Lost in Criterion

Spine 407: Mala Noche

Gus van Zant adapts an “autobiographical work” by Portland poet Walt Curtis, though also on the DVD is a documentary on Curtis by Bill Plympton which, to be honest, we’d probably rather talk about.

Spine 406: Martha Graham: Dance on Film

It’s another Criterion curveball as we get a short inside-the-studio documentary on pioneering dancer Martha Graham and then two recordings of her pieces, all produced for PBS by Nathan Kroll.

Spine 405: The Threepenny Opera

The argument of The Threepenny Opera is that under capitalism crime and legitimate business are indistinguishable in their exploitation.
As time marches on we can see that this is wrong. The system of exploitation perpetrated by “legitimate business”, protected by the police, and whose transactionary nature is thrust upon every aspect of society is the much worse crime.

Spine 404: Robinson Crusoe on Mars

I think probably the most important thing I can share with you before going into this episode is that on the Criterion dvd is a Criterion-produced music video in which one of the films co-stars sings the plot synopsis.

Spine 403: Cría Cuervos

Ana Torrent is back playing a weird little girl named Ana whose family is dealing with Francoist Spain in Carlos Saura's Cría Cuervos, a film that maybe pales in comparison to Spirit of the Beehive but also maybe stands on its own.

Spine 402: The Milky Way

This week Pat and Adam get very lost in Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way (1969), wondering mostly who Buñuel was making the film for, as its philosophical elements are so esoteric as to be off-putting. The sword fight is pretty neat, though.

Spine 401: Night on Earth

Jim Jarmusch explores humanity through the connections of taxi drivers and riders and emulating the film history of various places on "earth", which is to say New York, LA, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.

Spine 400: Stranger than Paradise

Friend of the show and theme song composer Jonathan Hape joins us to celebrate Spine 400! Someday we may finish this!

Spine 399: House of Games

The plot of David Mamet's House of Games is right up our alleys, even if Pat thinks it would be more appropriate to a USA channel original program. But there are certainly problems here.

Spine 398: Les enfants terribles

Jean-Pierre Melville adapts a novel written by fellow French director Jean Cocteau, and Melville believes Cocteau, who was on set everyday, was trying to undermine him at every turn. Melville's all but disowned the film, which makes this possibly the first time our opinion on a Melville film matches the director's.

Spine 397: Ivan's Childhood

We've talked before about how it may be impossible to truly make an anti-war war film, but in showing the human toll on both sides of the fight Andrei Tarkovsky's entry into the seminal Soviet genre of post-WWII war films may come pretty close. 

Spine 396: Ace in the Hole

This week I feel like Pat does his best to keep me from being blackpilled about journalism and I do my best to remind Pat that everything is stupid. Let’s strike the delicate balance between trusting experts and recognizing that manufactured consent, racist underpinnings in news spin, and yellow journalism are alive and well, and even plutacratized, as anyone with enough financial backing can create the right bias-confirmed headline and get a million shares.

Unspined: 4 Short Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

We finish up the 3 Films by Teshigahara boxset with four more films. Aside from the three collaborations with surrealist novelist Kobo Abe on the Criterion release are four shorts, three documentaries on a variety of subjects, and Teshigahara’s portion of an international anthology on the lives of teenage girls:
Hokusai (1953)
Ikebana (1956)
Tokyo 1958 (1958)
Ako (1965)

Spine 395: The Face of Another

The Face of Another seems to distill the political identity aspects we loved in the previous two films into a discussion on personal identity, and that’s disappointing. We really liked the political identity stuff, so we spend this week trying to come to a more political understanding of this film. This is one of those films where its hard to say what we think of it, as aside from the confused messaging in the context of the other films, it’s a beautiful and inventive movie, incredibly stylistically interesting.

This is the final film in the 3 Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara boxset, though we will spend one more week with the set as next week we discuss the four short films also included.

