Lost in Criterion

Jean-Pierre Melville draws on his personal experience as a member of the French Resistance to tell the heroic story of a bunch of ineffectual French Resistance fighters, whose only prize for avoiding death is the chance to avoid death once again.

In October 2016 we were unimpressed with Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers, but the Collection has finally brought us another of his and this time we don’t hate it. Not to say either Pat or I will be watching it again anytime soon, but Vengeance is Mine is at least more interesting to us than The Pornographers was and makes us actually look forward to seeing more of Imamura’s work in the future.

We return to the films of Jules Dassin (and to the starring roles of Burt Lancaster) with a prison drama that’s sort of undermined by Dassin’s later pro-cop movie Naked City which we watched a few weeks ago. In that movie cops are good. In this movie prisons are really quite bad. Pat and I certainly don’t share Dassin’s (or each others’) views on cops, but we are much more on board with the idea t...

We kick off the New Year with arguably the most pro-war film we’ve watched. And argue we do as I keep hoping to come to some anti-war interpretation and Pat shoots me down over and over in this extra-long episode. Truffaut argued that “to show [war] is to ennoble it”, that one cannot make an anti-war film that depicts war. We’ve seen some noble attempts, and I think, in the works of Kon Ichikawa w...

It’s been a long year. Near the end of this year’s holiday special we discuss our favorite movies of the year, Criterion and otherwise, and did you know that March was part of 2019? It seems like a lifetime ago. I mean, I have an excuse. I got hit by a car in May and basically did nothing for 2 months. But still. To look back and celebrate we gather our friends at this end of the year — Stephen Go...

In balance to last week’s police propaganda film, we come this week to the story of minority youth in France dealing with the oppression of society, particularly police violence. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine is based on true events, and could be based on true events that happen regularly before the film and since in France (and elsewhere). It’s a powerful and wonderful film, and a perfect ending t...

This week a bask in Jules Dassin’s visual record of mid-century New York. Of course it has to come in one of his most pro-America, pro-police works. Not to worry, though, as next week we’ll have a very anti-police movie, and in three weeks we’ll have Dassin’s own ideological answer to this one in the anti-prison film Brute Force. But this week’s it’s The Naked City, the story that launched a milli...

After last week’s intensity, we settle into a more sentimental anti-war film from Kon Ichikawa. The Burmese Harp. While both films deal with the loss of humanity that war forces on its victims and perpetrators, Fires on the Plain was more of a gut-punch while Harp plucks at the heart strings. Since The Burmese Harp came out first, we call this a classic Pasolini escalation: the easier to handle fi...

We kick off a duo of Kon Ichikawa anti-war films this week, though the two films could not be more different. We start of with Fires on the Plane, a sort of Heart of Darkness trek through the aftermath of the Americans recapturing the Philippines during World War 2, doing its best to undercut any idea of a nobility of war.

It is with great joy that we get to talk about the first Mikio Naruse film in the Collection this week, and with great sadness that we acknowledge that it is also the last Mikio Naruse film in the Collection at this time. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs from 1960 is one of the best movies we’ve seen, particularly for one trying to deal with the inner lives of women in the mid-20th century. Someday...

Powell and Pressburger decided to make a movie that would convince America to enter WW2. Powell and Pressburger made a movie that feels like the Tourist Board of Canada advertising to Nazis: “Canada is beautiful and you can kill dozens of us for months before you face any consequences.” Of course it is also a movie about the unity of the Commonwealth, not just Canada with the UK, but also the Inui...

Sidney Gilliat’s Green for Danger is a cozy little whodunit where everyone has something to hide and the main victim is a mailman. It also takes place in England against the backdrop of the Germany’s doodlebug bombing campaign and came out barely a year after the setting. It’s lighthearted. It’s dark. It’s delightfully weird. We spend a lot of time discussing why we think Criterion might want us t...

This week we watch one of the classics of world cinema, a tale of desperation in destitution, and continue our streak of not needing to leave the text very much at all in order to show the Marxist reading of a movie. Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves tells the story of a man who just wants to make an honest living in a society that is either indifferent or actively working against him.

We finish out our Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist boxset with Citizen of the World containing two films that began life as hard-hitting pro-labor pieces and were both neutered to varying degrees by the outbreak of World War II. Pen Tennyson’s Proud Valley (1940) takes the heavier hit, with the ending being changed from miners seizing the means of production to “management plays an important...

This week we talk about two British films starring Paul Robeson as we continue the Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist boxset. Zoltan Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935) was a project Robeson was very excited about until he saw the final cut wherein what he’d hoped would be a testament to African culture was gutted into a paean to British colonialism. As such Robeson demanded more creative contr...

We continue the Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist with two silent films: Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925) and Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson, 1925). Micheaux’s work is a “race film” made independently in the US, and is one of only a handful of the director’s works to survive. Likewise, the wildly experimental Borderline is the only surviving work of Macpherson and his Pool Group of British...

We have another boxset for October, but a marked change from our September Monsters and Madmen set. Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist is an exploration of singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson’s career from his start in the 20’s to his essential house arrest in the early 50’s when the US Government revoked his passport and refused to let him leave the country over his politics. Criterion de...

The fact that Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee are in Corridors for Blood may be the best thing about it, but also while Corridors of Blood fails at almost everything it thinks its doing as a horror movie or documentary about the creation of anesthesia — both of which are what the creators were trying to do —. it still succeeds in being the most ridiculous movie we’ve watched on the main podcast...

Robert Day’s The Haunted Strangler kicks off a pair of British period horror films starring Boris Karloff. Neither are all that great, but this one particularly so after some executive meddling that replaced a supernatural horror plot point with improbable amnesia. Great.

The only entry into the Monsters and Madmen boxset that isn’t directed by Robert Day, Spencer Gordon Bennet’s The Atomic Sub imagines a world where submarines provide intercontinental shipping and passenger service under the arctic, at least until those subs start mysteriously disappearing. Come for the alternative future! Stay for the special effects! Leave before the sworn pacifist realizes war...

We kick off a boxset of late 50’s scifi/horror this week with The First Man into Space. Monsters and Madmen is dedicated to films produced by Richard and Alex Gordon, who also produced Fiend Without a Face which we watched five years ago. Things kick off here with Robert Day’s First Man into Space, the tale of an American test pilot who decides to jet into outer space and things do not go well on...

Robert Bresson followed up au hasard Balthazar with an similar film, but this time focusing on a young woman instead of a donkey. Bresson calls the tale (and the writer’s other work — Diary of a Country Priest) “Catholic realism”, and like many applications of the terms Catholic and realism it is super depressing.

Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss spent years making Border Radio and it shows, though often in weaknesses and incoherencies. But perhaps it is less interesting for its plot and more so for its snapshot of life adjacent to the LA punk scene of the era.

After pretty much everyone involved with the first project was dead except Jerry and during a weird renaissance of attention to the Beales and Grey Gardens, Albert Maysles recut unused footage from the 1975 original Grey Gardens into a new film that feels even more explicitly exploitative. Great job.

William Greaves’ 1968 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm puts the experiment in experimental film. The documentary inside a documentary inside a third documentary, shot in public, essentially boils down to the director seeing how far he can push his cast and crew before they revolt — not violent push, but still an antagonistic one. It’s fascinating and absurd and wonderful. And I suppose it could be all fake.