGM Sarajevo – Covjek, bog, monstrum [MGM Sarajevo – Man, God, Monster] (Bosnia-Herzegovina) Paket aranzman (Yugoslavia) Parano, n’ayez pas peur d’en rire [Parano; Wacko] (France) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1996

1997

o mnibus f il m s San tung gui shut doi [The New Age of Living Together; In Between] (Hong Kong) Siren Spirits (UK) Sipurei Tel-Aviv [Tel-Aviv Stories] (Israel) Three Tales from Senegal (Senegal) Twisted Tales (US) L’unico paese al mondo [The Only Country in the World] (Italy) À propos de nice, la suite (France) Cinq films pour cent ans [Five Films for a Hundred Years] (Morocco) Er yue an shi [The Day That Doesn’t Exist] (Hong Kong) Erotic Tales 2 (Germany) Felicidade é . . . [Happiness is . . . ] (Brazil) Four Rooms (US) Freakshow (US) Girlfriends (US) Historias breves (Argentina) Lumière et compagnie [Lumière and Company] (France/Spain/Sweden) Memories (Japan) National Lampoon’s Favorite Deadly Sins (US) 1:00 am (Hong Kong) Paul Bowles – Halbmond [Paul Bowles – Half-Moon] (Germany) Picture Windows (US) Pribytiye poyezda [The Arrival of a Train] (Russia) Red Shoe Diaries 6: How I Met My Husband (US) Szeressük egymást gyerekek [Love Each Other] (Hungary) Totò che visse due volte [Toto Who Lived Twice] (Italy) America’s Dream (US) Blue Hearts of New York (US) Boys in Love (US) Campfire Tales (US) Il caricature (Italy) Cosmos (Canada) Danske piger viser alt [Danish Girls Show Everything] (Denmark) Esercizi di stile [Exercises in Style] (Italy) If These Walls Could Talk (US) Just another Day in London (UK) Maekjuga aeinboda joheun ilgopgaji yiyu [Seven Reasons Why Beer is Better than Lovers] (South Korea) Rainbow Stories (Germany/Italy/Belgium/UK/Netherlands) Si mian xiawa [4 Faces of Eve] (Hong Kong) Syndig sommer (Norway) Virtual Terror (UK) 02:00 a.m. (Hong Kong) 03:00 a.m. (Hong Kong) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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f il mo gr a p hy 259

1998

1999

1996: Pust pa meg! [1996: Breath] (Norway) Africa Dreaming (Namibia/Senegal/Tunisia/Mozambique) Boys Life 2 (US) I corti italiani (Italy) Filmart Takes Position: ALIEN/NATION (Austria) F.L.A.M.E.S. (Philippines) Guilty Pleasures (US) The Hunger (Canada/UK) Kisses in the Dark (US) Latavio [Life No. 2] (Latvia) Rescuers: Stories of Courage: “Two Couples” (US) Rescuers: Stories of Courage: “Two Families” (US) Rescuers: Stories of Courage: “Two Women” (US) Riot (US) Sipurium ketzarim Al Ahavah [Short Stories about Love] (Israel) Slidin’ - Alles Bunt Und Wunderbar [Slidin’ - All Bright And Colorful] (Austria) Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground (US) I vesuviani [The Vesuvians] (Italy) Yin yang lu [Troublesome Night] (Hong Kong) Yin yang lu 2 [Troublesome Night 2] (Hong Kong) Alien Agenda: Endangered Species (US) Crossroads (Yugoslavia) Enu liezhuan [Bad Girl Trilogy] (Taiwan) Evil Streets (US) Kawaii hito [Pretty One] (Japan) Kuldesak (Indonesia) Mala época [Bad Times] (Argentina) Min ching ching yau paai geng [Faces of Horror] (Hong Kong) Spotlights on a Massacre Things 2 (US) Three Minutes: A Cineworks Omnibus Compendium (Canada) Yam yeung lo ji sing goon faat choi [Troublesome Night 3] (Hong Kong) Zbogum na dvadesetiot vek [Goodbye Twentieth Century] (Macedonia) 1997: Torst – Framtidens forbrytelser [1997: Thirst – Crimes of the Future] (Norway) À vot’ service (France) Boys Briefs (US/Germany/France/Hong Kong) Boys in Love 2 (US) Ghessé hayé kish [Tales of Kish] (Iran) ID Swiss (Switzerland) Kass kukub käppadele [Happy Landing] (Estonia) Love Songs (US) Midsommar-Stories (Germany) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

260

2000

2001

2002

o mnibus f il m s Praha ocima [Prague Stories] (Czech Republic) Sellised kolm lugu . . . [Three Stories About . . . ] (Estonia/Latvia) Šest statečných [The Magnificent Six] (Czech Republic) Traição [Betrayal] (Brazil) Tube Tales (UK) De 7 dødssyndene [The Seven Deadly Sins] (Norway) Afrocentricity (US) Boys Life 3 (US/France) Erotic Tales 4 (Germany) Fantasia 2000 (US) Fathers (Ethiopia/Zanzibar/Nigeria) Floating Island (Taiwan) If These Walls Could Talk 2 (US) The Last Five Short Films of the 2nd Millennium (Palestine) Long Night’s Journey into Day (South Africa) Maldoror (UK/Germany) One Piece! (Japan) Scénarious sur la drogue (France) Stories about Love (Singapore) Terror Tract (US) Yo nimo kimyo na monogatari [Tales of the Unusual] (Japan) Začátek světa [The Beginning of the World] (Czech Republic) 99euro-films (Germany) Bangkok Haunted [Thailand] Blood of the Werewolf (US) Bogotá 2016 (Colombia) Dark Stories: Tales From Beyond the Grave (New Zealand) Dead Room (UK) Lianai qiyi [Heroes in Love] (Hong Kong) Un mondo diverso è possible [Another World is Possible] (Italy) Pas d’histoires! 12 regards sur le racism au quotidien (France) Sei come sei (Italy) Strange Frequency (US) Tabi Tabi Po (Philippines) Tokyo Zance [Tokyo Tales] (Japan) 11ʹ09ʺ01 (France) 24 Sata [24 Hours] (Croatia) Barcelona Story of a Night (Spain) Belgrade Sound (Serbia) Fasuna to Chibusa [Zipper and Tits] (Japan) Fimfárum (Czech Republic) Folk flest bor I Kina [Most People Live in China] (Norway) Fragmentos urbanos (Chile) Freitagnacht [Friday Night] (Germany) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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f il mo gr a p hy 261

