Half the fun of watching German director Tom Tykwer’s thriller RUN LOLA RUN (’98) is reveling in all of the visual details. There is so much to take in from Frank Griebe’s excellent cinematography to the brilliant use of color and objects that enhance the film’s themes. RUN LOLA RUN stars Franka Potente as Lola, a young woman who must secure 100,000 Deutschmarks and deliver the money to her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who desperately needs the cash to pay off a violent gangster. Lola has 20 minutes to complete her mission. The film explores three different outcomes as Lola encounters a variety of obstacles along the way.

Let’s first look at the film’s brilliant use of color. Red and yellow are strategically associated with the two lead characters. Lola is presented with the color red. Her hair is dyed bright red, and each of the three-time loops begins with her hanging up a red phone. Red continually appears at various points in her story, whether it’s a bicycle thief wearing a red shirt or her carrying a red bag full of cash. The image of Potente wearing a red wig and running through the streets of Berlin has become the visual symbol of RUN LOLA RUN and usually the first thing that people will remember about the film. Yellow is Manni’s color. He calls Lola from a yellow telephone booth as he contemplates robbing the grocery store across the street, which just happens to be adorned with yellow fixtures and trim.

Red can be seen to symbolize passion but is also represents speed, especially since Lola is moving at such a frantic pace. Yellow is the complete opposite. It symbolizes the tension-filled act of waiting. This can be observed in one particular scene in which workers dressed in yellow hazmat suits carry a large piece of glass from one side of the street to another. They are confronted with a red ambulance driving at a high speed to bring a cardiac patient to the hospital. This scene is played out in each of the three scenarios with a different result. In other scenes, Lola passes a yellow subway tram, a visual reminder that time is passing and Manni is waiting for her. 

One of my favorite, and a bit more subtle, use of color in the film is when green is associated with some form of authority. When Lola visits her dad’s bank to ask for money, his office is adorned with green furniture and a large green painting that Lola rips off the wall in anger. In one scenario, policemen driving green and white vehicles and dressed in green uniforms confront Lola and Manni.

Because the film is so focused on time—not only how Lola is pressed for time but also how one small act can change one’s destiny—clocks and watches are important symbols that pop up throughout the film. There is a big ornate clock in Lola’s bedroom, the face of which is taped over with green stickers, which could be seen as a symbol of how time exerts its authority over her. Manni is constantly checking the clock that hangs above the grocery store entrance, Lola shatters the glass clock in her father’s office with her ear-piercing scream and an old lady checks her watch to give Lola the time. In the casino scene, Lola chooses to play the number 20 on the roulette wheel, which plays to the fact that she only has 20 minutes on the clock to finish the job.

Tom Tykwer drew a lot of inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller VERTIGO (’58). For the casino scene, Tykwer had production designer fill in empty space on the wall by creating a replica of the iconic Carlotta painting from Hitchcock’s film. VERTIGO also inspired the spiral motif that can be seen throughout the film. As Manni calls from the yellow phone booth, the viewer can spot a shop called Spirale in the background complete with a spiraling fixture. When Lola sets out on her mission, she runs down a spiral staircase, presented in the film through animation rather than live-action. As each of the time loops resets, we see Lola and Manni, contemplating life while resting on pillows with a spiral print.

Cinematographer Frank Griebe also employs the sensation of vertigo through many excellent camera shots. Arc shots, in which the camera circles a subject, are used throughout the film. There are lots of tight close-ups, tracking shots, low angle-shots and top-down perspectives, which beautifully demonstrate the heightened emotion and tension felt by the characters. The camera is constantly moving and so is the imagery. In addition to animation, there are black-and-white flashback scenes, stop motion sequences and when time stops for a moment, those scenes are presented with a hazy filter. The bounty of visual symbolism and the film’s frenetic pace make RUN LOLA RUN a highly enjoyable experimental thriller.

