Michael Haneke

Now, if you’ve seen any of Haneke’s films (others include “Time of the Wolf,” “Code Unknown,” “Benny’s Video” and two different versions — one in German, one in English — of the horrifying “Funny Games”) you know that they have the uniquely unsettling quality of operating on several different and perhaps contradictory levels. Haneke generally wants to draw you into a compelling story, draw a political or philosophical parable, and remind you that what you’re watching is just a fiction — “an artifact,” as he puts it — all at the same time.

In Haneke’s notorious “Funny Games,” a pair of amoral and sadistic killers, who are less like characters than imaginary specters, address winking asides to the audience — and at a crucial juncture rewind the film with a remote control. “Caché,” Haneke’s biggest hit, appears to focus on the question of who has been making sinister videotapes of a middle-class Parisian family and leaving them on the doorstep. As in David Lynch’s somewhat similar “Lost Highway,” the mystery is both unsolved and (I believe) unsolvable. But Haneke isn’t just trying to undermine the narrative stability of conventional cinema, although he’s doing that too. He’s shining a spotlight on the atmosphere of paranoia and submerged guilt in which the middle-class family’s entire life has been constructed.

At first glance, “The White Ribbon” is the most mannered and most beautiful of Haneke’s films, and you could describe that fact as a calculated gamble on his part. Set in a village in rural northern Germany in 1913, with World War I looming on the horizon, it’s a gorgeously photographed and oddly riveting chronicle of a late-stage feudal society running on fumes. Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, “The White Ribbon” captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events — vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions — turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus.

If Haneke’s most obvious point is that the hierarchical, aristocratic society of peasant Germany was replaced by something much worse — by the “New Order” created by its mistreated children, a generation later — it definitely can’t be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. “The White Ribbon” is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the “Bad Seed”/”Children of the Corn” evil-tot tradition.

Haneke’s title refers to a ribbon parents of the period affixed to the sleeves of preadolescent children suspected of “impure” thought and behavior (i.e., masturbation). On one level, this story is about a very simple notion: The physical and psychic violence inflicted on one generation by another is always passed along, often in heightened and more dramatic form. But this severe and striking period piece is also a story that subtly but constantly reminds us that it is a story, and as such cannot be trusted. Even at the risk of undermining his own film, Haneke wants us to see history as a problematic and partial narrative, one that has more to teach us about the present than the past.

I met Haneke in his Manhattan hotel suite during his visit here in September for the New York Film Festival. We sat at a round table with an interpreter between us, which only heightened the atmosphere of competition and/or negotiation. Although Haneke understands English pretty well (or at least much better than I understand German), he waited for translations in both directions. Occasionally he corrected the interpreter or broke into brief snatches of English; I’ve marked those passages, as they seemed like important moments in the poker game.

All your earlier films have had contemporary settings, so it’s striking that you’ve done a period piece. I suppose there are some obvious reasons why you picked this time and place, rural Germany just before World War I. But I’d like to hear you explain it.

Unfortunately, Germany is the place and time in which ideological radicalism is most prominent, and that’s why I chose to set the film there. But it would be a mistake if one were to reduce the film to a German example.

“The White Ribbon” is also your first film in black-and-white. Were your reasons for that primarily aesthetic or, I don’t know, primarily philosophical?

There are two reasons for choosing to shoot in black-and-white. The first is that all of us, if we think back to that period, know it almost exclusively from photographs. Photography had been invented shortly before, and we all know the period from photographs we’ve seen. I thought it would be easier to enable the spectator to enter the story by shooting it in black-and-white.

That’s the first reason. The other reason, however, is that shooting it in black-and-white automatically produces an element of distance for the audience, in the same way as does the use of a narrator. The film opens with the narrator saying, “I’m not sure if the story I’m about to tell you corresponds to what actually took place. I can only remember it dimly. I know a lot of the events only through hearsay.” So both those elements, then, raise mistrust in the audience as to the accuracy of what they’re going to be seeing, and the reality of what they’re going to be seeing. Both the black-and-white and the use of a narrator lead the audience to see the film as an artifact, and not as something that claims to be an accurate depiction of reality.

Do this period and this place have any personal significance for you? You’ve spoken about the political importance, but you were born in 1942, the heyday of Nazism. I wonder, for example, whether your parents were young people in a similar time and place?

I think that most of my films have very little to do with me or my family. I was more interested in the theme: How are we ideologically conditioned?

All right. For film buffs, it’s hard to avoid thinking of Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer when you see this beautiful black-and-white photography, the rural Northern European setting, a story that’s about child-rearing and young love and religion.

