This month for the Deep Focus Notebook, we sat down with Hannah Jack, fearless leader of our highly popular and long-running Classic Hollywood discussion series, in advance of her seminar on Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Our conversation ranged from Hannah’s earliest experiences with movies to her thoughts on what makes Wilder such a unique talent. Read on below!

How did you first get hooked on classic movies? Is there a particular viewing experience you remember?

My parents were both big classic movie fans, so as a kid, I was always watching Shirley Temple, the Marx Brothers, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, The Wizard of Oz, and other movies like that. I can remember one early viewing experience that was very defining for me. When I was eight years old, I was working on a third grade project upstairs in my house. After finishing, I came downstairs and found my mom and my younger sister sitting on the couch watching a movie. Fred Astaire was in it, but Ginger Rogers was not. The movie was Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby. I was stunned, because suddenly I realized that this person who I knew in these movies with Ginger Rogers was in a movie without her, and I was like – “What? He did other things?” I can't overstate how much that moment made me want to learn more about this world. A lightbulb went on for me, and I wanted to see all of the things that he did. I was eight years old, and I was already interested in becoming a little expert on all of these movies.

In addition to running Deep Focus seminars, you work as a writer for Turner Classic Movies. How did you become involved?

I’ve been a TCM fan for as long as I can remember. I went with my mom on the very first TCM cruise, which they hosted back in 2011. I was still in college at the time. Lots of people were on the cruise, including TCM hosts Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz, and some very famous classic movie celebrities. It was like heaven for me. I got a chance to ask if there was going to be another opportunity for fans to be guest programmers on air, as there had been a few years earlier. This led to me being put in touch with Charlie Tabesh, who's the head of programming for TCM. The folks at TCM are such generous spirits, and they want to open doors whenever they can. So one thing led to another, and I was invited to be one of the twenty “ultimate fan” programmers who joined the network to celebrate TCM’s 20th anniversary in 2014.

For this celebration, TCM brought the twenty of us to Atlanta, and each of us got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to introduce a movie of our choice with Robert Osborne on air. While I was there, I had many opportunities to get to know the people who work for TCM, and we kept in touch afterward. In the meantime, I was pursuing a career as a teacher and writer in New York City. I was working on a novel and was pivoting towards a career as a writer after many years as a teacher. When I left my teaching job, I was looking for writing work, and I reached back out to some of the people at TCM. Fortuitously, at the time, they were launching the former streaming service FilmStruck, in partnership with Criterion. It was brand new, and they had some hosts who were going to be providing introductions that you could watch with the movies, so they needed someone to write those introductions. I was given a kind of audition with a couple of scripts, and they liked what I wrote. I started writing for Alicia Malone, one of the FilmStruck hosts. Then, in 2018, when Alicia was brought on as a host on TCM, she very generously requested to keep me as her writer. At the same time, TCM also brought Dave Karger on as a new host, and he wanted to work with me, too. I’ve been so lucky over the last four years to get to write for all five TCM hosts, and I regularly write for Ben Mankiewicz, Dave Karger, and Jacqueline Stewart. Through my work for TCM, I also write hosted movie introductions that appear on HBO Max and at TCM/Fathom Events presentations of classic movies presented in theaters across the country.

This summer, I’ve been working on a really exciting series called “Follow the Thread” that is on TCM and simultaneously on HBO Max. Inspired by the Met Gala, it’s a cinematic journey through the history of fashion and costume design. Recently, I also got to work on an exciting spotlight on LGBTQ+ filmmakers that aired on the network. In July, there’s going to be a really fun spotlight on the history of rock ‘n roll. And in August, TCM will present its annual “Summer Under the Stars” marathon: 31 days of programming, with 24 hours each day devoted to a different classic Hollywood Star. It’s always an amazing opportunity to take a deep dive into each star’s filmography. These are just a few of the fun programming themes I’ve had a chance to work on lately.

You’re working on a YA book that ties into your love of classic film. Would you mind telling us a bit about your interest in writing for that in that age group, and how you bring your passion for literature and movies together?

I was a high school English teacher in my previous life, so I feel a special kinship for the teenage age bracket. I think that when I sit down to write creatively, the voice that comes out is for that age group. I think that people who write fiction have that one kind of age bracket that they gravitate toward, because that's where their head is. In terms of my love of movies, the book that I have out to publishers right now is directly inspired by movies by Alfred Hitchcock, specifically Rear Window. I love to do retellings of classic movies that make them relevant to contemporary teenagers, because I think these are such great stories to tell with a new lens. I also think that it's a good gateway to get teenagers interested in the classics.