Satyajit Ray made Teen Kanya (THREE DAUGHTERS, ‘61) to commemorate the birth centenary of the Bengali cultural giant—poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, actor, educationist, painter—Rabindranath Tagore. It is noteworthy that Ray, a polymath himself, decided to concentrate on the three female protagonists of Tagore’s short stories from the volumes of poems, novels, short stories, dramas, essays and songs that Tagore left behind. May 2, 2021 marks Ray’s birth centenary and studying the expansive creative careers of both men often reveals several points of intersection.

Tagore’s women, like Ray’s, are complex—independent yet bound by tradition; inhabiting, as women do, the in-betweenness within a desire for boundless personal freedom and the socio-familial space that denies it to them. Teen Kanya is an anthology of three films: Postmaster with the young, orphaned protagonist Ratan (Chandana Banerjee); Monihara with the childless wife of a rich jute plantation owner Manimalika (Kanika Majumdar); and Samapti with the shrew-like “wild child” teenager Mrinmoyee (Aparna Sen). Incidentally, it is with Teen Kanya that Ray, too, found a seamlessness within his own creative pursuits, as he began to score music for his films.

Tagore’s “Postmaster”, written in 1891, tells the story of Ratan who works for her village’s Postmaster, the Anglophile Nandal from Calcutta (Anil Chatterjee). With Nandal’s arrival, Ratan, receives affection for the first time in her life. She learns how to read and write from him, makes him his meals and then takes care of him while he fights a bout of malaria. When, unable to tolerate village life anymore, Nandal hands in his resignation and Ratan’s world is robbed of the love she had begun to acclimatise to. While Tagore’s Ratan falls to the Postmaster’s feet, begging him not to leave her alone, Ray’s Ratan walks past Nandal and goes on attending to her household chores. Nandal breaks into tears as the potholed road ahead leads to his future back in the city; Ratan quietly lives out her destiny.

“Ray did not deny his women the right of choice. His women had agency. They were primary protagonists in their own right,” writes actor Sharmila Tagore who was 15 when she made her debut in Ray’s Apur Sansar (THE WORLD OF APU, 1959). Her words do not just ring true for Ratan but also for Manimalika and Mrinmoyee. The three women form the moral arc of the film, making the audience not just question the society but also the ways in which they, personally, inhibit women’s personal freedoms and ambitions.

Even within a horror story like Monihara, where the protagonist lives with a cavernous greed for gold and is probably unfaithful to her husband, Ray (and Tagore) divulge the psychology behind her greed. Manimalika feels judged by her in-laws because she hasn’t been able to bear her husband a child. As Sharmila Tagore says “Ray gifted his women protagonists the liberty which defied the cliché that the male desire is visual while the woman’s is sensory.” This obvious visual female desire, as heightened as it is in the protagonists’ sexual transgression in Charulata (THE LONELY WIFE, ‘64) and Ghare Baire (THE HOME AND THE WORLD, ‘84), finds a materialist incarnation in Manimalika’s unapologetic gold lust. When you reduce a woman to her womb, why should she find it in herself to be a holistic human being and not just a dehumanized, ever-widening lacunae of greed?

Her disappearance from her husband’s life does not leave behind a vacuum that he can fill with another wife who can perhaps bear him an heir. Instead, she haunts him, filling his existence with a hopeless wait and an obvious dread. It is not just a haunting of her husband’s life, but that of his ancestral home, the seat of long-standing patriarchy that perpetuates itself from one heir to another.

Aparna Sen, at 16, made her debut as Samapti’s Mrinmoyee, a bright-eyed, rebellious village teenager who wouldn’t toe the line of patriarchy and the way it expects “marriage worthy” young women to behave. When Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) marries Mrinmoyee, only with the consent of her parents, she lashes out, refusing to bow down to a life of servile conjugality. Not only does she have a mind of her own, but she also insists upon sovereignty over her body, which is only its most authentic self when running through fields and sitting on swings. She runs away from her husband on the night of their wedding and spends it outdoors, sleeping on her beloved swing.

