Every time I’m on the train heading to the Astor to see an old film print, at around South Yarra Station I start to question whether or not it’s going to be money well spent. Faded and near destroyed prints of films like McCabe and Mrs Miller always make me worry about whether it’s going to be worth the honestly pretty reasonable ticket price. It’s a ridiculous thing to question, for someone like me at least, because of course it’s worth it. But for every print I’ve seen that, even after more than half a century, is still in brilliant condition, I must have seen a dozen that were barely watchable. So why bother?

Back in 2015, the Melbourne Cinematheque hosted a month of Paul Thomas Anderson pictures. His first five films all on original 35mm prints and there was something said during the introduction of Hard Eight that really stuck with me. Turns out, the print we saw that night of Anderson’s first feature was one of only three known to still exist. “It seems it’s easier,” said the speaker, “to find prints of films from 50 years ago than it is to find prints from 15.”

Seeing Hard Eight up on the big screen, I almost couldn’t believe how rich the colour and grain of the print was, something that’s completely lacking from both the last official DVD release and the HD-TV rip that’s floating around. Details this minute and obsessive may seem a bit trivial, but it was incredible how much more I felt myself just lapping up how the film looked seeing it on 35. And while I have absolutely no idea how many prints of Hard Eight once existed, perhaps it was only ever three, I can’t help but think that if we don’t ever get that long awaited Criterion Collection 4K restoration the experience I had might not be possible in a decade or two.

It’s an oft-repeated statistic that close to, if not more than, half of the films made before 1950 are lost forever, and there’s no question that to have a film on sub-par rushed DVD release only is better than having nothing at all. But, as is often quoted in the originaltrilogy.com forums, films should evoke or stay true to the period they were made in. Everyone knows the most flagrant example of this in George Lucas’s infamous Star Wars Special Editions, but even Blu-Ray releases that are, by most people’s standards, pretty damn good often are subject to small changes that arguably make a lot of difference.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the perfect example. Its 4K release and the accompanying Blu-Ray is one of the best, it’s gorgeous to look at and feels relatively true to what the original intention was. There’s no egregious CGI, no digital “cleaning” of film grain that ought never have been touched, no recuts and re-edits no one asked for. But, turns out, it’s a far cry from what anyone originally saw in 1981. Every release of that film, since the original Laserdisk to now, has been subject to warmer and warmer colour corrections. That iconic heavy red hue over the Nepal bar sequence towards the beginning? Turns out, that was never there in the original theatrical presentation.

If I were ever going to develop some kind of a gambling problem, the closest thing to it would be these film print screenings. Because that’s what it is, it’s a gamble. Sure, there’s every chance it’ll be barely watchable. But nothing beats the scratches, the legitimate film grain, the idea that there’s some passionate person loading the reels and waiting for those cigarette burns in the top right corner.

And all too often now, taking the gamble that the print you’ll see at the Astor Theatre or ACMI will be any good is the only way you’ll ever be able to see a film the way it was originally intended. No one should wait around for the studios to release yet another restoration of films they’ve already worked on more than half a dozen times, and the beautiful obsessive amateur film restorers on forums like originaltrilogy.com can’t do everything, but if you see that there’s an original release print of a film you haven’t seen at all or seen a thousand times before, go see it. Take the risk that it’ll be a mess. Just see it, chances are you’ll have an experience you may never have a chance to repeat ever again.

A Field in England

Ben Wheatley, with films like Free Fire and High Rise, seems to be making a career out of making the kinds of films that people are so sure no one makes anymore. Set during the English Civil War, A Field in England, while certainly not for everyone, is a throwback to the slow-moving atmospheric horror films of the 1970’s. Though flawed, it’s one of the most original English language films to be released in years.

Bill Cunningham New York

Endearing and more than a little odd, Bill Cunningham was a fashion photographer for the New York Times from 1978 up until his death in 2016. This documentary highlights and celebrates the eccentricities, brilliance and keen eye of one of the greatest and most humble candid photographers ever to live. We see a man not interested in changing the landscape of photography, or fashion, or in creating art, or anything even remotely pretentious or highfalutin. He just loves fashion.