2003

2004

Jam Films (Japan) Jeon jang keu I hu [After the War] (South Korea/Japan/China] Jött egy busz . . . [A Bus Came . . . ] (Hungary) Lettere dalla Palestina [Letters from Palestine] (Italy) Mama Africa (Burkina Faso/France) Mudjima paemilli [No Comment] (South Korea) Night Thirst (US) Proyect gvul [Border Project] (Israel) Radhošt (Czech Republic) Sajasŏngŏ [Four Letter Words] (South Korea) San geng [Three] (Hong Kong/South Korea/Thailand) Six in Austin (US) Underground Zero (US) Urban Visions (Spain/UK/France/Germany/Finland/US/Italy) Zur Lage: Österreich in sechs Kapiteln [State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters] (Austria) 99euro-films 2 (Germany) The Animatrix (US) Before I Die (US) Boys Life 4 (US) Experiments in Terror (US/Austria) Firenze, il nostro domain (Italy) Fuyu no hi [Winter Days] (Japan) Ghost Office (Hong Kong) Goregoyles: First Cut (Canada/US) Horrortales.666 (US) Jam Films 2 (Japan) Jött egy busz . . . [A Bus Came . . . ] (Hungary) Kohtalon kirja [Book of Fate] (Finland) Monstersdotcom (US) Next Victim (US) The Path (South Korea) Senses (UK) Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (Spain/UK/Germany/Finland/ China/Netherlands) Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (UK/Germany) Werewolf Tales (US) Yŏsŏtgae ŭi sisŏn [If You Were Me] (South Korea) 1.3.6. (South Korea) 18-j (Argentina) Around Midnight (US) Bem-Vindo a Sao Paulo [Welcome to Sao Paulo] (Brazil) The Canterbury Tales (UK) Cinema 16: European Short Films (EU) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

262

2005

o mnibus f il m s Costo argentino (Argentina) Death 4 Told (US) Desperado Tonic (Slovenia) Eros (US/Italy/Hong Kong/China/France/Luxembourg) Európából Európába [From Europe into Europe] (Hungary) Evil Deeds (US) Hay motive [There’s Good Cause] (Spain) Kaidan shin mimibukuro 1 [Tales of Terror from Japan] (Japan) Koibumi-biyori (Japan) Lust: 12 Sexy Shorts (Germany/US/Italy/Finland/France/Japan/ Lebanon/Switzerland) Madrid 11M: We Were All on That Train (Spain) Queer Boys and Girls on the SHINKANSEN (Japan) Saam gaang yi [Three . . . Extremes] (Japan/South Korea/Hong Kong) Street Tales of Terror (US) Tales from the Beyond (US) Tales from the Crapper (US) Tokyo Noir (Japan) Tomb of Terror (US) Tres veces dos [Three Times Two] (Cuba) Twentidentity (South Korea) Twisted Illusions 2 (US) Über die Grenze – Fünf Ansichten von Nachbarn [Across the Border – Five Views from Neighbors] (Austria) Up for Rent (US) Visions of Europe (Austria/Belgium/Cyprus/Czech Republic/ Denmark/Estonia/Finland/France/Germany/UK/Greece/ Hungary/Ireland/Italy/Latvia/Lithuania/Luxembourg/Malta/ Netherlands/Poland/Portugal/Slovakia/Slovenia/Spain/Sweden) Visits: Hungry Ghost Anthology (Malaysia) Allerzielen [All Souls] (Netherlands) Anlat Istanbul [Istanbul Tales] (Turkey) Byeol byeol yiyagi [If You Were Me: Anima Version] (South Korea) Cinema different (France/Germany/Taiwan/US) Dark Tales of Japan (Japan) Deadroom (US) Les Européens [France] Faces of Schlock (US) Five Worlds (Palestine/Malaysia/Indonesia/Afghanistan/Iran) Fucking Different! (Germany) Guanyu ai [About Love] (Japan/China/Taiwan) Hell Hath No Fury (Canada) Inu no eiga [All About My Dog] (Japan) Isten bárányai [All the Invisible Children] (France/Italy) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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f il mo gr a p hy 263

2006

Jam Films S (Japan) Lost and Found (Bosnia and Herzegovina/Serbia and Montenegro/ Bulgaria/Estonia/Germany/ Hungary/Romania) Mail de todoita story [Stories Sent with e-mails] (Japan) Naisu no mori – The First Contact [Funky Forest: The First Contact] (Japan) Neun [Nine] (Germany) Nunbusin haru [One Shining Day] (South Korea) Oda do radosci [Ode to Joy] (Poland) Rampo jigoku [Rampo Noir] (Japan) Red Midnight (Italy/US) Solidarnosc, Solidarnosc . . . [Solidarity, Solidarity . . . ] (Poland) Speak of the Devil (Denmark) Stadt als Beute [Berlin Stories; a.k.a. City as Booty] (Germany) Stories of Lost Souls (Argentina/US/UK/Australia) Street Tales of Terror 2 (US) Tickets (Italy/UK) Time to Go John (Australia) Zhongguo cunmin yingxiang jihua [China Village Self-Governance Film Project] (China) Zoo (Japan) All About Love (Philippines) Black Night (Japan/Hong Kong/Thailand) Bul-taneun filmui yeondae-ki [16 Takes on Korean Society] (South Korea) Cadavre exquis première edition (Canada) City2City (France/Spain/Russian Federation/Germany/Hong Kong/ Switzerland/Finland/UK/Japan) Darna zaroori hai [Fear is Compulsory] (India) Fimfárum 2 (Czech Republic) Daseot gae ui shiseon [If You Were Me 2] (South Korea) Destricted (US/UK) Faces of Schlock 2 (US) Fimfárum 2 (Czech Republic) Genius Party (Japan) Imahe Nasyon (Philippines) Kowai onna [Unholy Women] (Japan) LovecraCked! The Movie (US) Paris, je t’aime (France) Puso 3 (Philippines) Resistance(s) (France/Algeria/Iraq/US/Palestine/Morocco/United Arab Emirates/Lebanon/Canada) Sebeonjjae siseon [If You Were Me 3] (South Korea) Shiruba kamen [Silver Mask] (Japan) The Signal (US) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