These women, and Ray’s later women like Charulata and Arati (MAHANAGAR, THE BIG CITY, ‘63), are well-versed in articulating a language of complex desire and longing through their bodies, even when they don’t have the verbal vocabulary for it. There is an insistence (in both Tagore and Ray’s works) of intellectual, economic and physical sovereignty by these women that, as pointed out by Sharmila Tagore, often predates the establishment of a formal women’s movement in India. They are the conscience of the texts they occupy, and this conscience is not a vague, moral or a spiritual one. Both Ray and Tagore embody this conscience within a female body that transgresses, fights and yet, always, desires.  

The last movie by acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, YI YI (2000) is a film of exceptional beauty, depth, empathy, humor and love. It is not a simple task to concisely describe its story, except to say that it is about a family living in Taipei, and that it follows the stories of each member of the family and the ways in which they try to make sense of the world. There are three central characters who are entwined in a larger web of other major characters, creating an intricate tapestry of relationships and events.

YI YI could have easily been convoluted if not for Yang’s masterful direction and his exquisitely constructed screenplay, which weaves in and out of the different characters and storylines so elegantly that you barely ever notice how complex the film really is. “Epic” would be an appropriate word to describe this film, except that there is nothing at all epic about these people or their experiences. Their lives and struggles are for the most part quite ordinary, and yet there’s not a moment of this nearly three-hour-long film that isn’t compelling.

Upon reflecting on YI YI, it’s remarkable to realize how little “plot” there actually is. Yang is not a director who is concerned with tight storytelling. Instead, he allows the story to breathe and follow a natural pace. He is also not too concerned with conventional structure. Rather than a series of plot points, YI YI is composed of a number of magnificent little moments. I would even go so far as to say that there are a handful of perfect scenes.

The first of these comes when the protagonist, N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), has a chance encounter with his high school lover, who he has not seen since he left her without a word almost 30 years ago. Another is when N.J. discusses music with Japanese businessman Ota (Issei Ogata, who has to be one of the loveliest characters in any movie) and takes him to a karaoke bar. And then there is the scene where N.J.’s brother-in-law, A-Di (Xisheng Chen), throws a party to celebrate the birth of his son, but the presence of an uninvited guest leads to a brawl. These scenes are simply beautiful, particularly in the way that they gracefully combine pathos and humor, which Yang does throughout the film.

Much of the runtime is also devoted to the development of the audience’s deep understanding of these characters. There are several major characters, but Yang’s depiction of each of them is so thoughtful and detailed that he manages to make them all feel real. It’s also impressive how many characters have complete, meaningful story arcs. By the time the credits roll, it feels like we genuinely know these people. Even the most minor characters feel authentic, like the bartender at the karaoke bar who tells N.J. about his troubles, or A-Di’s boisterous buddy Migo (Yungfeng Li). 

Although we are only given brief glimpses into these people’s lives, we understand them very well. Yang is a tremendously empathetic filmmaker, and his love for his characters is evident in every moment of the film. These characters certainly have flaws, but Yang loves them and makes his audience love them too. I know very little about Edward Yang as a person, but one gets the impression from this film that he was a very compassionate man with a sincere love for humanity.

Additionally, the film is full of brilliant performances. The actors in YI YI manage to be completely captivating while acting with great subtlety. (It’s especially enjoyable to watch the scenes with large groups of characters, because on each subsequent viewing, your eye is drawn to a great actor that you haven’t noticed before.) Perhaps the most extraordinary performance is that of Jonathan Chang, who played the character of Yang-Yang, N.J.’s son, when he was just nine years old. Yang-Yang is one of the central characters and a lot of time is spent on him, which can be a major risk with such a young actor. However, his portrayal of Yang-Yang is possibly one of the greatest child performances ever. He is stunningly natural. It is so refreshing to see a kid who acts like a kid. Yang-Yang is smart, but he’s smart in the way that a real child would be, and he narrowly avoids becoming irritatingly precocious like so many movie kids.