Of course I admire the directors you mention, but there are any number of directors I admire. I’ve heard the comparisons of my work, or this film at least, to Dreyer, and for that reason I recently watched “Ordet” again. I have to say that I see very little in terms of connections or similarities. In terms of the aesthetics, Dreyer’s staging and lighting are very theatrical, whereas I was looking for more realistic light. If there was any specific influence, it was much more the photographs of August Sander, who was the great German photographer of that period. If we oriented ourselves to anything, it was his work.

You’re depicting the 20th century here, but this doesn’t look anything like the age of industrial capitalism. Was it really still the feudal era in rural Germany at that time?

At the time, 85 or 90 percent of the population lived in villages. So the vision of society that I present is a mirror of a feudal society, in which there was the baron at the top of society, going down to the farm workers. In between them, you had the teachers, the professional classes, the pastor. The film in that sense reproduces the classes that were present in society at the time. Had I chosen to locate the film in the city, then social relationships would have been far more complicated and far less easy to discern.

I suppose what you’re showing us is the feudal order at exactly the moment it breaks down. I mean, the baron [played by Ulrich Tukur] is the most powerful man in the village, at least in theory. But we see his fields destroyed, and his son abducted and abused. His power is broken.

Yes, that’s precisely what you see in the film.

One of the hallmarks of your style is that you withhold acts of violence from us. Horrifying things occur, in this movie and in others, but we generally don’t see them. What interested me in “The White Ribbon” is that you withhold other kinds of intimate or emotional acts as well. When the farmer sits with his dead wife’s body, the camera remains behind the wall. We can tell he’s grieving but we literally can’t see it.

I’m always trying to enable and arouse the imagination of the spectator. Especially when you’re dealing with powerful emotions and tragic situations, I avoid using close-ups. First of all, the close-ups are always false. It’s unrealistic. They’re indiscreet and they’re kitschy as well. I think it’s far more powerful if you see this expression of pain indirectly. You hear a sigh, and that’s far more evocative than if we’d shown a shot of him.

In this film you also express emotions that are — how can I say this? — not strongly associated with the work of Michael Haneke. [Laughter.] There’s the relationship of the young lovers, the schoolteacher [Christian Friedel] and his girlfriend [Leonie Benesch], which is very tender and tentative. There’s the heartbreaking scene in which a little boy gives his father a caged bird, and even though the father is a cruel and unsympathetic figure, we see his humanity at that moment. It’s like you’re throwing us a lifeline, a way out of this place: The terrible things that happen are not the only things in life.

The film depicts the story of so many people that I think it’s realistic. In real life, not only catastrophes happen, but also pleasant things as well. There can be relationships that are positive. It’s also economic in dramaturgical terms. If it were a film about couples and there were only two or three leading roles, then it would be different. You concentrate on the conflict, and that’s more than enough to keep you busy in the film. Here I think it’s important to show positive as well as negative energies. That corresponds to our experience of daily life, in which not only terrible things happen. There were love stories in concentration camps as well.

One of your principal subjects here is education and the treatment of children. Can I sum it up by saying that you think the methods of child-rearing in this time and place had disastrous consequences?

I think that education is one of the decisive points in human experience. When I was making the American version of “Funny Games,” there was a word I discovered that I find is so indicative. There’s a scene in which one of the two boys pees himself, and the other one says, “Please forgive him. He’s not housebroken.” I think that word is so illuminating: It suggests that we have to be broken for the house. We have to be broken to be acceptable socially, and that’s the dilemma of every educational system.

You have to partially destroy or restrict the freedom of the individual in order for him or her to function in society. That’s the dilemma of every generation, and I’m not convinced that current approaches to educational theory are necessarily the ideal solution either.

You want people to perceive this as more than a parable about the roots of Nazism, isn’t that right?

The question that I’m asking is: What conditions have to be in place for people to seek to grasp such ideological responses? In a position of hopelessness, humiliation and despair, people clutch at any straw, and those straws usually take an ideological form, whether religious or political. Out of hopelessness, they turn to ideology — the model is always the same, although the external forms may be different.

You spoke earlier about using the black-and-white photography and the narration as a distancing mechanism, a way to remind the viewer that the film is an artifact. There’s another sense in which you are challenging the audience. As you did in “Caché,” you lead us part of the way toward a solution of the central mystery: Who is committing these violent acts, and why? And then you seem to suggest that solving the mystery is not actually important.

Those are the least important questions. In my previous film, “Caché,” the question of who sent the videotapes isn’t important at all. What’s important is the sense of guilt felt by the character played by Daniel Auteuil in the film. But these superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It’s relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.

There are so many different things that take place in “The White Ribbon” that there are any number of possible explanations. It may not be that the acts have been committed by someone intentionally. For example, when the barn burns down, it’s possible that was simply caused by an accidental spark. Perhaps the hay had been stored when it was too wet, and spontaneous combustion happened. Perhaps the farmer’s wife who died simply fell. It was an accident, and she was not murdered. The explanations, in fact, are so unimportant. In real life, there are any number of events that take place that we don’t understand. It’s only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It’s far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience.

