Lost in Criterion

The second of our pair of Ozu films finds the director between World War II deployments bringing to screen a script he'd been working on for nearly a decade about loyalty to one's father, and by extension -- perhaps at least to the Japanese censor board that celebrated the film -- loyalty to one's emperor. This is the closest thing to a propaganda film we've seen from Ozu, but we're not convinced that was Ozu's intention.

We kick off a pair of early Yasujirō Ozu sound films this week, and first up is his earliest. The Only Son (1936) comes out during a time period in Japan that we have yet to see represented in films from the country: directly pre-war as the right-wing imperialists are cementing their rule. Against that backdrop, and just months before Ozu himself would be drafted, The Only Son looks at the sacrifices of made by women for the promise of success for their sons and brothers in the modernizing Japan, success that remained out of grasp for many as the Great Depression reached its height.

Carol Reed helms a film that suggests screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder only had one plot. Night Train to Munich shares a lot of bones with the pairs' previously penned film, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, functioning as something between remake and sequel as well as being the second entry in the multimedia Charters and Caldicott Cinematic Universe. It's silly, it's fun, and the models are endearingly terrible.

Visually, aurally, and plot-wise this is a movie that is absolutely about the choking hellscape extractive capitalism forces us to live in, and the alienating spiritual sickness such a system causes. That is, unless you take the director's word on what that movie is actually about. Red Desert (1964) is Michelangelo Antonioni's ode to "progress" in which climate anxiety sounds like a you problem.

We joke this week that Swedish dramas are the bread and butter of the Criterion Collection, but Everlasting Moments is set apart from the rest through not being directed by Ingmar Bergman. Jan Troell's biopic of his wife's great aunt shows us a unique picture of a woman's life in early 20th century Sweden and the freedom found in artistic pursuit.

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up (1990) explores a real-life incident of celebrity impersonation in late '80s Iran through a mixture of documentary, recreation, and the director guiding the narrative as events still unfold. Because of that last element, exactly what mix of reality and fiction exists is up for debate, and in the end, much of what really happened only happened because of Kiarostami's influence. But beyond all the questions of manipulation, there's also a picture of class relations in Iran at the time.

Our experiment of walking through Stan Brakhage, An Anthology Volume Two at a reasonable pace comes to an end this week. After our rush through Volume One years ago we had liked Brakhage, and now after spending so much more time with him, well...we definitely still love his work, but here's hoping it's another few years before Criterion puts out Volume Three.

This week we cover films from the last years of Brakhage's life, including what he was working on when he passed away. And we finally get a behind-the-scenes look at Brakhage filming in "For Stan", a bonus feature short film from Brakhage's wife (and editor of this anthology) Marilyn Brakhage.

This week's selection of Stan Brakhage films has works from 1982, 1992, and 1994, all multi-media, mixing many of the Brakhage "genres": painted frames, manipulated photographic images, layering. We also get another with a soundtrack from Rick Corrigan, and one with probably the most on-screen (and almost legible!) text of any Brakhage film at all.

By Brakhage Volume Two Program 4 is totally dedicated to Stan Brakhage's 1989-90 four film cycle Visions in Meditation. Inspired by Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, the films take us on a journey into a meditative state, working better as a complete work than as four individual pieces. This is the only complete cycle of Brakhage's work in the Criterion sets, despite other films drawn from cycles being included in Volume Two.