Ten Minutes to Live (Oscar Micheaux, 1932) / The Girl from Chicago (Oscar Micheaux, 1932)
There was a period, less than a lifetime ago, when the filmgoer was met with a laidback prolificacy. In this stretch, from silents to the sixties, it would be common for a habitual spectator to see multiple films by, say, Raoul Walsh or Michael Curtiz in a given calendar year. For a director, the two-(or more)-films-a-year was a frequency in the studio system, whose mechanisms were set up to move personnel from one production to another seamlessly. The regularity of this occurrence likely allowed it to pass under the viewer’s gaze without notice.
Even the critic, in the fledgling era of auteurism, was unlikely to look at more than the resonances and dissonances of theme and style across two (or more) films of a director in a particular year. So, the phenomenon took on the selfsame approach to what auteurist critics did with the studio era already: look for personality in the humdrum of what brought the director to deployment: “screenplay, assignment, industry.”1
Somewhere in the 1960s, at least in the United States, the classical production system expired, felled by legal decisions, shrinking studio margins, and the cultural encroachment of television. In Europe, the Nouvelle Vague directors set the template for a radical, plein-air cinema that amplified the cultural role of the auteur. These and other changes broke cinema open while closing off parts of its past. New production modes brought new filmmaking styles and the transformation can be understood through the shifting role of the critic as noted by Jacques Rancière: “Around 1968 the critic, formerly devoted to showing the hand of the artist in the realization of the ordinary assignment, changed roles: he became attached to revealing what the position of the author concealed: the place of his camera, the political and social places to which it assimilated itself.”2 For directors the assignments dried up, studios became stingier, independent productions gradually increased as technology and finances allowed. To direct two films in a year became closer to a herculean task—of creativity, of stamina, of panhandling, and of luck. Thenceforth, a filmmaker releasing two films in a year—an annus miribalis—is like a four-leaf clover, something rarely found everywhere.
To follow is an indefinite list of this occurrence—all post-1968, all features, all fiction—that is far less than a canon, if not more than a preoccupancy. What communalizes these films? Well, it isn’t cross-connected themes or a unified style, but a type of artistry pointing towards a profundity of themes and suppleness of style. Directors who pull off this feat, without or in spite of the support of studios, express an allergy to the type of overwrought and persnickety filmmaking that mares many elephantine productions. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the lodestar. He directed thirteen films between 1970 and 1972, each one a glittering paean to profundity.) Certainly fastidiousness can produce greatness—here Kubrick’s approach shines like a high-wattage bulb drawing lesser talented moths to death—but it runs against (sometimes gleefully) a natural condition of the recording camera: the inability to completely wrangle the intractable reality within the photographic image. The artistry, then, of filmmakers whose methodologies allow for an annus mirabilis is to absorb the aleatory or to give some control of the image up to what is naturally concurrent during its recording. This leaves the filmmaker open, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, to what, following Rancière, “the camera decides for itself, what it inscribes in the film without the knowledge of the artist: power relations, obscure tradition of art, childhood secret.”3 To that list one could add many things: the dazzle of objects, spatial rhythms, intuition of an instant—which, when innervated by, form a dance of affects and ideas that light the search for the self.
A couple things must be said about the annus mirabilis. One, there’s a certain amount of luck commingled with arbitrariness involved. Arbitrary insofar as matters related to the calendar always are. No doubt filmmakers with qualifying practices are disqualified because their films, while being made in quick succession, were released on either side of January 1st. In terms of luck, to get one film made is a stroke of fortune, let alone two, let alone two in one year. As is often the case, artistic output is buttressed by being at the right place at the right time. Secondly, luck in this context is often systemic benevolence and the benevolent system often ignores everyone who is not white or male. Black, Asian, Hispanic, Indigenous, Muslim, Trans people, and women of any background have extreme difficulties getting any film made, let alone two in quick succession.