264

2007

2008

2009

2010

o mnibus f il m s Small Gauge Trauma (UK/Canada/Japan/Portugal/Belgium/Spain/ Argentina/Brazil) Time Piece (Turkey/US) Trapped Ashes (US) 5 Gross (Norway) AIDS JaaGO (India/US) Chacun so cinema [To Each His Own Cinema] (France) Di san zhong wen nuan [3 City Hotshots] (China) Dus Kahaniyaan (India) Enfances [Childhood] (France) Farsh-e Irani [Persian Carpet] (Iran) Fucking Different: New York (Germany/US) Geurimja [Resurrection of the Butterfly] (South Korea) GG 19 (Germany) Grindhouse (US) Invisibles (Spain) Komšije [Neighbors] (Serbia) Late Fragment – An Interactive Film (Canada) Lost Suburbia (US) Pantaseutik jasal sodong [Fantastic Parasuicides] (South Korea) Paraiso: Tatlong Kwento ng Pag-asa [Paradise: Three Stories of Hope] (Philippines) Perempuan punya cerita [Chants of Lotus] (Indonesia) Peur(s) du noir [Fear(s) of the Dark] (France) Shin onna tachiguishi retsuden [Eat and Run: Six Beautiful Grifters] (Japan) The State of the World (Portugal) Tie saam gok [Triangle] (Hong Kong) Vogelfrei (Latvia) Yume jūya [Ten Nights of Dreams] (Japan) The New Ten Commandments (UK) Stories on Human Rights (Russia/Germany) Sup fun chung ching [A Decade of Love] (Hong Kong) Toronto Stories (Canada) Chengdu, I Love You [Chengdu, wo ai ni] (China) Kerala Café (India) New York, I Love You (US) Visitors (South Korea) Zagrebacke price [Zagreb Stories] (Croatia) Camellia (South Korea/Japan/Thailand) Freakonomics (US) Kars öyküleri [Tales from Kars] (Turkey) Neke druge price [Some Other Stories] (Serbia/Slovenia/Croatia/Bosnia and Herzegovina/Macedonia/Ireland) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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f il mo gr a p hy 265 2011

2012

2013

3:11 A Sense of Home (Japan) 10+10 (Taiwan) 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (Estonia) Carmellia (South Korea) Chillerama (United States) Do Not Forget Me, Istanbul (Turkey) Little Deaths (UK) Tamantashar yom [18 Days] (Egypt) The Theatre Bizarre (US/France/Canada) Yulu [Wise Words] (China) 7 días en La Habana [7 Days in Havana] (France/Spain) The ABCs of Death (US/New Zealand) Les infidels [The Players] (France) V/H/S (US) Water (Israel) Bombay Talkies (India) Movie 43 (US) The Turning (Australia)

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Index

ABCs of Death, The (film), 83, 86, 108, 215 About Schmidt (film), 203 Action Episodes (film), 10 Actors and Sin (film), 16, 223n25 Adams, Henry, 205 adaptation, 6, 7, 9, 38, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 64, 70, 72, 90, 97, 107, 133, 135, 140, 142, 149, 150, 156, 241n12 Adolescents, The (film), 94 Adorable Creatures (film), 8, 232n18 Adorno, Theodor, 105–6 Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, The (film), 52, 64 Affairs of Anatol, The (play), 10 Africa Dreaming (film), 30, 218 After the Gulf War (film), 174 Akerman, Chantal, 165, 168, 234n33 Akin, Fatih, 192–3, 200 Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (film), 55 Albert, Barbara, 11, 182, 201 allegory, 29, 41, 42, 51, 74, 78, 121, 134, 149, 168, 173, 177, 187, 194, 211 Allégret, Yves, 19, 73, 74 Allegro non troppo (film), 56, 149 Allen, Woody, 33, 82, 166, 169, 236n23 All the Invisible Children (film), 5, 19 Altman, Rick, 41, 227n8, 247n7 Altman, Robert, 11, 100 amalgam picture, 16 Amazon Women on the Moon (film), 17, 224n31 Andrei Rublev (film), 36 animation, 44, 45, 53, 56, 57, 58–61, 71, 90, 93, 106, 149, 229n25, 229n26; see also package feature Annakin, Ken, 9, 96, 97, 134, 139, 142 anthology film, 4, 6, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 15, 16, 18, 33, 34, 35, 44, 49–50, 97, 98, 99, 107, 131, 134, 143, 149, 161, 162, 168, 175, 217, 218, 223n19, 234n39, 240n3 anticipation, 43, 76, 158–9, 160–1

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 5, 32, 75–6, 96, 148, 152, 153, 161, 171, 226n54, 232n25 Arabian Nights, The (stories), 51, 52, 53, 128, 150; see also Scheherazade Aria (film), 100, 192, 230n34, 237n23 Ar266istotle, 218 Arzner, Dorothy, 44 Asylum (film), 131 Attenzione: guerra! (film), 109 Autant-Lara, Claude, 19, 73, 74, 160 auteur theory 95–6, 209; see also transauthorial cinema Bakhtin, Mikhail, 65–6, 230n1 Balcon, Michael, 20, 98, 128–9, 135, 239n2, 240n6, 240n7 Barbaro, Nick, 73–5, 82 Barry, Peter, 85–6, 234n35 Barthes, Roland, 95–6, 247n7 Bartas, Sharunas, 195 Bashō (aka Matsuo Manefusa), 90, 93 Basket of Mexican Tales (film), 58 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 103, 117 Bazin, André, 32, 72 Beautiful Swindlers, The (film), 69, 76–7, 167, 175, 244n17 Beck, Julian, 170 Bed, The (film), 53, 140, 236n14 Beginning of an Unknown Era, The (film), 16 beginnings, 5, 12, 34, 55, 56, 102, 129, 137, 138, 139, 144, 169, 182, 190, 202, 209, 216, 218, 220–1 as “entrances,” 29, 50, 105, 220 Bellocchio, Marco, 169, 171 Benbihy, Emmanuel, 163, 203, 247n3 Beresford, Bruce, 100 Bergman, Ingmar, 96 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 169, 170, 171 Betz, Mark, 6, 90, 91, 161, 205, 248 Bevan, Billy, 118

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

268

o mnibus f il m s

Beyond the Clouds (film), 5, 96 bibliophilia, 8, 44, 46, 47, 49, 56, 64, 142, 144, 241n12; see also book Bini, Alfredo, 93 Bits and Pieces (film), 84 Blasetti, Alessandro, 7, 70, 161–2, 236n14 Blood of the Werewolf (film), 56 Boccaccio ’70 (film), 11, 36, 52, 55, 69, 86–8, 97, 98, 160, 166, 203, 234n38 Body Bags (film), 14, 131 Boe, Christoffer, 183, 190–1, 195 Bolognini, Mauro, 101, 156, 160 Bondanella, Peter, 95 Bond Street (film), 134, 135 Bong Joon-ho, 78 book, 8, 9, 19, 44–9, 61, 129, 130, 139, 144–5; see also bibliophilia; scrapbook chapters, 27, 130, 182, 209; see also DVD menu; title card border, 3, 23, 47, 65, 163, 167–9, 172, 185, 187–8, 190, 193 -crossing, 23, 167–9, 172, 185, 190, 193 Bordwell, David, 39, 222n14 Borges, Jorge Luís, 38, 128, 130 Bowles, Paul, 54 Boyd, Don, 100, 192, 230n34 Box, Sydney, 134, 135, 137, 141, 145, 146 Bozzetto, Bruno, 149 Brabin, Charles, 47, 164 Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner (film), 85 Breen, Joseph, 137 Breton, André, 91, 164 bridging, 79, 82, 122 Brigand, Alain, 212 Brustellin, Alf, 182 Bryden, Bill, 100 Cab No. 13 (film), 113 Calder, Robert, 144 Campfire Stories (film), 53 Campion, Jane, 86 Cane (stories), 52 Canterbury Tales, The (stories), 51, 52, 53, 150 Carax, Léos, 78 Castelanni, Renato, 155 Cavalcade (film), 123 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 4, 127, 130, 143, 240n6 censorship, 72, 140, 144, 155, 156, 182, 231n8, 232n25, 243n14 Cervi, Tonino, 175