People too often think of “education” and “entertainment” as separate categories, but with a program like Deep Focus we are working to bridge that gap. Still, some people have a hard time getting over the feeling that older movies are boring, and that watching them might feel like work. What would you say to those people and how do you work to combine education and fun in approaching these talks?

I learned this early on in my work as an educator: we are interested in things we know about. That's a fundamental human trait. When we zone out of something and think it's boring, it's often because we simply don't know anything about it. We have no entry point. I think that's true of people who say they don't like sports, or people who say they don't like museums. I learned this taking elementary school kids to a museum. If they didn't know what they were going there to look for, they weren’t hooked. But if we spent a week studying Vincent van Gogh, and then we went to the museum to see his paintings, they were like “Oh wow, that's Starry Night, that's so cool!” because they knew something about it. That’s where Deep Focus comes in. When you know more about what you're watching, you know what you're looking for, and it's more fun. I think it’s the more you know, the more you want to know.

I would also say to people who rule out old movies that there are what I like to call “gateway classics.” One example would be The Apartment. Billy Wilder is a great director of gateway classics because he had a sensibility that still feels relevant. A lot of Hitchcock movies, especially his 1950s movies, like North by Northwest or Rear Window, are movies that a lot of people today can get very into. The same is true for a lot of movies that William Wyler directed. He was such a gifted storyteller. These are movies that I find I can sit people down to watch, and they're like, “Oh, that was fun!”

I’m glad you brought up Billy Wilder, because wanted to talk to you about him. You recently gave a talk on Ninotchka, and have one coming up on Double Indemnity. We have also talked about Witness for the Prosecution and Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder worked as a screenwriter and/or director on all four. What is it about Wilder that keeps us coming back? What does his success say about the role of immigrants in Hollywood at the time?

The thing about Billy Wilder is that his movies tend to be very well-crafted, and they're also very varied in genre and style and tone. He had a knack for blending poignant drama with witty humor and bringing out powerhouse performances in such a range of stars. More often than not, he was able to juggle all of these qualities and create something memorable, meaningful, and charming. I think that’s something that a lot of people really respond to.

When I'm bringing movies to a group, I want to pick ones that a lot of people are going to react to. If you look at Wilder’s filmography, you have everything from the early comedies he was writing, like Ninotchka, to the first Hollywood movie about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, to a gripping drama about newspaper reporting, Ace in the Hole. Then you have Stalag 17, Sabrina, and The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, and Sunset Boulevard. There’s such a spectrum of what he tackled, not to mention Double Indemnity, which is the landmark film noir. I think he just had his finger in every kind of thing that was going on in classic Hollywood and is rightly held up as one of the great filmmakers of that era.

In terms of his role as an immigrant in America – so many Hollywood directors at the time were immigrants. Billy Wilder really had this ear for American language and vernacular. It’s pretty incredible that this little German man who came here not really speaking English created some of the most “American” movies of his era. He also brought a European kind of sensibility to things. Ernst Lubitsch, who was in many ways his mentor, really made European films in America with a very European attitude towards things like sex and marriage. Billy Wilder had some of that attitude, but he was able to pick up what was going on in America and tell stories that felt very relevant for American audiences. These immigrants, who were such inventive creators, found ways to connect with the country that became home for them. Billy Wilder is a great example of how people who move here can have an ear and an eye for what's going on, in a way that people who were born in America might not.

Both movies you are presenting on, Vagabond and Vivre Sa Vie, could be seen as stories about “fallen women” and both track a female protagonist’s precarious lifestyle and, ultimately, untimely death. How does each movie play with or resist the tropes of this kind of narrative?

Both Godard and Varda are interested in telling fresh stories about relationships between men and women, so it's not surprising that both of them would construct these complicated female protagonists. It's not really easy to say with certainty what Godard was hoping to achieve with Vivre Sa Vie, but my impression is that he's both interested in constructing fresh representations of women, and also somewhat beholden to the codes of female representation from more classical films. For example, in a film like, Contempt, Godard raises questions about of how an actress like Brigitte Bardot had been represented by other people, but the film also participates in these codes by filming her nude body.

