Our first film is one of them comes from Senegal, Touki bouki (1973) directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. If you must find analogues it's sort of Easy Rider via Jean Cocteau, but the film is one of the most unique we've experienced.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is our only film from Elio Petri in the Criterion Collection, which is disappointing because from what we can tell his work is like if Pier Paolo Pasolini only did mass market genre stuff. Of course it's also just impeccable mass market genre stuff filled with radical politics, which Petri termed PolPop, political popular film. It's right up our alley.

Zatoichi and the One Armed Swordsman (Mimiyoshi Yasuda, 1971) is probably a metaphor for international relations as we see Ichi meet Shaw Brothers' wuxia hit The one Armed Swordsman travel through time and over seas to have a lot of misunderstandings due to the language barrier. Zatoichi at Large (Kazuo Mori, 1972) has perhaps the best pre-credits sequence of any movie ever and then settles into a rushed and blase tale of people failing to communicate even through there is no language barrier. And Zatoichi in Desperation (1972) sees star Shintaro Katsu step into the directors' chair much to the detriment of the series and our mental health.

Sometimes the Criterion Collection hears a whiff that there's two guys doing a Spine Number podcast and says to themselves, "What can we do to mess this up?" Normally, within the Collection, and therefore within our podcast, each Spine Number release is a single film (or maybe a couple) or a collection of short works. Sometimes a boxset will have it's own number, but if the films in the boxset are features, each will have it's own release. But there are notable exceptions to this rule, boxsets made of feature works that it would not make sense (artistically or financially) to sell individually, so Criterion packages them all together under a single Spine. On exceedingly rare conditions, that single boxset contains over 2000 minutes of material. We cannot talk about 2000 minutes of material in a single episode.

This week we start the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset. It contains 25 films released between 1962 and 1973, and we have decided to cover the set by as one bluray disc per episode. There's three films per disc, in chronological order of their release. Yes, that means we'll be spending nine weeks on this set.

Our first episode covers The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi, 1962), The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (Kazuo Mori, 1962), and The New Tale of Zatoichi (Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963).

Anyway, we don't like Antonioni or his stated purposes in making these films, so we once gain must come up with a better interpretation of the story in order to stay interested.

According to the intertitles, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), directed by the late William Friedkin and co-written by Freidkin and former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich adapting his own novel, takes place from December 20 to January 30. While many holidays take place during that time period each year, including the anniversary of Lost in Criterion and the birthdays of our two hosts, yet no one in this movie has any loved ones to spend their time with. Instead they are too busy being bad cops. Sure, all cops are bad, but at least in fiction some are competent, here they are morally, tactically, and investigatorially terrible.

Our old friend Donovan H. joins us to talk about this bleak midwinter tale.

Shoah doesn't deal with the "why" of the Holocaust, but the "how", and Lanzmann presses his interviewees - victims, witnesses, and perpetrators - on that "how" to explicit and horrifying detail. But this detail must be seen, must be known, must be believed, to truly never let it happen again, to be able to stand against genocide no matter where it takes place now, from the US's deportation machines to the murder of thousands of children in Gaza.

Because of the emotional (and temporal) magnitude of the film we'll be spending the next three weeks covering this to better give it the time it deserves. Week one is on Shoah Era 1, the first four and a half hours of Shoah, week two will cover the rest of Shoah, and week three will cover the additional materials on the Criterion release including three additional shorter documentaries made by Lanzmann from his original footage.

3:10 to Yuma is also our first movie in the Collection based on the work of Elmore Leonard, a prolific writer whose work has been adapted into dozens of films of a varying quality over the years (from Burt Reynolds' Stick (1985) to Paul Schrader's Touch (1997). Despite there being some truly great films on that list, we won't see anything more from Leonard in this project for about 12 years when we reach the Ranown Westerns boxset at Spine 1186.