It strikes me that in “Caché,” and perhaps in this film as well, there literally is no answer that explains what is happening. 

[In English.] There could be an answer!

Well, we can point back at you, the director of the film. Who is making those videotapes and sending them to the family? You are!

[Laughter.] Every interpretation is right.

[In German.] I always say that a film is like a ski jump. The film constructs the jump and enables the spectator to jump. It’s up to each member of the audience to jump, and they’re all going to jump differently. I create tension. I raise certain questions. That’s my intention, but it’s to give the audience a chance to respond.

[In English.] The film ends in the head of the viewer, not on the screen.

On the simplest level, you want to leave us asking: What happens next? What will the events we have seen lead to, and how do we think about them?

[In English.] Yes, and why? Why do things happen like this? Everybody has to find his own explanation.

[In German.] It’s important to always try to tell a story in a way where there are several credible possible explanations. Explanations that can be totally contradictory! 

I know you want this story to have present-day relevance. But you’re running a risk, aren’t you? Viewers can watch this beautiful, stylized film that’s set almost 100 years ago in a society that no longer exists and think, “Well, that was then. Things are different now.”

Yes, absolutely. It wasn’t my intention simply to warm up an old subject for itself. I think the problems that existed then are the same today: Are we conditioned to accept and embrace certain ideologies? That is as relevant today as it was back then. I’m not simply trying to re-create a certain age. I’m not a history teacher.

I remember with my first film that was shown in Cannes, “The Seventh Continent” [in 1989], there was a screening and afterward we had a discussion. The first question came from a woman who stood up and asked, “Is life in Austria as awful as that?” She didn’t want to accept the difficult questions being raised in the film, so she tried to limit them to a specific place and say, “That’s not my problem.” You could make the same mistake with this film, if you see it as only being about a specific period.

“The White Ribbon” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

But even before the journey begins, the journalist’s 10-year-old son has joked that she’s decided to fall in love with James, and her behavior around him is oddly imperious and demanding. When a cafe proprietor in some picturesque village makes the obvious assumption — that she and James are married — Binoche’s character pounces on it: It’s been 15 years, my husband works all the time, I never see him, we fight a lot. James returns from making a phone call to persons unknown (perhaps his real wife or girlfriend) and gradually gets dragged into the game. As the pair continue their odyssey through a Tuscan afternoon, sparring like a couple who really have been together 15 years, the movie’s real question comes into focus: How does a forgery or copy of a relationship compare with the so-called real thing?

On one level, “Certified Copy” is exactly what it looks like — an elegant, wistful and picturesque tale of two ships passing in the Tuscan sunlight, somewhat in the mode of “Before Sunrise” or “Cairo Time.” It’s by far the most audience-friendly movie of Kiarostami’s career, and the first one that’s likely to draw numerous Western viewers who’ve never heard of him and never seen an Iranian movie. But you could also call it, well, a clever copy of that kind of film, with lots of other things going on under the surface. This story bristles with ideas and intelligence, and offers tremendous emotional highs and lows; the longer you stick with it, the more mysterious it gets. Ultimately, Kiarostami isn’t just inquiring into the nature of love, marriage and relationships, he’s probing the porous boundary between stories and reality.

When I met Binoche a few months ago in her Manhattan hotel room (around the time that “Certified Copy” premiered at the New York Film Festival), she explained that the film was the end result of a circuitous collaboration with Kiarostami. Even in the rarefied world of upscale French cinema, built around a tradition of ethereal, untouchable screen goddesses, the woman known to the Parisian media as La Binoche is a special case. She has certainly appeared in Hollywood movies — her only Oscar came for “The English Patient” in 1997, and she was nominated again opposite Johnny Depp in the schmaltzy 2000 “Chocolat” — but she has said no far more often than yes.

Beginning with her breakthrough performance in Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in 1988, Binoche has spent most of her career making high-prestige art films with adventurous directors, with little or no regard for their commercial potential. Cinephiles around the world will never forget her magnetic leading performances in the late Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy, but she’s also worked with Jean-Luc Godard (“Hail Mary”), Patrice Leconte (“The Widow of Saint-Pierre”), Leos Carax (“The Lovers on the Bridge”), Michael Haneke (“Caché”), Hou Hsiao-hsien (“The Flight of the Red Balloon”), Amos Gitai (“Disengagement”) and Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours”). She recently finished shooting American director Dito Montiel’s thriller “The Son of No One,” is developing a new film with Assayas, and has reportedly been cast in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “Cosmopolis.”)

What strikes you most about Binoche in person — after you get used to sitting in the same living room with Juliette Binoche, that is — is how sincere and earnest, even how vulnerable, she is. I don’t mean that we became terrific friends in a 20-minute conversation. She is French, after all, which implies a degree of formality that’s roughly 250 percent of the American norm. But Binoche, looking handsome and almost fragile in a tailored black pantsuit, gives off no hint of bogus pretension or of the diffident, superior boredom that emanates from other French movie stars. (You can probably guess who I’m talking about.) She listens carefully, laughs often and occasionally grabs hold of the conversation with the same ferocious intensity she brings to the screen.

I get the impression that making “Certified Copy” was the end of a long process between you and Kiarostami. How did it begin?

It was in the air when I met him several times in different places, at [screenwriter and producer] Jean-Claude Carrière’s place and at the Cannes festival. Then I did an interview with him. I filmed him, and at the end of the interview he said, “This interview was a really bad idea, but come to Iran.” [Laughter.] I said, “OK, OK, fine, maybe I’ll come.” About a year later, I really started to think about it. I thought I would love to know what was really going on there, after reading about all the Iranian bad people, you know, and all the politics. It turned out that I could get a visa. I was very surprised that I could get there. And I really discovered a completely different country than I imagined, than I was reading about in the media.

I’ve heard that from other people too. But what do you mean, exactly?

The joy inside the houses! They’re very much like Italians. They love life, they enjoy life, they’re full of culture. They have a great sense of themselves. And, you know, that area is, how do you say it? The curdle of civilization?

The cradle.

Yes, the cradle of civilization. They’re very aware of the power of their poetry, of their artistic strength and awareness. So discovering that was really — you know, we describe them as these retarded, ancient men who want to control women. And, hello? That happened quite a while ago, everywhere in the world. [Laughter.] Of course I’m against it, the veil thing, but it takes time for men to be aware. Of, you know, their fear, which is bringing more fear.

Well, since you mention the veil, I have to ask you about the recent law in France, which forbids Islamic women from wearing it in many public situations. How do you feel about that?

You know, we come from a different history. The revolution in France really places things on a different scale. The fact that the French policy really comes out of the revolution, the idea that everybody has to be the same — égalité, fraternité, liberté — which is, between us, a whole debate. From an outside point of view, it’s very hard to understand that. It’s not about pushing Muslims away from their beliefs. It’s like, everybody’s the same, and if you’re going in the swimming pool, you’ve got to be the same as the others. If you put yourself in the swimming pool completely covered, that puts that kid away from the others, away from the group.

Yeah, we have a more pluralistic tradition in the United States, although it’s safe to say that’s in question right now too. OK, so you went to Iran with him. Then what happened?

There was a sort of quid pro quo. When I arrived at the airport in Tehran, there were photographers and video cameras everywhere, and I was shocked: Wow, why did Abbas do that? Meanwhile, he was thinking: Wow, why did Juliette do that? We didn’t expect that. What happened was that there was a journalist on the plane who saw me and phoned some friends, and then it spread out, and the next day there were stories on the front page of the newspaper: Abbas and Juliette have a film together! Abbas was in trouble, because he thought: I have no film with you, and if the government is unhappy with that, I might be in difficulty. So I had to do tons of interviews the next day and the following day, saying, “We have no project! We have no film together!”

After two days of doing that, he started telling me this story about going to Tuscany with this lady who drove him around and started talking to him as if he was her husband. He gave me so many details! I was just taken aback by the story and how fascinating it was. He could see that, and as I was listening he was making up the story, I think. At the end of it, he said, “Do you believe me?” and I said yes. And he said, “No, it’s not true. It didn’t happen.” Of course I laughed, and I laughed for several days after that. I couldn’t believe he made me play along, emotionally, like this. After that it still took a while, but he said to me: “Find a producer, and we’ll make the film.”

This was the first time he’s made a film in the West. Was that a big adjustment for him, as you saw it?

I think the fact that we made it in Italy was better for him, because it feels closer to his own country in many ways. He had already done workshops in Italy and made a short film there, so there was already a space for him to work in Italy. He felt kind of comfortable there. It might have been more difficult somewhere else, but now I think he’s ready for that. His next project’s going to take place in Japan, because it’s become very difficult for him to work in his own country.

Yes, it’s a strange situation. He’s easily the most internationally famous Iranian director, and he can’t really make films there. But tell me about working with William Shimell, who had never acted in a film before. Because most of the film is just the two of you, which is a lot of pressure on a newcomer!

Yeah, I could see that it was very difficult sometimes, almost like vertigo for him. You jump into that space, and there’s a lot of tension that comes with that. You have to be precise and be free at the same time. How do you combine those two worlds? After a while, I’d say after two weeks, I really saw him differently. I wanted to make sure he was fine, and not panicking too much! We filmed chronologically, and you see him grow as well, as the story moves along.

