Lost in Criterion

Our itinerant samurai expert Donovan H. joins us for this set of three Zatoichi films, giving us some insight into Ichi's sword fighting style and what some of the movies we won't be watching say about Ichi's blindness. As for what we did watch: Kenji Misumi, who directed the first Zatoichi, directs his last two films of the series: Samaritan Zatoichi (1968) and Zatoichi and the Fire Festival (1970). While both suffer from the poor scripts that have accompanied many of Misumi's outings, he at least tries to make visually interesting films as he says goodbye to the series, and Zatoichi and the Fire Festival may be a top tier Zatoichi movie because of it (and the naked bathhouse brawl). Between those two, Kihachi Okamoto (The Sword of Doom and Kill!) drags Toshiro Mifune's Samurai with No Name into the Zatoichi universe in the overly long, surprisingly by the numbers Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970)

It's week six our wandering journey through the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset and we get some of our favorites of the bunch. Zatoichi the Outlaw (Satsuo Yamamoto, 1967) is perhaps the most politically interesting of the films so far, introducing us to an teetotaling anarchist samurai preaching about agricultural co-ops but also showcasing some pretty egregious stereotypes about blind people. Zatoichi Challenged (Kenji Misumui, 1967) gives Zatoichi a kid again, and finds our hero fighting the exploitation of labor, both within a textile sweatshop and to save the kid's dad from forced labor as a porno plate producer. Lastly, Zatoichi and the Fugitives (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1968) is the most blood-soaked (and spurting) Zatoichi we've seen yet but also co-stars the phenomenal Takashi Shimura.

It is week five of the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, which means we are now halfway through! Fittingly for the halfway point, though how could the filmmakers have known, we get three films in which Zatoichi must refrain from violence (but doesn't). Kazuo Miyagawa is once again behind the camera in the beautifully shot Zatoichi's Vengeance (Tokuzō Tanaka, 1966), in which Ichi meets a blind priest who tells him he's a bad guy what because of all the killing. The great Kaneto Shindo pens the script for Zatoichi's Pilgrimage (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1966) in which Ichi takes a sabbatical from killing to go on a pilgrimage of repentance, then immediately kills a man and is stalked by a horse, leading to a fight with some sort of metaphor for imperialism. And lastly Zatoichi's Cane Sword (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1967) is an origin story for Ichi's sword, in which the apprentice of its maker tells Ichi the sword will shatter if it is used to kill any more people (or presumably cut any more Go boards in half), so Ichi gets a real job and tries harder not to kill anyone than in either of the previous two films.

It's week four of nine of our trip through the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset. First up is Zatoichi's Revenge (Akira Inoue, 1965) wherein Ichi faces off against bad guys who are actually maybe too evil for this series. Then it's the mercifully short Zatoichi and the Doomed Man (Kazuo Mori, 1965). And we finish off with Zatoichi and the Chess Expert (Kenji Misumi, 1965) wherein Ichi meets another woman named Otane, makes friends with a board game loving samurai named Jumonji, and there is too much plot but in a good way. 

In week three of our boxset endeavor, we cover Zatoichi's Flashing Sword (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964) which has a series highlight so far Underwater Zatoichi Attack; then Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (Kenji Misumi, 1964) which gives Zatoichi a baby, a phenomenal premise that paves the way for Lone Wolf and Cub (on the horizon at Spine 841); and Adventures of Zatoichi (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1964) in which we get comic relief door-to-door salesmen, Ichi cutting an entire go board in half in one stroke, and a fantastic gag after Ichi fails to kill one of a group of five thugs attacking him.

It's week 2 of the Zatoichi boxset and we get our first taste of what will become a favorite aspect of the films moving forward: Zatoichi versus a corrupt government. That doesn't show up until movie six though, and we've got two others to talk about, too. First up is Zatoichi the Fugitive (Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963) which kicks off with some comedy sumo and sees the return of Otane from the first two films. Then we have Zatoichi on the Road (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1963) where Zatoichi decides that nearly everyone involved in the plot is bad and deserves to die. And we finish up with Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964) which not only brings us that aforementioned bad magistrate but is the most artistically interesting of the series so far, no doubt in part due to the cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa who also shot Rashomon, Ugetsu, Yojimbo, and Floating Weeds across a vast career that also spans five more Zatoichi films that we won't touch for a few more weeks.

