Lost in Criterion

We've talked before about how it may be impossible to truly make an anti-war war film, but in showing the human toll on both sides of the fight Andrei Tarkovsky's entry into the seminal Soviet genre of post-WWII war films may come pretty close. 

This week I feel like Pat does his best to keep me from being blackpilled about journalism and I do my best to remind Pat that everything is stupid. Let’s strike the delicate balance between trusting experts and recognizing that manufactured consent, racist underpinnings in news spin, and yellow journalism are alive and well, and even plutacratized, as anyone with enough financial backing can create the right bias-confirmed headline and get a million shares.

We finish up the 3 Films by Teshigahara boxset with four more films. Aside from the three collaborations with surrealist novelist Kobo Abe on the Criterion release are four shorts, three documentaries on a variety of subjects, and Teshigahara’s portion of an international anthology on the lives of teenage girls:

The Face of Another seems to distill the political identity aspects we loved in the previous two films into a discussion on personal identity, and that’s disappointing. We really liked the political identity stuff, so we spend this week trying to come to a more political understanding of this film. This is one of those films where its hard to say what we think of it, as aside from the confused messaging in the context of the other films, it’s a beautiful and inventive movie, incredibly stylistically interesting.

This is the final film in the 3 Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara boxset, though we will spend one more week with the set as next week we discuss the four short films also included.

The second of our Hiroshi Teshigahara films, his 1964 masterpiece The Woman in the Dunes gets even more into our wheelhouse than Pitfall did. This week we talk Japanese society and “friendly authoritarianism”, societal structure in general, the plight of lower classes, an anthropological study of friendship, and a movie that makes Adam a bit nervous about his planned trip to visit Japan and what might happen if he visits the wrong small town.

We kick off a month-worth of films from filmmaker and flower artist Hiroshi Teshigahara this week with Pitfall. The boxset Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara doesn’t just contain three films, but also four shorts which we’ll cover in their own episode at the end, but this week we get started with Pitfall (1962) a movie that seems made for us? Surrealist drama about labor politics in a Japan with an absurd eschatology? Yeah, it checks a lot of our boxes.

I’m sure that Lindsay Anderson’s if…. was a completely different film in a pre-Columbine world. Obviously there were other school shootings before Columbine, but Pat and I came of age in a time where school shootings are a norm, at least in the US, and the psychology (and pseudo-psychology) that’s popped up to explain them has bombarded us for over half our lives. We generally reject the view that a film needs to be judged in it’s own time, but this time around it’s clear that our times are the more broken ones, much more in this case than Anderson’s, and we hope to make an attempt to read if…. outside of our own issues.

That is not true of our response to Anderson’s short Thursday’s Children that is also included in the Criterion release. An Oscar-winning documentary short on a School for the Death, Thursday’s Children shows us a world that Pat and I, both trained in how to teach, react incredibly negatively to.

Who could have guessed the WR: Mysteries of the Organism was the saner of the two Dušan Makavejev films we’d watch? It did give us a better base by which to discuss Sweet Movie, and I think we come to a better understanding of Makavejev as a person. Not a more respecting position, but a more informed one.

We get a pair of films from Serbian director Dušan Makavejev this and next week and they are nearly impossible to describe. This week we have a combination documentary on pseudo-scientific research of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. shorts documentaries on artists who use sexuality in their work, and a narrative portion about the struggles between Sovietism and a more libertine version of communism.

Claude Berri’s The Two of Us is steeped in Berri’s own experience during the occupation of France during World War 2. It’s a story that reminds us that someone can have deeply held racist beliefs and still seem nice, especially if they don’t realize their new friend belongs to the group they hate, it’s a jokey inter-generational buddy film about the banal absurdity of prejudice with the looming threat of the Holocaust in the background. It’s among the clear inspirations for Jojo Rabbit, so feel free to imagine the backlash if it came out today.