Lost in Criterion

Spine 592: Design for Living

Noel Coward's Design for Living premiered in Cleveland, Ohio -- apparently the world's bastion of progressive and transgressive theater at the time -- on January 2, 1933. By the end of the month it would be on Broadway, by the end of the year Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht would adapt it into the sexiest film of 1933. Meanwhile, Coward wouldn't stage the play in his native England for nearly another decade. Why? Well, one there's the scandal of even portraying a polyamorous relationship, but then Coward's play, like Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), portrays polyamory only to show it not working. That's one of the major changes in Lubitsch's version, and the film is all the more scandalous for it: here the relationship is rocky but in the end works out, maybe. No wonder the Production Code Administration hated it.

Spine 591: 12 Angry Men

Somehow Sidney Lumet is our most watched director on our Patreon bonus episodes, but the actual Criterion Collection has a distinct lack. We get one of his best this week with 12 Angry Men (1957), a film adaptation of a teleplay from the Golden Age of Television (though not from Spine 495: The Golden Age of Television boxset). Our friend Stephen G. joins us to talk about how this is a great movie whose politics are not as great as we'd like and whose understanding of the legal system is going to lead to a mistrial.

Spine 590:Three Colors - Red

The final film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and the final film of the director's life, is the capstone to the set and, perhaps, a capstone to his entire career. A story of connection, coupled with the others in the trilogy, we're reminded that without Fraternity - the guiding theme of this film - life is hell. You gotta care. You deserve to be cared about.

Spine 589: Three Colors - White

D.H. Lawrence once said "Never trust the teller, trust the tale" and we fully embrace that as we struggle to step around the obvious political metaphor of a rocky relationship between a French woman and a Polish man in Krzysztof Kieślowski's anti-romantic comedy "Equality" movie Three Colors: White. Kieślowski is rather insistent that these are not political movies, though his collaborator and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz is perhaps less insistent. In either case though, the tale does the talking.

Spine 588: Three Colors - Blue

This week we kick off Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy with Blue. Each of the three colors, drawn from the colors of the French flag, are also used in the films to represent one of the ideals of the French Revolution: Blue is associated with Liberty, White with Equality, and Red with Fraternity. Ultimately, as we'll discuss in the coming weeks, the films make an argument that without Fraternity, Liberty and Equality are meaningless and even hellish. In Blue we see a woman who has embraced solitude in response to grief.  She believes solitude is liberation from pain, but the film shows that to heal she needs human connection. It's a beautiful and brilliant film, and a masterpiece of synthesizing message and form.

Spine 586: The Island of Lost Souls

Erle C. Kenton's The Island of Lost Souls is a pre-code adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the Criterion release contains quite possibly the most seemingly erratic and certainly esoteric collection of bonus features to ever be put on one of their discs. The movie itself is a wonder of early make-up effects, but among other things the additional materials bring us commentary from someone involved with a famously bad different adaptation of the work, a band loosely inspired by the film (but not the other band), and a two minute clip of a certain Northern Ohio television goofball interviewing himself.

Spine 585: Identification of a Woman

Listen, we don't get Michelangelo Antonioni. We admit it. Maybe someday we'll watch Blow-Up and kinda like it, but for now we're not there yet. This week we get Identification of a Woman (1982), Antonioni's entry into one of our most hated genres: male film director directs a movie about a male film director's search for a new lover/star/muse. This one is even arguably - and we do! - more self-aware and less misogynistic than others in that genre. It's certainly no less elliptical and enigmatic than previous films of Antonioni we've seen.

Spine 584: Kuroneko

Years after watching the fantastic Onibaba, we once again get an atmospheric horror film from Kaneto Shindo with Kuroneko (1968). Shindo continues to impress with this tale of feline and feminine justice. I just wish we didn't have to wait so long for his next film in the collection.

Spine 583: The Four Feathers

With their 1939 adaptation of The Four Feathers Zoltan Korda seems to have wanted to make a movie critical of British imperialism, while his brother, the film's producer Alexander Korda, seems to have wanted to make a movie in praise of their adopted British homeland. What we end up with is a beautifully shot film that is sometimes biting satire and sometimes unironic Islamophobic white saviorism.

Spine 582: Carlos Part 3

We finish up Olivier Assayas' Carlos with the final episode of the 3-part miniseries. While the original idea for a film about Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was to focus on his ultimate arrest and life just before that, Carlos Part 3 covers that time period with what amounts to a montage of scenes that end in ellipses. Our bonus features this week also reveal some surprises about Assayas' sources, and show that at least Edgar Ramírez understands he's playing a character even as Assayas continues to equivocate whether or not this work is historically accurate.

