Return to Form

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

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’.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.