Also it's an atmospheric fairy tale telling of a of a folkloric practice, a forced abandonment of our most vulnerable, even when they're not really that vulnerable. 

This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood and the movie that introduced Peter Lorre to English speaking audiences. It's a tight little thriller that may also involve a dog turning into a man and getting arrested.

Sadly, we lost take one of this conversation and Jonathan Hape was not able to join us for the re-recording. He added a lot to our discussion of the first two Qatsi films, and we wish it could have worked out. You should still go to https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ and check out his music.

Jonathan Hape joins us again for this journey, and along the way we talk about Reggio's Christian Anarchist and anarcho-primitivist influences, the 1990 Time Warner Earth Day Special, and Roger Ebert missing the point.

Our dear friend Jonathan Hape (https://www.jonathan-hape.com/) joins us for the entire trilogy (probably).

A slight fictionalization of the historical Johnson County War, Heaven's Gate (1980) is a beautifully shot epic western where Cimino sought to just tell the stories of real people and forgot that talking about real people in their historical context is what historical materialism is. Cimino's seemingly accidental Marxism was not lost on star Kris Kristofferson, and Cimino even changed some details to ratchet up the class conflict that was, historically, already at a fever pitch.

And, hey, it's not often that the historical villains we see in our Criterion films are still around and even have a website that glosses over their government-approved extrajudicial mass murders. "Guardians of Wyoming's Cow Country since 1872" and still shaping society 150 years later, because that's what happens when you don't stop greedy men from seizing absolute power.

Mia Farrow is great in it, perhaps because her personal life married to Frank Sinatra was pretty close to Rosemary's story. John Cassavetes is great in it despite Polanski's best efforts to reign him in. And I know have a least favorite cinematic satan to add to the list.

Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for as we celebrate another year in the books!

Or it's none of these things completely, as we get into a discussion this week about just how strong the metaphor in Eating Raoul is. But hey, it's still a pretty fun movie.

The additional features on the Criterion release also give us plenty to talk about with biographical information on Fejos' later-career shift to anthropology and ethnography, a topic we are always willing to jump in on, though Criterion doesn't provide any examples of this aspect of his work.

Like last week's film, and many social realist films we've seen, Rosetta doesn't end on a hopeful not, but perhaps on the hope for hope and the promise of freedom and dignity that comes from community and care. We need that now.

And that's not a miracle; it's a fact.

I don't comment on it in the episode, but Gray gives a shout out to Columbus, Ohio, hotdog institution Phillips Coney Island, which closed in 2022 after 110 year of slinging wieners and probably causing some eye injuries of their own doing that.

The Criterion release contains a composite of the 1925 version, reconstructed and rescored, and also Chaplin's own 1942 recut, where he added narration and trimmed what he considered excessive bits: primarily as much of the romance plot as possible since 17 years later he was no longer having an affair with the female lead, Georgia Hale.

It's an interesting enough early Bergman, with the director moving through his 30s and seemingly finally figuring out what he wants his art to be. Wonder what that's like.

Also on the Criterion disc is an early Kiarostami work, The Report (1977), also dealing with a couple becoming estranged, but this time against the backdrop of bureaucratic corruption in pre-revolution Iran.

We talk about both films this week, as well as the nature of communication both within the films and to us as viewers when we're dealing with subtitle tracks that aren't great.

Unfortunately less compelling is the slathering of artifice on the disc's additional features including an essay/interview by what appears to be a character from a Jonathan Lethem novel, a retrospective for a future neural implant release of the film, and scene commentary from someone completely uninvolved with the production.

In this week's episode we cover what Criterion deems Frampton's "Early Films", all made between 1966 and 1970. Included here are some early musings with light and color, some interesting installation pieces, and one epic alphabet. It's a lot to cover, but we try to keep an open mind, even as Frampton's manner of speaking gives us both a visceral reaction to the man, if not his work.