The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953) / The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)
Already let’s start by breaking my borderlines in hopes of some clarifications. Two filmmakers prior to 1968 deserve mention. The first is Oscar Micheaux, whose enterprising and pioneering methods blazed a possible path outside the aegis of big studios. Highly prolific, Micheaux directed four films in one year in both 1922 and 1932.4 The second is Ida Lupino, who, in 1953, directed two films about the stumbling psyche of men. The Hitch-Hiker, her most acclaimed film, follows two vacationing friends, who, while on a fishing trip where their marital faithfulness is tested, pick up a roaming killer. Later that year, Lupino directed herself in The Bigamist, where Harry (Edmund O’Brien) marries Lupino’s character despite being married to Eve (Joan Fontaine). The film, an icy premise filled with warmth towards its character’s foibles, is produced by Collier Young, Lupino’s producer and ex-husband, who married, in 1952, Joan Fontaine.
Beginning in the studio-era only retraces the tectonic shifts that diminished the two-a-year opportunities. Following studio directors from their fertile years in the forties and fifties to post-1968 only irradiates that particular accomplishment. Samuel Fuller, for example, a quick-working writer-director around the mid-century, directed three films in 1957: China Gate, Run of the Arrow, and Forty Guns. After 1964’s The Naked Kiss, his last studio film until 1980, Fuller struggled to get projects funded and never achieved the pace of his early career.5
10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971) / The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971)
Not every golden-era filmmaker fared as haplessly as Fuller. Richard Fleischer’s pace in the 1970s was equivalent to the 1950s; in both decade spans he made 13 films. In 1971 he made two films in London about murder and psychosexual aberration. 10 Rillington Place, about notorious necrophile and killer John Christie, shot in a queasy claustrophobic style at the real killer’s tight-quartered flat. And See No Evil, about a blind woman’s fight against a killer that intrudes on her family’s pastoral estate. As if giving two odious accounts on societal dilapidation was not enough, in between the two productions Fleischer took over The Last Run for John Huston. The film is a laconic exercise in European image making—lensed by Sven Nykvist—that straddles the confrontation of attachment and detachment. Fleischer’s 1971 shows his stylistic facility in cross-section: as salacious as Verhoeven and ascetic as Melville, filtered through studio-era competence.
Even as the fashionable auteurs of New Hollywood filled the marquees, there was a pulsating part of Old Hollywood still at work during the 1970s. Like Fleischer, Don Siegel’s annus mirabilis was in 1971 as he released Dirty Harry and The Beguiled, which show, in synchrony, both the Siegel project and popular cinema as thriving arenas. One outlier to both the era and this list’s parameters is Bill Gunn’s 1970. The first of his films was just a screenplay credit, for Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, and the other was his directed-but-never-released Stop!. While they have similar topics (sex, race, and modern love), the former is a sloppy film by a sometimes-good director and the latter an incendiary work by an indisputable artist. The sidelining of Gunn’s cinema confirms the false promise of freedom of New Hollywood that mutated into the commercialism of the succeeding decades.
Choose Me (Alan Rudolph, 1984) / Songwriter (Alan Rudolph, 1984)
The annus mirabilis in the 1980s often took the form of an industry adage: one for them and one for me. Taking for-hire work that sometimes helped fund personal fare became the best route for directing in rapid succession. This was the case for three great artists of the decade. First, in 1983, David Cronenberg released his personal screed on the body’s entanglement with globe-crossing technology, Videodrome. Around that time he was hired on a Stephen King adaptation, The Dead Zone, which, while being a mite less audacious and personal, is no less prescient. In August 1984, after showing at Cannes, Alan Rudulph’s deeply idiosyncratic Choose Me premiered. Two months later, Songwriter, a production that Rudolph took over a few days into filming, was released. The film is a proper parergon to Choose Me as it concerns itself with the woes of making personal work in a mercantile industry. In 1985, Jean-Luc Godard, needing money to complete Hail Mary, took on a commissioned project from Alan Sarde that came attached with Nathalie Baye and a thriller plot. The project became Détective and Godard turned the premise into, with his usual brio and puckishness, a Godard film. Later that year Godard released Hail Mary, a contemporary meditation on the morals and totems of modern society.6
