Wes Anderson: the craft of cinema takes centre stage in an exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française

From 19 March, the Cinémathèque Française (Paris) is dedicating an exhibition to the films of Wes Anderson. This event, which accompanies the opening of a space dedicated to him at the Musée Cinéma et Miniature in Lyon, highlights the museum-like quality of his erudite, handcrafted work, which is entirely focused on the past.

While an encounter between film and the museum space is not always an obvious one, the arrival of Wes Anderson’s cinematic work in exhibition form was almost inevitable. Firstly, because of the way the filmmaker makes his films. Eschewing Hollywood special effects, he champions a manual approach to cinema and cultivates the art of the ‘handmade’. Already present in his early feature films, this handcrafted dimension came to the fore with the release of Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, his first animated film.

For this adaptation of Roald Dahl's book, Anderson decided to use stop-motion, an animation technique that involves creating the illusion of movement of objects, which he had already used to create fantastical creatures in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). This led him to discover the role of miniatures as a creative tool for filming his movies. As he explains, these small models, which present the film’s set on a reduced scale, would revolutionise his approach to filmmaking:

“Every time I make a film, I learn something new. But with “Fantastic Mr Fox”, it was so unique and detailed that it completely transformed my approach. I continue to draw on that experience. If I hadn't made “Fantastic Mr Fox”, I would never have thought of using models and miniatures in a film. ”

Now a favourite tool of the filmmaker, miniatures are used both in the preparation of his scenes and in the shooting of his shots. Notable examples include those of the façade of the Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the train in Asteroid City (2023). This passion for miniatures undoubtedly explains why, from the 2010s onwards, Wes Anderson’s cinema has moved further away from its original material: reality, to focus on the creation of entirely original worlds.

A collection of references

In all cases, the use of models has allowed Anderson to control his unique aesthetic with even greater precision and care, making it increasingly recognisable. This aesthetic is characterised above all by its extreme geometry, with a pronounced taste for symmetry and frontal views as the centrepiece of his approach. The result is an orderly world where each element is carefully arranged within the frame, as in a collection.

This term (collection) has often been used to describe Anderson’s aesthetic, by film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, in his book of interviews with the filmmaker, by film aesthetics professor Marc Cerisuelo, in his letter to Anderson, and by English studies professor Donna Kornhaber in her monograph on Anderson. As the author notes, the construction of these diegetic universes based on a selection and precise assembly of disparate elements is akin to a process of collection.

But this dimension cannot be measured solely by the accumulation of concrete and material elements. It is also reflected in the numerous references and allusions to art history that pepper his feature films. As the title of an illustrated book published in 2023 suggests, Wes Anderson presents his “imaginary museum”, throughout his filmography, a kind of personal pantheon where works from cinema, literature, painting and television intersect without distinction.

Film naturally occupies a prominent place in this collection. The filmmaker and cinephile has continuously paid tribute to the directors he admires, even going so far as to set his films within their cinematic worlds. The story of a journey through India, The Darjeeling Limited can thus be seen as an immersion in the cinematic worlds of Satyajit Ray and James Ivory, as evidenced by the abundant presence of music from their various feature films in this road movie released in 2007.

Shot mostly in 1:33 format, as used in the silent era, The Grand Budapest Hotel brings back the atmosphere of classic Hollywood comedies. It evokes the style of Ernst Lubitsch, one of the masters of the genre. The film is set in interwar Europe, one of the classic filmmaker’s favourite settings. Above all, it is characterised by its emphasis on elegance and refinement, attributes that made Lubitsch famous for his ‘sophisticated’ comedies.

One of Lubitsch’s most famous films, To or no to be (1942), depicted the Nazi invasion of Poland. This event is parodied in The Grand Budapest Hotel in the form of the ‘ZZs’, soldiers reminiscent of those of the Third Reich. But here, their sudden appearance leads to a tragic outcome, highlighting Anderson’s other key inspiration: Stefan Zweig and his film The World of Yesterday. Like the Austrian writer’s work to which it is dedicated, the film is the story of a lost era, destroyed by the horrors of human beings and their history.

This dual inspiration – literary and cinematic – can also be found in Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City (2023). The golden age of New York theatre in the 1950s—when Method Acting, was developed and gained fame—rubs shoulders with films about the death of the West, released at the same time. Visually, this translates into the coexistence of two image systems: black and white for the dramatic part and colour for the wide open spaces.

This mix of colour palettes was already present in his previous work, The French Dispatch (2021). Shot in Angoulême, this film was a kind of culmination of his cinephile project, as it sought to revive a very broad period of French cinema, from the 1940s to May 1968. The sketch film format allowed him to oscillate between the murky atmosphere of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Film Noirs and the more youthful and feverish atmosphere of the French New Wave.

The World of Yesterday

These different devices highlight the same desire: to bring bygone eras back to life.

Indeed, the contemporary is strikingly absent from this film, which constantly looks to the past, even if it means mixing up different time periods. For Anderson is not so much interested in creating the retrospective illusion the past as in savouring the feeling of nostalgia that emanates from these vestiges. This reference to bygone eras is particularly significant for Anderson’s vision, as it echoes the narratives of his films, which always focus on loss and abandonment.

Whether set in his native Texas, in New York, on the Mediterranean Sea or in Japan, his characters must all live with the grief of losing a loved one or a period of their lives – primarily childhood and youth. This weight of grief is then embodied in the many objects that fill his cinematic world: the typewriter given to him by his mother in Rushmore, the carefully preserved letters in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, his father’s belongings in The Darjeeling Limited and the badge that reminds him of his beloved in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Sometimes these talismans are gathered in a single place and transformed into a memorial space, as film critic Marcos Uzal points out:

“The Tenenbaum house, the room in “Hotel Chevalier” (2005) and Mrs. Cross’s room in “Rushmore” appear as museums of childhood, of dear departed loved ones and lost loves, whose objects are the remnants of their lives.”

On every level, Wes Anderson’s films convey what could be described as a museum-like ambition: to restore, with order and precision, what is lost in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.