It’s interesting, I think this lady is telling him so many things. She’s telling him off, she’s pushy, she’s needy, all of that. He’s, like, subdued most of the time, he doesn’t answer back that well. He’s wondering what kind of situation he’s in. There’s something parallel between what William went through and what the character goes through.

This is a movie about people who have just met who start to pretend that they know each other well. You might call it a fiction about pretending, or a film where actors play people who are acting.

Well, as for me, it had to be always true. That’s a big theme we went through, Abbas and myself. He said to me: “Actors! They fake all the time! They don’t live emotion, it’s not true. Even though they cry, they cry for the film. It’s not like life, when you’re in real pain.” I said: “No, Abbas. You’re really recreating life and you’re really feeling the pain. It’s not technical, it’s heartfelt.” I could see that he didn’t agree, and it really didn’t matter to me, because he doesn’t know. So why do I need to battle? I didn’t want to go through big discussions about it. So I just smiled and thought, we’ll see.

Actually, I think what he discovered through the shoot was how emotional it was. I don’t think he expected that. Most of the time, the way he edits a film, it’s quite flat until the end, when the emotion comes in through the construction of the story. The story gives the emotion, not the actors going up and down and revealing their inside worlds. But as we made this one, we discovered that emotion could also give the film a shape in a different way. Theme-wise, this was wonderful. Between the man and the woman, the woman is exposing herself emotionally and the man is more controlling and thoughtful. But it’s also interesting that the woman in the film is Abbas as well. He raised his children on his own, and he knows what that’s like. So he never separated himself from her.

We only know one of the characters’ names, and we don’t know anything about their past. I mean, she’s got a child, so there’s that, obviously. But there’s almost nothing else.

I think for Abbas it was like Adam and Eve. You don’t know about Adam’s past, or Eve’s past. They are newly created.

You know, when the film premiered at Cannes, some people actually thought that there was a reality shift at some point. Maybe they actually are married, and either they’re pretending not to be at first or we’ve, I don’t know, gone from one universe into another. I don’t see it that way, but it’s an intriguing idea.

Yeah, and Abbas leaves it that way, which I like. It’s not about that — it’s not about choosing a side, whether they’re married or not married. It’s about the inside world, where you can imagine being married to someone you just met. So we’re more in that world, where she takes what’s inside her as real. Whether it’s true or not true, a copy, a reality, an original — that doesn’t matter in the end. It’s like: Can you see me? Can you hear me? Can you love me?

Talk about the moment when they first start to play the game together, pretending to be married. What happens in that scene?

It starts in the cafe, when the bartender asks her a question about him as a husband. He doesn’t know what to answer and turns to her, and she’s so angry. He’s not getting involved! He doesn’t know what to say. She catches him not playing the game, not being responsible, and it hits something in her: Oh, men! Men are not responsible! [Laughter.]

Anybody who’s ever been married is likely to identify strongly with that scene. [Laughter.] You know, you’re running the risk of playing someone who’s not likable all the time here.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Maybe not even most of the time! At least at the beginning of the film, at least, she’s pretty manipulative.

She’s manipulative, and she wants to be right all the time. But not at the end. At the end of the movie, there’s a moment where she becomes like a little girl.

Oh, I agree. I mean, people will have to see it for themselves, but I think at the end of the movie the audience will fall in love with her, just as the man does. Let me ask you quickly about your career trajectory of working with all these great directors, from Kieslowski and Godard through Haneke and Hou Hsiao-hsien and all the others. You’ve made other kinds of films too, more commercial films, but it’s quite an impressive list.

You know, I had a mother who loved the fine arts, and I was really educated by her. When I was 15, she sent me to see Tarkovsky’s films, Dreyer’s films, Rossellini’s films. I was educating myself very early on, with great directors, with film and theater. So for me it’s always been a continuation of that, that love of vision, of artists, and explorations of the human heart. Ideas, feelings and experiences. For me, it’s the same impulse. As an actress you also want to try other gears, other worlds, because you don’t know them, but you always come back to the world you’re really here for.

I also feel responsible, as an actress, to choose directors I really admire. It’d be easy, you know, to do more commercial films. There’s more money, more fame, more of whatever you want. But to find directors where you feel like: Oh! Artistically there’s a challenge there. Maybe people don’t know about them, but that doesn’t matter. I want to explore something with them. I have to say that it fulfills something in me, that at the end of it I say, “I’ve been through an experience with them, something I’ve never done before.” It’s all about exploration and sharing something with someone. And enjoying it, although it can be quite traumatic along the way. There was a lot of joy in Abbas’ film; we laughed all the time. I mean, it was concentrated and there was intensity. But there was joy as well.

