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It may have took 12 years for Walter Salles to direct another feature after his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” but with his awards-buzzy political bio-drama “I’m Still Here,” the Brazillian filmmaker proves that cinema is something that will always remain in his veins. Extolling on the power of the form, Salles took to the Criterion Closet recently to share his appreciation for a number of films that have shaped him as an artist and continue to inspire. After starting with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev,” Salles went on to select Jim Jarmusch’s absurdist comedy “Stranger than Paradise.”
“I think it was so refreshing to…starting to do films and see that narratives could be actually told in a different manner than the Greeks had teached us at the beginning, you know, the structure with five acts and character arcs and everything else,” said Salles, “and what Jim Jarmusch offers us here is something that transcends that kind of classical perception of narrative.”
Salles also acknowledged Italian iconoclast, Michelangelo Antonioni, as one of his most formative educators in the art form, not directly, but through his work.
“Antonioni is, in fact, the filmmaker that brought me to cinema,” he said, “the director that captured best the senselessness of society — of the industrial society — and, at the same time, the loss of identity that ensued after that. And ‘La Notte’ has the seeds of what was going to be later ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘The Passenger.’ The pillars of an extraordinary director.”
And on the subject of extraordinary, Salles also had to hold space for the work of Martin Scorsese. In grabbing his 1980 masterpiece “Raging Bull,” Salles spoke of its total originality and the difficulty of creating something completely new on screen.
“I saw it maybe 50 times. Maybe more than that,” Salles said. “Scorsese’s talent, unique sensibility. His understanding also of this character who is in between cultures, coming from Italy and yet having to redefine itself in another landscape, in another cultural landscape. Everything about this this film is unique, and it’s one of those films where every single image contains the film as a whole, and that is so difficult to achieve in cinema. I have a hard time actually analyzing it every time because I’m completely taken by it. So this is cinema at its highest point.”
Watch Salles’ entire Criterion Closet visit below.
English (US) ·