Varda, I think, is more radical in her representation of femininity in in Vagabond than Godard is in Vivre Sa Vie. I think Varda was really interested in in creating a character who is not necessarily physically attractive. Sandrine Bonnaire is a beautiful woman, but in that film, she was not costumed in a way that accentuated her figure. She was wearing dirty clothes, and she was asked to allow her hair to get dirty over the course of the film. Varda resists the easy pleasures that most filmmakers are interested in in terms of female representation. It's a radical thing to build a film around a woman who is meant to be unattractive, who does not have a pleasant personality, and who is inexplicable, utterly ambiguous. I think the film remains powerful, partly for that reason alone. Mona is a sexually active character, but Varda resists the rendering of the sexual woman as spectacle. She wants us to think about Mona on the road, Mona encountering other people who have very different views of her. Some people see her as a symbol of freedom, some people see her as prey, some people see her as a bad girl who needs to behave, and some people see her as someone in need of help. I think Varda is interested in exploring all of those elements, more than Mona as a woman who is attractive to men.

Vivre Sa Vie and Vagabond both disrupt the flow of their narrative by dividing it into segments. Vivre Sa Vie is divided into chapters, and Vagabond demarcates episodes with distinctive tracking shots and incorporated documentary-style interviews. What effect does this have on the storytelling?

That is such a good question. Both Godard and Varda were interested in structure, and the idea of the tableau. Both were also very interested in the work of Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and theorist. One of Brecht’s ideas was that it was important to both draw the viewer in and tell a good story, but also to keep the viewer at a distance, and ask the viewer to think about structure and narrative and style and politics. I think both Godard and Varda chose to create distinctive segments in their films in order to inspire the viewer to think about storytelling options and stylistic experimentation, and to question: What am I seeing? It keeps the viewer active.

Halfway through the shooting of Vagabond, Varda says she was struck by something that that troubled her, and it was that the film seemed to be emerging as a film about the people that Mona would meet in her travels. She realized that she wanted to emphasize Mona's movements instead, her walking. She wanted people to get an impression of what it felt like to walk and walk and walk. She wanted to emphasize the sound of Mona's footsteps on gravel versus pavement versus a field. She really wanted to capture the texture of Mona on the move. So she added twelve tracking shots that all move from right to left that feature Mona walking. They interrupt the flow of the narrative and ask us to contemplate her existence. Additionally, the tracking shots use graphic continuity in an interesting way. The beginnings and endings of those shots announce and echo one another.

Vagabond was made in 1985, well after what would traditionally be considered the “New Wave” period. Is it still productive to view it as a “New Wave” film? How else might we view it?

While key figures of that movement continued to work for decades after the initial wave of films in the late 1950’s and early sixties, most people think that the New Wave itself ended with the political events of May ’68. I would put Vagabond in a larger category of European art cinema. Varda’s techniques for creating ambiguity, and the film’s focus on a very unusual kind of character align here with this tradition. Another category we could put Vagabond in would be feminist film. Varda is very interested in thinking carefully about the representation of women, and also the condition of women in society.

Vagabond does retain many elements of the New Wave era, however. Like many New Wave films, it was made on a relatively low budget. She struggled to get funding for the film, and it was only when the film was accepted by the Venice Film Festival and won the Golden Lion that Varda was able to get a distributor interested. Another New Wave connection is that Varda also embraced improvisatory filmmaking during the Vagabond shoot. She made some pretty consequential decisions to incorporate elements that were not in the screenplay into the finished film.

In Vagabond, Varda focuses not just on a woman, but a woman on the edges of society. She returns to the margins again with her later work, The Gleaners and I. Why do you think she was drawn to these people that others pay less attention to? What is the effect of her centering them in her work?

Varda was always interested in people who were marginalized for one reason or another. Back in 1958, she made a short film called L’Opéra-Mouffe, which was about the street, Rue Mouffetard, in Paris, and her impetus for that film was to create portraits of homeless alcoholics living on that street. Right from the beginning she's curious about outsiders, and she wants to tell their stories, but not in a simplistic way that would simply garner sympathy for them. She's not interested in what we might call the social problem film, but she is interested in telling stories about people who typically remain invisible to others, and across the 60s and 70s she worked to represent women’s live in particular through her filmmaking. By the time she gets to Vagabond in 1985, she's not making a polemical film about feminism as much as creating a portrait about a woman who is mysterious, rebellious, on her own, and engaged in non-stop traveling. Who is Mona? Why is she doing what she's doing? We don't really ever get to know the answers to that question. Varda is instead interested in inviting us to look at a woman on the road, and she wants us to think about the various responses to a free and rebellious woman. Mona is not a sympathetic character and yet we can't take our eyes off her. it's a fascinating film. To advertise the film Varda put posters in the Paris subway, featuring Mona in profile, walking, looking dirty and unfriendly, and the line was, “Would you pick her up? Would you help her? Would you let her into your home?” The film asks, what is our debt or commitment to people who are fragile but not immediately attractive or friendly? What do we owe them? What can we do? The answers are not clear.