Films covered: Manual of Arms (1966 • 17 minutes, 10 seconds • Black & White • Silent) Process Red (1966 • 3 minutes, 37 seconds • Color • Silent) Maxwell’s Demon (1968 • 3 minutes, 44 seconds • Color • Mono) Surface Tension (1968 • 9 minutes, 30 seconds • Color • Mono) Carrots & Peas (1969 • 5 minutes, 21 seconds • Color • Mono) Lemon (1969 • 7 minutes, 17 seconds • Color • Silent) Zorns Lemma (1970 • 59 minutes, 51 seconds • Color • Mono)

Blithe Spirit is the final film we'll be covering in the boxset - Brief Encounter, the Lean and Coward masterpiece, is in here too, but we talked about it 11 years ago. A delightful romp about murdering your loved ones, accidentally murdering your loved ones' loved ones, hating your dead wives, and not being too fond of your living wives, Coward told Lean to "just shoot the play" and thankfully Lean didn't totally listen. The film gets worse the more faithful it is to the original, but thankfully Lean and company still have some flourishes to add (that Coward reportedly hated). The most bewildering part of Blithe Spirit is that they still came back together to make another movie afterward.

But thankfully between these two masterpieces we get Letter Never Sent (1960), a tale of Soviet vs Nature, a story of love, lust, science, sacrifice, and lots of fire. Raising not only the normal "how did they shoot this?!" questions associated with Urusevsky's work, but new and adjacent "how did they shoot this?!" questions about the special effects.

But Lost in Criterion has long held that the Collection seems to have had a particular interest in festival darling interpersonal family dramas in the early 2000s -- of a wide variety! like Lee's bleakly hopeful Secret Sunshine or Assayas' bourgeoisie Summer Hours -- and I'm not convinced Tiny Furniture doesn't fit into that mold.

In any case, this story of a young woman our age graduating college when we did and attempting to feel like an adult and an artist during the Great Recession hits home, and gives us a lot to talk about.

We return to Assayas in the Collection this week with a very different film, well the first of three, actually. Carlos (2010) is a sort of biopic (though with plenty of editorializing, supposition, and fictionalization) of the life of freedom fighter or terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, popularly known as Carlos the Jackal. The work is a 3-part miniseries of feature length tv films, and we'll be tackling each in its own episode, sprinkling in Criterion's ample supplements, in order to give the total 339 minute runtime of Carlos its proper due.

This week we see Carlos as a fledgling freedom fighter, aligning with the Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation and deciding that means blowing stuff up in France. Episode one (and this week's supplements) lay the foundation for what I hope does not prove to be the main thesis of the film: that Carlos is a hypocritical womanizer ultimately more interested in bourgeois comforts than in Palestinian liberation. We also cover disc 4 of the set, which contains what seems to be a good chunk of Assayas's sources: two tv documentaries on Carlos and an interview with then-on-the-run former Carlos associate Hans-Joachim Klein.

This winter we're gathering together on the longest night of the year, well in the northern hemisphere at least, and watching a holiday horror film. Well, holiday enough. Like each of our holiday specials, the end of year holidays are rather incidental to the plot of Blood Beat. Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for a film he was, inexplicably enough, already planning to watch this year for the first time.

As any review of Blood Beat will tell you, it's a deeply weird film, but it's maybe not even the weirdest movie we've seen this year? I mean, we watched House and Head and Crumb this year. Truly, from Antichrist to Zazie dans le Metro, the tenth year of Lost in Criterion brought us some brilliant films that are more than a bit out of the ordinary. Blood Beat isn't actually too far off from some movies we've seen this year, and even closer to some of the lower budget independently produced horror films we've seen as part of the collection in the past. Maybe we'll get a Criterion release of it before we're done.

This week we cover his first three works: a newsreel/travelogue look at class distinctions in a port town in À propos de Nice (1930), a "Tokyo Olympiad" style look at a swimming star in Taris (1931), and a narrative about schoolboy revolution in Zéro de conduite (1933). And it's a good thing we decided to split this up because just covering these three shorter works led to a nearly 2 hour episode.