YI YI is one of my very favorite movies, and it is such a delight that TCM Imports has decided to show it. If you’d like to see a film that’s moving, funny and ultimately very uplifting, don’t miss YI YI.

On September 21, Ava DuVernay will introduce Chantal Akerman’s remarkable film LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA (‘78) as part of TCM’s The Essentials series. This will be followed by Akerman’s experimental documentary HOTEL MONTEREY (‘73). This unique double feature will serve as an excellent introduction to her work for first-time viewers, as these two films capture what made the director so special and why her work is important.

From the very start of her career, Akerman was a radically original filmmaker. HOTEL MONTEREY, her debut feature film, is certainly an unusual movie. It consists entirely of silent footage shot in a New York City hotel. We see the hotel’s hallways, elevators, rooms and guests. HOTEL MONTEREY completely rethinks the documentary genre. It was released at a time when some documentarians were making films in the Direct Cinema style, which sought to depart from the conventions of traditional documentary filmmaking in favor of a more “objective” approach to shooting and editing. HOTEL MONTEREY, however, goes even further than the Direct Cinema movement by eliminating the constructs of character and story. By doing this, it presents these images of the hotel without any obvious message or agenda, and therefore is even more objective than Direct Cinema.

But this description doesn’t do justice to the hypnotic beauty of HOTEL MONTEREY. There’s something very special about the way that Akerman shoots this hotel. She takes something mundane and gradually turns it into something ominous. The slowness of her camera, the total silence that lasts throughout the film, the way some shots linger for just a little too long – all of this builds an unusual sort of tension. There is nothing “exciting” about this film in the ordinary sense of the word, and yet it’s hard to take your eyes off of it. As Akerman once said, “You don’t need to tell a story to make a film with a lot of tension.”

LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA, on the other hand, is a narrative film which tells the story of a film director named Anna Silver. While traveling through Europe to promote her newest film, she meets with a number of different people: family, friends, total strangers. During her conversations with these people, Anna never appears to truly care about what is being said, and these interactions are ultimately unfulfilling for her. Although she searches for genuine human connection, she is unable to find it.

Although this is a more “conventional” film than HOTEL MONTEREY, it still defies cinematic standards. Just as HOTEL MONTEREY breaks away from the traditions of the documentary genre, LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA does not at all resemble a traditional narrative film. Consider the way in which we learn about the character of Anna. Just as she feels detached from the people around her, the audience is detached from Anna and is never fully aware of what she’s thinking. She does not talk very much, and her dialogue often reveals little about her inner thoughts and feelings. The only real insight we get into her character is through the details of her face and body language (Aurore Clément, who plays Anna, gives a marvelously subtle performance). A typical protagonist would have some sort of supporting character with whom they could openly discuss their feelings and thereby explicitly convey them to the audience, but the tragedy of Anna’s character is that there is nobody in her life with whom she can truly confide – except perhaps the unseen character that Anna repeatedly tries to call but can never reach.

Even more unconventional is Akerman’s comfort with silence and long takes. Who else would choose to include a nearly two-minute-long scene of Anna laying down on the bed in her hotel room? It’s a bold choice, one that very few directors would have the audacity to shoot, but Akerman is willing to stop and just let the film breathe for a moment. This is the kind of touch that makes her films so special.

Akerman always made films that were distinctly and unquestionably her own. She rebelled against the trends of commercial filmmaking and instead made movies that served her own artistic vision. At a time when movies were becoming faster, simpler and more formulaic, she made movies that were slow, subtle and innovative. And she was doing all of this as a woman in an extremely male-dominated industry. On September 21, Ava DuVernay and TCM will celebrate Akerman’s life and work by showing LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA and HOTEL MONTEREY. These two films will show why she was so groundbreaking in her time and why she still matters today.