Chabrol, Claude, 76, 163, 164 Chahine, Youssef, 176, 212, 214 Champlin, Charles, 100, 236n22 Chan, Fruit, 78, 80, 233n29 chaos, 92, 171, 187; see also order Chekhov, Anton, 38, 51, 240n10 Chen, Kaige, 86 Chillerama (film), 108 cinematography, 4, 38, 56, 92, 200, 207 Citizen Ruth (film), 203 city film, 78, 164–6 Clair, René, 70, 115, 120 cliff-hanger, 12 Cloos, Hans Peter, 182 Cole, Sidney, 20, 100 collaboration, 21, 24–5, 92, 96, 100, 113, 116, 122, 149, 175, 225n44 collective protagonist, 52 Collins, Jim, 164 Comencini, Francesca, 195 Comencini, Luigi, 95, 101, 151, 159 commedia all’italiana, 153, 154, 155 Commedia dell’arte, 153, 154 Common Sense of Modesty, A (film), 155 compilation film, 4, 7, 10, 13, 14–15, 46, 114, 218, 223n21 Complexes, The (film), 17, 155 composite, 13, 51, 85–7, 104, 107, 218 macro- and micro-, 85–6, 107, 234n35 Conrad, Joseph, 136 containment, 6, 44–5, 47–8, 55–8, 60–1, 64, 76, 78–81, 104, 167, 181, 199, 206, 229n26 cooperation, 23, 109, 116, 117, 124, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181, 186, 188 Coppola, Francis Ford, 33, 82, 166, 169, 236n23 Coward, Noel, 51, 55, 123, 124, 133, 224n36 Cronenberg, David, 86 Countersex (film), 155 Country of the Pointed Firs (stories), 52 Couples, The (film), 16, 98 Cox, Paul, 99 Crane, Stephen, 136 Craptree, Arthur, 9, 139, 141 Craven, Wes, 206, 208, 210–11 Crazy Sex (film), 99 Creepshow (film), 107 Creepshow 2 (film), 107 Crichton, Charles, 20, 128, 130 Crime in the Girls’ School, A (film), 175

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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inde x 269 Crowther, Bosley, 20, 114, 143, 224n38 Culler, Jonathan, 67 Dance Hall (film), 134 Dangerous Game (film), 16, 164 Daniels, George, 181 Danish Girls Show Everything (film), 86 Dante, Joe, 17, 108 Dark Stories: Tales from Beyond the Grave (film), 78, 131 Daughter’s Inheritance, The (film), 150 Davis, Bette, 121 Davoli, Ninetto, 172, 173 Days of Glory (film), 148 Day that Doesn’t Exist, The (film), 16, 245n2 Dead of Night (film), 20, 35, 36, 53, 65, 69, 100, 126–31, 133, 134, 143, 166, 189, 203, 216 Dearden, Basil, 20, 128, 130 Death Travels Too Much (film), 109 De Broca, Philippe, 160 Decade of Love, A (film), 34 Decameron, The (film), 5, 52, 150 Decameron, The (stories), 51, 52, 53, 101, 150, 156 Decameroticus (film), 149 De Laurentiis, Dino, 95 Deleuze, Gilles, 81 DeMille, Cecil B., 39, 116 Denby, David, 12, 35 Deserter and the Nomads, The (film), 176 Deshpande, Shekhar, 205 De Sica, Vittorio, 7, 72, 86, 88, 97, 98, 160, 236n14 Destricted (film), 99 Devil and the Ten Commandments, The (film), 47 dialogism, 9, 45, 65, 172, 196–7, 201, 210, 213 digital filmmaking, 198, 218 Dirty Game, The (film), 70, 167 Disney, Walt, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 71, 119, 137, 229n26, 229n31 DJ Spooky, 91 Dolls, The (film), 17, 100, 101, 156–7, 158–9, 243n12 Donner, Richard, 107 Do Not Forget Me, Istanbul (film), 56 Don Quixote (novel), 12 Douchet, Jean, 163, 164 Douglas, Kirk, 102

Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 39 Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (film), 131, 223n19 Dubliners (stories), 52 Duchamp, Marcel, 15, 91 Dumplings (film), 78 duration, 63, 88, 148 Durgnat, Raymond, 134–5, 136 Duvivier, Julien, 47, 49, 97, 98, 103, 109, 225n38 DVD, 24–8, 197, 225n44, 233n30; see also paratextuality menu, 26–8, 197 Easy Money (film), 135 Echoes of Conflict (film), 176 Eidsvik, Charles, 63 18 Days (film), 176, 226n60 18-j (film), 176 Ekberg, Anita, 87–8 Election (film), 203 11ʹ09ʺ01 (film), 177, 182, 211–15, 226n57 Ellis, John, 135 Elstree Calling (film), 46 emcee, 42, 44, 228n14 Encore (film), 6, 8, 9, 16, 19, 64, 102, 131, 132, 135, 140, 143, 144–5, 146 endings as “exits,” 29, 50, 105, 220 “twist,” 75, 108, 127, 143 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (film), 5, 157 ensemble, 187–8, 190 Episode of Napoleon’s War with Spain, An (film), 10 episode title, 7, 27–9, 33, 37, 48, 55, 56, 57, 73, 76, 82, 84, 86, 91, 95, 140, 142, 144, 160–1, 181, 190, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 206, 207, 220, 240n10; see also film title; title card episodicity, 7, 9, 10–11, 16, 22, 28, 29, 30, 32, 40, 50, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67, 71, 72, 74, 103, 142, 163, 164, 173, 191, 192, 229n25, 240n10 internal, 74, 170 Eros (film), 32 Erotic Tales (film series), 99 European Union, 86, 110, 175, 183–9, 190, 195–6, 199 Europe By Night (film), 161–2 Europe 99euro-films2 (film), 186 exhibition, 71, 116, 117, 155, 175, 238n6, 243n14

