Return to Form (Return to Form)

The arrival of sound opened a proverbial can of worms in the mute halls of cinema. For ten furious years (1930-1940), the ‘talkie’ would make and break itself again and again. The names are in the history books: Lang, Clair, Lubitsch, Dreyer, Mamoulian, Berkely, Vigo, Mizoguchi, von Sternberg, Hawks, Ford. Etc! But over these same years, cinema would begin to ossify – “where the experiments of 1930 became the shortcuts of 1939”. That’s Eugene Kotlyarenko, speaking in this episode – because he joined us for this episode; clearing a path through the whisper-singsong-chatter-belly laugh-screeching of the decade that made cinema cinema.

A spectre is haunting central London, the spectre of five ebullient young men podcasting outside a pub on a warm night - the occasion is Olaf Nicolai’s Marx, a 24 hour film shown at the ICA this week, which consists entirely of one continuous closely-framed shot of a Karl Marx statue in Chemnitz, Germany. Owen and Ralph are joined by Daniel Neofetou, Matthew Turner and on the phone from Munich, George MacBeth.

This week, we’re slipping into the proverbial cinematic pool with a brief pitstop in Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein-biopic Maestro and a longer look at a luscious new restoration of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000). We also figure out what it means to be ‘Shanghaied’.

'The slightest movement sends reverberations through the viewer' said Scorsese of Greece's old master auteur. The boys locked in for punishing schedule of yearning and distance in snowy and misty conditions. As winter comes down the tracks, why not warm your hands under the projection lamp and witness the transcendent imagery of Theo Angelopoulos. Films covered include: Landscapes in the Mist, The Travelling Players, Suspended Step of the Stork, Voyage to Cythera, Eternity and a Day, The Hunters and The Beekeeper.

In a year when so much felt so over, film seems so beautifully back. Casting their eyes over twelve months, four festivals, and countless hours of chthonic kino encounters, the boys sat down to boil the broth of 2023; setting out to identify their top 10 films of the year. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6hdAjXtGPpeQTCcuJ3KNmH?si=Ud_f__90TOSa28tzYPA5GQ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/muub-tube/id1515030490 Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@returntoformpod 00:00:00 Intro 00:05:18 Honourable mention: Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella) 00:11:11 Honourable mention: Reality (Tina Satter) 00:11:58 Honorable mention: How To Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker) 00:15:17 Totem (Laura Aviles) 00:17:47 Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt) 00:21:59 Allensworth (James Benning) 00:23:46 The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams) 00:25:50 In Water / mul-an-e-seo (Hong Sang-soo) 00:28:10 May December (Todd Haynes) 00:29:48 Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thiên Ân) 00:32:43 One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen Love) 00:35:28 Afire (Christian Petzold) 00:41:49 Samsara (Lois Patiño) 00:43:42 Passages (Ira Sachs) 00:48:09 The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) 00:50:23 The Daughters of Fire (Pedro Costa) 00:51:53 Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice) 00:55:45 Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World (Radu Jude) 00:59:48 Honourable mention: Rotting in the Sun (Sebastian Silva) 01:00:45 The official RTF Top 5

Paul Mescal and Franky Corio star as a father and daughter on their hols in Turkey in the much-hyped feature debut of Charlotte Wells. Despite wearing Chantal Akerman’s influence on her sleeve Wells fails to conjure the formal flare of her heroine, leaning on a few set pieces, some sloppy cinematography and a very dodgy score. Even after 100 minutes under the projection lamp, neither Ralph nor Owen were feeling the burn.

The promise of a Raúl Ruiz film is almost irresistible, vivid colours, dynamic camera movement, non-linearity, pirates! And yet his unique films are little-seen, not quite canon. Ralph and Owen took a bold voyage through his seafaring 1983 classics City of Pirates and Three Crowns of a Sailor and ponder, were these ravishing ripples redolent of an undiscovered new wave, or is it all just naval gazing?

All good things must come to an end. The first of those is our four-episode season on Jean-Luc Godard, coming to a climatic halt with this hour-long chat with a jetlagged Daniel Neofetou. We did Godard the essayist, covering the dense thickets of his Mark Kermode-baiting wonders: IMAGE BOOK, GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, and FILM SOCIALISME.

And the second ‘end’ is MUUB TUBE itself. For seventy-odd episodes, we’ve talked about some of the greatest films ever made. We’ve also done some mids. That, ladies and gentlemen, is showbiz. Now for something else.