On August 14, Liv Ullmann, one of the greatest actresses of European cinema, will make her first ever appearance on TCM’s annual Summer Under The Stars programming. Eleven of her films will be shown, including the 2012 documentary LIV & INGMAR, which chronicles her artistic and romantic partnership with Ingmar Bergman, who directed her in 11 films. Four of those films will be shown on the 14th.

One of her collaborations with Bergman, AUTUMN SONATA (’78), pairs Ullmann with another great actress: Ingrid Bergman. In the film, Ingrid plays Ullmann’s somewhat estranged mother, a renowned classical pianist who has come to visit her. Over the course of one emotional, exhausting night, they try to reach a reconciliation for their anger towards one another. The film is so intense that it is almost hard to watch at times, but this is a testament to the powerful performances that drive the film. The emotional intensity of Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay would be laughable if attempted by lesser actors, but the realism that Ingrid Bergman and Ullmann bring to the characters is what creates such a harrowing experience. Though Ingrid is the film’s true star and it is her performance which ultimately dominates AUTUMN SONATA (her final film role), Ullmann delivers an excellent, nuanced performance as well.

Another one of Ullmann’s notable collaborators is Max von Sydow, who appeared with her in seven films, four of which will also be shown on the 14th. The first film in which they appeared together was HOUR OF THE WOLF (’68), another Bergman film. In this bizarre film, von Sydow plays a painter tortured by nightmares and hallucinations, and Ullmann is his concerned wife who lives with him on a small island. Once again, the extreme nature of Bergman’s screenplay works because of the strong central performances, and Ullmann and von Sydow are able to ground the film’s dream logic and dreamlike events in reality.

After HOUR OF THE WOLF, the two appeared as couples in two more Bergman films before appearing in Jan Troell’s epic two-part saga THE EMIGRANTS (‘71) and THE NEW LAND ('72). These films, which have a combined running time of about six and a half hours, tell the story of Kristina and Karl Oskar Nilsson, two Swedish farmers who immigrate to America in search of a new life. THE EMIGRANTS chronicles their difficult voyage to New York and their subsequent journey from New York to Minnesota. Although it ends on a note of hope, this is merely a happy stopping place, and as the story continues in THE NEW LAND, we see the new struggles that the Nilssons face in Minnesota. It’s hard to imagine any other actors taking on the demanding roles of Kristina and Karl Oskar. 

By the time they made these films, von Sydow and Ullmann had worked together for long enough to have developed a comfort with each other to believably portray a married couple. Years later, when reflecting on her work with von Sydow in these films, Ullmann said, “We knew each other so well. There was no shyness between us.” They are so natural with each other and within their own characters, that at times you forget that you’re watching a movie and lose yourself in their world.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Ullmann’s performances is how much she is able to communicate with just her face. Some of her most memorable moments in these films are silent. Consider the breathtaking scene in AUTUMN SONATA where her character Charlotte watches her mother play piano. All of her feelings about her mother—the resentment, the regret, the love—are channeled into one quiet, sad gaze. Or even the opening and closing scenes of HOUR OF THE WOLF, when she speaks directly to the camera and occasionally breaks eye contact to glance off into the distance. It is through these glances that we truly begin to understand the meaning behind her words – her deep concern for her husband, her desire to just make things the way they were before.

All too often, non-American actors don’t get the credit they truly deserve from American audiences. It can be hard for people to connect with actors and characters on screen when they’re busy reading subtitles. Even so, Ullmann’s talent transcends the language barrier, and this may be because she doesn’t depend on language as a means of expression. The fear in her eyes, the intensity of her gaze and the pain and strength of her characters resonate universally.

TCM is devoting August 14 to the films of Liv Ullmann to highlight this remarkable talent. Join us and see some of the beautiful characters she played and the great movies she made.