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

270

o mnibus f il m s

Exiles (film), 199–200 expressionism, 37, 82, 109 exquisite corpse, 6, 24, 90, 91, 92 Face to Face (film), 16, 136 Famous Love Affairs (film), 47 Fantasia (film), 35, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 71, 137, 149, 229n31, 230n32; see also Disney, Walt; package feature Far from Vietnam (film), 19, 34–5, 168, 172, 174 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 182 Felix (film), 91–2, 150, 157 Fellini, Federico, 13, 86–8, 148, 152, 243n14 Female (film), 79 feminism, 150, 234n33, 242n4 fetishism, 41, 49, 60–1, 63, 64, 98, 99, 151, 157 “Fighting Film Albums” (film series), 113–4 film festival, 27, 33, 71, 72, 77, 78, 86, 97, 175, 188, 213, 214, 232m25, 234n40, 243n14 film title, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20–1, 26; see also episode title; title card Fisher, Roy, 85 Five Feminist Minutes (film), 150 flânerie, 15, 163; see also city film Flesh and Fantasy (film), 49, 223n19, 234n39 Flirt (film), 167 Flynn, Gerard Mannix, 193–4, 198 food metaphors, 17, 32, 66–7, 79, 241n1 Ford, John, 96, 97, 108, 118 Forever and a Day (film), 20, 39, 103–6, 115–26, 237n31, 238n6, 238n8 Forman, Milos, 100, 179 Four Rooms (film), 32–3 framing, 6, 47, 53, 55, 223n19; see also Goffman, Erving Français vus par . . ., Les (film), 165 franchise, 13 Franklin, Sidney, 101 French, Harold, 9, 139, 140, 141, 144 Friday the Thirteenth (film), 128, 239n22 Friedberg, Anne, 15 From Beyond the Grave (film), 131 From Europe into Europe (film), 58 From the Edge of the City (film), 196–7 Fucking Different! (film), 99 Fun and Fancy Free (film), 59, 64, 71, 137

Gadjo Dilo (film), 200 gaps, 6, 22, 31, 32, 79 Gaudreault, André, 143 Gassman, Vittorio, 93, 154 Gatlif, Tony, 199–200 Gedeon, Sasa, 197 Genius Party (film), 66–7 genre hybridity, 43, 106–7 Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation (film), 174 Germany in Autumn (film), 19, 35, 91, 174, 182 Getting to Know You (film), 49–50 Giacovelli, Enrico, 155, 241n1 Giannaris, Constantine, 196–7, 198, 199 Gideon and Samson (film), 16 Gitai, Amos, 212 Glawogger, Michael, 182–3 Godard, Jean-Luc, 13, 32, 35, 76, 77, 93, 95, 100, 160–1, 163, 164, 169, 171, 175, 244n17 Goffman, Erving, 11, 54–5, 56; see also framing Golden Arrow, The (film), 30, 135 Gold of Naples, The (film), 72, 98, 164, 232n16 Gondry, Michel, 78–9 Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen (film), 151 Gordimer Stories, The (film), 38 Gori, Mario Cecchi, 51, 93 Goulding, Edmund, 44, 115, 120–1 Grahame, Kenneth, 64 Grand Hotel (film), 120, 129 Gray, Jonathan, 26, 29; see also paratextuality Great Depression, 42 Great Vaudeville (film), 47 Greenaway, Peter, 184 Gregoretti, Ugo, 93, 95 Grimaldi, Alberto, 175 Grim Prairie Tales (film), 108 Grindhouse (film), 33, 34 Griffith, D. W., 10, 11, 18, 37–9, 223n19 Guback, Thomas, 110 Guerrini, Mino, 95 Guitry, Sacha, 48–9, 97, 98 Guttmann, Allen, 181 Halle, Randall, 187–8 Hamer, Robert, 128, 130 Happy Days (film), 43, 137 Hardwicke, Cedric, 104, 115, 125

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inde x 271 Hark, Tsui, 92, 225n44 Hartley, Hal, 13, 99, 167 Hathaway, Henry, 20, 97, 108 Hawks, Howard, 20, 54, 95, 96, 97, 121 Hearn, Lafcadio, 56 Heavy Metal (film), 61 High Infidelity (film), 17, 97, 155 Hitchcock, Alfred, 12, 46, 95, 96, 115 Holiday Camp (film), 134 Holland, Tom, 107 Hollywood Canteen (film), 115 Hollywood Revue of 1929, The (film), 42–3, 137 Home, Sweet Home (film), 18, 38–9 homogenous heterogeneity, 162 Hong, Sang-soo, 17 Horkheimer, Max, 105–6 Horikawa, Hiromichio, 76 horizontal depth, 21–2, 143 horror (genre), 36, 53, 56, 78, 83, 99, 100, 106–8, 126–7, 131, 143, 207–8, 233n30, 245n2 Hou Hsiao-hsien, 86 House That Dripped Blood, The (film), 131 How Funny Can Sex Be? (film), 155 How the West was Won (film), 97, 108 Hrabal, Bohumil, 56 Hranitzky, Ágnes, 198 human rights, 3, 4, 176–7, 186 Ichikawa, Kon, 100, 179 ID Swiss (film), 23–4, 183 If I Had a Million (film), 20, 38, 42, 68–9, 81, 103, 143, 223n19, 231n9, 244n16 If You Were Me (film), 3 I Live in Grosvenor Square (film), 122 Imamura, Shohei, 213, 215 Iñarritu, Alejandro Gonzalez, 212, 215 Indovina, Franco, 160 infinity, 61, 128, 130, 216, 229n26 In July (film), 193, 197 In Our Time (film), 19 In Our Time (stories), 52 intertextuality, 9, 31–2, 81, 83, 102, 117, 215; see also intratextuality primary and secondary, 85–6 intratextuality, 32, 75, 81–2, 85, 88, 215, 233n30; see also intertextuality Intolerance (film), 11, 39, 223n19 Into the Badlands (film), 108 Invitation to the Dance (film), 53 Irving, Washington, 64 Ishihara, Shintaro, 94

Istanbul Tales (film), 163, 165 Italians and the Women, The (film), 150 It Always Rains on Sunday (film), 134, 239n2 It’s a Big Country (film), 16, 19, 20, 30, 146 Jameson, Fredric, 40 Jam Films (film), 106, 235n5 Jarman, Derek, 100 Jarmusch, Jim, 167 Jia, Zhangke, 176, 217 Jobson, Richard, 26, 28, 84 Joyce, James, 52, 113, 223n24 Just Another Day in London (film), 84 Karina, Anna, 70, 160, 244n17 Kaurismaki, Aki, 184 Kawai, Shin’ya, 106 Kawamoto, Kihachirō, 90, 93 Keaton, Buster, 39–40, 42, 104, 125 Kelly, Gene, 52 Kenez, Peter, 114 Kennedy, Gerald, 52 Kerala Café (film), 105 Kern, Anne, 93 Kiarostami, Abbas, 21, 24–5, 31 Killer’s Carnival (film), 49 King, Henry, 20, 97 King of Jazz (film), 44–6, 55, 137 kitsch, 60–1, 63–4, 192 Kluge, Alexander, 182 Knopf, Robert, 39 Koster, Henry, 20, 97 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6 Kristeva, Julia, 81 Kurosawa, Akira, 55 Kwaidan (film), 56 Ladies’ Room (film), 150 Lam, Ringo, 92, 225n44 Landis, John, 17, 108 Lang, Fritz, 96 Latin Lovers (film), 98, 150 Lattuada, Alberto, 152, 153 Leaves from Satan’s Notebook (film), 39 Lelouch, Claude, 100, 179, 212, 214, 215 Lessing, Doris, 51, 241n12 Lest We Forget (film), 186 Let’s Talk about Women (film), 154 Letters from Palestine (film), 97 Lewis, Jeffrey, 189 library, 47, 49, 52, 64, 138 Liehm, Mira, 161