Blow Out

“Murder has a sound all of its own.” If that isn’t a contender for greatest tag-line of all time, what is? Directed by Brian De Palma and starring John Travolta, Blow Out is an absolutely thrilling political conspiracy thriller with more than a little bit of influence from Alfred Hitchcock. It’s so good even Pauline Kael raved about it.

Ran

No one does Shakespeare like Kurosawa. Ran, loosely based off King Lear, is no question the greatest Shakespeare adaptation Akira Kurosawa ever made but a strong contender for his best film. Made toward the end of his career, Ran may not feature Kurosawa regulars Toshiro Mifune or Takashi Shimura but the performances across the board in this film are impeccable. It doesn’t waste a moment of its near 3-hour run-time and is guaranteed to stay with you for a long, long time. An unforgettable epic and a masterpiece.

Don’t Look Now

Whether they’re editors like David Lean or cinematographers like Nicholas Roeg, some of the most fascinating directors are the ones that come to the job from roles other than screenwriting. Starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, Roeg’s third narrative feature film is a haunting ghost story set primarily in Venice, Italy. While gaining plenty of notoriety thanks to its frank depiction of sex, Don’t Look Now is an absolutely gripping and bone-chilling thriller.

Once upon a time, if you’d believe it, there were directors that not only were most recognized for their work in a genre that’s as good as dead today, but they made their entire career out of it. Directors like John Frankenheimer and Alan J. Pakula made some of the most defining films of the 1960’s and 70’s, films that captured the paranoia and cynicism of a culture that felt they were at the brink of Nuclear War. Films like The Manchurian Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men.

Like the Western or the Slasher genre, the Paranoia Thriller hasn’t disappeared entirely. Just as Hollywood and others will keep pumping out the occasional 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit, they’ll keep pumping out Syriana and Michael Clayton. But while these films don’t seem to have too hard a battle to win themselves a couple of deserved awards, they don’t seem to stick to the culture like the genre once did. Back in 1976 there wasn’t a more appropriate film for the Zeitgeist than one like All the President’s Men.

But why’s that the case? All the President’s Men, for those unfamiliar, tells the story of the Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein investigating the Watergate Scandal that lead to Richard Nixon’s resignation as President. It was the final entry in the loose thematic “paranoia” trilogy by director Alan J. Pakula, following 1971’s Klute and 1974’s The Parallax View. Considering the current POTUS’s potential collusion with Russia during the election, no one needs reminding what it feels like to have a potentially criminal President.

With the Vietnam War and connected protests, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and the wider Cold War, not only did it seem like the fingers were only an inch away from entering the Nuclear Launch Codes but it was becoming harder and harder to be patriotic. All of a sudden, we had governments we no longer felt we could trust, we had police shooting protesters like the four dead in Ohio, we had masked terrorists breaking into the Munich Olympic Village and killing 11 Israeli athletes, we had weapons that had the power to destroy the world and our enemies had them too, we had more close calls than we had fingers on each hand. It felt like you weren’t able to place your trust in anyone anymore and perhaps, as The Manchurian Candidate questioned, that included yourself.

So where are we at today that’s so much different to then? Those feelings never seemed to disappear entirely, always simmering in the background waiting for something to tip the scales again and in 2001 we got it. Since 9/11 we’ve swapped what was once World War III paranoia for the fear that one day, who knows where or when, another group of ideological terrorists will carry out an attack we could never see coming. The paranoia is back, and with all the wide reaching social consequences that the old one had, we’ve got what looks like it could turn out to be a modern-day Watergate scandal in the Trump Campaign’s Russian conspirators, we’ve got dodgy Wall Street investments leading to global financial collapse and the promise that all of it might happen again very soon.