Claire Denis’ 1994 might set the acme for the annus mirabilis. The first to be released was I Can’t Sleep. Perhaps the last Denis film to not have its day on the cultural dais, I Can’t Sleep continues her works in the demimondes, as lovers and newcomers flit through the estaminets and nightspots of Paris as a killer takes prey. Many differ on where Denis’ mature work starts but for me, c’est ici. That same year Denis directed an episode of the Arte’s famed Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge series. Her sublime entry, U.S. Go Home, sets store by the signification of fleeting moments and the intricacies of human interaction. I probably prefer the latter film, but as Dave Kehr once said of two Fritz Lang films, “between one masterpiece and another who's to choose?”7
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001) / Brief Crossing (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
Two other French filmmakers fashioned woozy couplets at the turn of the century. In 2001, Catherine Breillat released two films, the oft-fêted Fat Girl and the under-seen Brief Crossing, that grey-out their vibrant milieus, a French resort town and shop-lined ocean-liner, in approaching the superimposition of sex and innocence. For Breillat, first sexual experiences batten a life with tragedy and trauma—only in the Brief Crossing, true to its title, is there some passing beauty and connection. The following year, Jean-Paul Civeryac released two films where backlit lovers amble through the new millennium. Man’s Gentle Love, in which a wistful poet falls in with a headstrong drug addict, and Fântomes, wherein disappearing lovers haunt the hors-champ.8 The former is a nimble work about love and ego in a new age, but the latter, likely Civeryac’s masterwork, exemplifies his rich spectral cinema, with one staggering scene, a dazzling danse macabre, that visualizes the permanent good of having been in love.
If all the films ever made are like a list of every number (interminable) then a record of anni mirabili is like a list of every prime number (also interminable). And thus far I’ve neglected paragons of the prolific such as Hong Sang-soo, Lucio Fulci, Johnnie To, Takashi Miike and Raúl Ruiz, among countless others. There are some more recent examples that I’ve neglected too, namely Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 (Enemy and Prisoners) and Pablo Larraín’s 2014 (Neruda and Jackie), but frankly neither exemplify the guiding spirit (fleet-footedness) of the accomplishment. (I’d bet the farm Villeneuve never directs two films in a year again). Another inheritor to the title is Clint Eastwood’s 2018 (The 15:17 to Paris and The Mule), but because his working conditions most closely approximate studio-era Hollywood there’s been eight different years where he’s directed two films. Besides, for Eastwood, it is more likely a vita mirabilis than a lone annus.
The cute constellations formed by the annus mirabilis possibly outstrips any crosshatched aesthetic significance, but there is something to the feat, particularly post-68, that makes it more than a shiny token. In appraising the work of the inexhaustible musician John Zorn, Joshua Cohen writes something that could also be said of Fassbinder: “Zorn, then, is the most we can ask of a modern artist: prolific. In an age of excess, the more excessive the artist, the more important he seems.”9 With things slanted towards clean commercialism, to work quicker and more recklessly seems, more than being alluring, an intuitive reaction. Unlike expensive slow corporate productions, whose over-groomed images are easily co-opted by the market, the annus mirabilis films form a chiasm with physical reality. The fantasy of the completely controlled image is ceded to the untidy and quicksilvered qualities of experience. In these films, then, the qualities of the world—its coltishness, its porousness, its thick intractability (all occurring simultaneously)—play out in the images.
1. Jacques Rancière,“La politique des auteurs, ce qu’il en reste”, in Cahiers du cinéma, 559, July-August 2001. Translated here: https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=2085
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. In 1922: The Dungeon, The Hypocrite, Uncle Jasper’s Will, and The Virgin of the Seminole. In 1932: Veiled Aristocrats, Ten Minutes to Live, Black Magic, and The Girl From Chicago.
5. Fuller almost directed two films in 1973: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (a German television project that Fuller was invited to direct an episode of) and he started out as the director of The Deadly Trackers before the production was scuppered by the studio, eventually to be retooled and recast.
6. In the U.S., Détective was released before Hail Mary, while it was the opposite in France.
7. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-woman-in-the-window/Film?oid=1052820
8. Fântomes did premiere at a small festival in 2001, but wasn’t released in theaters until 2002 in France.
9. https://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/last-man-standing/