Lost in Criterion

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.

This week Pat and Adam get very lost in Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way (1969), wondering mostly who Buñuel was making the film for, as its philosophical elements are so esoteric as to be off-putting. The sword fight is pretty neat, though.

Jim Jarmusch explores humanity through the connections of taxi drivers and riders and emulating the film history of various places on "earth", which is to say New York, LA, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.

Friend of the show and theme song composer Jonathan Hape joins us to celebrate Spine 400! Someday we may finish this!

The plot of David Mamet's House of Games is right up our alleys, even if Pat thinks it would be more appropriate to a USA channel original program. But there are certainly problems here.

Jean-Pierre Melville adapts a novel written by fellow French director Jean Cocteau, and Melville believes Cocteau, who was on set everyday, was trying to undermine him at every turn. Melville's all but disowned the film, which makes this possibly the first time our opinion on a Melville film matches the director's.

We've talked before about how it may be impossible to truly make an anti-war war film, but in showing the human toll on both sides of the fight Andrei Tarkovsky's entry into the seminal Soviet genre of post-WWII war films may come pretty close. 

This week I feel like Pat does his best to keep me from being blackpilled about journalism and I do my best to remind Pat that everything is stupid. Let’s strike the delicate balance between trusting experts and recognizing that manufactured consent, racist underpinnings in news spin, and yellow journalism are alive and well, and even plutacratized, as anyone with enough financial backing can create the right bias-confirmed headline and get a million shares.

We finish up the 3 Films by Teshigahara boxset with four more films. Aside from the three collaborations with surrealist novelist Kobo Abe on the Criterion release are four shorts, three documentaries on a variety of subjects, and Teshigahara’s portion of an international anthology on the lives of teenage girls:
Hokusai (1953)
Ikebana (1956)
Tokyo 1958 (1958)
Ako (1965)

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.