While, all the way back in the 60’s and 70’s when the vast majority of these films were made, they were considered to be timely and of the era they’ve never really dated. The climate today is perfect for the genre to have a renaissance, and we have the writers and the directors to make it happen. Who wouldn’t want to see John Hillcoat, or Andrew Dominik, or David Michôd, or Denis Villeneuve, or David Fincher tackle a genre like this?

Escape from Alcatraz

The last film in a five-film collaboration between Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel, Escape from Alcatraz tends to go through phases, one minute it’s a well-loved classic and then the next everyone seems to have forgotten about it all over again. Same can be said for its director. With films like Dirty Harry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the John Cassavetes/Lee Marvin version of The Killers, he’s more than earnt his place among the greats.

Cinema Paradiso

Alright, more than a little bit of a left-turn from Escape for Alcatraz, Cinema Paradiso is about a man who finds purpose in life after discovering the magic of cinema, and cinema doesn’t get much more magical than this film. With a score by Ennio Morricone and one of the most beautiful montages ever put to celluloid, this film is a must see. It’s guaranteed to stick to you like glue.

The Battle of Midway

Can’t say I’ve seen the list of directors awarded a Purple Heart military medal of honour, but I can’t imagine it’s very long. John Ford, the man behind virtually every great John Wayne Western, as part of the same initiative that led to John Huston’s Let There Be Light directed the grainy, vibrantly coloured, patriotically scored documentary of the Battle of Midway, a turning point in the Pacific Theatre.

Drunken Master

Along with Police Story, Drunken Master both introduced Jackie Chan to his what-would-become-rabid Western fanbase as well as establish many of the martial arts film clichés we know and parody today. As always, Jackie Chan is effortlessly charming, a seemingly natural comedian and one hell of a martial artist. There’s perhaps some relief to be had in that Drunken Master stands before the time when each Jackie Chan film seemed to always be trying to one-up the stunts from the previous film. It’s exactly what it should be, it knows what it is and it’s brilliant.

The Civil War by Ken Burns

As far as anyone’s concerned, Ken Burns might as well have invented the television documentary. His style, whether or not he really was the originator of it, is so widely mimicked and parodied that someone might have experienced the parody before the original. The Civil War, along with Jazz and Baseball, is a must-watch from the Ken Burns library. It’s a rich, blink-and-you’ll-miss-twenty-details, seemingly minute-by-minute account of the darkest chapter in American history.

The thing about Golden Ages is we’re rarely talking about quality, instead just prevalence. Steven Spielberg caught a lot of flak in comment sections for daring to say “Superhero films will go the way of the Western,” as if for some reason this craze is impervious to the same natural decay all crazes, from the Dutch Tulip Bubble to the Wild West film, face.

Unlike the Superhero genre, sequels in Westerns were rare, and when they did appear they were most often able to stand perfectly well on their own two feet. You don’t need to have seen A Fistful of Dollars to make sense of For A Few Dollars More. You could skip one and not have any cause to worry. Somehow Superhero films have managed to convince us this is not so for them. If you miss Iron Man 3 how is The Avengers 2 or Ant-Man going to make a lick of sense? You’d better see them all lest you get confused. But beyond setting up future team-up movies, what really changes between these films?

On paper, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its promise of never-ending cross-film set-ups and pay-offs seems like the ultimate business model, but when the status quo is never really shaken, those set-ups and pay-offs, inevitably, start to dilute in value. Just like the Dutch Tulip Bubble, which saw the then rare Tulip bulb at one point reach prices ten times the annual salary of the average worker, the more a product of worth becomes inescapable, the closer you get to the inevitable crash.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier came like a shot-off adrenalin to what was, even then, starting to get a bit stale. All of a sudden, we were given a Marvel film with a different tone and, best of all, a twist that was genuinely unexpected. Audiences, myself included in there, left Winter Soldier seriously speculating what the ramifications of that twist would wind up being. Turns out they’d amount to next to nothing, really. The government agency that oversaw the Avengers went from being called S.H.I.E.L.D. to just The Avengers, and the villainous secret society that was Hydra became S.H.I.E.L.D. and then was back to being called… Hydra, again.