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Light Grey (film), 106 Lisi, Virna, 156, 157, 158, 242n1 Little Deaths (film), 108 Little Theater of Jean Renoir, The (film), 7, 8 Lizzani, Carlo, 152, 160, 169, 170 Lloyd, Frank, 115, 116, 123 Loach, Ken, 21–6, 31, 212, 214 Lollobrigida, Gina, 7, 93, 101, 156, 157, 158, 243n13 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (film), 12 Loren, Sophia, 88, 160, 242n1 Lost and Found (film), 186, 217 Love (film), 156 Love and Anger (film), 110, 168–73, 226n54, 244n17 Love and the Frenchwoman (film), 19, 47–8, 83, 84 Love at Twenty (film), 93–4, 167, 234n40 Love in Four Dimensions (film), 66 Love in the City (film), 19, 69, 81, 151–2, 160, 163, 164, 169, 242n5, 242n6 Loy, Nanni, 151, 241n1 Lubitsch, Ernst, 44, 68, 231n9 Lucía (film), 36 Lumière and Co. (film), 186 Lupino, Ida, 105, 120, 125 Lynch, David, 86 Lyotard, Jean-François, 219 Magni, Luigi, 151 Mainka, Maximiliane, 182 Mainka-Jellinghaus, Beate, 182 Make Mine Music (film), 59, 64, 71, 137 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 71 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 177, 212, 214, 215 Malamondo (film), 168 Malle, Louis, 95, 175, 216 Man and Two Women, A (film), 51, 241n12 Mancini, Henry, 180–1 Manfredi, Nino, 30, 154, 155, 156, 242n1 Mania: Episodes in Terror (film), 10 map, 27–8, 163–4, 167, 172, 191, 201, 212 Martindale, Margot, 203, 204 Martinelli, Elsa, 160 Marx, Karl, 63 Maselli, Francesco, 152, 153 Mastrioanni, Marcello, 151 materiality, 9, 14, 28, 29, 30, 46, 58–64, 98–9, 165; see also objects Maugham, W. Somerset, 6, 8, 9, 51, 64, 97, 102, 121, 131, 133–47, 222n13

Maupassant, Guy de, 6, 51, 224n30, 240n10, 243n14 McLaglen, Victor, 118 Meet Me Tonight (film), 51, 55, 133, 224m36 Melody Time (film), 59, 64, 71, 137 Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others (film), 161 Memories (film), 57–60, 64 Mercier, Michele, 160 Metamorphoses (film), 61 metatextuality, 50, 55, 58, 171, 207 metrophilia, 163–4; see also city film Miike, Takashi, 78, 80 Miller, Henry, 91 miniature, 11, 38, 45, 60, 88, 98, 146, 162, 196, 219, 239n22 Minnelli, Vincente, 62, 70, 71, 101, 102, 103 mise-en-abyme, 33, 59, 60, 66, 191, 192, 196, 199, 209 Mitry, Jean, 62 mode of address, 9 presentational, 9, 18, 41, 43, 47, 49, 51, 54, 59, 62, 92, 142, 216 representational, 9, 18, 47, 51, 52, 54, 62, 92, 142, 164, 207, 212 viewer-directed, 54 Moment of Peace, The (film), 109, 174 Momentous Events (film series), 13 Mondo Bizarro (film), 163 Mondo Cane (film), 35 Mondo Freudo (film), 35 Mondo Macabro (film), 35 Mondo Topless (film), 35 Monicelli, Mario, 86, 88, 97, 151, 154, 234n40 Montreal vu par . . . (film), 217 Moretti, Nanni, 155 Most People Live in China (film), 4 Movie 43 (film), 18, 82 Mungiu, Cristian, 77, 217 museum, 55 music hall, 8, 9, 40 Mysteries of Rome (film), 98 Nair, Mira, 97, 212 narrative complexity, 105, 148, 211, 220 narrator, 8, 53, 54, 64, 117, 139, 141, 143, 162 Natali, Vincenzo, 207, 210 National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (film), 107 Negulesco, Jean, 20, 97

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inde x 273 Neo-Tokyo (film), 59, 229n26 New York, I Love You (film), 163, 166, 233n29 New York Stories (film), 19, 33, 82, 166, 170, 203, 236n23 Night on Earth (film), 167 Night Women (film), 162 99 Euro Films (film), 186 Noé, Gaspar, 84 Oates, Joyce Carol, 49 objects, 9, 14, 15, 19, 28, 30, 41, 43, 46, 49, 55, 58–64, 79, 98–9, 137, 158; see also materiality Office of War Information (OWI), 70, 119, 122, 124–5 Of Life and Love (film), 149 Of Wayward Love (film), 30, 69, 155, 236n22 O. Henry’s Full House (film), 5, 20, 37, 38, 51, 54, 69, 97, 136, 203, 222n2, 241n12, 244n16 Olalquiaga, Celeste, 60–1 Oldest Profession, The (film), 76, 160–1, 244n17 Olmi, Ermanno, 21, 24–6, 31 Olsen, Mikael, 184, 190, 191 Olympia (film), 180 Olympic Games, 100, 177–81, 183, 202, 245n4 Only Country in the World, The (film), 174, 186 On Our Merry Way (film), 20 opening credits, 28, 68, 94, 102, 104, 235n8 Ophüls, Marcel, 32, 94 Ophüls, Max, 51, 189 order, 58, 67–8, 72, 75–6, 83–5, 93, 233n30 Ōtomo, Katsuhiro, 58, 59, 229n26 Ouédraogo, Idrissa, 4, 176, 212, 214 Õunpuu, Veiko, 86 Our Time (film), 161, 236n14, 243n7 Out of the Clear Blue Sky (film), 150 Ozerov, Juri (Yuri), 100, 179, 202 package feature, 10, 52, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 71, 137, 229n26; see also animation; Disney, Walt painting, 11, 55, 61, 63, 82, 98, 118, 146, 190 Paisa (film), 5, 35, 148, 167 Pakalnina, Laila, 191, 199, 247n18 parade, 44, 228n11

