Lost in Criterion

Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting and Spike Jonze's directorial debuts, Being John Malkovich is a delightfully weird story of identity. Lotte (Cameron Diaz)'s storyline is particularly compelling, with Lotte experiencing gender euphoria as Malkovich, whereas our other main characters want to use Malkovich for patriarchal power, through fame or immortality.

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.

Mario Monicelli's The Organizer's title, like De Sica's Bicycle Thieves 15 years before it, had its title senselessly singularized for English release. The original title I compagni means "The Comrades" and is a bit more indicative of the ensemble organizing that is going on here. The story of a late 19th century textile mill strike, The Organizer is a warts and all look at workers exercising their power and capital bringing everything it has to crush them, from "haven't I always been good to you" manipulation to bullets.

In 1973 Robert M. Young made Children of the Fields, a short documentary about a family of Polo Galindo, migrant farm workers in the Southwest US including his young children living, a transient life as exploited laborers. Galindo opened Young's eyes not only to his and his family's plight, but to the struggles of an even lower rung: undocumented migrant workers. With Galindo as guide and translator, Young turned his documentarian eye to a narrative film, ¡Alambrista! (1977), showing us the life of a subsistence farmer who leaves Mexico to head north, desperate to make a living to care for his newborn baby as an undocumented migrant farm worker, taking a human look at the instability and exploitation faced in such a precarious life.

Written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby, scored by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Harold and Maude is a wonderful piece of counter-culture from early New Hollywood, and honestly, a better ode to freedom than most of what came out of the "America Lost and Found: The BBS Story" boxset of foundational New Hollywood works we watched a few months ago.

We finish up A Hollis Frampton Odyssey this week, covering work from his Magellan cycle, a massive project Frampton was working on when he died. While previously discussed works like (nostalgia) show Frampton's ironic detachment, Magellan melds the history of film and Frampton's life story in a way that feels sentimental. These works also often seem to be in conversation with Stan Brakhage in a way we haven't seen from Frampton before (but then that might just be "Guys who have only ever seen Stan Brakhage watch another avant-garde film").

We continue through A Hollis Frampton Odyssey and it feels a bit like being lost at sea this week. We cover 3 films from his Hapax Legomena series: (nostalgia), Poetic Justice, and Critical Mass. Each originally released in 1972, the three shorts are perhaps more conceptually interesting to us than they are in execution. Well, not Critical Mass, which is conceptually bad but perhaps executed in an interesting way.

Criterion once again brings us a boxset of avant-garde film, this time from American filmmaker Hollis Frampton. A Hollis Frampton Odyssey contains 20 or so shorts of varying length, adding up to 266 minutes of material that we'll be covering over the next three weeks.

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)

Ronald Neames says that after This Happy Breed he and the rest of Cineguild were tired of making war-time films, and were pretty sure audiences were tired of propaganda. But they weren't tired of working with Noel Coward, despite the fact that with each movie in Criterion's David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset we get new stories of Coward disagreeing with their choices in filming his work.

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.

The second film in the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset, This Happy Breed is the story of a British Middle Class TM family between the wars. Acting as a sort of "remember when" for British of a certain class, it's also an examination of the rigid structure and code of ethics of this particular pocket of social class which while not the Upper Crust still seems to considers itself above the working people.

This "story of a ship" kicks off the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset. Lean was an in-demand film editor (and had previously done some uncredited co-direction), and Noel Coward wanted to make a war propaganda film based on his friend Lord Mountbatten's naval exploits. Thus we get In Which We Serve (1942), a biography of the crew of a doomed destroyer told in flashback after the ship sinks in the Battle of Crete. Ronald Neame acts as cinematographer and the film is produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan, who would stick with Lean to form the powerhouse Cineguild Productions by the time they made next week's film This Happy Breed.

Every time we watch a documentary, we end up talking a lot about the nature of documentary. With Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room (1993), much of that end of the conversation is focused on how Direct Cinema is not a journalistic endeavor, and how the material covered - Bill Clinton's 1992 US Presidential campaign - could have used a journalistic approach. Instead what we get is a collection of some of the worst people in US politics for the last 30 years given free reign to lie to the camera. America: it may not be a perfect system, but it sure is bad.

Mikhail Kalatozov makes some beautiful films, particularly in his work with Sergey Urusevsky, who may just be our favorite cinematographer. Many, many years ago (Spine 146!) we watched their film The Cranes are Flying (1957), and images from that film still grace my dreams. Many, many years from now (Spine 1214!) we will watch I am Cuba (1964), their final collaboration, and we can't wait.

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.