What were the long-term effects of Civil War? While, to be fair, we haven’t had much of a chance to know for sure yet, my money is on not much. A story, no matter how many super-powered obstacles you pack in for the heroes to face, is nothing if the endings are virtually inconsequential. How many times can you see John Wayne inevitably bring justice to those marauding bandits? After a while it just gets a bit tired.

Just like we never saw the “End of the Western” absolutely, we won’t be completely bereft of superhero films either. There will always be Batman films and there will always be Spider-Man films, and added to that we’ll always get films like Logan and The Dark Knight. Just like Unforgiven or McCabe and Mrs Miller, just because your genre’s well past it’s Golden Age or, in the case of the latter, at least on its way out, doesn’t mean you’ve not got some great films to look forward to. You just don’t have to worry about watching John Wayne do the same thing for the thirtieth time in a row. Instead you can enjoy him as Genghis Kahn.

Lawrence of Arabia

The film that inspired Steven Spielberg to make movies, that has more versions than some directors have films, and one of the most enduring and undeniable classics of all time, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best ways to spend an afternoon. Directed by David Lean and the greatest Epic film ever put to celluloid, Lawrence of Arabia follows Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence fighting on the Arabian front in the First World War. Whilst I’m a bit cautious suggesting you watch this film on Netflix rather than getting to the Astor to see it, I can’t pass up any opportunity to recommend this film.

Barefoot in the Park

Neil Simon is a writer who doesn’t seem to be talked about much anymore. Once upon a time he was one of the biggest names on Broadway and in Hollywood. One of the finest comic writers of the era, Neil Simon penned The Odd Couple, The Goodbye Girl and Lost In Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer for Drama. Starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, Barefoot in the Park has, like The Odd Couple, a sense of fun that Neil Simon contemporary Mel Brooks shared but today is rarer than a Black Rhino.

In the Line of Fire

You don’t need me pointing out that Clint Eastwood is one of the most enduring Hollywood stars of all time, perhaps the most enduring. Actually no, he is, no question. In the Line of Fire came relatively late in his career as an action film star but it’s one of his best. As the last Secret Service agent on active-duty who was with JFK in Dallas, Clint Eastwood must track down a former CIA agent bent on killing the President.

The Way We Were

One of the best romance films of the 1970’s, The Way We Were stars Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in the era of How To Spot A Communist McCarthyism. Written by Arthur Laurents and directed by Sydney Pollack, The Way We Were is one of those special films that sees some of the most talented artists in many different films converge to make something truly memorable.

Let There Be Light

Completed in 1946 yet not released to the public until 1981, Let There Be Light is a war documentary directed by Hollywood legend John Huston. Expecting more a piece of propaganda, Let There Be Light’s uncompromising look at soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress disorder was suppressed by the U.S. Government for close to forty years. A short yet haunting film, this documentary was a big influence on Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master.

If you ask me, Stan is starting to seriously out-perform Netflix as a place to watch classic movies. From Midnight Cowboy, to Thief, to The Birdman of Alcatraz, Stan is killing it at the mo. I began to make a list and soon found the list to be over three pages long so… Instead of inflicting that on you, here’s a few good films you may have looked past.

A Bridge Too Far

The perfect entre for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Dunkirk, Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far is as big as war films get. Written by Misery, Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the SundanceKid screenwriter, William Goldman, this film managed to amass an ensemble cast that, for my money, hasn’t been topped. I’m talking about James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kruger, Lawrence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford and more…

Heaven’s Gate

Give it a chance. I know, I know, “Notorious Heaven’s Gate”, the film that single-handedly destroyed United Artists, but give it a chance. When Michael Cimino finally got to see his 216 “Director’s Cut” screen at the Venice Film Festival it was received with rapturous applause. Cimino is far from the one trick pony he’s made out to be and Heaven’s Gate is one hell of a way to spend an afternoon.