If a feminist film is a celebration of female strength and audacity and power and ingenuity, then Vagabond is not a feminist film. But if you think about feminist film as a way of helping us think about women in all their variety, then Vagabond is a feminist film. And Agnès Varda, like Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and Céline Sciamma, experiments not only with unusual female characterization, but also narrative ambiguity, and unconventional style.

You got to know Varda personally before she passed away. Is there anything else you wish I had asked you, or anything else in your conversations with Varda over the years that you think would be important for our patrons to know?

Varda was the consummate artist. She just never stopped looking at the world, asking questions about it, and thinking about how she could create art from what she was seeing. I can give you one anecdote. In the summer of 2018, her last summer, she was fighting cancer, going for these daily treatments at the Marie Curie Institute. And yet she continued to work. I spent several weeks in her production company, doing some research for a project, so I had the great good fortune to you watch her working. She worked endlessly, but also found time for friends and art exhibitions. In the mornings, she would go for her treatment, and then she would come back and have lunch, and maybe take a nap, then she would work all day and into the evening. She was putting the finishing touches on an installation that was going to be mounted in Spain. She wrote and delivered a speech about the history of women in film. She was making her last film, Varda by Agnès, which she showed at the Berlin Film Festival in February, before passing away in March. So, not only was she am accomplished filmmaker and a great photographer and multi-media installation artist. She was also a great model for how to live an engaged and intellectually challenging life to the very end.

Amy Heller and Dennis Doros are the founders of the independent film restoration and distribution company, Milestone films. We spoke to them before their upcoming seminar on the silent, cross-dressing sky pirate caper from 1915 Filibus. In our wide-ranging conversation, we covered topics from film preservation to gender identity to disrupting the film canon.

You are the founders of Milestone Films, a film restoration and distribution company. I wanted to start by asking what is most exciting about working in film preservation today.

Amy: I think for me it's the idea of bringing everything I'm learning about history, culture, and protest, intersectionality, and all those all the things that I'm thinking about in other parts of my life being to the practice. I increasingly approaching it with a real thoughtful idea of what we're hoping our efforts can do in terms of changing the canon, changing the way people think about twentieth and twenty-first century history. Before I started in film a million years ago, I studied history, and the kind of history I was interested in was working-class history. In what we do, I focus on the idea that ordinary people are important, and that their stories are as valuable as any other part of history.

Dennis: Beyond the philosophical, I can speak to what is most exciting on the technical side of restoration. When I was growing up, analog restoration meant that you were duplicating the flaws that have accumulated on films over the ages. With digital tools and the ability to transfer back to analog, you can create a version that is as good as it was on opening night at times. This has, however, raised philosophical concerns: if you consider a film as artifact, some archives are keeping the flaws in to show what time has done to these films.

Amy: I’ll just say one more thing -- since I was inspired by you, Dennis. One thing that we've seen in our own careers is that when we started, the world of film archives was very secretive, clannish, completely dominated or largely dominated by white men. What we've seen, thanks to the rise of the graduate programs in media archiving, is that now we have people who know each other at different archives, who like each other, who have worked together, and we have many more women and people of color. That has really changed the priorities and the practices. One of the changed priorities is access. For people who like us who, for whom access is everything, it's been really empowering.

I just was wondering if you would mind telling me a little bit more about the part of Milestone’s mission that focusing on disrupting the film canon, and why that's such an important thing to do right now.

Amy: It's always important to disrupt the cannon -- now and always. When we started, we weren't really thinking about that, honestly. We were thinking about the kinds of films we cared about, and we were interested in bringing images from the past into the present. So, we started with silent and early sound exploration films, and then we distributed the documentaries of our friend Philip Haas. But over the years, especially since we've worked with Charles Burnett, we've really experienced -- not just thought about, but experienced -- being in an audience where a film is meaningful in ways that we didn't anticipate. We've seen black audiences respond to films in a way that we didn't know they would respond. We didn't respond because they weren't images from our own childhoods, our own lives, and so we've seen the power of that.

