Lost in Criterion

Here at Lost in Criterion we strive to capture the organic conversation Pat and I have reacting to the films we've watched. Unfortunately, sometimes technical difficulties strike and we have to re-record. While this has only happened three times in 200 episodes -- which is frankly amazing -- the fact remains that you can't really have an organic conversation when you've already had it once. Due to Audacity inexplicably eating 10 minutes of my side of the conversation (we're still not sure how or why) you're getting take two for this week. It probably shows a little.

Veronika Voss (1982) is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's penultimate film and the second of the BRD Trilogy, though oddly enough the last film in the trilogy, Lola, was made before this one. I want to apologize for the fact that we probably spend more time talking about male lead Robert then Veronika herself, but see the paragraph above for why that happened and imagine take one where we actually talked about her. Not that it matters, we could talk for hours about either of them. Heck, we could talk for hours about the Public Health official. People in this movie are complex or weird in highly rant-able ways.

Our last encounter with Rainer Werner Fassbinder left us breathless, and now we move into a trilogy of some of the famed directors best (and final) work. All three stories feature female protagonists making their way in post-war West Germany, and all three are varying degrees of indictment against West German society as Fassbinder saw it. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) suggests that Fassbinder believes the BRD is about to blow itself up, but then he destroys all semblance of subtext in the final moments of the film. Even without that final hammer it's a fascinating tale.

David O. Selznick produced The Third Man and it is the best movie. Also he produced this one. Terminal Station, his 1953 collaboration with Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica, takes that ambivalence and splits it in two, which is appropriate: we get one movie to love and one to hate. Selznick so hated what De Sica brought him that he recut the film himself, shaving 25 minutes out and gutting it of it's emotional arc. The resulting film, Indiscretion of an American Wife, is also included on this Criterion release, so we talk both this week.