Lost in Criterion

The second of our Hiroshi Teshigahara films, his 1964 masterpiece The Woman in the Dunes gets even more into our wheelhouse than Pitfall did. This week we talk Japanese society and “friendly authoritarianism”, societal structure in general, the plight of lower classes, an anthropological study of friendship, and a movie that makes Adam a bit nervous about his planned trip to visit Japan and what might happen if he visits the wrong small town.

We kick off a month-worth of films from filmmaker and flower artist Hiroshi Teshigahara this week with Pitfall. The boxset Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara doesn’t just contain three films, but also four shorts which we’ll cover in their own episode at the end, but this week we get started with Pitfall (1962) a movie that seems made for us? Surrealist drama about labor politics in a Japan with an absurd eschatology? Yeah, it checks a lot of our boxes.

Who could have guessed the WR: Mysteries of the Organism was the saner of the two Dušan Makavejev films we’d watch? It did give us a better base by which to discuss Sweet Movie, and I think we come to a better understanding of Makavejev as a person. Not a more respecting position, but a more informed one.

We get a pair of films from Serbian director Dušan Makavejev this and next week and they are nearly impossible to describe. This week we have a combination documentary on pseudo-scientific research of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. shorts documentaries on artists who use sexuality in their work, and a narrative portion about the struggles between Sovietism and a more libertine version of communism.

Claude Berri’s The Two of Us is steeped in Berri’s own experience during the occupation of France during World War 2. It’s a story that reminds us that someone can have deeply held racist beliefs and still seem nice, especially if they don’t realize their new friend belongs to the group they hate, it’s a jokey inter-generational buddy film about the banal absurdity of prejudice with the looming threat of the Holocaust in the background. It’s among the clear inspirations for Jojo Rabbit, so feel free to imagine the backlash if it came out today.

We get a series of films from French multimedia artist Chris Marker this week of varying genius. First up is the absolutely brilliant and clearly influential sci-fi short La Jetée from 1962. Our other major conversation is on the significantly more controversial to Pat and me Sans Soleil, a sort of travelogue essay from 1983. We also briefly discuss his 1981 short documentary on found sculpture in the California mudflats with 1981’s Junkopia and (much more briefly) his venture into cd-rom interactive gaming with Immemory (1998). It’s also a weird one when Criterion decides that the one release they’re putting out from a director will contain a survey of his entire decades-long career.

This week Donovan Hill joins us once more, discussing boat law, America’s indifference to international law, the hilarious/frightening nostalgia within the book Hagekure (and WW2 era views of same), pretty much every adaptation of the 47 Ronin we can think of, and, oh yeah, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff. It’s a jam-packed episode (read: long), as episodes with Donovan tend to be.

Jean-Pierre Melville draws on his personal experience as a member of the French Resistance to tell the heroic story of a bunch of ineffectual French Resistance fighters, whose only prize for avoiding death is the chance to avoid death once again.

In October 2016 we were unimpressed with Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers, but the Collection has finally brought us another of his and this time we don’t hate it. Not to say either Pat or I will be watching it again anytime soon, but Vengeance is Mine is at least more interesting to us than The Pornographers was and makes us actually look forward to seeing more of Imamura’s work in the future.

We return to the films of Jules Dassin (and to the starring roles of Burt Lancaster) with a prison drama that’s sort of undermined by Dassin’s later pro-cop movie Naked City which we watched a few weeks ago. In that movie cops are good. In this movie prisons are really quite bad. Pat and I certainly don’t share Dassin’s (or each others’) views on cops, but we are much more on board with the idea that prison needs massive reform at the very least. I’ll say I’m more extreme than Dassin’s imagination could take him. For more information on what I mean there, check out Angela Davis talking to Democracy Now about Prison Abolition.

We kick off the New Year with arguably the most pro-war film we’ve watched. And argue we do as I keep hoping to come to some anti-war interpretation and Pat shoots me down over and over in this extra-long episode. Truffaut argued that “to show [war] is to ennoble it”, that one cannot make an anti-war film that depicts war. We’ve seen some noble attempts, and I think, in the works of Kon Ichikawa we discussed a few weeks ago, some successes. So Truffaut may be wrong, but Pat is right here, Stuart Cooper’s Overlord is not an anti-war film. It still may be an interesting experiment.