In the Realm of the Senses

Perhaps still the most widely known film by Nagisa Oshima (whose film A Cruel Story of Youth I wrote about a couple of weeks ago), it was a bit of a surprise hit in the West when it was released in 1976. This was helped in part by the film initially being banned, which is a sure-fire way, we all know, to guarantee the making of a cult classic. Great erotic cinema is rare, with the true masterpieces being able to be counted on only one hand, and Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses is one of the greatest examples of the genre.

Peeping Tom

“All this filming isn’t healthy”, a quote from the film about a boyish compulsive serial killer with a fascination for film cameras could easily be attributed to any number of great directors in the past. This is the film that would, upon release, be dismissed with disgust by both critics and audiences and put a permanent stain on the name of Michael Powell. But that’s not to say the film deserves it. It’s a fascinating watch, just as intoxicating as The Red Shoes, or The Black Narcissus, or any other of the Powell & Pressburger films. Peeping Tom would later find a new home with the adoration of the New Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma.

Marty

Starting life as a teleplay starring Rod Steiger, made during the original Television Golden Age, Marty would later be adapted to the silver screen, this time starring Ernest Borgnine in the title role. One of the greatest love stories ever told, Marty is short, sweet and absolutely heart breaking. Never one to avoid writing “messages” into his films, Paddy Chayefsky (who would go on to win two more Oscars for Best Original Screenplay in The Hospital and Network) gives us one of the most timeless stories ever put to screen… It’s like I’ve been saying for years, Rocky is just Marty with more punching.

Not long after the Second World War came to a close to-be-auteur Robert Altman, with nothing better to do, walked into a theatre in the middle of the afternoon. The film he wound up seeing, directed by David Lean and written by Noël Coward, puzzled him a bit at first. The two leads were pretty ordinary, not all that much to look at, the leading man certainly no Cary Grant, and the leading lady certainly no Rita Hayworth. “But,” as his wife Kathryn Altman said, “twenty minutes later he was in tears, and he had fallen in love with her. And it made him feel that it wasn’t just a movie.” The film he’d seen was 1945’s Brief Encounter.

Brief Encounter tells the story of a pair of ordinary middle-class people (Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard), both married, who happen upon each other in a train station buffet and, before either can stop themselves, fall in love. Adapted from a one-act play called Still Life written by Noël Coward, the film, in a way that’s rare for today let alone 1945, doesn’t try and come up with excuses for their extramarital affair, no abusive husbands or loveless wives.

Instead we follow them on small outing after small outing, with them every step of the way as they grow more and more fond of each other. With the question of if they will give in and commit adultery hanging over them at every moment, it would be easy for the film to leave us feeling like voyeurs obsessed solely with the will-they-or-won’t-they suspense of it all, but it doesn’t, we feel part of it. We feel as though this is happening to us just as much as it’s happening to Laura and Alec.

If Great Britain has a “national director” it’d no question be David Lean. Undoubtedly most famous for his mastery of the 4-hour runtime, with films like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, all sprawling epics about figures larger than life, David Lean can rest easy knowing he’s a long, long, long way from ever being forgotten. But if there’s a downside to turning out three gargantuan classics in a row, it’s that the one thing gargantuan classics tend to do is drown out other often just as brilliant films, just ask Frank Capra, or Martin Scorsese, or Billy Wilder. Before Lawrence, David Lean already had under his belt the wildly popular Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and, peppered in between, small, intimate films like Summertime and Brief Encounter.

While Lean’s remembered today as one of the greatest filmmakers ever to live, he’d be the first to admit that he owed everything to Noël Coward. A playwright, composer, director, actor, singer, Noël Coward did just about everything an entertainer could do and when he did it was always distinctly him. Most known for his work in the theatre, Coward’s career in film could be easily forgotten simply because of the breadth of his importance in other fields, but it was him that first gave then editor David Lean a shot behind the wheel. The pair made four films together, the first being In Which We Serve, where Lean and Coward shared directing credit, and the last being Brief Encounter.