Next week is our annual holiday special, so we'll finish up the Jean Vigo set with L'Atalante (1934) in two weeks.

It is the most interesting to us Polanski movie we've seen so far, certainly, resting mostly on the atmosphere of it's setting and the fact that this crime thriller maybe started life as a backdoor adaptation of Waiting for Godot.

But also, what malevolent coincidence have we encountered that we talk about Polanski films during the holidays.

Anyway, at least we got to talk about Liberation Theology and communism for a bit.

This week it's Zazie dans le Metro, an adaptation of a popular French book that borders on Finnegans Wake-level nonsense made into a live action cartoon that borders on Playtime-level nonsense. It's a real curveball as Malle's third film, coming after The Lovers and Elevator to the Gallows which are both certainly not this. It's also probably the funniest movie about a little girl running away from a child molester that you'd ever watch. It's a weird one.

Returning guest Adam S. joins us to talk about this marvelous movie that mocks fascists, which is always a worthwhile cause.

If Pale Flower were just director Masahiro Shinoda's avant garde deconstruction of a Shintaro Ishihara story and yakuza films in general, a New York Noir but Japanese, it would be worth talking about.

But Pale Flower (1964) is both, and more for the sum of it's parts.

Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion release, we also get to talk about Loach's 1966 teleplay Cathy Come Home, which is positively Godardian in style, though politically harder-hitting than Godard would get outside his work with Jean-Pierre Gorin.

In both films Loach appears to intuitively understand that the critique of traditional forms of art that the French New Wave was doing is an inherently political exercise, and Loach embraces its political nature without sacrificing the artistic form.

But let's face it, it's only in the Collection because of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Should have been a bonus feature, though I suppose if it had the Topsy-Turvy release would have been bloated. Instead we get a standalone episode dedicated to this piece of 19th century British Orientalism. Great.

Gilbert and Sullivan is not for me. Topsy-Turvy is for me. A story about art and capital, authenticity and caricature.

It's a beautiful film, thanks in no small part to the film's 3rd cinematographer, promoted cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno kicking off his illustrious career.

It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing cutting edge sitcoms. Unfortunately, he doesn't take the opportunity of a larger story to punch any harder.

Head was out there structurally, of course, and second to Head comes Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place, a film I cannot believe Columbia put out. It's structure has more in common with Chris Marker's Le Jetee (1962) than Easy Rider, and it feels more daring than anything we've seen in weeks of the BBS set. Jaglom is trying to chase Cassevetes, but unfortunately lacks Cassevetes' abilities. But at least he's got Orson Welles in his picture.

But maybe as Ohio boys we're just mad that Drive, He Said is set in Ohio but not filmed there.

It's well acted though! Despite the poorly drawn character, Michael Margotta is fantastic as Gabriel, and Karen Black's performances continue to be the highlights of these films.

We think Carole Eastman's script was probably a lot more interesting than Bob Rafelson's movie, but who can say.

Dennis Hopper directs this classic tale of...freedom? People tell me this movie is about freedom. I'll be honest, given the cultural hold this film seems to have I was surprised at how bleak it is.

We start off with perhaps the most out there of the set. Rafelson and Schneider are the creators of the Monkees, and much of BBS's success can be attributed to the just tons of money they made from that show. Our first film, directed by Rafelson, is Head (1968), the psychedelic swan song for the prefab four.

Our good friend Jonathan Hape, a long-time Monkees fan who'd never seen Head before, joins us for a rollicking conversation about the film and the band.

Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Great Dictator, and really cannot wait for that! For now his heart is in the right place even if he's doing a lot that Rene Clair already did in A Nous la Liberte with a better political message but no Chaplin set pieces so it's really hard to rank them against each other. Clair's production company actually sued over Modern Times, but settled out of court and Clair himself was horrified that they sued his friend Chaplin. In the end, we get two great films about the hellish nature of technology in the hands of capital.

