Lost in Criterion

Spine 623: Lonesome

We get three early films from Paul Fejos all under the banner of his 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. Also on the Criterion release is the much more interesting to us Broadway (1929) and the much less interesting to us The Last Performance (1929). Each film is inventive and interesting in its own right, but Broadway just kept getting bigger, facilitated by Fejos and his team inventing a camera crane, and then needing to build a sound stage that could accommodate their camera crane, and then needing to make a movie to justify it all.

The additional features on the Criterion release also give us plenty to talk about with biographical information on Fejos' later-career shift to anthropology and ethnography, a topic we are always willing to jump in on, though Criterion doesn't provide any examples of this aspect of his work.

Spine 622: Weekend (2011)

Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) is an exquisite character study of a Friday-Sunday fling between two pretty opposite young men, in a precarious time where homophobia is constantly bubbling in the background. It's also just one of the cutest love stories we've experienced in the Criterion Collection. Just an absolute delight of a movie.

Spine 621: Rosetta

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 care about freedom or dignity or even, really, normalcy, at least not for the lower rungs of the economic ladder Rosetta lives in. It's sort of an answer to and modernization of Bresson's Mouchette (1967), but the Dardenne are much more interested in social realism than Bresson ever was.

Like last week's film, and many social realist films we've seen, Rosetta doesn't end on a hopeful not, but perhaps on the hope for hope and the promise of freedom and dignity that comes from community and care. We need that now.

Spine 620: La promesse

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's a story of rejecting what you've been told is the order the world must work in, and finding the community and care that your heart cries out for. A better world may be illegal, but it remains possible.

Spine 619: Le Havre

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's a child's morality that needs to lead us: Community brings life.

And that's not a miracle; it's a fact.

Spine 618: Gray's Anatomy

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, but Gray gives a shout out to Columbus, Ohio, hotdog institution Phillips Coney Island, which closed in 2022 after 110 year of slinging wieners and probably causing some eye injuries of their own doing that.

Spine 617: And Everything is Going Fine

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 week we'll talk about Gray's Anatomy (1996), Soderbergh's film of one of Gray's monologues, but this week it's all context for a body of work we know nothing about. That doesn't mean we aren't engrossed in it though. Well, at least one of us.

Spine 616: Shallow Grave

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 you can convince yourself that your extractive profits have no victims, well, they soon will. Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, and Ewan McGregor star as the victims of their own avarice in this fantastic film.

Spine 615: The Gold Rush

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 survives by getting one over on authorities every so often. So is this a celebration of the American spirit? Or a condemnation of the system of social murder that cannibalizes it's most desperate citizens like so many Donner parties, promising riches while sending them into a frozen hell? I don't know, it's just a funny movie.

The Criterion release contains a composite of the 1925 version, reconstructed and rescored, and also Chaplin's own 1942 recut, where he added narration and trimmed what he considered excessive bits: primarily as much of the romance plot as possible since 17 years later he was no longer having an affair with the female lead, Georgia Hale.

Spine 614: Summer with Monika

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 he wants his art to be. Wonder what that's like.

Spine 613: Summer Interlude

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 reason we know him as an auteur.

Spine 612: Certified Copy

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 between the two parties in this extended conversation in a slow flux, from strangers to estranged spouses in the course of an afternoon.

Also on the Criterion disc is an early Kiarostami work, The Report (1977), also dealing with a couple becoming estranged, but this time against the backdrop of bureaucratic corruption in pre-revolution Iran.

We talk about both films this week, as well as the nature of communication both within the films and to us as viewers when we're dealing with subtitle tracks that aren't great.

Spine 611: Being John Malkovich

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 slathering of artifice on the disc's additional features including an essay/interview by what appears to be a character from a Jonathan Lethem novel, a retrospective for a future neural implant release of the film, and scene commentary from someone completely uninvolved with the production.

Spine 610: The Organizer

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 their power and capital bringing everything it has to crush them, from "haven't I always been good to you" manipulation to bullets.

The Organizer is the final film released by the Criterion Collection before we first started recording Lost in Criterion in April 2012, and with that milestone I wrote a short reflection on what the podcast has become, available free at our patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/milestone-and-110655785

Spine 609: ¡Alambrista!

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 translator, Young turned his documentarian eye to a narrative film, ¡Alambrista! (1977), showing us the life of a subsistence farmer who leaves Mexico to head north, desperate to make a living to care for his newborn baby as an undocumented migrant farm worker, taking a human look at the instability and exploitation faced in such a precarious life.

Spine 608: Harold and Maude

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.

Spine 607: A Hollis Frampton Odyssey Part 3

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 way we haven't seen from Frampton before (but then that might just be "Guys who have only ever seen Stan Brakhage watch another avant-garde film").

Spine 607: A Hollis Frampton Odyssey Part 2

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 interesting way.

Spine 607: A Hollis Frampton Odyssey Part 1

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 some early musings with light and color, some interesting installation pieces, and one epic alphabet. It's a lot to cover, but we try to keep an open mind, even as Frampton's manner of speaking gives us both a visceral reaction to the man, if not his work.

Films covered:
Manual of Arms (1966 • 17 minutes, 10 seconds • Black & White • Silent)
Process Red (1966 • 3 minutes, 37 seconds • Color • Silent)
Maxwell’s Demon (1968 • 3 minutes, 44 seconds • Color • Mono)
Surface Tension (1968 • 9 minutes, 30 seconds • Color • Mono)
Carrots & Peas (1969 • 5 minutes, 21 seconds • Color • Mono)
Lemon (1969 • 7 minutes, 17 seconds • Color • Silent)
Zorns Lemma (1970 • 59 minutes, 51 seconds • Color • Mono)

Spine 606: Blithe Spirit

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 Spirit is the final film we'll be covering in the boxset - Brief Encounter, the Lean and Coward masterpiece, is in here too, but we talked about it 11 years ago. A delightful romp about murdering your loved ones, accidentally murdering your loved ones' loved ones, hating your dead wives, and not being too fond of your living wives, Coward told Lean to "just shoot the play" and thankfully Lean didn't totally listen. The film gets worse the more faithful it is to the original, but thankfully Lean and company still have some flourishes to add (that Coward reportedly hated). The most bewildering part of Blithe Spirit is that they still came back together to make another movie afterward.

Spine 605: This Happy Breed

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 working people.

Spine 604: In Which We Serve

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 the Battle of Crete. Ronald Neame acts as cinematographer and the film is produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan, who would stick with Lean to form the powerhouse Cineguild Productions by the time they made next week's film This Happy Breed.

 

Spine 602: The War Room

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 collection of some of the worst people in US politics for the last 30 years given free reign to lie to the camera. America: it may not be a perfect system, but it sure is bad.

Spine 601: Letter Never Sent

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 thankfully between these two masterpieces we get Letter Never Sent (1960), a tale of Soviet vs Nature, a story of love, lust, science, sacrifice, and lots of fire. Raising not only the normal "how did they shoot this?!" questions associated with Urusevsky's work, but new and adjacent "how did they shoot this?!" questions about the special effects.

Spine 600: Anatomy of a Murder

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.