Lost in Criterion

Like much of the early work of Jean-Luc Godard (and the rest of the young directors of the French New Wave), Vivre sa Vie (1962) wears its American influences on its sleeves. Perhaps better than our experiences with other pre-1968 Godard work, we can see the seeds of the more explicitly Marxist ideology that will bubble up in his work later in the decade. And that's probably not the only way this is prototypical Godard.

This week we finish up the Pedro Costa boxset Letters from Fontainhas with Colossal Youth which is a beautiful and affecting piece of art, despite the fact that we are still left a bit suspicious of Costa's politics.

We continue through the Letters from Fontainhas boxset this week. The story goes that one of the co-stars of Pedro Costa's Ossos, Vanda Duarte, invited Costa to see what her life was really like, and Costa decided to strip the artifice of film down to its essentials or something and make a "docufiction" film about Vanda and Fontainhas with just his subjects, himself, and a handheld DV camera.

We start a box set from director Pedro Costa this week. "Letters from Fontainhas" contains three of Costa's films set in the impoverished Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas. Ossos (1997) is our first, and the closest to a traditional film. While "closest" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, the others move from outright narrative fiction to something more accurately labeled "docufiction" or even "ethnofiction", a fictionalized ethnography. We'll talk more about that aspect in the rest of the series, but for now we have Ossos which is a beautiful film.

Last week we had a long conversation about the nature of ennui today and this week Nicholas Ray swings in with a movie from 1956 reminding us that middle class ideals lead to fascism. I love it when the Criterion Collection gives us unmarked ideological sets.

Marco Ferreri's 1969 film Dillinger is Dead takes a look out how being a victim of alienation under capitalism makes committing oppressive violence feel like liberation. Or at least I hope so, because otherwise it's a bad movie.

Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the most subtly political films we've seen, particularly from America. Leo McCarey's masterpiece tells the story of an older couple forced apart by economic forces, having lost their income and their home in a world were their children cannot financially or emotionally care for them. It stands as a beautifully made depressing drama, but it shines as an example of the state of things and the need for change as the New Deal and, particularly, Social Security were bringing a much needed safety net to Americans in similar situations.

Long time supporter of the show Jason Westhaver joins us to talk about this wonderful film.

Director Steve McQueen's feature debut, Hunger is a historical drama about the mistreatment of IRA political prisoners by the British government, particularly centered on Bobby Sands' part in the 1981 hunger strike that led to his death. McQueen and his cast all insist this movie is meant to be apolitical and show that wrong was done on both sides. If that is true, this brilliant film failed its makers' intentions.

Our fourth and currently final Max Ophuls movie in the Collection is his final film, a historic romance that takes a lot of liberties and is maybe kinda about taking liberties? Capitalist patriarchy is a circus in Lola Montes.

Götz Spielmann's 2008 film Revanche feints at being a crime drama, and has a title suggesting it's a revenge thriller, but settles into being a study on loss and grief.