Ultimately, the film is sort of a mix between Salo and Haxan, and like Salo it is a film that I am glad I watched but will never recommend to anyone. Like Salo, Antichrist is steeped in sexual and gender-based violence, some of it graphically self-inflicted. You should not watch the film without knowing that is coming.

But still, it is a fascinating look at depression and grief. And this is one of my favorite episodes as of late, and we've watched a lot of good movies lately.

Speaking of religious elements, a note: this episode we spend some time talking about the [Anglo] Latin Catholic influence in India since that is the Christianity we see in the movie (and it gives us a chance to reference Black Narcissus). While the colonialism of more modern waves of Christianity into India cannot be sidestepped, we should point out that Christianity has a 2000 year history in parts of India, particularly the south, and it’s not all the rather austere Latin Catholicism that we see in the movie and talk about in this episode.

Casey Hape joins us once again as the person we know who has been into Anderson the longest, and we got her husband Jonathan to sit in as well.

Big thanks to Adam S. for joining us, because it's always nice to have someone who may actually know what they're talking about on the podcast.

OK, "anti" war film. Whenever we watch an anti-war film the comment attributed to Truffaut comes up: "there's no such thing as an anti-war film". We don't entirely think that's true. We've seen spiritual and humanist anti-war films as recently as last week's episode that I would say achieve their goal. Unfortunately, as we discuss this week, American culture, particularly post WW2, may be so steeped in war that an American cannot make an anti-war film.

Still, Malick tries, and if the production stories are to be believed, it took quite a toll on him.

We started this podcast as an excuse to talk after Pat moved to Japan. While Pat and I were far from cinephiles, we enjoyed the conversations we'd have leaving the cinema after a movie, and wanted to continue having those talks even though we weren't going to the same cinema anymore. So we, pretty arbitrarily to be honest, picked a list of movies to talk about, and happened to pick one that now grows faster than we release episodes. We will never be done! So look forward to more decade anniversaries in the future!

To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to revisit one of the first 100 films we talked about. This is a redemption thing. While we moved to podbean so that our entire catalogue of episodes would be more easily available, we do not recommend the first 100 (or more!). They're rough. They're evidence of two idiots getting film education by fire. I like to think we've gotten better over the years, but our iTunes reviews disagree.

So Pat and I made a list of films we particularly wanted to revisit from those first 100 Criterion Spines. Over the last few weeks, our Patreon supporters have voted on which film they'd like to hear us re-examine. The winner is a movie I loved, but was only going to watch again if I was forced to because it is so long.

Andrei Rublev (1966) is the first Andrei Tarkovsky film Pat and I saw and we were not prepared. The original episode finds Pat calling everything but the bell making sequence "boring" and "confusing" and me finding the film hard to defend because I liked it on vibes alone. Have our opinions changed? Well, they'd have to have, but you'll have to listen to this episode to be sure.

Thanks to everyone who voted! Thanks to everyone who's listened to and supported us over the years! Maybe someday we'll be done!

While one end of year holiday - New Year's - is symbolically important to the film's time motif, every gift-giving holiday of the winter season takes place uncommented on in the background of this movie that is explicitly about a best-selling toy. And that's not the silliest aspect of this silly film!

The last week notwithstanding, we had a good year this year! We kicked off 2022 with Jeanne Dielman, a film that by the end of the year was declared the best movie ever or something. Well, it's certainly up there. We were introduced to the wonderful works of Mira Nair this year, and took a way too long working through the second By Brakhage Anthology, sorry! We talked Z and Hunger and Che and we sure do love it when Criterion gives us a political film to sink our teeth into, even when the director claims their obviously political film isn't political at all (looking at you Pedro Costa and Josef von Sternberg!) Oh, and we got to watch another Antonioni film we didn't like, but at least we enjoyed talking about it this time!