“Certified Copy” is now playing in New York, with wider national release to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Dubious as I remain about the Blu-ray format — sure, it looks awesome if you’ve got the right equipment, but talk about planned obsolescence! — I too have relented. We’ve tried to catch every instance where a film is available on both formats, but I’m simply not thorough enough to pay attention to the different extras often available on Blu-ray. The complaint desk is open alternate Thursdays from 12:01 to 12:45, in every month without a “u,” “r” or “y.”

Please chime in with your own suggestions, since I’ve definitely left out a lot of great stuff.

“Gamera the Giant Monster” and “Gamera vs. Barugon”

What mad, nerdy, completist spirit has led the folks at Shout! Factory to release the original Japanese-language versions of two second-string mid-’60s monster movies (never previously available on DVD)? Well, the same spirit led me to watch both of them with tremendous relish. If you’ve worn out your Godzilla library, you’ll find much the same blend of Cold War dread and high-camp cuteness in these sagas about the reheated giant turtle from the Lost Continent of Atlantis, accidentally thawed when a Soviet bomber is shot down in the Arctic. Created by Daiei Studios as a rival to Toho’s “King of the Monsters,” Gamera and his spinning-saucer flight technique held his own in the Japanese market for several years, and became a staple of Stateside kids’ TV in badly dubbed versions. Shout! will reissue all six of the Daiei films, but the low-tech, black-and-white claustrophobia of the 1965 original has the most force. “Gamera vs. Barugon” is the first color entry, featuring an evil lizard that threatens to launch a new Ice Age, along with Japanese actors playing New Guinea natives. Awkward! But really fun!

Columbia Film Noir Classics, Vol. II

Columbia Pictures arrived late to the vault-scouring game of releasing big packages of ’50s genre films on DVD, but by partnering with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation on these loving restorations and remasterings, they’ve absolutely done it the right way. This second set of Columbia noirs features five little-known films, but all are worth seeing and at least two qualify as major discoveries. I’d never seen Fritz Lang’s “Human Desire,” a 1954 Emile Zola adaptation (!) with Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick Crawford as the parties in a tangled love triangle, but it’s a doozy. Jacques Tourneur’s “Nightfall” lacks star power and isn’t as good, but features classic noir cinematography by Burnett Guffey. Scorsese himself introduces “The Brothers Rico,” an obscure but ruthless and absorbing late-’50s Mafia flick. In Richard Quine’s terrific 1954 “Pushover,” cop Fred MacMurray falls for gangster’s moll Kim Novak (in one of her earliest starring roles) with predictably disastrous results. And what would a noir collection be without nuclear paranoia? In Irving Lerner’s 1958 “City of Fear,” Vince Edwards breaks out of prison with a canister of white powder he thinks is pure heroin. Whoops!

“Shinjuku Incident”

Amid all the Hollywood dreck he’s been churning out since the ’90s, it’s tough to remember what a massive and irresistible superstar Jackie Chan was, and is, in Asia — a Cantonese-speaking combination of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Tom Cruise. Chan never totally quit working in Hong Kong, and over the course of the last decade he’s returned to Chinese movies almost full time. Writer-director Derek Yee’s crime drama about a Chinese immigrant laborer named Steelhead, who rises to become a Tokyo mob boss, is a fairly routine H.K. action vehicle, delivered with grit and intensity. (I’ve heard good reports on Chan’s “New Police Story” from 2004, but haven’t seen it). But it’s great to see Chan quit playing the cutie-pie, lovable-mutt characters he’s always assigned in American movies and kick some yakuza ass. Even at his relatively advanced age, Jackie pulls off the fight scenes with brio, and “Shinjuku Incident” overall ranks among his meatiest and most satisfying flicks.

“Mystery Train” (Criterion Collection Special Edition, on DVD and Blu-ray)

Welcome to Memphis, circa 1989, both as a real place and the dream home of the American unconscious, as perceived through the cracked, off-kilter genius of Jim Jarmusch. Japanese tourists, Joe Strummer, a mysterious Italian widow (Nicoletta Braschi) and her overly talkative roommate (Lorraine Bracco); Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as a desk clerk and Cinqué Lee as an unhelpful bellboy. A tremendous, and tremendously odd supporting cast of musicians and street characters and presiding over it all, of course, the ghost (both seen and unseen) of Elvis Aron Presley. Jarmusch is the director who puts the loose in “allusive” and the lipstick in “elliptical”; I fully recognize his movies aren’t to everybody’s taste. But this charming, radical, deceptive meditation on rock ‘n’ roll, race, Memphis and America might be his most enjoyable, most thoughtful and most profound film, all at once. Watching it now — for me , at least — involves multiple layers of personal nostalgia piled atop cultural nostalgia, so I won’t even pretend objectivity. So I kind of think it’s a great movie, but even if you don’t agree, it’s plenty of fun and not like anything else.

