“Memories of Underdevelopment is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece portrait made in 1968 Cuba—a visually explosive, formally pathbreaking, morally complex portrait of a disaffected man trying to reconcile himself, or not, to history. Gutiérrez Alea was thirty-eight when he decided to adapt a short novel by the Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes into a film—the same age as the story’s protagonist. That’s not all they shared: Sergio is, as Gutiérrez Alea was, a bourgeois intellectual and a light-skinned member of Havana’s elite. His story unfolds in 1961 and 1962, over the pregnant months between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the scary days of what Cubans call the Crisis de Octubre, when their leaders’ confrontation with Washington nearly became a nuclear war. Memories of Underdevelopment is an exercise in narrating, in cinematic terms, a history that was still ongoing. It examined events from a half decade before: momentous days and images that continued, in 1968, to shape the story of a revolution that had left its heady youth behind and was just beginning to deal with the contradictions of adulthood.

Sergio remains in Havana because of inertia and ennui, not conviction. He is glad to live off the rent collected from his family’s property, and ambivalent at best about the changes he sees in the streets. He’s a sophisticate from whose lips the word underdevelopment falls easily: he has no problem tying statistics about child poverty in Latin America to colonial predation. But when he attends a ponderous public forum about the role of intellectuals in building socialism in Cuba, he’s more bemused than engaged by the earnest men onstage. 

About the only thing that he seems to like about Cuba is that women, as he prowls Havana, return his gaze. By the time he bumps into the one who’ll drive the film’s story, we know he is not to be trusted. Maybe Elena does, too. But she’s as bored as he is: she’s a simple girl from outside town, loitering on the streets in a pretty skirt, waiting for a break. Or maybe for a well-dressed stranger who has an apartment nearby, on a higher floor than she’s ever been to, that is full of his wife’s fancy clothes, to which he says she’s welcome. 

Sergio quickly tires of Elena. When they go to a bookstore, she looks at her nails; at the art museum, she studies her purse. Elena becomes a symbol of Sergio’s contempt for his island: “She makes me feel underdevelopment at every step.” The power of Memories of Underdevelopment derives less from the quotidian drama it depicts than from the way Gutiérrez Alea uses cinematic imagery both to sketch Sergio’s internal life and to set that life against the larger historical drama unfolding on an island that’s not only attempting a wholesale transformation of society but will soon bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. 

Nowadays, the images by which lived moments are rendered as history, in Cuba like everywhere else, are absorbed as often from glowing smartphones as from the big screen at the Yara cinema. The implications of such shifts are deep. But in continuing to parse them, we can be more grateful than ever to have this Cuban classic to turn to. Memories of Underdevelopment remains among our most refractive and eloquent meditations on the power of moving images to at once capture history and shape it.”

Words by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro for The Criterion Collection

“One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujirō Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife’s city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband’s small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change—in the form of her headstrong, modern niece—sweeps over their household. The director’s abiding concern with family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, with a wry, tender humor and buoyant expansiveness that moves the action from the home into the baseball stadiums, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops of postwar Tokyo. 

Class identities are reasserted throughout The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, through speech, activities, and tastes in clothing, food, and cigarettes. Much of our laughter in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is elicited by Ozu’s visual gags and playful framing. In interior shots, many of which take place in Taeko and Mokichi’s stylish home, the filmmaker often uses 360-degree space for shooting or covers a third of the image vertically with sliding doors, creating pockets of offscreen space within the frame that contribute to bursts of comedy.

As so much of the tension between Taeko and Mokichi has been at mealtimes, it is fitting that their eventual reconciliation also happens around food, this time in the kitchen, which we have barely seen in the film until this point. As Fumi (the housekeeper) is sleeping, they must figure out how to prepare a snack for themselves. Taeko, transported from the realm of privileged recreation (boutique, hot-spring resort, theater) to the realm of labor (kitchen), is as comically disoriented as Mokichi is in this feminized space. As Mokichi wolfs down the humble meal of green tea over rice (ochazuke) that they’ve cobbled together, you can hear the sound of his gobbling spills versus Taeko, the genteel wife eating ochazuke like a peasant woman. In this moment, we are briefly led to believe in an impossible ending: Has Taeko adopted the very demeanor she abhorred? That suspicion—or desire, perhaps—is overturned in the following shot, where Taeko is shown to be eating her ochazuke without any noise.

In this denouement of sublime beauty and sweetness, we are given hope that two different ways of being can coexist in peace, without tension, animosity, or hierarchy. The film concludes when Taeko learns to love her rustic husband precisely because of the way he was raised, while also remaining true to herself. Earlier in the film, Mokichi said he liked “things to be cozy, down-to-earth, without ceremony and affectation”; by the end, that sentiment reverberates like the dream of an egalitarian society to come.”

Words by Junji Yoshida for The Criterion Collection

“Ozu’s characteristic blend of tones—humor, melancholy, yearning, resignation, serenity—here achieves perhaps its greatest richness. In this world, elders hide cake so kids won’t get any, and an obtuse employer startles us by sensing a staff member’s uneasiness. The pacing gives us time to search every shot for details, to weigh every facial expression, and to reflect on each character’s attitude. Trying for happiness is like trying to win at the racetrack, says Aya. Koichi urges Noriko to take the best suitor she has; she can’t do better. And as for finding the lost son? “There’s no hope now,” says Grandfather, smiling.

Ozu filters urban, suburban, and rural life through his distinct pictorial vision. The shots outside Noriko’s office building turn a street lamp into a barometric needle marking various camera positions. He manages to make a crane shot (the only one in his surviving work) an exercise in seaside geometry. The shots that take us into and out of the Uncle’s home across fields of grain evoke the original Japanese title (The Barley Harvest Season) while also playing a sophisticated game with shot scale. 

