This is a documentary about celebrated Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer that was released in the Criterion Collection in tandem with a collection of his celebrated films.  So, it’s time to learn!  And maybe review the quality of the documentary from a cinematic perspective.  Does that even make sense for this podcast?  Doesn’t matter.  A random number generator told us to watch it, so we’re watching it.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997).

Luis Bunuel joins illustrious list of directors to be featured on our podcast.  What an honor!  And in classic, Random-Acts-of-Cinema-fashion, we’re going to start with a later film in a filmmaker’s oeuvre that doesn’t quite fit the mold.  Diary of a Chambermaid tells the 1920s-set story of Celestine, a beautiful and confident femme du chambre who takes employment at a large country estate filled with a mix of controlling, repressed, ignorant, perverse, boorish, and murderous characters.  She moves among them with aplomb and a sort of detached participation until a vicious crime leads her to more direct and risky involvement with their sordid world.  Bunuel crafts a steadily-paced and satirizing takedown of French manners and society that leaves it’s viewers unsettled and uncertain about the trajectory of the European political landscape.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be reviewing and discussing Torben Skjodt Jensen’s Carl Th. Dreyer - My Metier (1995).

Luis Bunuel joins illustrious list of directors to be featured on our podcast.  What an honor!  And in classic, Random-Acts-of-Cinema-fashion, we’re going to start with a later film in a filmmaker’s oeuvre that doesn’t quite fit the mold.  Diary of a Chambermaid tells the 1920s-set story of Celestine, a beautiful and confident femme du chambre who takes employment at a large country estate filled with a mix of controlling, repressed, ignorant, perverse, boorish, and murderous characters.  She moves among them with aplomb and a sort of detached participation until a vicious crime leads her to more direct and risky involvement with their sordid world.  Bunuel crafts a steadily-paced and satirizing takedown of French manners and society that leaves it’s viewers unsettled and uncertain about the trajectory of the European political landscape.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be reviewing and discussing Torben Skjodt Jensen’s Carl Th. Dreyer - My Metier (1995).

Reflections, prisms, the dance of car lights across a rain sprinkled window to a Parisian cafe.  It sure looks like we’re reviewing some 1990s art house cinema this week.  And we are are doing exactly that, with the ur-Trois Coleurs trilogy entrant, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique.  This film follows a period in the life of the titular character, played by Irene Jacob, and of her Polish doppelgänger Weronika, played by Jacob as well.  They’re their unexplainable bond is explored through shared sensory experiences and coincidences spanning the continent as each young woman navigates their lives made fraught with emotional poignancy and whimsical happenstance.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be reviewing and discussing Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964).

Reflections, prisms, the dance of car lights across a rain sprinkled window to a Parisian cafe.  It sure looks like we’re reviewing some 1990s art house cinema this week.  And we are are doing exactly that, with the ur-Trois Coleurs trilogy entrant, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique.  This film follows a period in the life of the titular character, played by Irene Jacob, and of her Polish doppelgänger Weronika, played by Jacob as well.  They’re their unexplainable bond is explored through shared sensory experiences and coincidences spanning the continent as each young woman navigates their lives made fraught with emotional poignancy and whimsical happenstance.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be reviewing and discussing Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964).

Now we’re talking.  This is some serious Criterion Collection viewing right here.  Pedro Costa’s docufiction is a snail’s-paced meditation on the lives of the largely Cape Verde immigrants living in the Fontainhas neighborhood of Lisbon, Portugal.  This movie is not concerned with entertaining you.  This movie is not concerned with delighting you.  The rose-colored glasses of studio cinema are nowhere to be found.  Follow Ventura (played by himself) as we walks from home to home, visiting with “his children” as he listens to recitations of their lives marked by the struggles of poverty and oppression.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991).

Now we’re talking.  This is some serious Criterion Collection viewing right here.  Pedro Costa’s docufiction is a snail’s-paced meditation on the lives of the largely Cape Verde immigrants living in the Fontainhas neighborhood of Lisbon, Portugal.  This movie is not concerned with entertaining you.  This movie is not concerned with delighting you.  The rose-colored glasses of studio cinema are nowhere to be found.  Follow Ventura (played by himself) as we walks from home to home, visiting with “his children” as he listens to recitations of their lives marked by the struggles of poverty and oppression.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991).

Ah, if only we could go back to the bohemian nexus of the American folk scene in 1960s Greenwich village.  To be among the beatnicks and intellectuals, musical anthropologists and legendary performers.  Drinking coffee and arguing over varyingly intense leftist ideas.  Living, loving, and just soaking in the timeless music so lionized during this romantic and vibrant time and place.  Or we could just watch Joel and Ethan Cohen’s 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis and enter a bleak, frigid, desperately commerical version of the same place bent on breaking down our titular, self-destructive prototagonist with an endless barage of assaults and indignities.  But, you know, it’s kind of a comedy.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006).

Ah, if only we could go back to the bohemian nexus of the American folk scene in 1960s Greenwich village.  To be among the beatnicks and intellectuals, musical anthropologists and legendary performers.  Drinking coffee and arguing over varyingly intense leftist ideas.  Living, loving, and just soaking in the timeless music so lionized during this romantic and vibrant time and place.  Or we could just watch Joel and Ethan Cohen’s 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis and enter a bleak, frigid, desperately commerical version of the same place bent on breaking down our titular, self-destructive prototagonist with an endless barage of assaults and indignities.  But, you know, it’s kind of a comedy.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006).

A plucky trio of young contributors to the Allied war effort find themselves caught up in a dastardly plot to poor glue in girls’ hair in a small English town. But mostly they all just come to learn about how the shared heritage of America and England is a noble culture worth celebrating. Basically, this is a government-sponsored bit of war-time propaganda, but it is directed by Powell and Pressburger, so that’s something. As the title suggests, it’s kind of related to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but just barely. In the end, this somehow becomes a delightfully charming film. 

If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be watching Joel and Ethan Cohen's Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).