discursion

In episode 20 of discursion, Dominic and Steven take a second look at the twisty Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo, 2015) in its Grasshopper Blu-Ray edition, a film that provides two different versions of one filmmaker's travels to a festival where he will meet and become enamoured of a young painter (twice over, with different interactions and outcomes that we are invited to observe). As Dennis Lim writes in his recent book on the South Korean director, it is also possible to find in this film that 'repetition is both the realm of the banal and the otherworldly'.

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In episode 19, Dominic and Steven turn back the clock to 1941 with an almost forgotten Japanese film directed by Yasujiro Ozu, recently resorted and released for home viewing by the British Film Institute. The director's stylistic trademarks are prominent enough to rediscover and discuss in this story of family negotiating their paternal inheritance and wartime.

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Steven and Dominic return with an exploration of secret identity and stylish standoffs in the Hong Kong-set action thriller, Infernal Affairs, recently remastered and released on home video for the Criterion Collection.

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Dominic and Steven reconsider Medium Cool (1969) and continue their discussion of films with moving cameras in episodes 14-16. This American cinéma vérité film was directed, shot and scripted by Haskell Wexler, who extensively used handheld cameras before the era of Steadicam technology, partly to track the violence surrounding the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago.

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Dominic and Steven examine a key sequence involving the moving camera in the second of two episodes dedicated to The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau, 1924), available via Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD series.

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Der Letzte Mann (released as The Last Laugh in the USA), directed by F.W. Murnau, is well known for its 'unbounded' moving camera techniques. The film has now been re-issued within a boxset by Eureka Masters of Cinema. Dominic and Steven examine this German silent film across two episodes, beginning with the sympathetic story of a hotel porter stripped of his rank and community status in an archetypal 1920s modern European city.

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Dominic and Steven revisit the Max Ophuls French classic 'Madame de...' (1953) which has been released by the BFI on Blu-Ray/DVD. Episode 14 beings a new season of podcasts, the theme of which emerges in the course of discussing the film's camera style, performance and jewellery...

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Steven and Dominic take a closer look at Mona Lisa (1986), the London crime film directed by Neil Jordan and starring Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson, with Michael Caine and Robbie Coltrane. Important themes include Hoskins' portrayal of naivety within a gangster world of decay and the film's representation of race.

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Dominic and Steven catch-up for another in-depth conversation about film, continuing the Season 2 theme of contemporary crime and mystery with Cure (1997), a Tokyo-set procedural directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Recently released on home media for the first time in the UK via Eureka/Masters of Cinema.

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Dominic and Steven begin 2021 with a look at the South Korean psycho-thriller film, Burning (Chang-dong Lee, 2018), which is compared with Parasite and examined in terms of characterisation. They finish with a sequence analysis involving Ben (Steven Yeun) and his flat.

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