Lost in Criterion

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 Delmer 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.