Dennis: We always wanted to bring out films that nobody else had considered, that were too difficult to acquire, that were too difficult to restore. When people said, “what do you have coming up?” they would be excited until we told them. They had no clue what we were doing, because they didn't know the films. But some of those the same films that were inaccessible, not possible to restore, were by women, by Latinos, by African Americans, and so we sort of fell into it that way, through our own desire to bring out those films that were too difficult to bring out. The difficulty has always been a fun challenge.

Let’s talk about Filibus, the film you’ll be presenting on for Deep Focus. How did you discover this film?

Amy: We were in Bologna for the Cinema Ritrovato festival. The Cinema Ritrovato festival is sort of like being in an oven -- so hot it's unbelievable and the theaters are not well air conditioned. So we were sitting in the piazza and having espresso or something, with our friend, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi [of the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam]. We had decided we couldn’t acquire anything because we had so many films to bring out. Still, I was talking to a Elif, and Elif starts telling me the story of Filibus the jewel thief -- the cross-dressing, the dirigible. By the time she was done. I was like -- we have to distribute it! She sold it so well! I went in like “no Elif, we're not gonna pick up anything” and, by the end of it, I was like “you got me.” She's a wonderful archivist, and she has real excitement and passion for what she does. It's really fun to work with her and the Eye Film Institute.

Dennis: It’s important to remember that restorations like this are collaborations. Everybody wants to make out singular heroes. There were so many people involved in a 60-minute silent film, dozens of people were involved in this.

The title character is very interesting. She wears all these different disguises, has these different personas. How do you think both of the film and the character experiment with gender identity?

Amy: Right now I'm reading Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, so just this is in my head. We have a trans daughter, and we were already working on Filibus when we found out that our daughter was trans, but these are issues that are close to our hearts. I think Filibus really is a fabulous, queer. She's so fascinating. She's an outlaw in so many ways. She's a thief, she's an actor, she's kind of a grifter, she's trans in some way. And she's queer, because she's also romancing a woman.

Dennis: The other thing I want to say is that very little was known about Valeria Creti, the actress who plays Filibus. Nobody even knew that she was the one who played the role until a few years back, because David Emery discovered it while researching the film and looking at contemporary photographs. It's fairly obvious that she has a dance background -- she has this grace of movement. The director also showcases her grace in such a way that it's mesmerizing. Even back in the 1910’s when many women had starring roles in films, Valeria Creti really stands out for being above the pack in her movements and expressions. It's really an incredible performance if you look at it that way.

Why is it important for people today to still watch and appreciate films from over a 100 years ago?

Dennis: To paraphrase, Lin Manuel Miranda, art is art is art is art is art. Film is film. The history of film is not just last week. It's exciting, there is a flow to it. There's a sophistication, there's a brilliance in 1915 as there is in 2022, and maybe even more so -- but let's not get into that. Let's just say that there were films with artistic capabilities that were as exciting then as they are now. You don't go into a museum to see what was painted in the last week. In this film, we get to see Italy a month before World War I, so there is a view into history that is exciting as well. It's funny -- when Filibus came out, it was not considered very advanced or very interesting. The special effects weren't that good, but we now see this amateurism as exciting. There's a quality about it that makes it more real.

Amy: Back to the issue of gender nonconformity. Growing up, a lot of us felt that gender nonconformity didn't exist with the exception of, say, Renée Richards. It didn't exist in the culture, and I thought it didn't exist period. But, in many ways Filibus, is more playful and interested in gender nonconformity than most films are now. What gender means is not in necessarily in our hormones or in our anatomy. It's in our culture, in our history, in our world. A world where Filibus can dress like a guy and be a famous jewel thief is a different world from the world of The Donna Reed Show, which we grew up with, or the or the Brady Bunch, you know I mean. it's important that we rescue other images from the past, other people's lives.

Richard Neupert is Charles H. Wheatley Professor of the Arts at the University of Georgia, author of A History of the French New Wave Cinema, and a board member for the non-profit Ciné theater in Athens, Georgia. We spoke with him before his upcoming presentations on The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player about Truffaut, the New Wave, and more.

You teach a course on French Film history. How do your students tend to respond to the French New wave and Truffaut in particular?


