Lost in Criterion

We love when we get to watch an unapologetically leftist film, and even better when it's just a very well-crafted movie. Juan Antonio Bardem's Death of a Cyclist swings at the upper class in Franco's Spain with a wildly creative use of cuts and transitions showcasing a nation of dichotomies, and a college professor caught in the middle.

Ang Lee's story of two families trying to make sense of life during the Nixon impeachment came out on the cusp of the Clinton impeachment and maybe this week just has impeachment on my mind because the movie doesn't really have that much to do with either of them.

Hiroshi Teshigahara went on a trip to Spain with his dad and made a short, silent vacation movie during it. Years later, after his father’s death, Teshigahara essentially reshot it, elongated it, and focused it on the Barcelona-area works of architect Antonio Gaudi. It is, arguably, unlike any other movie we’ve seen in the Collection in good and bad ways.

Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso is a black comedy about a dumb man who makes a bad promise while in the background his wife has a very sweet fish out of water story. It’s also about the people who progress leaves behind, and perhaps continues to leave behind. We also spend a little time talking about bridges, in particular the nearly inscrutable comparison image on the wikipedia page for the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge in Japan. Check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashi_Kaiky%C5%8D_Bridge

Alex Cox went to Sandinista Nicaragua to film a biography of an 18th century American colonialist while the US was pretending to take the Iran-Contra scandal seriously. No wonder American critics hated the movie.

Despite my false belief that Last Tango in Paris is in the Criterion Collection, The Last Emperor proves to be our last Bernardo Bertolucci movie for the foreseeable future. The tale of Puyi, crowned emperor of China at the age of 3, just before a half century of political revolution, and eventually dying of old age while working as a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Gardens. Bertolucci and the Chinese government may have different views of what that life trajectory means.

Over the years it's become rather apparent that a lot of folks do not appreciate our opinions on Godard. Like Fellini we will not let our awareness of the issue lead us to change.

We finish off the Agnès Varda boxset with a talk on the short films packaged as bonus features: L'opéra-mouffe (1958), Du côté de la côte (1958), and the short narrative film contained within Cleo from 5 to 7, Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald.

We couldn't be happier than to have guest Adam Spieckermann bring his insight to our discussion of Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur, a brightly colored relationship horror film.

We start the 4 by Agnès Varda boxset in medias res, or at the beginning after seeing the middle? This week we’re talking about La Pointe Courte, Varda’s first film but the third in the boxset. Why not talk about the first two? Because we have. This boxset contains two films, Vagabond and Cleo from 5 to 7, which we watched in much earlier episodes of Lost in Criterion in the times we don’t talk about except in apologetic tones of shame.

Some of the best tragedy narratives indict a whole society for creating the system and the path that keep the tragic character imprisoned in his journey toward loss. There's a bit of that in This Sporting Life but the tragedy is focused on the main character's inability to court the woman he can't stop harassing, herself an even starker victim of the local political and economic system.

What Alf Slöberg’s 1951 film adaptation adds to August Strindberg’s 1888 play makes the film both more interesting and quite probably more infuriating. How fun.

Who amongst us hasn't decided to solve a problem maybe without talking to anyone actually affected by the problem or even understanding what the problem is, so you just ended up doing something that adds to the problem in a different way?
The Naked Prey wants to solve racism. It does not.

An experiment in what constitutes a movie finds James Taylor and Dennis Wilson partnered in a cross country race that resolves (or doesn't) sometime after the last reel burns up.

Frequent guest Donovan H. joins us again, and he's maybe become more of an accelerationist than the last time he was on. We're talking Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, the famed director's first work with Toshiro Mifune.

The earliest Bergman we've seen yet is the story of circus performers humiliated at every turn, and apparently something about the battle of the sexes.

Another week, another adaptation of a stream-of-consciousness novel about a perpetually drunk man, this time Fassbinder’s epic mini-series adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Taking place (and originally written) in Germany between the wars, it’s got some lessons for us.

I finally actually counted and figured out this is episode 400. Too bad it's the story of a drunk white guy.

We get our first taste of Terrence Malick in the collection with his tenuously Biblically-inspired period story of poor farm workers and a series of cons that don't really make sense.

I promise you there are Godard films we actually like.

Gus van Zant adapts an “autobiographical work” by Portland poet Walt Curtis, though also on the DVD is a documentary on Curtis by Bill Plympton which, to be honest, we’d probably rather talk about.

It’s another Criterion curveball as we get a short inside-the-studio documentary on pioneering dancer Martha Graham and then two recordings of her pieces, all produced for PBS by Nathan Kroll.

The argument of The Threepenny Opera is that under capitalism crime and legitimate business are indistinguishable in their exploitation.
As time marches on we can see that this is wrong. The system of exploitation perpetrated by “legitimate business”, protected by the police, and whose transactionary nature is thrust upon every aspect of society is the much worse crime.

I think probably the most important thing I can share with you before going into this episode is that on the Criterion dvd is a Criterion-produced music video in which one of the films co-stars sings the plot synopsis.

Ana Torrent is back playing a weird little girl named Ana whose family is dealing with Francoist Spain in Carlos Saura's Cría Cuervos, a film that maybe pales in comparison to Spirit of the Beehive but also maybe stands on its own.