Lost in Criterion

Sometimes Criterion shows us a single film from a director we'd never seen before and leaves us wanting for the rest of our project, so often actually that we call them "one and dones". But then sometimes Criterion shows us a movie by Edouard Molinaro and it's fine that they aren't going to show us another. La Cage aux Folles (1978) is a funny movie, and is also a film that wants to show a very normal family that happens to be LGBTQ. It even may succeed, despite the fact that nearly everyone involved in writing, directing, and performing seems to be a straight guy who holds the material in some amount of disdain, though a disdain that doesn't necessarily shine through in performance. There is heart here, despite everything, but it's mostly a "both sides" farce. Still Criterion takes the opportunity to include an interview with Laurence Senelick, author of The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, who gives a very interesting history of drag and gender-nonconformity that helps contextualize La Cage in its time, even if it doesn't quell our troubles with the film's politics.

A problem talking about the films of Ernst Lubitsch is that it's very hard not to just start listing the good gags, and To Be or Not to Be (1942) is full of great gags. It's also full of suspense - a film that seamlessly balances noir-ish intrigue with farce. Fascism deserves to be mocked. Fascism is a performance, and can be undermined with performance. To wring our hands over jokes about Hitler, or any other fascist past or present, is to suggest fascist figures are somehow sacrosanct. They aren't. They never will be. Become the frog that plagues Pharaoh, make der Fuehrer into a clown, reject their authority and reject the fear they want to use against you. And where whatever mask you need to to do so.

Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) is a masterpiece. We haven't seen a film that so exquisitely captures longing since Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) 500 Spines ago. In ten more years I suspect I will still be thinking about the visuals of Charulata - the swing, the bedroom window, that final pair of freeze frames - as much as I still think about, say, the camera following the cigarette in In the Mood. Absolute perfection.

We absolutely fell in love with the films of Satyajit Ray when we first watched The Music Room a few years ago, and we are so happy that Criterion is finally showing us more of his work. The Big City (1963) is an Ozu-like take of the effect progress has on the "traditional" family, an ode to female emancipation, and a condemnation of social, racial, and gender-based discrimination in Ray's homeland. And it's also a gorgeous movie. Ray is a filmmaker who knows that film is its own language, a language of the eye, of light, of frame, and The Big City has some of the most beautiful scenes we've ever seen.

We get our first John Frankenheimer feature in the Collection with Seconds (1966), though we covered his version of Dr. Moreau on a Patreon episode recently and also he directed The Comedians teleplay in the Golden Age of Television boxset. In Seconds a late middle aged banker, bored with career and marriage is stalked and blackmailed into using a MLM service that promises a new life with the face of Rock Hudson. Turns out sometimes you can't just walk away from your past with no strings attached and become a new hot person.

Sometimes the Criterion Collection goes and does a silly thing, like releasing Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone as Spine 666. How spooky! One of the great Mexican director's films about how fascism is bad for children - a lesson we as a society apparently do actually keep needing to learn - The Devil's Backbone sets a ghost story at an orphanage during the waning years of the Spanish Civil War, just before Franco cemented power. The release is also chock full of del Toro and his collaborators talking about the film, its politics, and its special effects.

Gabriel Axel's beautiful Babette's Feast (1987) looks at food as art and art as freedom. "Give me leave to do my utmost" - allow each of us the resources and time to create and any of us can create. Capital destroys the Commune, destroys the freedom of resources, creates scarcity and destroys art. But still the artist lives, and lives abundantly.

We are very happy to finally get another Kenji Mizoguchi film with The Life of Oharu (1952), a film that kicked off a postwar boon for the famed Japanese director. This melancholy tale shows us the dangers of patriarchy and social hierarchy, like how it can lead to Mifune getting cameo'd to death.

In addition to Shoah (1985), the Criterion release contains three of the five additional films Claude Lanzmann has made from the footage he shot for his landmark documentary. A Visitor from the Living (1997) is an interview with Maurice Rossel in which Lanzmann swings hard at Rossel's report for the Red Cross on conditions in the "potemkin ghetto" of Theresienstadt. In Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001) Lanzmann speaks with Yehuda Lerner about his participation in the Sobibor revolt. While Jan Karski is interviewed in a significant portion of Shoah, The Karski Report (2010) is day two of that interview, wherein Karski recounts his heroic efforts to inform Allied officials, including FDR, about the Nazis' extermination of the Jewish people of Europe, hoping to force the Allies to act to save them. As Karski said in a later interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995: "The Allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it." Ending genocidal authoritarianism seems impossible until we act. And we must act, from Cop City to Gaza City we must act.

The second half of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) focuses on explicit details of how the Nazi's machinery of mass murder worked, on the industrialization and logistics of the business end of it. Lanzmann also focuses on just how incomprehensible the scale of violence was, how no one who had not seen it with their own eyes could believe that humans were capable of such inhumanity, how even victims mere moments from their death could scarcely believe it. And we end with stories of resistance and revolt.

Shoah doesn't deal with the "why" of the Holocaust, but the "how", and Lanzmann presses his interviewees - victims, witnesses, and perpetrators - on that "how" to explicit and horrifying detail. But this detail must be seen, must be known, must be believed, to truly never let it happen again, to be able to stand against genocide no matter where it takes place now, from the US's deportation machines to the murder of thousands of children in Gaza.