It’s been a long year. Near the end of this year’s holiday special we discuss our favorite movies of the year, Criterion and otherwise, and did you know that March was part of 2019? It seems like a lifetime ago. I mean, I have an excuse. I got hit by a car in May and basically did nothing for 2 months. But still.

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.

In balance to last week’s police propaganda film, we come this week to the story of minority youth in France dealing with the oppression of society, particularly police violence. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine is based on true events, and could be based on true events that happen regularly before the film and since in France (and elsewhere). It’s a powerful and wonderful film, and a perfect ending to our year. We’ll see you next week for the annual end of year holiday episode, then in 2020 as we continue being Lost in Criterion.

After last week’s intensity, we settle into a more sentimental anti-war film from Kon Ichikawa. The Burmese Harp. While both films deal with the loss of humanity that war forces on its victims and perpetrators, Fires on the Plain was more of a gut-punch while Harp plucks at the heart strings. Since The Burmese Harp came out first, we call this a classic Pasolini escalation: the easier to handle films failed in their message so the message was turned up to 11.

We kick off a duo of Kon Ichikawa anti-war films this week, though the two films could not be more different. We start of with Fires on the Plane, a sort of Heart of Darkness trek through the aftermath of the Americans recapturing the Philippines during World War 2, doing its best to undercut any idea of a nobility of war.

It is with great joy that we get to talk about the first Mikio Naruse film in the Collection this week, and with great sadness that we acknowledge that it is also the last Mikio Naruse film in the Collection at this time. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs from 1960 is one of the best movies we’ve seen, particularly for one trying to deal with the inner lives of women in the mid-20th century. Someday when we have free time we’ll have to check out more of Naruse’s work.

Powell and Pressburger decided to make a movie that would convince America to enter WW2.
Powell and Pressburger made a movie that feels like the Tourist Board of Canada advertising to Nazis: “Canada is beautiful and you can kill dozens of us for months before you face any consequences.”
Of course it is also a movie about the unity of the Commonwealth, not just Canada with the UK, but also the Inuit and other Indigenous Peoples, French Canadians, and Hutterites are all in this together, even if there is slight acknowledgement that Canada on the whole isn’t trusting at least the Hutterites.
A note of apology, Pat and Adam talk about the film in the film’s terms and therefore quote the films use of “Eskimo”, but also we continue to use that term when talking about the scene in question. Eskimo is mainly seen as pejorative now and we both should know better. The scene itself is meant to be a rejection of prejudice, which makes our use all the more egregious.

Sidney Gilliat’s Green for Danger is a cozy little whodunit where everyone has something to hide and the main victim is a mailman. It also takes place in England against the backdrop of the Germany’s doodlebug bombing campaign and came out barely a year after the setting. It’s lighthearted. It’s dark. It’s delightfully weird. We spend a lot of time discussing why we think Criterion might want us to see it.

This week we watch one of the classics of world cinema, a tale of desperation in destitution, and continue our streak of not needing to leave the text very much at all in order to show the Marxist reading of a movie. Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves tells the story of a man who just wants to make an honest living in a society that is either indifferent or actively working against him.

We finish out our Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist boxset with Citizen of the World containing two films that began life as hard-hitting pro-labor pieces and were both neutered to varying degrees by the outbreak of World War II. Pen Tennyson’s Proud Valley (1940) takes the heavier hit, with the ending being changed from miners seizing the means of production to “management plays an important guiding role” argument à la Metropolis. Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand’s documentary Native Land (1942), based on the finding’s of the Senate’s La Follette Committee investigating violence against labor organizers and organizations, pulls slightly fewer punches, with its release ending being a tacked on message from narrator Robeson about Nazis being the greater threat to freedom than bosses and the US government, but it was still suppressed for years afterward.

This week we talk about two British films starring Paul Robeson as we continue the Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist boxset. Zoltan Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935) was a project Robeson was very excited about until he saw the final cut wherein what he’d hoped would be a testament to African culture was gutted into a paean to British colonialism. As such Robeson demanded more creative control over his role in Thornton Freeland’s Jericho (1937), even completely changing the ending.

We continue the Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist with two silent films: Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925) and Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson, 1925). Micheaux’s work is a “race film” made independently in the US, and is one of only a handful of the director’s works to survive. Likewise, the wildly experimental Borderline is the only surviving work of Macpherson and his Pool Group of British and American outsider artists working in Switzerland. Both are fascinating in their own light, but Borderline in particular exhibits film technique that are rather mind-blowing to see in the silent era.