Parky at the Pictures (DVD 26/5/2011)

Yet Guillermin was a fine film-maker, with Town on Trial (1957), I Was Monty's Double (1958) and The Waltz of the Toreadors (1962) all demonstrating a firm grasp of characterisation, as well as his famed eye for a camera angle. The pictures he made for Arthur Dent and his sons Stanley and David at Adelphi Films were also impressive, with the crime thriller Torment (1949) being followed by Song of Paris (1952) and The Crowded Day (1954), which have just been released as a double bill by the BFI.

Based on a story by William Rose (who, the following year, would script Genevieve) and boasting additional dialogue by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, Song of Paris is a brisk comedy with musical interludes that marked the British debut of Hollywood veteran Mischa Auer. But, rather than shooting in the City of Light, he had to make do with functional sets in the Nettlefold Studios in Walton-on-Thames, although compensation came in the form of a splendid supporting cast and some pleasingly manic farce.

Travelling to Paris to investigate why the French sales of his family's patented stomach pills have plummeted, stuffy businessman Dennis Price falls for chanteuse Anne Vernon after covering her modesty with his jacket after club publicist Marcel Poncin arranged for her skirt to be torn off by a passing car. However, she is also being jealously pursued by Auer's impecunious aristocrat and he follows doggedly after she flees to London to escape his clutches.

Clearly unaware of her late husband's continental antics, Price's mother (Hermione Baddeley) disapproves of romantic entanglements and has to be duped into believing that Vernon hails from the social elite. However, such is her snobbery that she also extends her hospitality to the opportunistic Auer and Price has to rent a flat for Vernon and convince Auer that Baddeley suffers from lunar rages to prevent the two Parisians from meeting. But, even with sister Joan Kenny and best pal Brian Worth acting as accomplices, his ruse is rumbled and Auer demands satisfaction in a duel on Hampstead Heath.

Displaying a timidity that was far removed from his suave villainy in Robert Hamer's Ealing classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Price just about convinces as the bashful Brit smitten with the charming mademoiselle. But this is primarily a vehicle for Auer, who seizes every chance to play to the gallery, whether he's being beset by creditors after he persuades Price to cash him a cheque, laying low from Baddeley's supposed craziness or inexpertly firing his pistol at dawn. That said, it also affords Vernon a showcase for her singing talent and provides choice cameos for Kynaston Reeves as a besotted vicar and Richard Wattis as a starchy man from the ministry.

The excellent Wattis also steals several scenes in The Crowded Day (1954), as he escorts a naked mannequin around a heaving London department store in the run-up to Christmas. Scripted by Talbot Rothwell from a story by John Paddy Carstairs, this is a picture with impeccable comedy credentials, as Rothwell would go on to write the early Carry Ons and Carstairs would guide Norman Wisdom through his first films. Yet this also has a pleasing soap operatic feel, as it examines the role of women in the workplace and their relationships with each other and their male counterparts.

As nightwatchman Sid James opens the West End premises to Dandy Nichols and her cleaning crew, Freda Jackson supervises the ablutions of the shopgirls living in a nearby hostel. Amidst much gossiping about the evening's staff party, prim Joan Rice frets that boyfriend John Gregson thinks more of his vintage car than he does about her, peppy Rachel Roberts wonders what food will be served and wannabe starlet Vera Day promises shy Patricia Plunkett that movie producer beau Sidney Tafler will find her a suitable date. But nobody seems to notice that mousy Josephine Griffin is looking anxious and perfume counter co-worker Sonia Holm is more concerned about her taking an extended lunch break than her state of mind.

However, everyone has their problems as the shift begins. Day complains to model Patricia Marmont that Jackson keeps stealing her customers and depriving her of much-needed commission, while Rice is being pestered by married furniture department boss Brian Oulton. But she is more concerned by Gregson's indifference and feigns an attachment to personnel officer Cyril Raymond in a bid to make him envious. A mix-up with keys at a rental property scarcely improves matters and Gregson's future looks decidedly bleak when Raymond discovers that a promotional campaign he has submitted has been cribbed directly from store owner Edward Chapman's own book.