See you around, we hope.

Ralph & Owen

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.

In their 2nd despatch from Wroclaw, Owen, Ralph and George cover James Benning’s new structural state of the nation United States of America, Claire Denis’ dodgy lockdown drama Both Sides of the Blade, David Cronenberg’s speculative surgery sci-fi, Michel Franco’s existential Acapulco ennui in Sundown and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s poignant road movie Broker.

The greatest film ever made? Laurels like these come with their own anxiety of influence. Taking pole position in 2022’s decade-awaited Sight & Sound top 100 films list, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman – a 3-hour ‘structural’ film centered on the habitual rituals of everyday, gendered labour – was an unexpected ‘winner’ (whatever that means). Between sex work and schnitzel, the boys unpack precisely how Akerman felt her way through the formal problems and potentials of an avant-garde cinema that was still – resolutely – a cinema of narrative; even as she found daring ways to undermine it. Essential viewing.

The boys are back in town, and the town is Wroclaw, Poland - a sweaty Mecca for cineastes across Europe. Joined by frequent guest George MacBeth, Ralph and Owen dissect Ruben Östlund’s new caustic cruise comedy, Jerzy Skolimowski’s dizzying tale of a downtrodden donkey, Lukas Dhont’s tender childhood tragedy and Ulrich Seidl’s formidable Rimini. Garnish your pierogies and settle in for our first round…

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)

This week the boys are joined by screenwriter James King to discuss one of the most disctinctive voices in world cinema. An audacious arthouse alchemist who wears his influences on his sleeve, an access-all-areas immersion architect who raise moments of intimacy to the level of holy miracles, and a lover of landscape who lingers with as much curiosity on the hills of the Morelos as he does the concrete jungle of Mexico City.

We also speak in depth about the new Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll and Chantal Akerman's triumphant placing on it. To skip to the main event find us at 12-minute mark!

This week, the boys complete their New Horizons derive; casting a wide net over the work of Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, they set sail for Enys Men (his latest) before dipping their oars into Jenkin’s preceding forays into hand-cranked celluloid (Bait and Bronco’s House). Questions. What’s eating contemporary British filmmaking, and how can we escape the leery lobster-pot of hauntological homages and atavistic hauntings? Derrida’s spectres – Fisher’s ghosts. They’re knocking on the door and asking for a cup of sugar. Maybe it’s time we told them to get lost.

Last weekend we dreamed in celluloid, in three-strip technicolor and, crucially, on NITRATE. The BFI's new, hopefully regular, festival dedicated to cinema's technical heritage was a triumph - give or take an opening night. The boys sampled some exhilarating expanded cinema on 16mm by Malcolm Le Grice, some dicy nostalgism from Mark Jenkin, and of course Blood and Sand, Rouben Mamoulian's bullish nitrate delight. Join us for recollections of this sweaty and flickery weekend as we discuss the good, the bad and the flammable.

Plumbing the murky and anodyne depths of German modernity, Christian Petzold – leading light of the Berlin School; protege of artist-filmmaker Harun Farocki – has a bafflingly uneven reputation.

The highs are thrilling and poised; the lows, schlocky and off-note. Why so inconsistent?

To separate the sauer from the succulent, the boys – joined by George MacBeth – set out on a long-distance road trip through the autobahns and service stations that have provided such weirdly compelling settings for his filmmaking – a journey that makes pit-stops at the great (Afire, Gespenster), the so-so (Jerichow, Cuba Libre), and the wurst (Barbara, Phoenix, Transit, Undine).

With a career bookended by moments of brilliance we celebrate a true return to form.

Elaine May's 'Mikey and Nicky' stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as old cronies bickering, and on the run. Cassevetes film 'Husbands' made around the same time, stars Cassavetes himself, Falk again, and Ben Gazarra as a pack of middle class dad bods wearing themselves out with aimless adventures in New York and London. That as maybe today's podcast is about Ralph and Owen: two dirtbag film podcasters with jobs in the creative industry, repressing their feelings, indulging in toxic displays of bravado and generally just not doing the work. And let's be honest, no self-respecting Muub Tube listener would want it any other way.

Nine years have elapsed since the last salvo sprung from the mind of the layabout Leos Carax (remember, he was the director of 2012’s unkempt Holy Motors). Now, Carax brings us Anette. And it's a musical - a sort of sloppy and often sublime mess of a thing that seems as indebted to Bo Burnham as it is Fellini (apes of god, uncanny mannequins, the lot). But is Anette good enough, or does it go out with a whimper? This week, the boys brought their mics along for a post-screening pub chat in order to figure it all out.

Un-reel city, under the brown fog of winter (well, autumn) dawn – a crowd flowed over Picadilly Circus, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Apologies to T.S. Eliot, but London Film Festival 2023 has landed – banging the slush from its shoes, clapping its hands together, and inviting us to step inside the cheugy rooms of Picturehouse bloody Central for two weeks of untapped film. For the first of our festival reports (there’ll be three), we got to grips with some biggies and some smallies: Kore-eda's MONSTER, Breillat’s long-awaited latest, LAST SUMMER, the Camera d’or winning INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL, and a slurry of BFI-funded short films of [muffled cursing] dubious quality, alongside Coppola’s PRISCILLA. Oh, and we filmed the whole thing, just in case you want to see the whites of our eyes. 0:00 Intro 3:59 Last Summer - Catherine Breillat 16:17 British short films and why they’re bad 37:53 Haar - Ben Hecking 50:00 Monster - Hirokazu Kore-eda 1.07:40 Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell - Pham Thien-An 1:25:17 Outro

Watch at:

https://youtu.be/420bIpL7UdM?si=lJ235_IDbgA2Vxkp

Ralph shares some immediate, close-mic reflections on Alain Resnais’s 1963 film Muriel, or the Time of a Return - a whirlwind of desire and deception, full of deft cuts and lost love.

German cinema would be much impoverished without the unique filmmaker and cultural wrangler Alexander Kluge. The boys are joined by George MacBeth to revel in Kluge's most ambitious works, those that oscillate wildly between multiple fictional and documentary forms; including Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, The Power of Emotion, Germany in Autumn and Yesterday Girl 

Battered and broken, their eyes barely staying open, Ralph and Owen are joined by Berlin correspondent George MacBeth for a second heaving helping of LFF. The stakes are high, covering the likes of Radu Jude’s towering DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH OF THE END OF THE WORLD, Steve McQueen’s uneven symphony of OCCUPIED CITY, Mortezai’s unexpectedly bracing EUROPA, Scorcese’s *shrugging emoji* KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, Franco’s divisive MEMORY, Todd Hayne’s blistering MAY DECEMBER, Luna Carmoon’s drab debut HOARD and Sean Price Williams’ promising debut, THE SWEET EAST. And possibly some other things. We’re tired. 0.00 Intro 2.14 Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World - Radu Jude 25.29 Killers of the Flower Moon - Martin Scorsese 44.47 May December - Todd Haynes 55.13 Memory - Michel Franco 1.07.28 The Sweet East - Sean Price Williams 1.20.30 Hoard - Luna Carmoon 1.36.48 Europa - Sudabeh Mortezai 1.53.05 Occupied City - Steve McQueen

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.

LFF may be over, but the takes are not. For their final derive through the halls of contemporary arthouse film, Ralph, Owen, and George take stock of flicks both fair and foul: Jonathan Glazer’s tautly rigorous Zone of Interest, Molly Manning Walker’s spring-breaky debut How to Have Sex, Moin Hussain’s service station sci-fi Sky Peals, Wim Wender’s flabby kunstlerfilm Anselm, Linklater’s poorly-aimed Hit Man, Hamaguchi’s ham-fisted Evil Does Not Exist, Lila Aviles’ raucously intimate Totem, Pedro Costa’s compelling proof-of-concept The Daughters of Fire, and – finally – Close Your Eyes, the much-much awaited return of Victor Erice, in fine and dazzling form. 0:00 Intro 3:09 ZONE OF INTEREST - Jonathan Glazer 34:37 HOW TO HAVE SEX - Molly Manning Walker 57:04 TOTEM - Lila Aviles 1:05:47 HIT MAN - Richard Linklater 1:07:45 ANSELM - Wim Wenders 1:16:26 SKY PEALS - Moin Hussain 1:19:18 EVIL DOES NOT EXIST - Ryusuke Hamaguchi 1:27:12 CLOSE YOUR EYES - Victor Erice 2:01:53 DAUGHTERS OF THE FIRE - Pedro Costa Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6hdAjXtGPpeQTCcuJ3KNmH?si=Ud_f__90TOSa28tzYPA5GQ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/muub-tube/id1515030490 Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@returntoformpod

