The Wes Anderson Collection

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Wes Anderson’s new quartet of films, based on stories by Roald Dahl, which dropped on Netflix last week, may be brief—three are seventeen minutes long, one runs thirty-nine—but there’s nothing minor about them. They make even clearer what his features have long shown: Anderson is one of the two most original inventors of cinematic forms since the heyday of the late Jean-Luc Godard. The other is the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Where Kiarostami undermined the artifices of fiction with documentary elements, Anderson overmines fiction by overloading it with intricate artifices that nonetheless have a quasi-documentary aspect—in that they reveal the contrivances on which filmed fictions depend. Anderson’s Dahl shorts go further than ever in foregrounding his conceptual work, but the results are more than just theoretical; they embody a vision of human relations, of society at large, that is properly understood to be political. Footage of the actors voicing their characters, puppet construction, stop-motion setups, and the recording of the score

Get ready for a very Wes Anderson autumn. This September, four new short films from the celebrated filmmaker are hitting Netflix, and we’ve got all the details, only on Tudum. Michael Chabonis the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of many novels, including the recent Telegraph Avenue. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and four children. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the publisher of Press Play, a blog of film and TV criticism and video essays. He is the director of the 2005 romantic comedy Home. And what are we even watching, anyway? Here we have one of the most distinctive auteurs of 21st-century cinema, adapting short stories into a series of filmed plays for a streaming service, and somehow it makes perfect sense. Netflix seemed not to remotely know how to handle what I’ll call the Henry Sugar Quartet: I had to search for the four shorts individually to watch them, even though Ralph Fiennes, playing Dahl, appears in each one, part avuncular host, part ferryman into the underworld of the author’s macabre imagination. These are easily the least twee works Anderson has ever made—there are no banjos, no pastel colors, scarcely a shred of disaffected existentialist whimsy. But there is a point behind the series, not unrelated to the foregrounding of Dahl. Throughout, Anderson jolts us in and out of the story, encouraging us to think actively and even skeptically about what it’s telling us.Essays and interviews by Mark Zoller Seitz, amazing illustrations by Max Dalton and endless fascinating stills from all the films plus a potpourri of relevant items from old films, books, magazines, catalogs and advertisements that will have you intrigued and wanting to keep returning again and again to marvel at all this content. The Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel stays true to Seitz’s previous book on Anderson’s first seven feature films, The Wes Anderson Collection , with an artful, meticulous design and playful, original illustrations that capture the spirit of Anderson’s inimitable aesthetic, offering an overview of Anderson’s filmography. Nine Academy Award® nominations, including Best Picture, Directing, and Writing - Original Screenplay; Best Film - Musical or Comedy, Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, 5 BAFTA awards, including Best Original Screen Play; Best Production Design, Best Costume Design; Best Make Up & Hair and Best Original Music. Henry Sugar, without spoiling too much, is an optimistic tale: A man is irrevocably changed by a book. The other three Dahl stories in the series are much darker. In The Swan, a man played by Rupert Friend recounts how, as a child, he was bullied almost to death one day by two casually cruel older boys (also played by Friend). The Rat Catcher uses Friend and Ayoade again as two men in a village plagued by rats, who have a deeply disturbing encounter with a rodentlike exterminator played by Fiennes. In Poison, Cumberbatch, Patel, and Kingsley reunite for a story about a man threatened by a lethal snake who reveals some of his own venom. Animalistic imagery abounds: People, all three stories suggest, sacrifice something profound when they lose their humanity. Of these, The Swan departs furthest from the source material, which is to say, not very much, because Anderson has characters in each short read the text virtually verbatim. Still, the fact that Friend recounts what happened to his younger self affirms that he does actually survive, a reassurance that Dahl’s original story withholds until the end. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which Dahl published in a 1977 short-story collection, has been cited by Anderson as one of the early inspirations for his habit of nesting narratives inside one another. The tale is about a wealthy, narcissistic man (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Netflix version) who stumbles upon a handwritten notebook in the library of a friend’s country house and has the course of his life drastically rerouted. The story that Henry reads is a first-person account of an encounter with a performer, who in turn relays his own strange biography. Add to this Dahl’s own narration, as Anderson does, and suddenly you’re several layers deep into a grand metafictional mille-feuille.

I am in no way a student of film, but I have always been drawn to Anderson's movies, and so I am drawn to the man himself. This book has much more informative interviews with Anderson than the previous collection. You get the sense that Matt Zoller Seitz has really honed his interviewing skills since writing the first. A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited, or produced more than a hundred hours’worth of video essays about cinema history and style for the Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay, “ Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style,” was later spun off into a New York Times bestselling hardcover book series: The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2013) and The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams, 2015). But the more I’ve watched them, the more the Henry Sugar shorts have come to feel like, if not a defense of Dahl exactly, a treatise on how storytelling, by nature, is always morally questionable, even indefensible, and yet utterly vital. To not only adapt Dahl but to also build the series around him—to have the most real setting on-screen be a painstaking reenactment of the room in which he wrote—makes him inextricable from the plots at hand. Across these works, Anderson never lets us lose ourselves in what we’re seeing. Rather, he has us survey it from different angles, observing how things mutate and shift depending on our perspective. These shorts demand active viewing, which in turn leads to curiosity and inquiry. What does this mean? Why did Dahl write it this way? What are we to make of it?In The Wes Anderson Collection, Seitz expands a series of video essays on Anderson’s influences, illuminating as much of Anderson’s process as possible in a massive, beautifully rendered volume. Although it looks (and sometimes reads) like a coffee table book, The Wes Anderson Collection brings together style and substance to provide a loving homage to Anderson’s films and moviemaking in general.” This New York Times bestselling overview of Wes Anderson’s filmography features previously unpublished behind-the-scenes photos, artwork, and ephemera. The best thing about this in depth look at the films of director Wes Anderson is when it focuses in on the details, the minutia, the production design and plotting that Anderson is famous for. For example, I loved seeing the storyboards, the illustrations, the photos from behind the scenes during filming, things like that. Reading the book, you feel as if you’re disappearing into the miniature world of Anderson’s movies, like you’re playing around in the files and fastidiously kept dossiers assembled for each project. In this way, the book mimics the work.” That would all be topped with his arguable masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a dizzying trip through alternate history, meta-fiction, shootouts, and Renaissance paintings, and one very pretty building. It earned Anderson another Best Screenplay Oscar nomination, his first nomination for Best Director, and the film won for Original Score, Editing, Production, and Costume. After four years, his longest gap between films, he put out another stop-motion film, the dystopian, Japan-set Isle of Dogs, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature.