Witches, pigs, and thick midlands accents: in this episode we’re discussing Murran, the 1975 teleplay by Nigel Kneale.
When vet Critch arrives at the Bealey farm to treat a mysterious illness in a group of pigs, he’s surprised to discover a growing conspiracy in the village, centered around a suspected witch, Clemson.
For this discussion, I’m excited to be joined by Daniel Kokotajlo, director of Apostasy and the upcoming folk horror film Starve Acre with Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark. Dan knows his folk horror really well and has some fascinating insights on how this inspired Starve Acre, so hope you enjoy listening.
In Cast-Offs, a group of disparate disabled people – like wheelchair user Dan, thalidomide-affected Will, and deaf Carrie – are stranded on a deserted island for 3 months as part of a reality TV show. Cutting between their lives at home before the show and the challenges of living together on the island, Cast-offs takes aim at disability representation with dark humour.
Joining me to chat about this hidden gem is Delyth Thomas, a director across film and TV whose previous credits include all-time fave The Story of Tracy Beaker, as well as episodes of Vera, Silent Witness, Victoria, and working with baby Bella Ramsey in The Worst Witch.
Erica Tremblay joins to discuss Kelly Reichardt's film Certain Women. Erica is the director of new film Fancy Dance, which follows Lily Gladstone as Jax, who searches for her missing sister and cares for her niece, as they prepare for an upcoming powwow.
Erica offers a super insightful analysis of Reichardt's film and walks through casting Lily Gladstone in her own film, her inspirations as a director, and working with the nearly extinct Cayuga language in Fancy Dance. This conversation can't be missed!
Certain Women: in Livingston, Montana, the intersecting lives of three women illuminate tensions between old and new, and male and female, in the American West. Attorney Laura Wells is dealing with an unstable client. Gina is building a period-inspired home with her husband, who has just broken off his affair with Laura. And Jamie, a lonely ranch hand played by Lily Gladstone in her starmaking role, chances into an education law night class and forges a bond with teacher Beth, a junior attorney who works at Laura’s practice.
In this break from normal programming, I sit down with Curzon's Jake Garriock to talk about the historic Curzon Mayfair cinema, which is currently in jeopardy, as well as the importance of cinemas serving their communities, the gorgeous design of Mayfair itself, and my illicit Christmas decorations there in 2019.
Help with the campaign:
Director name lengths, the hazards of POV filming, and guest Ed Lovelace's new film Name Me Lawand; join me and Ed to explore why this 2007 disability drama by Julian Schnabel is so intriguing.
Queer kitsch, the varied career of Jimmi Simpson, and whether 'Charlie's Angels knockoff' is such a bad thing after all. In this episode I'm joined by video essayist Queline Meadows (aka Kikikrazed) to explore why D.E.B.S., a lesbian spy parody directed by Angela Robinson in 2001, is a queer comedy is worth watching.
00:00:02:09 - 00:00:23:09
Will
Hi. I'm Will Webb, and this is why you should watch. In today's episode, we're looking at DEBS, the 2003 spy comedy directed by Angela Robinson. Before we get started, if you aren't subscribed yet, then make sure you are so you don't miss out on another cracking episode in future. And if you could leave a comment and give the video a thumbs up, that would be awesome.
00:00:23:23 - 00:00:25:06
Will
Okay. On with the episode.
00:00:27:06 - 00:00:53:13
Voiceover
Deep within a college exam is a secret test. It measures a student's innate ability to lie, cheat, fight and destroy those who score well are recruited into a secret paramilitary university. Some call them seductress, as some call them spies. Fools call them innocent. They call themselves Debs.
00:00:54:14 - 00:01:21:09
Will
Amy is top of her class at the Debs Academy, where the spies of tomorrow receive their top secret training. But a chance encounter with supervillain Lucy Diamond leads Amy to question her place in Debs, as well as her own sexuality. Joining me to discuss this movie is Queline Meadows, a video essayist whose previous work includes plenty of sight and sound, mentions commissions for the BFI and a physical media release on the film wolfwalkers.
00:01:21:18 - 00:01:25:02
Will
Hope you enjoy our discussion. Hi, Queline, and welcome to the show. Hey.
00:01:25:02 - 00:01:28:00
Queline
Well, thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be here.
00:01:28:00 - 00:01:45:24
Will
Oh, no, thank you. And thank you so much for picking such an interesting film. When I get in touch with people about being in the podcast, what I often say is like, I want to hear about what you think of really interesting films. They don't even have to be good. And I think Debs is like right on the line of being maybe more interesting than good.
00:01:46:03 - 00:02:06:29
Will
I think it's definitely merging the good, but it may not even be good, but we might get into that as we go. I'm happy to have like a fight about it. It's great. And I know that you're a as I use your video essayist and we know each other through discourse, we're part of what I guess we sometimes call in our CVS a collective of video assets who function, who organize remotely.
00:02:06:29 - 00:02:14:09
Will
And one of the things that's come up in that a lot is that you are like a massive rom com fan, particularly Hugh Grant.
00:02:14:09 - 00:02:18:19
Queline
Movies. Yeah, yeah. Notting Hill is is number one for me.
00:02:19:00 - 00:02:21:06
Will
Have you engage with any of the discourse about Notting Hill?
00:02:21:11 - 00:02:22:29
Queline
What's the discourse? What? What?
00:02:23:17 - 00:02:50:03
Will
So Notting Hill, the area of London is a historically black area. It's one of the main historic black areas of London. It's also where our carnival is, is where like the Afro-Caribbean and Caribbean community particular lived from about the fifties onwards. So the fact that Notting Hill, the most famous depiction of this area, features no black cast at all, as far as I can remember, is like quite a discussed point in like for film criticism.
00:02:50:13 - 00:03:12:25
Will
It's interesting because it like it. I think about it as being the the peak of like Blair, Tony Blair like neo liberal cinema because it's basically like imagine a London where there were no black people. Everything was fine in this area. Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, I really like Richard Curtis movies for what they are. I don't have like a great love of rom coms.
00:03:12:25 - 00:03:13:20
Will
Like, I know you do.
00:03:13:23 - 00:03:16:20
Queline
Yeah, I do know that. I love you, girl. You know that at all about Notting Hill?
00:03:16:21 - 00:03:35:10
Will
I will send you off this. There was a like, I guess what we now call adult animation show on BBC three, which was like a teen focused channel. That kind of come and gone from the airwaves over the years over here. And they did a surreal animated sketch show, basically. And one of the sketches was them shooting at Notting Hill.
00:03:35:10 - 00:04:06:01
Will
It came out in 2000 for the program. And so it's like Hugh Grant as a caricature, like wobbling around of a giant has and there's like a big brick wall and armed police, like holding out anyone who's like, I think they're darker than like a certain color scheme. Yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting it's interesting legacy and I've always wanted to think about like doing a Blair Blair romcoms thing because there's also like Billy Elliot from that time is very light of a school of that kind of film.
00:04:06:27 - 00:04:24:28
Will
But I do love Hugh Grant. I have to say, I think he's like a fab actor. And when he's actually trying, which is, I don't know, maybe half the time he can be he can really act. Yeah, but I love his particular brand of just like, awful. He's great. And I like that he can play a villain and a romantic lead with basically the same character.
00:04:25:24 - 00:04:45:00
Will
He never really changes it. Like to think about how he is in Bridget Jones, where he's essentially the bad guy versus how he is in one of my favorites. And I've said that I confess that I've ever tackled music and lyrics. Oh, okay. Yeah. I like it because it has an excellent fake song in it. Oh, yeah, there's not many.
00:04:45:02 - 00:04:46:17
Queline
Pop Goes My Heart. Yeah, yeah.
00:04:47:01 - 00:05:06:22
Will
Oh, yeah. One of my favorite 80 songs that was not made in the eighties. And yeah, I think even the song at the end is quite good. But yeah, as a as a movie overall, it's not great. But I think that that's like the nadir of his rom com experience, right? He kind of after that took a bit of time off and then did Cloud Atlas where he ate someone.
00:05:06:25 - 00:05:07:25
Will
And I think that kind of.
00:05:08:03 - 00:05:08:10
Queline
That.
00:05:08:16 - 00:05:12:16
Will
Gave him and it gave him a new reputation. And now he does gangster movies nicely.
00:05:12:27 - 00:05:15:23
Queline
And he's going to be in the new Dungeons and Dragons movie, too.
00:05:16:24 - 00:05:34:09
Will
He is, indeed. Yeah. I saw a beautiful interview of someone trying to explain to him what a DM was and him thinking it was something to do with BDSM, which is just like he obviously is not engaged at all, which I love. Good for him. I mean, that's fair enough. And so it's fun that you chose a rom com for us to talk about.
00:05:34:09 - 00:05:52:02
Will
We did actually talk about chatting for me and all of the dying girl, which I think is like a really interesting pic, but maybe for another episode. But Depth is a movie that I like, have very fond memories of having seen the first time, and then I have not watched it about a decade until like about a week ago.
00:05:52:09 - 00:05:56:03
Will
And I would love to hear about how you first came to see that.
00:05:56:12 - 00:06:23:02
Queline
Well, when I watch it, today was my sixth time seeing it. The first time I watched it, it was my freshman year of college. I was 18 and I think I was just like making my way through different like lesbian movies like I had seen. But I'm a cheerleader, I think, these days, but I'm a cheerleader is like the first lesbian movie that a lot of like baby gays will watch.
00:06:24:07 - 00:06:39:29
Queline
So I had seen that a million times and then I heard about Debs. I don't even know, probably like Letterboxd or something. So I watched it on like some legal website and yeah, I just thought it was so awesome and fun.
00:06:41:09 - 00:06:45:27
Will
Yeah. How did you watch it? Like you slept in a dorm room sort of environment. Do you watch it with people?
00:06:45:27 - 00:06:47:04
Queline
I watch it with one of my friends.
00:06:47:23 - 00:07:03:19
Will
We I feel like that's a that's that's how I saw it the first time as well. And I feel like that is a better way of doing it because there's something sort of like crowd pleasing about it that I think maybe doesn't hold up if you watch it just on your own. Like I did this by where I watched any new for the first time as well.
00:07:05:00 - 00:07:27:29
Will
I think it would have been about about six, seven years old. Then the L word had come and gone, which is what Andrew Robinson, the director of this, did after Debs. So I actually did one other thing after Debs that we'll talk about in a sec. But yeah, L-word was the next one. And I actually was also going through all the gay movies basically when I was at uni and they had I'd seen but I'm a cheerleader.
00:07:27:29 - 00:07:53:12
Will
It was like 1 a.m. on film for I was just like one of our free to air film channels in the UK. And I, it's not surprising to me that the Debs would come up. I feel like Debs is what IMDB would recommend you if you had just watched. If you'd gone to the page of I'm a Cheerleader, there's about three years between them and I think there was a real move in comedy in general to go towards like more surreal stuff, heightened sort of settings.
00:07:54:25 - 00:08:05:11
Will
And then there's also that like there's a reaction against it. Like Anchorman is like the dividing line, I think, when they start doing like improv instead and that's 2004, which is the same year this came out. It's all right. You've all.
00:08:06:10 - 00:08:07:10
Queline
Got to take your word and.
00:08:07:10 - 00:08:19:04
Will
Release period because it was indie. Yeah, okay. But yeah, I'd heard about it because it won. She won an award at Sundance for the short film The Starter Off. Have you seen the short film?
00:08:19:04 - 00:08:19:15
Queline
No.
00:08:20:20 - 00:08:49:19
Will
So it's essentially the opening title sequence of the film. It's basically like an intro for a fake TV show about Debs and it has like the SAT tests and stuff like that, which is great and it's really fun, a very crowd pleasing. And I think at Sundance they must have been like, Well, fuck, fuck. It's like fun. And I do think that's like the place that it has in the kind of queer cinema canon and in America anyway, because like so many LGBT films are tremendously sad, like for really good reason, but it's nice to have like, like fun.
00:08:50:01 - 00:09:10:10
Will
And I think even but I'm a cheerleader is very much about it's about gay conversion camps, right? Like it's not inherently a fun premise, it's just the way that the film treats it. And so yeah, I would have introduced the plot a little bit, but just to recap it, like Debs basically is about a group of indeterminate aged girls.
00:09:10:10 - 00:09:12:25
Will
I think they're supposed to be like in their early twenties.
00:09:12:25 - 00:09:13:04
Queline
Yeah.
00:09:13:20 - 00:09:44:12
Will
But they're wearing schoolgirl outfits and they tend to institution with a headmistress that seems to be training them for spy work. And no one really knows how they're select, why they're selected as they're selected through the SAT test. And they have a handler who is Michael Clarke Duncan dearly departed massive nerd that he was and yeah it basically uses that as a jumping off point to tell essentially like a coming out story within the context of supervillains and a very cops and robbers way.
00:09:44:12 - 00:09:55:06
Will
So I was wondering like, what hit you about that when you first watched it? Because you I guess you'd seen all the major rom coms by this point, right? You'd seen the holy text. Yeah. The Richard Curtis is the Nancy Meyers.
00:09:55:25 - 00:10:23:15
Queline
Yeah. Well, I think the thing is, especially with like other gay movies, it's like a lot of them, like they're good, but they have to do with like coming out is like a major conflict. Like being gay is a major conflict. Like and with Debs. The the real problem with Amy. Amy, I think is the one who gets the Lucy Diamond.
00:10:23:15 - 00:10:42:18
Queline
It's like, yes, she discovers that she's gay. But to me, like in the film, the problem is just that she's, like, sleeping with the enemy, you know? It's like, not like really an issue that that she's queer. So I just, like that.
00:10:42:18 - 00:10:49:07
Will
I think no one actually mentions it when they find her in bed. They're like, immediately, like, oh, come on. Like, she's the enemy instead of anything else.
00:10:49:10 - 00:11:10:20
Queline
Like someone like Holland, Taylor's character or the headmistress makes a joke, like, Oh, like you wanted to have your collegiate lesbian fling in style. Well, yeah, it's just like it just. And I just. I think it's nice to watch a movie where it's not a big deal that someone's gay. So.
00:11:11:16 - 00:11:34:04
Will
Yeah, and it seems like not unexpected within the context either. One of the things that strikes me really early on is that we meet this super villain character, who's Lucy Diamond, which is his greatest Jordana Brewster, who I think is underrated. I mean, she's very funny and she's very funny in this context. I think the name of her lackey, the actor, could really recognize him.
00:11:34:05 - 00:11:34:17
Queline
Good.
00:11:34:17 - 00:11:34:27
Will
Yes.
00:11:34:27 - 00:11:36:11
Queline
Got played by Jimmi Simpson.
00:11:36:26 - 00:11:55:16
Will
Yeah. Who's like well, these people, he pops up in, like hundreds of things in like small but weird roles. He always plays that character and he's a great kind of counterpoint to her. And we see her like doing some evil plan that looks like she's setting up a hit. And then it turns out to be the she's being set up on a first date with this ex assassin or possibly current assassin.
00:11:56:01 - 00:12:24:25
Will
And what I like about that is that there'
The most obscure pick yet: 2001 cryptic Japanese horror Suicide Club! Joining me for this conversation is Cassiah Joski-Jethi, a writer-director whose previous credits include Catch a Butcher, a BFI Network funded horror. Cassiah's analysis is super interesting and makes this episode a must-listen.
If you have questions about the film, film in general, or anything indietrix-related, get in touch on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Willwebbful
https://twitter.com/indietrixfilm
Cassiah can also be heard on her podcast, One of Us Is A Filmmaker:
https://oneofusisafilmmaker.podbean.com/
indietrix film reviews is a movie review channel hosted by Will Webb with a wide view of cinema, taking in arthouse, indie and blockbuster movies with lots of analysis and discussion.
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/indietrix
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/indietrix
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indietrix
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/Willwebbful/
Transcript:
00;00;02;02 - 00;00;24;10
Will
Hi. I'm Will Webb, and this is why you should watch. In today's episode we're talking about Sion Sono’s 2001 film, Suicide Club. As you might expect from the title, this is a very transgressive film with multiple content warnings around suicide, animal harm and sexual assault. So please be aware of that going into this conversation. In this subversive Japanese horror.
00;00;24;10 - 00;00;47;26
Will
A mass teen suicide sparks a spate of copycat incidents as police and the audience work to untangle the possible motives behind these disparate events. Joining me for this conversation is Cassiah Joksi-Jethi, a writer director whose previous film Catch a Butcher was funded by BFI Network and played at a load of BAFTA qualifying festivals. I can see how you do.
00;00;48;10 - 00;00;50;26
Cassiah
Hi Will, thanks for having me. I'm good. How are you?
00;00;51;09 - 00;00;59;19
Will
I'm really well. It's like I didn't mention in that intro that you always have your own podcast as well, which we should probably like. Let's plug it now and we can chat about it later as well.
00;00;59;24 - 00;01;21;00
Cassiah
Yes. So my podcast is called One of US as a filmmaker, and I actually do it with my brother. We get along like a house on fire and we essentially just chat nonsense about our favourite nostalgic films. So that's, you know, big franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean. But we're going to do episodes on like classics like George of The Jungle, and, you know, those films we watched when we were kids.
00;01;21;12 - 00;01;39;05
Will
George of The Jungle is like my go to when someone says, like, What's the film that really inspired you to be a filmmaker? And it's, I think, a bad answer because it sounds it is a bad film, I think, by and large, from an adult point of view. But I do have a distinct memory of it being the first time I realised that films didn't just like appear.
00;01;39;21 - 00;02;01;14
Will
They were made by people. There's like a talking chimpanzee character, right? Mm hmm. And I remember I was about six when it came out, and I was watching it, like, monkeys don't do that. So someone has taught that monkey to do that thing. And, yeah, it was a super, like, super formative moment. I mentioned it in my NFTS interview and that did not get in so that I really maybe a good thing to not mention.
00;02;01;26 - 00;02;22;14
Cassiah
I hate when people like I have two lists of favourite films, so I have my favourite films which are full of nostalgia that are fun and yes, objectively are probably not great films. And then I have myself more sophisticated group of favourite films, which Suicide Club? Probably falls under. I suppose that they're all valid, like even bad films.
00;02;22;14 - 00;02;32;23
Cassiah
If they get a kid who's five years old, I don't see it in the cinema. When I was five on my birthday. If it gets me into wanting to tell stories, you know, it's a valid film. You know, it's done its job, you know.
00;02;32;24 - 00;02;53;28
Will
I totally agree. And I also like my whole philosophy about film criticism insofar as I can call myself a critic, is that we ought not to talk about watching good films. We ought to talk about watching films. Well, regardless of their quality, like to think about them as attempts by people to tell a story or kind of like engage an audience, even if they suck.
00;02;54;12 - 00;03;17;05
Will
Like a lot of the stuff that I see does. I watched Ant-Man Quantumania the other day in the cinema, which was like just a completely sterile experience, really rough, but it was, you know, there was interesting failures in it, I would say. But it's just the attempt to do things. And there's some stuff I liked very little. But it was that you've chosen probably the most obscure film anyone's chosen for this.
00;03;17;17 - 00;03;39;21
Will
I'd certainly give you like a round of applause for that. This film is only available in the UK on DVD, where second hand copies at sea currently sell for about 28 quid, which is a extortionate price for DVD nowadays. And it's interesting. It's the first film from the director, see on Now, who is a very prolific Japanese director, made a number of very transgressive films.
00;03;39;21 - 00;04;00;29
Will
I think some of them actually kind of cross into like softcore porn kind of territory. He has also recently been accused of sexual misconduct, so we're probably not going to have any further films from him and not for a while. And it's interesting to go into that movie, this movie, kind of knowing that I will put a content warning on this podcast because there is a lot of stuff in this that is very transgressive.
00;04;01;12 - 00;04;15;14
Will
Even, you know, 22 years after it originally came out right from the opening, which I think is like saying that really bears a strong discussion. But what I wanted to start off with is just asking you how it came to be the case that you saw Suicide Club.
00;04;16;19 - 00;04;36;16
Cassiah
So I was staying at my sister's flat in London and back in this must have been 2014 or 2015. And she has an extensive cinema collection. If you went to both our houses, she looks much more than like a filmmaker than I do in terms of the stuff that she has. She has very upscale films, very international films.
00;04;36;26 - 00;05;03;28
Cassiah
And I was just I just that's how I just want to watch something different, you know, pick a film for me and the things you recommended, Suicide Club. And I was like, All right, so I know. And I watched it, and it was one of those films that just stuck with me. And I can't say I don't think again, like you were talking about whether it was a good film or not, I don't think I could quite quantify this film in that way.
00;05;03;28 - 00;05;14;16
Cassiah
It's almost too simplistic and I don't know if it's a good film. That's my honest answer, but it's a film that will stick with you and has a lot to unpack.
00;05;14;21 - 00;05;32;21
Will
I feel like sometimes those the worst films, especially talking from a filmmaking point of view, I often find that the films that really influence me are not films I particularly love. Like I eat the Gaspar Noé film and To The Void is a film that I talk about constantly, kind of like in the context of my work. But actually the film itself, I don't really like it.
00;05;33;04 - 00;05;53;20
Will
I mean, there's plenty of stuff that's interesting in it and I think this is absolutely like the opening I think is like fascinating and it is extremely attention grabbing is probably the way I would describe the whole film, but it starts off with introducing this mass suicide incident where 54 schoolgirls kind of all go and stand on a busy train platform.
00;05;53;20 - 00;06;26;05
Will
So very documentarian style is sort of like long lenses, shaky cameras, and then this carnival music kind of stops up. It's like very jaunty song and they very happily throw themselves in front of a train and all this really kind of like heads exploding, blood spring up of commuters underneath. And I think it's a good microcosm of the whole tone of the film in the sense that it just seesaws between these like this, this very brutal violence and like this weirdly realistic portrayal of everyday life.
00;06;26;24 - 00;07;00;28
Cassiah
Yes. Yeah. I think the film is very unpredictable and that's purposeful. I think in terms of the overall theme and what Sanjana is trying to say, but also his style constantly changes. So you have that opening, which is very documentary style. It's a handheld, very shaky guerilla shot feel, but then you suddenly go into these much more cinematic, slow shots after this main sequence, which is actually quite scary and tense and, you know, very considered camerawork.
00;07;01;09 - 00;07;14;03
Cassiah
It and throughout the whole film, it just changes styles between those two senses. And I think the point is to keep you on edge and to say you don't know where this ride's going to take you.
00;07;14;27 - 00;07;40;04
Will
Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely like the the reviews at the time when you look at them often said that the film feels uneven. And I think that is a deliberate choice. Whether or not that's a good choice, I don't know. But it definitely like produces a very difficult to describe feeling when I describe the plot. At the start of this, I was kind of searching for a way of describing what goes on in it, because there's very little through line.
00;07;40;04 - 00;07;58;11
Will
And if we can talk about spoilers, I'd like you have a main character, ostensibly this police detective who is just killed off with his entire family 30 minutes from the end. Yes. You suddenly have the lost you no further. The film really has no protagonist in a very disarming way.
00;07;59;03 - 00;08;18;20
Cassiah
Yeah, I feel like the protagonist sort of split between, as in this detective, which is called Coda. And then it's almost then switches to this young woman called Miss Mexico, who only then only really appears in the first hour like once, but then is suddenly in it quite a lot in the last 30 minutes.
00;08;18;20 - 00;08;32;18
Will
And likewise, there's this hacker character who looks like she's going to be like a recurring free line in the film, and then she kind of gets ignored for a load of runtime and then gets and I think she gets killed off, but she gets like kidnapped and kind of taken out of action. So she doesn't really feature in the lost vote at all?
00;08;32;21 - 00;08;33;03
Cassiah
No.