Otto Preminger's ripped-from-the-headlines courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) stars a delightful mix of young and old Hollywood, is a big middle finger to the Production Code, and is an ode to manipulating the US legal system. And if that weren't enough, we've got a soundtrack by Duke Ellington and titles by Saul Bass.

Louis Malle reunites with the stars of My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, for a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a an abandoned theater just off Time Square. Not just a delightful production of Uncle Vanya, but also a look at theater for the sake of theater, squatting and otherwise unmoored from financial obligations.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's only sci-fi work, World on a Wire asks the important questions: what if we asked an AI to simulate the Matrix as a 1970s German television miniseries, and then scrapped that garbage and just had a great screenwriter, fantastic cinematographer, and masterful director make it instead. While dealing with the same questions of humanity and existentialism that many tales of virtual prisons do, World on a Wire also gives us a jumping off point to talk about tech innovation, forced consumer trend, treating algorithms like gods, and how cars are bad. It's a pretty amazing production, which is unsurprising from Fassbinder and his phenomenal team behind and in front of the camera.

Lena Dunham has a tendency to say dumb things, and she's garnered quite a backlash during her short career. Because of that the inclusion of her 2010 film Tiny Furniture in the Criterion Collection appears to be often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bay's Armageddon and Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: that is, with Criterion aficionados asking "why is this here?"

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.

Our friend and samurai-film-fiend Donovan joins us to talk about Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). This origin story for a long-running tv show that seems like it was Gosha's version of the A-Team plays like a more cynical version of a Kurosawa tale. It's also got some fantastic camera work thanks to Tadashi Sakai.

Following the festival successes but domestic box office failures of Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Hands over the City (1963), Francesco Rosi decided an international picture would fix his money problem, and decided to make a documentary on the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. He didn't end up making exactly that, as The Moment of Truth (1965) is a narrative film with a neo-realist bent, and if you can get over all the ritualistic animal abuse it's probably the best bull fighting movie there is.

We've got sympathy for the Godzilla as guest Jason W. returns to talk with us about the Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla and the American recut of it, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the original film's anti-war metaphor (and what gets lost in the Americanization), as well as the media inspired by the film. We've got a lot to cover so save this one for long evening walk.

We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the source material and imagines a film that is perhaps 100% a character's fantasies, but even if it's not, it's still at least 50% a character's fantasies. And yet, somehow, it's also one of the director's most subdued films.

Noel Coward's Design for Living premiered in Cleveland, Ohio -- apparently the world's bastion of progressive and transgressive theater at the time -- on January 2, 1933. By the end of the month it would be on Broadway, by the end of the year Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht would adapt it into the sexiest film of 1933. Meanwhile, Coward wouldn't stage the play in his native England for nearly another decade. Why? Well, one there's the scandal of even portraying a polyamorous relationship, but then Coward's play, like Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), portrays polyamory only to show it not working. That's one of the major changes in Lubitsch's version, and the film is all the more scandalous for it: here the relationship is rocky but in the end works out, maybe. No wonder the Production Code Administration hated it.

Somehow Sidney Lumet is our most watched director on our Patreon bonus episodes, but the actual Criterion Collection has a distinct lack. We get one of his best this week with 12 Angry Men (1957), a film adaptation of a teleplay from the Golden Age of Television (though not from Spine 495: The Golden Age of Television boxset). Our friend Stephen G. joins us to talk about how this is a great movie whose politics are not as great as we'd like and whose understanding of the legal system is going to lead to a mistrial.

The final film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and the final film of the director's life, is the capstone to the set and, perhaps, a capstone to his entire career. A story of connection, coupled with the others in the trilogy, we're reminded that without Fraternity - the guiding theme of this film - life is hell. You gotta care. You deserve to be cared about.

D.H. Lawrence once said "Never trust the teller, trust the tale" and we fully embrace that as we struggle to step around the obvious political metaphor of a rocky relationship between a French woman and a Polish man in Krzysztof Kieślowski's anti-romantic comedy "Equality" movie Three Colors: White. Kieślowski is rather insistent that these are not political movies, though his collaborator and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz is perhaps less insistent. In either case though, the tale does the talking.

This week we kick off Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy with Blue. Each of the three colors, drawn from the colors of the French flag, are also used in the films to represent one of the ideals of the French Revolution: Blue is associated with Liberty, White with Equality, and Red with Fraternity. Ultimately, as we'll discuss in the coming weeks, the films make an argument that without Fraternity, Liberty and Equality are meaningless and even hellish. In Blue we see a woman who has embraced solitude in response to grief.  She believes solitude is liberation from pain, but the film shows that to heal she needs human connection. It's a beautiful and brilliant film, and a masterpiece of synthesizing message and form.