Lost in Criterion

Derek Jarman's Jubilee is complicated. It started life as a documentary about Jordan, a movie "about punk rock", and slowly grew into the post-apocalyptic time travel weirdly pro-Monarchy-ish critique of punk rock and British society. As an openly gay man in London in 1978, perhaps Jarman was an outsider outside other outsiders, further anti-establishment than the punk movement he saw around him. At least that's the argument I try to make against Pat and guest Donovan Hill, who really just think Jarman's thesis -- whatever it is -- doesn't land. I don't necessarily love the film, personally, but it's definitely more interesting than I think my Pat and guest Donovan Hill give it credit for. Of course I could very well be wrong -- certainly Jarman doesn't hit his critique out of the park -- but we manage a pretty great conversation about punk rock, politics, ideals, and selling out. One of my favorite episodes to record, hope you love it as much as I did.

The best Shakespeare adaptation wonder far from the text. Donovan Hill joins us to talk about Kurosawa's Throne of Blood

Federico Fellini's first solo feature directorial The White Sheik (1952) is everything we love about the famed Italian, and very little of what we don't. The book Adam mentions in the introduction is Harriet Russell's Envelopes and is delightful as well.

The final film in Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series and our boxset, 1979's Love on the Run is a capstone and a bit of a clip show, editing in flashbacks not just to the previous four films, but recontextualizing other Jean-Pierre Leaud films in order to add more backstory. Pat isn't necessarily impressed, but that doesn't stop us from fantasizing about what this film would have been like if it was made, say, last year, with the rest of Leaud's career to pull from.

We next meet Antoine Doinel in 1970's Bed and Board. This time director Francois Truffaut has his character slightly more married but just as restless as ever before. Unfortunately, this manifests in some pretty demeaning tropes about Asian women in general, and Japanese women in particular. C'est la vie, as the French say, but perhaps more apropos: C'est la vie quand vous comptez sur les stéréotypes raciaux.

Truffaut (and star Jean-Pierre Leaud) tell the continuing (and more comedic) story of Antoine Doinel, last seen running to the sea in The 400 Blows, now older but not quite wiser.

This week's episode is a long one solely for the plethora and variety of material we're tasked with talking about. Stan Brahkage was an experimental filmmaker and a long-time film professor at the University of Colorado, who principally focused on non-narrative film. By Brakhage covers work from six decades of his career. With over four hours of material in 26 pieces ranging from 9 seconds to 74 minutes long, there's a lot to digest: a lot to love and some, well, not to.

Robert Bresson is French, and therefore I apologize for pronouncing the T in Robert throughout this episode. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Though as it turns out Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) may have come before Bresson really became Bresson. His amazing propensity for when and how to use music is there, yeah, but this is also his last film to use professional actors, and it's only his second film. It'll be interesting to see more from him moving forward, and given his stature in French film, we certainly will.

Dustin Hoffman's character in Straw Dogs (1971) is not a pacifist. If director Sam Peckinpah was trying to set up a conflict between David's values and the violent world in which he found himself, he does a terrible job of establishing David's values as any thing more than "conflict-avoidant" which is not the same thing as pacifistic. Since Pat and I really are pacifists, this distinction plays a central role in our response to the famously violent film. It doesn't help that the violent world -- where the long arm of the law is broken and religion and sleight-of-hand magic are one in the same, where a Batman villain is a peripheral character -- is a bit unrealistic. But then again, maybe that's just wishful thinking one the part of us two idealists.

Vilgot Sjöman made one of the most controversial films ever with I am Curious (Yellow) and a not very controversial at all film with I am Curious (Blue). Originally meant to be released as one film in 1967, the two are really companion pieces, telling versions of the same story Rashomon style. Or maybe not? It's all a bit confusing, not helped by the meta-narrative in which the film is being made (Sjöman plays himself, or perhaps "himself", but then that's true of star Lena Nyman as well.) We originally planned to do an episode for each movie, but it became apparent very quickly that it would be a disservice to both to talk about them in a vacuum -- they're too intertwined, too related, parallel films more than sequels or prequels. But that does make this for a longer-than-normal episode.