Some Like It Unauthorized

We interrupt your regularly scheduled podcast to hash out our Bugonia feelings - does Yorgos Lanthimos strike a chord with his sci-fi class war extremity, or do these provocations ring hollow? Topics include: Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, Stanley Kubrick and Rian Johnson, and the nature of meaning in the universe. Next week: The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci UnauthorizedPod.com for more...

This week we tackle another “reclaimed” classic, actress Barbara Loden’s sole feature-length directing effort, the spare character study Wanda. Should we be wary, like Paul Schrader suggested after the 2022 BFI Sight and Sound List was published, of the new canonizing of just this sort of previously unsung film? To find the answer, we go deep on Loden’s aesthetic choices, and the themes to be teas...

King Hu stood at a crossroads early in his career, just before the release of 1967’s Dragon Inn. He had left Hong Kong and the film industry he had just begun to break into, following his mentor Li Han-Hsiang to Taiwan at a time when there was no taiwanese film industry. To make matters worse, Li’s epic gamble Beauty of Beauties had just flopped, casting the entire future of their independent ente...

What does it mean to be an artist in a fascist country? Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film starring Leonardo DiCaprio appears to be less about revolutionary politics and more about the universal experience of two generations of a family struggling to relate. The politics are timely, but is there something untoward about an overtly political film, especially in the Trump era, that wants to frontline i...

Do yourself a favor, and watch this Toshio Matsumoto film. It’s made by a playful and original filmmaker, whom was almost certainly versed in the work of Godard, Resnais, and every other new wave voice in that moment, but whom brought his own eye and his own inventions to film and made something totally new. It stars strikingly beautiful trans and queer actors that you’d otherwise never see on fil...

A new generation of cinephilic filmmakers have arrived on the scene in the US; raised on Hitchcock and Godard, these youngsters know what makes a film feel exciting, and they know how to get their kicks in real life too: with drugs and women. But, as we examine on this episode, Easy Rider is not just a hangout film. Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson are out to explore why they’ve hit...

Jean-Pierre Melville’s look back at the perilous times of France’s occupation during WWII arrived while the French were trying to look forward; protests and workers’ strikes throughout ‘68 had attempted to spur change in de Gaulle’s government, and that man, who had made a political career of his role in the campaign to free France from nazi occupation, was the last person that young audiences wan...

Pier Paolo Pasolini described his 1968 film with young star Terence Stamp as the story of when “a young man, maybe god, maybe the devil, that is to say, authenticity, visits this bourgeois family,” and the aftermath that follows. It’s a boldly provocative work from a gay catholic marxist that never failed to speak his mind, even when it meant defying those whom might otherwise identify with him. I...

What do you know about Free Cinema? Not much, Lindsay Anderson would presume, as he and his group of british outsider filmmakers put on screenings of their films in the 50’s and did not set the world on fire like they hoped. Some of his cohorts would make the biggest films of the kitchen-sink genre that followed in the 60’s: gritty, working-class portraits of modern discontentment in Britain. But...

Jacques Tati enjoyed great critical and commercial success as the director and star of comedies in the 50’s, but like Chaplin or even Fellini, he wouldn’t dare repeat himself twice. He dreamt of going above and beyond, and it would take a decade to finally realize the giant, genre-bending Playtime. The gentle, conservative satire did not capture the attention of the young radicalized french audien...

Like in hollywood with the bloated roadshow musical, the italian film industry faced a crisis of identity in the 60’s as their investment in huge historical epics drew in smaller and smaller crowds. Sergio Leone had the antidote. The son of a director, Leone worked his way up to that vaunted role and started making westerns that borrowed liberally not just from his favorite Ford or Hawks films, bu...

They don’t make ‘em like Luis Buñuel anymore, a true blue iconoclast whose career charted across continents and spanned the last days of silent film up to cinema’s heyday in the 70’s. We catch up with the serial offender of catholic and bourgeois sensibilities in his late career team-up with an adventurous movie star, Catherine Deneuve, in this fantastical exploration of taboo sexuality among the...