In the French Film class, I think everybody walking in the door doesn’t know a whole lot about French cinema except really early stuff. They’ve already studied Lumière and Méliès and maybe some 20’s things, but they all have heard of the New Wave before they walk in the door. One thing about the French New Wave is that it kind of permeates all different kinds of film history classes and introduction to cinema classes, so it already has a reputation. I think that they tend to react to it sometimes by being surprised by how diverse the output is, but in general they are usually kind of looking forward to it. They either have a sense that this is something that’s pertinent to them in terms of low-cost filmmaking or they feel like “these are these old black and white museum pieces” and “I’ve seen 400 Blows” or “I’ve seen Breathless” and that’s all I need to know.” It’s fun to teach it. I think it half teaches itself, but there’s also a kind of resistance or a simplification of the French New Wave that we kind of have to overcome as we go.

I think almost everybody can appreciate the heartfelt element in most Truffaut films. They’re humanist and, in some ways, everybody is both sympathetic and pathetic in a Truffaut film. Really serious film students tend to already privilege Godard and know a couple of his films, but they also assume sometimes that Godard is the much more interesting filmmaker, while Truffaut is more romantic. So, they tend to really discover that both filmmakers are a lot more complex than they think.

This is the first Truffaut film featuring the character of the Antoine Doinel, but he went on to make many more about this character as he grew up. Do you know why Truffaut chose to follow this particular character and what do you think the effect is of following him throughout the years?

Because this feature launches his career, it is natural that he was very close to a number of the people involved with it, but Antoine really does become this almost avatar for Truffaut. Francois Truffaut’s life was always intertwined with why he got into cinema, how he wrote criticism, what kind of movies he liked, and I think he really had a sense of that coming back to Antoine Doinel movies after a number of years was like a homecoming. It kept him grounded in terms of telling stories that in one way or another connected with his life. They weren’t all autobiographical to the same extent, but they all spoke to different stages of his life. Part of this was his incredible connection with the lead actor in all his Doinel films, Jean-Pierre Léaud.

In this coming-of-age tale, Antoine is repeatedly viewed as a juvenile delinquent by his teachers and parents. The audience, however, can see that he is a very sensitive youth with troublemaking as just one side to him. What is the film trying to say about youth and authority?

I think the film wants us to be sensitive to Antoine and his problems, but also being embarrassed by him at certain points and just disappointed by him. Truffaut really wanted to bring to the screen a character who reflected his memory of that era, which was not an easy time for him. I was just thinking about this with Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast: there aren’t many movies where you really feel like the director or the narrator is actually in the shoes of a young character. There’s lots of movies about kids, but there aren’t that many that capture both embarrassing and joyous aspects of childhood at the same time. I think Truffaut wanted to capture a transitional period in his life and a transitional period in France in the aftermath of World War II, when people’s lives were changing very rapidly around them.

This is Truffaut’s first feature film. How did it help him transform from primarily working and being seen as a film critic to a director?

He said that when he was reviewing films, he wasn’t thinking like a critic, he was thinking like a director. In his late teens and early twenties he was writing about all kinds of movies globally: Japanese films, South Korean Films, American films, and French films, and he was providing these really incredible insights. He really was a really passionate, sometimes cruel critic who could praised things and unpack them. He could be thrilled with one part of a movie and attack some other aspect of it, and he really felt that he should think this way about his own films. He wanted to apply his own rules to them. He wrote articles early on saying: “Get out of the studio. Plant your camera on the streets.” Much of The 400 Blows is shot on location, even the school. He shot in a real school, not a movie set of a school. A lot of things that he had already been criticizing or also encouraging in his reviews he put to the test with his first feature. A lot of his fans couldn’t wait to go see it, and a lot of his enemies wanted to see what he was going to do.

This film is dedicated to André Bazin. Could you talk about his connection to Truffaut?

As most people would agree now, Bazin was the most important film critic of the 20th century. He was someone who came out of teaching and got fascinated with cinema. He started writing criticism during the war and after WWII. He would go around to ciné clubs, where he met people like Truffaut, and talked about movies. He eventually became a major figure in French Culture and a kind of father figure to Truffaut. In the early 50’s, he helped launch Cahiers du Cinema, and really helped get that established. He brought Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claud Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard on board as well as Truffaut. He really opened the doors for a new generation of film critics and cared deeply about film style. He wanted people to care about camera placement, lighting, acting, long takes, and things like that. He taught people to be much more careful and analytical in how they talked about movies. He helped launch the idea of auteur writer-directors, when other countries were paying much more attention to who was in front of the camera.