00;08;33;07 - 00;09;07;00
Will
Yeah, it's very, very strange. Structurally I do sometimes find out what she Japanese films I think there's a different cultural expectation about the shapes that story can take. Yeah, I often find myself thinking, Oh, we're almost at the end of the movie. And then there's like an hour left film as a Japanese trilogy of, I guess you would call them sci fi films that I really like called 20th Century Boys, which were all released in the same year, like frame ups, the parts really cool idea of a way to release films and likewise like it has just the wildest pacing film to film.
00;09;07;13 - 00;09;33;01
Will
Sometimes you'll spend like 40 minutes with this family and this guy trying to learn how to play guitar after an apocalyptic invasion by aliens or something like that. Like it. Very odd decisions about it, but it's even in the context of Japanese film feels very strange. I guess I would describe it as chaotic. And that's even within the story itself, because there's a sense like one of the things that really drives the first half hour is like the police have this level of confusion about what's going on.
00;09;33;16 - 00;09;39;09
Will
They can't even agree that there's a pattern at all. You know, or that there is, like, something behind it.
00;09;39;15 - 00;10;02;29
Cassiah
Mm hmm. Absolutely. And I think also what you were just talking about, understanding Japanese culture and trying to look into a bit more of the context of the backdrop of the movie. Japanese and Japan has a very high suicide rate. So whether that's something that Saito is trying to sort of dig into, and also interestingly, he grew up in a cult.
00;10;03;10 - 00;10;29;15
Cassiah
So I think the sense of is there a cult behind this? Is this a fad? Is this what's going on? It is quite open to interpretation, but I think it really leans into that in-flow and other people can have on you, whether that's pop culture, whether that
Funfairs, truancy and typewriters: it's time to discuss a bonafide classic, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Joining me for this conversation is Tara Creme, a film composer whose previous credits include documentaries Seahorse and March for Dignity. Tara’ brings her personal journey into cinema to this discussion, making for a fascinating conversation.
If you have questions about the film, film in general, or anything indietrix-related, get in touch on Twitter:
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indietrix film reviews is a movie review channel hosted by Will Webb with a wide view of cinema, taking in arthouse, indie and blockbuster movies with lots of analysis and discussion.
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Transcript:
00:00:02:01 - 00:00:12:27
Will
Hi. I'm Will Webb, and this is why you should watch. In this episode, we're discussing Francois Truffaut's 1959 film, The 400 Blows.
00:00:14:23 - 00:00:16:23
Tara
00:00:17:06 - 00:00:40:29
Will
In this classic coming of age film, young Antoine bunks off school and runs around Paris, returning home to a chaotic domestic situation that he yearns to escape. Joining me for this conversation is Tara Creme, a film composer whose previous credits include documentaries Seahorse and March for Dignity. Tara brings her personal journey into cinema to this discussion, making for a fascinating conversation.
00:00:42:00 - 00:00:42:28
Will
Hi, Tara. How you doing?
00:00:43:14 - 00:00:44:29
Tara
Hi. I'm well, thanks. How are you?
00:00:45:17 - 00:01:12:19
Will
So well. And the thing I left out about that, about you there in that plotted intro is that we've actually worked together on a project as well, which is how I know you so, me and Tara did something I think that's probably quite different to a lot of the rest of your work. A Very like a dodgy is like kind of sampling leads electronic music for a fake BBC magazine show for a short film last year, which was a very fun project and very different for me too, I should say.
00:01:12:21 - 00:01:33:09
Will
We're talking today about like an absolute all time classic movie, much more so than some of the other stuff that we featured here. But it's great to touch on this, these real classic stuff, which is Lazy 59 Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, which I'm reliably informed is actually a really badly translated title. It's not so much as these like hits this kid gets in French.
00:01:33:09 - 00:01:54:09
Will
I think the title means more something like the 400 tricks, the tricks that are played on him, I guess. So we've got this kind of classic to talk about, and it's actually one that I had never watched. I knew very little about going in. Despite all the movies I've seen. Somehow I've managed to leave this off the list, and it'd be great to kick off by talking about how you came to the movie and kind of.
00:01:55:02 - 00:01:59:20
Will
Was it a recommendation for you? Was it one of those like thousand one films to watch before you die type things?
00:02:00:12 - 00:02:28:11
Tara
No, I was really lucky. I had I did French A-level when I was young. And it wasn't going very well. My French, I loved it was hard. It was really hard. We did. We had. But it improved when along with learning about the road system and the wine of Burgundy, we learn films of Truffaut. And it was just this fantastic syllabus which totally turned me on to film.
00:02:28:25 - 00:02:54:00
Tara
And we so I think what we've got to do is we've got to watch the films. All of his films, pretty much in with subtitles and then wrote about it in French. And there were themes like I remember the, the sort of exam themes were things like the role of children and the films of truth or the role of women in the films and Truffaut, things like that.
00:02:54:14 - 00:03:34:25
Tara
And I, I don't actually remember that it was just part of the syllabus, so we would have watched that. And yeah, totally. It saved my French A-level because I suddenly suddenly loved French and kind of studied French really through French cinema. And I used to it just completely turned me on to film and I used to go the used to be the everyman cinema in Hampstead before it got old Posh used to be this kind of rundown, lovely little repertory cinema, and you used to be able to go there and have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake and watch double and triple bills.
00:03:34:25 - 00:03:41:22
Tara
French On a monday afternoon. I don't know. I'm not sure if I was at school or if I had the afternoon off. So but it was very.
00:03:41:23 - 00:03:43:15
Will
Moving and talking with friends did.
00:03:43:16 - 00:03:53:12
Tara
Yes, I was travelling and so on. Whether it's when I was going over there to watch. Yeah, double and triple bills. So that's how I got into, that's how I got to watch the film.
00:03:53:15 - 00:04:10:20
Will
A triple bill is a serious bit of film going. I've never done a triple bill. I've done double bills, and I've sometimes played with the idea of going to the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square to see their like five film overnight screenings. But I cannot I don't think I could do that. I mean, I could sit still for as much as I like a long movie.
00:04:10:27 - 00:04:13:06
Will
I think five different movies is too much for me to get it.
00:04:13:12 - 00:04:34:26
Tara
Yeah, I think the triple bills were quite rare thing. Double bills I did often, but I remember once going to the well, there was one in Kings Cross for a scholar. Yeah, this I remember seeing all night there. But yeah, that was kind of mayhem, really. Everyone was just smoking at the back or people falling asleep in the aisles.
00:04:34:26 - 00:04:40:15
Tara
That was. Yeah, I think I kind of went there late or something. It was. It's too much. Five films the night.
00:04:40:15 - 00:04:57:18
Will
The the school is famous for that stuff isn't it. The I remember going to a talk with one of the guys who ran it, Nick Powell, who unfortunately died last year. And he said the worst thing that they had happened there was that one guy just died in the back row during an overnight because it was in an area that was very rundown in London at time.
00:04:57:18 - 00:05:11:12
Will
It was the King's Cross now is like so gentrified, but it was very rundown. And so a lot of homeless people would come in and basically use it as a cheap or even just like they snuck in a free place to sleep. And yes, old guy just died in the back row. So yeah, what a way to go.
00:05:11:14 - 00:05:28:09
Will
And at a real risk for survival of screening anyway. And I think it's lovely that you found this through A-level language. I mean, I'm just thinking about it as like an example of French language. There's so much like kind of playful and jokey colloquialism as well. I can't imagine how that would have been.
00:05:28:25 - 00:05:29:25
Tara
Yeah, that's so true.
00:05:29:25 - 00:05:45:12
Will
Yeah, I noticed that like Anton's stepdad, I thought it was his dad originally watching the film, but apparently his stepdad. Right. He says he gave him his name at some point. And I don't know if there's like something missing in the French individual in it, but I believe he's a stepdad.
00:05:46:00 - 00:05:47:08
Tara
Yeah, his dad.
00:05:48:00 - 00:06:00:20
Will
And he is like this real clown character who, like, has these recurring kind of bits that he's playing. And I'm assuming some of that stuff just goes right over my head as someone who's not a not a French speaker. So, yeah, that must have been slight.