But Raymond is not having a good day, as he has also been forced to fire Griffin after learning that she is expecting a child and that snooty Mary Hinton refuses to let her tell son Peter Hammond that he is the father. Distraught and ashamed, Griffin steals some pills from the store pharmacy and plans to commit suicide before seeking sanctuary in a church after being chased through the dark streets by a predatory stranger. Her change of heart contrasts with the glamorous Marmont's quiet night in with war-wounded husband Michael Goodliffe, Rice's predictable reunion with Gregson and Plunkett's quiet satisfaction that her paid party companion refuses to accept a penny for his services. Yet, regardless of these happy(ish) endings, the hectic saga will inevitably begin all over again next morning when the store opens its doors.

Despite the odd awkward transition (which belie Guillermin's advocacy of Sergei Eisenstein), this is a slickly handled mix of melodrama and gentle humour. Touching upon issues that were considered risqué in the mid-1950s, each storyline is accorded a decent amount of screen time, while the air of authenticity is reinforced by Gordon Dines's use of the Bourne & Hollingsworth interiors on Oxford Street. Moreover, Guillermin keeps the camera moving to capture the bustle of the shopfloor, as the central quintet interacts with cameoing colleagues Joan Hickson, Kynaston Reeves and Marianne Stone and customers Thora Hird, Prunella Scales and Dora Bryan.

Griffin's encounter with the intimidating Hinton errs towards penny dreadfulness, while Hammond's failed efforts to contact her are more than a little contrived. But the nocturnal chase introduces a noirish menace, while there's an intriguing contrast between the emancipated Rice's muddled attitude to romance and the anguished diffidence of Chapman's plain daughter, Dorothy Gordon. Moreover, there are also sly insights into class, gender and the code of workplace politics that recur in James Hill's Lunch Hour (1961), which is joined this month by Michael Sarne's Joanna (1968) in the BFI's increasingly important Flipside series.

Adapted by John Mortimer from his own play, this modish comedy rather disproves poet Philip Larkin's contention in `Annus Mirabilis' that `sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three...Between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles' first LP.' Yet, despite Hill's laudable efforts to combine kitchen sink realism with nouvelle vague chic, this always feels a decidedly British affair, as while the limiting of much of the action in a single room vaguely recalls Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1960), it's impossible to imagine Jean Seberg - let alone Anna Karina or Jeanne Moreau - making a phone call from a provincial post office with a couple of pesky kids in tow.

The story begins with married wallpaper executive Robert Stephens and newly recruited painter Shirley Anne Field rendezvousing in a shabby London hotel after weeks of stealing illicit moments in various restaurants, cinemas, parks and art galleries. Hill flashes back to show the couple meeting for the first time in a cavernous corridor and Stephens pulling rank on personnel manager Nigel Davenport to flirt with Field's pert Essex art school graduate. But his inability to get away at night means that they have to confine their canoodling to lunch hours and the failure to find any privacy finally convinces Stephens to spin an elaborate yarn to hotelier Kay Walsh in order to secure a room without inviting disapproving glances.

However, he omits to tell Field her complex backstory and she begins to have her doubts about the entire relationship as she learns that Stephens has made her travel down from Scarborough for the day and deposit young children Neil Culleton and Sandra Lea with fearsome aunt Hazel Hughes to have a heart-to-heart about the future of their marriage. With Walsh barging in and out to bring Field a cup of tea and a shilling for the gas meter, the action becomes increasingly nightmarish as it cuts away from the room to confront Field with the realities of domesticity and the shortcomings of her anything but dashing paramour.

Splendidly played by Field and Stephens, this revisionist spin on Brief Encounter overcomes occasional passages of theatrical verbosity to show how dangerous a little imagination can be in a world of necessary mundanity. While Field is busy living her fantasy, she is oblivious to the consequences of her actions and it's telling that this supposedly liberated woman only comes to recognise the sordidness of the liaison when she becomes its victim rather than Stephens's cheated wife.

Evovatively photographed around the capital by Wolfgang Suschitzky, this teasing revelation that the Sixties were not yet ready to swing suffers from the odd bout of indulgent self-reflexivity. But Hill deftly contrasts the idyllic locations with the inhibiting interiors to remind the audience of the adulterous nature of the trysts and the sleaziness of Stephens's gauche attempts to exploit Field's naiveté. Moreover, he also makes increasing use of intrusive close-ups as the full monstrosity of the well-intentioned lie becomes more crushingly apparent.

The stylish monochrome imagery makes for compelling comparison with the Technicolor that Hill used on the BP shorts, Skyhook (1958), Giuseppina (1959) and The Home-Made Car (1963), which are included on the disc as extras. Familiar to viewers of a certain age from being used as trade test films on BBC2 in the 1960s, this is an exceptional trio that makes one wish the BFI did more with such archival gems.

Narrated by Bernard Braden, Skyhook shows how a helicopter saved time and money by transporting heavy machinery to a remote oil exploration site in the jungle of Papua New Guinea. But, while this handsome travelogue adheres closely to the industrial film template, the Oscar-winning Giuseppina is an utter delight that employs an episodic narrative that gently mocks national stereotypes to demonstrate the professionalism of a BP garagist. Giulio Marchetti convinces young daughter Antonia Scalari that she will have more fun assisting him with his customers than visiting the fair that has come to their remote Italian village. She is far from convinced when the only excitement comes from a bicycling priest losing his hat. But things change with the arrival in quick succession of an American couple that has to photograph everything, a British family that takes picnic tea while their engine is repaired, a Spanish guitarist and his dancing friend and a pair of Italian newlyweds with a puncture.

The simplicity of the set-up and the geniality of the wit make this irresistible and Hill again charmingly focuses on a young girl's growing fascination with all things mechanical in The Home-Made Car, which added the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival to its Oscar nomination. Indeed, Sandra Leo goes from shooting at twentysomething Ronald Chudley with a toy gun to helping him construct a vehicle from scrap in order to lure garage owner Frank Sieman's secretary Caroline Mortimer away from sports car-driving toff Anthony James. But while motoring enthusiasts will be drawn to the blue 1923 Bullnose Morris Oxford, others will fix upon Chudley's bored, but faithful dog and the use of Ron Grainer's score to cross refer a rag`n'bone gag to Steptoe and Son (for which Grainer also composed the famous theme, `Old Ned').

The release of Joanna couldn't be more timely, as the bright young things depicted by singer-turned-director Mike Sarne in this wanton satire on Swinging London have much in common with those currently gracing the small screen in Made in Chelsea. Addicted to pleasure and determined to sample everything life has to offer, they are rarely sympathetic and often infuriating. But their antics often matter less than the mode of their representation in a picture so in thrall to the techniques of the nouvelle vague that it often feels more like a parody than an hommage.

Bursting into a drab London station with a splash of provincial colour, 17 year-old Geneviève Waïte leaves behind doting (but possibly abusive) father Geoffrey Morris to move in with grandmother Marda Vanne. Having unpacked pots of homemade jam, she enrols in an art school and bounces back from discovering that boyfriend Anthony Ainley has been cheating on her by sleeping with anyone and everyone she can find, including painter Christian Doermer and aristocrat Donald Sutherland.

Waite shares both men with Glenna Forster-Jones, a Sierra Leonean party girl whose brother, Calvin Lockhart, owns a nightclub. Yet, for all her free-loving ways, Waite secretly longs to settle down and has high hopes of raffish banker David Scheur. However, not long after returning from a spontaneous trip to Morocco with Sutherland, Forster-Jones and Lockhart, Scheur dumps her (with a slap that sums up the film's surprisingly casual attitude to chauvinism and violence) and Waite decides she needs to do some growing up after being caught in bed with a married man.

As Sutherland succumbs to leukaemia, Waite makes a move on Lockhart and persuades her magistrate father to intervene when the police descend upon his flat to investigate his pugnacious treatment of a burglar. However, the crook is well connected and, following a reprisal beating, Lockhart is forced to hide out in a coastal cottage bequeathed to him by Sutherland. But, soon after Waite gets back from an idyllic weekend, Lockhart is arrested in Ireland and put on trial for manslaughter, leaving the now-pregnant teenager to quit the capital and promise those seeing her off at the station that she will return.

Partially inspired by the misadventures of Sarne's ex-girlfriend, this urban picaresque was pitched to 20th Century-Fox as `the female Alfie'. In fact, it feels more like Georgy Girl meets Blowup, as Waite's rebellious naif pitches headlong into the temptations of the big city. Played out to songs by Rod McKuen and Scott Walker, her conquests and calamities are photographed by Walter Lassally and edited by Norman Wanstall in a modish manner that owes as much to contemporary trends in television commercials as the various new waves then petering out across Europe.