Paramount on Parade (film), 44–5, 55, 137 paratextuality, 26, 28–9, 61, 78, 93, 99, 108; see also DVD menu Paris, je t’aime (film), 4–5, 22–23, 163, 186, 202–11, 247n3 Paris vu par . . . (film), 14, 104, 163–4, 165, 166, 244n17 Paris vu par . . . 20 ans après (film), 165 Park, Chan-wook, 78, 80 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 5, 32, 52, 93, 95, 148, 150, 169, 172–3, 175 pastiche, 46, 227 Paul Bowles: Half-Moon (film), 38, 54 Payne, Alexander, 203–5, 207–8, 211 Pearce, Susan, 62–3 Pearls of the Crown, The (film), 48 Pearls of the Deep (film), 56–7, 58, 77, 175 Penn, Arthur, 100, 179 Penn, Sean, 212, 213 phenomenology, 15, 18, 64, 106, 177, 181, 215 Phillips, Gene, 179–80 Phleghar, Michael, 100, 160, 179, 181, 236n22 Picture Windows (film), 55 Pippa Passes (film), 10, 37–8 Place in the Crowd, A (film), 175 Plaisir, Le (film), 6, 51 Playboys, The (film), 160 Pleasant Nights (film), 51, 93 Polanski, Roman, 76, 86 Pollet, Jean Daniel, 163, 164 polyglot, 80, 109, 189 Pons, Ventura, 66 Ponti, Carlo, 88–9, 95, 97, 98, 155, 175, 234n40 portmanteau film, 8, 10, 13, 15–16, 18, 47, 52, 64, 103, 109, 136, 149, 168, 189, 218, 219, 226n54 portmanteau word, 8, 15, 223n25 postmodernism, 18, 44, 63, 64, 67, 164, 205, 219 Powell, Dilys, 104 Powell, Michael, 36, 63 Prague Nights (film), 164, 176 Prague Stories (film), 164 prefab structure, 83–4 Prévert, Jacques, 91 Price, Edgar, 121 propaganda, 34, 104, 114, 124, 245n4 Propp, Vladmir, 72 Prostitution (film), 160 Puccini, Gianni

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quantity, 83, 86 Quartet (film), 8, 9, 11, 16, 20, 51, 64, 97, 102, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135–46, 203, 225n38, 239n2, 241n12 Queer Boys and Girls on the SHINKANSEN (film), 30 Queneau, Raymond, 107 Raindrops, Water, Warriors (film), 21 Rains, Claude, 104, 119, 125 Rampo Noir (film), 108 Rank, J. Arthur, 124, 145 Ranks and People (film), 51 Ray, Satyajit, 72 reception, 82, 98, 101–3, 115, 117, 131, 159, 188–9; see also spectatorship Red Violin, The (film), 35 Reinhardt, Gottfried, 101, 103 Reitz, Edgar, 182 reflexivity, 10, 42, 55, 79, 191, 206, 209, 217 renga, 90, 92 Renoir, Jean, 7, 8, 96, 174, 243n14 Rentschler, Eric, 193 Repo Man (film), 64 Return to Life (film), 174 revue, 9, 11, 17, 41–6, 47, 48, 55, 59, 62, 71, 162, 227n8 Richards, Jeffrey, 126, 135 Rim, Carlo, 19, 73, 74, 75 Ringu (film), 106 Riot (film), 211–12 Risi, Dino, 152, 153, 158, 161, 220 Robot Carnival (film), 58, 229n26 Roddam, Frank, 100 Roeg, Nicolas, 99, 100 RoGoPaG (film), 93–4, 110, 163, 175, 244n17 Rohmer, Eric, 163, 164 Romero, George, 107, 108 Ronde, La (film), 189 Roots/Raíces (film), 51, 224n31 Rossellini, Roberto, 5, 19, 35, 73, 74, 93, 95, 98, 148, 175, 243n14 Rossi, Franco, 159 Rouch, Jean, 163, 164, 235n8 Roustang, Pierre, 93–4, 175 Rupé, Katja, 182 Russell, Ken, 13, 99, 100 Sade, Marquis de, 158 Salles, Walter, 13, 176, 207 Saludos Amigos (film), 137

Sandwich Man, The (film), 176 Sarris, Andrew, 34–5, 95–6, 227n61 Sátántangó (film), 189 Saturday, Sunday, and Friday (film), 151 Saville, Victor, 115, 119, 128 Scheherazade, 47, 49, 50, 52, 128 Schlesinger, John, 100, 179 Schlöndorff, Volker, 176, 182 Schneider, Romy, 88 Schroeder, Barbet, 163, 164, 244n20 Schubert, Peter, 182 Scola, Ettora, 95, 151 Scorsese, Martin, 33, 82, 166, 169, 236n23 scrapbook, 44–6; see also book Seidelman, Susan, 99 Seidl, Ulrich, 182–3 seriality, 11–13, 41, 50, 60, 64, 84, 107, 158–9, 162, 219 Serling, Rod, 108 7 Days in Havana (film), 84 Seven Deadly Sins, The (1952 film), 19, 73–75, 82, 113, 227n61 Sex with a Smile (film), 99 Shakespeare, William, 43, 115, 126 short story cycle, 9, 51–2, 81, 150, 228n11 Show of Shows, The (film), 42–3, 67, 137, 227n8 Sideways (film), 203 Sidney, George, 70, 71 Sinclair, Michael Steven, 5–6, 205–6 Sinkel, Bernhard, 182 Siren Spirits (film), 157 situatedness, 82, 162, 209 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (film), 19, 86 size, 83, 86–8, 148, 204 sketch comedy, 40, 148, 154, 155 sketch film, 7, 8, 10, 13, 16–18, 32, 40, 42, 45, 47, 52, 63, 72, 74–5, 77, 82, 98, 103, 109, 148–9, 150, 153–5, 158, 161, 164, 218, 224n30, 224n31, 227n62, 243n12; see also sketch comedy Sklar, Robert, 124 Skopje Remixed (film), 165 Skyler, Lisanne, 49–50 Slide, Anthony, 126, 137 Slidin’ – All Bright And Colorful (film), 186 Smart, Ralph, 9, 139, 140 Smith, Kent, 118, 122–3 Sobchack, Vivian, 64 Soderbergh, Steven, 32 Solás, Humberto, 36