A film that begins with “There’s No Place Like Home” tinkling on the soundtrack ends with a vision of a family scattered. Ozu’s ensemble plot portrays the relentlessness of passing time and the way it strains and frays human ties. The social networks we have sampled—the family and friends whom we have come to love—turn out to embody a grand cycle of life. And Ozu’s characters come to accept that rhythm of change with a good-humored, slightly troubled tranquility.”

Words by David Bordwell / The Criterion Collection

“There are several things that make Pratidwandi a great film. Perhaps chief among them is the way Ray handles the character of his protagonist. Frustrated beyond measure, and still keeping his sanity, his ethics and his decorum intact, Siddhartha is a man caught between a family that he cares for but cannot relate to anymore, a girl who is romantically interested in him but cannot commit to him because of her own problems, and a city that seems hell bent upon shoving him down to the ground every time he tries to stand up on his feet.

In a beautiful scene towards the beginning of the film, as he finds a bit of shade under a folly in a park and sits down for a moment of relaxation — exhausted and defeated from one more unsuccessful job interview — a bunch of hippies reach the spot, dancing and swaying under the influence of drugs and alcohol, having a good time, admiring the holy cows of India and the green trees and generally saying things which make absolutely no sense at all. Siddhartha watches them for some time, wondering what a happily oblivious state they were living in, and how their apparently silly behaviour could be justified only by the peace in their minds. Perplexing, as it is, he seems to find this peace in the minds of everyone around him — as if everyone is happily going about their own lives, and here he was, running from pillar to post, unable to find acceptance anywhere.

Without a shred of doubt, the two greatest characters in Pratidwandi are the two adversaries — Siddhartha and the city of Kolkata. Dhritiman Chatterji plays the calm, reserved, reticent young man who is barely holding it together, and he does it with such finesse that you can feel the tension building with each passing scene. The way Chatterji holds a frame is stuff younger actors of our generation can only dream of. His body language, his slight stoop, his impeccable diction, his expressions — everything brings Siddhartha alive on screen. In one of his essays titled ‘An Indian New Wave?’, Ray proposed his own definition of a film star — “A star is a person on the screen who continues to be expressive and interesting even after he or she has stopped doing anything” — and he went on to name Dhritiman Chatterji as an example of a true film star. And you can see what he meant when you see Siddhartha Chaudhuri in Pratidwandi. Throughout the film, even as he battles on tirelessly, even with all the rejections he faces, and despite the bitter sense of insecurity looming large, Siddhartha can’t help but recall the call of an unknown bird he had heard when he was a child. What an absolutely beautiful thought!

But at the end of the war between a vast city and a puny foot soldier, the inevitable happens. It is Siddhartha who finally accepts defeat. He crumbles under pressure and his patience gives away. He is forced to leave the city and take up a job in a small town. In one of the most beautiful ending scenes ever captured on film, Siddhartha finally finds peace in the most unexpected way, and accepts his fate.”

Words by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay for Firstpost

“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.” That is the opening (the first voice) of Chris Marker’s film. The phrase broaches a story (the hero will travel in time toward that childhood image); the destruction of cities and the devastation of the earth’s surface have threatened the very reality of the present and have thus let loose temporal virtualities normally locked up or held captive in the past (the past consisting only of a series of images that have become autonomous, tied to the living only by some affect or trauma). The fiction of La Jetée is thus a certain kind of work—whose object is the film’s hero—concerning the paradoxes of memory, concerning the inclusion of the past that lives on within the hero as an image, as a secret that the laboratory experiments in the underground camp will try to make him confess. The realization of the confession comes with the death of the hero himself as he relives a moment of his past, as he meets once again the girl whose image has haunted him.

The extreme emotion of images fading to white, fading to black, constitutes a subvention of the film’s material or its narrative mode. Through jump cuts and flashbacks, memory’s events are drawn by the sweetness, the violence, and in any case the capture of recollection (from a time that resists elision because a part of the subject began to be born then). It’s from this exploratory terrain—this terrain which consists of a man navigating blindly, struggling along in a body alienated from its own images, in the film version of his unrecognizable life. It’s from here that the flower of pure love arises, the object of all of humanity’s nostalgia, the memory of a love becoming innocent in the image.”

Words by Jean-Louis Schefer (translated by Paul Smith) / Passages de l’image, Exhibition catalogue, Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990

“Social comedy doesn’t get any nastier than “Martha,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s pitch-black satire of bourgeois marriage and patriarchal dominance in modern Germany. The 1974 film, follows a pathetically obedient wife on her path to destruction at the hands of a sadistic husband.

In the movie’s opening scene, Martha (Margit Carstensen) witnesses the death from a heart attack of her cold, much-adored father while they are touring Rome. Returning to Germany, she finds her mother celebrating the death by chasing down Valium with swigs from a whisky bottle. Liberated at last, her mother soon ends up in a mental institution. Martha turns down a marriage proposal from her boss at a research library and instead weds Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Bohm), a civil engineer who mauls her violently when they first meet, at a formal dinner party. One of the film’s most audacious set pieces, this party is staged like a grotesque state funeral, at which the guests are nearly smothered under banks of flowers.

Sumptuously photographed in a style that parodies old-time Technicolor glamour, “Martha” is relentless, down to its final searing images of the captive wife and her too-possessive husband. You don’t have to agree with its premise—that middle-class marriage equals sadomasochism—respond to the bravura comic glee with which the director lays it out.”

Words by Stephen Holden for The New York Times (Sept. 24, 1994)