00:06:00:29 - 00:06:11:23
Tara
Yeah. And I think we I think that was part of what we learnt as well I seem to remember, I mean that was another thing we used to write down these bits of slang I think while watching.
00:06:12:10 - 00:06:29:29
Will
And there's also like this, this corollary to that I guess is quite a lot of the classical French in it. There's love poetry that they study in class. And one of my favourite things about it is that Antoine becomes very briefly like obsessed with Balzac, the, the French author, and like a shrine to him in his little flat, which is, I think, a really funny touch.
00:06:30:28 - 00:06:58:20
Tara
I know it's really, really sweet. He liked this one brilliant little shot of him, him and his best friend. I mean, he's got this lovely best friend, Rene, and there is really a great friendship, a very loyal to each other. They really help each other. And so I don't know if you remember where he's just lying in Rene's on Rennie's sofa with either a cigarette or cigar in his hand, this huge Belzer book.
00:06:58:20 - 00:07:00:18
Tara
And he's like, this, yeah. 14 year old.
00:07:00:24 - 00:07:02:05
Will
Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic.
00:07:02:05 - 00:07:23:21
Tara
And then he has a shrine to him and it was really, really sad scene where he he plagiarising spells up on mistake because he's he's just absorbed spells so much that he by mistake completely right and I say with with all of the words from Balzac.
00:07:24:09 - 00:07:38:10
Will
Which is pretty wide back and actually explained the plot very briefly for those watching, there isn't really much of like a direct high stakes plot. It I mean, some high stakes stuff happens, but it's kind of like a random series of events type plots. And that's one of the things that marks out as part of the French New Wave.
00:07:38:10 - 00:07:57:21
Will
This is like one of the initial films of that film movement. We were watching these black and white almost verité movies in a way that I think to a modern viewer can feel a bit like unnoticeable. I noticed there was lots of like weapons and shaky camera kind of following the kids, and that's these style touches that feel really ubiquitous now.
00:07:57:21 - 00:08:28:07
Will
But back then were like these shattering like three big new ideas to bring in to drama, narrative, film in particular. And so we, we kind of follow Antoine through his daily life, and that's essentially the plot of it. He essentially gets into like a couple of scrapes. They get bigger and bigger stakes as they go on, which kind of climaxes in him ultimately entering the justice system, having stolen a very bad idea, stole a typewriter as one of the kids at the borstal tells him afterwards because they have zero members.
00:08:28:07 - 00:08:48:08
Will
Right. So they're really bad. Still. Yeah. So he has Rene who's this guy who seems to live in very different circumstances to him. His parents are also quite absent from his life. He has a rich dad and his mum, which apparently deliberately avoiding him and finding a son. He lives in this big gaff, which is where Antoine, when things get to heart of his parents, goes in like hides out there.
00:08:48:26 - 00:09:09:22
Will
We've read as well, and they also bank off school a lot. So that's a lot of the structure of the film is like that not going to school or getting into trouble at school and then deciding to avoid it following day and notably near the start of the movie, they go to a funfair which kind of kicks off the plot as much as it ever is, one because he sees his mum kissing another man on the street.
00:09:09:22 - 00:09:35:04
Will
So yeah, it's this kind of story of these kids who are very much adrift and very loose from society, really. But I was touched by that central performance from Jean-Pierre Lourd, I think is his name, which is this lovely and kind of sensitive performance. You know, he plays this boisterous kid who's trying to, like, construct his own identity, but he's always zipped up tight and is kind of grim and very closed in and quiet, prone to bursts of anger.
00:09:35:15 - 00:09:42:23
Will
And then opposite him is Rene, who is much more of a kind of fast walker and and then maybe more of a thinker with a group of things that.
00:09:43:16 - 00:10:13:24
Tara
Hmm, yeah. And yeah, I agree. The performance of Jean-Pierre is just fantastic. And do you know the story that he worked? He sort of he worked with him in successive films after this one. So he kind of took I mean, I think he was an actor. Oh, no, he wasn't an actor. And I mean, never acted before. But his mother once and that and so he kind of, you know, it wasn't unknown to the business, but he he'd never ac
00:00:01:11 - 00:00:38:10
Will
Hi. I'm Will Webb. And this is why you should watch. This episode of the podcast is a little different as instead of talking about an inspiration, we're talking about the director's own work. In this episode, I'm joined by Carla Simon, a writer-director whose second film Alcarras tells the story of the Solo family, peach farmers who are being evicted from their land in the titular area of Spain.
00:00:38:21 - 00:01:00:06
Will
Alcarras won the Golden Bear at Berlinale and is now in UK cinemas before releasing internationally on movie later in the year. And just a note, this conversation was recorded for Zoom. So apologies for any quality issues. Hi Carla, how you doing?
00:01:00:15 - 00:01:01:15
Carla
Good, thank you.
00:01:02:08 - 00:01:23:20
Will
So I'm hoping that everyone listening has already seen Summer 1993. And if they haven't, it's currently on MUBI in the UK, so I highly recommend they go and see it. But I wanted to start off by talking about how that's kind of different to this film. Summer 93 has a very specific autobiographical feel to it. It essentially tells your childhood story right in a fictionalised way.
00:01:23:20 - 00:01:32:19
Will
And I know that Alcarras draws on some of your family experience but isn't so autobiographical. So I wonder if we could start off by talking about that kind of transition of work.
00:01:33:03 - 00:02:07:24
Carla
Yes. I mean, it's so close to me and to my family and carers, but it's not like the real Alcarras mainly because the plot is is fiction. But the truth of it is that my uncles live in Alcarras, a small village, and this is like my mum's family business. So I didn't grow up. I grew up in the village that is portrayed in Summer 1993, but I used to go and still go very often to Alcarras for Christmas and summer holidays.
00:02:08:09 - 00:02:36:14
Carla
So just to spend time with my family. So it's a place that still for me, it was very important to investigate properly, to to be able to talk from the inside of this family. But but it was some somehow close to me and the plot, the political game when I when my father died and because it was the first time that I saw what would happen if one day these trees, you know, that they could be made.
00:02:37:17 - 00:02:55:08
Carla
And there's a space that we all share as a family. These appear now because when you have a very new family, it makes you think, well, this kind of thing. And then and then even if my family still could be repeated, then I hope they will be for a long time because my cousin wants to do to keep here in the land.
00:02:55:08 - 00:03:17:01
Carla
And I realised that this was something that was happening to many families that they have delayed the land because it's no longer sustainable nor as big as it used to be before. Because food, just to give a lot of money to the area, but now because the prices are changing all the time, it's important to live out of it now.
00:03:17:13 - 00:03:30:09
Carla
So yeah, so the plot came more, but yeah, it's in this thing about my grandfather and then also talking a lot to my, my uncle and learning about what was happening in the area.
00:03:30:19 - 00:03:46:01
Will
So I wonder, is there like an author avatar for you in in Alcarras? I know there's like I think it's one of the aunts, right? One of the three siblings comes from Barcelona, I think, to to the farm regularly. So is that kind of closer to you than the other characters?
00:03:46:14 - 00:04:20:01
Carla
Well, this one would be closer to my mum because she left the village when she was 18 with my dad and they and then they went to live in this other village that it's portrayed in summer 1993. And and she goes there just from time to time. And it's funny because this character is portrayed by my sister, who obviously knows my mom and like he's a professional actor, so she's the only professional actors in the family casting.
00:04:20:01 - 00:04:53:03
Carla
And I would say that if these guys that that I relate to, it would be mature enough with the teenager again because, you know, she's in this age where she starts discovering the other world, knowing and understanding that adult also make mistakes and and fight each other and this kind of things. And so I remember very well when I was like 12, 13, 14, that suddenly yeah, the perspective of the family for me tend to load.
00:04:53:03 - 00:05:08:15
Carla
Then I had this like observational attitude to know that actually I relate to my, my desire to make films that way and also so yeah, so I like this guide because I feel I could be behave.