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inde x 275 Solidarity, Solidarity (film), 186 Song of the South (film), 51 Sordi, Alberto, 154, 155, 242n1 Southern Winds (film), 217 spectatorship, 3, 4, 11, 13, 15, 22, 31, 34, 58, 62, 65, 69, 74, 76–7, 82, 100, 101–6, 108, 117, 118, 140, 158, 163, 168, 179, 188, 189, 201 Spielberg, Steven, 108 Spirits of the Dead (film), 36, 66, 70, 95, 110, 175, 216 Spoon River Anthology (stories), 52 Spotlights on a Massacre (film), 176 Stage Door Canteen (film), 115 Staiger, Janet, 39 stardom, 7, 38, 42, 43, 44, 69, 74, 88, 93, 95, 104–105, 106, 117, 121, 129, 133, 137, 158, 240n3 State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters (film), 182–3 Steinbeck, John, 51, 136 Stevenson, Robert, 115, 119 Stewart, Susan, 46, 99, 219, 223n24 Stories of Love (film), 218 Stories on Human Rights (film), 4, 86, 176–7 Story of a Cheat (film), 49 Story of Three Loves, The (film), 19, 101–3 Sturminger, Michael, 182–3 Sturridge, Charles, 100 Sulik, Martin, 194 Sunday Lovers (film), 220–1 supranational, 23, 110, 183, 185, 188–90, 197, 201 Surrealism, 40, 91, 92, 93, 190 Sweet, Blanche, 39 Swiss Made (film), 217 synchronized sound, 41 Szumowska, Malgorzata, 199 Tale of Five Women, A (film), 94 Tales from Beyond (film), 131 Tales from the Crypt (film), 53, 131 Tales from the Golden Age (film), 19, 77 Tales from the New World (film), 168 Tales of Borges (film), 38 Tales of Hoffmann, The (film), 55, 63 Tales of Kish (film), 71–2 Tales of Manhattan (film), 38, 103, 105, 109, 223n19, 225n38 Tales of Paris (film), 109, 158 Tales of the Unusual (film), 30 Tanguy, Yves, 91

Tanovic, Danis, 212, 214 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 36, 59, 98 Tarr, Béla, 184, 189, 198, 200 Tel-Aviv Stories (film), 166, 245n24 television, 7, 17, 38, 108, 170, 185, 187, 200, 225n46, 228n14, 234n33, 241n1 Temple, Julien, 100 Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (film), 186 Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (film), 186 terrorism, 107, 151, 177–9, 180, 181–3, 212, 214, 245n4 Terror Tract (film), 131 test screening, 101–2 Thank Your Lucky Stars (film), 115 That’s Entertainment! (film), 14, 15 Then and Now: Beyond Borders and Differences (film), 4 These Crazy, Crazy Women (film), 154 Thin Man, The (film series), 13 This and That (film), 151 This England (film), 125–6 This is the Enemy! (film), 114, 238n3 Thompson, Kristin, 39 Three Ages, The (film), 39–40 Three Caballeros, The (film), 71 Three Cases of Murder (film), 55 3:11: A Sense of Home (film), 217 Three . . . Extremes (film), 78–81, 233n30 Three Fables of Love (film), 70 Three in One (film), 77 Three Nights of Love (film), 156 Three Songs about Lenin (film), 35 Three Tales of Chekhov (film), 38, 240n10 Three Times Bucharest (film), 164 Three Waltzes, The (film), 55 Thrilling (film), 169 Tickets (film), 21–7, 30–2, 66, 143 Time Piece (film), 85 Times Gone By (film), 7–8, 161, 236n22 Tinkcom, Matthew, 62 title card, 42, 56, 58, 64, 161, 190, 206, 235n8; see also episode title To Each His Cinema (film), 86 Tognazzi, Ugo, 93, 154, 220 To, Johnnie, 92, 225n44 Tokyo! (film), 78–9, 81 Tokyo Decameron: Three Tales of Madness and Sexuality (film), 52 Tokyo Olympiad (film), 180 Tokyo Tales (film), 165 Torture Garden (film), 99, 131, 223n19 train, 20–6, 30, 31, 137, 225n43 Train of Events (film), 20–1, 135, 225n38

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transauthorial cinema, 3, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 37, 58, 69, 76, 78, 82–4, 90, 92, 130, 164, 176–7, 187, 201, 209, 217 Trapped Ashes (film), 108 Triangle (film), 34, 91, 92–3, 225n44 Trio (film), 8, 9, 16, 64, 102, 131, 132, 135, 140, 141, 143, 144–5, 234n39 Troell, Jan, 190, 246n16 Troll Garden, The (stories), 52 Troublesome Night (film), 53–4, 245n2 Truffaut, François, 12, 94, 234n40 Tube Tales (film), 26–9, 225n46 Turning, The (film), 82 Twice Told Tales (film), 47, 131 Twilight Zone: The Movie (film), 108 Two Daughters (film), 72 Two-Fisted Tales (film), 107 Tykwer, Tom, 4, 207, 209 Tyler, Parker, 7, 19 Underground Zero (film), 176 van Gogh, Theo, 200–1 variety, 9, 18, 40–1, 43, 46, 47, 51, 66, 81, 113, 158, 218, 228n14 Variety Stars (film), 47 Variety Time (film), 46 vaudeville, 8, 9, 18, 39–43, 46–7, 51, 70, 81, 113, 137, 142, 162, 228n8, 228n14 Vault of Horror (film), 53–4, 131 V/H/S (film), 108 Vie est à nous, La (film), 35, 174 Villaverde, Teresa, 193 Visconti, Luchino, 86, 88, 98, 148 Visions of Eight (film), 100, 177–81, 183, 202–3 Visions of Europe (film), 86, 110, 175, 177, 183–201, 215, 246n16, 247n18 Visitors (film), 17 Vitti, Monica, 156, 157, 158, 159 Vogelfrei (film), 83 Von Trier, Lars, 86 Wajda, Andrzej, 94 Walsh, Aisling, 193–4, 198 Ways of Love (film), 20, 243n14

Welch, Rachel, 160 Werewolf Tales (film), 131 Wet Dreams (film), 99 We, the Women (film), 98, 151 What’s It All About (film), 66 Where Are You Going on Holiday? (film), 155, 243n12 While New York Sleeps (film), 47, 164, 232n27 Whitehead, Peter, 166 Whiteman, Paul, 44–6 White, Red, Yellow, Pink (film), 155 Wigley, Mark, 63 Wilcox, Herbert, 115, 119, 122, 240n3 Wilde, Oscar, 208, 209, 211 Wilder, Billy, 67, 71 window shopping, 15; see also Friedberg, Anne Winesburg, Ohio (stories), 52, 228n11 Wind Rose, The (film), 4, 167 Winter Days (film), 90, 93 Wise Words (film), 94 Witches, The (film), 98 Wolper, David, 100, 178, 179, 181 Woman is a Wonderful Thing (film), 150 Woman Times Seven (film), 98 Women of the World (film), 150 Wong, Kar-wai, 11, 32 World By Night, The (film), 161 World War II, 104, 109, 113, 115–16, 124, 126, 134, 181, 215; see also Forever and a Day (film) Yank in London, A (film), 122 Year 01, The (film), 30, 235n8 Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (film), 66, 98, 160, 242n1 You’re Laughing (film), 72 Zagreb Stories (film), 19 Zavattini, Cesare, 97–8, 151–2, 153, 242n6 Zemeckis, Robert, 107 Zetterling, Mai, 100, 179, 181, 242n4 Ziegfeld Follies (film), 55, 62–3, 70, 228n8 Ziegler, Regina, 99 Zurlini, Velerio, 169

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Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.