Spine 582: Carlos Part 2

Our second episode on Olivier Assayas' Carlos (2010) finds the film in overdrive trying to strip away any ideological motivation from its main character and paint him as moving toward purely profit-driven, which is probably the worst thing a Marxist could be. While Disc 2's additional features have our first behind the scenes look with Assayas insisting that he is being true to reality as much as possible, there's already been a lot of speculation that seemingly serves to only depoliticize Carlos' actions. But at least the music is very, very good.

Spine 582: Carlos Part 1

The only work we've seen from Olivier Assayas before is Summer Hours, part of the Criterion Collections sub-collection of getting 21st century cinema into their purview by releasing seemingly every non-US family drama produced in the first decade of the new millennium. Like all those films (Yi Yi, Secert Sunshine, etc) we enjoyed Summer Hours.

We return to Assayas in the Collection this week with a very different film, well the first of three, actually. Carlos (2010) is a sort of biopic (though with plenty of editorializing, supposition, and fictionalization) of the life of freedom fighter or terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, popularly known as Carlos the Jackal. The work is a 3-part miniseries of feature length tv films, and we'll be tackling each in its own episode, sprinkling in Criterion's ample supplements, in order to give the total 339 minute runtime of Carlos its proper due.

This week we see Carlos as a fledgling freedom fighter, aligning with the Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation and deciding that means blowing stuff up in France. Episode one (and this week's supplements) lay the foundation for what I hope does not prove to be the main thesis of the film: that Carlos is a hypocritical womanizer ultimately more interested in bourgeois comforts than in Palestinian liberation. We also cover disc 4 of the set, which contains what seems to be a good chunk of Assayas's sources: two tv documentaries on Carlos and an interview with then-on-the-run former Carlos associate Hans-Joachim Klein.

Spine 581: Les Cousins

Our second Claude Chabrol film is his second film, Les Cousins (1959) which came out a month before Truffaut's The 400 Blows and as a piece of "French New Wave" meets almost none of the criteria we've come to associate with the movement. It's visually nice at times, but we just don't care about any of these characters or their conflicts.

Spine 580: Le Beau Serge

Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is, by some definitions, the first film of the French New Wave. I feel like I've said that before. Chabrol clearly has a preternatural eye for the visual language of film. If only he had a similar talent for writing. Le Beau Serge is beautiful, but it's bland.

Spine 579: The Phantom Carriage

We kick off 2024 with a New Year's Eve carol. Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921) exists in the same genre as A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life, but unfortunately its only social message is one of temperance from alcohol. But what The Phantom Carriage lacks in intriguing plot it more than makes up for in innovative special effects, with its ghostly characters fully inhabiting a three dimensional world. With the technical limitations of cameras at the time, this movie is all the more amazing. No wonder Bergman loved it so much.

Spine 578: The Complete Jean Vigo - Part 2

We finish up the Complete Jean Vigo boxset and the year 2023 this week, covering Vigo's final film L'Atalante. Vigo pressed himself for his first feature length, and perhaps too hard, dying of complications of tuberculosis before the premier. The studio took the opportunity of his demise to re-cut the movie, add different music, and try desperately to make it a pop culture smash in an era where France was obsessed with stories of barges. Despite the studio's efforts, a slightly restored L'Atalante and the other works of Vigo went on to be a major influence on the French New Wave, namely Truffaut who speaks with Eric Rohmer about L'Atalante in one of this boxset's special features.

Holiday Special 2023: Blood Beat (1983)

We've all been there, the trepidation of introducing a new partner to your family. And why do we always seem to do it at the holidays? Maybe we're hoping that all the tinsel and the trash will distract the family just enough to make them welcoming. The family in Blood Beat (1983) has your normal family problems when new girlfriend Sarah arrives, and things get worse immediately as mom's psychic abilities put Sarah on edge and celebrations take a backseat to a ghost samurai murdering the neighbors.

This winter we're gathering together on the longest night of the year, well in the northern hemisphere at least, and watching a holiday horror film. Well, holiday enough. Like each of our holiday specials, the end of year holidays are rather incidental to the plot of Blood Beat. Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for a film he was, inexplicably enough, already planning to watch this year for the first time.

As any review of Blood Beat will tell you, it's a deeply weird film, but it's maybe not even the weirdest movie we've seen this year? I mean, we watched House and Head and Crumb this year. Truly, from Antichrist to Zazie dans le Metro, the tenth year of Lost in Criterion brought us some brilliant films that are more than a bit out of the ordinary. Blood Beat isn't actually too far off from some movies we've seen this year, and even closer to some of the lower budget independently produced horror films we've seen as part of the collection in the past. Maybe we'll get a Criterion release of it before we're done.