Hope your year's been as good as ours! We've been doing this podcast for a full decade now! Wow. Next week we're going to have a special retrospective episode, looking back at a film from the first 100 Spines of the Criterion Collection that our Patreon supporters voted for us to revisit. Can't wait to share that with you!

For now though, happy all the holidays!

This week we cover films from the last years of Brakhage's life, including what he was working on when he passed away. And we finally get a behind-the-scenes look at Brakhage filming in "For Stan", a bonus feature short film from Brakhage's wife (and editor of this anthology) Marilyn Brakhage.

Back then we tried to talk about 26 Brakhage films in a single episode. It was a foolish thing to attempt. This time we're swinging the pendulum the other way and taking the set week by week with Criterion's "Program" subdivisions of the 30 total films. It means only covering about 4 films and about 1 hour of material each week for six weeks, but it also means maybe actually intelligently talking about any individual Brakhage work.

Long time supporter of the show Jason Westhaver joins us to talk about this wonderful film.

This episode is a bit late because the laptop I have recorded Lost in Criterion since 2013 on died. RIP the macbook I promised myself I would keep for a full decade in order to justify the cost. You almost made it.

In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 meticulous look at domestic life, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, her protagonist makes some changes. Maybe we all should.

Joining us this year are Stephen G. and Ben JW, and Ben makes a compelling argument that this is Shane Black's most actual Christmas movie. Whether or not that's true, it's ridiculous.

The Human Condition is, in total, just shy of 10 hours long. But it's helpfully broken up into three films (each containing two sections) released between January 1959 and January 1961. We'll be similarly breaking down Spine 480 into three episodes.

Revolutions that promise equality without upheaving power structures aren't revolutions. Equality must always broaden.

This week is also the first of a one-two punch of Buñuel's final Mexican films. While this week focuses on the aristocracy (and a little on religion), next week swings hard at organized Christianity and I can't wait to share that episode with you as well.

I'm happy to report that von Trier is 2 for 2 with Pat. Europa is an ambitious and weird movie that wears its pedigree and influences on its sleeve. And it's got trains! AND it's about the failings of American foreign policy! What's not to love?

Bottle Rocket was Anderson’s first feature length, based on a short that had played well at Sundance. The festival did not want the feature length, which bombed, but important people were interested, so Anderson and the Wilson brothers who helped marched on.

Happy New Year. It can only go up from here.

We’ve seen a lot of good movies this year, even through our last Criterion (and first of the year next week) are real low points as far as our opinions of the Collection. But the Varda boxset was certainly a highlight, and the Teshigahara set as well. When we started this project we joked that it would take us a dozen or so years. It’s been 8 and we’re barely closer to the end now than we were then. Time and Criterions march on.

Merry whichever holiday you may celebrate this time of year, and a very happy new year to us all. May we continue the first steps we’re taking out of the long dark.

This is the final film in the 3 Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara boxset, though we will spend one more week with the set as next week we discuss the four short films also included.

That is not true of our response to Anderson’s short Thursday’s Children that is also included in the Criterion release. An Oscar-winning documentary short on a School for the Death, Thursday’s Children shows us a world that Pat and I, both trained in how to teach, react incredibly negatively to.

To look back and celebrate we gather our friends at this end of the year — Stephen Goldmeier, Ben Jones-White, and Casey and Jonathan Hape all return to the show — and discuss the 1992 Robin Willams-starring, Barry Levinson-directed beautiful mess that is Toys. Also, you should look up youtube videos of Art Metrano.

So Happy Holiday[s]. There’s just so many. You should celebrate them all. Or at least whichever one makes you feel hopeful and loved. And keep that feeling all the year.

But this week’s it’s The Naked City, the story that launched a million stories in the form of the police procedural spin-off tv show, and every imitator down the line. Now today there are more fictional murders on New York-based crime dramas than there are actual murders in New York, so isn’t that something?