Oh boy. Sometimes the Criterion Collection hears a whiff that there's two guys doing a Spine Number podcast and says to themselves, "What can we do to mess this up?" Normally, within the Collection, and therefore within our podcast, each Spine Number release is a single film (or maybe a couple) or a collection of short works. Sometimes a boxset will have it's own number, but if the films in the boxset are features, each will have it's own release. But there are notable exceptions to this rule, boxsets made of feature works that it would not make sense (artistically or financially) to sell individually, so Criterion packages them all together under a single Spine. On exceedingly rare conditions, that single boxset contains over 2000 minutes of material. We cannot talk about 2000 minutes of material in a single episode. This week we start the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset. It contains 25 films released between 1962 and 1973, and we have decided to cover the set by as one bluray disc per episode. There's three films per disc, in chronological order of their release. Yes, that means we'll be spending nine weeks on this set. Our first episode covers The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi, 1962), The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (Kazuo Mori, 1962), and The New Tale of Zatoichi (Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963).

We kick off 2026 with a Michelangelo Antonioni film which totally bodes well. La Notte (1961) is the second of three or four films about middle class discontents in a rapidly changing world, and the last of the four that Criterion has decided to show us. It also caps off nearly two months of Lost in Criterion episodes dealing with divorce or other marital troubles - especially if you cast that net wide enough to count the mother-in-law jokes of The Uninvited and take the title of I Married a Witch at face value. What we're saying is that it feels like someone in a decision making position within Criterion was going through some stuff, and since next week starts a boxset of 25 Samurai films, they are no beating those charges. Anyway, we don't like Antonioni or his stated purposes in making these films, so we once gain must come up with a better interpretation of the story in order to stay interested.

Every December, during the darkest times of the year in our part of the world, we take a little break from our unending Criterion Quest to gather with friends and watch a film that takes place during the winter holidays that is not at all a holiday movie. We may have found the platonic ideal of that concept in this year's offering. According to the intertitles, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), directed by the late William Friedkin and co-written by Freidkin and former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich adapting his own novel, takes place from December 20 to January 30. While many holidays take place during that time period each year, including the anniversary of Lost in Criterion and the birthdays of our two hosts, yet no one in this movie has any loved ones to spend their time with. Instead they are too busy being bad cops. Sure, all cops are bad, but at least in fiction some are competent, here they are morally, tactically, and investigatorially terrible. Our old friend Donovan H. joins us to talk about this bleak midwinter tale.

Lewis Allen only gets one film in the Criterion Collection but it's a pretty fun one. The Uninvited (1944) doesn't have great special effects for a haunted house flick, or especially bad ones which can be fun in their own right, but it does have an over-complicated story about family lies, two ghosts who hate each other, a mean lesbian, and cinematography by Charles Lang Jr. And while the film is allegedly groundbreaking for approaching the haunted house genre with seriousness, it's also got some pretty great jokes (just not the ending one).

René Clair was an early favorite among the filmmakers this project introduced us to. It was a lifetime ago what we watched Le Million (Spine 72), A Nous la Liberte (Spine 160), and Under the Roofs of Paris (Spine 161) but they have stuck with us. And indeed it seems like Clair had lived a lifetime or two between those early 1930s French films and I Married a Witch (1941) just 10 years later, his second film in the US under contract with Paramount. I Married a Witch is a sexy screwball comedy that's perfectly fun to watch, but it's very much not the stories of the lower class that we were primed for from our other films. 

The third and final film in the 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman boxset is another film in a long list of looks at the class and culture of Naples, Italy across time - Rossellini's own Paisan, Rosi's Hands over the City (and his Neapolitan Diary), Garrone's Gomorrah, to name a few. While the story of Journey to Italy (1954) is about a British couple decoupling and recoupling while selling a relative's house, Rossellini says he wanted to make a film where Southern Italians were not viewed like "zoo animals", and indeed our main characters become the curiosities as they have a series of crises while interacting with the common people and tourist sites of Naples, a land that, like India in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, is just too weird for the British mind to comprehend.

The second film in our journey through the Roberto Rossellini Directs Ingrid Bergman boxset doesn't lead either our agnostic or Christian host to denounce the story's conversion narrative like last week's film. Instead, Europe '51 is a tale of a bourgeois woman reacting to tragedy by embracing social solidarity in a pre-Liberation Theology Catholicism, so a St. Francis-like faith that still thinks it needs to be a 3rd way separate from actual socialism. Like Dostoevsky's The Idiot this is a tale of living by the earliest tenets of Christianity in the modern world, and how the modern world will still kill you for it, at least figuratively.

This week we start 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, a boxset containing three of the five films Rossellini and Bergman made together over the course of their 7 year relationship. We've already seen enough variety from Rossellini, chronologically before and after this set in his career - The War Trilogy, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, The Flowers of St. Francis, Il Generale Della Rovere - that we shouldn't be surprised that Stromboli doesn't fit neatly into Italian Neorealism, but still it takes a bit for us to settle into and understand Rossellini's more spiritual approach to filmmaking in this set. While we'll take a minute to accustom ourselves to the spirituality guiding the film, the spirituality of the main character is one we will continue to take issue with. This is definitely the most cynical we've ever been about a film with religious themes.

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.

Claude Lanzmann was hired to make a 120 minute documentary about the Holocaust and turn it in within about 18 months. He did not do this. Instead, acknowledging the truth of the matter, that one could not begin to grasp the inhuman enormity of the Nazi's decimation of the Jewish people of Europe, Lanzmann spent the next decade interviewing survivors of the camps, non-Jewish Poles who lived and worked around the camps, Nazis who ran things, and other witnesses - over 350 hours of footage - and editing it down to the nine and a half hour documentary Shoah (1985) and a number of other shorter documentaries in the decades since.  Because of the emotional (and temporal) magnitude of the film we'll be spending the next three weeks covering this to better give it the time it deserves. Week one is on Shoah Era 1, the first four and a half hours of Shoah, week two will cover the rest of Shoah, and week three will cover the additional materials on the Criterion release including three additional shorter documentaries made by Lanzmann from his original footage.

With Safety Last! (1923, dir. by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor) the Criterion Collection brings us a fantastic introduction to Harold Lloyd only a few years after we introduced him to ourselves watching Grandma's Boy (1922) for a Patreon bonus episode. Safety Last! is a more fun movie than Grandma's Boy, not least of all because there's no Confederate apologia, and Criterion helps us contextualize Lloyd's career with a plethora of additional features including three shorts and the two episodes of The Third Genius, a 1989 career retrospective.

František Vláčil's historical epic Marketa Lazarová (1967) is another example of what happens when an insane artist is at the right place at the right time to be given carte blanche: a breathtaking film stuffed to the brim with beautiful images that seems like it was an absolute nightmare to work on. Fortunately, we didn't have to help make the movie, we just get to watch it.

A few months ago we were surprised to learn that HG Wells, the famed 19th century science fiction writer, survived long enough to comment on film adaptations of his work. This is a silly thing for us to be surprised by, because the man was only 66 when Island of Lost Souls, the movie that he commented on, came out. Just a few years later Alexander Korda hired Wells himself to adapt Wells' futurism work into Things to Come (1936), working with a crack team of art directors and artists including William Cameron Menzies as director, Vincent Korda officially acting as art designer, and a cadre of others including a mostly cut sequence by Hungarian experimental filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy. It's a beautiful film that looks at a future that Wells imagines is not a technocratic dystopia even though that's what he portrays.

To Pat, Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet (1990) feels a lot like a Very Special Episode of a 90s sitcom. Adam tries his best to rescue Pat from that particular abandoned refrigerator, and we arrive at the film as an interesting critique of capitalism in the era of Margaret Thatcher's “There's no such thing as society.” We also get five shorts from an unrealized television project Leigh originally shot in 1975. All six works take interesting looks at working class life.

Haskell Wexler was hired to make a film adaptation of Jack Couffer's The Concrete Wilderness, a 1967 novel that seems a lot like an American version of Barry Hines A Kestral for a Knave which came out the next year. Like some of our other favorite films in the Criterion Collection, Wexler nearly completely rejected the brief and took his adaptation far from the source material to make Medium Cool, a film that retains certain story elements from the book but focuses less on the child protagonist and more on the political education of his mother and the news cameraman job of her new boyfriend. If it were just that, it might be interesting, but what Wexler turns in is a film that mixes that narrative fiction with Cinema Verite documentary on the political powderkeg that is Chicago (and the whole US) in 1968, with fictional characters interacting with real-world events as they actually unfold, culminating in a breathtaking Direct Cinema-esque sequence of one character attending the Democratic National Convention as another wanders through the police riot outside.

The second in our pair of Delmer Daves westerns is certainly the superior movie: taut, beautifully shot, and that theme song! Like last week's film 3:10 to Yuma (1957) stars Glenn Ford, this time playing a villain who seems to have a monopoly on violence 'round these parts being taken in by a farmer (Van Heflin) with a real sense of wanting things to be normal for once. 3:10 to Yuma is also our first movie in the Collection based on the work of Elmore Leonard, a prolific writer whose work has been adapted into dozens of films of a varying quality over the years (from Burt Reynolds' Stick (1985) to Paul Schrader's Touch (1997). Despite there being some truly great films on that list, we won't see anything more from Leonard in this project for about 12 years when we reach the Ranown Westerns boxset at Spine 1186.

Criterion hasn't shown us a lot of classic westerns; this is only our sixth western in a broad definition, and of those only our third made before 1980 (or 1960 for that matter). I don't know if there's any conclusions to be drawn, but it seems a bit weird given how popular the genre has been throughout film history. Anyway, when we do get them, Criterion seems to favor ones that are elevate melodrama to Shakespearean levels, and Delmar Daves Jubal (1956), "Othello on the Range", is firmly in that camp, with an absolutely phenomenal cast to boot.

Our third and final week in the Pierre Etaix boxset brings us the final two movies Etaix directed. The narrative film Le grand amour (1969) is perhaps the most entertaining (and self-aware) director-going-through-a-divorce movie we've ever seen. The documentary Land of Milk and Honey (1971) belongs to our favorite genre of documentary: director hired to make a puff piece turns in an artistic final product that his producers despise (see also Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965)). Unfortunately, it wasn't just the producers that hated Milk and Honey, and Etaix never directed again.

We continue through the Pierre Etaix boxset with two more features and a short. Yo-Yo (1965) is even more of an overt homage to the history of film comedy than anything we've seen from Etaix so far. As Long As You've Got You're Health (1966) is a series of shorts aimed at different aspects of modern French society, not least of the rising car culture. And the short Feeling Good was originally released as part of As Long As... but Etaix re-edited the film in 1971 to take out Feeling Good and add the earlier shot Insomnia in its place.

This week we kick off a boxset of the 1961-71 works of French clown, comedian, and filmmaker (and illustrator and gag writer for Jacques Tati). The collection contains four narrative features and three shorts all co-written (and occasionally co-directed) by Jean-Claude Carrière, who may just be the most represented screenwriter in the Criterion Collection, as well as one documentary. For this first week we cover the shorts Rupture (1961) and Happy Anniversary (1962) and the feature length The Suitor (1962). We also cover the boxset's only substantial extra: Pierre Etaix, un destin animé (2011) a documentary on Etaix by his wife Odile Etaix just before his death.

In 1984 Alex Cox burst onto the scene with Repo Man, a hilarious critique of America's (then unique?) system of credit-capitalism, embodied in the industry of repossessing past-due cars. In a world where it is now possible to not only buy a hamburger today and pay for it next month, but to do so through multiple layers of corporate exploitation that will deliver it right to your door, Repo Man has not lost any of its punch. And the soundtrack is still dang good, too.

Daiei Film's first color film, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953) is an absolutely beautiful film and one of those rare instances where we really wish the Criterion Collection had included any bonus features at all, maybe something on the film's restoration or on Eastmancolor film in Japan. Anything. But we still manage to find something to talk about among the film's striking colors and very Buddhist message.

As the US government was hounding him for various "anti-American"isms, Charlie Chaplin made his first movie since before the war: a black comedy where in lieu of the lovable Tramp (or the Tramp-esque Barber) Chaplin plays a polygamist serial killer. Monsieur Verdoux (1947) isn't so much a change of form for Chaplin, though, as the movie goes through great pains (of misogyny) to make Verdoux sympathetic and gives him a third act monologue that's nearly as great as The Great Dictator's.

Terrence Malick's debut film is a story of America, of wanton violence driving across the great plains. Badlands (1973) isn't just Manifest Destiny marching over the continent; the film's from 1973, it's Vietnam, it's a murderous young man saying "Not that I deserve a medal." Malick hits the ground running with the spiritual lyricism he's known for, and kudos to the Criterion Collection for showing us our new favorite Malick right after showing us our new favorite Bresson.

Robert Bresson makes a prison escape film is the sort of premise that we cannot help but fall for, particularly as A Man Escaped (1956) is also our favorite sub-genre of crime film: the criminal procedural. While we really fell in love (sort of) with the "full Bresson" of Au hasard Balthazar or Mouchette, both a decade later, A Man Escaped takes Bresson's style into a genre we weren't expecting, and it is perfect.

Our hopes were so high for Ministry of Fear (1944). Sure, Carol Reed is the best at adapting Graham Greene novels, but Fritz Lang? He's just one of the best European directors there is. Lang adapting Greene? Making a movie called Ministry of Fear in 1944? We didn't think anything could go wrong. Enter Seton I. Miller, executive producer and screenwriter, a dangerous combination in normal circumstances, but when dealing with a director who famously had little regard for the script, the end result is...not great?

Sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch join forces for the Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault to turn their ethnographic lens on the empirical core and create the foundational text of cinéma vérité. It may be that this is the most truthful a French (or any) documentary had been up to this point, but the film's subjects often seem to be holding back, with many speaking in abstractions about the current political situations. The lack of honesty is further underscored by Criterion including Un été + 50 (2001), a 50-years-later followup where everyone can be a lot more upfront about their political associations, associations that probably would have landed them in jail or worse if mentioned in the original film. And while perfectly understandable -- we also would not like to be in French prison -- it still leaves us wanting for much of the film.

Probably the best acted, best scored, best directed, most beautiful, self-serving justification of being a traitorous jerk ever put to film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) could have been better if it was more true to the real life events that inspired it and less a justification for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committtee. Thank the unions and enjoy your May Day weekend by watching the best movie with the worst politics, or watch Salt of the Earth instead, a film that came out the same year but from people who were named instead of the people doing the naming of names. But we already talked about Salt of the Earth on our Patreon, so now we gotta talk about On the Waterfront.

Similar to the ways that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) reminded us of a modern day version of Breson's Mouchette, their film The Kid with a Bike (2011) feels like an updated The 400 Blows. Of course, the Dardenne's bring their unique style to the story of Cyril and Samantha, once again ending not with an established community, but a shaky hope of one, if we want it.

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a film about enforced austerity, about capitulating to the fascist power structures, about how we can be conditioned into killing ourselves even without a boot directly on our neck because that's the status quo. It's about what we do to others and to ourselves not because we have to but because we've been conditioned to think we have to. "Its power seems inescapable." Also it's an atmospheric fairy tale telling of a of a folkloric practice, a forced abandonment of our most vulnerable, even when they're not really that vulnerable. 

Wim Wenders had planned for years with German Neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch to make a film of her work, but Wenders didn't know how he could do it justice. Then he saw U2 3D (2008) and knew that digital 3D was the technology he needed. Unfortunately, as technology caught up to Wenders' vision, Bausch passed away, and Pina (2011) morphed from just a document of her work into a tribute from Wenders and Bausch's dance troupe. What they create together is an overwhelming piece of art.

In the first 140 Spines of the Criterion Collection there were five Alfred Hitchcock films, leading us to believe we'd be seeing a lot more from him over the years, but it turns out The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first Hitchcock we've watched for the podcast in just shy of a decade. This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood and the movie that introduced Peter Lorre to English speaking audiences. It's a tight little thriller that may also involve a dog turning into a man and getting arrested.

While the first two films in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy were built on filming in particularly locations, in Naqoyqatsi, the image itself becomes the location as editor and "digital cinematographer" Jon Kane takes us into the simulation that is modern life. Unfortunately, like the early unused setpiece footage from Koyaanisqatsi, the tech here has not aged well, though this time Reggio doesn't seem to realize its cheesiness. Sadly, we lost take one of this conversation and Jonathan Hape was not able to join us for the re-recording. He added a lot to our discussion of the first two Qatsi films, and we wish it could have worked out. You should still go to https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ and check out his music.

We continue through Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy with 1988's Powaqqatsi. Reggio works with Phillip Glass again but they lost Ron Fricke for this one and his absence is felt, particularly in the editing. While the first film looked at what US industrialization has done to its own people, Powaqqatsi travels around the world to look at the effects of industrialization on postcolonial peoples. Jonathan Hape joins us again for this journey, and along the way we talk about Reggio's Christian Anarchist and anarcho-primitivist influences, the 1990 Time Warner Earth Day Special, and Roger Ebert missing the point.

We start into Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy this week with what many consider the strongest of the three films, mostly because Ron Fricke's cinematography and editing is masterful in it. Built from scenes of natural beauty and alienating industry with a phenomenal sountrack by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi is a deeply effecting visual poem. Our dear friend Jonathan Hape (https://www.jonathan-hape.com/) joins us for the entire trilogy (probably).

Christopher Nolan's first feature, Following (1998) is a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. The man loves a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. Nolan describes the film as the pinnacle of what he could achieve in a low budget and just working with his friends. which is damning if true because it's just not very interesting.