This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Them! (1954) 3.20.20 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary Track begins at 15:36 — Notes — “Rip & Tear” by Mick Gordon Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950’s by Mark Jancovich — Insightful and engaging book discussing the various forms of monster/horror film produced in America during the 50’s. Jancovich is a talented writer on the horror film, and this book manages to jump from alien invasion narratives, to Roger Corman’s work, to the glut of teenage-themed horror pics, discussing each sub-genre with clarity. I’m unsure whether the book is currently in print, but it remains a valuable resource for anyone interested in studying this era of horror film production. We’ll include some relevant quotes below: “If the 1950’s invasion narratives are considered within this context, it can be seen that rather than legitimating Fordism and its application of scientific-technical rationality to the management of American life, these texts often criticised this system by directly associating the alien with it. It has often been pointed out that the qualities which identify the aliens with the Soviet Union is their lack of feelings and the absence of individual characteristics. It was certainly the case that during the 1950’s, many American critics claimed that in the Soviet Union people were all the same; that they were forced to deny personal feeling and characteristics, and to become more functionaries of the social whole. It should also be noted, however, that, as has been illustrated, it was common in the 1950s for Americans to claim that the efforts of scientific-technical rationality upon their own society was producing the same features within America itself. If the alien was at times identified with Soviet communism, it was also implied that this was only the logical conclusion of certain developments within American society itself. The system of scientific-technical rationality was impersonal, and it oppressed human feelings and emotions. It did not value individual qualities, but attempted to convert people into undifferentiated functionaries of the social whole, functionaries who did not think or act for themselves but were ordered and controlled from without by experts. It is for this reason that even in the most pro-scientific of the 1950’s invasion narratives, the scientists often display a respect for, and a fascination with, the aliens which, it is stressed, represent their ‘ideal’ of a society ordered by scientific-technical rationality” (26). “If the invaders are presented as natural, they are carefully distinguished from associations with ‘human nature’. They are vegetables, insects or reptiles. They are cold-blooded beings which lack what are generally understood to be human feelings or thought processes. They resist anthropomorphism, and are usually presented as little more than biological machines. As a result, the fact that many of the monsters are products of science is significant. These texts often display and anxiety about humanity’s role within the cosmos. The familiar world becomes unstable and potentially dangerous. Science may save us at times, but it also creates a world which we can no longer recognise, a world in which giant ants or man-eating plants threaten to overwhelm us” (27). “The Imagination of Disaster” by Susan Sontag — We didn’t explicitly reference this essay during the show, but it’s one of the fundamental pieces of criticism examining this era of filmmaking and the ways audiences consume destruction on screen. Sontag was generally an excellent writer and critic, and this essay lives up to her reputation. For more conversation relevant to the themes and subtext of Them!, listen to our episodes discussing Starship Troopers (1997), Pacific Rim (2013), Men in Black (1997), and Destr

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… The Band Wagon (1953) 12.19.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track begins at 9:30 — Notes — “The Band Wagon” by Joe McElhaney from Senses of Cinema — Review of The Band Wagon from Senses of Cinema. “Minnelli, Vincente” by Joe McElhaney from Senses of Cinema — Great director profile from Senses of Cinema. “Two-Faced Woman” outtake from The Band Wagon — An excised song from the film. This number further emphasizes Cyd Charisse’s liminal position between Art and Entertainment, and the sets utilize the same art style found in the Isle of the Dead sketch transition. “Ghost singer India Adams appears” by Susan King from Los Angeles Times — This article’s surprisingly brief given its fascinating subject matter, but it still manages to shed some light on India Adams and the practice of ghost singing in Hollywood musicals. “The self-reflexive musical and the myth of entertainment” by Jane Feuer — This links to a PDF of a tremendously insightful essay discussing the concept of spontaneity within the musical genre. Feuer’s discussion of the musical’s valorization of spontaneity and improvisation is incredibly helpful for any examination of The Band Wagon. Genre: The Musical edited by Rick Altman — This is a truly fantastic anthology of essays on the (mostly American) musical. I’m not quite sure if it remains in print, but if you can get your hands on it we highly recommend picking it up. “Vincente Minnelli” by Thomas Elsaesser and “Art and Ideology: Notes on Silk Stockings” by Robin Wood were both helpful in guiding our discussion for this week, but The Band Wagon is mentioned by several more essays as well. We’ll include some relevant passages below: “Vincente Minnelli” by Thomas Elsaesser “For what seems to me essential to all of Minnelli’s films is the fact that his characters are only superficially concerned with a quest, a desire to get somewhere in life, i.e. with any of the forms by which this dynamism rationalizes or sublimates itself. What we have instead, just beneath the surface of the plots, is the working of energy itself, as the ever-changing, fascinating movement of a basic impulse in its encounter with, or victory over, a given reality. The characters’ existence is justified by the incessant struggle in which they engage for total fulfillment, for total gratification of their aesthetic needs, their desire for beauty and harmony, they demand for an identity of their lives with the reality of their dreams. Minnelli’s films are structured so as to give the greatest possible scope to the expansive nature of a certain vitality (call it ‘will’, or libido) – in short, to the confrontation of an inner, dynamic, reality and an outward, static one” (15). “Minnelli’s typical protagonists are all, in a manner of speaking, highly sophisticated and cunning day-dreamers, and the mise en scene follows them, as they go through life, confusing – for good or ill – what is part of their imagination and what is real, and trying to obliterate the difference between what is freedom and what is necessity… What, in this context, characterizes the Minnelli musical is the total and magic victory of the impulse, the vision, over any reality whatsoever. The characters in his musicals transform the world into a reflection of their selves, into a pure expression of their joys and sorrows, of their inner harmony or conflicting states of mind” (15). “Thus defined, the world of the musical becomes a kind of ideal image of the medium itself, the infinitely variable material substance on which the very structure of desire and the imagination can imprint itself, freed from all physical necessity. The quickly changing décor, the transitions in the lighting and the colours of a scene, the freedom of composition, the shift fro

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) 12.13.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track begins at 17:47

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Pitch Black (2000) 12.6.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track begins at 17:30 — Notes — The Cinema Book edited by Pam Cook — I was unable to find the actual Robert Warshow essay online discussing the Western, and I’m not sure why it’s so challenging to find. In the meantime, the ideas in his essay are well-summarized in the section discussing westerns in The Cinema Book.  

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Detour (1945) 11.22.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track begins at 16:35 — Notes — We watched the Criterion Collection release of Detour for our show this week. It’s a wonderful version of the film, and it’s got lots of fun bonus supplemental features as usual. As of the posting of this episode (11.26.19), Detour is also available on The Criterion Channel. “Some Detours to Detour” by Robert Polito from The Current “Ulmer, Edgar G.” by Erik Ulman from Senses of Cinema Detour by Noah Isenberg — The BFI Film Classics book on Detour is as insightful and useful as you’d expect. Isenberg manages to pack in a lot of information and lead introduce lots of additional criticism on the film. “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experience of Exile” by Noah Isenberg from Cinema Journal — Here’s the link a PDF file of this essay. Isenberg discusses Ulmer’s entire career and his life as an Austrian-born émigré in the US, highlighting the ways in which Ulmer’s work can be seen as exploring concepts of exile. It’s a wonderful read. Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton by Andrew Britton, Ed. Barry Keith Grant — Here’s the link to a published collection of Andrew Britton’s film criticism. This was the first time we’ve relied on Britton’s writing in our preparation for the show, and the precision of his insights are genuinely remarkable. Britton avoids over-reliance on structuralist language, and the clarity of his arguments make his writing very enjoyable. We’ll include some of the relevant passages from his essay ‘Detour’ below: “The whole meaning of Detour depends on the fact that Al is incapable of providing the impartial account of the action which convention leads us to expect in first-person narratives… O’Hara and Marlowe [other male noir narrators] are to be thought of simply as speaking the truth, both about themselves and about the narrative world in general. They may be mistaken, but they never equivocate, and their impersonality is never questioned for a moment. Al’s commentary, however, though it is not hypocritical – he plainly believes every word of it – is profoundly self-deceived and systematically unreliable… In fact, Al’s memory of the past is in itself a means of blotting it out, and his commentary, far from serving as the clue which leads us infallibly to the meaning of the narrative action, is like a palimpsest beneath which we may glimpse the traces of the history he has felt comepelled to rewrite” (195). “[Al] has simply concluded this is the way life must be, and the willed (if unconscious) defeatism implicit in his attitude to his blighted career is the first sign of his habitual tendency to attribute his own choices, and their disastrous consequences, to forces external to himself… Ulmer uses these brief, and extraordinarily elliptical, expository sequences to define his hero as a man who lacks all sense of aim and purpose, who is essentially indifferent to everything but what he takes, at a given moment, to be his own interests, and who, above all, instinctively rationalizes his convenience on all occasions, either by absolving himself of responsibility for his actions completely or by providing himself with a spurious but flattering account of his motives” (195-96). “[Vera] clearly sets out to ‘rook’ Al in exactly the way he rooked Haskell, who was in turn preparing to rook his own father, but her spontaneous rapaciousness is actually quite different in kind from that of her male antagonists. The most obvious indication of this difference is the hectoring aggressiveness of her manner. Vera is not a trickster like Al and Haskell, and she does not try to deceive, disarm, or win the con

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… The Death of Stalin (2017) 11.14.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary Track begins at 17:57 — Notes — “What’s Fact and Fiction in The Death of Stalin” by Ellin Stein from Slate The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory by David Macey — This is a wonderfully useful reference guide to various critical terms one might encounter in various field of cultural study. Highly recommended. We’ll include some of the relevant terms from our discussion below: Hyperreality “A term used by Eco (1975) in an essay on the culture of those American museums and theme parks where an illusion of absolute reality is created by holographs, dioramas and detailed reproductions of original works of art. They represent a hyperreal dimension in which the American imagination demands the real thing and, in order to attain it, fabricates the absolute fake. With cynical amusement, Eco describes the facsimile of the bill of sale of Manhattan to be found in museum shops. It looks old, feels old and even smells old. It is almost real. But, Eco points out, its pseudo-antique characters are written in English whereas the original was in Dutch. Hyperreality is the defining characteristic of amusement cities such as Las Vegas or Disneyland ; they are real fakes. They are also more real than the real. The real crocodile in the zoo may be asleep or hiding, but Disneyland’s fake-real crocodiles never fail to appear on cue. Baudrillard also describes Disneyland in these terms, and is fascinated by the way in which it causes the aesthetic to disappear into kitsch and hyperreality (1986). Whilst the notion of hyperreality obviously stems from an encounter between European intellectuals and American culture, hyperreality itself is now more familiar thanks to Eurodisney and the Centerparc holiday resorts which reproduce a semi-tropical climate inside domes in the English countryside.” Panopticism “Expression formed from ‘pan’ and ‘optic’ (‘all-seeing’) and coined by Foucault (1975) to describe a form of power which relies not upon overt repression but upon the constant surveillance of a population and ‘discipline’, or the regimentation of the body. Panopticism is an important feature of modern disciplinary societies. Foucault derives the notion of panopticism from the writings of British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832; see the materials collected as Bentham 1996). Bentham’s original ‘panopticon’ is a model prison. A tower stands at the centre of a hollow circular structure housing a number of individual cells. The tower, which is also circular, is pierced by windows that allow a supervisor to look into the cells without being seen. The individual prisoner never knows whether he is under surveillance or not, and therefore assumes that he is; he is trapped by visibility. For Foucault, the major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a feeling of conscious and permanent visibility that ensures the automatic functioning of a regime of silent discipline. He argues that panopticism is also a structural feature of mental hospitals, educational institutions and factories, and that it introduces a regime of power based upon visibility and silence. Foucault’s study of panopticism and the origins of the modern prison system opens with a diptych contrasting the noisy spectacle of the public judicial torture of the Ancien Regime and the silent discipline of the contemporary prison.” A Companion to Film Comedy edited by Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf — We didn’t make use of them during the episode, but there are several compelling essays here that can provide lots of insight into a film like The Death of Stalin – “The Totalitarian Comedy of Lubitch’s To Be or Not To Be” by Maria DiBattista being the most directly related; itR

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Sherlock Jr. (1924) 11.1.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary Track begins at 10:58 — Notes — Sherlock Jr. (1924) — There’s the link to the Youtube version we watched for this episode. My Wonderful World of Slapstick by Buster Keaton — Here’s the link to Buster’s autobiography. Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. Edited by Andrew Horton — This is the link to the wonderful essay collection we referenced during the episode. This is a truly wonderful collection of essays, with the highlights (for me) being the essays by Henry Jenkins and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Buster Keaton’s work. We’ll include some relevant passages below: “‘This Fellow Keaton Seem to Be the Whole Show’: Buster Keaton, Interrupted Performance, and the Vaudeville Aesthetic” by Henry Jenkins “Vaudeville was streamlined, stripped down to those elements most likely to provoke emotion, building toward a ‘wow climax,’ a moment of peak spectacle calculated to ensure a final burst of applause. Performers often directly addressed the audience or crossed beyond the footlights. Making little attempt to preserve the invisible fourth wall that characterized theatrical realism, vaudeville performers foregrounded the process of performance, often in highly reflexive ways, as when the Keatons structured their performance around Buster’s perpetual disruption of his father’s act and included orchestra members and stagehands as part of the performance. Closely related to this reflexive quality in vaudeville performance was what Neil Harris calls the ‘operational aesthetic,’ a fascination with how things work, with the mechanics and technology of showmanship. Vaudeville was not about telling stories; it was about putting on a show and, more than that, it was about each performer’s individual attempt to stop the show and steal the applause. Vaudeville had little use for the trappings of theatrical realism; it was about the spectacular, the fantastic, and the novel. Vaudeville had little use for continuity, consistency, or unity; it was about fragmentation, transformation, and heterogeneity. The incorporation of this vaudeville tradition was what gave silent screen comedy its intensity and absorption; it was also what made the genre’s absorption into the mainstream of classical Hollywood cinema so problematic. Classical cinema, like theatrical realism, was in the business of telling stories, constructing characters, maintaining continuity, consistency, unity, causality and plausibility. Classical cinema, unlike vaudeville, sought to efface the mechanisms of its production, presenting itself as a coherent, self-contained world cut off from the realm of spectator experience” (36). “In fact, Keaton performs two types of tricks in Sherlock Jr. First, there are the tricks he performs for the camera, his pool table tricks, his acrobatic stunts… his motorcycle riding, his quick-change act, and his demonstration of stock comic turns, such as the sticky paper act or slipping on a banana peel. Here Keaton wants us to watch his performance unfold in continuous space and time so that there can be no escaping our awareness of his mastery. Second, there are the tricks Keaton performs with the camera, special effects such as the doubling of Keaton as he slips into dream or the transformation of the cast of Heart of Peals into their real-world counterparts or editing tricks such as the rapid transformation of space as Keaton struggles to get a foothold in the movie world. Here Keaton wants us to recognize that the camera can make us see things that could not possibly occur” (46-47). “The Detective and the Fool: Or, The Mystery of Manhood in Sherlock Jr.” by Kathleen Rowe Karlyn “The use of the detective as a model for the hero signa

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Dracula (1958) 10.24.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary Track begins at 12:57 — Notes — We watched the Warner Archive release of Dracula for the show this week. Terence Fisher by Peter Hutchings — An engaging and insightful book on the director of many of Hammer’s greatest movies, Terence Fisher. Peter Hutchings is a wonderful writer, and this book fits right in with a lot of his other writing. A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema by David Pirie — This study by David Pirie was one of the foremost academic examinations of the gothic tradition in British filmmaking. The book isn’t exclusively dedicated to Hammer, but Pirie still discusses Hammer films extensively, while also dedicating an entire chapter to Terence Fisher. Recommended for anyone looking to learn some more about Hammer. Dracula: The British Film Guide by Peter Hutchings — Here’s yet another wonderful book on horror from Peter Hutchings. If you’re interested in learning about Dracula specifically, this is the best resource available.

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) 10.18.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track begins at 16:03 — Notes — The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre by Tzvetan Todorov — Here’s a link to Todorov’s book on the Fantastic, which comes up frequently in our discussions of films featuring any supernatural elements – and it’s certainly relevant to any discussion of Scooby-Doo. Both insightful and engaging, there’s a reason this book is a classic of academic criticism. If you’re interested in learning more about the fantastic you can also check this post on Owlcation and then this excerpted PDF chapter on the fantastic Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover — One of the most substantial books discussing the horror genre. We bring it up almost every time we watch a horror film, and it definitely played a role in our discussion of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island as well. — Corrections — Hanna-Barbera shopped out animation of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, along with four other Scooby-Doo direct-to-video films, to Mook Animation in Japan. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain — This is the Anthony Bourdain book Austin couldn’t recall in the middle of the episode. Fantastic book. The Witches Curse is an insane 1962 peplum film directed by Ricardo Freda – highly recommended, by the way. What Austin & Maxx really meant was Scooby-Doo and The Witch’s Ghost (1999).

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Horror Express (1972) 10.28.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary Track begins at 9:05 — Notes — We watched the Arrow Video bluray release of Horror Express for the episode this week. It’s a wonderful release and probably the absolute best way to watch this movie right now. Midnight Movie Monographs: Horror Express by John Connolly — This book is the only major piece of criticism available on the film we could find. It’s equal parts autobiography, history of the production, and examination of the film itself, and it makes for a wonderful read. Recommended to anyone who enjoys this movie and is curious to learn more. Sex, Sadism, Spain, and Cinema: The Spanish Horror Film by Nicholas G. Schlegel — This book discussing Spanish horror cinema includes a chapter on Horror Express and has some worthwhile insights. I haven’t had an opportunity to finish the remainder of the book yet, but it seems like a fantastic choice for anyone curious about Spanish horror cinema. En Casa Contigo — Here’s Silvia Tortosa’s Youtube channel! She posts lots of cooking videos, and she’s currently releasing a lot of Halloween recipes.