Superimpositions, jump cuts, freeze frames, non-diegetic sound effects, silences and self-reflexive gambits abound, as Sarne references everyone from John Schlesinger and Michael Powell to Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard in packing proceedings with flashbacks, reveries, fantasies and magic-hour moments designed to make landmarks like the South Bank, Trafalgar Square, Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and the Albert Memorial seem as exotic as a North African sunset. He even allows himself a knowing cameo during the finale, as Waite bids farewell to him and his crew before joining the chorus line serenading her off from the adjoining platform.

Yet the flamboyance singularly fails to disguise the picture's essential waywardness. The episodic plotline is particularly haphazard, while the dubbed dialogue is often excruciating as it veers from the puerile to the pretentious. The sense of ending era is conveyed by repeated shots of clock faces. But this symbolism is as heavy-handed as the allusions to the emptiness that student Michelle Cook feels on aborting her baby. Indeed, such topical references invariably seem superficial and it's interesting that, while Sarne tackles mixed-race relationships with considerably more courage that the majority of other Hollywood-backed movies of the period, the self-consciously happening scene is totally devoid of gay characters.

The throwaway prejudice directed at Lockhart and Forster-Jones is more authentic, however, although Sarne seems more concerned with the politics of class and gender than race and the post-colonial legacy that preoccupies Frankie Dymon, Jr in the pioneering, but disarming 1969 short, Death May Be Your Santa Claus, which can be found amongst the extras, alongside Sarne's droll, Fenella Fielding-narrated short, Road to St Tropez (1966), which starred Melissa Stribling, Udo Kier and Gabriella Licudi, whom he had hoped to cast in Joanna. However, producer Michael S. Laughlin thought that South African catwalk model Waite was a better fit for the Twiggyesque heroine and she certainly brings a wide-eyed wonderment to a part that has similarities with Marilyn Monroe's guileless chanteuse in Joshua Logan's Bus Stop (1956). But she is always more comfortable posing than performing, while her girly accent will irk as many as Sutherland's amusingly crass impersonation of a Woosterish toff.

Yet, for all its many flaws, this is a compelling snapshot of its times and a vital insight into the state of British cinema as social realism and arthouse trendiness were about to go into abeyance and financial constraint was about to limit the industry to sitcom spin-offs, softcore romps and heritage dramas like Karel Reisz's Isadora (1968).

Adapted by Melvyn Bragg and Clive Exton from Isadora Duncan's autobiography, My Life, and Sewell Stokes's study, Isadora Duncan: An Intimate Portrait, this is very much a product of its time. Seeming both fashionably non-linear and quaintly reverential, it was sumptuously designed by Jocelyn Herbert, vibrantly photographed by Larry Pizer and lushly scored by Maurice Jarre. But it's Vanessa Redgrave's beguiling Cannes-winning performance that leaves the deepest impression and she would surely have earned the Academy Award for Best Actress had she not been up against dual winners in Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl and Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter.

Determined to fulfil a vow to live for Art and Beauty that she made while burning her parents' marriage licence, Isadora made enough money flashing her legs to Sousa marches on the vaudeville circuit to pay for her passage to Europe with her mother (Bessie Love), sister Elizabeth (Libby Glenn) and poet brother Raymond (Tony Vogel). Feted by high society, the family performed at soirées as Isadora rejected classical ballet techniques to devise a personal style based upon improvisation and emotion. She also established a dance school at Grunewald in Germany and it was here that she fell in love with theatre designer Gordon Craig (James Fox).

However, Reisz keeps interrupting this 1877-1927 chronicle with Duncan's fateful pursuit of a handsome stranger she had spotted driving a flashy car while dictating her recollections to her secretary (John Fraser). But while she sups petulantly in an outdoor restaurant with friends Mary Desti (Cynthia Harris), Archer (Wallas Eaton) and Bedford (Nicholas Pennell) or has her fortune told by Pim (John Quentin), she gets no closer to the elusive Benoît Falchetto (Vladimir Leskovar) - whom she nicknamed Bugatti after his motor. Moreover, she is periodically reminded of key events in her past that send the action off at tantalising tangents.

