Lost in Criterion

Our experiment of walking through Stan Brakhage, An Anthology Volume Two at a reasonable pace comes to an end this week. After our rush through Volume One years ago we had liked Brakhage, and now after spending so much more time with him, well...we definitely still love his work, but here's hoping it's another few years before Criterion puts out Volume Three.

This week we cover films from the last years of Brakhage's life, including what he was working on when he passed away. And we finally get a behind-the-scenes look at Brakhage filming in "For Stan", a bonus feature short film from Brakhage's wife (and editor of this anthology) Marilyn Brakhage.

This week's selection of Stan Brakhage films has works from 1982, 1992, and 1994, all multi-media, mixing many of the Brakhage "genres": painted frames, manipulated photographic images, layering. We also get another with a soundtrack from Rick Corrigan, and one with probably the most on-screen (and almost legible!) text of any Brakhage film at all.

By Brakhage Volume Two Program 4 is totally dedicated to Stan Brakhage's 1989-90 four film cycle Visions in Meditation. Inspired by Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, the films take us on a journey into a meditative state, working better as a complete work than as four individual pieces. This is the only complete cycle of Brakhage's work in the Criterion sets, despite other films drawn from cycles being included in Volume Two.

We continue our journey through By Brakhage, An Anthology Volume Two with a collection of works from 1972-1982 including the remix-y mashup of violence that is Murder Psalm and a few others that are less intense than that.

For By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One many years ago we tried to do the whole set in a single episode like we were trying to get the new world record for getting through the Louvre the fastest. These are art films, so for Volume Two we're taking our time to appreciate them and dedicating an individual episode to each of the six "Programs" that Criterion breaks the set down into. This is episode two, covering Program 2 including Stan Brakhage's Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One (1967), Machine of Eden (1970), Star Garden (1974), and Desert (1976).

Many years ago Criterion served us up By Brakhage: An Anthology collecting a nice cross section, or so we thought, of the works of experimental American filmmaker Stan Brakhage. We're back with Volume Two and a much wider cross section of the man's work, including styles of piece completely missing from Volume One.

Back then we tried to talk about 26 Brakhage films in a single episode. It was a foolish thing to attempt. This time we're swinging the pendulum the other way and taking the set week by week with Criterion's "Program" subdivisions of the 30 total films. It means only covering about 4 films and about 1 hour of material each week for six weeks, but it also means maybe actually intelligently talking about any individual Brakhage work.

This week we're joined by Adam Spieckermann to talk the stunt work, beautiful setting, and class politics of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), the star-making role for John Wayne.

Somehow The Fugitive Kind (1960) is our first Sidney Lumet film for the proper podcast despite having done three Sidney Lumet films for our Patreon bonus episodes. Based on a Tennessee Williams play (in turn based on the Orpheus myth), we spend most of this episode trying to put our fingers on what doesn't quite work about it.

I don't know if we ultimately got what Ang Lee wanted us to get out of Ride with the Devil (1999) but we still got something. An interesting, though perhaps too neo-liberal, look at how young men turn to (and from) extremism in extreme times. Still, it's a pretty movie with Jeffrey Wright and Jewel turning in phenomenal performances.

Olivier Assayas' look at what we inherit from our parents was sponsored by the Paris Musee D'orsay for their 20th anniversary and from that partnership came a movie with a satisfyingly over-ambitious art direction in any modern film we've seen.

Like much of the early work of Jean-Luc Godard (and the rest of the young directors of the French New Wave), Vivre sa Vie (1962) wears its American influences on its sleeves. Perhaps better than our experiences with other pre-1968 Godard work, we can see the seeds of the more explicitly Marxist ideology that will bubble up in his work later in the decade. And that's probably not the only way this is prototypical Godard.

This week we finish up the Pedro Costa boxset Letters from Fontainhas with Colossal Youth which is a beautiful and affecting piece of art, despite the fact that we are still left a bit suspicious of Costa's politics.

We continue through the Letters from Fontainhas boxset this week. The story goes that one of the co-stars of Pedro Costa's Ossos, Vanda Duarte, invited Costa to see what her life was really like, and Costa decided to strip the artifice of film down to its essentials or something and make a "docufiction" film about Vanda and Fontainhas with just his subjects, himself, and a handheld DV camera.

We start a box set from director Pedro Costa this week. "Letters from Fontainhas" contains three of Costa's films set in the impoverished Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas. Ossos (1997) is our first, and the closest to a traditional film. While "closest" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, the others move from outright narrative fiction to something more accurately labeled "docufiction" or even "ethnofiction", a fictionalized ethnography. We'll talk more about that aspect in the rest of the series, but for now we have Ossos which is a beautiful film.

Last week we had a long conversation about the nature of ennui today and this week Nicholas Ray swings in with a movie from 1956 reminding us that middle class ideals lead to fascism. I love it when the Criterion Collection gives us unmarked ideological sets.

Marco Ferreri's 1969 film Dillinger is Dead takes a look out how being a victim of alienation under capitalism makes committing oppressive violence feel like liberation. Or at least I hope so, because otherwise it's a bad movie.

Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the most subtly political films we've seen, particularly from America. Leo McCarey's masterpiece tells the story of an older couple forced apart by economic forces, having lost their income and their home in a world were their children cannot financially or emotionally care for them. It stands as a beautifully made depressing drama, but it shines as an example of the state of things and the need for change as the New Deal and, particularly, Social Security were bringing a much needed safety net to Americans in similar situations.

Long time supporter of the show Jason Westhaver joins us to talk about this wonderful film.

Director Steve McQueen's feature debut, Hunger is a historical drama about the mistreatment of IRA political prisoners by the British government, particularly centered on Bobby Sands' part in the 1981 hunger strike that led to his death. McQueen and his cast all insist this movie is meant to be apolitical and show that wrong was done on both sides. If that is true, this brilliant film failed its makers' intentions.

Our fourth and currently final Max Ophuls movie in the Collection is his final film, a historic romance that takes a lot of liberties and is maybe kinda about taking liberties? Capitalist patriarchy is a circus in Lola Montes.

Götz Spielmann's 2008 film Revanche feints at being a crime drama, and has a title suggesting it's a revenge thriller, but settles into being a study on loss and grief.

After we watched Wings of Desire a few months ago we were greatly anticipating another Wim Wenders film and Paris, Texas (1984) does not disappoint. The term "modern western" is usually applied to cowboyish action films, but I think it's fitting here for a story of the southwest US that doubles as a parable on the lack of community and connection when living in places built for cars not people.

We finish up the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy boxset with our least favorite of the bunch. Germany Year Zero (1948) is a deeply impactful film, but it also gets us thinking about the nature of Rossellini's commitment to "realism".

We continue through the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy boxset with 1946's episodic Paisan. This week we get six separate stories with various amounts of tragic endings and the lasting reminder that Italy would like America to be its friend now.

This week we kick off Robert Rossellini's War Trilogy, a boxset of the Italian director's films from the end of World War 2 and the beginning of the Neo-realist movement. First up is Rome, Open City, a movie that codifies Rossellini's neo-realist style out of necessity instead of ideology.

This episode is a bit late because the laptop I have recorded Lost in Criterion since 2013 on died. RIP the macbook I promised myself I would keep for a full decade in order to justify the cost. You almost made it.

Steven Soderbergh's Che (2008) is surprisingly pro-Che (and unsurprisingly anti-Castro) telling the story of the revolutionary's rise in Cuba and fall in Bolivia. Most of the bonus features on the Criterion dvd though are dedicated to the fact that this epic film is shot on a RED digital camera and isn't that neat?