It may have taken 12 years for Walter Salles to direct another film after his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” but with his award-winning political biodrama “I’m Still Here”, the Brazilian filmmaker proves that cinema will always remain in his veins. Salles celebrated the power of the form and took to it Criterion Wardrobe recently to share his appreciation for a number of films that have shaped him as an artist and continue to inspire. After starting with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev,” Salles went on to choose Jim Jarmusch’s absurdist comedy “Stranger than Paradise.”
“I think it was so refreshing to…start making movies and see that stories could actually be told in a different way than the Greeks had taught us in the beginning, you know, the five-act structure and character arcs and everything,” Salles said, “and what Jim Jarmusch offers us here is something that transcends that kind of classic notion of storytelling.”
Salles also acknowledged the Italian iconoclast, Michelangelo Antonioni, as one of his most educated educators in the art form, not directly but through his work.
“Antonioni is, in fact, the filmmaker who brought me to cinema,” he said, “the director who best captured the futility of society – industrial society – and at the same time the loss of identity that followed. . . And ‘La Notte’ has the seeds of what was to become later ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘The Passenger.’ The pillars of an extraordinary director.”
And in terms of the extraordinary, Salles also had to keep room for the work of Martin Scorsese. When he took his 1980 masterpiece “Raging Bull,” Salles spoke of its total originality and the difficulty of creating something completely new on screen.
“I saw it maybe 50 times. Maybe more than that,” Salles said. “Scorsese’s talent, unique sensibility. His understanding also of this character who is in between cultures, who comes from Italy and yet has to redefine himself in another landscape, in a different cultural landscape. All about this film is unique, and it’s one of those movies where every single frame contains the movie as a whole, and that’s so hard to achieve in theaters. I have a hard time actually analyzing it every time because I’m so caught up in it. So this is cinema at its highest point.”
Watch Salle’s full Criterion Closet visit below.