Spine 394: The Woman in the Dunes

The second of our Hiroshi Teshigahara films, his 1964 masterpiece The Woman in the Dunes gets even more into our wheelhouse than Pitfall did. This week we talk Japanese society and “friendly authoritarianism”, societal structure in general, the plight of lower classes, an anthropological study of friendship, and a movie that makes Adam a bit nervous about his planned trip to visit Japan and what might happen if he visits the wrong small town.

Spine 393: PItfall

We kick off a month-worth of films from filmmaker and flower artist Hiroshi Teshigahara this week with Pitfall. The boxset Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara doesn’t just contain three films, but also four shorts which we’ll cover in their own episode at the end, but this week we get started with Pitfall (1962) a movie that seems made for us? Surrealist drama about labor politics in a Japan with an absurd eschatology? Yeah, it checks a lot of our boxes.

Spine 391: If....

I’m sure that Lindsay Anderson’s if…. was a completely different film in a pre-Columbine world. Obviously there were other school shootings before Columbine, but Pat and I came of age in a time where school shootings are a norm, at least in the US, and the psychology (and pseudo-psychology) that’s popped up to explain them has bombarded us for over half our lives. We generally reject the view that a film needs to be judged in it’s own time, but this time around it’s clear that our times are the more broken ones, much more in this case than Anderson’s, and we hope to make an attempt to read if…. outside of our own issues.

That is not true of our response to Anderson’s short Thursday’s Children that is also included in the Criterion release. An Oscar-winning documentary short on a School for the Death, Thursday’s Children shows us a world that Pat and I, both trained in how to teach, react incredibly negatively to.

Spine 390: Sweet Movie

Who could have guessed the WR: Mysteries of the Organism was the saner of the two Dušan Makavejev films we’d watch? It did give us a better base by which to discuss Sweet Movie, and I think we come to a better understanding of Makavejev as a person. Not a more respecting position, but a more informed one.

Spine 389: W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism

We get a pair of films from Serbian director Dušan Makavejev this and next week and they are nearly impossible to describe. This week we have a combination documentary on pseudo-scientific research of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. shorts documentaries on artists who use sexuality in their work, and a narrative portion about the struggles between Sovietism and a more libertine version of communism.

Spine 388: The Two of Us

Claude Berri’s The Two of Us is steeped in Berri’s own experience during the occupation of France during World War 2. It’s a story that reminds us that someone can have deeply held racist beliefs and still seem nice, especially if they don’t realize their new friend belongs to the group they hate, it’s a jokey inter-generational buddy film about the banal absurdity of prejudice with the looming threat of the Holocaust in the background. It’s among the clear inspirations for Jojo Rabbit, so feel free to imagine the backlash if it came out today.

Spine 387: La Jetée and Sans Soleil

We get a series of films from French multimedia artist Chris Marker this week of varying genius. First up is the absolutely brilliant and clearly influential sci-fi short La Jetée from 1962. Our other major conversation is on the significantly more controversial to Pat and me Sans Soleil, a sort of travelogue essay from 1983. We also briefly discuss his 1981 short documentary on found sculpture in the California mudflats with 1981’s Junkopia and (much more briefly) his venture into cd-rom interactive gaming with Immemory (1998). It’s also a weird one when Criterion decides that the one release they’re putting out from a director will contain a survey of his entire decades-long career.

Spine 386: Sansho the Bailiff

This week Donovan Hill joins us once more, discussing boat law, America’s indifference to international law, the hilarious/frightening nostalgia within the book Hagekure (and WW2 era views of same), pretty much every adaptation of the 47 Ronin we can think of, and, oh yeah, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff. It’s a jam-packed episode (read: long), as episodes with Donovan tend to be.

Spine 385: Army of Shadows

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.

Spine 384: Vengeance is Mine

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.

Spine 383: Brute Force

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 that prison needs massive reform at the very least. I’ll say I’m more extreme than Dassin’s imagination could take him. For more information on what I mean there, check out Angela Davis talking to Democracy Now about Prison Abolition.