Lost in Criterion

We've already talked a bit about Italian neorealism, albeit through a filmmaker who was trying to reject the movement some years after it had died. Now we get to see the film that, arguably, killed it. Vittorio De Sica is hardly a stranger to the movement -- his Bicycle Thieves, which we'll talk about in the future, is one of its masterpieces -- but that didn't stop critics from piling on the hate for Umberto D. in 1952. Unfairly, I may add, as it's a great movie. Alas.

According to Wikipedia The Honeymoon Killers is Truffaut's "favorite American film." Wikipedia cites a 1992 New York Times piece, which pops off the quote without any solid attribution. Pat digs deeper and discovers the truth for this week's episode, though you probably could have guessed that Wikipedia isn't quite on the level.

Anyway, Leonard Kastle's 1970 ultra-low-budget true crime film is one of those where we spend a good chunk of time wondering just why it's in the collection anyway. The answer may solely be that a young Martin Scorcese was originally hired to direct, shot at least one scene, then was fired for taking too much time. The end product comes off as shades of John Waters without being purposeful or self-aware. So bad it's bad, and unhelped by its shocking use of violence.

Stephen Soderbergh puts all his bad ideas into one movie.

Continuing our short trend of films with messages that coincidentally speak to some of the darkest positions of American society today, mostly because they critique aspects of human interaction that, sadly, bubble up every so often in any civilization (and almost always exist at at least a low simmer). Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) -- our first from the renowned German -- is an homage to the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, in particular a retelling of All That Heaven Allows that takes that films class-divided love story and transfers it to a West Germany divided by class, race, religion, and immigration status.

A concentration camp is built like a Grand Hotel.

These were the lines of Night and Fog that may have hit me the hardest. Someone, some company, built the barracks, the guard towers, the ovens. And no doubt that company beat out other companies for the contract.

Alain Resnais' 1955 short documentary subtly twists the knife as the audience is called out for its part in the Holocaust (and all other holocausts) whether active or passive. Maybe you didn't place the noose around the neck, but maybe you sold the rope to the hangman, maybe you built the gallows, maybe you sat idly by because the people being led up the stairs didn't look like you.

But it's not about guilt; it's about responsibility.

When the Allies open the doors,

And it is not just a question of who is responsible for what happened, but of who is responsible for what may happen.

The skill of the Nazis is child's play today.

Someone builds the walls. Someone guards the gates. Someone fires the furnace.

Someone drops the bombs.

Someone steers the drones.

Someone writes the checks.

But also someone speaks the dehumanizing rhetoric: "they only want money", "they're all rapists and murderers," "they can't be trusted in a public restroom", "they're ruining this country." 

And someone listens.

Rhetoric has consequences.

Resist being one of these someones. Do what you can to help others resist being these someones.

The same amazing non-linear storytelling that we saw in masterful use last week kind of makes its cinematic debut here, in Alain Resnais' 1959 drama Hiroshima mon Amour. Sure, as we point out, other films had used flashback, but none in quite this way, a much more literary way to be sure (we cite To The Lighthouse, but Slaughterhouse Five is perhaps the literary codifier of the method). In any case, though, Hiroshima mon Amour's technique became THE film narrative for flashback. And we're all lucky for that.

I know it's just Italian for "end" but I Fidanzati ending with "FINE" in white block letters on a black frame sums up my emotional response.

Ermanno Olmi's films have all the hallmarks of Italian neorealism even though he claims his film style is a response to (and rejection of) Italian neorealism.

It's so rare that a perfect film could exist. How did Henri-Georges Clouzot make so many?

The year after their brilliant film The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, married movie-makers Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlondorff split their duties with Schlondorff staying behind the camera for Coup de Grace while von Trorra does double duty as co-writer and star. Filmed in 1976 and set in 1919, the filmmakers split the difference and rather successfully made a film that seems to have been made in 1939 for all it's melodrama and technology, though with its graphic depiction of war and its emotional consequences perhaps not in America in 1939. Oh goodness the emotional consequences.