“The White Ribbon” (DVD and Blu-ray)

Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning black-and-white fable, set in a Protestant village in rural northern Germany just before the outbreak of World War I, looks amazing in its hi-def DVD/Blu-ray release — and like all the Austrian director’s meticulous tales of shaggy-dog evil, it gains tremendous resonance from repeat viewings. From my original review: “Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, ‘The White Ribbon’ captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events — vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions — turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus. If Haneke’s most obvious point is that the hierarchical, aristocratic society of peasant Germany was replaced by something much worse — by the ‘New Order’ created by its mistreated children, a generation later — it definitely can’t be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. ‘The White Ribbon’ is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the ‘Bad Seed’/'Children of the Corn’ evil-tot tradition.” For more discussion of what may or may not be “going on” in the movie, here’s my interview with Haneke.

“Death Race 2000″ (Roger Corman’s Cult Classics, on DVD and Blu-ray)

Let’s see — it’s the year 2000, and pretty much all sports, politics and pop culture have been replaced by a coast-to-coast auto race where the point is to kill as many pedestrians as possible. David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone and Warhol pal Mary Woronov are among the leading racers — but wait, a bunch of Commie anti-race activists are looking to kill them! Well, OK, there’s no mention of that rigged presidential election, but otherwise that’s a pretty accurate description, wouldn’t you say? This 1975 Corman production (actually directed by Paul Bartel) captures the moment when B movies finally crossed the boundary into postmodern art. Shout! Factory’s new wide-screen, hi-def transfer comes with loads of featurettes and extras, including interviews with Corman and Carradine, two commentary tracks and a documentary on the film’s groundbreaking design team. Other titles in Shout!’s Corman series include “Forbidden World,” “Galaxy of Terror, “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” and “Suburbia,” with plenty more to come.

“Black Narcissus” (Criterion Collection Special Edition, on DVD and Blu-ray)

I haven’t yet seen Criterion’s new release of “The Red Shoes,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s acknowledged masterpiece, but in some ways the British sensualist duo’s lesser-known 1947 “Black Narcissus” is more worth noticing. To say that this tale of a group of nuns trapped high in the Himalayas is strange, gorgeous and intoxicating is just to say that it’s a Powell-Pressburger film, but even by their standards this gorgeous yarn about cultural isolation, sexual repression and terrible weather, set against a harsh but beautiful mountain landscape, is something special. The all-female cast headed by Deborah Kerr is outstanding, and Criterion’s disc is predictably loaded with extras, including a commentary track by Powell and leading admirer Martin Scorsese, an introduction by Bertrand Tavernier, and two interesting making-of documentaries. Both directors are deceased, but the hi-def transfer was supervised by cinematographer Jack Cardiff and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who is also Powell’s widow).

“Mystery Science Theater 3000″ Vol. XVIII

With 18 DVD sets, not all from the same distributor and not all simultaneously available, the digital-media history of meta-movie-mockery cult series MST3K is becoming as convoluted as the show’s original history. Nonetheless, if you’re a fan, put all that aside and just buy this — and if you’re simply curious, this collection makes a fine place to start. Once again we get four episodes never previously available (at least legally), including two cackle-inducing classics, “The Beast of Yucca Flats” (which features a true MST3K high point, the Puerto Rico short “Progress Island, USA”) and the immortally strange Soviet folktale “Jack Frost.” Also here: “Lost Continent” from the early, Joel Hodgson days, along with a Season 4 sci-fi mess that’s totally new to me, called “Crash of the Moons.” Wait, there’s more (as usual). Extras this time include introductions by MSTers Frank Conniff and Kevin Murphy, original trailers, four exclusive mini-posters and a new documentary about the unbelievably bad “Beast of Yucca Flats.”

“Night Train to Munich” (Criterion Collection)

Not only had I never seen this 1940 British espionage caper from “Third Man” director Carol Reed — made during the earliest and most dangerous stiff-upper-lip days of World War II — I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of it either. It turns out to be a handsome and thoroughly enjoyable adventure in a light, early-Hitchcock mode, starring Rex Harrison as a suave British superspy who must conduct a Czech scientist and his attractive daughter (Margaret Lockwood) across the heart of Nazi Germany. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s screenplay has some nice switchbacks, and Reed keeps the pace bubbling, especially by period standards. Of course the middle-European “locations” are all the Shepherd’s Bush studios in London, but such high artifice has its charms too.

“The Maid” (“La Nana”)

Friends and acquaintances kept telling me I was a dope for missing Catalina Saavedra’s award-winning performance as the blank, hostile, passive-aggressive “nana” to an upper-crust Chilean family. Now I get it: Whether you call Sebastián Silva’s film a dark comedy or a class-war drama is up to you — Latin American movies about social class are virtually a genre unto themselves — as is the question of whether Saavedra’s Raquel is a mistreated heroine or a manipulative villain. What I can be sure about is that this is a subtle, disturbing and funny film, suggestive of Hitchcock or Chabrol and open to various interpretations — and that Saavedra marvelously evokes a damaged and dangerous character who never asks you to understand or pity her.

Special months-old personal bonus selection: “Rocky Road to Dublin”

This witty, despairing 1967 documentary about the dire social and cultural condition of Ireland, 40-odd years after independence from Britain, is an absolute must if you (like me) have roots in that place and time. (Director Peter Lennon shares my great-grandfather’s name, for the love of God.) But it’s also interesting on other levels, as a fine early example of the ethnographic personal essay, shot by great French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, that includes interviews with such Irish leading lights as writer Sean O’Faolain, academic and diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien and Yank expat filmmaker John Huston. Bizarrely, Lennon’s documentary was the last film shown at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival before protests led by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard shut the place down. While that’s in no way relevant to its subject matter, it has helped cement the film’s legendary status. For any Irish person, With its depiction of a priest-ridden, repressed and mildewed version of nationalism, “Rocky Road to Dublin” may serve to remind Irish folks that, bleak as things on that dubious green island may be at the moment — and they’re fairly bleak — nobody wants to go back to that.

It’s easy to be cynical about the foreign-language Academy Award, given its history of rewarding pretty, heartwarming vapidity. “Ajami” might sound at first more like a publicity gimmick with laudable social goals than a legitimate work of art: a film co-directed by an Israeli, Yaron Shani, and a Palestinian, Scandar Copti, that tries to capture the two communities’ tormented coexistence. But “Ajami” is neither pretty nor heartwarming: It begins and ends with scenes of young boys shot down on the street, both of them ending up as cruel footnotes to a stupid misunderstanding.

Shot in what might be called the “international style” of independent film — a hand-held, eye-level camera, mostly in medium close-up — “Ajami” has a large cast that mixes Israeli professionals and neighborhood recruits. Cinematographer Boaz Yehonatan Yacov (who also shot the remarkable “My Father, My Lord”) captures the streets, living rooms and restaurants of Jaffa in near-documentary detail, and this pays off at the level of character complexity and social context. Inexplicable and unforgivable things happen in “Ajami”: We see an Israeli cop about to shoot an unarmed underage suspect in the head, and an Arab man stab a Jewish neighbor in the heart during an insignificant street argument. Shani and Copti’s central strategy is to show us these crimes and then, through their cut-up, back-and-forth chronology, explain how they happened.

In no sense is this movie some kind of lily-livered apologetic for violence on either side; indeed, in depicting all their characters as human beings with family lives and recognizable wants and needs, Shani and Copti also depict them as people in the grip of a near-hopeless pathology. If there are two central characters in “Ajami,” they are Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a Jaffa teenager whose family is deeply in debt to a dangerous Bedouin crime family, and Dando (Eran Naim), a stocky Tel Aviv cop and family man whose brother has gone missing in action in the Palestinian territories. Neither is an ideological or religious zealot; neither is consumed with hatred for the other side. But long years of war and hatred have taught them where to direct their anger.

Omar and Dando will eventually collide during a drug bust gone wrong in a Tel Aviv parking garage, an event we see multiple times from multiple perspectives. Along the way, Omar’s next-door neighbor is shot by the Bedouins (who take him for Omar), his cosmopolitan friend Binj (played by co-director Copti) — an Arab who plans to move in with his Jewish girlfriend — meets an ambiguous end after a police raid, and Dando’s missing brother is found dead in a West Bank cave while his personal effects turn up on Jaffa’s black market. Throw in a sinister Christian-Arab godfather figure, a wide-eyed kid from the territories who’s trying to raise money for his mom’s bone marrow transplant, and the cops who rule Ajami with an iron fist, and you’ve got a multistrand potboiler worthy of an Israeli Dickens.

In an Oscar category that also includes Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” and Jacques Audiard’s “Prophet” (which opens in late February), “Ajami” might not be the best film or the likely winner. But it’s still a remarkable accomplishment, a swirling, choral sea of humanity that forces us to confront that a man who does terrible things can also be a loving father who gives his infant daughter a bath. There’s no prescription for coexistence amid the fateful swirl of passion, cruelty and violence in “Ajami,” and certainly no assurance that things are getting better. For Copti, Shani and the rest of us, though, the fact that a bunch of Jews and Arabs got together to make this powerful film has to mean something.

“Ajami” is now playing at Film Forum and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, with wider release to follow.