Even today the topic of adultery in literature and in film is mostly something to be treated with contempt, the adulterer being only a step above a mass murderer on the morality scale. But the truth behind why people may be tempted to have affairs is as murky as anything gets. After all, what stickier topics and emotions are there than love and lust. While other critics have pointed to Brief Encounter as being a perfect example of repressed emotions as a British virtue, to me it’s far more universal. Every single person who’s been in a long-term relationship has met at one point or another someone they could imagine another life with, that if circumstances were different they’d run off with. Feelings like these aren’t only for the Cary Grants and the Rita Hayworths of the world, they’re for everyone. Just as the Paddy Chayefsky-penned Marty would do almost a decade later, Brief Encounter proves that, unlike what Hollywood would seemingly have us believe, love doesn’t only belong to the beautiful.

The French New Wave gets all the love. It seems every director who’s worked in the past 50 years has noted its influence, or had it noted for them by others. It’s beloved by film students, its jump cuts, handheld camerawork, location photography and often lack of narrative cohesion offering in their minds perhaps an easy way to stand out. And when people make fun of the idea of the “Art film” almost without fail what they’re teasing is the French Nouvelle Vague, whether conscious of it or not.

Perhaps, you could argue, it was because the French filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut and Demy really got the ball rolling with what would become a trend of “New Waves” all across the globe. I’m talking the New Hollywood, or American New Wave, the Australian New Wave and, of course, the Japanese New Wave. But that kind of talk seems like nothing more than rewriting history, if for no other reason than the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima.

Nagisa Oshima, who would become known as the “Avatar” of the Japanese New Wave, was 13 in 1945 when the war ended. He never attempted to hide the fact that the end of the war, or perhaps the society at large’s response to it, had an indelible effect on him. Perhaps if those around him were as willing to let it affect them as he was the wound might have been easier to bear.

“The problem was who in Japan was responsible for it. Our teachers who up until the day before had been militarists and emperor worshippers started to talk the next day all about democracy and freedom and equality and charity. I keenly felt their unwillingness to accept responsibility for their views,” he said, in 1985.

Oshima, with a career spanning four decades, was possibly the greatest critic of Japanese society to ever live. Whether he was criticising Japan’s far right militaristic past with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, or his disillusionment with the Japanese left wing with Night and Fog in Japan, no one was safe from falling between his crosshairs.

In 1960, at the age of 28, Nagisa Oshima released his first, by modern standards, feature length film; A Cruel Story of Youth. A story of teenagers falling in and out of love, and in and out of trouble, as quickly as the film’s brisk pacing. A Cruel Story of Youth is noted today for having that same energy and spirit that would be defined as one of the French New Wave’s most distinct features. But it’s worth noting that in the same year as Oshima’s film’s release, France would see the release of what is widely regarded as the seminal work of the French New Wave; Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

We see in A Cruel Story of Youth Oshima’s unflinching uncompromising eye on full display. He takes a theme that, with the masterful works of those like Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds, An Autumn Afternoon), had already become tradition in Japanese Cinema, the conflict between old and new generations, and gives it an almost volcanic energy. While Ozu’s films are beautiful, slow and meditative, Oshima’s A Cruel Story of Youth is fast and, like it’s title would suggest, cruel.

While characters depicted in the film show their fair share of cruelty within the first few minutes, the title could just as easily be referring to Oshima’s own depiction of them. He doesn’t attempt to forgive anyone in the film for their transgressions or flaws, he doesn’t let anyone get away with anything. The recklessness and voracious sexual appetite of youth are given just as much time as is given to their close relationship to violence.