00:05:09:14 - 00:05:27:11
Will
It's funny, I watched the film with my family over Christmas and it was interesting to see we would talk about it as an ensemble film, but then like, is there a main character or is there someone who you follow more who the audience kind of relates to? And I think it probably is Marianna Like for me, for us it was anyway.
00:05:27:11 - 00:05:48:14
Will
And I wonder if that's because of everyone. I think she gets the clearest emotional kind of journey in the film, that wonderful bit with the dance that she doesn't do at the end, you know, like, yeah, so much about it. It sort of ambition in that context. And I got to say, like, I think for me the, the big thing I like about your work is the, is the, the family story kind of focus.
00:05:48:18 - 00:06:08:16
Will
And I have a really big family. I have a kind of I have two sets of family. So my parents are divorced and both sides of the family are massive. And so it's it's great to see stuff like this, this moment of family bliss in Alcatraz, where they eat snails, I think. And yeah. Have a pool party. That's kind of.
00:06:08:16 - 00:06:33:05
Will
Yeah, yeah. Very, very relatable. They're like all the eating and shouting at the table is very much a family thing to do. Yeah, yeah. And that's why, you know, I'm kind of interested in that. You have quite a lot of stuff that feels universal in those films, but also plenty of very specific stuff. And there's one thing that I was wondering or rewatching about not having much context on, which is about the Spanish Civil War background that comes up in Alcatraz.
00:06:33:23 - 00:06:42:16
Will
And I wonder if you could speak on that. I particularly interested in as a song that recurs throughout the film, and I was wondering if that's related to that era. Is that specific to that?
00:06:42:24 - 00:06:49:12
Carla
The song that the grandfather sings and then the. Yeah, no, it's older than the Civil War.
00:06:49:19 - 00:06:50:02
Will
Okay.
00:06:50:04 - 00:07:21:09
Carla
Yeah, it's actually it's funny because it was very hard to find if we wanted to, to find a song from the area, which was complicated because not many songs go from generation to generation have been kind of slow recorded. So when we ask them, there was not like, like a big consensus about which song we should put not so we ended up finding this one that was it was recorded recently only because the original was released.
00:07:21:19 - 00:08:00:01
Carla
So it was only in the church, but then it kind of transformed to something else and became mega-popular. So, but we liked this song because it was an easy to sing and at the same time it doesn't have lyrics because it's this kind of lead that you make up while you're singing. Okay? So we end up like building the leaks through another song, which is called The Songs of Harvesting, Harvesting, not so songs that they used to do, thinking well, being the hope and and the song is very difficult to sing.
00:08:00:01 - 00:08:27:06
Carla
So that's why we kind of mixed both. And in there many recorded lyrics for this one. Most though at the end it was a mix of both, but it's not like it didn't like The Beast, but it feels like this kind of so many different. Yeah, and the thing about the Civil War. Yeah, for us it was very important because you know, in the in Spain we haven't quite well the song cycle memory.
00:08:27:07 - 00:08:48:18
Carla
No. And the end is still the Civil War. There are some in some places that are still female and still present. And this and calculating in the border between Catalonia and that is one which means that there were a lot of bad things. And you can still you know, you go around in the landscape and you can still find bunkers where they that they used in the Civil War.
00:08:48:18 - 00:09:12:13
Carla
And so to be present in the landscape, immersing in the memory of the families and and because the ownership of the land has always been something that it's a problem, you know, like it's never a good fix. Not so that's where it makes sense to kind of, you know, recall something that, again, that happened during the Civil War that people invade.
00:09:12:13 - 00:09:21:15
Carla
And then at some point this has to end because until when you have to kind of invade this kind of a context that we're the war now.
00:09:21:18 - 00:09:38:11
Will
When I watch this film, I was struck by there's this kind of like free things going on. There's this political story about like the specific thing to do with the peach farmers. And then there's a subtext about in general, modernity and tradition, like in the way in which the young people are trying to work out where they're going to be like, are they going to be farmers?
00:09:38:11 - 00:09:57:03
Will
Are they going to go out and do other stuff? And they have a complex relationship with their family for that. And then there's just this emotional story underneath about family. And I liked how they all kind of into motivated each other. I guess I would say like I was struck the. Is it Roger Rodger? Yeah. He's the he's the son.
00:09:57:03 - 00:10:14:15
Will
And cultivating his own weed on the farm is a very modern thing for him to do. And yet it is also a traditional thing. He's the one who grows the vegetables on the farm as well. Right? He grows the little like allotments. And I love that. That's kind of him trying to find his own path to that tradition via modernity.
00:10:14:15 - 00:10:16:16
Will
Yeah. Yeah. Some interesting stuff in that.
00:10:17:02 - 00:10:50:20
Carla
No, but it's funny that you say this like three lines, but for me, there's always a I have this theory that it's made for some when I to that you need to make films not that kind of go together and then you balance them. And in this case it was obviously the land one of the themes and then the family guy, you know, and then in the case of someone need the the beef of the girl and the the process of adoption and adaptation in this meal.
00:10:50:20 - 00:11:35:22
Carla
How not a thing was also like the family somehow that that was newly created not so so yeah so it was a way to kind of yeah and I always feel like what's more important not that it's like the big plot is the land and it has to kind of keep going. But for me, I think a lot of attention to so many dynamics because this with a lot, of course, you know so it's finding this equilibrium not with you are saying about the the women that this is that was very funny because when we show the film in India or well Paris, when they saw the film, the cornfield, they were really laughing because
00:11:35:22 - 00:11:59:22
Carla
they knew that that would was in say no and because they all everyone the plan might want to trees in a cornfield. So this is something that that they've been doing for a long time now there's something to this because because Polish the police have drones so they know where it is. Yeah. Okay. It's getting more complicated now.
00:12:00:13 - 00:12:35:19
Carla
But in any case, for me, it was interesting that Brazil was suggesting like like, yeah, you can even call it traditional or modern way of of growing vegetables because he from time to time, he talks about ecological and not and for me, this is the future. So if there is any hope on, you know, cultivate the land in a small family business or in this business or in a small in dinner and being respectful with the land with made ecological adequate or not.
00:12:36:02 - 00:12:58:10
Carla
And in Spain where to to to do this transition mainly because it takes them. So a family that wants to go from traditional agriculture to a ecological agriculture, it takes about four or five years, which is really hard to, you know, to sustain if yeah, of course, you know, for like these years to not have any income, it's really complicated.
00:12:58:20 - 00:13:21:06
Carla
But for me it's the future because it doesn't make sense that, you know, I mean, the climate change here, we still cultivate the land in like big companies that explore it. So that's why you have this aim to kind of not not use the the products. No, I don't know how you call it in English, but the the chemical.
00:13:21:06 - 00:13:27:03
Will
Like pesticides, that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course you can't do that of weed because otherwise anyone ends up smoking it.
00:13:27:03 - 00:13:28:08
Carla
So yeah.
00:13:28:15 - 00:13:53:24
Will
Yeah. So I was thinking about what you were saying about having all the themes overlap and in summer night you free. One of my favourite recurring things is the the main character. Like her prayers,
Want to see Michael Caine's John Lennon impression?
In a dystopian future where mankind is infertile, Theo lives a disaffected existence until his ex-wife employs him to escort a young refugee across the UK, unaware that she is the only known pregnant woman in the world.
Joining me for this conversation is James DeLisio, one of the hosts of the Socratic Cinema podcast, as well as a maker of video essays on their YouTube channel. James has some fascinating insights into the movie, so I hope you enjoy listening.
Listen to our chat to find out more.
Cowboys! Country songs! John Wayne's sensitive side!
In this classic western, a stubborn small-town sheriff rounds up a posse, including the town drunk, a young stranger and a disabled old man to keep a criminal in jail, away from the reach of his ruthless rancher brother.
Joining me for this conversation is Will DiGravio, a video essayist and podcaster who brings a very special expertise in Rio Bravo to the table. Listen to our chat to find out more.
Transcript:
00:03:05:22 - 00:03:06:17
Will Webb
Hi Will. How you doing?
