Some Like It Unauthorized

Few movie stars enjoyed the laurels or faced the criticisms that Sidney Poitier did, a historic Best Actor winner and a man accused of abetting all of hollywood’s fantasies of easy racial reconciliation. He played many a saintly character on screen before playing hollywood’s first black (and decidedly self-assured) detective in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. This novel role would allow him to embody the discontent of being black in late 60’s America, and audiences were more than ready for it — they made him the biggest box office draw of the year.

We reflect on how the film has aged, how quickly and dramatically the film landscape was changing with New Hollywood youngsters around the corner, and what it meant to bring together a talented production team that included Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Hal Ashby, and Haskell Wexler.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

We expanded the podcast for this episode and brought in some new voices to help us make sense of Ari Aster's new movie Eddington.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

From our vantage in the US today, we’re not just unaware of the history of african film, we’re unequipped — it’s hard to find documents that go beyond the surface level facts, and in many cases, even the films themselves have only recently been restored and widely released. Ousmane Sembène later in life said that even he did not know where many of his film’s original prints or negatives were. Would we be watching this film for the pod today if not for a restoration by the Scorsese-led World Cinema Project and a home release by Criterion?

It’s also hard to gauge the immediate impact of Sembène’s Black Girl, a film that breaks new ground in a way that few films ever have, because it may have screened mostly to relatively privileged audiences. Large portions of Senegal then could not understand French or read subtitles. What we do know is that it inspired filmmakers and intellectuals in Africa and abroad; Sembène’s acolytes are innumerable. This episode, we talk about the political conditions that brought african perspectives to the screen for the first time, and we talk through questions of intended audience and historical significance as a way of understanding the role cinema has in our lives.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

Mike Nichols. Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Burton. An expletive-filled broadway play. A draconian Hays Code on its last legs. These were the ingredients for a film that would shake hollywood to its core in the mid 60’s. We talk about a notorious production, the scenes that astounded us, and how the film feels like an inspiration for filmmakers like Cassavetes, Aster, and the Safdies.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

French New Wave gets all the publicity, but the Soviet New Wave might be the most astounding development that cinema had seen to date. In this episode, we talk about the precursors to Sergei Parajanov’s career-changing, and medium-changing, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, from Dovzhenko to Tarkovsky, and the films this Ukrainian folk art epic inspired, like Children of Men. We also discuss how folk art and music affects us deeply in this day and age when so much of culture is manufactured and lacking any tradition. And we explain what’s happening in the film plot-wise, with the help of the original short story. 

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

We take a break from the 60’s to discuss the new film from director Celine Song, Materialists, a contemporary romantic drama that has divided audiences. After that, we talk about our trip to the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and some of the standout films shown there from directors like Radu Jude and Hong Sang-soo.

2:09 - Materialists

21:58 - Materialists w/ spoilers

41:59 - Berlinale intro

43:21 - Magic Farm

44:12 - If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

46:45 - Kontinental ‘25

49:46 - What Does that Nature Say to You?

52:04 - Dreams (Sex Love)

57:59 - Dressed in Blue (1983)

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

Agnès Varda arrived as a filmmaker before the french new wave became a known trend (La Pointe Courte, 1955), and endured in the culture decades after it faded from public consciousness. Overlooked doesn’t begin to describe the biases she faced as a young female director; at least one american critic labeled Cléo From 5 to 7 as a derivative clone of earlier new wave films, not aware that Varda had released a stylistically daring feature film before Chabrol, Truffaut, or Godard. Her third film, Le Bonheur, arrived as Godard was being crowned the artiste-du-jour, and while her film shared a jury prize with Polanski’s Repulsion at Berlin, she would receive criticism for the film’s “absurdity” and “immaturity”. To make sense of Le Bonheur’s place in history, we talk second wave feminism, polyamory, and mixing documentary and fiction.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

Jean-Luc Godard’s feature film-shaped provocations have incited eye rolls and ire since the start: in the leftist literary mag Les Lettres Françaises, Louis Marcorelles read Pierrot Le Fou for filth, likening it to “the refusal to construct a film, to tell a story.” But in a later issue of that same publication, poet Louis Aragon settled the score, declaring Godard himself to be “art today.” Godard’s deification says as much about the times as it does the man himself; the 60’s were pretty square, mostly. Youths and the youthful were ready for someone to erase the borders of polite society, and this brash, self-obsessed filmmaker was more than happy to.

We try to match Godard’s freak and mash-up his life, work, his influences and the influenced, and talk it out! 

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

We talk a lot on this show about film festivals, and film itself as a mass-produced art form, redefining the vertices of contact between cultures post-WWII, and Satyajit Ray is one filmmaker that changed countless people’s perceptions of India in the 50’s. We chart his history at the euro festivals as a way of understanding his stature in the wider film world, and we talk about this virtuoso film, and what moved us.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

Bicycle Thieves topped the first BFI Sight and Sound List of the Greatest Films of All Time, published in 1952. Vittorio De Sica’s portrait of an impoverished family, shot all across the real streets of Rome, was the perfect avatar for postwar italian cinema, which astonished audiences and made the cinema of carefully designed sets feel dated and fake in comparison.

So when the new Sight and Sound list arrived in ’62, the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura came two votes short of the #1 spot (and four votes ahead of Bicycle Thieves) signaled a shift in attitudes. De Sica’s neorealism was passé, patronizing, and obvious. Antonioni’s modernism was startlingly provocative, unresolved, and new. Red Desert in ’64 would cap off this series of films set in Italy with soon-to-be ex-partner Monica Vitti, and it challenged audiences more than ever. Critics loved it — but how does it stand up today? We talk about it.

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy