Have no fear for your light switches - that's just the stark and shadowy world of German Expressionism! Dolly Back switches gears and tackles a canonical behemoth in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), now a centennial (and indeed timeless) tale of pestilence and the power of love. Famously part of scholar Siegfried Kracaeur's overview of Germany's film culture reflecting the anxeties of their political climate, its titular vampire is an outlier in its own genre and representation of Stoker's character. 100 years on the story continues to resonate, particularly with a polysemous icon whose interpretations can vary from the triumphant vanquishing of the tyrant to an exceedingly harmful instance of Other-ing. In the pod's oldest and first silent film exercise, your hosts dive into a filmmaking mode that still offers us a perfect crash course in mood and allegory, while also parsing the responsibilities of framing a movie monster.

J. Hoberman's Article on Tablet Magazine - The Twinned Evils of 'Nosferatu'

Siegfried Kracaeur's Book - From Caligari to Hitler (Chapter 6: Procession of Tyrants, p77-87)

Nosferatu (1922) on YouTube

Watch out listener, this episode might chew you up! Dolly Back takes on Julia Ducournau's directorial debut Raw, revolving around the coming-of-age of a young veterinarian student developing new appetites. As your hosts get a taste of what this course has to offer, they explore Ducournau's many cinematic influences, incredible command of lighting and montage, and set the film against the recent debate around "elevated horror". In the blood-slicked, sanitized world of Ducournau, bodies undergo constant metamorphosis, and your hosts check between the sutures as she dissects the way exchange value, initiation, biopolitics, and sisterhood all intersect in spectacular fashion!

Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Sandeep Sreelakha's Essay - Julia's Fascination With The Human Body and Cannibalism

Orla Smith's Essay - Sisterhood is the saviour in Julia Ducournau's humanist Raw"

Dream much, listener? Joining Dolly Back this week on a filmmaker and film near and dear to our hearts is Anna Swanson, a film critic and senior contributor to FilmSchoolRejects, and fellow Manniac on the director's neon-soaked and transcendent Manhunter (1986)! In the earliest adaptation of Thomas Harris' novels, the film would overcome its initial reception and commercial prospects to become an enduring classic among crime fans, replete with synth rock needle drops and an all too real deep-dive into the world of criminals, professionals, and voyeurs. As Will Graham, Hannibal Lecktor, and Francis Dollarhyde are left adrift amongst the red sands and blue skies of the Red Dragon, witness their thorough profile of perhaps the most mythic and romantically Expressionist work of this hallowed filmmaker's career - IT'S JUST YOU AND ME NOW, SPORT!

Anna Swanson's FilmSchoolRejects Author Page

Davey Davis' Article on Bright Wall/Dark Room - Manhunting

Rob Hunter's Article on FilmSchoolRejects - 31 Things We Learned from Michael Mann's 'Manhunter' Commentary

Ryan Lambie's Interview with Brian Cox on Manhunter, Michael Mann, and Brett Ratner on Den of Geek

Ben Simington's Article on MUBI - Close-Up on Michael Mann's "Manhunter"

Ringing in the scariest month of the year, Dolly Back is mesmerized by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, a 1997 detective thriller that is equal parts horrific and incisive. As a gruesome crime wave sweeps Chiba, Detective Takabe joins forces with the psychologist Sakuma to uncover the mysteries behind the distinct X pattern slashed into their neck and the amnesiac wanderer cropping up at crime scenes. What ensues is a prognosis on polite society, entangling memory, sound, national history, and the apparatus itself as Kurosawa probes the transference of myths and morbidity in a Japan about to enter the next millennium, all of which your hosts are eager to tackle this week! As the podcast embarks on a journey of delightfully scarier fare than usual for October,  make sure to pay close attention to their voices as they kick off...

Anton Bitel's Review - "Discover the hypnotic mystery of this nihilistic thriller"

In the worlds of Alan J. Pakula, one thing is paramount - trust no one. Your hosts are happy to make an exception to that rule this week as they are joined by Saffron Maeve, a fellow UofT student, a writer with featured publications across sites such as ScreenSlate and MUBI, and most recently, the recipient of the Canadian Cinema Scope Reader's Choice Award! Much like Warren Beatty's shaggy-haired Frady, this episode follows their investigative odyssey jumping everywhere from its brilliant noir underpinnings, to brief physics and American history lessons, and even a brief sojourn in the realm of video games! There's something about this film that makes it just as potent today as it was 50 years ago - and true to the podcast's namesake, join us as we occupy another viewpoint in our own parallax view!

Saffron Maeve's Article - "Trust No One: The Lingering Paranoia of The Parallax View"

Saffron's Website - Selected Writing (Stay tuned for her writing on Jerzy Skolimowski's EO (2022) when it premieres at NYFF in two weeks!)

Saffron's Twitter

Diagram of the Parallax Effect

Between Warholian pop art and Diego Velasquez, Jean Luc-Godard searches for a joie de vivre in perhaps his most astonishingly eye-popping and impressionist work. As iconic screen couple Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina hit the roads of Europe, this hallowed director and his characters make peace with their demons on love, life, and literature, breaking down screen barriers and the form's enduring practices along their way!

This episode is in tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, a master and shepherd of the form who  challenged himself and his audiences to never settle for the sandbox presented to them.

Richard Brody's Essay - Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens

As they brave the always-dangerous waters of Wong Kar-Wai's melancholy, Dolly Back is joined by Hannah Fleisch, a UofT graduate student with an extensive knowledge of world cinemas! Whether it's a sob at the end of the world or a family photograph at the center of yours, this famed Hong Kong filmmaker turns his viewfinder to every nook and cranny that conceals a piece of home - everywhere from a loved one and they food they make for us, all the way down to the ways we throw ourselves into work on the opposite side of the world. As Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung desperately attempt to repair a failing relationship and its many artifacts, so too do the filmmakers reach across time and space for a city on the precipice of change, thriving in the cracks of the film's editing and the numerous echoes across cultures that populate its text. It takes two to tango dear listener, and we invite you to join us on our journey into the politics of immigrant and diaspora cinemas, queer filmmaking, and how WKW's singular style brings them together into one heartbreaking experience!

Hugo Córdova Quero's Article - "Queer(N)Asian Im/Migrants’ Connectedness: An Inter-Contextual Decolonial Reading of Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together"

Svetlana Boym's Article - "Nostalgia"

BOMB Magazine Interview - "Wong Kar-Wai by Han Ong"

Enter Bayhem - a world of impulses and entropy that has perhaps never been as potent and singular as it was in Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (2009)! To your hosts, it is a miracle this film exists - even moreso that it sustained commercial success in spite of its WGA strike affected script, IP origins, and near-total departure from its predecessor's setting. As Optimus Prime and Megatron dip their feet into the sense impressions of Operation Desert Storm, this episode examines its impossible assembly, jarring reliance on analog filmmaking, and this film's unholy pact with producer Steven Spielberg's coming-of-age films of old. Although we don't quite have a Linkin Park needle drop - DOLLY BACK, TRANSFORM AND ROLL OUT!

Roger Ebert's Article - "The Fall of the Revengers"

In an odyssey into Douglas Sirk's black-and-white, melodramatic masterclass, Dolly Back is joined by Ryan Akler-Bishop, a UofT graduate student and film writer, on its 25th episode! Revolving around a toymaker who grows emotionally neglected by his family and reconnects with a coworker from his past, this German director explores the human condition through a focus on the American family, and as argued by Laura Mulvey, the moral contradictions inherent to melodrama. A swan song to one of cinema's most enduring onscreen couples, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, your hosts parse Sirk's strong command of mise-en-scène, intertextuality, and lighting, all of the critical embers that spark this doomed romance.

Laura Mulvey's Notes on Sirk and Melodrama

Ryan Akler-Bishop's Publication - Fluidity and Repression: The Ambiguity of Queerness in Giallo

"If it bleeds, we can kill it" - this immortal affirmation of an unknowable foe's mortality uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, embodies not only the ethos of John McTiernan's classic sci-fi actioner, but indeed all the body builders who went on to fight the many villains who personified a post-Cold War America on the silver screen. In the depths of a Central American jungle, espionage quickly evolves into asymmetrical warfare, and true to its name, the Predator upsets the military food chain in every environment it enters, whether it's the site of colonial proxy wars or even a modern day Los Angeles as represented in one of its many sequels. Join your hosts as they investigate the muddy hunting grounds of a classic movie monster who hunted other monsters, parsing exactly how its design, mise-en-scene, and tongue-in-cheek approach to its genre trappings that all make the Predator such an enduring and adaptable icon!

Drew Ayers' Article - Bodies, Bullets, and Bad Guys: Elements of the Hardbody Film