00:03:07:03 - 00:03:14:12
Will di Gravio
I'm doing great. Thank you so much. Great to be here and excited to talk Rio Bravo. Excellent. Excellent summary.
00:03:15:10 - 00:03:35:13
Will Webb
Thank you very much. Yeah, it's it's interesting film to summarize, isn't it? Because so much of it is actually short on plot. I think there's not much plot to the film. Not many things happen, which is a real surprise for things commercial as the Western. But before we get into that, I want to talk to you about your like your background and kind of how you come to film.
00:03:35:29 - 00:03:51:04
Will Webb
And the biggest thing that I know about you is that you run the video essay podcast, which is this like in, in what I think is quite a niche subject. Sometimes though, the world of making video essays and it's specifically for making video essays or at least talking about them in ways that are related to the making of them.
00:03:52:18 - 00:03:59:22
Will Webb
If you could tell me about how you came to that and what kind of brought you to video essay or video graphic criticism? As I've newly discovered it's called?
00:04:00:21 - 00:04:24:18
Will di Gravio
Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's great to be here. And I occupy a weird space in the video essay world because I think I'm more associated people. Maybe considering more as an interviewer and podcaster than an actual video essayist, although I am trying to make more and more video essays. The short story is I went to a school called Middlebury College to get my undergraduate degree, which is in the United States in Vermont.
00:04:24:29 - 00:04:45:18
Will di Gravio
It's a small liberal arts college. And there I the idea behind the liberal arts college system is that you're not really supposed to know what you want to study when you go in. They force you to take a bunch of different classes. And so I started off as a political science major and taking some econ classes did terrible in econ, like the worst grades I ever got.
00:04:46:13 - 00:05:01:26
Will di Gravio
Kind of got bored with the political science and was like, you know, maybe I want to be an English major deep down because I started to develop this interest in journalism. So I was like, okay, maybe I should try to become like a better writer. Didn't I like a lot of the classes I took? But then because of the liberal arts, you have to take something in the arts.
00:05:01:26 - 00:05:19:09
Will di Gravio
So I was like, Oh, okay, I like movies. Let's take film class. And then it's kind of like Boom by world changed. First screening was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and I kind of just like sat there with my mouth open and just like, wow, this is like the best thing I'd ever seen. I want to keep doing this.
00:05:19:11 - 00:05:52:27
Will di Gravio
From there, it was kind of off to the races. I was very lucky to study under Jason Martell and Christian Keatley, which if you're familiar with video essays in particular, the academic audio visual essay are two leaders in the field and they run this program for scholars where they essentially train them how to make video essays. As you can imagine, you know, a scholar who's been in the field 20 years, knows a lot about film, can write eloquently about film or TV or whatever moving image, but doesn't might not know how to use Adobe Premiere, which is obviously one of the most important things.
00:05:53:11 - 00:06:12:05
Will di Gravio
And it so that they teach those skills while also advocating for the form itself in the field. And so I was actually working as a journalist at a local newspaper in the town of Middlebury, and Jason invited me to cover this for the newspaper because it was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities here in the United States, the workshop.
00:06:12:05 - 00:06:29:21
Will di Gravio
So it's kind of big deal. A small town with 8000 people in Vermont, right? So I went and covered it. It was kind of like, whoa, this is really cool. So I enrolled in Jason's class the following fall, fell in love with it was like, You know what? Amidst the media, I'm interested in film. I'm just going to become a film major.
00:06:30:10 - 00:06:48:25
Will di Gravio
And I actually started off declaring a major in film and media because I was interested in, like I said, in journalism, I thought maybe I'll write something on like conservative television or something like that. But then I just started watching these amazing movies. I discovered Hitchcock. I discovered Spike Lee and experimental works like my Darren. And I was like, okay, this is what I want to do.
00:06:48:25 - 00:07:08:20
Will di Gravio
I'm a film studies guy, so that's kind of my origin story. But, you know, growing up, I never really watched a lot of movies. It just wasn't something that I did or my family did. Not a bad way. It's just, you know, people watch it and do certain things. And so I have a lot of gaps in my movie watching and I've been working to fill them for a while.
00:07:09:17 - 00:07:41:12
Will di Gravio
But I did stumble across Rio Bravo at one point, which is very serendipitous, and perhaps you can touch on that later. But yeah, so so for me, ever since 2017, it's been just about trying to engage myself in film studies and videographer criticism I found exciting because it seemed kind of like an untapped terrain, you know, and wanting to think about films and to do film criticism like, you know, you want something like an amazing for the first time, you're like, Oh my God, I'm so excited about this.
00:07:41:12 - 00:07:58:17
Will di Gravio
I want to work with it and do something. And then you go to the library, you go online and there's 100 articles written about it and ten books, and you're like, Oh, maybe there's no video essays. And you think, Oh, well, this is this is my way that I can contribute something new and be fresh and to revisit old films in new ways, which is my passion.
00:07:59:18 - 00:08:13:15
Will di Gravio
And so that's what got me really excited about video criticism. Then the more I kept watching, it was just there was an art to this and that we should be treating video essays in the same way. You know, I really love those books that are like conversations with filmmakers or experimental.
00:08:13:15 - 00:08:15:23
Will Webb
Shows like Little Lynch or something.
00:08:15:24 - 00:08:29:14
Will di Gravio
Yes, exactly. And I was like, there should be something like that for video essayists because I was seeing style across the works of video essayists. And so that was the inspiration for podcast. And now here we are today. I mean.
00:08:29:14 - 00:08:51:13
Will Webb
It's it's a very familiar story to me in some ways because like you, I went to university to do a philosophy degree. And although I was making films, I've never really done any film criticism. And I did a course that was essentially you just had to write an extended piece on a film or a set of films which ended up being on Dario Argento and interpreting how he feels about women through his giallo films.
00:08:51:13 - 00:09:06:28
Will Webb
I don't know if you're familiar with them, but yeah, it's a certainly interesting topic and I was lucky, like you saying about at the time, there wasn't much critical stuff about Giallo that was serious. They were stuck in the liner notes of DVDs, and the Blu ray revolution was just starting to get all those kind of exploitation films.
00:09:07:14 - 00:09:27:12
Will Webb
There's a lot of movies that skipped straight over even getting a VHS, let alone a DVD, and went straight to Blu ray because places like Alamo's releasing House and Arrow as well in the UK kind of got these little films, put them straight into a restoration with a reskin. So that was kind of the moment where I got into film criticism as well as filmmaking too.
00:09:27:13 - 00:09:49:10
Will Webb
And I think you're right that it's a we're a kind of inflection point for video essays in a way, because the technology is now available pretty easy to use. Premiere's relatively cheap, at least when you compare it to like, say, an avid video deck from the early noughties or something. And what it means as well is that it's freeing up people who are not academic video essayists to become video essayists.
00:09:49:10 - 00:10:18:12
Will Webb
And I love that there's this like incredibly rich and very stiff sometimes world of academic video essays. Some of my favorites are from there and some other video assists for those people who play like Rotterdam and the selection there and stuff like that. But I think the proliferation of videos online really focused on very mainstream films and TV, and that's really heartening to me because the main thing I want from criticism is to encourage people to think deeply about and probe into culture no matter what it is that they're engaging with.
00:10:18:12 - 00:10:37:25
Will Webb
And so when I see like a nine hour long video essay series on like Studio Ghibli or something like that or anime in general, it's like, Great. I can't wait to find out what you think about this thing that I'm never going to watch. And there's that iconic two hour long pathologic video essay and the HBO Maggie kind of canon, which comes up a lot in those conversations.
00:10:37:25 - 00:10:53:21
Will Webb
And again, like punishingly difficult Russian video game that I will never play. But they're out there talking about how great it is and what it means for video game design, stuff like that, which is Fab and I love that you have a focus on older films as well because I think when we talk about Rio Bravo, we are talking about a very commercial film.
