This week Owen and Ralph discuss the early works of a living legend, the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski. His recent poly-form donkey parable EO has led to a BFI retrospective and the long overdue Blu-Ray release of his first four features, made in 1960s Poland. These films and the London-based Deep End represent Skolimowski at his boldest and best. With depth and blocking worthy of Welles or Fellini, and a youthful rebellious spirit to match Jerzy proved he was a globally important cinematic voice. Yet his later international work often falls flat. Owen and Ralph dust off these underrated classics and ponder along the way what makes a truly cinematic image.

This week the boys caught the millennium bug, immersing themselves in films made at the turn of a new technological era. In the late nineties & early aughts filmmakers who dared to dance with digital video could capture compressed, constricted and chaotic footage, often surreptitiously and with new energy. By 2023 the revolt has been contained and the film industry once again dictates what constitutes a legitimate cinematic image.

Owen and Ralph and joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou to reflect on the unique power of this era of filmmaking via a focused selection of DV classics:

FESTEN Thomas Vinterberg (1998)

VISITOR Q Takashi Miike (2001)

LOVE & POP Hideaki Anno (1998)

JULIEN DONKEY-BOY Harmony Korine (1999)

TIMECODE Mike Figgis (2000)

COLOSSAL YOUTH Pedro Costa (2006)

INLAND EMPIRE David Lynch (2006)

UNRELATED Joanna Hogg (2007)

YEAST Mary Bronstein (2008)

Mia Hansen-Love’s latest is a dementia drama with a twist of romance. Always attuned to the intimate she blends naturalistic dialogue with Sirkian melodrama, with affecting performances from Lea Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud and Pascal Gregory. The spectre of Rohmer holds rather than haunts this luscious European arthouse gem. After the long Berlinale hangover One Fine Morning jolted the boys out of their cinematic malaise - this is a morning you want to be awake for.

This week, the boys went on ‘sabbatical’ to Hammersmith; peering under the hood of contemporary Polish film as part of Kinoteka Film Festival. They were reasonably delighted by Anna Kazejak-Dawid’s Ostlundian holiday comedy ‘Fucking Bornholm’ and predictably bored by Marta Minorowicz’s sombre grief feature ‘Illusion’. A review of the Jerzy Skolimowski retrospective is ahead.

This week, we’re taking a closer look at the impressionistic and (later) avant garde filmmaking of Germaine Dulac – particularly that which occupied her activities during the 1920s. For her, this was about “integral filmmaking” (as she called it): the rhythmic collision (and superimposition) of dissonant images and ideas. Clergymen, ballet dancers, fountains, machines. If it all sounds ‘so far, so Leger’, then think again. What she was doing was quite different – and unarguably distinct. Basically, you need to resolve your Dulac lack.

Films covered include: The Seashell and the Clergyman, DISQUE957, Themes and Variations, The Smile of Madame Beudet and Arabesques.

The boys are at the bottom of the Berlinale barrel, and their wallets, and despite a strict diet of doner kebabs they're still struggling to find something meaty in the programme. This time joined by George MacBeth they pore over the last morsels and reflect on the festivals offerings.

Reviewed:

Berlinale intro 0:00:00

Afire/Roter Himmel (Christian Petzold) 0:00:35

Music (Angela Schanelec) 0:15:08

Allensworth (James Benning) 0:23:32

Home Invasion (Graeme Arnfield) 0:37:04

Beasts in the Jungle (Patrick Chiha) 0:40:34

Samsara (Lois Patiño) 0:41:38

She Came To Me (Rebecca Miller) 0:44:43

Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg) 0:48:27

In Water/mul-an-e-seo (Hong Sang-soo) 0:56:16

Berlinale outro 1:06:30

Festival-fog is taking its toll on the boys, so they sympathise with the angst of many of Berlinale's fraught faces:

Willem Defoe’s trapped thief in Inside had them on the edge of their seats, while Vicky Krieps had them on the edge of walking out in Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachman biopic.

But ultimately it was Franz Rogowski's double Berlinale outing, as both a flirty filmmaker in Ira Sach’s Passages and a French foreign legionnaire in Giacomo Abbruzzese Disco Boy that won the lads over, especially Ralph!

Berlinale Intro 0:00:00

Inside - Vasilis Katsoupis 0:21:01

Ingeborg Bachman Journey into the Desert - Margareta von Trotta 0:21:01

Passages - Ira Sachs (R) 0:37:24

Disco Boy - Giacomo Abbruzzese 0:47:49

Le Grand Chariot - Phillippe Garrel 0:56:56

Being in a Place - Luke Fowler/Margaret Tait 01:03:32:19

Seneca - Robert Schwentke 1:11:51

Past Lives - Celine Song 1:19:02:09

Berlinale outro 1:34:26

Orson Welles has secured his place in the filmmaking firmament. But Citizen Kane (1941) – with all its magnate malarky – can roundly overshadow everything he turned his hand to in the decades that followed; his films torn to shreds by philistine producers and Hollywood suits. What remains is a roster of some of the 20th century’s most ebullient and sublime films – from the Magnificent Ambersons (1942) to Fallstaff (1966), and beyond. Here, the lads try to pick their way through the Wellesian terrain – with brief pit stops at the Lafayette Theatre and the deserts of California. Forgive them for not mentioning F is for Fake (1973). The tl;dr? Welles was among America’s greatest formalists; and, even in truncated form, between exile and rapprochement, his work will endure.