In this episode, Ralph and Owen journey into the spectral wastes of British film, asking: what went wrong, and what is to be done? Through kitchen sink realism, folk-horror spooks, socially-engaged documentarians, materially-inclined avant-gardism, and more than a handful of oddballs, the situation seems as underwhelming as it was in 1927, when Kenneth Macpherson opined that “it is no good pretending one has any feeling of hope about it”. Ninety-seven years later, is the landscape still as dispiriting – and why did ‘we’ never get our own New Wave – and why are we still stuck in the kitchen sink? Through cash, ‘character’, class, and capital, there’s a lot to unpick. Regardless, the boys do their best to keep the aspidistra flying. Who do they discuss? Who don’t they! Anderson, Macpherson, Grierson, Hogg, Keillor, Reisz, Clark, Watkins, Jarman, Brook, Greenaway, Powell & Pressburger, Reed, Lean, Hitchcock, Loach, Leigh. The lot. 00:00:00:00 Intro 00:04:20:04 Early Silent British film 00:05:27:03 Talent leaving Britain for America 00:06:52:14 British documentaries and municipal filmmaking 00:09:09:17 The Studios of the interwar years 00:12:01:16 Powell and Pressburger 00:15:22:14 Class and politics in film 00:17:56:16 Free Cinema movement 00:24:30:13 Woodfall 00:28:15:05 The Third Man 00:30:37:10 60s-70s studio films/Merchant Ivory 00:31:54:13 60s counterculture 00:35:12:00 Folk horror 00:37:04:09 London Filmmakers Coop 00:48:04:15 Playwrights 00:55:27:00 The Paternalism of Social Realism 01:00:11:03 Pedro Costa as a counterpoint to social realism 01:04:16:13 Peter Watkins 01:09:47:05 Lindsay Anderson making an arse of himself 01:10:55:10 Peter Wollen's 1963 essay on the British New Wave 01:13:10:09 Kenneth MacPherson's 1927 article about British film 01:19:02:16 TV's influence in the 70s-80s 01:19:16:09 Alan Clarke 01:23:05:18 Sally Potter 01:30:10:24 Peter Brook 01:31:47:19 90s 01:32:34:21 British art film/essay films 01:37:09:20 00s and 10s 01:40:06:10 Joanna Hogg 01:43:08:18 Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson) 01:48:13:19 Peter Greenaway 01:55:09:09 Top 5 worst tendencies 01:57:31:14 Alternative Top 5 British films 01:59:59:23 Conclusion Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6hdAjXtGPpeQTCcuJ3KNmH?si=Ud_f__90TOSa28tzYPA5GQ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/muub-tube/id1515030490 Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@returntoformpod

Ralph defends Terence Malick's star-studded late career odyssey of luxury and ennui with a spirited late-night monologue.

Jean Eustache is hard to pin down. A French auteur who combined the brevity of Bresson with the romantic rambling of Rohmer.

Eustache often preferred telling to showing. Yet somehow these moments of gossip and reminiscence are powerfully cinematic. A spell is cast with judicious editing, subtle performances and gentle fades to black.

After a short break the boys return to send new vibrations down your Eustachian tubes, prompted by a recent BFI Southbank retrospective.

Owen takes a long, hard look at Sátántangó - the seven hour magnum opus of Hungarian montage-hater Béla Tarr.

Owen and Ralph discuss Edward Yang - the golden boy of the Taiwanese New Wave. Yang rose to fame with elliptical films like Taipei Story and The Terrorisers - which depicted intimate relationships, strained by modernity and Taiwain’s unique east/west ambivalence. His dense period piece A Brighter Summer Day established a fascination with family dynamics, which he pushed further with his canonised swansong Yi Yi. 

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

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.

As dark clouds empty themselves over Berlin the boys hit a proverbial buffet of international Arthouse cinema - filling their plates with all kinds of quivering delicacies. But not everything goes down easy. In this first instalment we discuss: Berlinale intro 0:00 Manodrome (Trengrove) 1:20 Reality (Satter) 18:17 The Shadowless Tower (Lu Zhang) 30:10 Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (Emily Atef) 46:13 Blackberry (Matt Johnson) 1:07:49 The Survival of Kindness (Rolf De Beer) 1:22:34 Berlinale outro 1:27:22

Between the brooding, overcast skies of LA VIE DE JESUS (1997) and the molten media-sploitation of FRANCE (2021), French filmmaker Bruno Dumont has worn many (often contradictory) hats. But for this one-time enfant terrible of French arthouse cinema, a persistent thread can be carefully picked out. And to begin the work of that tangled unpicking, the boys enlist the support of arch Dumontian George MacBeth. Together, they embark on a careening, freestyle foray through the land of Dumont - from verbal tics and inflating stomachs to car crashes and divinely levitating coppers. It’s an in-depth and necessary look at one of contemporary cinema’s most thrilling auteurs. Strap yourselves in: this is ‘Slow and Furious: Normandy Drift’.

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.

A cinematic late starter, English filmmaker Joanna Hogg has been known for her clinically cool skewerings of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. But then, in 2019, she dropped The Souvenir - a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical account of her own artistic development and trials as a twenty-something film student. Resplendent and eerie, she’s now followed it up with The Souvenir part II - a kaleidoscopic and formally invigorating portrait of the artist as a young graduate. Here, we catch our thoughts on both films, fresh from viewing, before being briefly visited by friend of the pod Lucy Bull. But were we Hogg-tied or Hogg-pilled? Have a listen and find out.

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

The gentrification of a filmmaker. Owen and Ralph compare the avant-garde excitement of Philippe Garrel's classics Le Lit de la Vierge and Le Revelateur (made around May '68) with his more conventional 2017 romantic drama Lover For a Day and wonder where did it all go so regular?

Does length matter? This week Owen and Ralph go for film tapas, sampling the smaller dishes currently warm on the MUBI buffet, including some very recent works made during the Covid-19 lockdown. In this order they discuss:

 

Wind by Marcell Iványi

In My Room by Mati Diop

End of Summer by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Strasbourg 1518 by Jonathan Glazer

Seven Years In May by Affonso Uchoa

In response to unfolding events in America, Owen and Ralph watch a historical documentary about the civil rights movement, including a layman's intro to the films of the LA Rebellion movement. We encourage people to donate to this aggregate of bail and memorial funds https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd

Isabelle Huppert stars in this fiery adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann's classic novel about a writer torn between two unavailable men. Three more unavailable men, Owen, Ralph and their guest Matthew Turner, pick apart this neurotic classic.

We’re Havana a nice time over here. This week, the boys take a look at Mikhail Kalatazov’s sadly sidelined masterpiece, Soy Cuba (1964). It’s propaganda, but not as we know it.

Who’s afraid of structural film? Not special guests Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Daniel Neofetou, who join the boys this week to discuss the adventurous career of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. What is a film when the film is concentrated, elongated, and entirely the sum of its parts? They look at Wavelength (1967), La Region Centrale (1971), "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), and  Cityscape (2019), among others, with a digression via music, composition, and the films of Brakhage and Hollis Frampton.

Who's the daddy? Between the young, flighty romance of À Nos Amours and the earnest soul-searching of Under the Sun of Satan Maurice Pialat carved out a brusque editing style - balanced by tender naturalistic performances. Writer Paige Murphy joins the boys to unpack Pialat's contradictions, spiritually, sexually and cinematically.

Sexy, deranged, and a little bit, er, romantic. This week, the boys go eyeballs deep into Tinto Brass’s 1976 Nazispolitation soft core extravaganza, Salon Kitty. Does something serious stir beneath the covers, or was it just a limp attempt to shock us into submission?

Ida Lupino’s concise parable on marital deception was a source of unexpected empathy for the boys. Well worth your divided attention.

A desperate, misguided venture, driven by vanity and doomed to failure - but enough about Owen and Ralph’s podcasting ambitions, this week they’re joined by Lara Alonso Corona to discuss Kelly Reichardt’s existential western Meek’s Cutoff, a ‘desert poem’ from the dry valleys of the Oregon trail.

This week, the boys immerse themselves in the sensual worlds of Indian director Mani Kaul, specifically Uski Roti, Duvidha and Nazar. Underrated, underappreciated, a king among filmmakers. Sort your shit out, Criterion Collection.

A lone boy is jolted into manhood by the tribulations and traumas of WW2 in Eastern Europe. This is the premise of both Come and See (1985) and The Painted Bird (2019). The boys dig into this deadly double bill with fighting spirit, and find the fine line between epic and exploitation.

This week, the boys take their first podcast plunge into Bergman’s extensive oeuvre. The subject? Autumn Sonata of 1978. An explosively charged chamber piece that does open heart surgery on a tricky mother-daughter relationship. There’s baggage, there's close-ups, and there’s a lot barely concealed angst. Is this Bergman at his “most” Bergman? Probably. But is it his best?

In Lux Aeterna, art-house ingénue Gaspar Noé tackles the dynamics, egos, and erotics of cinema itself; turning the lens on his own (literally) pulsating practice. In a tight 50 minutes, the French-Argentinian filmmaker dissects a failing film set filled with inflated egos and questionable ethics. But is this aesthetically-charged and critically-toothed survey of cinema just another pretentious pump and dump, or is it something deeper? The boys decide.

This week, Owen and Ralph get down and dirty with Gaspar Noé's 2015 erotic psychodrama, Love. A film with balls, and heart, and a lot, lot more.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from? ‘Austria’ you might say, especially if, like Owen and Ralph you’ve spent the past week watching the films of Ulrich Seidl. Whether it’s the mail order bride-doom of The Last Real Men, the heavy petting of Animal Love or the subaltern sex tourism of Paradise Love - Seidl dignifies these desperate souls with attention and acceptance.

This week, Owen and Ralph share some extremely constructive thoughts on a well-intentioned yet gruellingly shallow portrait of late art critic John Berger.

Adam Curtis is back with ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ perhaps his most ambitious documentary series, an emotional history of the modern world, a rich tapestry of complex protagonists and a lot of moody archive and electronic music. Were the boys intellectually energised or did they overdose on the Curtis Kool-Aid?

The swinging sixties clashes with Soviet strictness under the auspices of Marlen Khutsiev, a lesser known Russian auteur, a one-man Russian new wave. We review Ilych’s Gate (1965), its more popular re-cut I Am Twenty (1988), and its flirty follow-up July Rain (1968). Watch out for obnoxious laddish banter, not just from the boys, but from a young Andrei Tarkovsky, whose callous cameo nearly steals the show.

In this first episode, Owen and Ralph take one small step for nobody in particular, and penetrate the pulsating red walls of High Life. Sometimes referred to as 'daddy Issues in Space', other times as 'ASMR Scientist with a French Accent Harvests Your Sperm', veteran director Claire Denis serves up a compelling yet flawed vision of intergalactic pain and punishment.

Dim the lights as Owen and Ralph take a trip down David Lynch's turn-of-the-century mystery noir. Re-assessing their adolescent Lynch obsessions they find a new compassion behind the confusion. Sweet dreams.

What's love got to do with it? Pedro Almodovar's chilling drama about two comatose women and the men who watch over them gets Owen and Ralph animated about desire, trauma and yes, repressed heterosexuality.

Owen keeps the show on the road, reflecting on two recent cinema outings, Godzilla and First Cow.

Obsessive, sexually-frustrated and determined to restore honour to a decadent society. But enough about Owen and Ralph, this week they wipe the white splashes off Paul Schrader's ornate biopic of horny militarian Yukio Mishima and ask: is this Hollywood homage edging or hedging?

This week, there’s ennui on the menui as the boys take on Humanité - Bruno Dumont’s intensely bleak police procedural from 1999. But did video kill the Eurostar? Tune in to find out.

This week, the boys are joined by the pod’s weird-suburbia correspondent Daniel Neofetou to discuss Ham on Rye, an unsettling meal comprised of adolescent yearning, unspoken ritual, and a side of small-town ennui. Fancy a bite?

Owen and Ralph give a sort of semi-enthusiastic yee-haw for Bacurau, the ‘weird western’ from Brazilian directors Kleber Filho and Juliano Dornelles. A town under siege. A bloody standoff. An opioid crisis. Oh my.

Male bonding, professional rivalry, a clash of ideas - but enough about Owen and Ralph, this week they discuss Krzysztof Zanussi’s subtle character study on the friendship between two scientists whose lives have taken divergent paths.

Live from Pottersville, NY, the boys are joined by Daniel Neofetou for a festive foray into Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. But is it, actually? And why is this paean to the American Dream quite so hard to pin down?

It's actually pretty good. Ralph is on strike. 

The boys dive in for a short, sharp dip in this cool 14-minute classic of the American avant-garde by Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hamid. 

Owen and Ralph are joined by special guest Daniel Neofetou to discuss Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, a comic horror bursting with visual effects and the hungry ghosts of war. They discuss the film’s formal experimentation and take a charming detour via Twin Peaks.

Beef’s back on the menu this week as the boys disagree over Alejandro Jodorowsky’s late-career output, The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016). Ravishing, restorative poetry or cringey, non-cinematic fluff? And we’re not just talking about Ralph and Owen’s camera rolls. Let the fight begin!

Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze is the subject of this week’s episode. His folk pastoral The Wishing Tree, with its blend of slapstick and sacrifice, enchants the boys in unequal measure, but they also dig up his Soviet satire Repentance for (partial) inspection. By the halfway mark, zapped of zeal after a year of lockdown film-watching, the boys digress into grassier pastures.

This week, Owen and Ralph take to the stand in defence of The Trial, Orson Welles' horny and hectic adaptation of Kafka's eponymous novel. But they also take a sip from the bottle of Welles' wider life, aided by a sensationalist Netflix documentary and his final, unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind. Has Welles aged well, like the finest of champagnes, or is he just a load of trapped wind? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, your deliberations may begin.

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror”. These lines are uttered, by Jean-Luc Godard himself, in 1983’s Prenom Carmen. Wild of hair, cigar to his lips. A Delphic oracle treading a tightrope between madness and cinema. In the years between 1983 and 1993, Godard turned his camera away from the screeching confections of his revolutionary period, and began to ask bigger and more transcendent questions. Like God. Like the relationship of man and woman. Like love (be it blue-balled or consummated). Languid, soft, graceful. On the surface, these films - Prénom Carmen (1983), Hail Mary/Je vous salue, Marie (1985), and Hélas pour Moi (1993) - look more like film-films; proper ‘arthouse’ stuff. And people have a tendency to disregard them because of this. Hitting middle age, what was Godard really aiming at? And does this period of his prolific filmmaking career still carry the banner of his earliest and most well remembered films? Naturally, Owen and Ralph take up the task of finding out.

Hello, hello, hello, what's all this then? A disappearance, on an Italian island, and the waves that this disappearance makes - and does not make - among a very loosely knit group of bourgeois 'friends'? Why, it's Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. A film that divided its critics, and then united them (a bit like Italy itself, really). But is it good, actually? Unsurprisingly, yes - yes it is. The boys explain why. Plus, a preview of the new cringey Fassbinder biopic 'Enfant Terrible'.

Out of the ashes of Mai '68 rises a very irritating phoenix, the didactic docu-diatribes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and their comrades at the Dziga Vertov Group, who take the collective blame for British Sounds (1969), Wind from the East (1970) and Tout Va Bien (1972). Ralph and Owen pore over the methodology behind the madness, wondering whether a cinema of displeasure can ever liberate an alienated people. Two wrongs don't make a left, guys.

Colonel Kurtz, I presume? This week, the boys deploy to Vietnam for Francis Ford Coppola’s psychedelic exegesis on violence, horror and despair. Is it more myth than movie - and how does war make monsters of us all?

Two moments in Portuguese history, 850 years apart, form the elusive backdrop to this dreamlike tale. The Jester by José Álvaro Morais navigates breakups, blackmail and a battle for independence. Owen and Ralph are provoked by this arduous gem to talk politics, art and failed revolutions, with a side order of Jean-Luc Godard's Hélas Pour Moi and Chris Marker's Grin Without a Cat.

Part 1 of 3: Owen and Ralph delve deep into Jean-Luc Godard’s energetic first decade, a treasure trove or cinephilia, aesthetic innovation and frustrated romance. From the frisson of Breathless to the acid satire of Weekend the boys explore how the Cahier critic became France’s most accomplished auteur. And this is only the start…

 

Full list of films covered:

A bout de souffle, Vivre sa vie, Le Mépris, Band a part, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Week-end

Part of a three-part retrospective on Godard's career.

“Eros and Thanatos, sitting in a tree”, fumbling, groping, and pulling away. This is the psycho-sexual world offered to us by French auteur Catherine Breillat; a controversial figure in European cinema, both celebrated and castigated for her “shock jock and cock-block” sensibility. In a career that has truly spanned the decades, Breillat has cast an unwavering eye at the subjects of sex and desire, of violence and power. This week, the boys go eyes deep; taking a long, hard look at two of her most notorious films: A Real Young Girl (1976) and Fat Girl (2001), with digressions towards Romance, Bluebeard, 36 Fillette and Anatomy of Hell. But could they keep (it) up?

As a little extra Owen and Ralph peer into the pink and gold interiors of Ariane Labed’s 2019 short Olla. A dose of dark comedy, female empowerment, and deep feelings.

Birth, sex, marriage, death. The movement of the stars and the planets, the chopping down of a tree. For Stan Brakhage, the prolific high priest of American experimental cinema, the entirety of existence was under the lens - something both beautiful and mortally terrifying. This week, the boys are joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou to dissect some of Brakhage's most essential works: Anticipation of the Night (1958), Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Mothlight (1963), and Dog Star Man (1961-1964), among many, many others, charting his development from lyrical cinema and toward the so-called 'mythopoeic' style that came to dominate the painterly expressionism of his later films (such as The Dante Quartet, 1987). It's hard, hairy, and long, but really, really worth it.

Mad, ‘bad’ and uncomfortable to watch, Michael Haneke’s films have often plumbed the very depths of what it means to be human in a time of crisis. In 2003’s minimalist apocalyptic chamber piece The Time of the Wolf, the boys find themselves torn: should cinema console us? Or should it lay our souls bare? Timely stuff indeed!

If ‘hell is other people’, then what is a commune exactly? Thomas Vinterberg — divorcee, director, dogmatist — sets his sights on a radical moment in 1970s Denmark, asking how far we’ll go to give up the things, and the people, we love.

It’s loved. It’s loathed. It’s rarely clothed. This week, the boys get hot under the collar discussing Paul Verhoeven’s salacious ‘masterpiece’, Showgirls.

Happy Halloween, you delightful ghouls, and happy twenty-five episodes! This week, the boys fall under the hypnotic spell of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘j-horror’ masterpiece, Cure (Kyua). They also rank every single film they’ve reviewed so far, in an act of righteous folly.

Insider? Outsider? Shakeitallaboutsider? Robert Altman’s career was prolific and paradoxical, but what makes his films so memorable? Perhaps it’s the cat food in The Long Goodbye, or the all-yellow motel in 3 Women, maybe it’s Elliot Gould stuffing his shoes with banknotes at the end of California Split, or the off-kilter interrogation scene in The Player? Joining Owen and Ralph this week is actress Blu Hunt, who shares her own Altman journey and helps us diagnose Hollywood’s Discourse disease.

This week, Owen and Ralph enter the exuberant dreamworld of Fellini’s 8 1/2 - a belly-busting feast for the senses. But did the boys overindulge?

Ever get the feeling you're in the wrong city, or maybe just the wrong genre? A bubbly Parisian dancer (Juliette Binoche) swaps apartments with an uptight Manhattan shrink (William Hurt) while a brooding arthouse auteur (Chantal Akerman) tries her hand at directing a fluffy screwball rom-com. What's the worst that could happen? To make sense of this 'perfect failure' the boys are joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou.

Welcome to Calcutta, or is it Versailles? The boys wade into Marguerite Duras’ woozy chamber play - oozing with promiscuity and desperation - and ask that crucial existential question, are we nearly there yet?

'How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?' So goes the famous tagline to Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's wildly controversial novel of 1955. This week, the boys met IRL to ask why Adrian Lyne bothered to do it again in 1997, taking a madcap detour via the motorways of the male gaze.

 

Ralph introduces Owen to one of his favourite films, The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has, an exuberant but mournful dream journey, transcending linear time and reconciling personal relationships with collective trauma.

Owen and Ralph are joined by Igor Toronyi-Lalic to discuss Éric Rohmer’s charming yet incisive cycle of ‘Comedies and Proverbs’, specifically The Aviator's Wife, Pauline at the Beach and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.  Behind these picture postcards lie questions of fate, desire and some serious object-oriented observation.

This week, the boys wade through the slow anthropological cinema of Ben Rivers - a man obsessed with society and those who live at its edges. A hunchback, a musician, a salty old sailor - a hippie with a finger in his arsehole. Expensively shot, intellectually minded, and glacially paced, are Ben's banks bursting, or do these Rivers run dry? The boys review A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, Slow Action and The Hunchback.

Since his debut in 1980, Pedro Almodovar has become Spain's most cherished auteur. Trashy and transgressive in his trademark Technicolor, Almodovar's cinema of darkly comedic and twisted telenovelas has sensually probed the darker corners of Spanish modernity. Passion, sexuality, drugs, and insanity. His is a world of melodramatic matadors, diffident directors, pouting pimps, and star-crossed lovers, all of whom are searching for something special - and they'll do anything to get it. This is intricate and complex stuff. But striding into the ring to help us grapple with Almodovar are Lucy Bull and Matt Copson. Together, we run a sword through Matador (1986). Law of Desire (1987), and Tie me Up, Tie me Down (1989).