Lost in Criterion

Last week Criterion introduced us to the work of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne with a phenomenal film, but this week they follow it up with something somehow even better. From it's frenetic first few minutes, Rosetta (1999) is the story of a a young woman that believes she can find freedom, or at least dignity, or at least normalcy in work. But she, and we, live in a society that doesn't actually c...

Our introduction to the films of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996) is, like last week's Le Havre, a story of African migrants in Europe. But where Aki Kaurismäki took a more magical approach, the Dardenne's hew much closer to the intense realism of, say, Ken Loach. The brothers' history in documentary perhaps make it even more intense than what Loach we've seen. It'...

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is a hard movie to categorize. It's the dramatic tale of solidarity and sanctuary, of a community setting aside petty differences to protect a vulnerable migrant. But it's not social realism; It's more magical than that. Some critics call it fairy tale-esque, Pat calls it a children's story, none of them to dismiss it. The moral here is one of a kids' book, but it'...

Steven Soderbergh's film adaptation of Spalding Gray's monologue about avoiding an eye surgery, Gray's Anatomy (1996) girds Gray's George Carlin-esque delivery in some dynamic visuals and inter-cuts them with stark black and white testimonials of people recounting there own terrible eye injuries. Perhaps not for the squeamish, but it's still an engaging story. I don't comment on it in the episode,...

Many documentaries are introductions to their topics, assuming the audience has limited or even no knowledge of the subject. Steven Soderbergh's 2010 documentary about his late friend monologuist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, is not. Soderbergh himself says it's for people who are already familiar with Gray. Since this is our introduction to him, it's a bit of a rocky start. Next we...

Add Danny Boyle to the long list of British directors who claim their work is apolitical, seemingly only to distance themselves from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But it doesn't take the death of the author to find a political read of his brutal debut feature Shallow Grave (1994), a film about the corrupting influence of money on relationships, about how greed inherently leads to violence and even if...

In 1925 Charlie Chaplin released the highest grossing silent film of all time, The Gold Rush, a tale of desperate men fighting the harsh elements to chase the American Dream: getting rich through extractive capitalism. Chaplin is certainly capable of political film (see The Great Dictator or Modern Times) but also the Tramp is a political character, an impoverished victim of capitalism who survive...

Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) was very popular in the US, due in large part to distributor Kroger Babb's cutting over half an hour and adding a lot of nudity to it. Criterion doesn't give us Babb's cut, but I guess they gotta save something for the bluray upgrade. It's an interesting enough early Bergman, with the director moving through his 30s and seemingly finally figuring out what...

Our earliest Ingmar Bergman film yet, Summer Interlude (1951) is a story of young love and internalized trauma. It also may be one of the earliest films we've seen where a manipulative groomer's actions are actually shown to be bad? In any case, it's Bergman before he's really BERGMAN, but well on his way to it; taking steps to assemble the troupe on both sides of the camera that will become the r...

Abbas Kiarostami is a man who understands the intimacy of a conversation in the front seat of a car. While Taste of Cherry (1997), which we watch way back at Spine 45 is the pinnacle of that truth, Certified Copy (2010) has plenty of driving and talking before it settles into sight seeing and talking. To keep things interesting, Certified Copy is a sort of surrealist drama, with the relationship b...

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 slathe...

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 thei...

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 translat...

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 wa...

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...

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 so...

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...

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 wor...

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...

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 c...

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 tha...

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 v...