Spine 578: The Complete Jean Vigo - Part 1

This week we're covering the first part of Criterion's The Complete Jean Vigo set. There's just enough material in this set that we felt like we should do two episodes on it to give Jean Vigo his due. And what due this director deserves! Before dying of complication of tuberculosis at the age of 29 in 1934, Vigo produced only four works but they are each innovative and influential.

This week we cover his first three works: a newsreel/travelogue look at class distinctions in a port town in À propos de Nice (1930), a "Tokyo Olympiad" style look at a swimming star in Taris (1931), and a narrative about schoolboy revolution in Zéro de conduite (1933). And it's a good thing we decided to split this up because just covering these three shorter works led to a nearly 2 hour episode.

Next week is our annual holiday special, so we'll finish up the Jean Vigo set with L'Atalante (1934) in two weeks.

Spine 577: Cul-de-sac

8 years ago this week our episode on Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water posted and we had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Two years ago this month, we talked about Roman Polanski's Repulsion and had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Now our third of his movies, Cul-de-sac (1966), offers us a chance to armchair psychoanalyze the man once again, as it becomes clear that his misogyny stems from his understanding all human relationships as power-struggles that someone must win.

It is the most interesting to us Polanski movie we've seen so far, certainly, resting mostly on the atmosphere of it's setting and the fact that this crime thriller maybe started life as a backdoor adaptation of Waiting for Godot.

But also, what malevolent coincidence have we encountered that we talk about Polanski films during the holidays.

Spine 576: Secret Sunshine

Lee Chang-dong's story of incredible loss and grief, of where community can be found and where it cannot, Secret Sunshine (2007) shows the failings of a religion designed to solve status quo middle class problems under capitalism, but reminds us that there is still hope. Hirokazu Kore-eda (director of Spine 554: Still Walking) called this the best film of the 21st century so far, and he may be right, but while Secret Sunshine is a must see, it's hard to imagine having the emotional fortitude to watch it twice.

Spine 575: The Killing

We get two early Stanley Kubrick films this week, not just The Killing (1956) but also Killer's Kiss (1955). While both are New York noirs, each offers a different view of the famed director. Killer's Kiss is the last film in which Kubrick did almost everything himself: directing, shooting, producing, and writing the story from scratch. The Killing is a Hollywood production, with  Lucien Ballard behind the lens (albeit to Kubrick's chagrin), James B. Harris producing his first of several collaborations with Kubrick, and Jim Thompson adapting a Lionel White novel (albeit with Kubrick still taking the credit). The Killing has the more compelling story and experimental structure, but Killer's Kiss has the more experimental (and guerrilla) camerawork and an axe fight in a mannequin factory.

Spine 574: Life During Wartime

Your hosts of Lost in Criterion were juniors in high school on September 11, 2001, and that certainly colors our opinion of Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime (2010). And so do current events. Solondz is also 25 years older than us, and while I agree, as Solondz says in one of the bonus features on this release, that the suburbs of New Jersey (where he grew up) and the suburbs of Ohio (where we lived in 2001) are not so different, I think that difference in generations is perhaps insurmountable. The gulf may keep us from fulling "getting" Solondz. I guess my point is that we spend a lot of time this week talking about how we would approach the metaphorical use of child abuse differently in a post-9/11 story, as we were 16 year old children on 9/11. And as is often the case, getting bogged down in what we wanted to see may keep us from fully seeing what Solondz is up to.

Spine 573: The Music Room

It took far too long for the Criterion Collection to show us anything from Bengali director Satyajit Ray, but we're finally here with the singular and beautiful The Music Room (1958). Ray's attempt at a more popular movie after his first two films (the first two of the Apu trilogy) failed to connect with an audience, The Music Room integrates classical Indian music into a story of decayed aristocracy, how holding onto power destroys everything you love.

Spine 572: Léon Morin, Priest

Jean-Pierre Melville's Léon Morin, Priest (1961) is the story of a hot priest and a hot communist having banal religious conversations that rarely rise to a level that we can even pretend they are theological or philosophical. That these conversations also take place in a French town occupied by Nazis should raise the stakes, but the whole thing largely seems flat. It's a love story, and any depth beyond that didn't connect with us. But in retrospect maybe that is the point, maybe Melville is saying something particular about how even liberal-leaning organized religion is nice looking but empty.

Anyway, at least we got to talk about Liberation Theology and communism for a bit.

Spine 571: Black Moon

Our second in this pair of Louis Malle at his weirdest, Black Moon (1975) is an Alice in Wonderland-ish coming of age story during a literal battle of the sexes. We were concerned about a French male director making such a movie at the height of second-wave feminism, but Malle is nothing if not surprising. Malle claims he wrote the film on a sort of automatic writing while also changing course whenever a plot line looked like it might be emerging, which leaves us with a film quite widely open to interpretation. Black Moon's surreal nature also gets a big help by being shot by longtime Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist.