Lost in Criterion

We get a series of films from French multimedia artist Chris Marker this week of varying genius. First up is the absolutely brilliant and clearly influential sci-fi short La Jetée from 1962. Our other major conversation is on the significantly more controversial to Pat and me Sans Soleil, a sort of travelogue essay from 1983. We also briefly discuss his 1981 short documentary on found sculpture in the California mudflats with 1981’s Junkopia and (much more briefly) his venture into cd-rom interactive gaming with Immemory (1998). It’s also a weird one when Criterion decides that the one release they’re putting out from a director will contain a survey of his entire decades-long career.

This week Donovan Hill joins us once more, discussing boat law, America’s indifference to international law, the hilarious/frightening nostalgia within the book Hagekure (and WW2 era views of same), pretty much every adaptation of the 47 Ronin we can think of, and, oh yeah, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff. It’s a jam-packed episode (read: long), as episodes with Donovan tend to be.

Jean-Pierre Melville draws on his personal experience as a member of the French Resistance to tell the heroic story of a bunch of ineffectual French Resistance fighters, whose only prize for avoiding death is the chance to avoid death once again.

In October 2016 we were unimpressed with Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers, but the Collection has finally brought us another of his and this time we don’t hate it. Not to say either Pat or I will be watching it again anytime soon, but Vengeance is Mine is at least more interesting to us than The Pornographers was and makes us actually look forward to seeing more of Imamura’s work in the future.

We return to the films of Jules Dassin (and to the starring roles of Burt Lancaster) with a prison drama that’s sort of undermined by Dassin’s later pro-cop movie Naked City which we watched a few weeks ago. In that movie cops are good. In this movie prisons are really quite bad. Pat and I certainly don’t share Dassin’s (or each others’) views on cops, but we are much more on board with the idea that prison needs massive reform at the very least. I’ll say I’m more extreme than Dassin’s imagination could take him. For more information on what I mean there, check out Angela Davis talking to Democracy Now about Prison Abolition.

We kick off the New Year with arguably the most pro-war film we’ve watched. And argue we do as I keep hoping to come to some anti-war interpretation and Pat shoots me down over and over in this extra-long episode. Truffaut argued that “to show [war] is to ennoble it”, that one cannot make an anti-war film that depicts war. We’ve seen some noble attempts, and I think, in the works of Kon Ichikawa we discussed a few weeks ago, some successes. So Truffaut may be wrong, but Pat is right here, Stuart Cooper’s Overlord is not an anti-war film. It still may be an interesting experiment.

It’s been a long year. Near the end of this year’s holiday special we discuss our favorite movies of the year, Criterion and otherwise, and did you know that March was part of 2019? It seems like a lifetime ago. I mean, I have an excuse. I got hit by a car in May and basically did nothing for 2 months. But still.

To look back and celebrate we gather our friends at this end of the year — Stephen Goldmeier, Ben Jones-White, and Casey and Jonathan Hape all return to the show — and discuss the 1992 Robin Willams-starring, Barry Levinson-directed beautiful mess that is Toys. Also, you should look up youtube videos of Art Metrano.

So Happy Holiday[s]. There’s just so many. You should celebrate them all. Or at least whichever one makes you feel hopeful and loved. And keep that feeling all the year.

In balance to last week’s police propaganda film, we come this week to the story of minority youth in France dealing with the oppression of society, particularly police violence. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine is based on true events, and could be based on true events that happen regularly before the film and since in France (and elsewhere). It’s a powerful and wonderful film, and a perfect ending to our year. We’ll see you next week for the annual end of year holiday episode, then in 2020 as we continue being Lost in Criterion.

This week a bask in Jules Dassin’s visual record of mid-century New York. Of course it has to come in one of his most pro-America, pro-police works. Not to worry, though, as next week we’ll have a very anti-police movie, and in three weeks we’ll have Dassin’s own ideological answer to this one in the anti-prison film Brute Force.

But this week’s it’s The Naked City, the story that launched a million stories in the form of the police procedural spin-off tv show, and every imitator down the line. Now today there are more fictional murders on New York-based crime dramas than there are actual murders in New York, so isn’t that something?

After last week’s intensity, we settle into a more sentimental anti-war film from Kon Ichikawa. The Burmese Harp. While both films deal with the loss of humanity that war forces on its victims and perpetrators, Fires on the Plain was more of a gut-punch while Harp plucks at the heart strings. Since The Burmese Harp came out first, we call this a classic Pasolini escalation: the easier to handle films failed in their message so the message was turned up to 11.