Criterion delivers the films to us in themed pairs on each Spine number, so we’ll be dealing with them in that division. First up is Paul Robeson: Icon containing Dudley Murphy’s 1933 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, which Robeson had been starring in on stage since 1925, and Saul J. Turell’s 1979 retrospective documentary Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist.

Happy Fourth of July, America.

How did we make it through this episode without making a Francostein joke? The world will never know.

Our guest Ben also works with WikiTongues, an organization dedicated to documenting and saving languages all over the world. If you have the resources please support their work.

With slight distance I think the boys would be more apt to agree that all of the moral tales of are critiques of various aspects of what we would now call toxic masculinity. In it, though, even with this last episode, we get bogged down wondering if that reading is more our wish than Rohmer’s design. But finally finishing the series at least provides us with a floor to talk about them better individually.

It’s uh…it’s a very good documentary.

Listen, Bunuel is a complicated guy, but this is not a mistake that is unique to him so I need to say this outside the podcast (and, repeatedly, inside the podcast): he is right, personal charity will not change systematic problems that stem from economic inequality. Systematic issues require systematic changes. But you know what? You still need to help people in the moment. So support organizations that seek to get people off the street. But also, buy a sandwich for that guy on the freeway exit ramp, give that lady downtown some gloves. And, best of all, promote policy changes that will eliminate the need for those social charities and actually raise up the destitute. We can do it all. If we want to.

Au revoir les enfants provides much more context to the previous two films autobiographical natures, to the point where I think we can say we have a deeper understanding of both the other films in the set having watched it. But more importantly than that, this is a hard-hitting, masterpiece of a film about selfless compassion in the face of extreme horror, and the personal toll that takes on you.

Anyway. Recognize yourself in Lacombe, because nearly all of us, at times, align with the powers of oppressive violence, and we need to see that in ourselves instead of writing it off as the moral failing of others. Be better. Do better.

That is to say, neither Pat nor I really enjoyed Murmur of the Heart (1971) when we first discussed it for this episode, but by the time we finish the boxset in 2 weeks we have a different understanding of this first film. While Pat has long maintained that he refuses to learn anything from this project, the self-evident truth is that the more movies we watch the better base of understanding we have in watching other movies. Often that means that we can look back on older episodes and know that we were certainly wrong in the discussion we had about them.

But even after all that learning, I think the incest in this movie ruins it for me. Not because it’s taboo, but because it doesn’t make sense.

La Bete Humaine has a lot of bad psychology and therefore some bad social commentary. It also misses a theme from the original novel that it seems like Renoir and Gabin — who had just finished The Grand Illusion — should have leaned into but instead ignored. But it does have trains! Lots and lots of trains!

In this week’s conversation I digress to talk about what I have recently learned about Karl Marx’s relationship to the early Republican Party in the US. While my research did not involve this Jacobin article, the piece is a good synopsis for those wanting to more beyond my rant.

Donovan Hill joins us, and along the way we also talk about public office corruption in Japan and Ohio. Good times!

This week in the middle is Ran, which Kurosawa wrote, then someone pointed out that it sounded a lot like King Lear, so Kurosawa rewrote it to lean into the comparison. Donovan Hill joins us once again.

Partway into the episode I present a reading of it as an adaptation of the Odyssey, with David Thewlis's Johnny as Odysseus. While I think that's a fair reading even though there's no cyclops, I only later realized that it's Claire Skinner's Sandra who returns from overseas to kick a bunch of interlopers out of her home, so maybe she's a background Odysseus instead. In any case the films got a lot to say about transience and the lives of people in the bottom rungs of capitalism. I love it, I'm just not sure I could stand to watch it again.

Le Samourai starts with a fake quote about bushido and is philosophically inconsistent with everything we've learned about bushido from the Japanese films Melville certainly watched and doesn't seem to quite grasp. Still brilliant, though.