Lost in Criterion

While the first two films in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy were built on filming in particularly locations, in Naqoyqatsi, the image itself becomes the location as editor and "digital cinematographer" Jon Kane takes us into the simulation that is modern life. Unfortunately, like the early unused setpiece footage from Koyaanisqatsi, the tech here has not aged well, though this time Reggio doesn't seem to realize its cheesiness.

Sadly, we lost take one of this conversation and Jonathan Hape was not able to join us for the re-recording. He added a lot to our discussion of the first two Qatsi films, and we wish it could have worked out. You should still go to https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ and check out his music.

We continue through Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy with 1988's Powaqqatsi. Reggio works with Phillip Glass again but they lost Ron Fricke for this one and his absence is felt, particularly in the editing. While the first film looked at what US industrialization has done to its own people, Powaqqatsi travels around the world to look at the effects of industrialization on postcolonial peoples.

Jonathan Hape joins us again for this journey, and along the way we talk about Reggio's Christian Anarchist and anarcho-primitivist influences, the 1990 Time Warner Earth Day Special, and Roger Ebert missing the point.

We start into Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy this week with what many consider the strongest of the three films, mostly because Ron Fricke's cinematography and editing is masterful in it. Built from scenes of natural beauty and alienating industry with a phenomenal sountrack by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi is a deeply effecting visual poem.

Our dear friend Jonathan Hape (https://www.jonathan-hape.com/) joins us for the entire trilogy (probably).

Christopher Nolan's first feature, Following (1998) is a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. The man loves a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. Nolan describes the film as the pinnacle of what he could achieve in a low budget and just working with his friends. which is damning if true because it's just not very interesting.

René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon is seems to find the director and screenwriter Paul Gégauff trying to drain the homoeroticism out of the source material. Fortunately, cinematographer Henri Decaë and star Alain Delon (in his breakout role) knew how to add it back in through both Delon's fantastic facial acting and some of the most erotic shots of a shirtless man ever to be put to film.

After Micheal Cimino's The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, United Artists gave him carte blanche for his next film and he really went to town. As in he built and rebuilt at least one whole town, on stilts in a National Park so as not to damage the landscape. If only he'd waited 45 years he could have just bought Glacier National Park outright and really become his film's villains. Anyway, the film was hemorrhaging money is what I'm saying, and is all the better for it.

A slight fictionalization of the historical Johnson County War, Heaven's Gate (1980) is a beautifully shot epic western where Cimino sought to just tell the stories of real people and forgot that talking about real people in their historical context is what historical materialism is. Cimino's seemingly accidental Marxism was not lost on star Kris Kristofferson, and Cimino even changed some details to ratchet up the class conflict that was, historically, already at a fever pitch.

And, hey, it's not often that the historical villains we see in our Criterion films are still around and even have a website that glosses over their government-approved extrajudicial mass murders. "Guardians of Wyoming's Cow Country since 1872" and still shaping society 150 years later, because that's what happens when you don't stop greedy men from seizing absolute power.

Jean-Luc Godard's goodbye to cinema, at least for a time, Weekend (1967) is not just a condemnation of bourgeois values, but a stunning attack on automobile culture. Sure the messaging is scattershot at best, but there's little in the film that isn't memorable. And it's gotta be hands down the film with the largest salvaged car budget.

The last of Pasolini's Arabian Nights betrays a director who is steadily on his way to making Salò, and he would begin work on that magnum opus just after he finished Arabian Nights. Like the previous two films in this trilogy, Arabian Nights adapts a well known collection of stories with a heavy focus on the most erotic ones. Pat argues that unlike the others Arabian Nights feels more dour, less fun. Adam's not so sure. But in either case Arabian Nights is filled with memorable and provocative images, like the dildo arrow.

Continuing through Pasolini's Trilogy of Life this week we have The Canterbury Tales (1972). Pasolini's adaptation of a a foundational English text includes many naked and British people, including Tom Baker. While the film's epilogue changes the book to make these tales "told only for the pleasure of telling", Pasolini's celebration of pre-consumerism sex comes with a certain growing darkness. We'll talk more on that next week, but for now let's enjoy medieval Charlie Chaplin.

Spine 631 is a boxset of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", a collection of adaptations of collections of stories. We kick it off this week with The Decamaron, based on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century collection of tragic and erotic stories. Pasolini adapts these as celebrations of pre-capitalist, pre-consumerist sex, language, and dentistry. Pasolini's Decamaron is very horny, and very fun. We can't wait to see what he does in the rest of the Trilogy of Life