At the start of Professor Erin Huang’s recent Deep Focus seminar on Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, she confessed to having a complicated relationship with the film. While she stressed its importance, she also expressed some frustration that almost all of her students in her courses on Chinese and Sinophone cinemas pick it as their favorite at the end of the semester. Participants at her talk were curious to know other Asian directors and films she would recommend. Professor Huang kindly provided me with a syllabus for her Chinese Cinemas Class. Here are the films she shows her students, in addition to In the Mood for Love.

The Piano in a Factory (2010) directed by Zhang Meng

Meishi Street (2006) directed by Ou Ning

Yellow Earth (1984) directed by Chen Kaige

Ash is Purest White (2018) directed by Jia Zhangke

The Midnight After (2014) directed by Fruit Chan

A City of Sadness (1989) directed by Hou Hsiao-hsian

Terrorizers (1986) directed by Edward Yang

Beyond the Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013) directed by Yuwen Hsuing

Professor Huang also made a special recommendation of all of Tsai Ming-liang’s films for us. She said that his films are very experimental and that he is one of the biggest names in Asian art house cinema, characterizing them as must-sees. Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), which Erin called her favorite of his movies, is listed as optional on the syllabus.

Would you mind telling me how you first heard about the French New Wave and got interested in it?

I went to the University of San Diego. I studied with Manny Farber who was a famous film critic and painter and I had heard the expression “French New Wave” when I was in high school. One day in Manny’s class we came in and he said “I’m gonna show you a movie by a still photographer who became a filmmaker.” “Angus Varda” is what I heard, so I just assumed it was a man. When I saw the name Agnès Varda I went “Oh god, she’s a woman!” A female director, you know, it was like my head exploded. I suddenly had a really different relationship with the movie, a more sisterly or proprietary feeling than I usually do because it was by a woman. It struck me as really different and then I went to the library and started reading “Sight and Sound” and “Film Comment” and learned more about the French New Wave more than a decade after it happened.

Breathless is the film most closely associated with The French New Wave to the point where it has almost become synonymous with the movement. Why do you think that is?

I think in part because of the way Godard approached the material. Generally people say the first year of the New Wave is 1959 because of The 400 Blows, but Breathless came out in 1960 and it was really a movie that Truffaut was going to make. Truffaut had other plans because The 400 Blows was so big, so he gave the idea for the screenplay to his friend Jean-Luc Godard. The 400 Blows was melancholy and personal, and Breathless was anarchic and it kind of illustrates Godard’s aphorism that movies should have beginnings, middles, and ends, but not particularly in that order. All of those jump cuts and jittery energy was exciting. It was kind of a love story between France and America that reflected the New Wave Filmmaker’s love for American films and film genres. It just seemed new. There was this new generation coming up.

I was going to ask you about the jump cuts actually! Can you first try to explain what a jump cut is for people who don’t know and then can you tell me why it was important?

For a jump cut, you edit from a frame and then you jump through a sequence of frames to a new frame. It’s kind of startling. Physically you kind of jump from one part of the time frame to a new part. Time is discontinuous and you accelerate in time. Godard had to that because his producer said his film was too long, so he just cut it.

The protagonist of Breathless, Michel, is obsessed with Humphrey Bogart and tries to adapt some of his personality traits. What does this say about Godard’s relationship with American cinema at the time?

I think that during WWII there weren’t a lot of American movies coming over and the Nazi occupation was basically prescribing what French people saw, so after the war is over, you suddenly see these imports of all the American movies they missed, a lot of them with Bogart. In the same way we Americans might have revered the manliness of Jean Gabin, the young French filmmakers like the coolness of Bogart, whose face was a little paralyzed. He was a little expressionless and mysterious. I think the homage to Bogart and the veneration of Dean Martin in Godard’s career was kind of this veneration of tough guy Americans.

You’re currently working on a project on Agnès Varda and will be leading a talk on one of her films for us in just a couple of months. What do you seem as similar or different between the work of the two directors you’ll be talking about in the Deep Focus French New Wave series?

