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When he’s not spooking and seducing with films like “The Lighthouse” and his most recent work, a reinvention of F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” filmmaker Robert Eggers is enjoying the best of moody cinema. Chatting inside the Criterion Closet, Eggers praised the work of Soviet writer/director Sergei Parajanov, pulling his film “The Color of Pomegranates” off the shelf first.
“Parajanov is a really fascinating filmmaker who is really into recreating folk culture with a lot of detail,” said Eggers. “And he does these beautiful tableaus that are interpretation[s] of the art from the world that he’s trying to articulate and bring us into. And it’s really spectacular.”
Continuing his appreciation for film aesthetics, Eggers went on to grab a set of work from Pier Paolo Pasolini, taking care to acknowledge the efforts of his designers in crafting the environments he shoots.
Eggers told Criterion, “The worlds that Pasolini creates with Piero Tosi, the costume designer, and Dante Ferretti, the production designer, who — Piero Tosi was older, Dante Ferretti was younger, and Dante Feretti’s had this insane career, but it’s amazing to see what Dante Ferretti does when he doesn’t have any money and he’s just got to go to a market and grab some rugs and grab some baskets and still create this incredible world.”
Discussing Luchino Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Eggers highlighted the performance of Dirk Bogarde, an English actor also known for “The Servant” (1963) and “Darling” (1965). Eggers also appreciated the changes made to the original source material and how the music of the film helped accentuate these shifts.
“To make the lead character a composer instead of a writer, it just makes it much more cinematic,” he said. “And a funny story — Warner Brothers, when they saw the director’s cut, they were perplexed and also disappointed. But then one of the studio executives said, ‘The composer is amazing. I love this guy.’ And Visconti said, ‘Well, it’s Gustav Mahler.’ And the studio executive said, ‘Let’s sign him!’ So that’s funny.”
Towards the end of his time inside the Criterion Closet, Eggers made sure to shout out the lesser-known work of monster master Tod Browning.
“‘Freaks’ is obviously a major classic that a lot of people know, but ‘The Mystic’ and ‘The Unknown’ are movies that people know a lot less,” said Eggers. “I actually saw ‘The Unknown’ on TV when I was a teenager and it’s this amazing, transformative performance by Lon Chaney. Of course, it’s transformative, it’s Lon Chaney. The special features are also insane, so…definitely, definitely check this out if you’re a Tod Browning fan, if you’re a Universal horror fan, if you’re a silent movie horror fan. It’s fucking cool.”
Watch Eggers’ entire Criterion Closet visit below.
English (US) ·