The only artists Michael Snow wanted to model his career after defied categorization, mixing mediums and blowing out boundaries of what was or wasn’t fine art. Artists like Dalí and Warhol loomed large, and each had also deigned to touch the lowly cinema when it was still thought to be below painting or sculpture. Snow saw the camera as a tool that had not yet been utilized to its full potential,...

Few movie stars enjoyed the laurels or faced the criticisms that Sidney Poitier did, a historic Best Actor winner and a man accused of abetting all of hollywood’s fantasies of easy racial reconciliation. He played many a saintly character on screen before playing hollywood’s first black (and decidedly self-assured) detective in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. This novel role would allow...

We expanded the podcast for this episode and brought in some new voices to help us make sense of Ari Aster's new movie Eddington. UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by  Zachary Domes  and  J Brooks Young . Music by  hetchy

From our vantage in the US today, we’re not just unaware of the history of african film, we’re unequipped — it’s hard to find documents that go beyond the surface level facts, and in many cases, even the films themselves have only recently been restored and widely released. Ousmane Sembène later in life said that even he did not know where many of his film’s original prints or negatives were. Woul...

Mike Nichols. Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Burton. An expletive-filled broadway play. A draconian Hays Code on its last legs. These were the ingredients for a film that would shake hollywood to its core in the mid 60’s. We talk about a notorious production, the scenes that astounded us, and how the film feels like an inspiration for filmmakers like Cassavetes, Aster, and the Safdies. UnauthorizedPod....

French New Wave gets all the publicity, but the Soviet New Wave might be the most astounding development that cinema had seen to date. In this episode, we talk about the precursors to Sergei Parajanov’s career-changing, and medium-changing, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, from Dovzhenko to Tarkovsky, and the films this Ukrainian folk art epic inspired, like Children of Men. We also discuss how fol...

We take a break from the 60’s to discuss the new film from director Celine Song, Materialists, a contemporary romantic drama that has divided audiences. After that, we talk about our trip to the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and some of the standout films shown there from directors like Radu Jude and Hong Sang-soo. 2:09 - Materialists 21:58 - Materialists w/ spoilers 41:59 - Berlinale int...

Agnès Varda arrived as a filmmaker before the french new wave became a known trend (La Pointe Courte, 1955), and endured in the culture decades after it faded from public consciousness. Overlooked doesn’t begin to describe the biases she faced as a young female director; at least one american critic labeled Cléo From 5 to 7 as a derivative clone of earlier new wave films, not aware that Varda had...

Jean-Luc Godard’s feature film-shaped provocations have incited eye rolls and ire since the start: in the leftist literary mag Les Lettres Françaises, Louis Marcorelles read Pierrot Le Fou for filth, likening it to “the refusal to construct a film, to tell a story.” But in a later issue of that same publication, poet Louis Aragon settled the score, declaring Godard himself to be “art today.” Godar...

We talk a lot on this show about film festivals, and film itself as a mass-produced art form, redefining the vertices of contact between cultures post-WWII, and Satyajit Ray is one filmmaker that changed countless people’s perceptions of India in the 50’s. We chart his history at the euro festivals as a way of understanding his stature in the wider film world, and we talk about this virtuoso film,...

Bicycle Thieves topped the first BFI Sight and Sound List of the Greatest Films of All Time, published in 1952. Vittorio De Sica’s portrait of an impoverished family, shot all across the real streets of Rome, was the perfect avatar for postwar italian cinema, which astonished audiences and made the cinema of carefully designed sets feel dated and fake in comparison. So when the new Sight and Sound...

How does a silly goofy comedy take a young director of minor note and launch him into the upper echelon of auteurs to pay attention to in the 60’s? Before he was the patron saint of film bros, Stanley Kubrick was a low budget film stylist, a hired hand for Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, and a provocateur still in search of the right buttons to push. We talk about how Lolita and Dr. Strangelove attempt...

Cannes Film Festival 1960 was the best time and the worst time for Fellini. He won the Palme d’Or for La Dolce Vita, but by beating out Antonioni’s L’Avventura, he was made a bit of a target by the festival jury, as critics and filmmakers rallied into a frenzied support of his fellow countryman’s film. It was not the first time one of Fellini’s against-the-grain films had caught ire, contributing...