00:10:54:05 - 00:11:19:22
Will Webb
It's a genre focused film. Although Howard Hawks is an, I would say, very strong filmmaker and certainly was at this point already recognized by people like his, the cinema, the original, the kind of events, the French New Wave, you know, he's one of their favorites, right? This is a very commercial film, even down to casting not one but two singers as these lead characters, because we have Dean Martin as dude and is it Ricky Nelson, his name?
00:11:20:06 - 00:11:41:28
Will Webb
Yep. This kind of teen heartthrob, country singer. Yeah. And so there's this attempt to make something that's very commercial, but with a real strong artistic sensibility. And my understanding of it is that it's largely a response to another Western right, which is high noon. I should preface this by saying I know very little about Westerns, and in fact, I hadn't seen Rio Bravo, so thanks for recommending it.
00:11:43:15 - 00:12:00:18
Will Webb
High Noon is a film about a sheriff who's in a similar situation and who is convinced by his are the people around him to kind of take on their help. And as far as I understand it, John Wayne and the director of this film, Howard Hawks, felt that a professional sheriff would absolutely not bring citizens into the line of danger like that.
00:12:01:03 - 00:12:12:19
Will Webb
And so this film is largely engaged in how he doesn't want to take on help. Why that's a bad idea. Well, the funny enough, he does end up taking on several people who really aren't good fits and then it just happens to work out. So the magic a film for you.
00:12:12:19 - 00:12:38:19
Will di Gravio
That yeah I think Hawks referred to the sheriff in high noon is Gary Cooper, who plays the sheriff, Will Cain. I think you refer to him as a chicken without a head running around. And for him, the one of the main problems was that, you know, a manly man, a true sheriff, would not go around groveling for help in that way, because in that film, Gary Cooper is bad guys are basically coming back to get their revenge and he's running around being like, Can you help me?
00:12:38:19 - 00:12:50:15
Will di Gravio
I need your help at the top. And they're all kind of like, No, no, no. And so John Wayne and Howard Hawks didn't like that. So there is definitely some of that at play in Rio Bravo, for sure.
00:12:51:05 - 00:13:19:18
Will Webb
And then away from that kind of like they call and response kind of element of the film. It's also a return to form for both director and star, right? John Wayne had built this kind of inexorable image of himself as John Wayne, the cowboy, and kind of got a reputation for playing himself, I think an unfair one. I think he is actually quite a strong actor, as you see in this film, but he went off and tried to do a number of films that played with his image, I guess that had him doing very different things and they mostly sucked or at least they bombed.
00:13:20:06 - 00:13:36:00
Will Webb
And Howard Hawks likewise had had a long period of not making films, and it's longer to him. I think it was four years, which by modern standards isn't bad at all. I think Terrence Malick usually takes about eight between each film. Yeah, he was a very commercial filmmaker and Westerns also were being churned out at this time in history.
00:13:36:14 - 00:13:54:27
Will di Gravio
Yeah, it's funny, he the film he directed, such as Land of the Pharaohs, was considered a huge flop. And he takes some time off. And he's actually he was already you know, people associate with the Western a lot, but he didn't he didn't direct a ton of Westerns as compared to maybe someone like John Ford. And he goes abroad to Europe.
00:13:55:04 - 00:14:18:10
Will di Gravio
I'm forgetting where. And he's watching a lot of American Westerns on television. And this is kind of taking a lot of that in and then eventually decides to reunite with Wayne, as you say, and do this. And I remember in in Roger Ebert's has that great collection of books, the great movies where he writes a bunch of great mov
In this episode I'm joined by Syd Heather, filmmaker, to chat about Strictly Ballroom, the 1995 film directed by Baz Luhrmann. Be prepared for chats about camp, Luhrmann's bewitching directorial style, and a very big Coca Cola sign. (And if we make any out of date references to an upcoming Elvis flick, it's because this was recorded a year ago).
Syd's great documentary Micropubs: The New Local is currently available on demand and touring the UK: https://micropubdoc.com/
You can find him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/syd_heather
If you have questions about the film, film in general, or anything indietrix-related, get in touch on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Willwebbful
https://twitter.com/indietrixfilm
Music: "Glass Android" by Lee Rosevere, available on the album Music For Podcasts.
What's your first family movie memory? Did you sneak downstairs to watch a late night action movie? Or was it a trip to the cinema to see something with giant spiders in it?
Recorded back in the UK's second lockdown, this episode is a conversation between me and a very special guest- my dad! We start off with childhood movie memories, how divorced parents divide up movie franchises, and spin off into a wide-ranging chat about Star Trek, Carrie Fisher and the future of film. Hope you enjoy listening.
Let me know your early movie memories by getting in touch on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Willwebbful
https://twitter.com/indietrixfilm
Music: "Glass Android" by Lee Rosevere, available on the album Music For Podcasts.
It's that not-very-regular time you're always waiting for- here's my round-up of reviews from July 2021. Featuring Fear Street, Deerskin and Martin Eden.
Black Widow and The Suicide Squad finally end a long gap without any new superhero movie releases; it’s an interesting time to cast our minds back to the late 90s, where superhero cinema was on the ropes and looking like yesterday’s news.
Joining me to discuss this topic is David Molofsky, Editor-In-Cape of A Place To Hang Your Cape (www.ap2hyc.com), the premiere source of British indie comics news and reviews as well as plenty of superhero content. We sat down to discuss Steel, Spawn and Blade, a triptych of 90s superhero films that experimented with the established format and in some ways prefigured the challenges and successes the genre would face over the next 20 years.
By the time you hear this, England may or may not be in the Euros. But in other big screen news, here's a round-up of my reviews from June 2021. Featuring Capone, Palm Springs, The Hunt, Gretel and Hansel, Monster Hunter, and Awake.
In this episode I'm joined by Arjun Sajip, film writer and programmer (www.twitter.com/ArjSaj) to chat about The Hudsucker Proxy, the 1994 film directed by the Coen brothers.
In the movie, Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) is fresh off the bus in New York City, 1959, and lands a job in the mailroom of the monolithic Hudsucker Industries on the same day its director commits suicide. Norville is suddenly propelled to the directorship of the company, attracting the attention of ace reporter Amy Archer, who smells a rat. Both are unaware that Norville’s change in fortunes is part of a scheme by villainous board member Sidney J Mussburger (Paul Newman) to buy a controlling interest in Hudsucker Industries, and no-one is prepared for the impact of Norville’s amazing new business idea… for kids.
You can check out Arjun's writing here: https://oldrockinchair.wordpress.com/
If you have questions about the film, film in general, or anything indietrix-related, get in touch on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Willwebbful
https://twitter.com/indietrixfilm
Music: "Glass Android" by Lee Rosevere, available on the album Music For Podcasts.
In this episode we’re discussing The Others, the 2001 film directed by Alejandro Amenàbar. In the movie, Grace (Nicole Kidman) lives with her two children, Ann and Nicolas, in a large empty manor on Jersey in 1945. The children are allergic to sunlight, so the manor is perpetually dark and Grace is always on edge. As the children begin to tell stories about speaking with ghosts, and Grace herself starts to experience strange phenomena, her carefully-balanced state of mind starts to fall apart.
I'm joined by director Ellie Rogers, (https://twitter.com/EllieRogersDir) who brings lots of filmmaking insight to this really fascinating movie.
If you have questions about the film, film in general, or anything indietrix-related, get in touch on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Willwebbful
https://twitter.com/indietrixfilm
Music: "Glass Android" by Lee Rosevere, available on the album Music For Podcasts.
Just under two weeks til cinemas re-open in the UK, here's a round-up of my reviews from April 2021. Includes Undine, Godzilla vs Kong, Chaos Walking and The Reckoning.
Music: "Glass Android" by Lee Rosevere, available on the album Music For Podcasts.
In this episode we’re discussing Knife+Heart, the 2018 film directed by Yann Gonzalez. In the movie, gay porn producer Anne (Vanessa Paradis) is forced to shut down production and investigate when a series of killings target her former cast and crew.
I'm joined by critic and curator Elle Haywood, (https://twitter.com/ellekhaywood) who provides a really fascinating perspective on this singular horror movie!
Music: "Glass Android" by Lee Rosevere, available on the album Music For Podcasts.
