Lost in Criterion

We've seen Roman Polanski before in a cameo in the bonkers Blood for Dracula, but this is our first encounter with him directing. Appropriate, then, that this is his first full length film. Knife in the Water was released in 1962 while Poland was still rather Communist which makes the content of the film perhaps a bit surprising. That doesn't make it good.

The Devil and Daniel Webster makes a feint at confronting something deep and true about America's past and then quickly ignores that hurtful truth for a hopeful cry of "a man shall own his own soul" and "Don't let this country go to the devil." The truth is that the US has always been in step with the Devil. Stephen Vincent Benet knew that when he wrote the story, and when he adapted it for William Deterle's 1941 film.

But by the same turn, as evident by Webster's  speech to the Jury -- a jury made of the "worst of Americans" though not a Confederate or slaver among them? -- we fight the Devil when we allow freedom to ring.

From Loving to Obergefell we overcome the Devil of our past and make America greater when we tear down bigoted laws.

From Brown to Roe to Lawrence we refuse to let this country go to the Devil when we distribute freedom out from the hands of a privileged few and take steps toward liberty and justice for all.

We recorded this November 5th. Somethings have changed since then. But then they haven't, have they?

As the film acknowledges, the devil's always been in power here.

As the film implores:
Don't be fooled like Jabez Stone.
Don't sell your soul.
Don't let this country go to the Devil.

In 1963 a fresh-faced Vilgot Sjoman asked Ingmar Bergman if he could watch his process, then Sveriges Television asked Sjoman if they could tag along. Of course Bergman only half said yes. The documentary is mostly true to life, and fascinating in that regard, though it's also a bit fake, with some sequences not exactly showing what they claim and at least one interview wholly reshot after Bergman didn't like the results.

We finish of the Three Films by Ingmar Bergman boxset next week with a documentary by Vilgot Sjoman, but the three titular films come to an end and a head this episode as we talk The Silence from 1963. While we praised the last two films for being the most straightforward Bergman films we've experienced, the third is a bit more obtuse unless the titular Silence of God is the fact that religion just isn't mentioned anymore. But it takes place at a hotel, so Adam gets to share some hotel stories!

The Communicants -- the actual translation of the Swedish title for Winter Light -- are what we call people who are taking the Communion, and perhaps the solid statement, calling everyone in this film Communicants, is as much a lesson as anything in the film. Of course the other definition -- someone imparting information -- brings its own interpretations. Winter Light -- the always dim but never dying sun -- well, that's a third meaning to keep on our plate. Bergman's 1962 followup and ideological sequel to Through a Glass Darkly acts as a rebuttal to the finale of that film. But at the same time even as rites and actions are confessed to be metaphysically useless, they're still psychologically important, maybe? As people who have sailed those seas and landed on separate shores Pat and I have a lot to say this week. It starts with 10 minutes about Communion itself, though, because BERGMAN.

1961, and specifically the film Through a Glass Darkly, marked a number of changes for Ingmar Bergman: it's the first time he starts to shoot on the island of Fårö, his first time working with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and, perhaps most strikingly, a brief flirtation with making philosophically straightforward film. This film and the next -- Winter Light which we'll talk about next week as we continue through the boxset Three Films by Ingmar Bergman -- are possibly the most easy to understand of Bergman's whole catalog, among the few where the filmmaker himself is doing most of the work for interpretation. This does not make them less depressing, but it does make it a good starting point for introducing yourself to the films of Ingmar Bergman.

Shohei Imamura is the only Japanese director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, which is probably more of an indictment against Cannes than the quality of Japanese film. Nonetheless, the award was not for The Pornographers, his first independent film made at his own production company in 1966. Imamura viewed himself as a "cultural anthropologist" and therefore wanted "to make messy films" about real people. This one may be a little too real for Pat and I. But it does give us an opportunity to revisit Ronald Neame's The Horse's Mouth, to which Imamura make a clear reference even though a Google search suggests that we are among the very few people in history to notice.

Lola (1981) brings us to the end of the BRD Trilogy. It can be argued that Veronika Voss is a political film, but for Maria Braun and Lola the argument stands on surface observation. Rainer Werner Fassbinder had some interesting political beliefs, and we tackle probably his most controversial stance in this week's episode as well. Find out what he's wrong about by giving us a listen.

Our last encounter with Rainer Werner Fassbinder left us breathless, and now we move into a trilogy of some of the famed directors best (and final) work. All three stories feature female protagonists making their way in post-war West Germany, and all three are varying degrees of indictment against West German society as Fassbinder saw it. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) suggests that Fassbinder believes the BRD is about to blow itself up, but then he destroys all semblance of subtext in the final moments of the film. Even without that final hammer it's a fascinating tale.

David O. Selznick produced The Third Man and it is the best movie. Also he produced this one. Terminal Station, his 1953 collaboration with Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica, takes that ambivalence and splits it in two, which is appropriate: we get one movie to love and one to hate. Selznick so hated what De Sica brought him that he recut the film himself, shaving 25 minutes out and gutting it of it's emotional arc. The resulting film, Indiscretion of an American Wife, is also included on this Criterion release, so we talk both this week.

We've already talked a bit about Italian neorealism, albeit through a filmmaker who was trying to reject the movement some years after it had died. Now we get to see the film that, arguably, killed it. Vittorio De Sica is hardly a stranger to the movement -- his Bicycle Thieves, which we'll talk about in the future, is one of its masterpieces -- but that didn't stop critics from piling on the hate for Umberto D. in 1952. Unfairly, I may add, as it's a great movie. Alas.

Stephen Soderbergh puts all his bad ideas into one movie.

Continuing our short trend of films with messages that coincidentally speak to some of the darkest positions of American society today, mostly because they critique aspects of human interaction that, sadly, bubble up every so often in any civilization (and almost always exist at at least a low simmer). Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) -- our first from the renowned German -- is an homage to the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, in particular a retelling of All That Heaven Allows that takes that films class-divided love story and transfers it to a West Germany divided by class, race, religion, and immigration status.

The same amazing non-linear storytelling that we saw in masterful use last week kind of makes its cinematic debut here, in Alain Resnais' 1959 drama Hiroshima mon Amour. Sure, as we point out, other films had used flashback, but none in quite this way, a much more literary way to be sure (we cite To The Lighthouse, but Slaughterhouse Five is perhaps the literary codifier of the method). In any case, though, Hiroshima mon Amour's technique became THE film narrative for flashback. And we're all lucky for that.

I know it's just Italian for "end" but I Fidanzati ending with "FINE" in white block letters on a black frame sums up my emotional response.

Ermanno Olmi's films have all the hallmarks of Italian neorealism even though he claims his film style is a response to (and rejection of) Italian neorealism.

It's so rare that a perfect film could exist. How did Henri-Georges Clouzot make so many?

The year after their brilliant film The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, married movie-makers Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlondorff split their duties with Schlondorff staying behind the camera for Coup de Grace while von Trorra does double duty as co-writer and star. Filmed in 1976 and set in 1919, the filmmakers split the difference and rather successfully made a film that seems to have been made in 1939 for all it's melodrama and technology, though with its graphic depiction of war and its emotional consequences perhaps not in America in 1939. Oh goodness the emotional consequences.

The best Shakespeare adaptation wonder far from the text. Donovan Hill joins us to talk about Kurosawa's Throne of Blood

Federico Fellini's first solo feature directorial The White Sheik (1952) is everything we love about the famed Italian, and very little of what we don't. The book Adam mentions in the introduction is Harriet Russell's Envelopes and is delightful as well.