Having discovered the pleasures of the flesh with Craig, Isadora lost contact after giving birth to his daughter Deirdre (Lucinda Chambers) and took up with Paris Singer (Jason Robards), a stage-door johnny who just happened to be the heir to the vast sewing machine fortune. He took her to England and set her up in a magnificent mansion and bought her a chateau outside Paris, in which she opened another school for the underprivileged. They had a son, Patrick (Simon Lutton Davies), but were never on the same wavelength, as Isadora sold the jewellery Singer bought her and resisted his plans to show her the world.

He also misunderstood her desire to perform again and angered her by hiring a pianist named Armand (Christian Duvaleix) solely because he was spectacularly ugly. Yet Isadora was still seduced by his artistry and Singer broke up with her on discovering their affair. But tragedy was to follow when Deirdre and Patrick were drowned after their car crashed off a bridge into the Seine while Duncan and Singer were meeting to discuss their future.

In 1922, Isadora was invited to the Soviet Union, where she was entrusted with another school and danced for the workers in shows that sometimes continued in the form of lamplit singsongs after the electrical supply gave out. Moreover, she became besotted with poet Sergei Essenin (Ivan Tchenko) and married him (despite the fact he was 18 years her junior) before embarking upon what proved to be her final tour of the United States.

Such was the anti-Bolshevik fervour that greeted them that Duncan was heckled on stage in Boston and caused outrage by baring her breast and declaring herself to be as red as her heart. She retreated to Europe and was planning to return to teaching when she finally encountered Bugatti at a party in Nice. But, as they sped away together, her trademark flowing silk scarf became caught in the open-spoked wheel and rear axle and she was strangled.

Reisz stages this gruesome demise with an insouciance that is absent from the remainder of the picture, as everything that Isadora says and does is invested with aching significance. Yet for all the aesthetic gravitas, this never feels precious or hagiographic, with the older Duncan's crotchety egotism constantly being set against the endearingly naive opportunism of her early years. Indeed, vanity has rarely seemed so romantic and mooching so altruistic.

But, by keeping the focus so firmly on Isadora, Reisz and his writers (who included novelist Margaret Drabble) fail to flesh out her paramours. Moreover, even though Redgrave is frequently depicted gyrating and swooning on stage and in rehearsal, too little is made of her dance philosophy and her revolutionary impact upon a highly conservative art form. Her status as a proto-feminist is also left largely unexplored.

Yet this is an engrossing insight into a remarkable life and it's only a shame that viewers have been deprived of the chance to see the original 168-minute cut that was shown in Los Angeles in December 1968 to qualify the picture for the Oscars. Nevertheless, this avoids the `nightingales and roses' that Duncan was so keen to exclude from her memoirs.

Finally, this week, it's back to the British Film Institute to celebrate Richard Woolley. Nobody does this sort of retrospective collection better and it's to be hoped that in marking the achievement of contemporary film-makers, the BFI doesn't neglect its duty to showcase the output of master shorts makers like Alberto Cavalcanti, Richard Massingham and Harry Watt and such silent pioneers as GA Smith, James Williamson and Cecil Hepworth.

Having started making films at King's College, London, Richard Woolley played in a band called Voodoo Strutters before spending three years at the Royal College of Art and two more in Berlin, where he made the experimental films Kniephofstrasse (1973) and Drinnen und Draussen (1974).

The first bears the influence of Structuralism to focus on 20 equal-sized segments within an establishing shot of a landscape dominated by two trees, a flyover, a garage, a factory chimney and an office block. Each aspect is accompanied by its own note on an organ and a montage soundtrack is created as Woolley cross-cuts between the stop-framed or slow-motioned images. By contrast, Drinnen und Draussen concentrates on the interaction in a single Berlin room of Ulrike Pohl and Wolfgang W. Mueller, whose conversations and clenches are accompanied by pianist Theo Hardtman. However, by staging events against a large window, Woolley is also able to keep an eye on the scene outside and use the reactions of the passers-by to contrast life in East and West Germany.