Similar to the critical response to folk like Stanley Kubrick or film critic Pauline Kael or The Paris Review co-founder and participatory journalist George Plimpton, some critics couldn’t stop themselves from desperately trying to find ways to write off Oshima. But to me, Nagisa Oshima’s films are as if you mixed together the stunning visuals, impeccable eye for composition and themes of Yasujiro Ozu with the energy, raw power and merciless sharp eye of John Cassavetes.

“My films are both fiction and documentary. The camera is shooting the action, and this becomes a document. What I hate most in cinema is sentimentalism. I want to follow humans in an ultra-logical way. If you do this, the essence of the human comes out and you have something as real as non-fiction.”

Jonathan Demme, who succumbed to Esophageal cancer last week at the age of 73, made some of the most beloved films of the past 30 years. Whatever your poison, he had something for you. Concert film, high velocity comedy, high tension thriller, heavy hitting drama, exploitation film, he did it all. It’s not often you find a director who can so easily ride the line between documentarian vs narrative fiction, let alone all the genres, styles and forms that Demme managed to make look easy.

He was a champion of those who needed one and those who desperately deserved one, whether that meant making Philadelphia about the AIDS epidemic right at its worst or setting to film Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray, the greatest monologist who ever lived, if you ask me. He made what is widely considered to be the greatest concert film of all time; Stop Making Sense with the Talking Heads. He elevated the horror film out of its rut with The Silence of the Lambs and collected five Academy Awards in total for it, the only time a horror film ever has.

After a decade of middling success at best, directing some Roger Corman exploitation films and the critically underrated films Citizen’s Band and, my personal favourite, Melvin and Howard, Demme set out on a decade that’s near peerless for its strike rate. Beginning with 1984’s Stop Making Sense, he followed with the comedy cult classic, fitting somewhere between John Hughes and Alfred Hitchcock, Something Wild starring Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith and a yet-to-breakout Ray Liotta.

Right after, he came out with Swimming to Cambodia. Like the Talking Heads film, Jonathan Demme went to see a performance and immediately saw something he thought needed to be caught on film. He was right too. Just like Talking Heads, there’s been no one quite like Spalding Gray. The film itself walks the line between being a documentary and being a narrative feature. If, however, I was going to say Melvin and Howard was his underrated gem of narrative film then without a second thought Swimming to Cambodia is, by a mile, his most underrated documentary.

One year later, in 1988, he sprung right to the Michelle Pfeiffer helmed comedy Married to the Mob and then, in 1991, a sharp left turn into the film that would make his career, define one of the one of the most enduring characters in cinema history, give us three career highlight performances, and one of the most unforgettable uses of music in motion pictures (Goodbye Horses by Q Lazzarus): His adaptation of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.

When going over Demme’s filmography like this it can be tricky to work out why exactly he never became the household name he surely deserved to be. In interviews, he’s always the biggest personality in the room, his smile always wide, enthusiasm knowing no bounds. He wasn’t against wearing track pants on the red carpet or on set, and on special occasions perhaps even breaking out a pair of Pokémon themed sweats. His films won award after award. He was beloved by the people who worked with him and worked around him.

His influence on other filmmakers too is not to be overlooked. While most people when referring to stylistic influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights are quick to point to the frenetic camera work and editing reminiscent of Scorsese’s Goodfellas, or the ensemble sprawl reminiscent of Altman’s Nashville, to Anderson himself the biggest influence on all three of his first films was Demme, noting in particular his use of close-ups. “I’d never seen a close-up that was exactly like how it ought to look in my mind until I saw Silence of the Lambs,” he said.

I can’t take credit for the title of this article, I gutted it right from the middle of what Jodie Foster had to say about her Silence of the Lambs director’s sudden passing. Her comment in full is a better closer than anything I could possibly hope to write about the man, so here it goes: “Jonathan was as quirky as his comedies and as deep as his dramas. He was pure energy, the unstoppable cheerleader for anyone creative. Just as passionate about music as he was about art, he was and always will be a champion of the soul.”

Rest in peace, Jonathan.