Interestingly, they were very, very close, despite what Godard does to Varda in Faces/Places. Godard and Truffaut wanted to kill the cinema of the father. Agnès came at film from the point of still photography and she blundered into it, so she didn’t have any theories. She had scarcely seen ten movies before she made one. She came in without the baggage of having to quote other movies or make movies about movies. But both Varda and Godard are looking for a different kind of cinema language and eliciting emotion from the audience. They don’t tell you what to think like many American movies do, they kind of leave it to you.

Why did you choose to lead a seminar on In the Mood for Love? What makes this film interesting or appealing to you?

As a scholar of Chinese and Sinophone cinemas, Wong Kar-wai’s films provide the lens into one of the most geopolitically complex archipelagic cities that is called “Hong Kong.” For me at least, Hong Kong is unlike any other big metropolitan cities that frequently appear as the settings of film or television productions. It is different due to its histories of colonialisms and the fact that it is a port city created for the need of maritime capitalism in the nineteenth century. In my view, Wong Kar-wai’s films that were produced from the 1990s to the present tell the embodied experience of Hong Kong as it reestablishes relationships with Britain and China. In the Mood for Love is one specific text through which we can see “Hong Kong” and the unique aesthetic language of film it motivates, especially given the film’s production after Hong Kong’s handover to China.



What do you find most interesting about Wong Kar-wai in general as a director?



I think Wong Kar-wai’s films have a transnational appeal because they are quintessential Hong Kong films. Hong Kong in this case does not only refer to a location. Hong Kong’s history that began in the nineteenth century as one of the first treaty ports opened to expand British colonial capitalism is a history of globalization, movement, and displacement. The characters in Wong’s films are extraordinarily relatable to audiences around the world because they can be easily one of us or someone we know. In In the Mood for Love, for example, the film’s characters represent the generation of displaced immigrants from Shanghai to Hong Kong in the aftermath of the Chinese civil war. In Chungking Express, the film that gave Wong international fame, the main spatial protagonist, Chungking Mansions, was meant to represent a miniature Hong Kong, referring to a point of transit and movement involving people who are constantly on the move as they are pushed and pulled by the circuits of capital.

You’ve taught a variety of classes that are about or touch on Asian cinema. How have your students responded to In the Mood for Love or other Wong Kar-wai films?


The students in my classes have very different experiences with Asia and Asian cinemas. Yet Wong Kar-wai is easily the most approachable filmmaker for them. Given Wong’s global popularity, I would say this is not a phenomenon that only takes place in my classes. There can be many explanations, including the unique visual and acoustic aesthetics he introduces to filmmaking, his focus on love and desire, his use of color and the sensual appeal in the texture of his films, etc. I think all the above are representative of Wong’s unique qualities.

We’re showing this at our theaters and you’re leading your discussion just around Valentine’s Day. What can you say about In the Mood for Love as an unconventional love story?


For anyone who has followed Wong Kar-wai’s works, Wong is known as the master of erotic disappointment. His films conjure desire, through color, music, and Christopher Doyle’s superb cinematography, by eroticizing the distance between characters. The more apart they are, the stronger the desires that seep into the films’ multi-sensory textures that overflow from the screen and engulf the audience. One reason for the enduring popularity of his films has to do with his ability to turn everything the camera touches into a surface of the characters’ interior worlds. One can consider the pineapple cans, the soap, and the towel that characters in Chungking Express (1994) constantly converse with, or the flowing waterfall lamp in the background that cleverly evokes an overflow of emotions as the gay couple in Happy Together (1997) break up and reunite in infinite repetitions. Rather than a conventional approach to romance that depends on the narration of a chronology of events, Wong’s style of romance explores the fundamental meaning of desire, which is the desire for desire itself. 


Much of this film takes place in Hong Kong from 1962 to 1966. Why do you think Wong Kar-wai chose to set it during this time period? What sorts of changes were happening in Hong Kong at this time?


If one situates the film in the history of Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love was the first film Wong made after Hong Kong’s transition from a colony of the British Empire to a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China in 1997. In the Mood for Love may be about a love story between two married characters. But the film is also very much a love story between the filmmaker and his unique relationship with a “Shanghai-Hong Kong” of the mid-1960s that now only exists as the trace of memories. While the old alleys and the ambient setting for Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan’s romance have forever disappeared in Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love is about the spectacularization of a ruin that takes place by reconstructing 1960s Hong Kong in the Chinatown of Bangkok, Thailand. Looking back at the 1960s from the perspective of post-handover Hong Kong, the film’s temporal setting has intense focus on nostalgia, and a longing for a loss that becomes eroticized.