If this was politically contentious, Illusive Crime (1976) infuriated many feminist critics for its inclusion of the sound of a rape in a bid to suggest that screen audiences can be audio as well as visual voyeurs. Opening with James Woolley arriving home, the action is constructed around a series of repetitive shots as Woolley doubts the insistence of wife Amanda Reiss that she was assaulted by policemen Andrew McCullough and Colin Proctor while being interrogated for an offence she probably didn't commit. Filmed on Ektachrome reversal stock and less concerned with the purity of the imagery than the disconcerting effect of the off-screen incidents and non-synchronised dialogue, this suggests that, even in the absence of the gaze that had been identified by theorists like Laura Mulvey, women can still be objectified by both the camera and the spectator.

Woolley further reminded viewers of the distance between themselves and the drama they are witnessing in his first feature, Telling Tales (1978). But, alongside the Brechtian distanciation technique that is reinforced by dialectical speeches made directly to camera, Woolley fashions an ABBA-accompanied story that is as moreish as the soap operas it seeks to dissect, as an industrialist named Willoughby (James Woolley) enters into negotiations to sell his company to Paul (also played by Woolley) just as his shop steward Jones (Stephen Trafford) begins urging his comrades to come out on strike. However, the twist in the tale is that Jones is married to Sheila (Bridget Ashburn), who works as the maid tending to Paul's terminally ill wife, Ingrid (Patricia Donovan, who also doubles as Willoughby's spouse, who is tired of living in rural isolation and intends filing for divorce as soon as their son turns 16 and goes to boarding school).

Switching between colour and monochrome, this could be interpreted as a parody of the kind of domestic saga perfected in the early 1970s by Mike Leigh. But the discussion of gender, class, greed and morality within this comedy of manners is often as trenchant as anything produced by Ken Loach. And the same is also true of his first 35mm feature, Brothers and Sisters (1981), which contains an autobiographical element, as Woolley was residing in Leeds at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders.

When part-time prostitute Carolyn Pickles is murdered, brothers Robert East and Sam Dale are among the chief suspects. East is a right-wing army major who frequently pays for sex despite protesting his respect for wife Elizabeth Bennett. Her nanny (also played by Pickles) is having an affair with Dale, who mocks live-in girlfriend Jennifer Armitage when she discovers his infidelity. But in deconstructing the thriller genre, Woolley relies too heavily here on clumsy plotting and schematic characterisation. Moreover, he seems too intent on reiterating points made previously about voyeurism and the emotional, economic and physical exploitation of women. Thus, while this is as politically and stylistically challenging as its predecessors, it feels more self-conscious and, on occasions seems downright hectoring in its disapproving tone.

Sexual hypocrisy is also the theme of the featurette Waiting for Alan (1984), which was produced by Channel Four after the collapse of a full-length project for the BFI. Woolley himself compared it to one of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. But it actually feels closer in tone to an Alan Bennett Talking Head, as bourgeois wife Carolyn Pickles complains to the camera about wasting her life waiting for husband Anthony Schaeffer to come home and then loathing his company. But, while her monologues are often acerbically amusing, too little attention is paid to the fact that she treats maid Joyce Kennedy with scarcely more consideration, as she allows her to cook and clean while she lounges around in her confortable ennui.

Affluence also informs Girl from the South (1988), Woolley's final film before he quit directing to concentrate on writing and teaching. Designed to lampoon the Mills & Boon style of romantic potboiler, it follows teenager Michelle Mulvaney on a trip north to stay with grandparents Alan Thompson and Daphne Oxenford. However, she quickly gets bored and decides to live out her own love story and makes for the wrong side of the tracks to find the kind of rugged everyman who inhabits her fantasies.

Luckily, Rosamund Greenwood's grandson Mark Crowshaw fits the bill, even though he is black and likes listening to Elgar and visiting art galleries. But the more smitten Mulvaney becomes with Crowshaw, the more determined she is to challenge the social injustice that divides them. However, her scheme to pull off a burglary to redistribute some wealth misfires and she learns the harsh realities of race relations in late-80s Britain.

Lacking formal and thematic complexity, this often feels like a small-screen drama that exists solely to score politically correct points. The performances are amiable enough, but the storyline is rather negligible and this feels like a deeply unsatisfying conclusion to the career of a highly distinctive talent who was once rightly rated alongside Peter Greenaway as this country's most innovative auteur.