Lost in Criterion

Here at Lost in Criterion we strive to capture the organic conversation Pat and I have reacting to the films we've watched. Unfortunately, sometimes technical difficulties strike and we have to re-record. While this has only happened three times in 200 episodes -- which is frankly amazing -- the fact remains that you can't really have an organic conversation when you've already had it once. Due to...

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...

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 o...

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...

According to Wikipedia The Honeymoon Killers is Truffaut's "favorite American film." Wikipedia cites a 1992 New York Times piece, which pops off the quote without any solid attribution. Pat digs deeper and discovers the truth for this week's episode, though you probably could have guessed that Wikipedia isn't quite on the level. Anyway, Leonard Kastle's 1970 ultra-low-budget true crime film is one...

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...

A concentration camp is built like a Grand Hotel. You need contractors, estimates, competitive bids And no doubt friends in high places. These were the lines of Night and Fog that may have hit me the hardest. Someone, some company, built the barracks, the guard towers, the ovens. And no doubt that company beat out other companies for the contract. Alain Resnais' 1955 short documentary subtly twist...

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 cas...

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 bee...

Derek Jarman's Jubilee is complicated. It started life as a documentary about Jordan, a movie "about punk rock", and slowly grew into the post-apocalyptic time travel weirdly pro-Monarchy-ish critique of punk rock and British society. As an openly gay man in London in 1978, perhaps Jarman was an outsider outside other outsiders, further anti-establishment than the punk movement he saw around him....

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.

The final film in Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series and our boxset, 1979's Love on the Run is a capstone and a bit of a clip show, editing in flashbacks not just to the previous four films, but recontextualizing other Jean-Pierre Leaud films in order to add more backstory. Pat isn't necessarily impressed, but that doesn't stop us from fantasizing about what this film would have been like i...

We next meet Antoine Doinel in 1970's Bed and Board. This time director Francois Truffaut has his character slightly more married but just as restless as ever before. Unfortunately, this manifests in some pretty demeaning tropes about Asian women in general, and Japanese women in particular. C'est la vie, as the French say, but perhaps more apropos: C'est la vie quand vous comptez sur les stéréoty...

Truffaut (and star Jean-Pierre Leaud) tell the continuing (and more comedic) story of Antoine Doinel, last seen running to the sea in The 400 Blows, now older but not quite wiser.

This week's episode is a long one solely for the plethora and variety of material we're tasked with talking about. Stan Brahkage was an experimental filmmaker and a long-time film professor at the University of Colorado, who principally focused on non-narrative film. By Brakhage covers work from six decades of his career. With over four hours of material in 26 pieces ranging from 9 seconds to 74 m...

Robert Bresson is French, and therefore I apologize for pronouncing the T in Robert throughout this episode. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Though as it turns out Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) may have come before Bresson really became Bresson. His amazing propensity for when and how to use m...

Dustin Hoffman's character in Straw Dogs (1971) is not a pacifist. If director Sam Peckinpah was trying to set up a conflict between David's values and the violent world in which he found himself, he does a terrible job of establishing David's values as any thing more than "conflict-avoidant" which is not the same thing as pacifistic. Since Pat and I really are pacifists, this distinction plays a...

Vilgot Sjöman made one of the most controversial films ever with I am Curious (Yellow) and a not very controversial at all film with I am Curious (Blue). Originally meant to be released as one film in 1967, the two are really companion pieces, telling versions of the same story Rashomon style. Or maybe not? It's all a bit confusing, not helped by the meta-narrative in which the film is being made...

Lasse Hallström had quite a career, getting his start directing a plethora of ABBA music videos and going on to direct The Cider House Rules, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocolat, and a few other awards-season darlings, though Hallström himself has never won an Oscar. Somewhere in there lies My Life as a Dog, his 1985 coming-of-age tale about life in a Swedish small town.

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) is a tale of a woman criminalized for normal behavior to the nth degree. But Blum is more than that, as it also tackles the corrupting relationship between law enforcement and the media, and how both forces spread fear through the masses, decimating civil rights under the guise of "anti-terrorism". It's brillia...